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"20th century chinese history"
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Gifts to the sad country : essays on the Chinese diaspora
\"The book is a study of an ethnic-Chinese family in Malaysia as it struggled with the upheavals in China during the Land Reform (1945-1953) and the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). Based on fieldwork in Malaysia and in a village in Dabu County, Southern China, it tells a story of a family whose existence straddled two nations, two political systems. Emigration is shown to be both a positive experience and a source of despair. The study redefines the conventional narrative about the Chinese diaspora as economically driven and politically expedient; mobility, personal freedom and transnational journeying were a part of their cultural history. The book highlights the fact that Chinese homeland, even under communist rule, offered the people a means of identification under difficult circumstances. During the time of radical reform, the diaspora adapted themselves to the conditions in the homeland, and for some China remained a place of longing and emotional attachment. \" -- Provided by publisher.
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Tapestry of Light
In Tapestry of Light Huang offers an account of the psychic, intellectual, and cultural aftermath of the Cultural Revolution found in the works of prominent Chinese intellectuals, writers, artists and filmmakers.
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Chinese grammatology : script revolution and Chinese literary modernity, 1916-1958
\"In premodern East Asia, Chinese dominated everything from poetry to international trade, but by the early twentieth century, the ancient Chinese script began to be targeted as a roadblock to literacy, science, and democracy. Its abolition and replacement by the Latin alphabet came to be seen as a necessary condition of modernity. In China, both the Kuomintang Nationalist government in the 1920s and the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s had active movements for replacing Chinese script with Latin characters. Nonetheless, when script reform was taken up by the party in 1958, simplification, not latinization, was instituted, and today Chinese script is alive and well. Yurou Zhong argues that just as broader international currents swept the latinization movement in, a postwar anti-imperial critique of Western ethnocentrism was responsible for the retention of the script. She also relates these political movements to the birth of modern Chinese literature and to similar movements in other--mostly socialist--countries at the time\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The lyrical in epic time
In this book, David Der-wei Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China's social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyricism in extraordinary ways. Wang calls attention to the form's vigor and variety at an unlikely juncture in Chinese history and the precarious consequences it brought about: betrayal, self-abjuration, suicide, and silence. Despite their divergent backgrounds and commitments, the writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book all took lyricism as a way to explore selfhood in relation to solidarity, the role of the artist in history, and the potential for poetry to illuminate crisis. They experimented with poetry, fiction, film, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, painting, calligraphy, and music. Western critics, Wang shows, also used lyricism to critique their perilous, epic time. He reads Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man, among others, to complete his portrait. The Chinese case only further intensifies the permeable nature of lyrical discourse, forcing us to reengage with the dominant role of revolution and enlightenment in shaping Chinese—and global—modernity. Wang's remarkable survey reestablishes Chinese lyricism's deep roots in its own native traditions, along with Western influences, and realizes the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time.
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The art of modern China
\"In the early twenty-first century, China occupies a place on center stage in the international art world. But what does it mean to be a Chinese artist in the modern age? This comprehensive study of modern Chinese art history traces its evolution chronologically and thematically from the age of Imperialism to the present day. Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen pay particular attention to the dynamic tension between modernity and tradition, as well as the interplay of global cosmopolitanism and cultural nationalism.\"--Back cover.
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On the Margins of Modernism
Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). This groundbreaking book re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940's, with in-depth analyses of their innovative short stories and novels.
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Language Ungoverned
By exploring a rich array of Malay texts from novels and
newspapers to poems and plays, Tom G. Hoogervorst's
Language Ungoverned examines how
the Malay of the Chinese-Indonesian community defied linguistic and
political governance under Dutch colonial rule, offering a fresh
perspective on the subversive role of language in colonial power
relations.
As a liminal colonial population, the ethnic Chinese in
Indonesia resorted to the press for their education, legal and
medical advice, conflict resolution, and entertainment. Hoogervorst
deftly depicts how the linguistic choices made by these print
entrepreneurs brought Chinese-inflected Malay to the fore as the
language of popular culture and everyday life, subverting the
official Malay of the Dutch authorities. Through his readings of
Sino-Malay print culture published between the 1910s and 1940s,
Hoogervorst highlights the inherent value of this vernacular Malay
as a language of the people.
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Kingdom of characters : the language revolution that made China modern
\"After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire, with literacy reserved for the elite few. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's greatest and most daunting challenge was a linguistic one. Just as important as China's technological and industrial advances and political maneuvers was the century-long fight to make the Chinese language-with its many dialects and complex character-based script-accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold and cunning innovators who adapted the Chinese language to a world defined by the West and its alphabet: the exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, the Chinese Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a tea cup, among others. Without the advances they enabled, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. The revolution of the Chinese script is just as breathtaking as China's transformation into a capitalist juggernaut, in large part because those linguistic innovations literally enabled China's reinvention. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China's tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle yet potent power to be exercised and expanded\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Arc of Containment
Arc of Containmentrecasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of American intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing Ngoei articulates a new regional history premised on strong security and sure containment guaranteed by Anglo-American cooperation.
Ngoei argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to US hegemony. Central to this revisionary strategic assessment is the place of British power and the effects of direct neocolonial military might and less overt cultural influences based in decades of colonial rule. Also essential to the analysis inArc of Containmentis the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors upon Anglo-American imperial strategy throughout the post-war period.
InArc of ContainmentNgoei shows how the pro-US trajectory of Southeast Asia after the Pacific War was, in fact, far more characteristic of the wider region's history than American policy failure in Vietnam. Indeed, by the early 1970s, five key anticommunist nations-Malaya, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia-had quashed Chinese-influenced socialist movements at home and established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of states that contained the Vietnamese revolution and encircled China. In the process, the Euro-American colonial order of Southeast Asia passed from an era of Anglo-American predominance into a condition of US hegemony.Arc of Containmentdemonstrates that American failure in Vietnam had less long-term consequences than widely believed because British pro-West nationalism had been firmly entrenched twenty-plus years earlier. In effect, Ngoei argues, the Cold War in Southeast Asia was but one violent chapter in the continuous history of western imperialism in the region in the twentieth century.
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