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The rise of China presents a long-term challenge to the world not only economically, but politically and culturally. Callahan meets this challenge in China: The Pessoptimist Nation by using new Chinese sources and innovative analysis to see how Chinese people understand their new place in the world. To chart the trajectory of its rise, the book shifts from examining China's national interests to exploring its national aesthetic. Rather than answering the standard social science question \"what is China?\" with statistics of economic and military power, this book asks \"when, where, and who is China?\" to explore the soft power dynamics of China's identity politics. China: The Pessoptimist Nation shows how the heart of Chinese foreign policy is not a security dilemma, but an identity dilemma. Through careful analysis, Callahan charts how Chinese identity emerges through the interplay of positive and negative feelings in a dynamic that intertwines China's domestic and international politics. China thus is the pessoptimist nation where national security is closely linked to nationalist insecurities. Callahan concludes that this interactive view of China's pessoptimist identity means that we need to rethink the role of the state and public opinion in Beijing's foreign policy-making.

China's Futures cuts through the sometimes confounding and unfounded speculation of international pundits and commentators to provide readers with an important yet overlooked set of complex views concerning China's future: views originating within China itself. Daniel Lynch seeks to answer the simple but rarely asked question: how do China's own leaders and other elite figures assess their country's future? Many Western social scientists, business leaders, journalists, technocrats, analysts, and policymakers convey confident predictions about the future of China's rise. Every day, the business, political, and even entertainment news is filled with stories and commentary not only on what is happening in China now, but also what Western experts confidently think will happen in the future. Typically missing from these accounts is how people of power and influence in China itself imagine their country's developmental course. Yet the assessments of elites in a still super-authoritarian country like China should make a critical difference in what the national trajectory eventually becomes. In China's Futures, Lynch traces the varying possible national trajectories based on how China's own specialists are evaluating their country's current course, and his book is the first to assess the strengths and weaknesses of \"predictioneering\" in Western social science as applied to China. It does so by examining Chinese debates in five critical issue-areas concerning China's trajectory: the economy, domestic political processes and institutions, communication and the Internet (arrival of the \"network society\"), foreign policy strategy, and international soft-power (cultural) competition.

In Collecting Objects / Excluding People, Lenore Metrick-Chen demonstrates an unknown impact of Chinese immigration upon nineteenth-century American art and visual culture. The American ideas of \"Chineseness\" ranged from a negative portrayal to an admiring one and these varied images had an effect on museum art collections and advertising images. They brought new ideas into American art theory, anticipating twentieth-century Modernism. Metrick-Chen shows that efforts to construct a cultural democracy led to the creation of unforeseen new categories for visual objects and unanticipated social changes. Collecting Objects / Excluding People reveals the power of images upon culture, the influence of media representation upon the lives of Chinese immigrants, and the impact of political ideology upon the definition of art itself.

Is popular anger about rising inequality propelling China toward a \"social volcano\" of protest activity and instability that could challenge Chinese Communist Party rule? Many inside and outside of China have speculated, without evidence, that the answer is yes. In 2004, Harvard sociologist Martin King Whyte has undertaken the first systematic, nationwide survey of ordinary Chinese citizens to ask them directly how they feel about inequalities that have resulted since China's market opening in 1978. His findings are the subject of this book.

Providing quality public service is one of the essential functions of a government. In the turbulent time, however, governments worldwide are experiencing a variety of unprecedented challenges to meet citizens' increasing demands and expectations. In China, building a service-oriented government and a harmonious society is central to the 12th Five-Year Plan and challenges the governance philosophies, capacities and competencies of Chinese government at every level. Researchers of Nanyang Centre for Public Administration (NCPA) at Nanyang Technological University systematically examined the concept of service-oriented government in the context of China and developed an assessment scheme to evaluate the performance of building service-oriented government in Chinese cities. Under the auspices of the Lien Foundation in Singapore, based on the assessment scheme, they conducted large-scale telephone surveys of citizens and businesses in 32 major Chinese cities in 2011. This book presents their findings and empirical studies on public service performance, citizen satisfaction, political trust and government transparency based on the data collected from the 2011 Lien project. Moreover, it also includes selected papers presented at the 2012 Lien International Conference on Public Administration in Singapore. Contributed by scholars from Mainland China, the US, Hong Kong and Singapore, these papers discuss various important issues related with building a service-oriented government including public ethical values, the roles of NGO, social accountability, urban integration, performance measurement and emotional labor in public service.Contents:Evaluating Public Service Performance in Urban China: Findings From the 2011 Lien Chinese Cities Service-Oriented Government Project (WU Wei, YU Wenxuan, LIN Tingjin, WANG Jun and TAM Waikeung)Public Ethical Values and Service-Oriented Government (Kuotsai Tom LIOU)The Role of Emotional Labor in Public Service (Meredith A NEWMAN)Irrationality, Bricolage, Quality and Performance Measurement: Unpacking the Conundrum in a Comparative East-West Context (Paul HIGGINS)Social Accountability for Public Service in Higher Education: A Text Analysis of Chinese Research Universities' Undergraduate Teaching-Learning Quality Annual Reports (TIAN Linghui and XIONG Qingnian)Integrated Development of Metropolitan Governance and Public Service: A Case Study of the Pearl River Delta Region (YE Lin)The Role of NGOs in Maintaining Social Stability in China - Based on the Perspective of Public Security Service Delivery (HAN Lin)Political Trust, Public Service Performance and Government Transparency in China (YU Wenxuan)Explaining Citizens' Satisfaction With Public Service Quality in Chinese Cities 2010: Citizen-Level Predictors vs. City-Level Predictors (LIN Tingjin)Public Satisfaction Survey and Its Analysis on Chinese Cities Public Education Service - An Empirical Study Based on 2010 Lien Chinese Cities Public Service Quality Evaluation Survey Data (WANG Jun and WU Wei)Readership: Students and researchers in the fields of policy studies and China studies.