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Beyond Citizenship focuses on the role of literacy in building a modern nation-state by examining the government provision of adult literacy training in early twentieth-century China. Based on untapped archives and diaries, Di Luo uncovers people's strategic use of literacy and illiteracy in social interactions and explores the impact of daily experiences on the expansion of state power. Highlighting interpersonal and intergroup relations, Beyond Citizenship suggests a new methodology of studying literacy which foregrounds the agentive role of historical actors and so moves away from a more traditional approach that treats literacy itself as the key factor enabling social change.

Selected Essays on China's Education: Research and Review (4 volumes) consists of 22 most influential theses on the history and tradition of Chinese Education. These essays, selected and translated from China's Education: Research and Review, a serial publication in Chinese, reflect the progress of qualitative research on Chinese education both within and outside China. Volume 1 focuses on Written and Oral Narratives, including six articles; Volume 2 focuses on History and Current Reality, including five articles; Volume 3 focuses on Knowledge and Tradition, including six articles; and Volume 4 focuses on Gender and Education, including five articles. Aiming to promote academic dialogues on Chinese culture and education, these essays explore important educational and cultural issues in China with a transcultural perspective.

Selected Essays on China's Education: Research and Review (4 volumes) consists of 22 most influential theses on the history and tradition of Chinese Education. These essays, selected and translated from China's Education: Research and Review, a serial publication in Chinese, reflect the progress of qualitative research on Chinese education both within and outside China. Volume 1 focuses on Written and Oral Narratives, including six articles; Volume 2 focuses on History and Current Reality, including five articles; Volume 3 focuses on Knowledge and Tradition, including six articles; and Volume 4 focuses on Gender and Education, including five articles. Aiming to promote academic dialogues on Chinese culture and education, these essays explore important educational and cultural issues in China with a transcultural perspective.

With a membership of nearly 90 million, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the world's largest political party. It is also one of the longest ruling parties in the world and has been able to weather huge challenges caused by the deep transformation of Chinese society as well as the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Moreover, in recent years, and especially during the era of General Secretary Xi Jinping, the CCP has centralized its grip over Chinese society. This study is intent on depicting major aspects concerning the CCP's organizational arrangement and explaining some key concepts in the ideological framework constructed by the CCP leadership over time. it is important to take a new and closer look at how the study of the CCP has evolved in terms of themes, concepts, and areas of research. We do so in the following discussion by exploring nine topics: Party organization, cadre management, nomenklatura, cadre advancement and training, Party ideology, Party reform and adaptation, the Party and business, the Party and corruption, and the Party and the law. The intention is not to develop a new theory on how to understand the Party's role in Chinese society but, rather, to identify key debates, paradigms, and emerging research directions.

The Church as Safe Haven conceptualizes the rise of Chinese Christianity as a new civilizational paradigm that encouraged individuals and communities to construct a sacred order for empowerment in modern China. Once Christianity enrooted itself in Chinese society as an indigenous religion, local congregations acquired much autonomy which enabled new religious institutions to take charge of community governance. Our contributors draw on newly-released archival sources, as well as on fieldwork observations investigating what Christianity meant to Chinese believers, how native actors built their churches and faith-based associations within the pre-existing social networks, and how they appropriated Christian resources in response to the fast-changing world. This book reconstructs the narratives of ordinary Christians, and places everyday faith experience at the center. Contributors are: Christie Chui-Shan Chow, Lydia Gerber, Melissa Inouye, Diana Junio, David Jong Hyuk Kang, Lars Peter Laamann, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, George Kam Wah Mak, John R. Stanley, R. G. Tiedemann, Man-Shun Yeung.

In Liang Shuming and the Populist Alternative in China, Catherine Lynch offers an alternative understanding of Liang Shuming's work. While the current work on Liang suggests a connection to other Asian philosophical traditions (like Confucianism and Buddhism), this new work argues that Liang's work is an important part of the evolution of the modern Chinese thought and examines the role of populist ideas in the development of Liang's thinking. In addition to Liang's writings, this reading of Liang relies on lengthy interviews the author completed with Liang as well as with people associated with Liang. This book adds a new perspective based on access the author had to Liang while he was still alive.

In Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences, edited by Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Martin Bak Jørgensen, the contributing authors look into precarity. Precarity has become a buzzword in as well academia as among activist. The book depicts precarity as being both a condition and a mobilizing force for resistance. The volume asks questions that investigate conditions and resistance across diverse cases such as first generation urbanites in China, migrant pensioners and unemployed youth in Sweden and Spain, refugees in Germany, irregular and regular migrants in Southern Europe, Turkey, Russia the United States and South Africa.Contributors are: Susanne Bregnbæk, Ines Calzada, Maribel Casas-Cortés, Anna Gavanas, Gregoris Ioannou, Martin Bak Jørgensen, Irina Kuznetsova-Morenko, Ronaldo Munck, Dimitris Parsanoglou, John Round, Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Peter Schultz Jørgensen, Nazlı Şenses, Vassilis Tsianos, Nicos Trimikliniotis, and Mimi Zou.

The last of four two-volume sets on the key periods of paradigm shift in Chinese religious and cultural history, this book examines the transformation of values in China since 1850, in the “secular” realms of economics, science, medicine, aesthetics, media, and gender, and in each of the major religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity) as well as in Marxist discourse. The nation and science are the values invoked most frequently, with the market and democracy a distant second. As in previous periods of fundamental change in Chinese history, rationalization and secularization have played central roles, but interiorization nearly disappears as a driving force. Also in continuity with the past, the state insists on an exclusive right to define and adjudicate orthodoxy.Contributors include: Daniel H. Bays, Sébastien Billioud, Adam Yuet Chau, Na Chen, Philip Clart, Walter B. Davis, Arif Dirlik, Thomas David DuBois, Lizhu Fan, David Faure, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Ji Zhe, Xiaofei Kang, Eric I. Karchmer, André Laliberté, Angela Ki Che Leung, Xun Liu, Richard Madsen, David Ownby, Ellen Oxfeld, Volker Scheid, Grace Yen Shen, Michael Szonyi, Wang Chien-ch'uan, Xue Yu

Against the background of the Ürümchi riots (July 2009), this book provides a longitudinal study of contemporary Uyghur identities and Uyghur-Han relations. Previous studies considered China's Uyghurs from the perspective of the majority Han (state or people). Conversely, The Art of Symbolic Resistance considers Uyghur identities from a local perspective, based on interviews conducted with group members over nearly twenty years. Smith Finley rejects assertions that the Uyghur ethnic group is a ‘creation of the Chinese state', suggesting that contemporary Uyghur identities involve a complex interplay between long-standing intra-group socio-cultural commonalities and a more recently evolved sense of common enmity towards the Han. This book advances the discipline in three senses: from a focus on sporadic violent opposition to one on everyday symbolic resistance; from state to ‘local'representations; and from a conceptualisation of Uyghurs as ‘victim'to one of ‘creative agent'.

Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series has been granted the EastAsiaNet 2014 Award! In Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series, Florian Schneider analyses political discourses in Chinese TV dramas, the most popular entertainment format in China today. Schneider shows that despite their often nationalistic stories of glorious emperors and courageous officials, such programmes should not be mistaken for official propaganda. Instead, the highly didactical messages of such series are the outcome of complex cultural governance practices, which are influenced by diffuse political interests, commercial considerations, viewing habits, and ideological assumptions. Schneider argues that these interlinking factors lead to a highly restrictive creative environment and to conservative entertainment content that ultimately risks creating precisely the kind of passive masses that Chinese media workers and government officials are trying so hard to emancipate.

Liang Shuming (1895-1988) is one of the most important Chinese philosophers in twentieth century China. Generally considered to be a Confucian, and even the last Confucian, the author argues that he was in fact a Buddhist. Liang's thoughts are analysed within the background of the intellectual debates on religion in republican China. He reshaped the Western concept of religion from the standpoint of Yogācāra Buddhism. Yet, he advocated for the present time Confucianism as the ethical religion that would lead ultimately to the Buddhist liberation. Examining Liang's religious belief sheds new light on his fascinating life, particularly his involvement in the Rural Reconstruction movement of the nineteen-thirties. It also explains why Liang was the only intellectual who dared to publically oppose Mao in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.

This is the first major publication in the West to study modernity and its impact on contemporary Tibet. Based on field work by researchers from the fields of anthropology, sociology, environmental science, literature, art and linguistics, it presents essays on education, economics, childbirth, environment, caste, pop music, media and painting in Tibetan communities today. The findings emerge from studies carried out in Ladakh, Golok, Lhasa, Xining, Shigatse and other areas of the Tibetan world. It will provide important and sometimes surprising results for students of Tibet, China, Himalayan studies, as well as an important contribution to our understandings of modernity and development in the modern world.

Three issues essential to our insight into the concept and function of historical consciousness, and the description thereof, form the core of this book: historical truth, historical comment and criticism, and ideology (including the historian's trustworthiness).Taking as a point of departure the workings of these concepts in Chinese historical thinking, the volume carefully draws comparisons with similar topics in the Western tradition. It thus advocates and shows a truly comparative approach that sets the stage for an intercultural dialogue on this important subject.The first comprehensive work on the political and cognitive dimensions of Chinese historical consciousness set against its Western counterpart.

This collection of original, new studies about Mainland China and Taiwan focuses on religious changes, and especially the role of the state and market in affecting religious developments in these societies. Information was gathered by participant observation and interviews primarily, and the analysis of documents secondarily. The topics covered are: the growing interest in the study of religion, the methods used by Christians to be able to coexist with a communist government, revival techniques being used by Buddhist monks, the strategies of Daoist priests and sect leaders to attract followers, the significance of mass-circulating morality books, and the ongoing debate about the significance and nature of Confucianism. The book will interest social scientists, religious specialists, journalists, and others who want to understand the changing nature of Chinese societies, and those interested in religious change in modernizing societies.