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Drawing from Life explores revolutionary drawing and sketching in the early People’s Republic of China (1949–1965) in order to discover how artists created a national form of socialist realism. Tracing the development of seminal works by the major painters Xu Beihong, Wang Shikuo, Li Keran, Li Xiongcai, Dong Xiwen, and Fu Baoshi, author Christine I. Ho reconstructs how artists grappled with the representational politics of a nascent socialist art. The divergent approaches, styles, and genres presented in this study reveal an art world that is both heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. Through a history of artistic practices in pursuit of Maoist cultural ambitions—to forge new registers of experience, new structures of feeling, and new aesthetic communities—this original book argues that socialist Chinese art presents a critical, alternative vision for global modernism.
First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In this provocative account, Karl Gerth argues that consumerism rather than communism explains the history of China since 1949.
This book is a political history of global attempts to reduce politics to science and the results of such an attempt in modern China. The book follows the discourses and activities of a special group of local officials in China’s Nationalist government (1928–1949). These officials had been students or faculty at the Central Politics School (CPS), the only national university in modern Chinese history that trained professional bureaucrats according to the blueprint of the United States’ science of public administration conceived by Frank Goodnow. Through its accounts of how these officials handled land administrative reforms, the battlefront of statebuilding during World War II, and rebellions of ethnic minorities, the book discusses why some of the most talented CPS officials resorted to non-modern humanistic political techniques and achieved a Chinese statecraft more efficient and sustainable than science. As such, the book invites readers to think whether science and the rational-legal authority proposed by Woodrow Wilson and Max Weber, is a proper conceptual framework for understanding politics in China and the rest of world.
"This book is aimed at rethinking social scientific approaches to collective action by exploring China's ongoing water crisis from the vantage point of Huize County, a water-stressed, ecologically damaged, multi-ethnic area of rural Yunnan Province"--
In the early twentieth century, the first large batch of Chinese civil engineers had graduated from the USA, and together with their American senior colleagues returned to China. They were enthusiastic about reconstructing the young republic by building new railways, highways, and canals, but what the engineers experienced in China, including mismanaged railways, useless highways, and silted canals, did not always meet their expectations and ideals. In this book, Thorben Pelzer makes the stories of these Chinese and American engineers come to life through exploring previously unpublished letters, rare images, maps, and a rich biographical dataset. He argues that the experiences of these engineers include a myriad of contradictions, disillusionment, and discontent, keeping the engineering profession in a constant flux of searching for its meaning and its place in Republican China.
How did rivers contribute to the economic and political development of modern Africa? How did African and European notions of nature's value and meaning differ? And how have these evaluations of Africa's rivers changed between 1850 and the present day? Drawing upon examples from across the African continent, Developing the Rivers of East and West Africa explores the role African waterways played in the continent's economic, social, and political development and provides the first historical study of the key themes in African river history. Rivers acted as more than important transportation byways; their waters were central to both colonial and postcolonial economic development efforts. This book synthesizes the available research on African rivers with new evidence to offer students of African and environmental history a narrative of how people have used and engaged the continent's water resources. It analyzes key themes in Africa's modern history - European exploration, establishment of colonial rule, economic development, 'green' politics - and each case study provides a lens through which to view social, economic and ecological change in Africa.
This is a rich and comprehensive study of beggars’ culture and the institution of mendicancy in China from late imperial times to the mid-twentieth century, with a glance at the resurgence of beggars in China today. Generously illustrated, the book brings to life the concepts and practices of mendicancy including organized begging, state and society relations as reflected in the issues of poverty, public opinions of beggars and various factors that contribute to almsgiving, the role of gender in begging, and street people and Communist politics. Panoramically, the reader will see that the culture and institution of Chinese mendicancy, which had its origins in earlier centuries, remained remarkably consistent through time and space and that there were perennial and lively interactions between the world of beggars and mainstream society.
If we place women at the center of our account of China’s last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? This deeply knowledgeable book illuminates the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Leading scholar Gail Hershatter asks how these events affected women in particular, and how women affected the course of these events. For instance, did women have a 1911 revolution? A socialist revolution? If so, what did those revolutions look like? Which women had them? Hershatter uses two key themes to frame her analysis. The first is the importance of women’s visible ...
Flowing through the heart of the North China Plain—home to 200 million people—the Yellow River sustains one of China’s core regions. Yet this vital water supply has become highly vulnerable in recent decades, with potentially serious repercussions for China’s economic, social, and political stability. The Yellow River is an investigative expedition to the source of China’s contemporary water crisis, mapping the confluence of forces that have shaped the predicament that the world’s most populous nation now faces in managing its water reserves. Chinese governments have long struggled to maintain ecological stability along the Yellow River, undertaking ambitious programs of canal an...