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A new look at the impact of the Communist Revolution on Chinese family structure.
In Useful Bullshit Neil J. Diamant pulls back the curtain on early constitutional conversations between citizens and officials in the PRC. Scholars have argued that China, like the former USSR, promulgated constitutions to enhance its domestic and international legitimacy by opening up the constitution-making process to ordinary people, and by granting its citizens political and socioeconomic rights. But what did ordinary officials and people say about their constitutions and rights? Did constitutions contribute to state legitimacy? Over the course of four decades, the PRC government encouraged millions of citizens to pose questions about, and suggest revisions to, the draft of a new constit...
This book explores legal mobilization, culture, and institutions in contemporary China from a perspective informed by 'law and society' scholarship.
In 1950, China's new Communist government enacted a Marriage Law to allow free choice in marriage and easier access to divorce. Prohibiting arranged marriages, concubinage, and bigamy, it was one of the most dramatic efforts ever by a state to change marital and family relationships. In this comprehensive study of the effects of that law, Neil J. Diamant draws on newly opened urban and rural archival sources to offer a detailed analysis of how the law was interpreted and implemented throughout the country. In sharp contrast to previous studies of the Marriage Law, which have argued that it had little effect in rural areas, Diamant argues that the law reshaped marriage and family relationship...
This groundbreaking book examines the treatment of veterans of the People's Liberation Army and military families as an illuminating window into Chinese patriotism, citizenship, and legitimacy. Using a wealth of recently declassified archival documents and employing a wide comparative perspective, Neil J. Diamant presents the first large-scale study of these groups in comparison to similar populations in other parts of Asia and in the West. He offers an unprecedented look at the "everyday interactions" among veterans, military families, state officials, and ordinary citizens as they attempted to secure urban residence, jobs, spouses, medical care, and respect. Often celebrated by the governm...
In 1950, China's new Communist government enacted a Marriage Law to allow free choice in marriage and easier access to divorce. Prohibiting arranged marriages, concubinage, and bigamy, it was one of the most dramatic efforts ever by a state to change marital and family relationships. In this comprehensive study of the effects of that law, Neil J. Diamant draws on newly opened urban and rural archival sources to offer a detailed analysis of how the law was interpreted and implemented throughout the country. In sharp contrast to previous studies of the Marriage Law, which have argued that it had little effect in rural areas, Diamant argues that the law reshaped marriage and family relationship...
This book shows how memories of Mao era suffering drive popular resistance to state power in authoritarian China.
Throughout its modern history, China has suffered from immense destruction and loss of life from warfare. During its worst period of warfare, the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), millions of civilians lost their lives. For China, the story of modern war-related death and suffering has remained hidden. Hundreds of massacres are still unrecognized by the outside world and even by China itself. The focus of this original hisotry is on the social and psychological, not the economic, costs of war on the country.
An increasingly popular view holds that institutions--in particular, the rule of law--are the keys to unlocking the developing world's full growth potential. But what exactly does this mean? Which legal institutions matter and why? How can policymakers use this knowledge to promote growth? In The Law-Growth Nexus, Kenneth Dam brings five decades of experience as a legal scholar and policymaker to bear upon these questions. After reviewing the burgeoning literature on legal institutions and economic development, Dam unpacks the "rule of law" concept. Successive chapters analyze enforcement, contracts, and property rights—the three concepts that collectively define rule of law—and examine ...
This powerful study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law dissects the world of Chinese workers today and finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Intense working-class agitation is being spurred by massive unemployment of Mao's socialist proletariat in the northern rustbelt and by the exploitation of millions of young workers in the southern sunbelt. Providing a broad comparative political and economic analysis of the vast mosaic of this labor struggle together with unprecedented fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the multi-faceted humanity of the Chinese working class as their stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at heroic moments of street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.