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Chinese citizens are becoming increasingly mobile, both inside China and abroad, as migrant workers, tourists, and students. China is caught between perceived benefits and dangers posed by mobility, complicated by the government’s own conflicting impulses to support and discourage it. Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China demonstrates this intricate balance through an in-depth look at patterns of migration and state response. Pál Nyíri argues that the loosening of China’s restrictions on internal and international migration, its promotion of domestic tourism, and its increasingly positive portrayal of migrants all follow a similar logic in which mobility comes to epitom...
Twenty years ago, commercial tourism in the People’s Republic of China hardly existed. Today, China has a burgeoning tourist industry, characterized by a unique style with deep roots in traditional Chinese culture. Scenic Spots is an engaging exploration of why Chinese tourists pursue certain kinds of experiences, what they make of them, and how their experiences and interpretations are shaped by the state. Working from within a Chinese cultural framework, Pál Nyíri argues that China’s brand of tourism is distinct from the traditions of both Western bourgeois tourism, which values authenticity, and Soviet tourism, with its emphasis on rugged and selfless experience. In China, tourism d...
This engagingly written, jargon-free challenge to the misguided and dangerous global obsession with cultural difference critiques the popular notion that world affairs are determined by civilizations with immutable and conflicting cultures. Culture is too often understood as a straightjacket of values that make people act in a certain way. A more accurate and constructive approach is to see culture as a changing system of meaning, which individuals deploy selectively to make sense of the world.
While Western media are shrinking their foreign correspondent networks, Chinese media, for the first time in history, are rapidly expanding worldwide. The Chinese government is financing most of this growth, hoping to strengthen its influence and improve its public image. But do these reporters willingly serve formulated agendas or do they follow their own interests? And are they changing Chinese citizens’ views of the world? Based on interviews and informal conversations with over seventy current and former correspondents, Reporting for China documents a diverse group of professionals who hold political views from nationalist to liberal, but are constrained in their ability to report on the world by China’s media control, audience tastes, and the declining market for traditional media.
Since the late nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have moved to Russia and Eastern Europe. However, until now, very little research has been done about the initial migrants in the nineteenth century, the presence of the Chinese in Europe and Russia in the twentieth century before the collapse of the 'socialist' regimes or about the great wave of Chinese migration to Eastern Europe and Russia which occurred after 1989. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Chinese in Russia and Eastern Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day. Particularly important is the movement of entrepreneurs in the early 1990s, who took advantage of unmet demand, inadequate r...
First published in 1999, this book is a political enthnography of recent migration from the People’s Republic of China into Europe. It argues that the very high mobility and intensive communications of Chinese migrants enable them to maintain a transnational community within which they easily shift countries and social roles - from student to trader to worker - if doing so is economically expedient. This makes them the natural beneficiaries and users of the Western globalization discourse, even more so that - contrary to culturalist explanations of global Chinese networks - anonymity, sovereign decision making and freedom from social pressures are at least as important in motivating migration as family connections. Yet their identity discourse expresses an authentic Chinese globalization . Chinese migrants see themselves not as local minorities but as a global majority attached to China by a deterritorialised nationalism. This nationalism is not only encouraged by China’s official discourse but also supported by the economic dependence of new migrants on cultural capital built up in China, which makes them less reliant on resources in their countries of residence.
This book investigates the origins and mechanics of recent Chinese migration, focusing on the work and life of Fujianese migrants in the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Italy, and exploring the many transnational spaces that connect Fujianese across Europe, the United States, and China.
Today's world is shaped by an obsession with cultural difference that penetrates everyday life and matters of state in unprecedented ways. Culture and cultural difference are commonly used to explain everything that's in the news - from wars to economic development and consumer behavior. This fuels the belief that our world is shaped by clashing cultures, a view that is counterproductive when it assumes falsely that culture is a timeless container that traps nations and ethnic groups. Seeing Culture Everywhere challenges the misguided and dangerous global obsession with cultural difference and directly critiques the popular notion that world affairs are determined by essential civilizations ...
Many countries have a rich tradition of domestic travel and holidaying which not only predates but exceeds mass international travel. This is particularly the case in Asia where recent economic prosperity and trends in globalization have not merely spurred, but continue to shape traditions in domestic tourism.This book is the first to address specifically the continuities and changes in domestic tourism in Asia. It explores the ethos of domestic travel and holiday-making in order to understand the distinctive common strands that underlie conventional and contemporary tourism practices, against the local and global backdrop. A considerable range of countries is covered in the case studies, including those with patrimonial histories, namely China and India, the economically developed nation-state of Japan and the microstates of Taiwan, Singapore, Macao and Hong Kong, besides the coastal countries of Malaysia, Philippines, Laos and Vietnam, as well as the land-locked countries of Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia. The book presents some of the many interfaces of Asian cultural and natural heritages with tourism, while giving due considerations to today's political and economic realities.