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Caring in Times of Precarity draws together two key cultural observations: the increase in those living a single life, and the growing attraction of creative careers. Straddling this historical juncture, the book focuses on one particular group of ‘precariat’: single women in Shanghai in various forms of creative (self-)employment. While negotiating their share of the uncanny creative work ethos, these women also find themselves interpellated as shengnü (‘left-over women’) in a society configured by a mix of Confucian values, heterosexual ideals, and global images of womanhood. Following these women’s professional, social and intimate lives, the book refuses to see their singlehoo...
With its emergence as a global power, China aspires to transform from made in China to created in China. Mobilised as a crucial source for solid growth and soft power, creativity has become part of the new China Dream. Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China engages with the imperative of creativity by aligning it to three interrelated phenomena: boredom, shanzhai, and digitisation. How does creativity help mitigate boredom? Does boredom incubate creativity? How do shanzhai practices and the omnipresence of fake goods challenge notions of the original and the authentic? Which spaces for expressions and contestations has China's fast-developing digital world of Weixin, Taobao, Youku, and Internet Plus Policy opened up? Are new technologies serving old interests? Essays, dialogues, audio-visual documents, and field notes, from thinkers, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers, examine what is going on in China now, ultimately to tease out its implication to our understanding of creativity.
Chinese Subjectivities and the Beijing Olympics develops the Foucauldian concept of productive power through examining the ways in which the Chinese government tried to mobilize the population to embrace its Olympic project through deploying various sets of strategies and tactics. It argues that the multifaceted strategies, tactics, and discourses deployed by the Chinese authorities sustain an order of things and values in such a way that drive individuals to commit themselves actively to the goals of the party-state. The book examines how these processes of subjectification are achieved by zooming in on five specific groups of the population: athletes, young Olympic volunteers, taxi drivers, Chinese citizens targeted by place-making projects, and the Hong Kong population. In doing so it probes critically into the role of individuals and how they take on the governmental ideas to become responsible autonomous subjects.
Made in Taiwan: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Taiwanese popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of Taiwanese music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Taiwan and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in Taiwan, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Trajectories, Identities, Issues, and Interactions.
Cantopop was once the leading pop genre of pan-Chinese popular music around the world. In this pioneering study of Cantopop in English, Yiu-Wai Chu shows how the rise of Cantopop is related to the emergence of a Hong Kong identity and consciousness. Chu charts the fortune of this important genre of twentieth-century Chinese music from its humble, lower-class origins in the 1950s to its rise to a multimillion-dollar business in the mid-1990s. As the voice of Hong Kong, Cantopop has given generations of people born in the city a sense of belonging. It was only in the late 1990s, when transformations in the music industry, and more importantly, changes in the geopolitical situation of Hong Kong...
'Sonic Multiplicities is a fascinating book, with essays rich in empirical detail and - captivatingly combining the personal and the theoretical - evocative of the complexities of experience, desire and politics in our perplexingly mobile and entangled world. The book's focus on Hong Kong pop music as part of a translocal, if not global network of flows provides a starting point for the authors to unsettle received notions of Chineseness, place and identity, of particular importance in a time when we need to come to terms with, and resist, the increasingly stifling discourse of "the rise of Ch.
This book traces the evolution of the Hong Kong’s popular culture, namely film, television and popular music (also known as Cantopop), which is knotted with the city’s geo-political, economic and social transformations. Under various historical contingencies and due to the city’s special geo-politics, these three major popular cultural forms have experienced various worlding processes and have generated border-crossing impact culturally and socially. The worlding processes are greatly associated the city’s nature as a reception and departure port to Sinophone migrants and populations of multiethnic and multicultural. Reaching beyond the “golden age” (1980s) of Hong Kong popular c...
Since the early 1990s the media and cultural fields in China have become increasingly commercialized, resulting in a massive boom in the cultural and entertainment industries. This evolution has also brought about fundamental changes in media behaviour and communication, and the enormous growth of entertainment culture and the extensive penetration of new media into the everyday lives of Chinese people. Against the backdrop of the rapid development of China’s media industry and the huge growth in social media, this book explores the emotional content and public discourse of popular media in contemporary China. It examines the production and consumption of blockbuster films, television dram...
This pocketsized paperback is one of the twentyfour titles published for 2017 Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. The theme of IPHHK2017 is "Ancient Enmity. IPNHK is one of the most influential international poetry events in Asia. From 22–26 November 2017, over 20 invited poets from various countries will be in Hong Kong to read their works based on the theme "ncient Enmity". Included in the anthology and box set, these unique works are presented with Chinese and English translations in bilingual or trilingual formats.
Western commentators have often criticized the state of press freedom in China, arguing that individual speech still suffers from arbitrary restrictions and that its mass media remains under an authoritarian mode. Yet the history of press freedom in the Chinese context has received little examination. Unlike conventional historical accounts which narrate the institutional development of censorship and people's resistance to arbitrary repression, this book is the first comprehensive study presenting the intellectual trajectory of press freedom. It sheds light on the transcultural transference and localization of the concept in modern Chinese history, spanning from its initial introduction in 1831 to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. By examining intellectuals' thoughts, common people's attitudes, and official opinions, along with the social-cultural factors that were involved in negotiating Chinese interpretations and practices in history, this book uncovers the dynamic and changing meanings of press freedom in modern China.