Globalization euphoria and enthusiasm for the West are on the decline in contemporary China. Critical voices make themselves heard in artistic and cultural circles, turning towards their personal everyday lives to take stock. Their questions revolve around concrete experiences in the radical upheaval of lifeworlds, the continued significance of traditions after many of them have been thoroughly uprooted, and the paradoxes produced by the predominance of neo-liberalism. The 17 positions assembled in this volume provide a vivid illustration of such a »new thoughtfulness« in a wide variety of aspects ranging from aesthetics and art to theatre and photography.

Since the confirmation of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of Opening and Reform in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has undergone a liberalization of culture that has led to the production of numerous forms of avant-garde, experimental, and museum-based art. With a fast-growing international market and a thriving artistic community, contemporary Chinese art is riding a wave of prosperity, though issues of censorship still abound. Shedding light on the current art scene, Paul Gladston’s Contemporary Chinese Art puts China’s recent artistic output into the context of the wider cultural, economic, and political conditions that surround it. Providing a critical mapping of ideas and practices that have shaped the development of Chinese art, Gladston shows how these combine to bind it to the structure of power and state both within and outside of China. Focusing principally on art produced by artists from mainland China—including painting, film, video, photography, and performance—he also discusses art created in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and diasporic communities. Illustrated with 150 images, Contemporary Chinese Art unravels the complexities of politics, artistic practice, and culture in play in China’s art scene.

This ethnographic study of prostitution in the metropolitan city of Dalian, China, explores the lives of rural migrant women working as karaoke bar hostesses, delving into the interplay of gender politics, nationalism, and power relationships that inhere in practices of birth control, disease control, and control of women's bodies.

In Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China, Geng Song and Derek Hird offer an account of Chinese masculinities in media discourse and everyday life, covering masculinities on television, in lifestyle magazines, in cyberspace, at work, at leisure, and at home. No other work covers the forms and practices of men and masculinities in contemporary China so comprehensively. Through carefully exploring the global, regional and local influences on men and representations of men in postmillennial China, Song and Hird show that Chinese masculinity is anything but monolithic. They reveal a complex, shifting plurality of men and masculinities—from stay-at-home internet geeks to karaoke-singing, relationship-building businessmen—which contest and consolidate “conventional” notions of masculinity in multiple ways.

Explores China's new entrepreneurs, uncovering secrets of their business, and the relationships underlying China's economic transformation.

Bringing Forth the New provides a headlong introduction into the world of Chinese contemporary visual art, opening from the art world onto the political, technological and economic vectors of recent Chinese history. Each chapter reads an important facet of recent Chinese history through the work of a significant artist. From examining trade war and intellectual property through the work of political pop painters such as Yu Youhan, to the development of gendered constructs in China through the work of Cui Xuiwen.

This book provides a unique perspective on contemporary German and Chinese cultural encounters. Moving away from highlighting exchanges between the two countries in terms of colonial connections, religious influences and philosophical impacts, the book instead focuses on the vast array of modern cultural dialogues that have influenced both countries, especially in literature, theatre and film. The book discusses issues of translation, adaptation, and reception to reveal a unique cultural relationship. The editors and contributors examine the existing programs and strategies for cultural interchange, and analyse how these shape or have shaped intercultural dialogue, and what kind of intercultural exchange is encouraged. This book is of interest to students and researchers of film and media studies, Sinophone studies, transnational studies, cultural studies and social and cultural anthropology.

In the new millennium, China is expanding dramatically under the guidance of the communist party. It took Thomas Bremanger a while to fully grasp the kind of expansion happening in China. Whenever he experiences this, he becomes frightened, as if he's left behind at a train station, watching the last car of a train vanish into the distance. Ambitious geopolitical expansions such as China's inevitably produce irresistible gravitational pulls. Much like the merciless, unforgiving sun, its dominance is everywhere. Nation-states adapt to these dominances, not the other way around. The United States held that prominent position immediately following World War II. China's industrial sectors currently consume half of the world's supply of vital resources, such as zinc, aluminum, copper, nickel, steel, and rare earth elements. In the Congo, they have a stranglehold on cobalt production and a monopoly on cobalt sulfate, which is essential in battery manufacturing. The value of Chinese items is higher than that of European ones. Asia looks up to China. Indeed, envy of China is universal. It would not alarm Bremanger if it were democratic. However, it is repressive by necessity because it is a communist, one-party authoritarian state. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has an open road to hegemony, facing a nation as split against itself as the United States. The fickle American lumpenproletariat may even roll out the red carpet for the Chinese. The idea of a communist state ruling the entire world sickens Bremanger. Too much to bear too is the risk that the West will undertake to appease China and allow the CCP to swallow Taiwan. The United States mustn't acclimate itself to this domination but contain it as it did the Soviet Union. Bremanger's dread isn’t an illusion, and with anguished lucidity, he rages against the eventuality and swears to do all it takes to neutralize it. But Bremanger’s dread isn't just pointed at the CCP's ascendancy. The rise of the lumpenproletariat — historically America's white society's dispossessed — as a transcendent power has crippled the U.S. America is shackled by its attributes and exigencies. In the first installment of Thomas Bremanger's case study on the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to the United States in the twenty-first century, Bremanger focuses on efforts to contain China. In contrast to the Soviet containment, Bremanger will need to employ a one-of-a-kind stealth strategy at an unsuspected but strategic location.

Recent years have witnessed the remarkable development of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in Asia, from the global popularity of the Japanese games and anime industries, to Korea’s film and pop music successes. While CCIs in these Asian cultural powerhouses aspire to become key players in the global cultural economy, Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand are eager to make a strong mark in the region’s cultural landscape. As the first handbook on CCIs in Asia, this book provides readers with a contextualized understanding of the conditions and operation of Asian CCIs. Both internationalising and de-Westernising our knowledge of CCIs, it offers a comprehensive contribution to the field from academics, practitioners and activists alike. Covering 12 different societies in Asia from Japan and China to Thailand, Indonesia and India, the themes include: State policy in shaping CCIs Cultural production inside and outside of institutional frameworks Circulation of CCIs products and consumer culture Cultural activism and independent culture Cultural heritage as an industry. Presenting a detailed set of case studies, this book will be an essential companion for researchers and students in the field of cultural policy, cultural and creative industries, media and cultural studies, and Asian studies in general.