A most remarkable change took place in the first half of the twentieth century in China--women journalists became powerful professionals who championed feminist interests, discussed national politics, and commented on current social events by editing independent periodicals. The rise of modern journalism in China provided literate women with a powerful institution that allowed them articulate women's presence in the public space. In editing women's periodicals, women writers transformed themselves from traditional literary women (cainü) to professional women journalists (nübaoren) in the period of 1898-1937 when journalism became increasingly independent of and resistant to state control. The women's media writings in the early decades of the twentieth century not only reveal the historical diversity and complexity of feminist issues in China but also casts light upon important feminist topics that have survived the Nationalist, Communist, and economic reform eras. Today, public debate on women's issues in Mainland China and Taiwan is shaped by past feminist discourse and uses a vocabulary and language familiar to readers of an earlier era. This book examines how women journalists constructed Chinese feminism and debated patriarchy and women's roles in the newly created public space of print media during the period of 1898-1937. It studies Chinese women's public writings in periodicals edited and staffed by women journalists in four major urban centers-Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing, and Tianjin at a time when urban society underwent major transformation and experienced drastic political, social, and cultural changes. The revolution that overthrew the imperial government in 1911; an attack on patriarchy by cultural radicals in 1915-1919; and the advocacy of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, and feminism by intellectuals who received a Western-style education all worked together to undermine the Confucian notions of gender hierarchy, spatial separation of the sexes, and female domesticity among the well-educated urban classes. Doors of political participation, public activism, and production cracked open for courageous women who ventured into urban public spaces. From 1898 to 1937, urban women of the upper, middle, and working classes became increasingly visible at modern schools, as well as in career and production fields, political activism, and women's movements. At the same time, women edited independent periodicals and championed women's rights. Women's periodicals provided a site where writers negotiated with nationalism, patriarchy, and party lines to define and defend women's interests. These early feminist writings captured how activists perceived themselves and responded to the social and political changes around them. This book takes a historical approach in its examination and uses gender as an analytical category to study the significance of women's press writings in the years of nation building. Treating women journalists as agents of change and using their media writings as primary sources, this book explores what mattered to women writers at different historical junctures, as well as how they articulated values and meaning in a changing society and guided social changes in the direction they desired. It delineates the transformation of women journalists from political-minded Confucian gentry women to professional journalists, and of women's periodicals from representing women journalists' views to addressing the concerns and needs of the majority of women. It analyzes how the concepts of "feminism" and "nationalism" were embodied with different--even contesting--meanings at given historical junctures, and how women journalists managed to advance various feminist agendas by tapping on the various meanings of nationalism. This is an important book for collections in Asian studies, journalism history, and women's studies.

The year 1995, when the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, marks a historical milestone in the development of the Chinese feminist movement. In the decades that followed, three distinct trends emerged: first, there was a rise in feminist NGOs in mainland China and a surfacing of LGBTQ movements; second, social and economic developments nurtured new female agency, creating a vibrant, women-oriented cultural milieu in China; third, in response to ethnocentric Western feminism, some Chinese feminist scholars and activists recuperated the legacies of socialist China’s state feminism and gender policies in a new millennium. These trends have brought Chinese women unprecedented choices, resources, opportunities, pitfalls, challenges, and even crises. In this timely volume, Zhu and Xiao offer an examination of the ways in which Chinese feminist ideas have developed since the mid-1990s. By juxtaposing the plural "feminisms" with "Chinese characteristics," they both underline the importance of integrating Chinese culture, history, and tradition in the discussions of Chinese feminisms, and, stress the difference between the plethora of contemporary Chinese feminisms and the singular state feminism. The twelve chapters in this interdisciplinary collection address the theme of feminisms with Chinese characteristics from different perspectives rendered from lived experiences, historical reflections, theoretical ruminations, and cultural and sociopolitical critiques, painting a panoramic picture of Chinese feminisms in the age of globalization.

This book investigates sisterhood as a converging thread that wove female subjectivities and intersubjectivities into a larger narrative of Chinese modernity embedded in a newly conceived global context. It focuses on the period between the late Qing reform era around the turn of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, which saw the emergence of new ways of depicting Chinese womanhood in various kinds of media. In a critical hermeneutic approach, Zhu combines an examination of an outside perspective (how narratives and images about sisterhood were mobilized to shape new identities and imaginations) with that of an inside perspective (how subjects saw themselves as embedded in or affected by the discourse and how they negotiated such experiences within texts or through writing). With its working definition of sisterhood covering biological as well as all kinds of symbolic and metaphysical connotations, this book exams the literary and cultural representations of this elastic notion with attention to, on the one hand, a supposedly collective identity shared by all modern Chinese female subjects and, on the other hand, the contesting modes of womanhood that were introduced through the juxtaposition of divergent “sisters.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that brings together historical materials, literary and cultural analysis, and theoretical questions, Zhu conducts a careful examination of how new identities, subjectivities and sentiments were negotiated and mediated through the hermeneutic circuits around “sisterhood.”

Tlostanova examines Central Asia and the Caucasus to trace the genealogy of feminism in those regions following the dissolution of the USSR. The forms it takes resist interpretation through the lenses of Western feminist theory and woman of color feminism, hence Eurasian borderland feminism must chart a third path.

Maid in China is the first systematic, book-length investigation of internal rural migration in post-Mao China focused on the day-to-day production and consumption of popular media. Taking the rural maid in the urban home as its point of departure, the book weaves together three years of engaged ethnographic research in Beijing and Shanghai with critical analyses of a diverse array of popular media, and follows three lines of inquiry: media and cultural production, consumption practices, and everyday politics. It unravels some of the myriad ways in which the subaltern figure of the domestic worker comes to be inscribed with the cultural politics of boundaries that entrench a host of inequalities—between rich and poor, male and female, rural and urban. Wanning Sun explores a number of paradoxes that the domestic worker lives out on a daily basis: her ubiquitous invisibility, her enduring transience, and her status as an intimate stranger. Collectively, these paradoxes afford her a unique window onto the spaces and practices of the modern Chinese city. This intimate stranger’s epistemological status makes her an unauthorized yet authoritative witness of urban residents’ social lives, offering a revealing lens through which to examine both the formation of new social relations in post-reform urban China, and the new social uses of space—both domestic and public—engendered by these relations.

Presenting compelling case study material, international specialists examine the labour issues surrounding the workplace in China during a tumultuous time in the country’s history and reassesses the significance of labour process theory in the context of the changing Chinese workplace.

In the waning years of the Cold War, the United States and China began to cautiously engage in cultural, educational, and policy exchanges, which in turn strengthened new security and economic ties. These links have helped shape the most important bilateral relationship in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book explores the dynamics of cultural exchange through an in-depth historical investigation of three organizations at the forefront of U.S.-China non-governmental relations: the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies, the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and The 1990 Institute. Norton Wheeler reveals the impact of American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on education, environment, fiscal policy, and civil society in contemporary China. In turn, this book illuminates the important role that NGOs play in complementing formal diplomacy and presents a model of society-to-society relations that moves beyond old debates over cultural imperialism. Finally, the book highlights the increasingly significant role of Chinese Americans as bridges between the two societies. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with leading American and Chinese figures, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese politics and history, international relations and transnational NGOs.

A cultural studies consideration of marriage and those considered “deviant” in the nineteenth-century American imagination. A radical revision of the politics of race and sexuality within racial capitalism, Uncoupling American Empire provides an original cultural genealogy of how the institutionalization of marriage shaped imagined relationships among working people who were seen as sexually deviant in nineteenth-century U.S. imperial cultures. Departing from the longstanding focus on domesticity as a middle-class white women’s imaginary construct of home, nation, and empire, this book foregrounds the relationship between marriage and subjects marked by slavery, prostitution, indentured labor, and colonialism through tracing overlooked linkages among the period’s fiction texts, journalistic accounts, pictorial illustrations, and missionary narratives. Yu-Fang Cho’s feminist intersectional approaches illuminate the complex web of social difference that uneven access to marriage has historically produced; the cumulative effects of the ironic—and indeed cynical—promise of freedom, equality, and inclusion through sexual conformity; and the central role that cultural imagination plays in forging alternative relations among minoritized subjects. “I cannot state strongly enough how visionary and momentous Cho’s book is, and how much it will contribute to not only nineteenth-century literary studies, American studies, and ethnic studies, but also gender studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory.” — Grace Kyungwon Hong, UCLA “This ambitious book demonstrates Yu-Fang Cho’s facility with feminist, transnational, and queer theory, and her great dexterity moving between literary and historical methods. The book’s broad conceptual strokes are equally matched by her impressive archival research and close readings.” — Siobhan B. Somerville, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “Utilizing arguably the best exemplar of a comparative and intersectional approach, Cho exposes the contradictions of the promise of freedom and emphatically calls for scholars to address the multiple and differentiated ways that subjects are positioned by U.S. imperialism across national borders.” — Kent A. Ono, University of Utah “Uncoupling American Empire profoundly integrates a wide range of legal and social history with nuanced cultural and literary analysis. This innovative project goes well beyond the forced borrowing that characterizes much work that calls itself ‘interdisciplinary’ and truly challenges the divisions of ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and transnational American studies.” — Josephine D. Lee, University of Minnesota

Impure Cinema goes back to Bazin's original title precisely for its defence of impurity, applying it on the one hand to cinema's interbreeding with other arts and on the other to its ability to convey and promote cultural diversity. In contemporary progressive film criticism, ideas of purity, essence and origin have been superseded by favourable approaches to 'hybridization', 'transnationalism', 'multiculturalism' and cross-fertilizations of all sorts. Impure Cinema builds on this idea in novel and exciting ways, as it draws on cinema's combination of intermedial and intercultural aspects as a means to bridge the divide between studies of aesthetics and culture. Film is revealed here as the location par excellence of media encounters, mutual questioning and self-dissolution into post-medium experiments. Most importantly, the book argues, film's intermedial relations can only be properly understood if their cultural determinants are taken into account. Scholars and students of film, cinefiles and students of the arts will discover here unexpected connections across many artistic practices.

Transformative market reforms in China since the late 1970s have improved living standards dramatically, but have also led to unprecedented economic inequality. During this period, China’s educational system was restructured to support economic development, with educational reforms occurring at a startling pace. Today, the educational system has diversified in structure, finance, and content; it has become more market-oriented; and it is serving an increasingly diverse student population. These changes carry significant consequences for China’s social mobility and inequality, and future economic prospects. In Education and Reform in China, leading scholars in the fields of education, sociology, demography, and economics investigate the evolution of educational access and attainment, educational quality, and the economic consequences of being educated. Education and Reform in China shows that economic advancement is increasingly tied to education in China, even as educational services are increasingly marketized. The volume investigates the varying impact of change for different social, ethnic, economic and geographic groups. Offering interdisciplinary views on the changing role of education in Chinese society, and on China’s educational achievements and policy challenges, this book will be an important resource for those interested in education, public policy, and development issues in China.