Since opening to foreign investment in 1979, China has emerged as the leading investment site for multinational corporations. Remade in China looks beyond the macroeconomic effects of China's investment boom to analyze how foreign investors from the US, Japan, and other nations are shaping China's legal, labor, and business reforms. Wilson draws on interviews with nearly 100 foreign and local managers, attorneys, workers, and members of the business community to explain why Chinese laborers and firms have gravitated toward foreign models, especially US businesses and their institutions. Wilson uses the term "state-guided globalization" to describe how China has used foreign engagement to advance its domestic reform objectives and to enhance its role in international society. Rather than undermining state power, globalization actually has allowed China's state to push through difficult labor and legal reforms. Wilson concludes that Chinese policy makers drew lessons from foreign investors and foreign legal experts on how to introduce difficult labor market reforms in its state-owned enterprises and how to promote rule of law. Remade in China examines globalization and foreign investment in a different light, showing how these developments have helped to chart China's entry into international society. China's WTO accession agreement and international norms have established parameters by which to judge Chinese legal and business reforms. Although China's rise is a grave concern to the world, Remade in China asserts that Chinese leaders now see compliance with international rules as a means to secure more investment and to enhance their international legitimacy. Wilson provides a lucid and insightful analysis of how foreign and domestic actors, from political leaders to average laborers, have contributed to remaking China's institutions.

Examining the rise of Pudong and its role in re-creating Shanghai as a global city, Global Shanghai Remade utilises this important case study to shed light on contemporary globalisation and China’s integration with the world since the late 20th century. Unpacking the rise of Pudong in the context of Deng Xiaoping’s nation-building agenda, this book explores the development of the district from its earliest planning into a global city centre through multiple perspectives. In doing so, it explores the role of key decision-makers and actors, the strategic planning process, the approaches to urban development, and some of the iconic projects that define the rise of Pudong, Shanghai, and China itself. A timely volume for the 30th anniversary of China’s strategy of ‘developing and opening Pudong,’ it combines the analyses and findings from these perspectives into a framework for a broader understanding of city-making with Chinese characteristics. The first study of its kind, providing a comprehensive and systematic examination of Pudong, this book will be useful for students and scholars of urban planning and design, as well as Chinese Studies and Development Studies more generally.

This book describes how notions of Chinese identity, culture, and popular film genres have been reinvented and repackaged by major U.S. studios, spurring a surge in Chinese visibility in Hollywood.

China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has embarked on its most wide-ranging and ambitious restructuring since 1949, including major changes to most of its key organizations. The restructuring reflects the desire to strengthen PLA joint operation capabilities- on land, sea, in the air, and in the space and cyber domains. The reforms could result in a more adept joint warfighting force, though the PLA will continue to face a number of key hurdles to effective joint operations, Several potential actions would indicate that the PLA is overcoming obstacles to a stronger joint operations capability. The reforms are also intended to increase Chairman Xi Jinping's control over the PLA and to reinvigorate Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organs within the military. Xi Jinping's ability to push through reforms indicates that he has more authority over the PLA than his recent predecessors. The restructuring could create new opportunities for U.S.-China military contacts.

Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.

Charts the changing landscape of Shanghai as it embraces modernity

Chan looks at the dramatic post--1997 surge in Chinese presence in Hollywood, especially through the works of Ang Lee, John Woo, etc.

China's rise over the past several decades has lifted more than half of its population out of poverty and reshaped the global economy. What has caused this dramatic transformation? In China's Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation, author Bradley Gardner looks at one of the most important but least discussed forces pushing China's economic development: the migration of more than 260 million people from their birthplaces to China's most economically vibrant cities. By combining an analysis of China's political economy with current scholarship on the role of migration in economic development, China's Great Migration shows how the largest economic migration in the history of the world has led to a bottom-up transformation of China. Gardner draws from his experience as a researcher and journalist working in China to investigate why people chose to migrate and the social and political consequences of their decisions. In the aftermath of China's Cultural Revolution, the collapse of totalitarian government control allowed millions of people to skirt migration restrictions and move to China's growing cities, where they offered a massive pool of labor that propelled industrial development, foreign investment, and urbanization. Struggling to respond to the demands of these migrants, the Chinese government loosened its grip on the economy, strengthening property rights and allowing migrants to employ themselves and each other, spurring the Chinese economic miracle. More than simply a narrative of economic progress, China's Great Migration tells the human story of China's transformation, featuring interviews with the men and women whose way of life has been remade. In its pages, readers will learn about the rebirth of a country and millions of lives changed, hear what migration can tell us about the future of China, and discover what China's development can teach the rest of the world about the role of market liberalization and economic migration in fighting poverty and creating prosperity.

China is hot. The world sees a glorious future for this sleeping giant, three times larger than the United States, predicting it will blossom into the world's biggest economy by 2010. According to Chang, however, a Chinese-American lawyer and China specialist, the People's Republic is a paper dragon. Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao's death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society. Beijing's cautious reforms have left the country stuck midway between communism and capitalism, Chang writes. With its impending World Trade Organization membership, for the first time China will be forced to open itself to foreign competition, which will shake the country to its foundations. Economic failure will be followed by government collapse. Covering subjects from party politics to the Falun Gong to the government's insupportable position on Taiwan, Chang presents a thorough and very chilling overview of China's present and not-so-distant future.

During the years spanning the late Qing dynasty and the early Republican era, the status of Chinese women changed in both subtle and decisive ways. As domestic seclusion ceased to be a sign of virtue, new opportunities emerged for a variety of women. Much scholarly attention has been given to the rise of the modern, independent “new women” during this period. However, far less is known about the stories of married nonprofessional women without modern educations and their public activities. In At Home in the World, Xia Shi unearths the history of how these women moved out of their sequestered domestic life; engaged in charitable, philanthropic, and religious activities; and repositioned themselves as effective public actors in urban Chinese society. Investigating the lives of individual women as well as organizations such as the YWCA and the Daoyuan, she shows how her protagonists built on the past rather than repudiating it, drawing on broader networks of family, marriage, and friendship and reconfiguring existing beliefs into essential components of modern Chinese gender roles. The book stresses the collective forms of agency these women exercised in their endeavors, highlighting the significance of charitable and philanthropic work as political, social, and civic engagement. Shi also analyzes how men—alive, dead, or absent—both empowered and constrained women’s public ventures. She offers a new perspective on how the public, private, and domestic realms were being remade and rethought in early twentieth-century China, in particular, how the women navigated these developing spheres. At Home in the World sheds new light on how women exerted their influence beyond the home and expands the field of Chinese women’s history.