This book surveys the explosive youth culture in twenty-first century China, an active and powerful force catalysing cultural innovations, social changes, and collective efforts, re-inventing a pluralistic and multivalent youth (qingnian) in an age of enormous change, division and uncertainty. Providing a comprehensive analysis of literary, cinematic, musical, televisual, and social media representations about, for and by disparate youth groups, this book seeks to offer a systematic investigation of a trans-medial and multi-locale youth culture. In so doing, it examines contributions from high school dropouts, industrial workers, migrant laborers and "leftover women", as well as best-selling writers and filmmakers, cultural entrepreneurs, queer idols and fans, and young feminist activists. Observing the Chinese youths’ deployment of "small" genres, such as light novels and short videos, in addition to digital media, this book ultimately demonstrates the renewal of cultural forms and the transformative power of networked "small" atomized individuals in reinventing a youthful coalition of silenced, belittled, and marginalized groups. A thoroughly interdisciplinary study, Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, as well as Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Media Studies.

This Handbook offers a rich survey of topics concerning historical, modern and contemporary Chinese genders and sexualities. Exploring gender and sexuality as key dimensions of China’s modernisation and globalisation, this Handbook effectively situates Chinese gender and sexuality in transnational and transcultural contexts. It also spotlights nonnormative practices and emancipatory potentials within mainstream, heterosexual-dominated and patriarchally structured settings. It serves as a definitive study, research and resource guide for emerging gender and sexuality issues in the Chinese-speaking world. This Handbook covers interdisciplinary methodologies, perspectives and topics, including: History Literature Art Fashion Migration Translation Sex and desire Film and television Digital media Star and fan cultures Fantasies and lives of women and LGBTQ+ groups Social movements Transnational feminist and queer politics Paying acute attention to nonnormative genders and sexualities and emphasising the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity and class, this Handbook offers an essential, field-defining text to Chinese gender and sexuality studies.

The remarkable transformation of the Chinese economy in terms of its structure and growth has drawn unprecedented attention from academics, policy makers and businessmen alike. In the past four decades, China swiftly transformed from a centrally-planned to a market-oriented economy, with an economic size just behind the US and ahead of Japan. Amid commendations for China's economic success offering valuable reform and growth lessons to other developing countries, underlying challenges have been emerging, which constitute long-term risks in shaking China's sustainable success. These challenges encompass a wide range of sectors and issues such as the rural-urban divide, state monopoly, policy loans in the banking sector, lack of skilled and sophisticated workers, environmental degradation, etc. This book unveils the risks and challenges embedded in China's spectacular economic success and demonstrates that effective handling of these challenges is vital for China to avoid falling into the "middle-income trap". It is elucidated that feasible solutions are available to accommodate these risks and the clue of success lies on the willingness and ability of China's central leaders to implement further reforms. This book is a valuable reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics, and public and business policy makers who are concerned about the current status and future development of the Chinese economy.

The 2010s have seen an explosion in popularity of Chinese television featuring same-sex intimacies, LGBTQ-identified celebrities, and explicitly homoerotic storylines even as state regulations on “vulgar” and “immoral” content grow more prominent. This emerging “queer TV China” culture has generated diverse, cyber, and transcultural queer fan communities. Yet these seemingly progressive televisual productions and practices are caught between multilayered sociocultural and political-economic forces and interests. Taking “queer” as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, this volume counters the Western-centric conception of homosexuality as the only way to understand nonnormative identities and same-sex desire in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. It proposes an analytical framework of “queer/ing TV China” to explore the power of various TV genres and narratives, censorial practices, and fandoms in queer desire-voicing and subject formation within a largely heteropatriarchal society. Through examining nine cases contesting the ideals of gender, sexuality, Chineseness, and TV production and consumption, the book also reveals the generative, negotiative ways in which queerness works productively within and against mainstream, seemingly heterosexual-oriented, televisual industries and fan spaces. “This cornucopia of fresh and original essays opens our eyes to the burgeoning queer television culture thriving beneath official media crackdowns in China. As diverse as the phenomenon it analyses, Queer TV China is the spark that will ignite a prairie fire of future scholarship.” —Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London “This timely volume explores the various possibilities and nuances of queerness in Chinese TV and fannish culture. Challenging the dichotomy of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ representations of gender and sexual minorities, Queer TV China argues for a multilayered and queer-informed understanding of the production, consumption, censorship, and recreation of Chinese television today.” —Geng Song, Associate Professor and Director of Translation Program, University of Hong Kong

This book outlines the major social and political changes in the city of Macau during its first 20 years under the "One Country, Two Systems" arrangement with Mainland China. Despite the long-standing image of Macau as Asia’s Las Vegas, it is a city that has changed a great deal since its return to China. Equally, despite this return, it retains a unique social, economic and political character, distinct both from the Mainland of China and from its larger neighbour, Hong Kong. The chapters in this book examine the detail of this uniqueness from a range of perspectives, including the gambling industry, police-society relations, media usage patterns and protest movements. Analysing the state of affairs 20 years after the city’s return to China, they also attempt to anticipate its future trajectory. This is a valuable guide for scholars of Asian, and particularly Chinese, urban politics that will be of interest to academics and students looking to better understand the particularities of Macau.

This book investigates uneven regional development in China – with particular focus on the cases of Guangdong and Zheijiang provinces – which have been at the forefront of debate since Chinese economic reform. Rapid economic growth since the ‘opening-up’ of China has been accompanied by significant disparities in the regional distribution of income: this book represents one of the most recent studies to present a picture of this inequality. Built upon a multi-scale and multi-mechanism framework, it provides systematic examination of both the patterns and mechanisms of regional development and inequality in provincial China, emphasizing the effects of economic transition. Approaching from a geographical perspective, its authors consider the interplay between the local, the state, and the global forces in shaping the landscape of regional inequality in China. Extensive empirical findings will prove useful to those researching other developing countries within the frontier of globalization and economic transition. Regional Inequality in Transitional China will appeal to scholars and students of geography, economics and Chinese studies more broadly.

This book argues that China’s international socialization of the political elites of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partner states is an exceptionally effective instrument of China’s current foreign policy. It shows how the BRI-related process of socialization generates shared beliefs in the legitimacy and therefore in the acceptability of a Chinese international order among target elites and how in turn the policies and actions of states controlled by these elites tend to become aligned with the norms ‘taught’ by the Chinese socializer. It goes on to show how this serves the interests of China’s government, firms, and citizens at national, regional, and global levels; and how the resulting increased support for Beijing’s version of the international order creates a virtuous circle that further enhances China’s international position and potential.

Over the last decade, Chinese energy companies have engaged in the acquisition of oil and gas in Africa. This book investigates the activities of Chinese energy companies throughout a number of African countries, including Nigeria, Angola, Sudan and Tunisia. Based on seven years of empirical research and hundreds of interviews with Chinese government and company representatives, Chinese Energy Companies in Africa breaks original ground in understanding the emergence of domestic interest groups in foreign policy. It examines the impact of non-state actors on Chinese foreign policy, and in particular the increasing role played by national oil companies (NOCs). Supported by extensive data, this is also the first publication of its kind to focus on the foreign policy behaviour of an authoritarian state and the role herein played by non-state actors. In addition to the main cases put forward, a chapter of comparative mini-cases is included. This book creates important implications for both policymakers and scholars; it will serve as a valuable resource for those involved in the fields of foreign policy, international security and international relations.

How did labor NGOs come into existence in contemporary China? How do labor activists act – or not act – when the limits of state tolerance are unclear? With a focus on labor NGOs in South China and Western funding agencies, this book sets out to address these questions by investigating the dynamics of state control in post-socialist China since the 1970s, in which rapid economic and social transformations have cultivated an environment of uncertainty. Taking uncertainty as an analytical space, productive of emergent practices and discourses, this book draws on original fieldwork and interviews to study the lived experiences of different actors throughout the labor NGO community, the foreign donors trying to bring about change, and the networks of social relationships being strategically reconfigured. Doing Labor Activism in South China offers an ethnography of the Chinese state that reveals an intimate and complicit modality of self-governing, demonstrating how neoliberal ideas are at once represented by international development and deflected in grassroots development. It will be useful to students and scholars of Social Anthropology and Urban Ethnography, as well as Political Science and Chinese Studies more generally.

Combining a historical approach of Chineseness and a contemporary perspective on the social construction of Chineseness, this book provides comparative insights to understand the contingent complexities of ethnic and social formations in both China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This book focuses on the experiences and practices of these people, who as mobile agents are free to embrace or reject being defined as Chinese by moving across borders and reinterpreting their own histories. By historicizing the notion of Chineseness at local, regional, and global levels, the book examines intersections of authenticity, authority, culture, identity, media, power, and international relations that support or undermine different instances of Chineseness and its representations. It seeks to rescue the present from the past by presenting case studies of contingent encounters that produce the ideas, practices, and identities that become the categories nations need to justify their existence. The dynamic, fluid representations of Chineseness illustrate that it has never been an undifferentiated whole in both space and time. Through physical movements and inherited knowledge, agents of Chineseness have deployed various interpretive strategies to define and represent themselves vis-à-vis the local, regional, and global in their respective temporal experiences. This book will be relevant to students and scholars in Chinese studies and Asian studies more broadly, with a focus on identity politics, migration, popular culture, and international relations. “The Chinese overseas often saw themselves as caught between a rock and a hard place. The collection of essays here highlights the variety of experiences in Southeast Asia and China that suggest that the rock can become a huge boulder with sharp edges and the hard places can have deadly spikes. A must read for those who wonder whether Chineseness has ever been what it seems.” Wang Gungwu, University Professor, National University of Singapore. “By including reflections on constructions of Chineseness in both China itself and in various Southeast Asian sites, the book shows that being Chinese is by no means necessarily intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept, while at the same time highlighting the incongruities and tensions in the escapable relationship with China that diasporic Chinese subjects variously embody, expressed in a wide range of social phenomena such as language use, popular culture, architecture and family relations. The book is a very welcome addition to the necessary ongoing conversation on Chineseness in the 21st century.” Ien Ang, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University.