Based on a longitudinal fieldwork study in the Pearl River Delta, which is the heartland of the Cantonese-speaking world, the book explores how the ordinary people and their society evolved in a period of time characterized by drastic change.

The volume collects the published articles of Dr. Marjorie Topley, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the postwar period and also the first president of the revived Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Her ethnographic research in Singapore and Hong Kong set a high standard for urban anthropology, and helped creating the fields of religious studies, migration studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology, focusing on topics that remain current and important in the disciplines. The essays in this collection showcase Dr. Topley's groundbreaking contributions in several areas of scholarship. These include “Chinese Women’s Vegetarian Houses in Singapore” (1954) and “The Great Way of Former Heaven: A Group of Chinese Secret Religious Sects” (1963), both important research on the study of subcultural groups in a complex urban society; “Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung” (1978), now a classic in Chinese anthropology and women’s studies; her widely known and cited article, “Cosmic Antagonisms: A Mother-Child Syndrome” (1974), which investigates widely shared everyday practices and cosmological explanations that Cantonese mothers invoked when they encountered difficulties in child-rearing; and “Capital, Saving and Credit among Indigenous Rice Farmers and Immigrant Vegetable Farmers in Hong Kong's New Territories” (2004 [1964]).

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? In this volume the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty we need to know more about the “cultural lives”—past and present—of the state’s ultimate sanction.

The conventional belief that all regions have equally benefited from China’s remarkable development over the last three decades is subjected to criticism in this book as Hong Yu systematically analyses the issue of regional inequality during the post-1978 period using the case of Guangdong. Guangdong is one of the key industrial centres and economic powerhouses in China and as a pioneer province, instigating economic reform as China opened up to the world, it offers an ideal focus upon which to question and enrich the Western theories of economic geography and regional disparity. Based on field research, analysis of geographic characteristics and regression models, this book illustrates how Guangdong’s impressive development record has been marred by its rising regional disparity, investigates the main causes of this disparity, and draws conclusions regarding the lessons China can learn from it. Economic Development and Inequality in China will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese economics, Chinese regional studies, economic geography and China Studies. Hong Yu is a Visiting Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in the field of regional economy. He is the author of a chapter on China’s two delta regions in the book "China and The Global Economic Crisis".

Looks at the fate of Hong Kong’s unique culture since its reversion to China.

The notion of the individual creator, a product in part of the Western romantic ideal, is now troubled by accounts and explanations of creativity as a social construct. While in collectivist cultures the assimilation (but not the denial) of individual authorship into the complexities of group production and benefit has been a feature, the notion of the lone individual creator has been persistent. Systems theories acknowledge the role of others, yet at heart these are still individual views of creativity - focusing on the creative individual drawing upon the work of others rather than recognizing the mutually constitutive elements of social interactions across time and space. Focusing on the domain of music, the approach taken in this book falls into three sections: investigations of the people, processes, products, and places of collaborative creativity in compositional thought and practice; explorations of the ways in which creative collaboration provides a means of crossing boundaries between disciplines such as music performance and musicology; and studies of the emergence of creative thought and practice in educational contexts including that of the composer and the classroom. The volume concludes with an extended chapter that reflects on the ways in which the studies reported advance understandings of creative thought and practice. The book provides new perspectives to our understandings of the role of collaborative thought and processes in creative work across the domain of music including: composition, musicology, performance, music education and music psychology.

This set comprises a comprehensive selection of colonial Western scholarly texts on Chinese secret societies from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It includes a selection of important papers on Chinese secret societies by a variety of scholars, missionaries, and colonial officials.

By studying six different aspects of culture in Canton in the period between the two World Wars, this book helps broaden our limited knowledge of the social and cultural lives of the common people in this largest city of South China. The author examines how the Cantonese in this periodindulged in their imagined cultural superiority as "modern" citizens, ushering in a cult of the modern city. During this period, Cantonese opera was also emerging and evolving into a widely accepted form of commercialised mass entertainment. The process of social and cultural change and its impacton the development of this city and its people are revealed throughout the book. This book also aims to redress some major misconceptions of the socio-cultural realities as seen in official rhetoric or academic discourse on the matters of patriotism and anti-foreignism, gambling, prostitution, and opium consumption. Contemporary non-official and folk materials reveal that thecommon people were much more pro-Western than xenophobic in attitude, and the alleged social and political "calamities" of gambling, opium consumption and prostitution were more rhetorical than real. Understanding Canton provides us with, not only a fuller and more comprehensive picture of city lifeand popular mentalities, but also an important clue to understand how and why the social history of this city was distorted and constructed in ways that suited the political ideology and nation-building agenda of the ruling regimes.

This book is a two-part discussion about mid-late nineteenth-century traditional Cantonese society and the material conditions that fostered large-scale Cantonese overseas emigration. Part I: discusses the Peasant-farmer, merchant, and Gentry (scholar-official-landed Gentry) social classes. An additional chapter focuses on Cantonese “special interests’ groups,” which embraced those people with shared group needs, identities, and interests, which cut across social class lines. Part II: analyzes four adverse material conditions, which motivated and contextualized large-scale Cantonese overseas emigration. This includes: 1) high-density population concentration and over-population; 2) economic immiseration of the Cantonese peasant-farmer class; 3) Cantonese communal conflict and social chaos; and 4) local Cantonese/fan-kwai (“foreign devils”) conflicts in the Cantonese heartland. This book is the product of over forty-five years of research and writing, it is the third volume of a new series entitled The Gum-Shaan Chronicles: The Early History of Cantonese-Chinese America, 1850-1900. About the Author Douglas W. Lee, PhD is a second-generation Cantonese-Chinese American, trained as a historian of Modern China, with a special research interest in early Chinese American History. He earned a BA at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon (1967); an MA at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1969); a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1979); and JD from Lewis and Clark Law School, Portland, Oregon (1988). In 1979-1980, Lee was the cofounder and first national President of the National Association for Asian American Studies. In 1981, he was cofounder of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest, and the first editor of its journal, The Annals of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, Washington).