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Title   | Year | Author | Language | Abstract |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shanghai in Contemporary Chinese Film | 2010 | Liu, Xiangyang | English | This thesis is intended to investigate a series of films produced since the 1990s. All of these films deal with the theme of Shanghai, old or new, yet, under different circumstances, they are of disparate styles and perspectives and represent various ideological and cultural characteristics of each period. In Chapter One, I will discuss Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon and two films by Lou Ye, Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly, from which we can see the differences between two generations of Chinese filmmakers. While the Fifth Generation tend to imagine and investigate in the framework of Chinese history, the younger generation avoids the grand narrative and chooses to focus more on the life of individuals and their inner world. Chapter Two will take three Hong Kong films as examples, one by Ann Hui and the other two by Stanley Kwan. From these three films, we can see a special relationship between Shanghai and Hong Kong and the circulation of urban culture in modern Chinese history. Chapter Three will examine some newer films, respectively by younger directors Zhang Yibai and Lee Xin and by three world-renowned directors Ang Lee, Ann Hui, and Stanley Kwan. Some of these films pay attention to contemporary urban life, but some still dwell on the past to make further explorations. The diversity of these films apparently reflects the chaotic and noisy era we are living in, and through them we can hear the different voices of anxiety, bewilderment, optimism, sentimentalism or nostalgia. |
| Socialist market economy and industrial reform in China during the Dengist era from 1978 to 1997 | 2001 | Hui, Wan-sze | English | What signifies the term "socialist markets economy" (SME)? What is the concrete change from the socialist planning to this SME? What impact of the change on one industrial sector (automotive)? On the production danweis? We will study these questions in this PhD thesis. Our approach is empirical based on our first observations and numerous on-site interviews. Our approach is also systemic and institutional as the reforms, by modifying the rules of the game, have an impact on the organization and the structure of an industry and danweis. We highlight the evolution of the socialist production networks to differential industrial sectors still branded by their past. We analyze the particularities of the Chinese automotive industry and compare them to those of an automotive industry in the capitalist market economy. The results of our research are: In the mainstream economic thoughts, the idea of "market socialism" is associated to the idea of a market system which would avoid the problems of unequal richness distribution linked with the private ownership system. But the Chinese case shows us that it is rather a coexistence of two parallel systems than a compatibility between socialism and market. Parallely to a socialist system which endures, political power and administration tend to be reduced, with a more independent legislation, and a progressive installation of market mechanisms. For the industries, the reforms tend to transform the vertically and horizontally isolated socialist production networks into industrial sectors. To transform the multi-functional danweis, the reforms try different management methods by experimentation, the danweis tend to become "economically responsible", while the public ownership system must stay intact (socialist ideology). |
| Struggling with Famine in Warlord China: Social Networks, Achievements, and Limitations, 1920-21 | 2011 | Fuller, Pierre Emery | English | This dissertation makes the case that in China’s most severe food crisis of the first quarter of the 20th century, the great north China famine of 1920-21, considerable life-saving relief was generated by three segments of society largely neglected in the existing literature: Buddhist and other native charity efforts working along parallel social channels to the better-publicized missionary and international relief groups; the Republic’s maligned military establishment; and officials and residents of the stricken communities themselves who were operating largely “below the radar” of the distant, mostly city-based chroniclers of the famine whose interpretations have been privileged in subsequent histories. In the process, this study makes several historiographic interventions: first, it expands the study of modern north China relief beyond the imperial and modern state apparatus. In doing so, one can identify a paternalistic relief culture shared by state and extragovernmental actors in the countryside that operated at multiple levels simultaneously and that persisted despite the Qing collapse and increased marginalization of China’s interior. Second, this study offers a corrective to the scholarly emphasis on the culture of “modernizing” elites in more affluent and Westerninfluenced south China and the treaty ports, arguing that the prominence of southern elites in late 19th and early 20th century disaster relief elsewhere in the country was more a function of shifting economic resources to the coasts and new forms of media than the emergence of a new “modern” civic or humanitarian consciousness. This corrective allows us to trace continuities with traditional Chinese society stretching well into the 20th century, to appreciate the social dynamic of inland communities, and to recognize the possibility of multiple, alternative modernities coinciding in China’s many regions. Finally, this study suggests that the dating of China’s descent into a country of predatory state policies, widespread social dislocation, and incessant civil war – all the hallmarks of “warlordism” – be pushed back to the mid-1920s, half a decade after our famine. In short, this dissertation offers grounds for the reconsideration of the trajectory of modern Chinese history through the prism of social responses to disaster in the early 20th century. |
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