New Narratives Of Urban Space In Republican Chinese Cities

Download or read book New Narratives of Urban Space in Republican Chinese Cities written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-03-27 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nine empirical studies in New Narratives of Urban Space in Republican Chinese Cities, organized under the general framework of urban space, examine three critical dimensions of the great urban transformation in Republican China—social, legal and governance orders. Together these narratives suggest a new perception of this historical urbanism. While modern economic development was a major drive for Chinese urban transformation, this volume highlights the dimension of the multilayered forces that shape urban space by looking into that less quantifiable, but equally important cultural realm and by exposing the ways in which these forces created new urban narratives, which became themselves shapers of urban space and of our perception of the Republican urbanity.

Download or read book Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937-1949 written by Ma Zhao and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1937 to 1949, Beijing was in a state of crisis. The combined forces of Japanese occupation, civil war, runaway inflation, and reformist campaigns and revolutionary efforts wreaked havoc on the city’s economy, upset the political order, and threatened the social and moral fabric as well. Women, especially lower-class women living in Beijing’s tenement neighborhoods, were among those most affected by these upheavals. Delving into testimonies from criminal case files, Zhao Ma explores intimate accounts of lower-class women’s struggles with poverty, deprivation, and marital strife. By uncovering the set of everyday tactics that women devised and utilized in their personal efforts to cope with predatory policies and crushing poverty, this book reveals an urban underworld that was built on an informal economy and conducted primarily through neighborhood networks. Where necessary, women relied on customary practices, hierarchical patterns of household authority, illegitimate relationships, and criminal entrepreneurship to get by. Women’s survival tactics, embedded in and reproduced by their everyday experience, opened possibilities for them to modify the male-dominated city and, more importantly, allowed women to subtly deflect, subvert, and “escape without leaving” powerful forces such as the surveillance state, reformist discourse, and revolutionary politics during and beyond wartime Beijing.

Download or read book Chinese Urbanism: Urban Form And Life In The Tang-song Dynasties written by Jing Xie and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1990s, the urban landscape of China has witnessed revolutionary changes that are unrivalled in any country of the world throughout history. Rapid urbanization, facilitated by the modern planning mechanism for growth, provides a feast for property developers. Yet, associated urban problems such as housing affordability, traffic congestion, energy consumption, and environmental deterioration are aggravated. This book takes a historic approach to investigate the planning philosophy, urban form and life of the past. Through a detailed study of urban development from early times through the imperial period with a focus on the Tang-Song dynasties, this book attempts to articulate the good qualities of urban landscapes from the past that still have instructive value for modern practices. The focus on the Tang-Song period is not only because China was the most advanced civilization of its time, but also because it underwent a similar process of 'urbanization', evident by tremendous economic growth, a dramatic rise of urban population, and an extended building boom. Through evaluating the streets, city layout, public places, urban communities, houses and gardens, and using interdisciplinary research in urban planning, urban design, architecture, history, and cultural studies, this book asserts that the past is quintessentially important. The past not only truthfully records the course of social and cultural formation of urban community and its associated physical fabric, but also regulates the directions we may take in the future.

Download or read book Legal Transplantation in Early Twentieth-Century China written by Michael H. K. Ng and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-23 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Practicing law" has a dual meaning in this book. It refers to both the occupational practice of law and the practicing of transplanted laws and institutions to perfect them. The book constitutes the first monographic work on the legal history of Republican Beijing, and provides an in-depth and comprehensive account of the practice of law in the city of Beijing during a period of social transformation. Drawing upon unprecedented research using archived records and other primary materials, it explores the problems encountered by Republican Beijing’s legal practitioners, including lawyers, policemen, judges and criminologists, in applying transplanted laws and legal institutions when they were inapplicable to, incompatible with, or inadequate for resolving everyday legal issues. These legal practitioners resolved the mismatch, the author argues, by quite sensibly assimilating certain imperial laws and customs and traditional legal practices into the daily routines of the recently imported legal institutions. Such efforts by indigenous legal practitioners were crucial in, and an integral part of, the making of legal transplantation in Republican Beijing. This work not only makes significant contributions to scholarship on the legal history of modern China, but also offers insights into China’s quest for modernization in its first wave of legal globalization. It is thus of great value to legal historians, comparative legal scholars, specialists in Chinese law and China studies, and lawyers and law students with an interest in Chinese legal history.

Download or read book Treaty Ports in Modern China written by Robert Bickers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a wide range of new research on the Chinese treaty ports – the key strategic places on China’s coast where in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries various foreign powers controlled, through "unequal treaties", whole cities or parts of cities, outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese authorities. Topics covered include land and how it was acquired, the flow of people, good and information, specific individuals and families who typify life in the treaty ports, and technical advances, exploration, and innovation in government.

Download or read book Tourism in Asian Cities written by Saurabh Kumar Dixit and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely and significant book explores the characteristics and complexities of Asian urban tourism, considering the extent to which Western paradigms can be transferred to Asian settings and the striking contrasts that exist within the region. In an era of unprecedented urban expansion in Asian cities, this book comes at a time of great urgency, illuminating the possible problems and opportunities that arise when a destination emerges as a tourism hotspot. Split into three parts; introducing Asian urban tourism and urbanization, the management and marketing of Asian cities, and emerging trends and issues associated with Asian urban tourism, the book offers a range of varying and vibrant perspectives from international and interdisciplinary experts in the field. Chapters include studies on a wide range of destinations such as Hong Kong, Macau, Cambodia, Phuket, Kolkata, Busan, Delhi, and Sri Lanka among many others, and explore crucial contemporary themes such as overtourism, urbanization and administrative challenges, world heritage, smart cities and the use of technologies such as VR in urban tourism experience creation. It will be a vital resource for upper-level students, researchers, and academics in tourism, city tourism, Asian studies, development studies, cultural studies, and sustainability, as well as professionals in the field of tourism management.

Download or read book Women and China's Revolutions written by Gail Hershatter and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If we place women at the center of our account of China’s last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? This deeply knowledgeable book illuminates the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Leading scholar Gail Hershatter asks how these events affected women in particular, and how women affected the course of these events. For instance, did women have a 1911 revolution? A socialist revolution? If so, what did those revolutions look like? Which women had them? Hershatter uses two key themes to frame her analysis. The first is the importance of women’s visible and invisible labor. The labor of women in domestic and public spaces shaped China’s move from empire to republic to socialist nation to rising capitalist power. The second is the symbolic work performed by gender itself. What women should do and be was a constant topic of debate during China’s transformation from empire to weak state to partially occupied territory to nascent socialist republic to reform-era powerhouse. What sorts of concerns did people express through the language of gender? How did that language work, and why was it so powerful? Drawing on decades of Hershatter’s groundbreaking scholarship and mastery of a range of literatures, this beautifully written book will be essential reading for all students of China’s modern history.