Guo Rongfei’s documentary short absorbs viewers in the quiet, intimate life of a three-generation migrant family of five, who work and live on their small family-run barge, cruising across and mooring alongside Shanghai’s Huangpu River day and night. “Every time we pass by the Bund, my entire family gets out to admire it,” says Wang Fuchao, the barge's captain, referring to the night view of the illuminated waterfront of the city.
On January 11, Taiwanese will go to the polls. Their election pits the incumbent President Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which favors greater distance from Beijing, against Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu of the Kuomingtang, which favors warmer relations with the mainland. Many fear Beijing will meddle in the election. What’s at stake in the 2020 Taiwanese election? And what role will Beijing play?
Evan Dawley is Associate Professor of History at Goucher College, where he has taught since 2013, and he previously worked in the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State. He completed his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University in 2006. His primary research interests relate to modern East Asian history, with particular attention to the histories of Taiwan, China, and Japan, as well as identity formation, imperialism, and international/transnational history. His first monograph, Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s, was published in 2019 by the Harvard Asia Center Press. He has published essays on Japanese women settlers in Taiwan during the 1910s, the deportation of Japanese from Taiwan after 1945, and a review essay of recent scholarship on Taiwanese identity. He has co-edited The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s, with Tosh Minohara and Tze-ki Hon (Brill, 2014), and is co-editor of Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment in East Asia, with Tosh Minohara, forthcoming with Lexington Books. He is beginning a new project, tentatively titled “Chinese at Home, Chinese Abroad, and the Global Construction of the Modern Nation-State,” in which he explores the relations between the Republic of China government and communities of Chinese and Taiwanese abroad, and interactions with foreign governments around these communities, from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Nicholas Brealey Publishing: The rise of China’s tech companies and intense competition from the sector is just beginning. This will present an ongoing management and strategy challenge for companies for many years to come. Tech Titans of China is the go-to guide for companies (and those interested in competition from China) seeking to understand China’s grand tech ambitions, who the players are, and what their strategy is.
Featuring detailed profiles of the Chinese tech companies making waves, the tech sectors that matter most in China’s grab for super power status, and predictions for China’s tech dominance in just 10 years.
Related Reading:
“The Inside Story of China’s Stunning Rise from Tech Imitator to Innovator,” Marcus Baram, Fast Company, September 5, 2019
On December 4, an NGO from Pakistan registered a representative office in China, making it the first Pakistan-based organization to either register an office or file for a temporary activity since the Foreign NGO Law went into effect in 2017.
As we do periodically, we recently updated our categorization scheme for foreign NGOs’ fields of work in China. We added “Science” to the “Technology” category to yield the new label “Science and Technology.”
Havard University Press: What does it mean to be Taiwanese? This question sits at the heart of Taiwan’s modern history and its place in the world. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly focus on Taiwan after 1987, Becoming Taiwanese examines the important first era in the history of Taiwanese identity construction during the early 20th century, in the place that served as the crucible for the formation of new identities: the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung).
Part colonial urban social history, part exploration of the relationship between modern ethnicity and nationalism, Becoming Taiwanese offers new insights into ethnic identity formation. Evan Dawley examines how people from China’s southeastern coast became rooted in Taiwan; how the transfer to Japanese colonial rule established new contexts and relationships that promoted the formation of distinct urban, ethnic, and national identities; and how the so-called retrocession to China replicated earlier patterns and reinforced those same identities. Becoming Taiwanese is based on original research in Taiwan and Japan, and focuses on the settings and practices of social organizations, religion, and social welfare, as well as the local elites who served as community gatekeepers.
Verso: On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among China’s educated, urban women. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest challenge to China’s authoritarian regime today.
Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their “joy of betraying Big Brother,” as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.
“The Rise of China’s Feminists: Will Activists Spark Social Change, Or Burn out, Asks Writer,” Joyce Lau, South China Morning Post (September 6, 2018)
“#MeToo in China: A Force for Change Or Another Doomed Movement?,” Keith B. Richburg, The Washington Post (November 21, 2018)
“China’s Feminist Fight: #MeToo in the Middle Kingdom,” Susan Greenhalgh and Xiying Wang, Foreign Affairs (June 6, 2019)
“‘You Can’t Arrest Us All!’,” Emily Walz, Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel (January 28, 2019)
