Jia Pingwa, whose novels have caused both fame and controversy, has an enormous readership throughout the Chinese speaking world. However, despite Pingwa's cultural significance and the use of his poetry, novels and prose in schools and universities, there has never been any substantial academic study of the writer and his writings. Filling that gap, this book examines the corpus of Pingwa's writing and emphasizes his importance, prominence and relevance to contemporary Chinese society.

This pioneering study discusses Pingwa's works in the light of 'cultural nationalism',...

Introducing readers to the far-reaching global orientation that is now taking place in urban China, an international team of contributors describe overarching globalization through a detailed examination of the transformation of the built environment.

A range of urban development processes are analyzed including urbanization, real estate development, changing landscapes, the industrial restructuring of the second-tier city, and the formation of the city-region in the context of global and local interactions. In examining city development and local practices as part of globalization...

The authors explore the degree to which Chinese multinationals have a distinctive 'Chinese' approach to human resource management, in the same way as large Japanese companies are widely regarded as having a special Japanese approach. Based on extensive original research in the subsidiaries of Chinese multinationals outside China, the book examines a wide range of issues related to this key question including the evolution of human resource management in Chinese companies, the internationalization of Chinese business, recruitment and selection, rewards and compensation, performance...

Based on documentary materials including interviews with key players in China, this book charts the development of non-governmental and non-profit organizations in China from the late 1970s to the present day. It recounts how in the aftermath of the 1978 reforms that created a market economy and diversified interests and social life, new institutions and organizations outside of the state system increased dramatically in number, size and influence. These organizations, which barely existed before the reforms began in the late 1970s, carry out many social, economic and cultural tasks...

Grounded on a series of first-hand interviews with Chinese government officials, this book examines China's accession to the World Trade Organization, providing an 'inside' look at Chinese WTO accession negotiations. Presenting a systematic political economy model in analyzing Beijing's decision-making mechanisms, the book argues that China's WTO policy making is a state-led, leadership driven, and top-down process. Feng explores how China's determined political elite partly bypassed and partly restructured a largely reluctant and resistant bureaucracy, under constant pressure from an...

Unemployment in China offers a new and invaluable insight into the Chinese economy, keenly analyzing the new directions the world's next superpower is now taking.

Successfully bringing together a wide range of research and evidence from leading scholars in the field, this book shows how unemployment is one of the key issues facing the Chinese economy. China's market-oriented economic reform and industrial restructuring, while greatly improving efficiency, have also sharply reduced overstaffing, leading to a large increase in unemployment.

At the same time, further...

Based on extensive original research, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the current status of state enterprise reform in China.

Chinese State Enterprise Reform considers the relationship between public ownership and public enterprises, and the historical evolution of China's economic reform programme since 1978, including assessments of the Contrast Responsiblity System, which operated from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, and the Group Company Experiments, which began in the 1990s. It discusses the relations between workers, managers, and the state in post-Dengist...

After decades of near silence on the matter, sex is being talked about in China. But what is being said? Who is allowed to speak? And whose purposes are being served?

This ground-breaking book takes a critical look at how sex in China is thought and talked about. Drawing on the work of the country s foremost sex experts, and years of research in the field, it gives an overview of the sexual landscape in China today.

Including new material on transsexuals, fetishism, sex aids and pornography, the book shows that the dominant ways of thinking about sex are...

Since the victory of the 1949 revolution the incumbency of the Chinese Communist Party has been characterized by an almost relentless struggle to legitimize its monopoly on political power. During the Mao era, attempts to derive legitimacy focused primarily on mass participation in political affairs, a blend of Marxist and nationalist ideology, and the charismatic authority of Mao Zedong. The dramatic failure of the Cultural Revolution forced the post-Mao leadership to discard these discredited paradigms of legitimacy and move towards an almost exclusively performance based concept founded...

Although it is generally believed in China that socialism raised women's status and paid work liberated them from the shackles of patriarchy, the economic reforms of the last two decades of the twentieth century meant women workers were more vulnerable to losing their jobs than men. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on the macro-structural features of this process, this book makes the voices of ordinary women workers heard and applies feminist perspectives on women and work to the Chinese situation.

Drawing upon extensive life history interviews, this book contests...