This book explores changing concepts of marriage and gender relationships and attitudes toward sex in a rural Chinese community over the past five decades. The book is based on a study of an industrialized peasant village in Guangdong Province from 1994 to 1996 and subsequent visits from 2000 to 2002. According to the authors, the rural economic reforms of the 1980s in southern China have challenged and reinforced the deep structure of Chinese familism and this has lead to tensions between tradition and modernity. The first section of the book explores how attitudes toward marriage and...

This book investigates the process of negotiation between societies and information and communication technologies (ICTs); how ICTs evolve in this global world, transforming the organization of everyday life as well as the production of technologies. It analyzes how societies mediate the quantity and quality of technologies needed and how these technologies are in turn metabolized by societies. In the globalization process, technological products that originate from European cultures undergo a resemanticization process by Asian users. Adaptation and transformation of the meaning of ICTs...

The fast diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in China has brought forth new forms of connection among the Chinese and has changed their social lives. Virtual networks have been developed and in turn have led to the formation of networks in the actual world. This collection explores the resultant complications in the relationship between virtual, actual, and local interactions. It discusses various aspects of the implications of the new connectivities on these three types of interactions in China. The topics examined include: the possibility of the development of...

The fast diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in China has brought forth new forms of connection among the Chinese and has changed their social lives. Virtual networks have been developed and in turn have led to the formation of networks in the actual world. This collection explores the resultant complications in the relationship between virtual, actual, and local interactions. It discusses various aspects of the implications of the new connectivities on these three types of interactions in China. The topics examined include: the possibility of the development of...