This collection of essays concerns both urban and rural Chinese communities, ranging from professional to working-class families. The contributors attempt to determine whether and to what extent the policy shifts that followed Mao Zedong's death affected Chinese families.

This collection of essays concerns both urban and rural Chinese communities, ranging from professional to working-class families. The contributors attempt to determine whether and to what extent the policy shifts that followed Mao Zedong's death affected Chinese families.

China's bold program of reforms launched in the late 1970s--the move to a market economy and the opening to the outside world--ended the political chaos and economic stagnation of the Cultural Revolution and sparked China's unprecedented economic boom. Yet, while the reforms made possible a rising standard of living for the majority of China's population, they came at the cost of a weakening central government, increasing inequalities, and fragmenting society. The essays of Barry Naughton, Joseph Fewsmith, Paul H. B. Godwin, Murray Scot Tanner, Lianjiang Li and Kevin J. O'Brien, Tianjian Shi, Martin King Whyte, Thomas P. Bernstein, Dorothy J. Solinger, David S. G. Goodman, Kristen Parris, Merle Goldman, Elizabeth J. Perry, and Richard Baum and Alexei Shevchenko analyze the contradictory impact of China's economic reforms on its political system and social structure. They explore the changing patterns of the relationship between state and society that may have more profound significance for China than all the revolutionary movements that have convulsed it through most of the twentieth century.

This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.

Unconventional, creative, and highly original, Wang Min’an’s work centres on the assemblage of household machines that create the space of contemporary domesticity. It offers pathways to a new understanding of how the sudden commodification of domestic space in China beginning in the late 1980s has transformed Chinese domestic life beyond recognition. In terms of modern urban Chinese family life, people do not just move into new apartments; they move into new modes of living which involve new ways of relating to the world. Wang’s discussion on the reconstitution of Chinese domestic life—its founding moral, aesthetic, political values—is tremendously useful and enlightening. In these essays, the author stages a Latourian collapse of subject and object in adopting the point of view of both human and non-human actants. This volume brings a new sensibility to bear on objects of modern everyday life. This work is not a "China book," but rather a work marked profoundly by China. Wang experiments with the applicability of "theory" to what might be thought of as a transcultural common life embedded in mundane technologies. The book is particularly concerned with rescuing everyday materiality and bodily life from the numb obscurity to which things have been relegated by modern consumerism and bourgeois hygiene. This book is not an oddity from the mysterious East; it is a playful experiment in writing from a unique scholar, a leading thinker and theorist in the humanities in China, and will be of interest to scholars and students of East Asian, particularly Chinese, political and domestic studies.

Through the sweeping cultural and historical transformations of China, entrepreneur Lan Yan traces her family’s history through early 20th Century to present day. The history of the Yan family is inseparable from the history of China over the last century. One of the most influential business leaders of China today, Lan Yan grew up in the company of the country’s powerful elite, including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping. Her grandfather, Yan Baohang, originally a nationalist and ally of Chiang Kai-shek, later joined the communists and worked as a spy during World War II, never falling out of favor with Soong May-ling, aka Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek. Lan’s parents were diplomats, and her father, Yan Mingfu, was Mao’s personal Russian translator. In spite of their elevated status, the Yan’s family life was turned upside down by the Cultural Revolution. One night in 1967, in front of a terrified ten-year-old Lan, Red Guards burst into the family home and arrested her grandfather. Days later, her father was arrested, accused of spying for the Soviet Union. Her mother, Wu Keilang, was branded a counter-revolutionary and forced to go with her daughter to a re-education camp for five years, where Lan came of age as a high school student. In recounting her family history, Lan Yan brings to life a century of Chinese history from the last emperor to present day, including the Cultural Revolution which tore her childhood apart. The reader obtains a rare glimpse into the mysteries of a system which went off the rails and would decimate a large swathe of the intellectual, economic and political elite country. The little girl who was crushed by the Cultural Revolution has become one of the most active businesswomen in her country. In telling her and her family’s story, Lan Yan serves up an intimate account of the history of contemporary China.