Social and Cultural Changes in China [SCCC]
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Edited by:
Ricardo K. S. Mak
Studies towards China’s emergence as a major global economy has so far created two differing poles. On the one hand questioning the connection between China’s experience since the mid-nineteenth century and the recent developments, and on the other hand assessing the various social and cultural changes, the nation has simultaneously encountered and generated for countries across the globe.
Throughout the years, the myriads of internal challenges and outside influences that have confronted China, resulted in the formulation of sublime synergy, which has assisted in reshaping interactive transformations with and within China itself. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, this series aims to collectively bring together scholarly research and academic writings in history, geography, sociology and the political sciences to tackle the many facets of China’s transitional ages, further encompassing the different branches of the humanities and social sciences to foster engaging discussion on the different levels of social and cultural adjustments and reconstructions in China. At the macro level, visible and intangible forces have joined to mold the tempo, pattern and uniqueness of China’s recent growth in various aspects. On the micro level, the gradual transformation of different areas of life in modern and contemporary China through ecology, migration, urban life, material culture, mass media, popular entertainment and intercultural exchanges has no doubt played specific yet crucial roles in dismantling and mending the old and new, the traditional and the innovative in a changing Chinese context. Offering a kaleidoscopic view, this series targets a wide audience that transcends academic disciplines and especially welcomes pioneering attempts to frame China’s social, intellectual and cultural experience in transnational contexts.
Topics
The movement of goods and passengers between port cities not only stimulates growth in coastal trading networks and centers but also inevitably changes the social and economic lives of people in these port cities and, subsequently, of their fellow compatriots farther inland. Studies of port cities have focused on the interactive political and economic relationship between trading centers. The center of attention in this book is socioeconomic life and cultural identity, which are shaped by the movement of goods, people, knowledge, and information, particularly when the community faces a crisis.
Transnational studies focus on cross-border connections between people, institutions, commodities, and ideas, with an emphasis on their global presence. This book looks at the responses of different localities to the same global crisis. It gathers a selection of the fifty papers presented at the conference on "Coping with Transnational Crisis: Chinese Economic and Social Lives in East Asian Port Cities, 1850-1950," held in Hong Kong on June 7-11, 2016. The period from the 1850s to the outbreak of war in the Pacific in the late 1930s encompasses two major transnational crises with significant impacts on the Chinese population in Southeast Asian port cities in terms of their way of living and the construction of their identity: the emergence of bubonic plague in the 1880s and 1920s and the global economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The authors discuss the social and economic lives in various South East Asian port cities where many residents had to cope with these transnational crises. They do so through examining institutional measurements, rituals and festivals, communication, knowledge and information exchange as well as identity (re)construction. In addition, they explore how local communities responded to knowledge and information between the port cities and cities as well as inland locations.
The chapters in this book offer solid grounds for future comparisons, not only based on a specific time or event but also on how society reacted over time, space, and various types of crises.
Both the conceptual framework and case-studies are drawn from research presented at HKBU since 2011 under the auspices of the Global Social Sciences Conference Series and supplemented by additional papers.
