Streetlife China (Cambridge Modern China Series) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)If you were in China and studied American history, you would never learn about slackers, pop music or be able to quote the movie the Princess Bride. Were you to then come to America, you would find yourself in an area whose history and political structure you understood, but in a society beyond what you had read and filled with people who can quote beer commercials you've never seen.
Fortunately for those outside China looking in, we have Dutton. Like Barme, Dutton looks at the stuff that most people miss: advertisements for STD cures on flyers in Beijing, new slang, fads that come and go without changing the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, but that slightly touch millions of lives in China. Without overstepping his bounds and claiming to have great insight in to the Chinese psyche based on these little facets of society, Dutton looks at the general attitudes on the street that he's gathered while in China. Apart from the propaganda bureau and the Public Security bureau (China's cops), no political actors pop up in his book. He quotes artists, triads and prostitutes for a look at China that lets students get a little of what they would have learned by living and slumming on the streets of Beijing.
This is not a great way to start understanding China, but is a fantastic addition to your bookshelf if you want to flesh out your academic learning with a bit of street-level detail.

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Product Description:
This imaginative and incisive collection of pieces about life in contemporary China reveals, like a series of snapshots, a picture of the lives of ordinary people and the rules and rituals that govern their daily existence.Key themes surface: in particular, the emergence of a consumer culture driven by the market, and the way in which this intersects with the "floating population" of vagrants, prostitutes and liumang (hooligans). We see how, in turn, the official strategies of the state deal with this perceived social disorder and how the street responds. Underlying much of the discussion of contestation and transformation is the notion of human rights. Street life is shown to be a creative, dynamic, dissenting, deviant and often compliant aspect of the economic, political and cultural face of China. Articles, written by Chinese scholars and journalists, as well as reports, official documents and interviews, all engaging and interesting in themselves, range from discussions of the work unit system to architecture, murder rates, acupuncture and Mao fetishes. Some of the pieces are quirky: we learn about the Chinese version of "Monopoly," translated as Entrepreneur, the Chinese Ethnic Culture theme park and the increasing popularity of tatoos, for example. Readers are guided through the book by extensive commentary written by Michael Dutton. There will be no better introduction to the discourses of contemporary China, and few more entertaining, vivid and stimulating accounts of shifts in cultural life and politics.

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