Full Description
In spite of the intense preoccupation with individual and self in modern Western thought, the social sciences have tended to focus on groups and collectives and downplay the individual. This implicit view has also coloured the study of social life in China where both Confucian ethics and Communist policies have shaped collective structures with little room for individual agency and choice.
What is actually happening, however, is a growing individualization of China - not only changing perceptions of the individual but also rising expectations for individual freedom, choice and individuality. The individual has also become a basic social category in China, and a development has begun that permeates all areas of social, economic and political life. How this process evolves in a state and society lacking two of the defining characteristics of European individualization - a culturally embedded democracy and a welfare system - is one of the questions that the volume explores.
A strength of this volume is that its authors succeed in depicting the individualization process in conceptually acute and empirically sensitive terms, and as something with its own distinctively Chinese profile. That makes this book a 'must read' for all those wanting to understand present-day Chinese society, with all of its ambivalences, contingencies and contradictions.
Contents
Contributors vii Preface xi Foreword: Varieties of Individualization (Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim) xiii Introduction: Conflicting Images of the Individual and Contested Process of Individualization (Yunxiang Yan) 1 1 Idealizing Individual Choice: Work, Love and Family in the Eyes of Young, Rural Chinese (Mette Halskov Hansen and Cuiming Pang) 39 2 He is He and I Am I: Individual and Collective among China's Elderly (Stig ThA gersen and Ni Anru) 65 3 Individualization and the Political Agency of Private Business People in China (JA rgen Delman and Yin Xiaoqing) 94 4 A Collective of Their Own: Young Volunteers at the Fringes of the Party Realm (Unn Malfrid H. Rolandsen) 132 5 Between Self and Community: The Individual in Contemporary Chinese Literature (Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg) 164 6 Individual Self-Discipline and Collective Freedom in the Minds of Chinese Intellectuals (Rune Svarverud) 193 7 'Friendly Pressure': Law and the Individual in Modern China (Klaus Muhlhahn) 226 8 Collective Symbols and Individual Options: Life on a State Farm for Returned Overseas Chinese after Decollectivization (Li Minghuan) 250 Index 271
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