During the past quarter century Jonathan Unger has interviewed farmers and rural officials from various parts of China in order to track the extraordinary changes that have swept the countryside from the Maoist era through the Deng era to the present day. A leading specialist on rural China, Professor Unger presents a vivid picture of life in rural areas during the Maoist revolution, and then after the post-Mao disbandment of the collectives. This is a story of unexpected continuities amid...

What role do Chinese popular associations play in the expansion of civil society and democratization? Under Mao few associations were permitted to exist, while today over 200,000 associations are officially recognized. Are they important foundations of civil society, or vehicles for state corporatism and control? In this book leading China specialists examine an interesting range of associations, from business associations to trade unions, to urban homeowners associations, women's groups a...

This book describes and analyzes how politics among the Chinese leadership has operated and evolved from the period of Mao's court up to the present day. Part I explores politics under Mao and Deng. For this section the five leading western analysts of elite Chinese politics -- Lowell Dittmer, Lucian Pye, Frederick Teiwes, Andrew Nathan, and Tsou Tang -- have contributed major papers that measure the empirical evidence against political science theory, recent Chinese history, and Chinese p...

Provides conceptual insights that put the reader in a position to come to grips intellectually with the complex weave of Chinese nationalist sentiment today and in the future.

An historiographical examination of the political debates of the 1980s over despotism in Chinese history and over Party history. The extent of popular culture and its reinterpretation of history is also assessed, as governmental control of the media has decreased.

During the early 1980s China embarked on what can be seen as one of the world’s largest social experiments ever. Decollectivization meant much more than the reorganization of agricultural production into family based farming. It signaled significant changes to rural social relations, when privatization, marketization and increased geographical mobility started tearing apart the economic and social institutions that had structured collective village life under Mao.The focus of this ...

Nine specialists from four continents address the following questions: is China moving toward the type of developmental state and sophisticated economic powerhouse associated with the East Asian miracle? does China's Leninist political system and the heritage of a state-run-heavy-industrial sector present too great a burden for successful transformation? and what is the likelihood that China's party-state will ultimately collapse in a fashion similar to the Leninist governments of Europe? ...

A vivid novelistic account that details a crucial period in the evolution of Polish Hasidism, translated from Yiddish.Half a century after Hasidism blossomed in Eastern Europe, its members were making deep inroads into the institutional structure of Polish Jewish communities, but some devotees believed that the movement had drifted away from its revolutionary ideals. Menashe Unger's A Fire Burns in Kotsk dramatizes this moment of division among Polish Hasi...

A collection of lyrical, philosophical early poems by “one of Chile’s foremost poets” (Publishers Weekly)Enrique Lihn is among the most important Chilean poets, alongside Nicanor Parra, since the generation of Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and Pablo Neruda. Lihn’s first two poetry books represented here—Nada se escurre (Nothing Slips Away), 1949, and Poemas de este tiempo y de otro (Poems of This Time and Another), 1955—introduce hi...

In 1974, a small group of young intellectuals, the Li Yizhe group, circulated their dissident manifesto, ‘On Socialist Democracy and the Legal System,’ a probing critique of the leftist authoritarianism of Mao Zedong. This title examines the writings of these dissidents as a means to better understand the views of non-Party Marxists in their struggle to defy the government and construct their own vision of a socialist China. Originally published in 1985, this title remains relevant in rela...