China Information

This article questions the idea of a Chinese model. It argues that the so-called Chinese model is a variant of neoauthoritarian development associated with the developmental experience of other Eastern Asian states. What distinguishes China is the revolutionary experience – ignored by both Chinese and non-Chinese promoters of the Chinese model idea – that has left its mark on post-revolutionary development. Admiration for the authoritarian China model idea is voiced most audibly by those who place efficient development ahead of all other considerations, including democracy and social justice. These voices include apologists for the corporate neoliberal model that combines organizational authoritarianism with market ‘freedom’, as well as educational institutions that emulate corporate models, and serve as willing instruments of the Chinese regime’s search for ‘soft power’. Competing ‘models’ within China itself provide prima facie evidence of an unsettled search for sustainable development that reconciles the ideological goals of the regime with the realities of participation in a global capitalist economy. Indeed, if there is a ‘China model’, its most outstanding characteristic is the willingness to experiment with different models.

This article applies the techniques of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to an examination of the Chinese government-owned English-language newspaper the China Daily. The aim is to see whether there is evidence that over the last decade the newspaper, which describes itself as the overseas ‘Voice of China’, has attempted to adapt its style of reporting in response to China’s raised international profile, as well as to the increasing diversity and commercialization of its media industry. The study adopts a quantitative and qualitative approach to the analysis of two corpora of texts from the newspaper: one from 1998 and the other from 2010. The focus is on what Labov calls evaluation: an aspect of the narrative structure of a text that has to do with the way the narrator embellishes a narrative to make it more interesting. The results suggest that the China Daily has made its reporting more diverse and interesting, probably in response to the commercialization of China’s media industry and to China’s growing international profile.

Despite the recent emergence of scholarship on various aspects of contemporary urban Chinese residential life, these accounts typically perpetuate a narrative that situates the anonymous and emotionally distant life in new, often high-rise, apartments in contrast to the hugely more intimate relationships in older, predominantly low-rise living spaces. This article, whilst acknowledging the meaningfulness of such a distinction, first seeks to add ethnographic richness to this division, showing how, at least in the case of a small area within Shanghai’s Luwan district, an old/new neighbourhood division is incapable of expressing the more complex, often ambivalent, ways in which people experience residential life, before proceeding to show how residents’ experiences often cross-cut what is, in large part, a discursive division rather than a physical demarcation of separate spaces. The article also explores the ways in which residents seek to cope with, as well as find security and comfort within, residential spaces that are changing. Permeating this article are various meanings associated with the term ‘ontological security’ that, broadly speaking, refers to the order and regularity, as well as sense of well-being, that people feel in their lives.

Over the past three decades, rural China has seen a resurgence of ritual and religious practices involving lineage halls, temples, and novel sectarian movements. This revival of rituals is well documented in ethnographic literature, and a case in point is the establishment of a temple for a local dragon deity in the Hebei township of Fanzhuang. Descriptions of this particular revival focus on a score of males involved in the practical organization of the annual temple fair, while largely ignoring the contributions of a group of spirit mediums and middle-aged women attending rituals in private homes and neighbouring villages throughout the year. The locals often compare the gendered division of labour evident in the temple to households where men are said to be responsible for external matters while women take care of internal affairs. Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the article argues that religious practices in both temples and households evince a gendered division of labour: men take charge of the public exterior and relations with the authorities and women see to the private interior and relations with deities. The ongoing revival of rituals is thus gendered in such a way that the significant role of women tends to be hidden from public view.