51 research outputs found

    Chen Duxiu's early years: The importance of personal connections in the social and intellectual transformation of China 1895--1920

    Get PDF
    Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), is without question one of the most significant figures in modern Chinese history. Yet his early life has been curiously neglected in Western scholarship. In this dissertation I examine the political, social and intellectual networks that played such an important role in his early career---a career that witnessed his transformation from a classical scholar in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), to a reformer, to a revolutionary, to a renowned writer and editor, to a university dean, to a founder of the Chinese Communist Party, all in the space of about two decades

    Integrating Rural Schools and Societal Modernization: The Example of Heterogeneous Villages in China

    Get PDF
    In China, rural schools often have to deal with the complex realities of the village. It is very important to understand why rural students and their parents value rural school education. Two villages, namely Utoprague village and Karasu village, in Xinjiang, China, were selected for this study. And two schools ,namely Utoprague Village Central Primary School and Karasu Village Central School, were selected. The study is a qualitative study. Textual data were collected mainly through interviews and questionnaires. 38 teachers were interviewed, 381 questionnaires were collected from primary students and 30 parents were interviewed. The analysis took grounded theory as the analysis method, and the analysis process was completed through the software Nvivo 12. Results show that the majority of parents and students in rural areas have a positive attitude toward school education consider schooling important, and accept it. The main reason for the positive attitude is the changes in production and lifestyle in the villages, which make fundamental changes in the knowledge and skills students need and the ways they can acquire them. In the past, students primarily learned the knowledge and skills of farming and herding with their parents so that they could do the same work in the future instead of gaining knowledge from schools. Moreover, knowledge changes destiny is a belief held by rural students and parents. They believe that schooling is the path to a better life, which means living in the city, having a decent job, and earning more money, in the future

    Rhetorics of globalism.

    Get PDF
    This project examines the rhetorics that enable nations to tap into and deploy capital transnationally. Its primary focus is on China. China\u27s globalism promotes a version of Western neoliberalism, including tropes such as efficiency, individuality, and freedom, to underwrite inequality, consumerism, and masking of surplus labor/value. While an ostensible boon for China\u27s marginalized, China\u27s globalism continues to increase the gap between wealthy and poor. Chapter One introduces the project with an overview of theoretical and disciplinary responses to globalization. This chapter demonstrates how the discourse of transnational capital supports consumerism, competition, and simultaneous universality/difference worldwide. Chapter Two offers a rhetorical analysis of China\u27s Progress in Human Rights in 2004, an official document published in political organs such as People\u27s Daily and China Daily , to show how China\u27s party-state appropriates neoliberal discourse to appease international trade organizations. It is argued that China\u27s neoliberalism is a roll-out political neoliberalism that maintains state participation in its increasingly privatized provinces. Paradoxically, the market\u27s valorization of an interest-based social order must coexist with the nationalist call for a unity that would raise the people above the individual. Chapter Three offers a discourse analysis of the narratives of the dagongmei ( working sister ) and the dagongzai ( working son ), China\u27s floating population of migrant laborers who often work in urban factories and reside in hostile dormitories where the laboring body is alienated and sexualized. Migrant literacy is shown to resist and sustain China\u27s dominant discourse, an internal Orientalism that pejoratively constructs migrants as country bumpkins. The project\u27s final chapter presents analyses of interviews with Chinese factory workers. These interviews and other worker testimonies represent a clash of neoliberal, Confucian, and Maoist discourse, a rhetorical borderlands that bears new ways of talking about solidarity and workplace democracy

    Reimagining Revolutionary Labor in the People's Commune: Amateurism and Social Reproduction in the Maoist Countryside

    Full text link
    This dissertation reveals transformations in the conceptual and cultural understanding of labor during the socialist period of the People’s Republic of China. This era witnessed radical transformations in expert cultures (bai) that were marked through their redefinition in proximity to the proletariat (hong) and the forms of labor with which they were associated. I argue that the introduction of the people’s commune (renmin gongshe) in 1958 precipitated the widespread reorganization of multiple sites of labor in the Chinese countryside, including those not traditionally recognized as productive in the Marxist account, such as medicine, amateur art, higher education, and the home. I explore new revolutionary epistemes of work through analysis of literature, film, fine art, and visual culture from the period. In the first two chapters of my dissertation, I examine the processes by which professional cultures of work were converted into revolutionary cultures of labor, focusing on the transformation of medical and artistic labor through the figures of the barefoot doctor (chijiao yisheng) and the amateur artist. I argue that amateurism functioned as a means of converting highly professionalized, even rarified occupations such as the doctor or the artist, into practices of the everyday. The barefoot doctor redefined healing through their labor relationship with their communes, while the amateur artist transformed the specialized labor of the professionally trained artist into a productive leisure activity accessible to the worker, peasant, and soldier alike (gongnongbing qunzhong). In the third and fourth chapters, I examine attempts to disrupt the divisions of labor that reproduced social inequality through chapters analyzing the filmic depiction of the Jiangxi Communist Labor University (Gongda), and literature depicting rural women’s “liberation” from domestic labor. In Juelie, a fictional film from 1975 set at Gongda, college students combined intellectual and productive labor in a transformation of the student from the elite, bespectacled urban intellectual of the May Fourth era into a diffuse, pluralistic subject position embedded within the socialist project and its productive social relations. Short stories by the authors Ru Zhijuan and Li Zhun published during the late 1950s and early 1960s examined the social consequences of re-organizing domestic labor on rural communes, resulting in works of fiction haunted by the endless physical and metaphorical reproduction of women around the countryside. This dissertation describes how the work associated with each of these sites—medicine, fine art, education, and the home—was re-positioned through their relationship to agricultural or productive labor in a “laboring” of the cultures associated with each. Through the embrace of the rural female subject, I find that the structures of feeling sustaining these revolutionary attempts at reorganizing labor and society were ultimately produced through the gendering of revolution itself.PHDAsian Languages & CulturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163004/1/abaecker_1.pd

    Journey between East and West : Yang Changji (1871-1920) and his thought

    Get PDF
    This is a study of Yang Changji (1871-1920), whose thought exerted a profound influence on the shaping of intellectual trends in the early twentieth-century China, notably the ideology of Mao Zedong, who was taught by Yang for five years. Yang, well-versed in the Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions, spent ten years studying Western moral philosophy and education in Japan (1903-1909), Scotland (1909-1912) and Germany (1912-1913). After returning to China he devoted the rest of his life to teaching ethics and education firstly at the First Normal School in Changsha (1913-17) and latterly at Beijing University (1918-1920), and to introducing Western philosophical, ethical and educational thought through translation and writings. How Yang Changji adopted and incorporated various Western elements, such as Kantian and Neo-Kantian ethics, the British idealism of T.H. Green, the humanistic and liberal tradition instigated by J. Rousseau, and Spencerian utilitarianism, into his socio-political and ethical thoughts, while retaining the framework of Confucian humanism, is one of the principal aims of this study. This study is divided into three parts, each of which consists of three chapters. A narrative account of the Hunanese intellectual tradition and the main trends of thought prevalent in nineteenth-century China, with particular reference to Hunan, will be outlined in chapter I. The starting point of Yang's intellectual-spiritual quest was the achievement of sagehood and self-cultivation, a goal was based on a threefold humanistic concern: man's ultimate potential as an individual, the individual's relationship to society and the realisation of man's ultimate potential. Mind-cultivation and altering natural character were particularly emphasised, and his methodology was characterised by quietness, reverence and the floating mind. During this painstaking process of self-cultivation Yang's metaphysical views of man, mind and human nature were formed, influenced mainly by Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi (see chapter 2). Between 1897 and 1902 Yang reached his intellectual maturity. His reformist thought can be seen as a syncretism of the Confucian humanistic principle of "Perpetual Renewal of Life" and Western liberal democratic ideas, such as "popular sovereignty," "people's rights" and "individual rights." These new democratic ideals, together with nineteenth-century Western evolutionary theory, provided a new authority for Yang to challenge the Chinese monarchical system, and to call for political reform. However, on a practical level, Yang committed himself to an intellectualistic-educational approach mainly influenced by his idea of seeking for radical solution and gradualism (see chapter 3). Yang Changji's life and study abroad are studied in the contexts of the movement of Chinese students abroad at the turn of the twentieth century and of cultural communication between China and Scotland. The experience in Japan was crucial for providing Yang with his first contact with Western philosophy, ethics and education. The intellectual influence of Aberdeen University can be seen in Yang's systematic exposure to the history of Western ethics and modem currents of British and German ethics, such as utilitarian and evolutionary ethics and T.H. Green's concept of self-realisation. In chapter 7 of Part Ill Yang's reappraisal of Confucianism, from the perspectives of Confucianism as religion and his attitude toward traditional culture, are discussed. In chapter 8 Yang's intellectual-education approach to China's modernisation is characterised in six aspects. His social criticism is distinctive for its application of Western humanistic values, particularly the concepts of person and personality in Kantian ethical thought. Furthermore, Yang was probably the first Chinese to introduce and advocate the idea of "sound and wealthy middle class." The influence of Western thought can also be seen in shaping the core of Yang's thought, that is, two distinctive but inseparable ideas; valuing the self and comprehending the present reality, which are the subject of the final chapter. Yang incorporated pivotal ideas and values of Western liberal individualism, particularly Kantian notions of autonomy, respect for the self and person, and subjectivity, etc., into his notion of valuing the self. While freedom was the most fundamental concern in Kantian ethics and humanism, the independence of the self or an individual was at the centre of Yang's idea of valuing the self. However, his metaphysical view of the self and person remains largely a Confucian one. His notion of comprehending the present reality shows his profound concern with reality and an overwhelming emphasis on "strenuous action." The Individual's self-realisation should be applied here and now. Underlying Yang's two ideas was Confucian threefold concern with humanity. The Confucian ideal of the sage-king or junzi still loomed large in both the form and content, of each of Yang's two ideas

    Firm Characteristics and Corporate Social Responsibility Practices in Nigerian Listed Firms: An Empirical Investigation

    Get PDF
    In recent past, Corporate Social Responsibility has been a fundamental subject of discussion in academic literatures because of its vital contribution to sustainable development. In line with this assertion, this study assessed the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performances of listed companies on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE). A cross-sectional research design was adopted for the study and secondary data compiled from the annual reports of those companies were used for the analysis. The study employed multiple regression estimation technique to analyse the CSR ratings of sixteen (16) companies used as the basis of investigation. The study found that while market capitalization had a positive significant relationship with corporate social responsibility practice, period of existence on the listing of Nigerian Stock Exchange had a negative relationship. Also, the industrial goods sector had a positive significant relationship with CSR practice while the oil and gas sector had a significant negative relationship. It is therefore recommended that activist groups, NGOs and community leaders should be more dynamic to challenge organizations to do more for their communitie

    Adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards and Market Performance of Listed Banks in Nigeria

    Get PDF
    Abstract. The objective of this study is to examine the effect of the adoption of IFRS on the market performance of banks in Nigeria. Secondary data were acquired from the financial statement of 15 money deposit banks listed on floor of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) while regression and paired sample test analyses were used to determine the association between the adoption of IFRS and the market performance of listed money deposit Banks in Nigeria. The study found a positive and significant relationship between the adoption of IFRS and the market performance of listed money deposit banks in Nigeria proxy by Dividend pay-out (DPO) and Dividend Yield (DY). Furthermore, the paired sample test result indicates a significant difference exists between Dividend pay-out (DPO) and the adoption of IFRS while no significant difference exists between Dividend Yield (DY) and the adoption of IFRS. Thus, the study recommends that the global adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards particularly in developing economies like Nigeria should be properly implemented and studied, so as to keep abreast with the various changes the would likely affect the market performance of the Nigerian Banking industry

    Impact of Ethics on the Conduct of Professional Accountants in Nigeria

    Get PDF
    High profile corporate collapses and fraud with which accountants are said to have been associated with has given rise to the questioning of the integrity of the professional accountants. This systemic failure has brought into focus issues of long standing debate with respect to how to curb this act and regain the confidence of the public in the professional accountants and the professional accountancy bodies at large. The study examined the impact of code of ethics on the conduct of professional accountants in Nigeria. Regression Analysis, Correlation Technique and Ttest were employed in analyzing the data collected. The results revealed that the fundamental principles of ethics have a significant impact on the positive conduct of professional accountants. It further revealed that there is no difference in the various opinions of stakeholders with respect to the impact of the code of ethics. It is therefore recommended that early stage teaching of ethics in all schools and continuous improvements taking into consideration changes in time, based on the current trend should be encouraged. There should also be a program in place to effectively monitor the adherence level of accountant

    Bankers’ Perspectives on Integrated Reporting for Value Creation: Evidence from Nigeria

    Get PDF
    This study aims to examine the opinions of Zenith bank employees on the value, content and processes as well as the challenges of Integrated Reporting () in Nigeria with the hope of highlighting recommendations to encourage organizations to adopt it. Ninety eight employees responded to our survey. Generally, the respondents agree that () has value that could lead to better reporting of corporate activities. They also identified challenges that could mitigate the value of (). It was however noted that some of the challenges could be overcome with time, given that framework exist that is being test run by a number of organizations. The study recommends that there should be awareness campaigns to sensitize organizations on the value of . This paper contributes to the extant literature by offering insights of Zenith Bank employees on
    corecore