Modern China

July 2010; 36 (4) : pp367 – 460

Copying, Counterfeiting, and Capitalism in Contemporary China: Jingdezhen’s Porcelain Industry

Maris Gillette

Haverford College, Haverford, PA, USA

Abstract：Eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jingdezhen between 2003 and 2006 revealed that copying and counterfeiting dominated porcelain production. Ideas about markets and the organization of production encouraged ceramists to copy and counterfeit in search of profit. At the same time, producers responded to others’ fraudulent acts by personalizing their market participation. Their network building was motivated by the belief that individuals with whom you shared a personal connection would not cheat you. Ideas about atomized individuals and dishonest markets, on the one hand, and strategies to personalize market activity, on the other, characterized contemporary capitalism in Jingdezhen (and perhaps China more broadly). This contradiction exemplifies a dual process by which capitalism affects how people think and what they do, while at the same time preexisting ideas and practices inform how capitalism operates in a particular setting

Chinese Masculinities Revisited: Male Images in Contemporary Television Drama Serials

Geng Song

Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

Abstract：This article investigates the discourse of masculinity in contemporary Chinese popular culture by critical readings of TV drama serials (dianshi lianxuju), a crucial and underresearched site for the study of ideology, shown on prime-time national channels in recent years (2003—2007). In particular, it examines the male images in three sweepingly popular TV programs—The Big Dye House ( Da ranfang), Halfway Couples (Banlu fuqi), and Unsheathing the Sword (Liangjian)—as “cultural types.” It looks at the social, economic, and cultural factors that have affected men and representations of men in today’s China against the backdrop of the dynamic interplay between nationalism, globalization, and consumerism. Building on the burgeoning research on Chinese masculinity in the past decade, it argues that forms of masculinity are becoming increasingly hybrid in a globalizing China and that the male images in these dramas are a product of social changes tied in with new formations of power.

The Legacy of China’s Wartime Reporting, 1937-1945: Can the Past Serve the Present?

Parks M. Coble

University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA

Abstract：Japan’s invasion of China in the summer of 1937 dealt a devastating blow to Chinese journalism. Yet despite the hardships, China’s wartime reporters produced a legacy of vivid writing. In the face of a series of major defeats, the journalists attempted to shore up morale and stressed the heroic resistance of Chinese forces. They reported on Japanese atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing, but not to such an extent that might erode morale. During the Maoist era, the legacy of this war reportage largely faded from a public memory which privileged the revolution. When a “new remembering” of the war emerged in the reform era, the heroic resistance narrative from war reportage dovetailed nicely with the new nationalism of today’s China. But this literature has been less helpful in developing the theme of Chinese victimhood, a key component of the new memory of the war. Finally, memoir literature, so common in most combatant nations, has been problematic in China. Those who remember their war experiences do so through the prism of later traumas, particularly the Cultural Revolution.