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Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World. by Yiyan Wang. London

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Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World. by Yiyan Wang. London 1272 The Journal of Asian Studies the Great Leap. The concluding chapter shows that even in the reform era, mem- ories had a far-reaching impact on state–society relations, as survivors of the Great Leap were determined to settle old scores. Thaxton’s findings and analytical insights make important contributions to the study of regime consolidation in the Maoist era. First, Thaxton challenges the conventional understanding that the Chinese Communist state encountered little or no resistance when it consolidated its power in the early 1950s. Elizabeth J. Perry’s analysis of the Shanghai Strike Wave in 1957 has drawn attention to the outbreak of well-organized, widely coordinated, urban resistance against the Maoist regime (see “Shanghai’s Strike Wave of 1957,” China Quarterly, no. 137 [1994]: 1–27). In a similar fashion, Thaxton’s study of peasant activism in Da Fo presents another good example of collective and protracted resistance against the state in the countryside. Second, this work builds on James C. Scott’s concept of moral economy, as it examines a wide range of survival strat- egies that peasants in Da Fo employed to challenge the state (see The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976]; and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985]). While acknowledging that peasants drew on cultural values rooted in the past, such as the practice of reciprocity, the right to subsistence, and traditional reli- gious beliefs, Thaxton indicates that their actions were also informed by a basic understanding of rights: the right to a decent living and human dignity, and not just the subsistence right of traditional moral economy. This perspective has significant implications for understanding the emergence of rights conscious- ness in China today. Highly readable and informative, Thaxton’s work, which combines analysis of oral sources and admirable use of theories, is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the study of peasant activism, regime consolidation, and the Great Leap Forward in Maoist China. JOSEPH TSE-HEI LEE Pace University [email protected] Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World.ByYIYAN WANG. London: Routledge, 2006. x, 318 pp. $170.00 (cloth). doi:10.1017/S0021911809991148 Yiyan Wang’s Narrating China is the first book-length study in the English language on the life and works of Jia Pingwa (1952– ), one of the most prolific contemporary Chinese novelists; it is also part of an ever-shrinking group of monographic studies devoted to single writers today. As the only title on literature in the Routledge Contemporary China Series so far, Wang’s in-depth study of Jia Book Reviews—China 1273 is a welcome contribution to the field of Chinese studies. In the 1970s, Twayne’s World Authors Series, sponsored by Boston-based Twayne Publishers, brought out more than twenty volumes on classical and modern Chinese novelists, poets, and dramatists, which significantly broadened the understanding of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world and brought these writers into the purview of “world” and comparative literature. Since then, interest in book-length studies of single literary figures has waned, especially in the field of contemporary Chinese literature, though there is no shortage of volumes on such writers as Lu Xun. Addressing the close biographical connection between Jia’s life and writing, and his identity as a “peasant writer” (nongmin zuojia), Chapter 1 explores lit- erary nativism (“the belief and the practice that literary writing should … con- tinue and develop ‘indigenous’ narrative traditions,” p. 10) in relation to the artistic and ideological construction of native place in modern Chinese literature. Recognizing the emotional, cultural, textual, and even pragmatic ties between Jia’s writing and Shaanxi Province, Wang argues that Jia’s three-decades-long pre- occupation with his native place reinscribes rural China in the national discourse of modernization (p. 24). She points out that Jia’s pride in his regionality does not necessarily create a binary opposition between urban centers and rural commu- nities. Rather, Jia’s writing constitutes a conscious incorporation of both popular and elite narrative traditions, staking claims to a native place that “articulate[s] regional aspirations for national identification” (p. 14)—hence Wang’s thesis that Jia’s interest in local eccentricity is part of a larger project to narrate China, or what Wang calls “the poetics of native place.” Throughout her ethnographic and biographical study, Wang details the roles of folklore, local dialect, and popular culture in Jia’s works. Chapters 3–5 are devoted to the questions of cultural landscaping, sexual dissidence, and female domesticity in Jia’s most important novel, Defunct Capital (Feidu, 1993; also known as Ruined Capital, The Abandoned Capital,orLa capitale déchue), a con- troversial work that has been regarded by some as misogynist and a distortion of history and by others as exemplary social criticism. Wang defends Jia’s use of female subjectivity that is “regressive and removed from social reality” (p. 94) in his first attempt to portray an urban environment. While his previous stories set in Shaanxi are “imbued with vitality and energy,” the cityscape in Feidu “is a forecast of the doomsday of Chinese high culture” (p. 50). Wang traces the pro- tagonist Zhuang Zhidie’s “soft” masculinity to the Chinese tradition of scholar- beauty romance (caizi jiaren) and suggests that the novel is a necessary “antithesis to the ‘real man’ that had been sought after in contemporary Chinese society” (p. 93). Chapter 6 examines another novel with a male idler as its protagonist in search of personal identities, White Nights (1995). Having connected the idea of insomnia and the title of the work to the French phrase une nuit blanche (“a sleepless night,” p. 118), Wang suggests, “Ye Lang is the alter ego of Zhuang Zhidie and White Nights is very much a story of emotional and mental survival in a totally alien and isolating environment” (p. 129). The next four chap- ters analyze several other works, poems, and essays, including Earth Gate (1996), 1274 The Journal of Asian Studies Old Gao Village (1998), and Remembering Wolves (2000), that simultaneously defamiliarize “contemporary Chinese quotidian” life (p. 205) and bring rural China forcefully into the discourses of modernization. The national imaginary of the native place and its symbolic weight return to full force in these dystopian visions caught between the urban–rural divide. Based on Wang’s doctoral thesis (University of Sydney), Narrating China provides students and scholars with useful guidance on the world of a dynamic writer. The book also has several useful features, including a twenty-page tran- script of Wang’s in-depth interview with Jia (an extremely valuable document), two chapters (2 and 10) with in-depth biographical information that is essential to understanding Jia’s works, an annotated English–Chinese bilingual chronology of Jia’s publications that divides his literary career into five major periods (a classroom-friendly feature), a separate chronological list of Jia’s autobiographical writings and critical biographies (a useful research tool), and a comprehensive bibliography of Jia’s works including editions issued in Taiwan and Hong Kong (such as Baiye and White Nights). ALEXANDER C. Y. HUANG Pennsylvania State University [email protected] From Iron Fist to Invisible Hand: The Uneven Path of Telecommunica- tions Reform in China.ByIRENE S. WU. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 2009. xx, 187 pp. $45.00 (cloth). doi:10.1017/S002191180999115X This is a valuable and timely book for scholars who are interested in the evol- ving regulatory framework of China’s telecommunications sector. Irene S. Wu, a former official at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, examines China’s telecom policy through comparison with “global norms.” This approach is effective for two major reasons: First, although international trends in regu- lation do not necessarily provide a good guide for China, the comparative stand- point—reflecting the transnational logic of the market economy—gives a clear sense of the external demand for global convergence that China faces. Telecom- munications are an indispensable infrastructure for global integration; as China has become a formal member of the World Trade Organization, China’s large domestic markets are bound to attract foreign participation. Second, the comparative approach highlights China’s unique—and often contradictory—trajectory of reentry into the global economy in the field of tele- communications. Despite the neoliberal trends of privatization and deregulation that proceeded across the globe in the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese state only partially liberalized telecommunications through divestiture, but extended its power through licensing. Consequently, China’s telecommunications are still.
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