DSpace Collection:
http://hdl.handle.net/10722/148830
2024-03-28T14:23:25ZCuring capitalism : 'Zhineng qigong' and the globalisation of Chinese socialist spiritual civilisation
http://hdl.handle.net/10722/332159
Title: Curing capitalism : 'Zhineng qigong' and the globalisation of Chinese socialist spiritual civilisation
Authors: Winiger, Fabian Valentin
Abstract: The present thesis traces the emergence and transnational circulation and
transformation of “Zhineng Qigong” (“Intelligent Qigong”), a neo-socialist grassroots
movement that in the first two decades of the post-Mao era aimed to synthesise
Marxism, modern science and traditional Chinese self-cultivation practices to create a
revolutionary “science of life”. Following the terminally ill patients, Communist Party
activists and spiritual seekers who dedicated themselves to Zhineng Qigong, it narrates
an attempt to propagate this science, hoped to precipitate society’s leap into the “realm
of freedom” – a spiritual-political utopia that combined the communist ideal with China’s
ancient dream of datong, the “Great Harmony”, when humanity will live in perfect accord
with the laws of the cosmos.
Drawing on the group’s internal documents, this study explores the emergence,
beliefs and practices of Zhineng Qigong in post-Mao China: how, between the late
1980s and 1990s, the movement gained several million followers; operated a large
“medicine-less hospital” that treated terminally ill patients using qigong only; created a
nation-wide network of qigong-scientists and a socialist commune intended to model a
new way of life based on qigong science. It further draws on interviews conducted in
five countries and four years of participant observation with a group of 650 non-Chinese
practitioners to show how, following the government’s crack-down on the Chinese
qigong movement in 1999, Zhineng Qigong was circulated and rearticulated outside the
People’s Republic, carrying into the world a subtle, embodied critique of global
capitalism.
The case of Zhineng Qigong, it is argued, brings to attention a new, post-Mao
form of productive state-power: confronted by the widespread loss of faith in socialism
after the Cultural Revolution, the new leadership left behind the coercive politics of
revolution and class struggle and began to rework China’s rich cultural memory into the
vision of a distinctive Chinese modernity. Zhineng Qigong, which at its peak counted
between 3.47 and 10 million followers, represents one striking example of an emerging
form of discoursive power which channels the freedoms of the reform-era into a
controlled and productive direction, produces docile, self-regulated bodies, and invites
the subject to partake in the grand narrative of the revival of China’s millenia-old
“socialist spiritual civilisation”.2018-01-01T00:00:00ZThree faces of Woman Huang : textual anthropology of a story in Lanten Yao culture
http://hdl.handle.net/10722/324418
Title: Three faces of Woman Huang : textual anthropology of a story in Lanten Yao culture
Authors: Sun, Jiayue; 孫嘉玥
Abstract: The story of Woman Huang (Huangshinü) is narrated by the Lanten (a branch of the Yao people) in northern Laos in three genres: storybook, folktale, and ritual text. This story originates in Han Chinese Buddhist culture. It is found narrated by many ethnic minority groups, including the Lanten, whose culture is profoundly impacted by Daoism. The first objective of this research is to interpret different sides of Lanten culture based on a multi-layered analysis of stories. It adopts an anthropological perspective to conceptualize different genres of texts as different “faces” of culture. Each genre displays a relatively independent cultural domain, while intertextuality sheds light on the complexity and multifacetedness of culture, analogous to a heterogeneous “tool kit.” The second objective of this research is to contribute to the theoretical discussions of ethnicity and religion, especially the spread of Chinese religious culture among ethnic minority groups at the periphery. The story of Woman Huang showcases how the Lanten have gradually encountered, indigenized, and incorporated this foreign narrative into their own culture, facilitated by the three genres. Meanwhile, the co-existence of multiple versions of the story indicates that cultural interactions cannot be reduced to models like “Sinicization” or “Daoicization.”
This thesis begins by introducing the field of Yao studies, its theoretical foundations, and data and method. Two chapters are then devoted to studying the Woman Huang stories in Han and other ethnic cultures (especially the Bai). They build essential research tools that enable comparative research at structural and thematic levels. The following three chapters examine the story’s three genres in Lanten contexts, comparing them to the three “faces” of Woman Huang. Each chapter starts with introducing a “key text” collected from northern Laos by the Yao Dao Project Team at the University of Hong Kong. It then conducts inter-genre (i.e., with other key texts) and intra-genre (i.e., with published variants from China and Vietnam) comparisons. To conclude the findings, manuscripts contain a relatively unchanged version of the original story, whereas folktales and ritual texts involve in-depth appropriation and creative reinvention. A diversity of social meanings and functions are embodied in each genre. Put together, these comparisons provide a holistic portrayal of Woman Huang’s three “faces,” reflecting the Chinese, indigenous, and religious aspects of Lanten culture and identity. With the story of Woman Huang, this thesis hopes to bring narratives to the center of ethnic and religious studies on the Lanten culture.2022-01-01T00:00:00ZTechnological choices of Chinese taxi drivers under e-hailing : conventional occupation groups under the impact of digital automation and post-fordism
http://hdl.handle.net/10722/318378
Title: Technological choices of Chinese taxi drivers under e-hailing : conventional occupation groups under the impact of digital automation and post-fordism
Authors: Xing, Linzhou; 邢麟舟
Abstract: With the development of information and communication technologies (hereinafter “ICTs”), industrial robots, and internet-based platform algorithms, etc., the current wave of digital automation has raised increasing public concerns about future prognostics of potential mass unemployment not only in the conventional low-skilled manufacturing works, but in the relatively high-skilled professions. In this thesis, I contribute to this discussion by a case study about conventional licensed taxi drivers in mainland China under the impact of the e-hailing (ridesharing) technology and business.
Drawing on primary sources, documentary analysis, and above all one-year of ethnographic fieldwork research with licensed taxi drivers and e-hailing private car drivers in Xi’an, China, I analyze taxi drivers’ technological choices, their job choices, and their attitudes towards the sociotechnical systems of taxicab driving and e-hailing. My analysis focuses on a number of aspects including the socioeconomic background and skills of drivers, the technical practicalities of driving and managing cars, the intermediary parties that provide business support, and the companies and governments with their different policies or regulations.
This thesis shows that licensed taxi drivers in Xi’an have a working-class background as predominantly SOE-laid off workers and rural migrant workers, and this socio-economic background shapes their technological choices and job choices. Most licensed taxi drivers favor the existing conventional sociotechnical system of taxicab driving, as opposed to becoming e-hailing private car drivers, because the sociotechnical system of taxicab driving is more compatible with their class-shaped value system and ethical expectations in terms of stability, social support, state endorsement, and conventional professional identity. Beyond this question of the technological choices of licensed taxi drivers, I argue that the current wave of digital automation as represented by the recent rise of e-hailing companies is fueled not only by technological advancements, but also by capital. For this reason, the ultimate purpose of automation is not the entire substitution of human labor. Instead, it is to use capital to manipulate the content and value of human labor through technologies, and achieve profit maximization. This is not to say that we are witnessing the end of conventional occupation groups. The case study analyzed in this thesis suggests that society is holding on to the notion of conventional occupation groups and is resisting the capitalist push for labor displacement through technological advancement. Therefore, a reasonable prediction for the near future is to say that automation technologies will transform, rather than replace conventional professional occupations and structures of labor.2019-01-01T00:00:00ZThe ordos bronze crosses as performative assemblages : understanding the materialization of silk road material cultures
http://hdl.handle.net/10722/313679
Title: The ordos bronze crosses as performative assemblages : understanding the materialization of silk road material cultures
Authors: Chen, Jian; 陳劍
Abstract: Thinking about things has shifted from an epistemological to an ontological stance, resulting from an updated understanding which now sees things as actants, rather than merely containers of meaning, and as both events and effects in the field of material culture studies. However, in Asian contexts, studies in the field, especially Silk Road material culture studies, have been less developed, if not under-developed, until very recently. Some signs of the discipline moving forward appeared in 2018 when Susan Whitfield published her pioneering and much appraised book that approaches Silk Road material cultures through narratives of objects. Nevertheless, the degree to which Whitfield can defend the alignment of her theoretical ground with material culture studies remains debatable. To fill this research lacuna, the present project provides an interdisciplinary Silk Road material culture study in a critically ontological approach that incorporates insights from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and broader theoretical frameworks. Through micro as well as macro examinations of the performative Ordos Bronze Crosses assemblages (known also as the Nestorian Crosses), this study focuses on various aspects of the processes of materialization (and also dematerialization) of them amidst the Silk Road networks. That is to say, processes during which artefacts constantly enter into new assemblages of the Ordos Bronze Crosses by stabilizing the networks.
The study sets out to answer three major research questions: 1) Can an “incomplete” collection, such as the Ordos Bronze Crosses, advance understanding of the Silk Road material culture studies? 2) What are the updated understandings? 3) What is the significance of the present study to Silk Road material culture studies?
Adopting synthetic and symmetrical approaches that break the material-immaterial dualism, the study applies critical ontological theories, such as assemblage theory, agential realism, Actor Network Theory, and the notion of propinquity, to the exploration of Silk Road material cultures with a focus on the Ordos Bronze Crosses assemblages. It does so by attending to three main aspects of the processes of (de)materialization of these assemblages: palimpsest nature of assemblages, the alterity and the practice of archaization revealed by the processes, and the residuality that they endured. The investigation and analysis are undertaken in the paradigm of a new historicity. By challenging, and suggesting alternative solutions to several underlying assumptions, namely the problematic interpretive structures and mind-material dualism embedded in previous studies, and by situating the objects back in their relational networks, this study reveals that Silk Road material cultures, enacted by the Ordos Bronze Crosses assemblages, are never passive, inert, static, unambiguous, or deterministic. On the contrary, they appear to be performative and hence unpredictable and contingent. Moreover, they are actively entangled in the intra-activity of the networks and in creating their own narratives, which not only makes sense of the past but also folds the past into the present.2021-01-01T00:00:00Z