Recent and Contemporary China
Department of Chinese Studies
People Involved
The department now has a group of three scholars working in recent and contemporary Chinese Studies, with research expertise across a range of social, political and literary fields.
David Bray works on urban governance and social space in contemporary China. His past research has focused on the origins and development of the Chinese danwei (work unit) system, and its role in governing socialist subjects. He is now working on “community building” (shequ jianshe) and the transformation of urban space in contemporary China.
Eddy U’s specialisation is in social institutions, social relations and social consciousness in twentieth-century China. One of his projects re-examines the relationship between state socialism and bureaucracy in China; another investigates how the category “intellectual” (zhishi fenzi) has been constructed and reconstructed since the May Fourth Movement.
Wang Yiyan conducts research on nationalism, localism and gender representation in contemporary Chinese fiction, and is also interested in Chinese diaspora studies and Chinese artists in Australia. While her past research focused on Jia Pingwa, she has recently won an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant for her project “From Local Stories to National Identity: Competing National Myths in Chinese Nativist Fiction.”
This is an active research group whose members provide a diverse yet mutually complementary coverage of the contemporary Chinese world and its recent background. They offer Honours and postgraduate supervision across the range of their combined research interests, and envisage that as China’s global significance continues to grow, research activity in these fields will expand considerably over the coming years.
New books by members of this group are David Bray’s Social Space and Urban Governance in China: the Danwei System from Origins to Reform (Stanford, 2005), and Wang Yiyan’s Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and his Fictional World (RoutledgeCurzon, forthcoming later in 2005). Shorter studies include Eddy U’s “Leninist Reforms, Workplace Cleavages, and Teachers in the Chinese Cultural Revolution” in Comparative Studies of Society and History (2005), his “The Hiring of Rejects: Teacher Recruitment and the Crises of Socialism in the Early PRC Years,” in Modern China (2004), and Wang Yiyan’s “Mr Butterfly in Defunct Capital: ‘Soft’ Masculinity and (Mis)Engendering China,” in Chinese and Japanese Masculinities, ed. K. Louie and M. Low (Routledge, 2003).