Underground Front is a pioneering examination of the role that the Chinese Communist Party has played in Hong Kong since the creation of the party in 1921, through to the present day. The second editi
Text, Cases and Commentary on the Hong Kong Legal System covers all the topics encompassed in the syllabus for “Hong Kong Legal System”, as required for the Hong Kong Conversion Examination for PCLL A
Based on a close reading of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s extant films, this book provides insights into the ways the director created narrative structures and used symbolism to construct meaning in his films. Against critics’ insistence that Ozu was indifferent to plot and unlikely to use symbols, Geist demonstrates otherwise, revealing the director’s subtle iconographic paradigms. Her incisive understanding of the historical and cultural context in which the films were conceived amplifies her analysis of the films’ structure and meaning. Ozu: A Closer Look guides the reader through Ozu’s early, silent films and his sound films made during Japan’s wars in Asia and the subsequent American Occupation, then takes up specific themes relevant to his later, better-known films. These themes include religion, gender, and the influence of traditional Japanese painting. Geist also examines the impact that Ozu’s films had on specific directors in Europe, America, and Japan. Intended for film
In Painting Architecture: Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271–1368, Leqi Yu has conducted comprehensive research on jiehua or ruled-line painting, a unique painting genre in fourteenth-century China. This genre relies on tools such as rulers to represent architectural details and structures accurately. Such technical consideration and mechanical perfection linked this painting category with the builder’s art, which led to Chinese elites’ belittlement and won Mongol patrons’ admiration. Yu suggests that painters in the Yuan dynasty made new efforts towards a unique modular system and an unsurpassable plain-drawing tradition. She argues that these two strategies made architectural paintings in the Yuan dynasty entirely different from their predecessors, as well as making the art form extremely difficult for subsequent painters to imitate.
A Contemporary History of the Chinese Zheng traces the twentieth- and twenty-first-century development of an important Chinese musical instrument in greater China.The zheng was transformed over the course of the twentieth century, becoming a solo instrument with virtuosic capacity. In the past, the zheng had appeared in small instrumental ensembles and supplied improvised accompaniments to song. Zheng music became a means of nation-building and was eventually promoted as a marker of Chinese identity in Hong Kong. Ann L. Silverberg uses evidence from the greater China area to show how the narrative history of the zheng created on the mainland did not represent zheng music as it had been in the past. Silverberg ultimately argues that the zheng’s older repertory was poorly represented by efforts to collect and promote zheng music in the twentieth century. This book contends that the restored “traditional Chinese music” created and promulgated from the 1920s forward—and solo zheng music in
Taiwan is a peculiar place resulting in a peculiar cinema, with Hou Hsiao-hsien being its most remarkable product. Hou’s signature long and static shots almost invite critics to give auteurist reading
Medical Negligence in Hong Kong and How to Avoid It provides essential information concerning the potential legal liabilities that medical professionals face when they treat patients. An easy-to-read
Falling into the Lesbi World offers a compelling view of sexual and gender difference through the everyday lives of tombois and their girlfriends ("femmes") in the city of Padang, West Sumatra. Tomboi
English Explained explores the areas of English grammar that are most affected by misinformation and confusion and supplies the learner with the knowledge to finally grasp the workings of this multifa
The First Estates shows the impact on Hong Kong’s urban history of Fairview Park and Hong Lok Yuen, the earliest examples of private estates provided in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Completed in
During the Mao years, laughter in China was serious business. Simultaneously an outlet for frustrations and grievances, a vehicle for socialist education, and an object of official study, laughter bro
With this book, Yang Yuanzheng has produced what will long be regarded as a ground-breaking milestone in the voluminous scholarship on Jiang Kui (1155–1221). Based in part on his 2011 discovery of a m
Sinoglossia places the terms of embodiment, mediality, and translation at the center of analytical inquiry into Chinese and Sinophone cultures. Converging in the rubric of Sinoglossia, the chapters in this volume introduce a theory defined by cultural formations not overdetermined by Sinitic linguistic ties. The concept of Sinoglossia combines a heteroglossic and a heterotopian approach to the critical study of mediated discourses of China and Chineseness. From the history of physical examinations and queer subalternity to the cinematic inscription of Chineseness-as-landscape, and from Sinopop to the translational writings of Eileen Chang and Syaman Rapongan, this book argues for a flexible conceptualization of cultural objects, conditions, and contexts that draws attention to an array of polyphonic, multi-discursive, and multilingual articulations. In this new horizon of understanding, place or topos necessarily constitutes the possibility of friction and source of innovation.“Sinogloss
When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of the city's Jazz-Age nightlife. Mu'
A City Mismanaged traces the collapse of good governance in Hong Kong, explains its causes, and exposes the damaging impact on the community’s quality of life. Leo Goodstadt argues that the current we
This book provides an essential introduction to commercial arbitration law and practices, focusing on Hong Kong as an example of a model law jurisdiction with a pro-arbitration stance. It is written i
An analysis of the lessons learned from tuberculosis control in Shanghai. Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911-2011 is the first book on the most widespread and deadly infectious disease in China, both historically and today. Weaving together interviews with data from periodicals and local archives in Shanghai, Rachel Core examines the rise and fall of tuberculosis control in China from the 1950s to the 1990s. Under the socialist work unit system, the vast majority of people had guaranteed employment, a host of benefits tied to their workplace, and there was little mobility--factors that made the delivery of medical and public health services possible in both urban and rural areas. The dismantling of work units amid wider market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s led to the rise of temporary and casual employment and a huge migrant worker population, with little access to health care, creating new challenges in TB control. This study of Shanghai will provide valu
