In A Grand Materialism in the New Art from China, Mary Bittner Wiseman shows that material matters in the work of Chinese artists, where the goal is to call attention to its subjects through the directness and immediacy of its material (like dust from 9/11, 1001 Chinese citizens, paintings made with gunpowder, written words) or the specificity of its sites (such as the Three Gorges Dam). Artists are working below the level of language where matter and gesture, texture and touch, instinct and intuition live. Not reduced to the words applied to them, art's subjects appear in their concrete particularity, embedded in the stories of their materials or their sites. Wiseman argues that it is global in being able to be understood by all thanks to its materials and the stories that accompany it, and the art is contemporary in having to make the case for itself that it is art. Finally, it satisfies Arthur Danto’s characterization of art as any representation that puts its subject in a new light by way of a rhetorical figure that the viewer interprets. The material art from China is the paradigm for an art that is global and contemporary.

New and annotated translations of philosophical essays written by Mao Zedong in 1937, which have come to be regarded as a cornerstone in the development of Chinese Marxism. The editor analyzes their textual, philosophical and historical significance.

An ethnographic study of China’s new elites and their rarified world of debauchery and corruption: “A must have book for China studies” (Choice). This pioneering investigation reveals the private lives—and the nightlives—of the powerful entrepreneurs and managers redefining success and status in the Chinese city of Chengdu. For more than three years, anthropologist John Osburg accompanied wealthy Chinese businessmen as they courted clients, partners, and government officials. Now he invites readers along on his journey through the highly gendered world of luxury karaoke clubs, saunas, and massage parlors—places designed to cater to the desires of elite men. Within these spaces, a masculinization of business is taking place. Osburg details the complex code of behavior that governs businessmen as they go about banqueting, drinking, gambling, bribing, exchanging gifts, and obtaining sexual services. These intricate social networks play a key role in generating business, performing social status, and reconfiguring gender roles. Yet underneath the façade, many entrepreneurs feel trapped by their obligations and moral compromises in this evolving environment. Osburg examines their deep ambivalence about China’s future and their own complicity in the major issues of post-Mao Chinese society—corruption, inequality, materialism, and loss of trust.

For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. Burning Money explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The work examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the burning money custom has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology. Innovative and original in its interpretation of a common ritual in Chinese popular religion, Burning Money will be welcomed by scholars and students of Chinese religion as well as comparative religion specialists and anthropologists interested in contemporary social theory.

This compelling book explores the explosive pace of change in China and how its citizens are grappling with a dramatically new world, both in the public and private spheres. China’s stratospheric growth has made it the second largest economy in the world—and one of the most unequal. Marxist ideology and socialist ideals have almost completely collapsed, replaced by a combination of materialism and assertive nationalism. The vast migration of labor from countryside to city has continued apace. The pressures of a hypercompetitive market economy are ripping apart the traditional family and threatening the environment. Corruption has reached new heights. The political system is even more rigid, but perhaps more brittle, than a decade ago. There is enormous popular pride in the ascension of China to the rank of global superpower and general satisfaction in the material benefits that the poor as well as the rich have been gaining from an expanding economy. But there is also great restlessness, anger about structural injustice and political corruption, and a search for new forms of spirituality and ethics to replace a collapsing moral order. The question “What does it mean, in the new day, to be Chinese?” lurks just beneath the surface. This unique interdisciplinary book frames this central issue through an innovative set of case studies on such cutting-edge topics as reality dating shows, countercultural invented language, star bloggers, faith healers, and subversive jokes. Contributions by: Jeremy Brown, X. L. Ding, Hsiung Ping-chen, William Jankowiak, Shuyu Kong, Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen, David Moser, Paul G. Pickowicz, Su Xiaokang, Xiao Qiang, Yunxiang Yan, and Yang Lijun.

Dialectical thought is at the core of Karl Marx's work and all subsequent attempts to build on his legacy: Marxism. And, arguably, Marx's special departure into dialectics represents an anomaly in that tradition and all of Western philosophy. Marxism finds its philosophers in the academy; in trade unions; in former soviet states; in industrial and non-industrial nations and this makes it distinct from all other modern philosophies. It is certainly the most international modern philosophical movement. Chinese Dialectics From Yijing to Marxism is an unparalleled investigation into the conversation between Western Marxism and Chinese, or Eastern Marxism. An autochthonous version of Marxism persists in China coming to fruition through the work of Mao Zedong. Chenshan Tian contends that the conversation between Eastern and Western Marxism results in a striking feature of dialectics that pervades the everyday thinking and speech of ordinary persons in China. No study to date has undertaken the task of tracing the development of Marxism in China through it's ancient philosophical texts. This book is absolutely essential reading in the disciplines of comparative political theory, philosophy, and Asian studies.

Wang Fanxi, a leader of the Chinese Trotskyists, wrote this book on Mao more than fifty years ago. He did so while in exile in the then Portuguese colony of Macau, across the water from Hong Kong, where he had been sent in 1949 to represent his comrades in China, soon to disappear for decades into Mao’s jails. The book is an analytical study whose strength lies less in describing Mao’s life than in explaining Maoism and setting out a radical view on it as a political movement and a current of thought within the Marxist tradition to which both Wang and Mao belonged. With its clear and provoking thesis, it has, since its writing, stood the test of time far better than the hundreds of descriptive studies that have in the meantime come and gone.