Suchergebnisse

Through an 11-month multispecies ethnography in Yulin where the annual Yulin Lychee and Dog Meat Festival is held, this paper examines various types of men-dog relationships in Yulin and explores how such relationships contribute to men's understanding and performance of their gender and why local men defend the dog meat festival vehemently. It finds that traditional rural men in Yulin keep local dogs for guarding, hunting, and dogfighting while "useless" dogs are eaten. In all these relationships, dogs are understood as humanlike individuals endowed with and serving men's " wu masculinities", a concept that Kam Louie adopts to denote a type of traditional Chinese masculinities that is often associated with working-class men. With a change of lifestyle in the modernization of Yulin, the dog meat festival became the most important platform for the celebration of wu masculinities and is strongly defended by local men for their dignity.

In this article I analyze the China-Russia strategic partnership of cooperation from a constructivist perspective. By employing Wendt's concepts and structures of identity to understand relations between China and Russia, and their relations with other countries, I seek to elucidate the drivers of the current China-Russia partnership and shed light on the reasons why, despite burgeoning ties, the two countries have not established a formal alliance. I argue that both China and Russia are in the process of reconstructing their national identities while also integrating into the international community. There exists an ideational foundation for the China-Russia strategic partnership, but divergent concepts of harmony and honor make China and Russia act differently when interacting with a third party in the international community. I argue that China and Russia are still on the way to forming a shared concept of strategic partnership. Beijing and Moscow are not likely to set an alliance arrangement against a third party in the foreseeable future. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)

The challenge for contemporary literary scholars comes down to the question of how useful a cultural product is in describing and configuring the contemporary cultural scene, for example, the impact of literature, film, and TV in the globalizing era. Many scholars, in order to capture this diversified post-socialist cultural phenomenon, explore as many genres of art as they can in their research. However, identifying the common feature of post-socialist diversity in China still remains a question without answer. My research focuses on the theme of youth narratives in order to provide a solid and concrete perspective to assess contemporary Chinese culture and society.My research is motivated by a cultural phenomenon that I observe in contemporary China, namely the prevalence of youth narratives in fiction, film, and popular culture. The youth narrative has been frequently intertwined with China's pursuit of modernity and its nation-building projects under different political and cultural ideologies. My research traces the emergence and evolution of youth narratives in modern Chinese literature and then delves into various recurring themes and motifs about youth in literature, film, and TV from the 1990s to 2010, to discuss the cultural, social and political significances of youth narratives in contemporary China in order to capture common and critical features of diverse post-socialist status and engage with the furious debate on post-socialism and globalization in the Chinese context. What is more, my study reveals conflict between elitist state discourse and civil discourse implied by youth narratives from the 1990s to the present. This period provides rich textual and visual materials that showcases the most heatedly-discussed phenomena in China and resonates with classic dilemmas and ambivalences of Chinese modernity. Moreover, each of these phenomena relates to drastic economic change and social transition during the contemporary period. In a nutshell, these texts do not only reflect the moment but are also part of the moment. Hence, my research of contemporary Chinese culture links the past, present, and future; and is located at the intersection of historical and cultural studies, providing both diachronic and synchronic visions of key issues such as modernity, nationalism, and globalization.

This study explores the Taiwan Dollar (TWD) as the currency of a small island economy, uses the trading information sets from overseas and the market itself to examine the impacts on the adjustment of daily spot exchange rates. The daily USD/TWD is explained by the trading information sets, contain which the daily trading activities and the ratio of the real body on the daily candlestick chart of technical analysis on the Taipei Foreign Exchange Market, as well as the US-dollar index return to explain the USD/TWD spot rate change. The results showed that some of the USD/TWD changes were related to the US-dollar index return on overseas, and that the effect of the US-dollar index return was not limited to the adjustment rate from the previous closing rate to the opening rate on the day, which would affect the adjustment spot exchange rate in the intraday opening-to-closing period. There is a significant positive relationship between the real body ratio of the daily candlestick chart and the return of the exchange rate, supporting the real body ratio related to the change of the exchange rate. The study model can greatly improve the model interpretation ability of the change of exchange rate by about 50% after considering the trading activity factors. Finally, this study found that the volatility has a positive effect on Mondays and the 2008-financial crisis, and based on the shock that the news of depreciation was higher than the news of appreciation, so there exist asymmetry volatility.

Environmental regulations have a certain impact on regional green technology innovation affected by regional differences. Using the panel data of 30 provincial-level administrative regions in China (excluding Tibet, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) from 2011 to 2019, we consider China's new environmental protection law (NEPL) as a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate the impact of environmental regulation on green technology innovation in a difference-in-differences (DID) framework and further analyze the influences of regional differences. The results indicate that environmental regulations can promote regional green technology innovation, and that regional differences have a significant impact on this issue. Furthermore, environmental regulations in regions with high and low levels of economic development and education, and regions with medium and low levels of energy consumption have a significant impact on green technology innovation. The government should reasonably formulate environmental regulation policies on the basis of regional differences, encourage cross-regional exchanges and cooperation, and more efficiently stimulate regional green technology innovation to achieve sustainable development.

Exploring the cultural politics of diasporic entrepreneurs and migrant labourers through an examination of Chinese restaurants in Johannesburg, this article presents what I call the "intra-migrant economy" amid everyday racialized insecurities in urban South Africa. I use the term "intra-migrant economy" to refer to the employment of one group of migrants (Zimbabwean migrant workers) by another group of migrants (Chinese petty capitalists) as an economic strategy outside the mainstream labour market. These two groups of migrants work in the same industry, live in the same city, and have established a sort of unequal employment relation that can be hierarchical and interdependentat once. Chinese migrants are socially marginalized but not economically underprivileged, which stands in contrast to Zimbabwean migrants, who remain economically underprivileged even though they speak local languages. Their different socioeconomic positions in South Africa are profoundly influenced by their nationality and racialization. Thisanalysis of their interdependency focuses on the economic and political structures that shaped the underlying conditions that brought Chinese and Zimbabwean migrants to work together in South Africa.