Yunxiang Yan

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.

Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999

Private Life under Socialism

In this study, the author examines the gift-giving and related social activities that pervade daily life in China, focusing on routine activities.

Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village

The Flow of Gifts

Arthur Kleinman

Everett Zhang

Jing Jun

Dr. Sing Lee

Deep China investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity. Sharing a medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry perspective, Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua delve into intimate and sometimes hidden areas of personal life and social practice to observe and narrate the drama of Chinese individualization. The essays explore the remaking of the moral person during China’s profound social and economic transformation, unraveling the shifting practices and struggles of contemporary life.

The Moral Life of the Person

Deep China

Letian Zhang

This rare collection of personal letters presents not only a huge amount of original and disaggregated data but also constitutes an oral history of social life in China that is unintentionally being recorded by the authors.

Personal Letters between Lu Qingsheng and Jiang Zhenyuan, 1961-1986

Fuqun Xi

Covering more than 20 years of social life under collectivization, village cadre Zhou’s work journals contain a gold mine of information waiting to be explored and uncovered.

Work Journals of Zhou Shengkang, 1961-1982 (2 vols)

Chinese society has seen phenomenal change in the last 30 years. Two of the most profound changes have been the rise of the individual in both public and private spheres and the consequent individualization of Chinese society itself. Yet, despite China's recent dramatic entrance into global politics and economics, neither of these significant shifts has been fully analysed. China may indeed present an alternative model of social transformation in the age of globalisation - so its path to development may have particular implications for the developing world.The Individualization of Chinese Society reveals how individual agency has been on the rise since the 1970s and how this has impacted on everyday life and Chinese society more broadly. The book presents a wide range of detailed case studies - on the impact of economic policy, patterns of kinship, changes in marriage relations and the socio-economic position of women, the development of youth culture, the politics of consumerism, and shifting power relations in everyday life.

Yunxiang Yan

Books

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