Xian Zhou

From the perspective of critical cultural sociology, this book delves into the intertwining relations of cultural transformation and social evolution, illuminating contemporary Chinese culture's landscape and underlying logic since the 1980s. With a special focus on the tensions among politics, economy, and culture itself, the book examines the transitions of Chinese culture from tradition to the modern age. It expounds the cultural differentiation and its effect in contemporary China. Within this framework, the author addresses some key issues and phenomena that figure in the cultural scene of modern China, ranging from the crisis of Chinese cultural identity in the context of globalization, the media culture and its impacts on everyday life, to the visual culture and social transformation. Offering a panoramic view of Chinese contemporary culture, literature, arts, and society, this title will serve as an essential read for scholars of China Studies, Cultural Studies, and Visual Culture as well as anyone interested in what's going on in Chinese contemporary culture.

American Municipal experienced the evolution from traditional to modern historical process. The early 19th century, municipal governments to develop a political oligarchy dominated municipal, the early 20th century and lived through the municipal reform, the government today showing many of the numerous state metropolitan area, the change process and the social, economic and cultural development are closely related. Their point of view on municipal, municipal-scale growing, more and more functions, management from the British model to mimic the stress scientific management

Editors’ AbstractSituating the controversy over Sinologism within the larger context of geopolitical and economic rebalance of power in the globalized world, this article seeks to provide a few strategies to tackle the problems arising from the problematic production of China knowledge and to rethink the approaches to cross-cultural research and knowledge production. By highlighting the need for self-conscious reflections on epistemology and methodology in China studies, it calls on scholars to treat Sinologism as both a local and global concept so as to go beyond the local horizon of Sinological studies and enter a global horizon of cross-cultural studies.

One of the most disputed issues in twentieth-century literary theories and critical studies is what literary textual meaning rests upon. A further question is whether textual meaning is ascertainable or not. The two questions are interrelated. The first one looks into the origin of textual meaning in literary texts: is it derived from authorial intent, or from sentences and rhetorical devices, or actualized in the process of readerly activities and critical interpretation? As John Searle sees it, three theories focused on this matter during the twentieth century:Now, these three different claims—that meaning is a linguistic property of the text, that meaning is a matter of authorial intention, and that meaning is...

In this short tribute to Mario Perniola, Zhou Xian remembers his friendship with the Italian aesthetician. Zhou, one of the most prominent art theorists in China, discusses his friendship with Perniola and the significance of their relationship both at a personal and intellectual level. After describing in a touching way their first encounter in Rome, which started in Perniola’s studio, Zhou celebrates the innovative character of Perniola’s aesthetic theorizing, and in particular his interest in Chinese contemporary aesthetics.