The Power of an Alternative: Implications of the Chinese Response to Globalization

By Yunxiang Yan

Introduction

The most notable feature of Chinas response to globalization is that the Chinese party-state had strategically positioned itself as the ultimate manager of the globalization process by promoting Chinas integration into the global economy and international community on one hand and carefully controlling this process on its own terms on the other. Taking a close look at the four primary domains of cultural globalizationthe business elite culture, popular culture, intellectual culture, and social movements, we can see that the Chinese party-state has thus far taken different strategies to maintain control and at the same time to facilitate growth.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Bio: Yunxiang Yan is professor of anthropology and co-director of the Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. He earned a BA and MA in Chinese literature at Peking University, China, and a Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village (Stanford University Press, 1996) and Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999 (Stanford University Press, 2003). His research interests include family and kinship, social change, social inequality and hierarchy, mass consumption and consumerism, and the impact of cultural globalization.

Published: Friday, April 27, 2007

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