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The research study aims to raise questions about and gain new insights into the development of performance art in China. The development of performance art in China is set out in a chronological account of the events and art works that illustrate the development of a permissive, open-ended medium with endless variables. The events and works included in this study are executed by Chinese artists impatient with the limitations of traditional or established forms and determined to take their performance art works directly to the public. Following the rapid socio-economic development that started in the late 1970's, soon after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the start of economic reform. The chronological account of the development of Chinese performance art explains how Chinese artists, in creating their work, draw freely on a number of disciplines and media including literature, poetry, theatre, music, dance, architecture and painting, as well as video, film, slides and narrative. The account also illustrates how Chinese performance art has gradually moved away from the traditions of Chinese performance and how performance art works often promote interpretive individualism. Research shows that Chinese artists choose performance art to break free from the dominant media and the constraints of working within the evolving social and political environment in China. Research further shows that artists use performance art as a provocation to respond to changes. Finally, performance art is gaining acceptance from the public in recent Chinese socio-economic development.

This thesis examines China’s contemporary global cultural footprints through its recent development of cultural diplomacy and its global expansion of the Confucius Institute, whose prominent features are investigated by exploring the four specific research questions of ‘why’ China wants to launch cultural diplomacy and the CI, ‘what’ is the vehicle, ‘who’ is the agent, and ‘how’ it is carried out in the field. The thesis challenges the adequacy of the mainstream concepts of ‘soft power’ and ‘nation branding’ that are most commonly cited in the current literature, and argued for an alternative analytical framework that goes beyond and beneath these Western-defined concepts. After deciphering the multiple contexts, Gramsci’s concepts of cultural hegemony and ideology and Said’s critique of Orientalism are adopted to frame a different understanding of the historical and international contexts, while the double-edged role played by nationalism is analysed to deepen our understanding of the domestic context. The proposed new perspectives are then applied to chart the global cultural terrain of struggle, where the cultural encounters in the shifting global power relations between China’s long-held image as the “cultural other” and the ‘ideological other’ and its self-representations are examined. A comparative case study of the CIs, one of the most visible and controversial manifestations of China’s cultural diplomacy, is carried out to answer the main research question of why China’s similar efforts in promoting its culture were perceived and received differently to other Western countries and encountered unexpected controversies. The answers outline the unique challenges faced by China’s cultural diplomacy in both the cultural encounters and the interactions between its internal articulations and external communications. Primary data were collected from 25 interviews with staff from nine CIs in five different countries and one Goethe Institute in Beijing. The dynamics between these interweaving contexts elaborate the complexity of China’s cultural diplomacy and the CI project, whose prominent features are presented as the major research findings of this thesis, while what will make it a truly ‘great leap outward’ is also discussed.

The present study argues for a generic approach to the study of the representation of Chinese society in a selection of Australian fiction and non-fiction writings, based on the assumption that how China is represented is as important as what is represented. The three works that will be used to represent travel literature, journalism and the novel are: The East Is Red by Maslyn Williams, Real Life China by Richard Thwaites, and the Avenue of Eternal Peace by Nicholas Jose, all of which have been written by contemporary Australian writers. The study re-examines the obligations and meanings inherent in each of these genres, and discusses .these writers' individual ways of experimenting with the genres in which they write in order to cope with the complexity, ambiguity, and the fictionally of reality. These works are analysed in detail within two frameworks: the writers' relationships to their writings, and the relationship between the text and the external world, leading to the realization of the increasingly important role writers' consciousness plays in reshaping and fictionalizing their personal experience, as well as the recognition of the increasingly important role fictionalization plays in the representation of Chinese society in both fiction and non-fiction writings.

How does Chinese society define the class and stratum? Why do the classified methods and the standards of the class and stratum take place? The thesis primarily concentrates on studying the class and stratum in Chinese society. Reviewing class and stratification concepts, the reexamination of theories and the establishment of analytical framework, the thesis claims that the classified methods of the class and stratum are usually motivated by political purposes. That is to say, new class and the stratum categories derive from the alternations of political purposes. Hence, in addition to assisting readers to understand how Chinese class and stratum are classified, the result of the research can also predict the future development of class and stratum in Chinese society by means of the reformation of politics, economy, and the society.

My study focuses on the working lives of Chinese women in the light of China's attempt to incorporate its socialist system into the world economy in the Reform era. My cardinal concern is the formation of a new social body - dagongmei - in contemporary China. The great transformation experienced during the reform era creates significant social changes, and the lives of dagongmei are the living embodiments of such paradoxical processes and experiences. The first part of my thesis looks at how the desire of the peasant girls - the desire of moving out of rural China to the urban industrial zones - is produced to meet the demands of industrial capitalism. The second part, based on an ethnographic study of an electronic factory in Shenzhen, studies the processes of constitution of the subject - dagongmei - in the workplace. First, I look at the disciplines and techniques of the production machine deployed over the female bodies, and see how these young and rural bodies are turned into docile and productive workers. Secondly, the politics of identity and differences is analyzed, to see how the existing social relations and local cultural practices are manipulated to craft abject subjects. Thirdly, the processes of sexualizing the abject subjects in relation to cultural discourses and language politics is unfolded. The final part examines the relation of domination and resistance inside the workplace. Dream, scream and bodily pain are seen as the actual form of struggle against the enormous power of capitalist relations in Chinese society. In short, my study explores the process, the desire, the struggle of young rural girls to become dagongmei; and in the rite of their passages, unravels how these female bodies experience the politics and tension produced by a hybrid mixture of the state socialist and capitalist relations.

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In this thesis, three culturally similar yet distinct Chinese societies, China, Taiwan, and Singapore, are analysed in the context of their (in)tolerance towards homosexuality. Although they share many cultural similarities rooted in Chinese cultural heritage, these three societies are not always socially and politically homogenous. Differences in the political and social systems among the three societies contribute to divergences in social tolerance of homosexuality. Therefore, social tolerance of homosexuality and the social mechanisms behind it are explored in this thesis in order to comprehend the three Chinese societies better. The thesis starts with an introduction to the primary purpose of the research and contextualises homosexuality in historically traditional Chinese culture. It then discerns whether Chinese people are more or less homophobic compared with others on a global scale. Next, through quantitative approaches and under Inglehart’s postmaterialist theoretical framework, the research examines the socioeconomic and sociopolitical heterogeneity among Chinese societies. Overall, the findings confirm that homosexuality is still a form of identity politics in Chinese societies, and political and economic structures profoundly influence the tolerance of homosexuality. Also, Mainland China displays some unusual patterns with respect to the relationship between the economy and the tolerance, which sheds new light on the particularity of Chinese politics. / Graduate

In China, to go to college one must first pass the entrance exam commonly known as the gaokao . The test is grueling, but also seen as the key in China to becoming elite and successful in China's competitive job market, no matter what walk of life a person comes from. This paper examines the images society has created around the gaokao's status in China, and seeks to understands the dualities between these images and the realities that exist in China today- realities sometimes far different than what the gaokao promises.

The first part of the diploma thesis is focused on theory of culture, cultural dimensions and standards, as well as different concepts of cultural dimensions applied on the Chinese culture. The second part is targeting values and norms of the Chinese society with the help of: religious and philosophical doctrines, position that individual occupies in the society, systems of social relations, family life, holidays, and business ethics. In the third part the attention is paid to the research prepared on the basis of questionnaire survey, which main goal was either to confirm, or disapprove certain stereotypes, concerning the Chinese cultural standards from the Czech culture point of view.