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published_or_final_version / abstract / Chinese Historical Studies / Master / Master of Arts

 This thesis sets to sketch Chinese intellectuals’ sustained efforts to search for an alternative modernity to the Western model throughout the twentieth century, and uncover the interaction between intellectual politics and Chinese modernity discourse by historicizing and contextualizing Chinese modernity discourse. This study starts with delineating the consistence and the inconsistence of Chinese modernity discourses by juxtaposing different historical conditions and examining reappeared trends of thoughts. Three intellectual currents, i.e., cultural conservatism, humanism, and professionalism, which emerged in the May Fourth period and remerged in the post-socialist condition, are examined to mirror the spiral dynamics and the locus of Chinese modernity. Their respective roles in reconstructing Chinese cultural, ethical and academic orders in response to Western model of modernity are highlighted in the research. Cultural conservatism attempts to legitimize the Chinese culture in the framework of global modernity by resetting or reinterpreting the dialectical relation between the whole and part, universalism, and essentialism. Humanism emphasizes the standard, the guidance of authority, and the self-perfection to resist the ethical disorder caused by the so-called “modern spirit”, which is embodied by individualism, romanticism, and the immoderate expansion of desire. Professionalism influences the pattern of producing and reproducing knowledge about modernity by re-standardizing the academic and the discursive fields and by remolding the identity of the agents. After exposing how the “alternative modernity” in China, as a discursive-political device, has been produced and repackaged with various contents and meanings, this thesis proceeds to explore the intellectual pedestal of Chinese modernity discourses from two aspects. First, how do the intellectual strategies of self-positioning and position-taking influence knowledge production and reproduction of the Chinese modernity discourse; second, how articulation and re-articulation of modernity discourse reflect the self-adjustments of intellectual politics as well as identity shifts. Through the comparative and diachronic examinations, it poses that, as Chinese modernity discourse is increasingly served as a symbolic capital or a strategy of intellectual politics, it gradually loses its authenticity or even becomes a signifier without signified. Meanwhile, the state-led modernization practice is reversely becoming homogenous, stable, and less diverse, although the dominant ideology, namely, socialism with Chinese characteristics, is, in itself, hybrid, paradoxical, and strategically manufactured. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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published_or_final_version / Chinese Historical Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Arts

This thesis contributes to debates on the changes and continuities affecting women's lives in mid-twentieth century Britain, examining the factors that shaped what was possible for women coming of age in the immediate post-war years. Within the developed historiography on the coalfields, women's histories have been limited to broad overviews of women's social history. This thesis enriches these overviews by offering a close reading of a small cohort of women's composure of their life narratives. It thus promotes an understanding of a fuller 'life history', as affected by changes with the onset of the welfare state and the impact of community on women's well-being. The thesis contributes to the growing body of literature combatting the silencing of women in the male dominated historiography on industrial working-class communities. Specifically, it does so in the context of the interplay and tensions between a community and its individuals, and the impact of that community on women's life trajectories. The south Wales community of the Rhondda is utilised as a case study. Culturally and economically significant, the Rhondda has been the focus of much of the historiography on the coalfields. I conclude that the impact of gender ideology and community structures on Rhondda women's experiences were diverse, complex and contradictory. In composing their life narratives, the cohort negotiated aspects of their lives experienced as poor, unchallenging and unsatisfying. Rhondda's poverty had a detrimental impact on the women's lives. Relationships between community values and individuals emerged as structures enabling and constraining the potential of women in the cohort to live their lives freely and satisfactorily. The pressure for respectability within the community was a major constraining force. Early experiences were influential in how they conducted themselves in adulthood. Yet evidence of happiness is present, particularly around experiences of married life, which presents as an antidote to the frequently pessimistic discourses surrounding the debates on companionate marriage. Utilising their own experiences of struggle and disadvantage, many of the cohort emphasised their support for increased opportunities for subsequent generations of Rhondda women.

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