The goal of this dissertation is to determine how elite status in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is formed, maintained, and perpetuated. The role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is studied to see how the CCP confirms elite status. The political, military, and commercial elites form the membership of the national leadership bodies of the CCP and the PRC government, and as such, they hold the most influence. The political elites hold the most status and prestige. Other elites exist, namely in the form of scholarly, artistic, and born elites. It is important to realize the role of the CCP and PRC government in confirming PRC elite status. Political, commercial, and military elites claim elite status by their position in the CCP and government hierarchy. Born elites gain their status from being related via blood or marriage to political, commercial, or military elites. Artistic and scholarly elites derive their status from how closely they are aligned to the CCP and government.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file viewed on (February 23, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation examines efforts to foster a culture of democracy in postwar Japan, focusing on Science of Thought, one of the most influential associations engaged in publicly rethinking democracy in the years after fascism and defeat. The group was founded in 1946 by seven young intellectuals whose wartime experiences had convinced them of the urgent need to bridge the gap between the world of intellectuals and that of "ordinary people." My dissertation shows how the group's many attempts to realize that goal embodied a vision of democratic experimentation that had to be re-articulated again and again in response to challenges that arose in connection with geopolitical events and also with the social changes that accompanied economic recovery and growth. For Science of Thought, democracy was not something that could be decreed by occupation authorities or conjured into existence by the media. Its seeds had to be sought in the "thought" (shisô) of the "man on the street." Contributors to the group's journal espoused a "science of thought" capable of enabling researchers to discover the mental worlds and implicit philosophies of ordinary people. Drawing methodological insight from American pragmatist philosophy and social science, the group conducted statistical surveys and interviews, and produced content analyses of popular movies, novels, and comic books in an unusual experiment to probe the mind of the "common man." In the charged political context of the early fifties, members of the group searched for new ways to nurture democracy from the grassroots. Inspired by the apparent success of the ongoing social revolution in China, members began promoting and facilitating educational and cultural movements underway in the Japanese countryside. In the process, Science of Thought became an anchor for a nation-wide network of factory workers, engineers, students, and housewives linked together by reading groups and writing circles. As economic growth began to transform Japanese society in the late fifties and early sixties, the group's earlier faith in the inherent democratic pragmatism of ordinary people gave way to promoting a more oppositional stance, embodied in the classless ideal of the citizen-activist confronting the pressures of conformism in mass society and white-collar life. On the basis of this ideal, the group became an enthusiastic supporter of the large-scale protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960, which marked the beginning of citizen movements that influenced Japanese civil society in the subsequent decades. The evolution of the group from a small research circle into a standard-bearer for citizen's activism in the sixties can be seen as a metonym for the experience of postwar progressives, an experience that included moments of pro-Enlightenment optimism and anti-American nationalism. Rather than through developing a specific theory of democracy or citizenship, the significance of Science of Thought lay in the way it exemplified democracy in practice. The accumulated practical experience of the intellectuals and citizens associated with the group remains relevant to those who continue to grapple with the dilemmas of democracy today.

This dissertation uses the concept of fascism in order to examine the socio-culture of contemporary Japan. Defined in terms of its commodity structure, fascism turns out to be a relevant concept to Japan not only prior to and during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) but also from the postwar days to date. Against various forms of culturalism that claim that the country is essentially totalitarian and its culture is innately violent, I will argue that the country has shared fascist conditions with those other countries and regions that operate in the mode of mechanical reproduction. While the overall mode of mass-reproduction has been further articulated by different moments, such as late capitalism or post-modernism, the cultural and political condition of reducing singular lives and events into standardized forms has continued in these countries and regions roughly since the 1920s. My view will expand the horizon of studies of fascism, which has hitherto been limited to Europe between the two World Wars. At the same time, the view of fascism's generality should not be blind to local inflections and historical specificities. In this dissertation, I will examine such trans-war Japanese institutions as the ideologies of emperorship, formation of the petty bourgeois class, and corporatist organizations of gender and locality. My dissertation will ethnographically investigate the way in which these institutions have interacted with the country's modern capitalist everyday to result in fascist violence. The specific sites in which my ethnographies take place are the contemporary Tokyo and Yokohama suburbs (Chapters 1 and 3) and the Yasukuni Shinto Shrine in Tokyo (Chapters 2 and 4), among others. These ethnographies will elucidate how the categories of class, gender, and generation crisscross everyday pleasures and anxieties of commodification. Lastly and not least importantly, another historically specific element of postwar Japanese fascism is memories and traces of its prewar violence exercised on other Asians and Pacific Islanders. The problem of ill mourning seems to critically ground the postwar Japanese formation of fascist potentialities. The last chapter will discuss contemporary Japanese efforts for mourning and the accompanying issue of ethics.

During the Tang dynasty, an increased capacity for change created a new value system predicated on the accumulation of wealth and the obsolescence of things that is best understood as fashion. Increased wealth among Tang elites was paralleled by a greater investment in clothes, which imbued clothes with new meaning. Intellectuals, who viewed heightened commercial activity and social mobility as symptomatic of an unstable society, found such profound changes in the vestimentary landscape unsettling. For them, a range of troubling developments, including crisis in the central government, deep suspicion of the newly empowered military and professional class, and anxiety about waste and obsolescence were all subsumed under the trope of fashionable dressing. The clamor of these intellectuals about the widespread desire to be "current" reveals the significant space fashion inhabited in the empire - a space that was repeatedly gendered female. This dissertation considers fashion as a system of social practices that is governed by material relations - a system that is also embroiled in the politics of the gendered self and the body. I demonstrate that this notion of fashion is the best way to understand the process through which competition for status and self-identification among elites gradually broke away from the imperial court and its system of official ranks. Out of status instability grew a desire for novelty that transformed the dressed body into an object for status display during the late eighth and ninth centuries. Sartorial savvy became a critical arena for the articulation of wealth and power by the old aristocracy and new military or professional elite alike. A foundational aim of my dissertation is to understand how fashion contributed to a new system for ordering the world in Tang dynasty China. By the ninth century, changes in the Tang economic and political structure enabled the rise of a new fashionable elite whose politics of appearance were driven more by the luxury silk economy than by the old symbolic order. I argue that the emergence of fashion was intimately related to developments in the silk industry, which not only reached record production levels during this period, but also manufactured fabrics that were unprecedented in design and complexity. The rise of private silk workshops in the latter half of the dynasty made silk more available to the new military and professional elites. As consumers of novel silks, these elites propelled the silk industry forward and with it, fashion. The new silk economy was personified in a popular literary trope of the ninth century: the impoverished weaving girl slaving away in the silk workshops as an icon of the damages engendered by the excessive consumption of luxury. With this project, I illustrate how the history of Tang fashion serves as an important prism into the workings of the Tang state, the productive lives of premodern women, and the formation of social and cultural identities during a dynamic period of world history. My approach is interdisciplinary, informed by economic history, art history, literature, and textile technology. To my analysis of Tang poetry, sumptuary laws, and economic treatises, I add careful examination of the visual representations of dress and a close study of the corpus of silk artifacts to map the transformations in sartorial practice. By the end of the dynasty, fashion had become a key part of a larger critique of the waning empire's economic landscape, the rise of a new military and professional elite, and the collapse of stable status displays. Involved in a nascent market system, tied to the building of new hierarchies, and implicated in structures of gender and cultural identity, the Tang fashion system was integral to these larger historical processes.

One of the most stimulating issues in East Asian art history is the influence and reception of art and culture. My dissertation presents a case study of ceramic production and consumption between 1400-1800, in which Korea is a source for new art, and Japan is not only a recipient but an active transformer and innovator. The dissertation focuses on the following three themes: 1) ceramic production in Korea ca. 1400-1600, especially the unique buncheong ware; 2) the reception and consumption in Japan of buncheong and other non-porcelain ceramics produced in Korea ca. 1500-1700, some of which were made specifically for Japanese consumers; 3) the production of Korean-inspired stoneware in Japan, particularly in northern Kyushu, ca. 1600-1800.

This dissertation reconsiders the early history of ink painting in Kamakura- (1185-1333) and Muromachi-period (1336-1573) Japan, focusing on art in the former administrative capital of Kamakura, the cradle of Chinese-style monastic Zen and the Sinocentric cultural apparatus that accompanied it. I examine the early reception of Chinese painting by the city’s political and ecclesiastical elites and subsequent artistic production by priest-painters active at local Zen monasteries. My study reveals Kamakura as the nucleus of a heretofore disregarded cultural sphere in medieval eastern Japan, one in which Zen priest-painters engaged with nearby collections of Chinese painting to create a local pictorial tradition that would endure, seemingly immune to artistic trends in Kyoto, through the late fifteenth century. I examine the history of ink painting in Kamakura in an introduction, five chapters, a conclusion, and one appendix. Chapter 1 surveys the establishment in Kamakura of Japan’s first two Rinzai Zen monasteries modeled exclusively on Chinese precedents, namely Kenchōji and Engakuji, cultural exchange between Kamakura and the Southern Song Chinese capital Hangzhou, and the early reception of Chinese painting. I use extant diaries and documents to partially reconstruct the vast collections of Chinese works of art held in thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Kamakura and investigate the large-scale deaccessioning of these same objects after the collapse of the Kamakura shogunate in 1333. A full English translation of the only extant inventory of one of these collections, that of the Engakuji subtemple Butsunichian, is included as an appendix. Chapter 2 focuses on the long-term development by local priest-painters of a unique ink painting style derived from works associated with the Chinese master Muqi Fachang (fl. 13th c.), affording the first sustained view of ink painting in Muromachi-period Kamakura. Chapters 3 through 5 focus in varying ways on Kamakura’s enigmatic fifteenth century, characterized by relative isolation from artistic developments in Kyoto and a dearth of extant documentary materials. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the obscure Kamakura priest-painter Chūan Kinkō (fl. first half 15th c.), known and misconstrued since the Edo period (1603-1868) as “Chūan Shinkō.” Chapter 3 traces the fabrication of “Chūan Shinkō” that occurred piecemeal from the mid-seventeenth century to the present day, while Chapter 4 reimagines the painter as “Chūan Kinkō” through an examination of his relatively large, mostly unstudied corpus of ink paintings. In Chapter 5, I survey a large body of devotional paintings produced by a multi-generational circle of anonymous artists active at Kamakura’s premier Zen monastery, Kenchōji, and posit the existence of a prolific painting studio that served as a primary source of models for painters active at other monasteries in Kamakura and throughout eastern Japan. In the conclusion, I begin to explore the continued impact of this local painting tradition on ink painters active in Kamakura and the surrounding region during and after the recommencement of artistic exchange with the capital in the late fifteenth century.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-133). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR19650

Thesis (Ph.D. East Asian Studies)--University of Waikato, 2007. / Title from PDF cover (viewed October 2, 2008) Includes bibliographical references (p. 244-263)

This thesis contains a detailed study of contemporary South Asian diasporic literary and cinematic works in English. The majority of the works analyzed and discussed are those produced from the 1980s onwards. My research investigates how selected diasporic texts and films from South Asia problematize representations of homeland and host spaces. I reveal in the course of this study, how these works, actively negotiate alternative modalities of belonging that celebrate the plurality of cultural identities within and outside the homeland. This exploration of diasporic narratives of homeland and host land is explored by examining these narratives across two mediums: the cinematic and the literary. In so doing, the thesis initiates a dialogue between the two mediums and locates these selected diasporic works within a larger tapestry of contemporary cultural, literary and global contexts. The thesis shows that these literary and filmic representations celebrate as well as present an incisive critique of the different cultural spaces they inhabit. The thesis also reveals how, in representing the experiences of multiple-linguistic, geographical, historical dislocations, these texts invite readers to see the changing faces of diasporic cultures and identities. My thesis complements this analysis of representation with a broader analysis of the reception of these diasporic works. My analysis sets out to move away from the critical tendency to scrutinize texts in relation to a politicized rhetoric of reception which privileges a reading of texts through insider/outsider binarism, by drawing together and contrasting academic and popular responses in the reception of diasporic texts. In so doing, my thesis reads these texts as agents of cultural production, focusing on interpretative possibilities of the literary critical mode of reading and enabling nuanced modes of analysis attentive to issues of diasporic identity, the identity of nation-states and the emergent global dynamics of migrant narratives. The texts I analyze are Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight's Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), Micheal Ondaatje‘s Running in the Family (1982) and Anil's Ghost (2000), Rohinton Mistry‘s A Fine Balance (1995), Mohsin Hamid‘s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Hanif Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and as well as two filmic texts, Mira Nair‘s The Namesake (2007) and Gurinder Chadha‘s Bend It Like Beckham (2001).