Asian Studies Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Asian Studies Theses and Dissertations by Subject "China"

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    Aspirational Migration: The Case of Chinese Birth Tourism in the U.S.
    (University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Folse, Brandon; Otis, Eileen
    The ways in which individuals navigate the globe today complicates previous conceptualizations of migration and mobility. Once such mode of contemporary movement which challenges scholars is known as "birth tourism." This research considers birth tourism to be a form of "lifestyle migration," which I label aspirational migration. By analyzing the motivations which drive many parents to give birth abroad, I shed light on the complex and risky process, which involves a host of players, including family, friends, and a global birth tourism infrastructure. Through this drawn-out process, which begins well before the decision to give birth abroad and continues into the distant future, I argue that birth tourists and their foreign-born children become aspirational migrants and acquire cosmopolitan capital.
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    Authenticity and the Copy: Analyzing Western Connoisseurship of Chinese Painting through the Works of Zhang Daqian
    (University of Oregon, 2014-06-17) Menton, Sara; Lin, Jenny
    This thesis examines conflicting attitudes regarding artistic authenticity and differing approaches to connoisseurship vis-à-vis the field of Chinese art and its reception in Europe and North America. Although this thesis examines both Chinese and Western approaches to the copy and highlights different cultural methods, this is not a Chinese versus the West argument. This thesis displays how concepts are combined in the Western art field to reach differing conclusions about a painting's authenticity. Specifically, this thesis analyzes the art of Chinese painter Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) and the debate surrounding Along the Riverbank, a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection attributed to 10th century Chinese painter Dong Yuan (c. 934-c. 962). Many believe this painting is one of Zhang's forgeries. The controversies surrounding Zhang's art and forgeries reveal diverging conceptions of art education and methods of determining authenticity and the complexities of evaluating Chinese art in non-Chinese academic contexts.
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    Changing Rurality in Contemporary China: Double Commodification of the Countryside
    (University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Wu, Shuxi; Buck, Daniel
    This thesis examines contemporary rural transformations in China. I suggest that a different spatial relationship among production, reproduction, and consumption is in the making, grafted onto the urban-rural divide. A different urban-rural relationship is also in the making, shaped by changing divisions and integrations of labor that go into production, reproduction, and consumption. I argue that these two processes are occurring through a double commodification of the countryside, which produces what I call “rural commodity” and “rural-as-commodity”. “Rural commodity” refers to the ways in which products of rural labor are absorbed into urban-centered accumulation processes. “Rural-as-commodity” refers to how rurality itself has become an object of desire and exchange. These two forms of commodity collaborate to transform the urban-rural division of labor in China to facilitate accumulation. I focus specifically on rural tourism and media representations of new rurality to illustrate how these two forms of commodification converge.
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    Science, Space, and the Nation: The Formation of Modern Chinese Geography in Twentieth-Century China
    (University of Oregon, 2014-10-17) Wallner, Rachel; Goodman, Bryna
    At the turn of the twentieth century, the modern epistemological framework of science superseded indigenous Chinese knowledge categories as the organizing unit for empirical knowledge about space. By the 1920s, pioneering Chinese intellectuals housed spatial knowledge under the new category of modern geography. While this framework for modern knowledge was rooted in the West, Chinese scholars innovated the discipline in ways that enabled them to consistently attend to fluctuating nation-building imperatives. Using autobiography, memoir, and periodicals produced by early Chinese geographers, this study explores how the intellectual shift toward spatial epistemological modernity facilitated modern China's entrance into the global nation-state system. Modern geographic knowledge ushered in new geopolitical claims and notions of citizenship that would define the new Chinese nation and its position in the world until today.
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    Sun Yat-sens: Contested Images of a Political Icon
    (University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) Fischer, Thomas; Goodman, Bryna
    This thesis explores the afterlives of the Chinese revolutionary icon Sun Yat-sen and their relevant contexts, arguing that these contexts have given rise to different images of the same figure. It serves as a gallery in which these different images are put into conversation with one another, revealing new insights into each. Key to the discussion, Sun is first introduced in a short biography. Then, the thesis moves to his different afterlives: Sun and the fight for his posthumous approval in the Republic of China before 1949; Sun and his usage in Chinese Communist political rhetoric from 1956 through 2016; Sun and his changing image in the ROC-Taiwan, a change that reflects the contentious political environment of an increasingly bentu Taiwan; Sun and two of his images among the overseas Chinese of Hawaii and Penang. Through this exploration, the thesis shows that there is no one Sun Yat-sen.
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    Superscribing Sustainability: Reformulating China's Contemporary Urbanism
    (University of Oregon, 2013-10-03) Rodenbiker, Jesse; Buck, Daniel
    Within China's post-1980's urban planning discourse, shan-shui, a significance-laden compound character set translatable as `mountain-water' or `landscape', aligned with urban sustainability. The focus of this genealogical discourse analysis delineates the origins, evolution, interpretation, and application of the term shan-shui within China's contemporary urbanization as a developing urban design paradigm, informed through transnational flows of urban design practices. This work highlights case studies showing this discourse's morphological materializations and analyzes interviews, publications, media, letter exchanges, and urban designs to problematize the use of shan-shui within the discursive processes of urban development and sustainability discourses. The superscription of shan-shui generates a rubric through which Chinese cultural and symbolic elements are (re)formulated in contemporary urban developments and conjoined with sustainable urban design practices facilitating multifaceted ends including efforts towards sustainable urban development, bourgeoning neo-classical urban aesthetics, conceptual bridging of human-nature relations, land-centric capital accumulation, and a vernacular urbanism.