Rural China in ruins: The rush to urbanize China's countryside is opening a moral battleground (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

China has officially become a predominantly urban country, with over 50% of the population now registered as urban residents. Its urbanization process has been described as the most managed in human history. The Chinese government manages the building of new cities, regulates the housing of displaced people and controls squatters. As an historically poorer area, the west of China has been the target of ongoing efforts at infrastructural development. Describing urbanization as managed however masks the conflicts and contradictions involved in a process which is far from smooth. Although villagers are usually seen to be largely the powerless victims of these initiatives, it is clear that many try to take advantage of the situation, while others are unable to do so. Based on recent fieldwork and eight years of visits to one village undergoing urbanization, this article looks at the complex dynamics involved and at the moral battleground which they lay bare.     

Democratisation: Antidemocratic and democratic elements in the political culture of China

The nature of the political culture itself is often seen by commentators as the cause of democracy failing to take root in China; the antidemocratic elements of that culture being overemphasised while the democratic elements are underemphasised. This paper examines the application of the ideas of democratic culture in China to the current state of play, including the possibility of the democratic card being played by factions within the Chinese Communist Parry (CCP). There are indeed cultural problems associated with Chinese democratisation such as cultural anomie, unconscious authoritarian personalities, the legacy of egalitarianism, the radical polarisation of Chinese culture, difficulties of institutional compromise and the irrational control of aggression and fear. While the antidemocratic culture is stronger at present than the democratic culture, the new Chinese democratic culture is likely to gather strength in the future.     

胶东青铜器科学分析

本文通过考古实物的科学分析,认为早在西周时期胶东青铜技术便发展到了一定水平,战国后便发展到了较为成熟的阶段,大约自西周始,胶东青铜技术与中原便是大体同步发展了的.文章最后还将胶东青铜合金成分与《考工记·六齐》作了比较,并提出了“六齐”既不是生产经验的总结,也不是指导生产实践的工艺规范,而是一种试验资料的反映和归纳的观点。     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.