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After group presentations, discuss the different folktales, in particular their similarities and differences, their lessons, and their impact. Are there differences? Should there be differences? How are their courses similar and how are they different? Point out that Yang leaves us to wonder about the path and life choices Wei-Chen will take. Discuss the options he might take and the probability of his taking them.
Compare and contrast the structure and effectiveness of his storytelling versus that of multiple-voice poems. Discuss how Yang uses these tools as he weaves his story. Compare and contrast how well each hero fits the definition, and why there may or may not be discrepancies. Modes of Storytelling and Visual Literacy In graphic novels, images are used to relay messages with and without accompanying text, adding additional narrative and dimension to the story. For example: Compare and contrast the opening images and words for each of the stories page 7, page 23, and page How do the words and the images help distinguish the stories and set their respective tones?
Words and Their Stories (Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section 4, China) [Edited by Wang Ban] on giuliettasprint.konfer.eu *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. In spite. The series features scholarly reference works and research tools on topics in A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture Words and Their Stories.
Have students hunt for visual and verbal examples of stereotyping throughout the book. Compare and contrast the visual and verbal means Yang uses to portray these stereotypes. On page 30 and then again on page 36, Jin Wang and Wei-Chen are introduced by well-meaning but clueless teachers to their classmates. Discuss how the images and text interact relaying the diverse actions and reactions of the students and teachers. On page 67, we see various gods, many of them bruised and battered and complaining to Tze-Yo Tzuh about the Monkey King. Discuss how these gods are portrayed in this folktale.
Compare and contrast these gods with other gods of myths, such as those found in Greek pantheon. Discuss how Yang is able to incorporate Chinese cultural aspects into his portrayal of the gods. So Far from the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins semi-autobiographical memoir : This work takes place during the last days of World War II as Yoko and her family flea from their home in Nanam, North Korea and end up, eventually in the United States, and must face hardship and ridicule throughout their arduous journey.
Common Core State Standards This book of identity, self-worth, assimilation, and racial tolerance is full of advanced vocabulary, simile, slang, idioms, and cultural folklore.
It promotes critical thinking, relates a hero and a coming of age story laden with issues of cultural and self-identity, justice and friendship, all done through verbal and visual story telling that addresses multi-modal teaching, and meets Common Core State Standards including: Key ideas and details : Citing textual evidence, determining a theme or central idea, describing how a plot unfolds, analyzing how particular elements of the story interact; analyzing how particular lines of dialogue or incidents of a text reveal aspects of a character or provoke a decision; and analyzing a particular point of view or cultural experience from outside the United States.
All images c Gene Luen Yang. All Rights Reserved. What the country is obviously lacking is the last component of his three-item recipe 14 for Economic Democracy , namely, democracy in the work-place. But Schweickart sees light in the dark, for he thinks China has the right ideological resources for advancing revolutionary forms of work management.
In spite of the apparent contradictions between the CPC's rhetoric and practice, it still is publicly committed to socialism; and, despite its authoritarianism, it does allow internal debates on the possibility of creating a virtually more just and democratic society, not to mention verily socialist. It knows that speeding up the market reforms - that many in the party already believe have gone too far - will only worsen the already acute problems of income inequality, corruption, and environmental disaster.
Employing then Schweickart's definition of capitalism - which encompasses the market for goods, for labour and for capital -, we shall proceed to investigate how "well" China fares in its putative move to capitalism; or, if Schweickart is correct, if China still harbors much of the socialist legacy of social control of capital, investment, and economic decisions.
Markets for goods and services are already paramount in China. Through the price mechanism, firms buy services, raw materials and machinery from firms and sell their produce to consumers and other firms; and the environment in which these agents interact is largely free from government controls. Of course, the state still holds monopolies or quasi-monopolies in key sectors such as telecommunications, financial intermediation, energy and utilities But the State-Owned Enterprises SOEs which are responsible for the bulk of production in these important industries theoretically respond to market incentives and are profit-driven.
That means we have come a long way since the early s, when SOEs still bore a great deal of the social costs related to the transition to a market economy. According to Wang , up until the early s a large share of SOE's were not turning a profit not due to some inherent inefficiency but because they bore the brunt of tax burdens 16 and had various social responsibilities, including providing workers with day-care, health care, housing services and social security, not to mention the fact that state enterprises concentrated in sectors heavily subject to price control.
For the sake of the economy, prices of energy, transportation and other public utilities had long been kept artificially low.
But what is the picture now? In the period Chinese economy expert Barry Naughton calls "Reform with Losers" present , state enterprises were forced to resort to significant restructuring and downsizing. From the mids onward, there ensued an era of relative macroeconomic austerity and apparent diminished patronage: credit to public firms became tighter and they were exhorted to compete on an equal footing with other types of firms semi-public, collective, private and foreign firms.
The biggest losers from the mids reforms were, of course, the former state-workers that were laid off or lost many of their social benefits. The number of SOE workers decreased by half between and and already at the end of this year the urban industrial private sector, without counting foreign-owned firms, employed almost twice as many workers as the traditional state-sector: 55 million against 30 million in SOEs Today it is estimated that only 19 million people work in industrial state enterprises.
However, we should not underestimate the state enterprises' sheer importance in the economy.
Three hundred and ten of China's biggest companies are statecontrolled, and in the combined operating revenue of those companies was four times as big as the revenue from the top private companies Proletarians do not yet comprise the majority of the population, for China is still a semi-agrarian society.
We make this statement bearing on Minqi Li's classification of Chinese social structure into three major social groups: the Proletariat, skilled and semi-skilled wage workers whose income derives basically from wage-labour; the semi-proletariat, unskilled workers in the urban centers that more often than not are migrant workers who spend part or most of their lives in the countryside - the semi-proletariat also normally cannot make a living off of wage-labour only, and therefore must engage in all sorts of petty commodity production and other informal activities to survive; thirdly, there are the "peasants", agricultural commodity producers farmers , who also use part of their time to undertake non-agricultural work activities - that is, despite having their own plot of land, they can also derive part of their income from rural industry; finally, the "middle class" comprises all urban highly skilled professionals, technicians and managers.
Bearing in mind that many workers under the rubric of "semi-proletariat" live part of their lives as peasants and vice-versa, Minqi Li , p. In the last 10 years, Chinese social strata structure has not changed significantly. The Chinese Social Survey Data of 19 revealed that the peasantry number is about We cannot properly compare these data with Minqi Li's ones. After all, the terms "blue collar" and "white collar" are occupational classifications that distinguish workers who perform manual labour from those who have "professional jobs".
But that doesn't mean necessarily that white collars are middle-class workers; many are low-paid "professionals" employed in the service sector With this caveat in mind, we can only regret not having more recent Minqi Li-like data about the level of proletarianization of Chinese society, for his figures tell us much about the level of capitalist development in a country. We know, nevertheless, that by the end of , the Chinese population of migrant workers - who would fall under the semi-proletariat group - had risen to approximately million. Their free movement into good urban employment opportunities is ever constrained by the continuing existence of the archaic Chinese house-hold registration system called hukou , that splits up the population into rural and urban residents that enjoy mutually exclusive residential rights and entitlements to land or welfare services, respectively And it is unnecessary to say that "legal" urban residents have at their disposition much higher-quality welfare services.
It is not hard to see that the hukou system is a type of control of labour flows that discriminates against the rural population.
Nonetheless, the system is not "perfect" and we are likely to observe, in the coming years, the greatest proletarianization the world has ever seen. And, as the share of proletarians approaches that of other "semi-periphery" countries like Brazil, we should expect to see significant wage increases as wage workers amass the necessary political power to fight for better life conditions - and of course, as the supply of unskilled workers dwindles. In a way, we are already observing great wage increases. Despite the fact the wages in China have been rising nominally at high rates since the beginning of the Reform Era, only more recently real gains have become spectacular.
Between and , for example, real wages grew at an annual average of And, according to the China Labour Bulletin, the average monthly wage in urban areas in was 2, yuan approximately dollars , six times higher than the figure for Social control of investment. China is well known for its much above average rates of gross capital formation. It is also common knowledge that much of China's double-digit growth for the last 30 years has been spurred by investment, which has become the backbone of the economy.
In effect, investment in China is said to be too high, for the counterpart of high investment rates is a permanent suppression of private household consumption 25 , which would more closely correspond to people's life conditions than GDP per capita. Even compared to other East Asian countries in their period of miraculous growth China investment rates are high. The CPC's response to the financial crisis was to exhort companies, particularly SOEs over which it holds direct influence, to spur their investments to even higher rates, which was accomplished with a billion dollar stimulus plan.
Chinese State-Owned Enterprises have been responsible for most of the increase in investment in recent times. First of all, in China equating the non-directly state-controlled sector of the economy with the private sector is problematic, for sometimes boundaries between what is and what is not public are tenuous. The economy, it seems, is still enmeshed in party politics, as the Communist Party of China has the power to appoint many of the main executives of key companies, even if not majority-owned by the state. In effect, Huang suggests that OECD's assumption that a category of firms known as "legal-person shareholding firms" 28 are privately-owned firms is a flawed assumption, as much of the legal-person share of capital originates in the state sector because SOEs, both national and local, hold significant equity in other firms.
This means that even when the government per se does not own the majority of assets of a company, it can exert substantial influence on its management through SOEs that own part of the capital of the supposedly nonstate company. This way, Huang , p. What is remarkable, though, is that those figures weren't significantly bigger 10 years earlier Mattlin and Imai hint at why this is so.
They believe all the privatization, corporate laws favouring private activity, downsizing, joint-venturing etc. It becomes visible, then, how most of the "privatization" happened at the provincial and local level, and big international players like Sinopec oil , China National Petroleum, State Grid Corporation electric utilities , China Telecom, Bank of China etc.
To extend the analogy, there is also the fact that we are all virtuosos on at least one "instrument" namely, our native language , and learning instruments from the same family is easier than embarking on a completely different instrument. Students can replace language units with equivalent language study overseas in semester one, semester two, summer semester, or over a full year, at approved partner institutions in the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. But raw data and inchoate experience should not be equated with reality. In contrast, a Calculation section represents a practical development from a theoretical basis. This website a great online resource for learning languages run by Olly Richards. Is there a specific stroke order to writing Chinese characters? This rather tame dictionary includes definitions for a mere , characters!
Just for curiosity's sake, the telecom equipment Huawei, the largest Chinese private enterprise, generates only one tenth as much revenue as Sinopec the largest state enterprise does: 1. It remains to be said that the influence of the State on the Chinese economy goes much beyond its ownership of assets. According to Bardhan , government policy still discriminates against indigenous private entrepreneurs in matters of finance, market access and regulatory approvals. Due to imperfect private property rights over assets like land and other types of infrastructure, for years the relationship between private businesses and the state has been rather clientelistic.
In their study, Li et al. Lastly, it should be noted that the five largest banks in China are all state-controlled, and together they account for around one half of the Chinese banking system assets and deposits. To conclude with, over the last years the government has actually strengthened its financial control over the biggest and most strategic companies.
In it created SASAC State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission , a special commission directly under the State Council that exercises ownership rights of state enterprises on behalf of the government, including appointing managers, executives, and approving mergers and sales of assets. By stipulating strict demarcations on which industries the government considers strategic, it made clear that around 40 SOEs will be indefinitely off-limits to private or foreign control. In Mattlin words , p. China has come a long way since the days of the Command Economy.
Markets operate competitively in most sectors and labour is very much commodified, despite imperfections in labour flows between the countryside and urban centers. Nonetheless, China is not yet fully a capitalist economy and it does not necessarily follow that it will ever be. It is not yet a full-fledged capitalist economy due to the incomplete proletarianization of its work force, still largely composed of peasants; though that may soon not be true anymore. Burn after Writing by Sharon Jones , Paperback 2. Save on Nonfiction Trending price is based on prices over last 90 days.
Land of Hope by Wilfred M. You may also like. Language Study Reference Books. This item doesn't belong on this page.