Search results for ""author hill gates""
Cornell University Press Chinese Working-Class Lives: Getting By in Taiwan
Taiwan’s working class has been shaped by Chinese tradition, by colonialism, and by rapid industrialization. This book defines that class, explores that history, and presents with sensitive honesty the life experiences of some of its women and men. Hill Gates first provides a solid and informative introduction to Taiwan’s history, showing how mainland China, Japan, the convulsions of twentieth-century wars, and the East Asian economic expansion interacted in forming Taiwanese urban life. She introduces nine individuals from Taiwan’s three major ethnic groups to tell the stories of their lives in their own words. The narrators include a fortuneteller, a woman laborer, and a retired air force mechanic. A former spirit medium and a janitor are among the others who speak.
£45.90
Cornell University Press China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism
This monumental work reveals the continuities that underlie the changing surface of Chinese life from late imperial days to modern times. With a perspective that encompasses a thousand years of Chinese history, China's Motor provides a view of the social, economic, and political principles that have prompted people in widely varying circumstances to act, believe, and behave in ways that are labeled as Chinese. This original reinterpretation of Chinese culture, as meticulous in detail as it is vast in scope, will revise not only the study of China but also the very terms of social analysis.
£34.20
Stanford University Press Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China
Footbinding was common in China until the early twentieth century, when most Chinese were family farmers. Why did these families bind young girls' feet? And why did footbinding stop? In this groundbreaking work, Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates upend the popular view of footbinding as a status, or even sexual, symbol by showing that it was an undeniably effective way to get even very young girls to sit still and work with their hands. Interviews with 1,800 elderly women, many with bound feet, reveal the reality of girls' hand labor across the North China Plain, Northwest China, and Southwest China. As binding reshaped their feet, mothers disciplined girls to spin, weave, and do other handwork because many village families depended on selling such goods. When factories eliminated the economic value of handwork, footbinding died out. As the last generation of footbound women passes away, Bound Feet, Young Hands presents a data-driven examination of the social and economic aspects of this misunderstood custom.
£44.10
