Cultural Studies

Chinese ferment

by Joan Grant •

March 2009, no. 309

The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture by Kam Louie

CUP, $90 hb, 400 pp

Cultural Studies

Chinese ferment

by Joan Grant •

March 2009, no. 309

Imagine a street with a neo-Gothic church, a fish and chip shop, and bronze statues of Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, and Shakespeare. Someplace in England? No, it’s Thames Town, a satellite on the outskirts of Shanghai. German, Czech, Spanish, Scandinavian and American suburbs are also planned, to cater to the new Chinese middle class, for many of whom, like the Chinese for most of the twentieth century, ‘modern’ equals ‘Western’. Or recall your local Chinatown, with its ‘Chinese’ shops and restaurants, curved roof façades and resident diaspora, many of them convinced that they are preserving the ‘real’ Chinese culture, now lost in the mainland’s twentiethcentury convulsions. How does each of these represent modern Chinese culture?

Joan Grant

Dr Joan Grant is an academic, book editor and writer. From 1985 she taught a graduate course in contemporary Asian history and politics at Monash University and also from 2001-05 in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Canberra, to young diplomats from Australia and Asia/Africa. In 1990 she became Executive Officer of Monash Asia Institute, where she is now Adjunct Research Associate. She edited the Asian Studies Association of Australia Review and was an editor at Eastern Universities Press (Singapore), and Rigby Publishers, McPhee Gribble, and Sisters Publishing (Melbourne). Her publications include The Australopedia (Penguin/McPhee Gribble, 1988) - the official Children’s book of the Australian Bicentennial, winner of the Children’s Book of the Year Honour Book, 1999 - Worm Eaten Hinges (Hyland House, 1990) - an account of a year teaching in Shanghai during the Tiananmen student revolt - Cat and Fish (Lothian/Hachette, 2003) - winner of the 2004 Australian Children’s Picture Book of the Year award - and Cat and Fish Go to See (2005). Dr Grant has also published articles, book reviews and poetry in a range of newspapers and journals. She has served on the Australia China Council, and on the Boards of Asialink and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and on the Council of the Institute of International Affairs, and is currently on the Board of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, where she also teaches English and chairs the Policy Committee.