Shanghai A Beautiful City Analysis

China has changed in certain ways and remained the same in others from the early Golden Ages to the late 1900s. China has experienced a series of cultural and political transformations, shaping the lives of many Chinese citizens. Culturally, the country’s art and literature hardly changed for almost eight hundred years. Along with their culture, China remained politically the same from the beginning of the Golden Ages all the way until the 1800s. On the other hand, China’s government and society were restructured after new leaders took over. From a monarch to total communism, China’s society had a multitude of new ideas and policies they had to adapt to.

Shanghai Girls is written in the atmosphere of 1937 Shanghai, ‘the Paris of Asia’ . Where the Chinese were influenced by the westernization. The developing Shanghai features the rapidly growing influence of the west over traditional Chinese beliefs.

The port of Shanghai spanning over 1,000 years, was where the Ming’s naval expeditions were launched and was place of hectic trading, where fortunes were made and lost. My parents are both civil engineers and my childhood was spent on this unique river and Deepwater port, witnessing the harbour sweep into a grandiose showpiece of a booming economy. I watched basic structures integrated piece by piece and eventually form spectacular architectures.

As the empire becomes stabilized, Ming dynasty reached a big advance in expression in art. In the book Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting from the Forbidden City, it is said that “The reigns of the Hongwu, Yongle and Xuande emperors were relatively strong and well-organized, supported by a strong agricultural base in the south below the Yangtze river, and by a particularly large and efficient merchant fleet (Howard 22).” and during that time “…great advances in

When I was 10 years old, my mom and I went to Shanghai for a month and a half. Shanghai was very entertaining, it was very different from America in some ways, yet it also was in some ways very similar to America. Surprisingly, the most popular restaurant in Shanghai is actually KFC. The most popular part of Shanghai is on the other side of the river from all the buildings, known as “The Bund”. The view from the riverside was an amazing view, so everybody went there to see the skyline and take pictures. The metro station to go to the riverside was about 3 blocks away from the real riverside, so you had to walk through the main marketplace. Since this area was the most tourists visited the place, there were a lot of businesses and stores there.

As one of the ancient civilization, the Chinese history could trace back to five millennium years ago. Along with the continuous development of the Chinese society, the artistic and cultural achievements also simultaneously progressed. Bowser Museum exhibits a Chinese collection that portrays the evolution of Chinese art and culture. From the dawn of Chinese civilization Neolithic period to the last imperial Qing dynasty before the Republic of China. Throughout the progress, the Chinese art is continuously adapting to the changing society and combining its cultures to produce various art forms. In this exhibition, each symbol in each artwork is associated with special meaning behind and to reflect some phenomenon of personality or the

“Dear Scott, you are about to embark on the ride of your life, so, buckle up dude,” writes author Scott Kronick in the opening line of a letter his younger self. “…When you have the chance to move to China in 1995, jump at this. It will be an inflection point in your life you will not forget.” Kronick, CEO of Ogilvy Public Relations, Asia Pacific, the leading public relations consultancy in Asia, has lived in China for nearly two decades, during which he’s experienced tremendous social, economic and personal change. The Lighter Side of China, while diminutive in weight, is more than an autobiography or travelogue, it’s Kronick’s professionally refined “CliffsNotes” on how to survive 20 years as a foreigner in modern China. They key to it all, to happiness in business and at home, Kronick explains, is to continuously “seek to understand.”

Recently, I read Postcards From Tomorrow Square by James Fallows. This book addresses the Universals of Culture by exploring different misconceptions about China and proving them wrong. From exploring the television programming to entrepreneurial endeavors, Fallows tries to paint a new picture of China. In America, we have many preconceived notions of what China and its people are like, but if you explore the country, you’ll see how unique and complex China really is. Three examples of this include: China’s recent industrial boom, China’s game shows, and China’s gambling industry. These each highlight some of the most prominent Universals of Culture in China.

When I am happy, I know the best restaurant in the city to celebrate. When I am bored, I know my friends are somewhere in the city I can hang out with. When I am tired, I know my home is in the city that welcomes me anytime. Beijing gives me a sense of safety and belonging. Although I do not know its dialect, the city quietly collects all my stories: when now I pass by Zhongguancun Street where my elementary school locates, I can still see the clock tower in front of our classroom building which I used to believe was the slowest clock in the world; when now I go to the Haidian Theatre where I always went with my high school friends during school breaks, I can still smell the caramel popcorn which I used to believe was the best popcorn in the world; when now in the evening I walk in Zizhuyuan Park where our family always took a walk after dinner, I can still see my parents’ figures which I used to believe, believe and will always believe to be the most trusted ones in the world …I am affiliated with the object, the smell, the people, and the city. This is the place where I will naturally miss and call my home when I travel to other places. Here, Beijing, is where I am

History’s glory and trauma, and how they are shaping today’s China in its pursuit for the Chinese Dream

The art during the Qing dynasty was very different from those throughout China. During the Qing Dynasty art was coveted over greatly. Many people respected art during this Time. There were many scholars, poets, painters, and potters during this time that took their work very seriously. Painters during this time were either individualist or traditionalist. They focused in wars and what was going on in the real world, other than what people wanted to see. The Manchus, who had already adopted many Chinese practices before ruling as the Qing, continued to show respect for Chinese art that was based on the study of old styles and masters. Literati painting in the Qing thus became orthodox and stereotyped, especially as represented by the prestigious “Four Wangs” of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth

Chinese culture and art flourished in many ways during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Scholar-painters (Southern School), also known as the literati, thrived in many artistic aspects during this period, largely changing the creative world of imperial China. The medium of choice for these artists was a brush, monochromatic ink, and various scrolls. The intentions of the literati painters weren’t to illustrate environments realistically; instead they were more focused on producing art in ways to express their opinions and views. Some artwork was formed near nonrepresentational.

China is a modern super-power, and looking a little deeper, there is a wealth of cultural heritage just waiting to be unearthed. A history often grisly but always remarkable, China is a realm that seems to have been forever in a state of extremes, somewhere between war and peace, wealth and poverty, materialism and spirituality.

In China today, slogans on public hygiene are everywhere, restaurants, subways, road sides, to name just a few. Literally, it is one of the priorities of the Chinese government to promote public hygiene and to encourage people to behave civilized in public. Yet here comes the question: why is personal hygiene associated with public in China, and why does it have to do with being civilized? Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity provides perceptive answers to these questions. It traces the history of the word weisheng, hygiene in Chinese, through the late-Qing Tianjin, its Republican period, Japanese occupation, and until the first few years of New China. Rogaski argues that the changing meaning of weisheng in Tianjin provides a window to China’s conception of modernity and its emphasis of modernization projects; it is the implication of hygienic modernity in weisheng that marks China’s deficiency, internalized by the intellectuals in the pre-war era and used against imperialism after the establishment of the PRC. In other words, weisheng itself embodies China’s complex modern history represented in the semi-colonial condition of Tianjin as a treaty port. This paper aims to discuss China’s semicoloniality through Rogaski’s concept of hygienic modernity, or weisheng and compare it with the previous week’s reading, i.e. Rhoads Murphey’s and Bryna Goodman’s notions of Chinese

This assumption influences the distaste for or fascination with Shanghai’s culture formed in the national and global frameworks throughout modern Chinese narrative. Shanghai can excel by displaying that it is neither a reduced, twisted and reified adaptation of the Chinese or of the modern, nor a boggy, undifferentiated blend of the two. Alternatively, according to Xudong, the presence of Shanghai urban culture situates in a reterritorialization and deterritorialization, which pursues a various route of flight and creates a varying plane of consistency. In other words, “the modernity and Chineseness of Shanghai can be understood only as something more modern than the modern and more Chinese than the Chinese” (Xudong