Chinese Working-Class Lives: Getting By in Taiwan

Hill Gates

Published by Cornell University Press 1988

Chinese Working-Class Lives

Getting By in Taiwan

Hill Gates
Funded by: National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program

In the series The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501719912

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Hill Gates has retired as a lecturer in anthropology at Stanford University. She is the author of China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism and Looking for Chengdu: A Woman's Adventures in China, both from Cornell University Press.

Reviews

Janet W. Salaff:

Gates’s life-history method gains strength as it places the individual in concentric circles, overlapping groups, networks, and fragments of relationship to society. The reader learns about the structure of society from the bottom up, as it is seen and experienced by its participants. This is rich material drawn from the experiences of ordinary people, and its strength is to be found in both its rarity and its reality.

Mark C. Thelin:

Words and phrases that best describe this book are ‘absorbing,’ ‘insightful,’ ‘straightforward,’ and ‘it makes you wish you had done it yourself.’ Through effectively telling nine life histories of mostly middle-aged people, Hill Gates gives the reader a comprehensive picture of working-class life on Taiwan in the 1980s. Gates has sought to present a range of types in some depth—thus portraying very clearly the life and cultures of this class on this island.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Preface Open Access Download PDF	vii
A Note on Chinese Romanizations Open Access Download PDF	xi
[1] Introduction Open Access Download PDF	1
[2] Fieldwork in Taiwan: Becoming a Little Chinese Open Access Download PDF	5
[3] An Island of Immigrants Open Access Download PDF	26
[4] The Changing Political Economy under the Nationalists Open Access Download PDF	50
[5] Working for a Living Open Access Download PDF	68
[6] Home and Family Open Access Download PDF	103
[7] Women and Men, Old and Young Open Access Download PDF	145
[8] Folk Religions, Old and New Open Access Download PDF	175
[9] Education, the Great Escape Open Access Download PDF	205
[10] Conclusions Open Access Download PDF	226
Source Materials on Taiwan Open Access Download PDF	231
References Open Access Download PDF	243
Index Open Access Download PDF	251

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 270
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 1
- Other: 1 map
Keywords: Anthropology

eBook

Published: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 9781501719912