'Made in China' has become a tag familiar to all Westerners, but China's shift to a market economy in the early 1980s released not only the industrial, but also the vast creative energies of China's citizens to produce a cultural renaissance unique in the contemporary world. In the past quarter-century, communist ideology has been in rapid retreat and the cultural resources of China's pre-socialist past have been rediscovered and combined with current influences from home and abroad to construct competing responses to China's ever-changing present.
The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture is the first reference book to digest this vast cultural output and make it accessible to the English-speaking world. The Encyclopedia contains nearly 1200 entries written by an international team of specialists, to enable readers to explore a range of diverse and fascinating cultural subjects from prisons to rock groups, underground Christian churches to TV talk shows and radio hotlines. Experimental artists with names such as 'Big-Tailed Elephants' and 'The North-Pole Group' nestle between the covers alongside entries on lotteries, gay cinema, political jokes, sex shops, theme parks, 'New Authoritarians' and 'Little Emperors'.
While the focus of the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture is on mainland China since 1980, it also includes longer, specially commissioned entries on various aspects of contemporary culture in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Most entries include full and up-to-date references for further reading, making the Encyclopedia an indispensable reference tool for all teachers and students of contemporary Chinese culture. It is also likely to be warmly embraced as an invaluable source of cultural context by tourists, journalists, business people and others who visit China.
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