From Hutong to Hostels: Cultural Tourism and the Process of Commodification in Beijing

As Beijing develops into a global city, high-rise banking and apartment buildings appear almost daily, while historical hutong neighborhoods have been destroyed to accommodate this development. At the same time, hutong tourism has become popular with Chinese and foreign tourists. While some have advocated tourism in the hutong as a strategy to ensure preservation and economic development, others argue that attention from tourists will inevitably change the lives of hutong residents. As the hutong are reconstructed through tourism, new cultural forms are produced under the ideal of "authenticity." These forms both reflect existing cultural values and produce new cultural possibilities. This paper analyzes the development of cultural tourism in the hutong based on ethnographic observations, secondary sources, and email interviews with hutong tourism business owners. My argument does not focus on whether the commodification of the hutong is inherently good or bad, but rather on the production and uses of authenticity in the hutong as well as interpretations of that ideal by different people at different times. I suggest that the debates over hutong tourism development in the capital illuminate the lack of consensus in Chinese discourse about what modern China is and ought to be

FROM HUTONG TO HOSTELS: CULTURAL TOURISM AND THE PROCESS OF COMMODIFICATION IN BEIJING FROM HUTONG TO HOSTELS: CULTURAL TOURISM AND THE PROCESS OF COMMODIFICATION IN BEIJING

iv As Beijing develops into a global city, high-rise banking and apartment buildings appear almost daily, while historical hutong neighborhoods have been destroyed to accommodate this development. At the same time, hutong tourism has become popular with Chinese and foreign tourists. While some have advocated tourism in the hutong as a strategy to ensure preservation and economic development, others argue that attention from tourists will inevitably change the lives of hutong residents. As the hutong are reconstructed through tourism, new cultural forms are produced under the ideal of "authenticity." These forms both reflect existing cultural values and produce new cultural possibilities. This paper analyzes the development of cultural tourism in the hutong based on ethnographic observations, secondary sources, and email interviews with hutong tourism business owners. My argument does not focus on whether the commodification of the hutong is inherently good or bad, but rather on the production and uses of authenticity in the hutong as well as interpretations of that ideal by different people at different times. I suggest that the debates over hutong tourism development in the capital illuminate the lack of consensus in Chinese discourse about what modern China is and ought to be

From the Soil to the People: The Rural Question in Chinese Literature 1940-2010

From the Soil, to the People shows how representations of rural society and the rural environment in Chinese literature from the 1940s to the present illuminate changing attitudes towards community, land, and modern life. It spans the explicitly political and state-regulated literature of the 1950s-1970s, literature produced under the relaxed guidelines of the 1980s, and literature written amid the increased commercialization of the 1990s and early 2000s. Conventional scholarship often separates these periods to examine them in isolation or focuses on pre- and post-socialist literature while ignoring the socialist period in between. In contrast, From the Soil, to the People uses “the rural question” to bring these disparate periods together, examining a persistent sociopolitical challenge through vastly different literary contexts.From the Soil, To the People examines the relationship between formal shifts in the literary portrayal of rural society with changes in the social, economic, and political conditions for both rural society and literary production. Close readings of 2-3 canonical novels from each era serve as vantage points, revealing signs of shifting ideologies of the rural that allow a longer timeline to emerge. Examining traditional literary categories including characterization and description across an 80-year period of monumental change, From the Soil, To the People argues that the relationship between literary production and historical change was not simply a matter of the representation of reality or a blueprint for an ideal society. From the Soil, To the People breaks down monolithic, timeless approaches to thinking about rural life through its historicization of particular moments in literary production across place and time in an environment of constant, yet not linear, change. Tracing the fluctuations of rural ideologies across these changes shows moments of both forward movement and circular return. Questioning linear narratives of rural modernity and progress that persist in the present day, From the Soil, To the People opens up space to imagine new forms for “modern” life amid increasing skepticism that urban modernization is the only future for the human species

Towards Teachers Quickly Creating Tutoring Systems

Intelligent Tutoring Systems have historically been shown to be an effective means of educating an audience. While there is great benefit from such systems they are generally very costly to build and maintain. It has been estimated that 200 hours of time is required to produce one hour of Intelligent Tutoring System content. The Office of Navel Research has funding this thesis because they are interested in reducing the cost of construction for Intelligent Tutoring Systems. In order for Intelligent Tutoring Systems to be widely accepted and used in the classroom environment there needs to be a toolset that allows for even the most novice user to maintain and grow the system with minimal cost. The goal of this thesis is to create such a toolset targeted towards the Assistments Project. One of the goals of the Assistments Project is to provide a means for teachers to receive meaningful data from the system that they can take to the classroom environment thus enabling a comprehensive learning solution. The effectiveness of the toolset was measured by its ability to reduce the overall time taken to package and distribute content in an Intelligent Tutoring System by providing the tools and allowing the completion of the tasks to be at a reasonable speed

Nuclear Chemistry

389 hlm. : il. ; 24 cm