Member’s Publication: Taru Salmenkari
Salmenkari, T. 2025, Global Ideas, Local Adaptations: Chinese Activism and the Will to Make Civil Society, Edward Elgar.
Exploring the boundaries, fringes, and inner workings of civil society, Taru Salmenkari investigates local forms of political agency in China in light of the globalization of political values, practices, and institutions. She provides a theoretical framework for globalization, examining new forms of governance emerging with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and how these have reconfigured social power in China.
This topical book outlines how civil society has been promoted globally since the 1980s, as NGOs advance development cooperation, democratization, and neoliberal third-sector service production. Salmenkari studies the outcomes of these processes in China, where civil society promotion met strong localizing forces rising from NGO activists” own values, governmental regulation, and local society. Evaluating various forms of Chinese self-organizing, she discusses the social omissions of Chinese environmental NGO agendas, Confucian ties in global translations, gay self-organizing, and the idea and practice of Minjian.… Read more ⤻
« Dans la pensée chinoise, la musique est une partie du monde, sinon le monde lui-même en ses manifestations sonores. Œuvre humaine, elle constitue l’essence de la culture, au même titre que l’écriture ou la peinture, mais elle est avant cela l’expression de la nature, voire du 道 dao qui génère les êtres et leur confère leurs normes de fonctionnement cyclique » (préface de Rémi Mathieu). L’ouvrage est ainsi une approche par la voie musicale d’un univers qui s’avère être, à considérer les fondements esthétiques chinois, un véritable entrelacs des arts. Il est aussi fondé sur le constat que la poésie chinoise – à la fois un langage artistique et un langage sur l’art – en révèle des aspects essentiels à une compréhension fine de la pensée musicale et du geste artistique. Dès lors, un tiers de poèmes, un tiers d’illustrations et un tiers de texte théorique et technique, trame tissée d’explicitations directes et brodée d’�!… 
Volume 52, edited by Thomas Fröhlich and Brigit Knüsel Adamec, will be a special volume devoted to Chinese Reflections on the Exile Experience after 1949. China’s 20th century was a century marked by exile. The multifarious experience of exile is arguably one of the salient features of a distinction, as historical periods, between the 19th and 20th century in China.
“Passion, Love, and Qing examines the vitality of Peony Pavilion, the most famous drama in Ming China (1368-1644), through four essays (by Isabella Falaschi, Paolo Santangelo, Tian Yuan Tan, and Rossella Ferrari) and an extensive Glossary of specific terms and expressions related to the representation of emotions and states of mind. It explores the evolution and permanence of the universal message about passion or emotions contained in the language of the play. Written in the late Ming, Peony Pavilion embodies the new trends in the ‘cult of passions’ and new sensibility of the times. It is also a rich intertext of love that both inherits the legacy of earlier literary traditions and influences later amatory literature and theatrical performances.”
