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"The demise of state-owned enterprises, the transformation of collectives into shareholding cooperatives, and the creation of investment opportunities through stock markets indicate China’s movement from a socialist, state-controlled economy toward a socialist market economy. Yet, contrary to high expectations that China’s new enterprises will become like corporations in capitalist countries, management often remains under the control of the onetime bureaucrats who ran the socialist enterprises. The concepts, definitions, and interpretations of property rights, corporate structures, and business practices in contemporary China have historical, institutional, and cultural roots. In tracing the development under founder Zhang Jian (1853–1926) and his successors of the Dasheng Cotton Mill in Nantong into a business group encompassing, among other concerns, cotton, flour, and oil mills, land development companies, and shipping firms, the author documents the growth of regional enterprises as local business empires from the 1890s until the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949. She focuses on the legal and managerial evolution of limited-liability firms in China, particularly issues of control and accountability; the introduction and management of industrial work in the countryside; and the integration and interdependency of local, national, and international markets in Republican China."

As a vehicle to convey both the history of modern China and the complex forces still driving the nation’s economic success, rail has no equal. Railroads and the Transformation of China is the first comprehensive history, in any language, of railroad operation from the last decades of the Qing Empire to the present. China’s first fractured lines were built under semicolonial conditions by competing foreign investors. The national system that began taking shape in the 1910s suffered all the ills of the country at large: warlordism and Japanese invasion, Chinese partisan sabotage, the Great Leap Forward when lines suffered in the “battle for steel,” and the Cultural Revolution, during which Red Guards were granted free passage to “make revolution” across the country, nearly collapsing the system. Elisabeth Köll’s expansive study shows how railroads survived the rupture of the 1949 Communist revolution and became an enduring model of Chinese infrastructure expansion. The railroads persisted because they were exemplary bureaucratic institutions. Through detailed archival research and interviews, Köll builds case studies illuminating the strength of rail administration. Pragmatic management, combining central authority and local autonomy, sustained rail organizations amid shifting political and economic priorities. As Köll shows, rail provided a blueprint for the past forty years of ambitious, semipublic business development and remains an essential component of the PRC’s politically charged, technocratic economic model for China’s future.

Kulturkirche - unter diesem Label firmieren verschiedenste Formate, von der anspruchsvollen Kulturarbeit einer Ortsgemeinde über urbane Profilkirchen bis zum entwidmeten Sakralgebäude in öffentlicher Trägerschaft. Sie alle verbindet jedoch der Anspruch, Theologie und religiöse Praxis mit zeitgenössischer Kunst zusammenzubringen. Zugleich bilden Kulturkirchen Kontaktflächen für die städtische und regionale Öffentlichkeit. Der Band zeigt, wie Kulturkirchen die Zusammenarbeit mit anderen kulturellen Akteuren und Institutionen fördern und das kulturpolitische Profil kirchlicher Kulturarbeit prägen. Dies verbindet sich mit dringlichen kirchentheoretischen Fragen, z.B. nach neuen Sozialformen, Milieus und dem Verhältnis von Kulturkirchen und klassischer Gemeindearbeit. Weitere Beiträge nehmen in den Blick, wie der Dialog zwischen zeitgenössischer Theologie, Liturgie und künstlerischem Ausdruck heute produktiv geführt werden kann.