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Dissecting modernity : anatomy and power in the language of science in China

Dead Bodies and Forensic Science: Cultures of Expertise in China, 1800-1949

The smiling professions: Salesmanship and promotional culture in Australia and China 1920-1939

Those working within the sub-field of the modern history of childhood have rarely taken the dead child as their starting point. However, in a secularising, post-Enlightenment world, elites pursuing “progress” contemporaneously, and very publicly, reinterpreted death in relation to redefinitions of childhood as evidence of the divine. Dead children featured prominently within public modern mourning practices until, late in the nineteenth century scientific explorations of child death drove societies to occlude the presence of dead children. As infant mortality rates fell, perceptions of children as a dangerous, unstable presence, and a threat to the nation grew. New spaces emerged to receive and conceal dead children. New literary and visual cultures recast living children’s relationship with death. And in the early twentieth century accidental deaths in commercial space, in reformatories, and within the home inspired powerful debates over the future of childhood and society. This article surveys recent literature, raises key themes, and introduces the articles featured in this special issue on the relatively underresearched theme of child death.

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"Closer to God": Child Death in Historical Perspective

The burial of war dead was a key element of displacement and community formation during wartime and postwar China and Taiwan, 1937–1955. Reckoning with the physical burial and spiritual pacification of civilian as well as military dead posed practical and epistemological problems for the tens of millions forced to migrate amid shifting political and military boundaries. Various populations of living and dead refugees became increasingly politicized on the national and international levels, affecting local rituals and family burials. The accumulation of unidentified or lost bodies raised the stakes for the incorporation of the known dead into local, translocal, or national communities. The moral imperative of families and lineages to reconstitute themselves in the aftermath of war was made concrete via the extensive networks of locally-identified charitable organizations who worked to transport coffins back “home” from China's interior. The Nationalist government, meanwhile, prioritized symbolic control over military heroes in ways that ignored or eschewed burial and family ritual. The KMT and those who fled with them to Taiwan in 1949 were then cut off from their national as well as family graves, and struggled to find ritual and practical methods of overcoming or temporarily ameliorating political boundaries, geographic distance, and the passage of time.

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Burying, repatriating, and leaving the dead in wartime and postwar china and taiwan, 1937–1955*

This paper is a study of death in Republican Shanghai with a focus on the issue of exposed corpses and abandoned coffins. Throughout the republican period and into the early years of the PRC, exposed corpses were collected daily in the streets of the city. A huge proportion of them were children. Shanghai was like a gigantic funnel that swallowed up lives by the hundreds or thousands every year, even in times of peace. The first part of the paper attempts to assess the extent of this phenomenon and to examine its main causes, as well as the discourses it generated. There was a huge gap between the scale of this tragedy and its social “invisibility.” Taking care of the poor and destitute became a major feature of the work of the benevolent societies. In Shanghai, some associations eventually concentrated on collecting unclaimed bodies and establishing cemeteries where they could be buried after a proper ceremony. Finally, the outbreak of hostilities in 1937 in Shanghai magnified the problems to such an extent that the local authorities were compelled for the first time to get involved in the management of death and regulate the treatment and movement of the dead bodies.

Christian Henriot

Papers

'Invisible Deaths, Silent Deaths': 'Bodies Without Masters' in Republican Shanghai