Showing papers in "Twentieth-century China in 2022"

The Rise of Municipal Government in Early Twentieth-Century China: Local History, International Influence, and National Integration

Abstract: Abstract:Municipal government as an institutional form spread across China in the first decades of the twentieth century. Inspired by foreign models, the form embedded itself quickly into the domestic political order. As it came to be implemented in China, municipal government focused on policing and infrastructure. Municipal officials' promises of economic development and social discipline were attractive to local elites. New urban institutions opened avenues for ambitious younger men to build careers alongside established county and provincial administrations. Urban administration enjoyed cachet, being understood as an important priority worldwide. The creation of municipal governments facilitated the incorporation of new technologies, techniques, and training into the Chinese political order. Municipal government contributed to national integration by spreading common practices and building a new institutional framework that the Nationalist and Communist governments were able to knit together via new laws and personnel transfers in later decades.

Collaboration and State Making in China: Defining the Occupation State, 1937–1945

Abstract: Abstract:Recent works on collaboration during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) have contributed much to the field by focusing on the concrete functioning of institutions in occupied China. Yet, a more systematic definition of the process by which these institutions took shape is necessary in order to better understand how state making in occupied China relates to the longue durée of the Chinese state, on the one hand, and to Japan's imperial endeavor, on the other. This article aims to fill this gap by proposing a new definition of state making in occupied China and providing an overview that clarifies both the chronology of the occupation state and the roles of key actors within it. Ultimately, it makes the case for a reassessment of the occupation state as one of the competing political realms that contributed to shape the modern Chinese state.

The Patriarchy of Diaspora: Race Fantasy and Gender Blindness in Chen Da’s Studies of the Nanyang Chinese

Abstract: Abstract:This study critically appraises the earliest sociological investigations of Nanyang (South Seas) Chinese communities by the sociologist Chen Da (1892–1975). By exploring Chen’s corpus of work and highlighting systemic blind spots of race and gender, the study reveals the normative rather than empirical quality of his sociological elaboration of the huaqiao (overseas Chinese). Tracing the genesis of his research and his travels through Southeast Asia, it shows that, at each stage, Chen’s investigations, academic networks, connections he made with his local informants, and even his collaborations with his principal translator offered an understanding of the world beyond a patriarchal, patriotic Chinese diaspora that he declined to fully explore. The paper thus offers an intimate window into the historically contingent conceptual work that went into constructing the Chinese “diaspora,” and it highlights the need to exercise caution in making ahistorical use of social science studies of overseas Chinese.

Lange Schatten der Kulturrevolution: Eine transgenerationale Sicht auf Politik und Emotion in der Volksrepublik China by Sascha Klotzbücher (review)

Abstract: Reviewed by: Lange Schatten der Kulturrevolution: Eine transgenerationale Sicht auf Politik und Emotion in der Volksrepublik China by Sascha Klotzbücher Felix Wemheuer Sascha Klotzbücher. Lange Schatten der Kulturrevolution: Eine transgenerationale Sicht auf Politik und Emotion in der Volksrepublik China. Psyche und Gesellschaft Series. Giessen, Germany: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2019. 543 pp. Softcover (€59.90). Many books have been published on the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1977). It is not Sascha Klotzbücher’s intention to add another new national or local political history. His book focuses on Maoism as the “lived experience” of individuals. His methodological approach is inspired by concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis and aims to understand the role of emotions in people’s self-perceptions of their roles during the Cultural Revolution. In the context of Western China scholars and the Chinese Red Guard generation, the author also analyses how memories of engagements with Maoism are transferred to the next generation. The book uses a rich variety of sources such as diaries, memoirs, and transgenerational oral-history interviews. Thankfully, Klotzbücher provides long excerpts from the diaries and interviews in Chinese, so that the educated reader is able to comprehend his interpretation. In the first part of the book (chapters 1 and 2), Klotzbücher reflects on roles and self-perceptions of China scholars from the West. He argues that, in beginning our studies, many scholars are attracted to China as a projection surface for their own fantasies about the country as an alternative to “Western civilization.” Moreover, as a result of personal contacts, friendship, love, marriage, or cooperation with Chinese colleagues in field studies, we unavoidably become emotionally involved with the object of our research. However, our professional self-perception as academics does not allow us to acknowledge this lack of emotional distance. Hence, this issue becomes taboo. Klotzbücher takes as an example the well-known sinologist Rudolf Wagner (1941–2019) of Heidelberg University (Germany), where the author received an MA degree. According to him, Wagner contributed in the 1970s, before becoming professor, to establishing in Germany a positive view of Maoism as a modern form of chinoiserie. As editor of his academic journal, Befreiung (Liberation), Wagner defended the Khmer Rouge as late as 1978 and labeled accusations of war crimes “CIA propaganda.” However, Klotzbücher says Wagner would never have been able to reflect on this emotional involvement with the Maoist movement. Wagner’s past would have been a taboo topic at his institute in Heidelberg, so much so that even second-generation scholars like the author himself would not challenge Wagner’s background (until writing this book). Klotzbücher argues that we need to take emotional involvements with China seriously and incorporate critical reflection about it into our research designs. To reflect on his own submission to taboos, the author selected Wagner for a case study, otherwise he could have chosen one of the many other Western professors who were Maoists in the 1970s. Klotzbücher also warns us not to follow in the “footsteps of the communist party” by limiting our research agenda according to official taboos in China. Our fear of putting our Chinese colleagues or relatives in danger might also influence and frame our field studies. Hence, we should always reflect on our emotions instead of pretending to be only rational professionals. In the book’s second part (chapters 3–6), Klotzbücher analyzes published diaries and memoirs from members of the Red Guard generation who participated in the Cultural Revolution as teenagers and young adults. In China, this generation is called the “old three classes” (lao sanjie 老三届), referring to 1966, 1967, and 1968 graduates of [End Page E-33] urban junior and senior high schools. Some Red Guards saw violence against “enemies” as bystanders, while others were even involved in killings. The author wants to understand how these individuals coped with these experiences. One way to suppress feelings of guilt would have been to internalize the ideological Maoist dichotomy of friends and enemies. However, the Maoist ideal of a selfless and pure Communist always would have been larger than life and never could have been attained by most people. Therefore, some Red Guards felt shame and inferiority...

War, Disunity, and State Building In China, 1912–1949

Abstract: Abstract:Xavier Paulès and David Serfass—in their introduction to this special issue—call for greater recognition of the many agents involved in multicentered state-building processes during China's Republican era (1912–1949). This article addresses their intriguing idea by linking it to the theoretical paradigm associated with Charles Tilly (1929–2008), in which states are formed and strengthened through war. The article briefly reviews how Tilly's paradigm has figured in research on China's early twentieth-century era of conflict among regional strongmen and struggle against Japanese invasions. Recounting trends construed as unifying processes, it then reconsiders the idea that the unity of the People's Republic of China (PRC) grew out of regional and central state-building efforts of the Republican period. With an eye to the potential for further analytical exploration of conflicts born of political disunity in China, the article concludes by proposing greater precision in the conceptualization of centralization and continuity in Chinese state-building processes.

A Critical Dimension of State Building: Taxation in Nationalist China, 1928–1949

Abstract: Abstract:The Republic of China on the mainland (1912–1949) was hardly a unified nationstate. During times of division, however, China's state building continued, and a case in point is the increasing capacity of the Guomindang (GMD) state to impose and collect new taxes under difficult circumstances. This paper identifies three themes that emerge in some recent studies on the taxation initiatives taken by the GMD state, in the context of its differentiation from and competition with other subnational power-holders. International standing and state legitimacy (and capacity), ideological justification for taxation and institutional growth in taxation, and the negotiations and compromises between the state and society over taxes were some of the crucial elements in the unfolding of state building under the GMD state.

Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China by Y. Yvon Wang (review)

Abstract: Reviewed by: Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China by Y. Yvon Wang Leon Antonio Rocha Y. Yvon Wang. Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. 289 pp. Hardcover ($45.00) or e-book. Scholarship on the history of sexuality in China has often focused on the radical shifts that took place in the early twentieth century, when Chinese intellectuals appropriated foreign ideas such as sexology, eugenics, and psychoanalysis for their nation-building projects. While undoubtedly there had been discontinuities in the way that gender, body, and selfhood were conceptualized in China, historical research animated by the scientia sexualis/ars erotica dichotomy of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, vol. 1—whereby a Western scientia sexualis basically supplanted Chinese ars erotica—could fall into the trap of rehearsing an obsolete "Western impact, Chinese response" historiography (13–15).1 Y. Yvon Wang's ambitious and innovative study uses pornography and "licentious" (淫 yin) representations as a cultural tracer to tease out both the continuities and discontinuities in the history of sexuality in China from the late imperial period to the present. Wang's primary sources include Beijing Police Force archives, Republican pictorials, newspaper advertisements, folk song collections, "spring pictures" (春宮圖 chungong tu), and cigarette wrappers, among many others. The work forensically uncovers the lives of obscure but entrepreneurial bookstall (書攤 shutan) keepers in urban China, as well as critically reevaluating more familiar figures such as The Plum in the Golden Vase (金瓶梅Jinpingmei) commentator Wenlong (文龍 fl. 1870–86), Double Plum Sun and Shadow Anthology (雙梅景闇叢書 Shuangmei jing'an congshu) compiler Ye Dehui (葉德輝 1864–1927), painter and maverick pioneer of nude models Liu Haisu (劉海粟 1896–1994), and Sex Histories (性史 Xingshi) author Zhang Jingsheng (張競生 1888–1970). At the heart of Wang's monograph are three analytical frameworks: the "regime of licentiousness" (or "yin ideology"); the "early modern challenge to yin"; and the "global modern pornographic turn" (16–17). The regime of licentiousness refers to "notions of sexual propriety and power as well as the canon of erotic tropes and themes that had coalesced by the late Ming" (16), whereby power and legitimacy of desire were mutually constituted and sexual materials were circulated in restrictive elite circles. The expansion of woodblock printing and the proliferation of erotic texts and images presented an early modern challenge to this yin ideology. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, sexual representations as commodities and objects of regulation had converged globally, and ordinary folk's access to nude photographs, tracts on sexual science, and other "titillating" products threatened to undermine power relations and social hierarchies. Even progressive-minded Chinese thinkers who championed sexual emancipation and cultural democratization quickly closed ranks to reinscribe hierarchies of authority—thereby "reinventing licentiousness" (17). Moreover, Wang formulates the useful concept of "implied masturbators"—imagined readers/"hooligans" (流氓 liumang) who might look at a text or image in the "wrong" way, looming specters that legitimize the labeling, censorship, and removal of "pornographic" things (18–19). Using debates surrounding Jinpingmei as a starting point, chapter 1 explores the connections between the introduction of media technologies and the spread of sexual [End Page E-13] representations. By the Qing dynasty, two genres exemplified this movement: drum song (鼓曲 guqu) booklets and woodblock prints "were woven into everyday life in Beijing" and "enjoyed by members of the imperial court and ordinary working people alike" (39). However, this did not upend the "hierarchical underpinnings of licentiousness" (44), and the Qing government deployed a number of legal and cultural strategies to contain "wicked words" (邪言 xieyan) and maintain sociopolitical order (45–53). Chapters 2 and 3 venture into the Republican period, when erotic representations imported from Europe or made domestically using state-of-the-art technologies appeared in the Chinese market (61). New genres such as nude photographs and medicoscientific manuals on "marital hygiene" (婚姻衛生 hunyin weisheng) became immensely popular, but traditional forms like erotic fiction, lyric books, and "spring pictures" remained influential: "familiar visual conventions [were] 'translated' into new formats," and it was this "process of incorporation that helped new ideas about sex take root" (87–88). Wang identifies five such ideological changes surrounding sex and sexual representation: first, growing feminist discourse accompanied the entrance of women into the public...

Editorial

Abstract: Editorial del número 16

Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era by Jie Li (review)

Abstract: Reviewed by: Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era by Jie Li Di Luo Jie Li. Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era. Sinotheory Series. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 367 pp. Hardcover ($114.95), softcover ($31.95), or e-book. Inspired by well-known author Ba Jin's idea of a memorial museum for learning about the causes and consequences of mass violence, Jie Li's new book curates exhibits of textual archives, audiovisual records, and material remains from the Mao era (1949–1976). It focuses on traumatic periods, spanning the Anti-Rightist campaign (1957) that criminalized intellectuals for their dissident voices, the Great Leap Forward (1959–1961) that induced famine claiming millions of rural lives, and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) that threw the country into turmoil. Analyzing the traces of the past as "externalized" memories (7), this book highlights the technological, media, and historical conditions of memory inscription, preservation, and transmission. All the traces this book examines have been brought to public awareness during the twenty-first century via digital, cinematic, and museum remediation. Unveiling the processes of memory-making and resurrection, this book reveals the "palimpsest" of memory formation (3) featuring nonlinear diachronic interactions between the past, present, and future. Utopian Ruins presents multilayered, pluralistic interpretations and representations of the Mao era. It reminds the reader of the idealistic visions of prosperity, equality, and collectivity that had inspired mass participation in the Chinese Revolution as well as the violence and mass suffering underwriting this zealous pursuit. This study thus challenges both the official master narrative in China that plays down traumatic experiences and the Western master narrative that epitomizes the Maoist years as the so-called "dark ages" (17). It instead stresses the "interconnection between idealism and violence, victimhood and complicity" (20) and nuances the dichotomous debates—"elite trauma" vs. "grassroots nostalgia" (6)—in previous discussions about the multivalent memories of the Mao era. The interconnection between utopian ideals and human costs is first exhibited via government dossiers of two intellectuals, Lin Zhao (林昭 1932–1968) and Nie Gannu (聂绀弩 1903–1986). Both were revolutionaries and were later accused of counter-revolutionary crimes. Chapter 1 focuses on Lin Zhao's writings in prison. Being denied stationery, Lin inscribed memory using her own blood. Deprived of any public communication channels, Lin utilized the state surveillance apparatus for her memory storage and transmission. The materiality of her blood writing, its circumstance of production, and its heart-wrenching messages embodied both the suffering and idealism of this period. Whereas Lin died a martyr, Nie Gannu survived. Scrutinizing the production, forms, and genres of this celebrated poet's police file, chapter 2 sheds light on record-keeping practices under the "archival regime of memory" (70). During this period, the masses served—voluntarily or coerced by the sense of fear—as eyes and ears of state surveillance. At the same time, they were acutely aware of the potential for their own sayings and writings to be archived. In composing confession and self-criticism, people living in Maoist China struggled to claim authorship over their own thoughts, words, and actions against others' interpretations. Once a disciplinary force, the police files of Lin and Nie gained public afterlives via a 2004 hagiographic documentary and via 2009 cyber forums, respectively. Later generations' remediation has revived these past-made memories to evoke subversive remembrance against official historiography. [End Page E-9] Turning to images, chapters 3 and 4 advance our knowledge about the evolving visual conventions and audiovisual ecology that conditioned memory-making during and after the Mao era. Rather than simply dismissing propaganda photos as fake or deception, chapter 3 excavates their evidential values by unveiling the theoretical rationales behind their production. The author points out that since the 1930s Chinese photojournalists, in their patriotic endeavors to rectify Western photographers' imperialist gaze, had embraced both the "testimonial qualities" and "propagandistic function" of photography (110). But what photographs testify changed from "reality as it is" to "reality as it should be" during the Great Leap Forward (105). Narrowing the visual conventions to merely witness socialist miracles largely excluded famine and catastrophes from photographic documentation. The two documentaries by European filmmakers...

World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century by Xin Fan (review)

Abstract: The study of the politics and intellectual stakes of historical production has long been an important subfield in modern China studies. Xin Fan’s World History and National Identity in China is a valuable and unique addition to this literature. On the one hand, it shares the approach of recent studies in focusing not only on the politics of historical writing but also on the structural changes in the education system, the formation of academic disciplines, and the rise of modern print culture.1 On the other hand, this book spans the entire twentieth century and places its emphasis not on the historiography of China but on the development of world history (世界史 shijie shi) as an academic field from the late Qing to contemporary China. Furthermore, in using sources such as autobiographies, correspondence, and, importantly, archived personnel files and declassified secret reports, it sheds empathetic light on the “agency of non-Western world historians in writing history based on the lived experiences of some of the most significant Chinese world historians” (10). In the opening chapter, Fan locates the origins of modern Chinese world-historical writing in the late Qing, connecting long-standing Neo-Confucian and statecraft interests in compiling geographical knowledge of foreign realms to recent changes in the New Policies period under a reformed education system. This shift is evidenced in the work of Zhou Weihan (周维翰 1870–1910), a Changzhou scholar and physician, whose An Outline of Western History (西史綱目 Xishi gangmu), published in 1901 through the translation-oriented Shanghai press Jingshi wenshe (經世文社), represented a new temporally focused approach to world history. Instead of idealizing past epochs such as the Three Dynasties period like many other late Qing intellectuals, Zhou applied universal categories to his comparative analysis of ancient European and Chinese societies, while he held onto Confucian notions such as human nature (性 xing) in an “attempt to embrace the belief in a common humanity in overcoming the differences between the East and West” (48). For Fan, Zhou’s seemingly cosmopolitan approach would serve as both a standard and a challenge for later generations of Chinese scholars whose study of world history proceeded under vastly different professional and political circumstances. Professionalization, print capitalism, and the shifting priorities of Republican and wartime China serve as the context of chapter 2. Here, Fan focuses on Western-educated “returned students” who became university professors and practicing world historians. Although Chen Hengzhe (陳衡哲 1893–1976), who was notably the only renowned woman

Top Secrets Revealed: The Political Ambitions of China's Last Emperor, 1933–1937

Abstract: Using the documentation of secret meetings recorded by Hayashide Kenjirō, "Genpi kaiken roku," this article analyzes the political ambitions of the last emperor of China, Puyi. The image of a puppet clings to Puyi, the leader of Manchukuo, as does the opinion that he planned to utilize the Japanese to revive the Qing dynasty. I challenge these notions. This article deems Puyi a more ambitious and autonomous individual who primarily identified with Japan's imperial projects in China Proper. Chronologically analyzing Puyi's conversations with the Kantō Army's four supreme commanders between 1933 and 1937, I argue that Puyi's desire for autonomous power and a lack of good information from the outside world motivated his support of Japan's expansion in China and prompted him to identify Manchukuo's interests with Japan's. Puyi frequently influenced Manchukuo's policies, confirming that his political role was more prominent than many have imagined.

Editorial

Abstract: Editorial Margherita Zanasi Xavier Paulès and David Serfass are the guest editors of this January 2022 special issue devoted to challenging the pervasive view that, in the Republican period, political fragmentation posed an obstacle to modernization and state building. In fact, they argue, political disunity did not hinder state building, as local power-holders often pursued parallel reform trajectories, thus contributing to, and often stimulating, the wider state-building effort at the national level. This issue is organized as a roundtable, collecting short conceptual interventions in order to allow for the inclusion of multiple perspectives. Its main objectives are to renew our understanding of "the regional/national tensions inherent in a huge state"—as an anonymous reviewer aptly phrased it—and go beyond the restrictive label of "warlordism." Even if recent studies have cast new light on individual local power-holders, revealing the inadequacy of simply identifying them with regional militarism, this term still holds negative connotations and contributes to flattening the complexity of this important period in Chinese history. The roundtable includes the guest editors' introduction and seven interventions. Paulès and Emily M. Hill debate theoretical approaches for the study of this period of division. Paulès introduces four dynamics––the "cunning of reason," a common set of values, zeitgeist, and emulation––to explain how the local power-holders' interests in state building tended to converge, ultimately contributing to state building at the national level. Hill's intervention tests the validity of applying Charles Tilly's idea of war as a catalyst for state building to the "warlord" era. After discussing common historical narratives of this period, Hill concludes by advocating a "greater precision in the conceptualization of centralization and continuity in Chinese state-building processes." Kristin Stapleton, Pierre Fuller, Xiaoqun Xu, Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, and David Serfass focus on specific aspects of state building. Stapleton discusses the rise of municipal governments in the early decades of the twentieth century. She argues that, although they were the product of political fragmentation and the weakening of the central authority, they contributed to national integration because they tended to follow a common model and develop common administrative practices. Focusing on the Manchurian border, Fuller discusses state migration governance in the Beiyang period, arguing that the "deployment of migrants and refugees in developmental or strategic settlement programs" was an important aspect of successful state building. Xu discusses the success of the Nationalist government's taxation policies, an important aspect of state building. He argues that the Nationalists had three advantages vis-à-vis competitive subnational power-holders: [End Page 1] international recognition, an effective ideological justification, and the ability to negotiate with groups in society. In her intervention, Barnes explores the rapid expansion of health services during the Second Sino-Japanese War in both the Nationalist- and Communistcontrolled areas, emphasizing the role played in this important facet of state building by "atypical state agents," such as young women who served as volunteer and military nurses. The blueprints of these wartime efforts greatly contributed to the post-1949 expansion of healthcare. Finally, Serfass discusses state building in occupied China. He argues that the "occupation state"––characterized by a tension between Japanese imperial goals and those of the local administrative apparatus—was not an empty "anomaly" in the long-term process of modern state building and that such states actually contributed to "shap[ing] the modern Chinese state." This issue also includes a review essay by Rebecca E. Karl, "Subject to the State: Language and Data in Twentieth-Century China." In this essay, Karl introduces two recently published books—Arunabh Ghosh's Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China and Gina Anne Tam's Dialect and Nationalism in China: 1860–1960—that, she argues, taken together, highlight the changing nature of the Chinese state. Seven book reviews are available at Project MUSE (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/390). Finally, Xavier Paulès and David Serfass are the authors featured for this issue in our interview series, available at http://hstcconline.org/interviews-with-authors/. The interview includes links for free access to the roundtable's introduction, which they authored jointly, and to Paulès's article...

From Disillusioned Returned Youth to Party Propagandists: Rural Educated Youth and their Involvement in Rural Clubs in Southeast Shanxi, 1961–1965

Abstract: Abstract:In the period from 1961 to 1965, the Chinese Communist Party forced a vast number of rural educated youth to return to their countryside homes. Despite the party’s initial expectations, they had trouble readjusting to rural life. This merited political attention, as the scheme was associated with the party’s aim to cultivate revolutionary successors at the grassroots during the Socialist Education movement. The party therefore attempted to make use of the rural club, a popular cultural entity in the Chinese countryside, to transform the disillusioned rural educated youth into qualified grassroots propagandists. However, such transformation should not be understood as a mere top-down initiative. As this article demonstrates, rural educated youth enthusiastically participated in rural clubs. By leveraging their identity as simultaneously rural and educated, they proved themselves the ideal vehicle for ideological conditioning in the countryside, which enabled them to bargain with the party for upward mobility.

Cold War Mosque: Islam and Politics in Nationalist Taiwan

Abstract: Abstract:This article examines the Chinese Nationalists' engagement with postcolonial Muslim states in the early years of the Cold War. It argues that the Nationalists extended support to Chinese Muslims to continue the ethnonationalist policies developed on the Chinese mainland before their retreat to Taiwan. The inclusion of non-Han citizens in their foreign diplomatic outreach was instrumental in projecting their claim to be the rightful government of China. Through outreach and deliberate political gestures like the construction of the Taipei Grand Mosque and the publication of a translation of the Qur'an, the Nationalists intended to reestablish links with Muslim allies and gain the support of Muslims worldwide for their efforts to retake the mainland. Starting with the opening of the mosque, the article uses outreach by the Chinese Muslim Association to postcolonial Muslim states in the 1950s and 1960s to tell a unique story about the Cold War in East Asia. The focus on Muslims recasts these actors as individuals who played an important role in shaping a postwar East Asian future.

Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940 by Peter Zarrow (review)

Abstract: Reviewed by: Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940 by Peter Zarrow Matthew Galway Peter Zarrow. Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. 273 pp. Hardcover ($95.00), softcover ($32.95), or e-book. "Utopia is that which is in contradiction from reality." So averred Albert Camus in "Ni victimes, ni bourreaux" ("Neither Victims nor Executioners"), a series of essays written for the Resistance daily Combat.1 Years later, Fredric Jameson contended, as quoted by Abolishing Boundaries author Peter Zarrow (University of Connecticut) in his book's opening pages, that "we need to distinguish between the Utopian form and the Utopian wish: between the written text or genre and something like a Utopian impulse detectable in daily life and its practices by a specialized hermeneutic or interpretive method" (9).2 To track "utopian impulses" of four politically active, "well-known" Chinese intellectuals, social critics, and political activists—Kang Youwei, Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, and Hu Shi—Zarrow probes deeply into their political writings. Through his attentive textual exegesis, he provides an intellectual taxonomy of the emergence of modern Chinese utopian thinking, which for him links the most prominent ideological discourses of China in the twentieth century. His goal is to show how each intellectual's dialogic engagements with Confucianism, liberalism, and Marxism, propelled by "anger and terror and desire" (21), represented palimpsests onto which they drew their own respective politics and prognostications. In so doing, each developed distinct utopian courses to "regenerate" China. Abolishing Boundaries is not Zarrow's first effort to explore these intellectuals' utopian thinking. His contribution to Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context examined utopian thinking in New Culture movement–era writings by Chen and Hu.3 Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture explored utopian impulses in medieval and early modern Chinese thinkers.4 It also analyzed the link between reformist intellectual influences, including Kang Youwei's concept of Datong (大同 Great Unity), and Chinese intellectuals such as Tokyo group anarchist Liu Shipei (劉師培). However, Abolishing Boundaries breaks new ground with its expanded focus on the textual record of these Chinese intellectuals. Insightful is its analysis of how their utopian impulses factored into their written engagements with traveling ideas of a purportedly universal nature as a response to crises in Qing and Republican China. More than simply the quotidian desires of each intellectual, their "utopian impulses," help us understand those "textual elements" in political writings that represent "'fantasy mechanisms' that allow the theory [End Page E-16] in question to operate" (9). Each intellectual, in different ways, responded to the crises and "contradictions of the modern world" with "new moral visions" (184). In addition to the first chapter, which serves as the introduction, the book's four core chapters track utopian impulses and thinking in these four thinkers' writings. Chapter 2 is on Kang Youwei, the "foundational figure of modern Chinese utopianism," the only one of the four intellectuals to author "a full-scale utopia," and the very first to call for "abolishing boundaries" (10). Rather than a "comprehensive overview" of Kang's concept of Datong, which the author translates as "Great Commonwealth" (the archaic spelling of Commonwealth) to "captur[e] Kang's sense of a shared and egalitarian universal political order" (24), Zarrow highlights the theme of abolishing political boundaries in Datongshu (大同書 Book on the Great Unity) and connects it to the larger global utopianist moment. A "deeply universalist thinker" (29), Kang authored Datongshu between 1900 and 1902 and across travels through Asia, North America, and Europe. Datongshu thus encapsulates the historical moment of the global utopianism of the era in which he wrote it, and it represents less of a tableau vivant, and more of a "speaking picture," of utopia (24). If we understand Datong in three aspects of social arrangements, material civilization, and spiritual states, then Kang's cosmopolitan idiom and eclecticism are evident across all three. Kang's "utopian impulse" did not crystallize in isolation, but as "part of a global manifestation of the utopian impulse in the late nineteenth century" and had...

A Rich New Window Into The Social, Economic, And Military History Of Cold War China

Abstract: Abstract:A recently published collection of archival documents provides not just a trove of records on the history of one particular development campaign but also a rich resource for the study of political dynamics and socioeconomic patterns in Mao’s China and the early years of the Reform era. The collection, titled Xin zhongguo xiao sanxian jianshe dangan wenxian zhengli huibian (Compilation of archival documents about New China’s Small Third Front; Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu wenxian chubanshe, 2021), is the product of a research group headed by Xu Youwei. Documents spanning the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in the compilation’s eight volumes shed light on industrial policy, government-enterprise and civil-military relations, factional politics of the Cultural Revolution, welfare benefits, the urban-rural divide, cultural activities, the education sector, family life, gendered practices, and elements of everyday life, among other topics.

The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic by Bryna Goodman (review)

Abstract: In this compelling study, Bryna Goodman offers a rich analysis of 1920s China and its fragile democracy, with a focus on gender and the role of the “new woman,” economic speculation, as well as notions of morality and justice in an evolving legal culture. She presents these intersecting themes through a famous—though now largely forgotten—case of a female office clerk, Xi Shangzhen, who in 1922 was found hanging in the office building of her employer, a businessman and social reformer named Tang Jiezhi. Tang also served as the managing director of the Journal of Commerce. He was, moreover, active in the manically-inflated stock exchange bubble of the day. So was Xi Shangzhen, who, involved financially with Tang (and perhaps otherwise, as some of the day’s popular press suggested), had lost a great sum of money she had given Tang to invest. In exploring this case and its broader context, Goodman offers an invaluable contribution to the literature on the early Chinese republic as she masterfully weaves together an analysis of gender, legal, and economic perspectives. Goodman’s study begins with a chapter introducing Miss Xi’s suicide and its context. As Goodman eloquently details, Xi’s suicide and the subsequent trial of Tang shed important light on a period in the history of the Chinese republic after the fall of the Qing empire but before the rise of central party rule (19121927). During this early republican period we find a socially and politically active urban public that simultaneously lacked a strong state and legal institutions. Newspapers and journals played a central role. Framing this era as one of invention and “democratic improvisations,” Goodman elucidates the active and complex dynamics between print media (newspapers, journals, reader letters, etc.) and a heterogeneous crowd of urban readers through which public opinion gained shape and substance. Public associations were particularly significant as was the business culture to which many of these groups were linked. Goodman highlights this link and the ways in which members of the early republican business community were invested in the rhetoric(s) of national and economic citizenship. As Goodman demonstrates in fine analytic detail in Chapter 2, the public discourse surrounding Xi and the trial was inextricably linked to gender and sexuality. This public discussion also complicated simple or existent models,

Two Approaches to Writing the Cultural Revolution

Abstract: Abstract:Two approaches to writing the history of the Cultural Revolution have been adopted in two recent books. While Alessandro Russo interprets the Cultural Revolution as a reexamination of Communism happening only in the upper echelon, Dong Guoqiang and Andrew G. Walder document exclusively how the Cultural Revolution unfolded at the bottom level of Chinese society. This essay questions the applicability of Russo's approach and calls for a combination of the two approaches to achieve an enhanced understanding of China's Cultural Revolution.This essay discusses the following works. Dong Guoqiang and Andrew G. Walder. A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Rural China. Princeton Studies in Contemporary China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 225 pp. Hardcover ($95.00), softcover ($29.95) or e-book. | Alessandro Russo. Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 351 pp. Hardcover ($104.95), softcover ($28.95), or e-book.

Health and State Making: The Expansion of State Health Services During the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937–1945)

Abstract: Abstract:Wars frequently instigate the expansion of health services, a key component of state building. China first witnessed rapid growth in military and civilian health services during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945). This essay explores two factors that enabled this development: low-paid medical work of women and an influx of charitable donations from overseas. It centers gender and women's care work in its analysis and argues that attention to the interpersonal and affective facets of state making shows that atypical state agents can emerge as formidable state-builders in an extraordinary time. As with other facets of the Communist state, health administration owed much to Nationalist-era growth and innovation.

Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960 by Elizabeth LaCouture (review)

Abstract: Reviewed by: Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960 by Elizabeth LaCouture Jack Neubauer Elizabeth LaCouture. Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 364 pp. Hardcover ($145.00), softcover ($35.00), or e-book. In the early twentieth century, China's New Culture movement intellectuals attacked traditional large families as feudal and oppressive and instead advocated for modern "small families" (小家庭 xiao jiating), which they argued would facilitate Chinese people's awakening as citizens of a modern nation-state. While historians such as Susan Glosser have analyzed the family reform proposals of Chinese intellectuals and officials, few attempts have been made to study whether real Chinese families followed their ideological prescriptions.1 Elizabeth LaCouture's brilliantly researched book, Dwelling in the World, examines how urban elites in the treaty-port city of Tianjin forged new practices of family, house, and home. Focusing on everyday life rather than ideology, LaCouture convincingly shows that the Chinese family home was a site of neither feudal oppression nor nationalist awakening. Rather, it was a space in which China's urban elites forged new gendered and classed identities by consuming and combining the global array of tastes and styles circulating through China's treaty ports. Dwelling in the World recovers the modern home as a key site in the formation of Chinese modernity—a history that has been deliberately erased in service of a narrative that attributes "the ability to inhabit a home" solely to the Chinese Communist Party (3). In late imperial China, well-ordered households were considered the basis of a well-regulated state, and therefore designing houses in accordance with cosmological principles was central to maintaining political stability. But after the collapse of China's imperial order, nationalist reformers paid little attention to issues such as architecture and home design. Likewise, in the multiply colonized city of Tianjin—which at one point contained nine foreign concessions—the coexistence of diverse architectural and design practices created gaps in which Tianjin's residents "could design a unique Tianjin modern style" (156). The powerful argument at the core of LaCouture's study is that the modern home emerged as a space in which Chinese people could form new individual subjectivities "precisely because nationalist ideologues and foreign imperialists ignored it" (12). Dwelling in the World is organized into eight roughly chronological chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 analyze how a series of colonial confrontations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries violently disrupted the sociospatial order of Tianjin, paving the way for the "colonial coproduction" of a new family ideology that transformed "the myth of the backward extended Chinese family into a social scientific fact" (55). These chapters establish two foundational points. First, Chinese urban families did not conform to social scientific models or nationalist prescriptions. Second, the new family ideology ignored space, disconnecting "the social relations of the family from the social space of the house" (79). Chapter 3 shows how property ownership became key to the masculine identities of elite Chinese men, while women property owners were often prevented from managing their properties and were not afforded the political rights of their [End Page E-24] male counterparts. Chapter 4 analyzes how urban elites navigated the choice between competing "technologies of space"—Chinese courtyard houses and Western houses—in Tianjin's competitive real estate market. Exploring the process of designing house and home, chapter 5 traces the emergence of a new Tianjin style that LaCouture terms "the chimeric modern," defined by the juxtaposition of distinct Chinese and Western elements. Chapter 6 deploys the notion of "home life" (家庭生活 jiating shenghuo) to show how Chinese women forged gendered and classed identities by imbuing household objects with affective meaning. In chapter 7, LaCouture examines lively debates on the relationship between household and society in the Tianjin women's press. The final chapter follows the construction of public housing in Tianjin early in the era of the People's Republic of China, arguing that the Chinese Communist Party "reconnected the social space of the household to the political...

Listening to the Enemy: Radio Consumption and Technological Culture in Maoist China, 1949–1965

Abstract: Abstract:Drawing from a substantial body of government archives and internal reports from mainland China, the United States, and Taiwan, this article examines how daily transnational and technological communication practices among the masses impacted the making of political culture in Maoist China. The article begins with an overview of the pervasiveness of listening to enemy radio—the overseas radio stations unsanctioned by the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC)—followed by an in-depth analysis of the historical legacies, ideological and cultural rationales, and structural deficiencies that contributed to that popularity. It then explores how local radio users' responses and active reaching out to enemy radio stations in the 1950s and 1960s prompted the competing geopolitical powers facing off across the Taiwan Strait to adjust their government policies. Ultimately, this article argues that listening to enemy radio as a technological counterculture was instrumental to the making of socialist subjectivity, arising from the populace's appropriation of the strategic interplay between the PRC government and its Cold War rivals.

Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China by C. Patterson Giersch (review)

Abstract: Reviewed by: Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China by C. Patterson Giersch David Brophy C. Patterson Giersch. Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 284 pp. Hardcover ($95.00), softcover ($32.00), or e-book. C. Patterson Giersch's new book enriches our understanding of both Yunnanese and national Chinese state-building efforts from the perspective of commercial history. Building on the efforts of local enthusiasts and academic historians in the People's Republic of China (PRC) to reevaluate the role of corporate entrepreneurs in the region's history, Giersch here follows the rise of private and state-run firms from the late Qing through the first decades of the PRC, making a strong case for the centrality of this previously marginal story to modern Chinese history. With an eye to the PRC's post-1979 reforms, which saw a shift away from state planning to more stringent principles of corporate governance, Yunnan emerges here as a pioneer, witness to "the most important early efforts to theorize and then implement state-run corporations and state control over private firms" (170). The book ends with the fascinating suggestion that Miao Yuntai (缪云台), architect of Yunnan's province-level state-private partnership in the 1930s, may have even had some influence on China's Deng-era restructuring. Giersch's book is divided into two parts. Part 1 is a wide-ranging discussion of the social, cultural, and political role of Yunnanese firms in their distinctive borderlands setting; the second is a more linear narrative of state-directed industrialization efforts. The state-private symbiosis is present from the start, with eighteenth-century Qing improvements to infrastructure laying the basis for the emergence of long-distance trading firms in the nineteenth century. Drawing on practices pioneered by Shanxi banks, and with one foot in British-controlled Burma and links to the Tibetan plateau, the western Yunnanese firm was not the stereotypical Confucian family business but a sophisticated profit-seeking enterprise. Even those that were centered on lineages, Giersch points out, emphasized shareholding to a greater degree than elsewhere in China. In chapter 2, we see how this relatively inchoate lineage structure, as well as social anxieties engendered by the Yunnanese merchantry's sojourning lifestyle, drew the new commercial elite to culturally exaggerate their loyalty to Confucian norms. In a political sense, Giersch sees in this mercantile elite a continuing preference for cosmopolitan visions of modernization, contrasting this with the more conservative Confucian nationalism espoused elsewhere. At the same time, we learn that by the 1920s newer reformers were engaged in a struggle with a "1911 generation" that was now rallying in defense of classical learning. The networks here are remarkable: a society dedicated to the improvement of the frontier town of Tengchong had its journal published in Beijing and distributed as far afield as Mandalay in Burma. Part 2 tracks the turn of these "progressive merchants" toward state-led development schemes, and Giersch highlights the path-dependent nature of these initiatives. Republican [End Page E-20] Yunnan was indeed not a blank slate: the dynamics here were a continuation of late Qing efforts to develop Yunnanese commodities such as tin. In contrast to negative PRC portrayals, Giersch provides us with an admiring portrait of entrepreneurs such as US-educated mining engineer Miao Yuntai. As chair of the Yunnan Economic Commission, the "visionary" Miao leveraged his connections to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the United States to build up a strong provincial bank, make Yunnanese mining profitable at last, and create new industries such as textile production. Because of its relative independence from the bureaucratized economic planning of the Guomindang (GMD), Giersch sees in this provincial experiment a more rational form of public-private partnership than those that gradually came to replace it from 1937 onward. From that point on, Giersch charts the quixotic efforts of men such as Miao to formulate strategies for Yunnanese development in the face of an encroaching state whose centralizing drive ultimately left little place for them. Of the keywords in the book's title, "business" and "the state...

Transformative Agendas: Postwar Gazetteers and the Reconstruction of Urban Taiwan, 1945–1960

Abstract: Abstract:This essay studies how the government of the Republic of China attempted to reterritorialize Taiwan as a part of modern China, following Japanese colonization, by examining the first editions of postwar gazetteers for Taiwan's major cities. This genre historically played an important role in the assertion of control by China's dynasties and in efforts by local elites to shape official knowledge and policies, and these editions on Taiwan's cities were some of the first dedicated city gazetteers produced in the twentieth century. The essay argues that these texts were among several important tools that the state used to project its Chinese nation-state onto Taiwan, by linking urban Taiwan to China's history and envisioning future cities that would be the basis of the nation. Versions of these future cities gradually took shape, but they did so more within the context of Taiwanization than of Sinification.

Subject to the State: Language and Data in Twentieth-Century China

Abstract: Abstract:Two recent books illumine arenas of state practice in Qing and Republican China and/or in the People's Republic of China. One takes up state practice through the problem of the establishment of a national language in China's nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the other engages statecraft from the perspective of the 1950s efforts to collect data and account statistically for China's material conditions and its population. Each book contributes to narrower and broader areas of research and academic interest in China's and the world's modern history, and both could be of interest to scholars of nationalism, language, statistics, Chinese identity, and the Chinese state.This essay discusses the following works. Arunabh Ghosh. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China. Histories of Economic Life Series. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 340 pp. Hardcover ($45.00), softcover ($32.95), or e-book. | Gina Anne Tam. Dialect and Nationalism in China: 1860–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 261 pp. Hardcover ($99.99), softcover ($29.99), or e-book.

Maoism and Grassroots Religion: The Communist Revolution and the Reinvention of Religious Life in China by Xiaoxuan Wang (review)

Abstract: Reviewed by: Maoism and Grassroots Religion: The Communist Revolution and the Reinvention of Religious Life in China by Xiaoxuan Wang Yupeng Jiao Xiaoxuan Wang. Maoism and Grassroots Religion: The Communist Revolution and the Reinvention of Religious Life in China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 220 pp. Hardcover ($31.95) or e-book. In 1970, aiming to understand the astonishing fact of "a nation state, with one fourth the earth's population, in which religion as an effective force seems to be all but nullified," Dr. Richard C. Bush Jr. published his Religion in Communist China.1 For a few decades, this book was one of the most cited among scholars and journalists who worked on Chinese religions. Although recent scholarship has convincingly proved that Dr. Bush's oversimplified argument was wrong, the myth that China had no religions during the Mao era remains a dominant misunderstanding of Chinese religious history. In Xiaoxuan Wang's Maoism and Grassroots Religion, he invents the expression "destructively constructive," which creatively and accurately captures the nature of the Chinese religious landscape during the Mao years (186). Wang characterizes Chinese religions and believers' adaptation of state policies under Mao as "uneven continuities," a process that not only helped various forms of religious practices survive the hostile political environment but also shaped the future path of religions in the post-Mao period through recreation and reinvention (182). As Wang mentions in the introduction, the study of Chinese religions in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has shifted from a generic perspective of nation-centered political policies to local and nonelite actors, which has often produced unexpected outcomes in opposition to the conventional understanding of religions' decline under Maoism (5). This book is based on thorough and detail-oriented research on Rui'an (瑞安) County in Wenzhou (温州). Known as China's Jerusalem or Ephesus among Chinese Protestants, Wenzhou is one of the most well-known religious centers in China, not only for Christianity but also for a diverse group of other religions. In recent scholarship on Chinese religions, Wenzhou has drawn the attention of several prominent religious scholars, such as Mayfair Yang and Shih-Chieh Lo. Chapter 1 is an overview of Wenzhou's religious ecology before 1949. Wang specifically highlights the antisuperstition campaigns during the Republican era, the indigenization of Christianity, and the flourishing of salvationist groups in Wenzhou. Chapter 2 studies the CCP's religious policies in the early 1950s, especially the impact of the Land Reform campaign (Wang clearly points out that the CCP had no systematic religious policies right after 1949). Whereas traditional communal religions, Buddhist temples, and salvationist groups suffered significant losses during the state's land acquisition and suppression of alleged counterrevolutionaries, Protestant communities remained largely in place. Chapter 3 examines the fate of communal temples from the 1950s to the 1970s. Wang shows that the ups and downs of communal temples ran parallel to major political campaigns in the PRC. For instance, the intense political struggle during the Great Leap Forward gave local religions a staggering blow, but the relatively relaxed political environment during the early 1960s and the recession of formal political institutions during the Cultural Revolution left space for religions to recover. Local cadres' responses to religion were also flexible—sometimes they even made concessions to religious groups. Chapters 4–6 are entirely about the Christians, especially Protestant groups, from the 1950s to 2014. [End Page E-26] Chapter 4 reiterates the points already made in chapter 2: despite the fact that Catholics were heavily suppressed in the early 1950s, the 1950s witnessed the continuous operation of Protestant communities until the Great Leap. Some Protestant churches even grew bigger. The Great Leap suddenly intensified the suppression of Christians, which also caused divisions within the church as many church leaders were forced to renounce their faith. The crackdown also incited small clandestine meetings and house church gatherings. Chapter 5 discusses the diversification and unification of Protestantism during the Cultural Revolution. The proliferation of house churches and the previous persecution of church leaders gave rise to a new generation of preachers without formal ordination, the convergence of denominations (an unexpected consequence that the Three-Self Patriotic Movement failed...

Warlords at Work: Four Crucial Realms and Four Dynamics of State Building in Republican China, 1916–1937

Abstract: Abstract:During the years 1916–1937, a time of critical political disunity for China, statebuilding efforts by central authorities were not the only ones that were significant and worthy of attention. The contributions of local power-holders (warlords) were also crucial. Contrary to the usual depiction of warlords as concerned only with their personal wealth and power, I argue that many had a strong concern for state building. Warlords' achievements were particularly significant in four realms: transportation infrastructure, education, economic planning, and statistics. Besides reappraising the warlords' contributions in these four realms, it is of equal importance to explain the remarkable convergence of state-building politics at the national scale. The four different realms under consideration are interesting not only for their intrinsic importance in state building but also because they are representative of four more general "dynamics" that explain such a convergence.

Questioning the Teleology of the Central State in Republican China

Abstract: No doubt the expansion of the reach of the state can be considered one of the prominent features of the twentieth century.1 Many studies have described this process in Western Europe and beyond.2 In the case of China, however, there is a marked tendency in the historiography to assume that, except for the Qing dynasty’s lastditch efforts to modernize from 1901–1911 with the New Policies (新政 xinzheng) reforms and a short-lived attempt during the Nanjing Decade (1928–1937), the first half of the twentieth century represented, for the most part, a discontinuation in the process of state building. It was in order to question this assumption that we organized a conference on “State-Building through Political Disunity in Republican China,” held in Paris at EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales) in September 2018. The idea was to target the Republican period (1912–1949) as one of critical importance in the process of state building in modern China. A key aspect of the Republican period, in fact, is political fragmentation. None of the central governments asserting themselves and (mostly) recognized as such—the Beiyang governments (1912–1928) and the subsequent Nationalist government (1928–1949)—was in a position to control China Proper, let alone the whole territory formerly dominated by the Qing dynasty. Moreover, these central governments faced many formidable challengers, including regional warlord and Communist regimes as well as pro-Japanese governments. Contemporaries lamented the lack of effective centralization because they saw political disunity as a decisive obstacle on the road toward a modern and powerful China capable of (among other things) renegotiating the “unequal treaties” as Meiji Japan had done. This Republican concern for disunity and its negative effect on state building tends to persist among today’s specialists on Republican China (regardless of nationality). Admittedly, scholars have demonstrated that the Beiyang governments, despite their

Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn by John A. Crespi (review)

Abstract: Reviewed by: Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn by John A. Crespi Li Guo John A. Crespi. Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn. Philip E. Lilienthal Imprint in Asian Studies. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2020. 197 pp. Softcover ($34.95) or e-book (open access). In his well-researched monograph Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn, John Crespi offers a timely study of manhua (漫畫), a term commonly translated as "cartoon," and its connection with mass culture from 1937 to the early 1960s. Tracing the art of manhua to its roots in the illustrated magazine's "kaleidoscopic aesthetics" in the 1920s and 1930s, Crespi argues that manhua's intermediality and transcultural character transcend the ideological discourses of war and propaganda. Instead, the rich and productive ambivalence of manhua-mediated images since 1937 invite "horizontal readings" of the polyphonic and polytextual "surfaces" of magazines (14). Drawing from the scholarship of Paul Pickowicz, Yingjin Zhang, and Kuiyi Shen, the author argues that a horizontal reading is meaningful and productive because of both its potential to contest the "word and image divide" and its focus on the "affectively charged, cross-genre, inter-media" juxtaposition of contradictory material as "kaleidoscopic" (15). The book's discussion of the "pictorial turn" of manhua in China is built on W. J. T. Mitchell's definition of the term, that is, "a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institution, discourse, bodies, and figurality."1 Crespi argues that manhua, rather than being treated as a passive display of ensembles of words and images, could be regarded as self-conscious "commentators" on the power relations and ideological structures that define, construct, and disseminate manhua (Crespi 16). The city pictorial, "an interactive matrix of images and text," is not only entertaining and informative but also facilitates an alternative vision of modernity and individual agency beyond the discourses of nation and citizenship. The book contains a theoretical introductory essay and four chapters. The introduction elucidates how the term manhua, a loan word from Japanese, gained its currency around 1925 as a reference to the monochrome paintings by Feng Zikai (豐子愷 1898–1975) (4). Rather than using an English translation of manhua, Crespi justifies his usage of the original term and expresses a hope to "retain the word manhua's semantic symbioses with the print genre of the pictorial magazine, or huabao (画报), the medium in which manhua thrived through the middle decades of the twentieth century" (24). The term manhua surpasses the implication of pictures or cartoons and highlights the importance of illustrated serials "as a defining site of manhua" (24). Magazines such as Shanghai Sketch (上海畫報 Shanghai huabao) function as "a visual technology" that instructs and represents the readers' experiences of urban life to create a shared sense of identity (26). Images and texts in magazines engage readers in new epistemic encounters, endowing them with a sense of "knowingness" based on "up-to-date knowledge of a broad range of ephemeral, contemporary material" (44). [End Page E-3] Chapter 1, "Shanghai Sketch and the Illustrated City" examines "two foundational moments in the consolidation of manhua—the formation of the Manhua Society and the publication of Shanghai Sketch"—that can be considered as parts of "a shadow history" of urban materialities, mass culture, and topographies of everyday life in metropolitan Shanghai. Manhua arose "not just in pictorial magazines but as pictorial magazines" (26, emphasis original). It manifests artistic engagements with a historical moment: an indispensable element of the city pictorial that meets the urban dwellers' needs and desires, moderates their moral disposition and assessments, and engenders hybrid aesthetic tastes and values. Members of the Manhua Society came together as a collective initiative that united a group of cultural entrepreneurs and provided them with financial sources for joint creative endeavors. The chapter discusses the artistic agency of this collective and how they contributed to the "heterogenetic milieu of the illustrated city pictorial" (39). The illustrated magazines, as exemplified by the richly diverse "metapanels" on the pages of Shanghai Sketch, should be seen as "a multi-authored collage" that embodies "an interactive vernacularization of everyday gestures and consumption patterns built into...

Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China by Grace C. Huang (review)

Abstract: Reviewed by: Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China by Grace C. Huang Patrick Fuliang Shan Grace C. Huang. Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China. Harvard East Asian Monographs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. 245 pp. Hardcover ($55.00) or softcover ($28.00). Chiang Kai-shek (蒋介石 1887–1975) has been well studied by scholars from diverse perspectives because he exerted an enduring influence upon pre-1949 mainland China and post-1949 Taiwan. Grace C. Huang contributes to this growing literature with her particular focus on Chiang’s politics of shame (耻 chi), her in-depth analysis of Chiang’s psychological world, and her persuasive discussion of Chiang’s endeavors to transform his country. Although scholars have long categorized Eastern culture as the culture of shame and Western culture as the culture of guilt, Huang’s monograph enables us to gain [End Page E-30] a deeper understanding of Chiang’s use of chi in his leadership role for the most populous country in the world. Huang’s monograph is divided into six chapters besides the introduction, conclusion, and appendices. Although her approach is to investigate the notion of shame in Chiang’s political thought and to explore China’s political history, Huang uses Shilüe (事略 Mr. Chiang’s Draft Manuscript), a primary source compiled and authored by secretaries of the Office of Personal Attendants in the 1920s and the 1930s to register the routines of Chiang’s daily life. Needless to say, Shilüe incorporated quotations from Chiang’s diaries, telegrams, speeches, reports, and other documents. Huang utilizes this valuable source to probe Chiang’s concept of chi and his application of it in his personal life as well as in his political actions. According to Huang, Chiang Kai-shek’s sense of shame was deeply connected to what China had suffered at the hands of imperialist powers, and at the hands of Japan in particular, something Chiang intended to avenge. Thus, Chiang wrote his diary with a diurnal reminder about the national humiliation inflicted by Japan for two decades after the Jinan incident of 1928. During the Northern Expedition, the Japanese imperial troops, under the pretext of protecting their citizens, occupied the capital of Shandong Province, where they bullied Chinese officials and killed more than 3,000 people (34). The Jinan incident posed a humiliation for which Chiang had to swallow bitterness in order to accomplish his goal for the Northern Expedition. By citing the story of King Goujian, who endured humiliation for success, Chiang jogged his memory of this national humiliation, as he pressed himself to learn, read, and reflect to find an achievable solution for it. Huang demonstrates how much there is to be learned about Chiang Kai-shek’s multiple uses of chi. Chiang shamed the Chinese for their shortcomings, criticized them for being selfish, urged them to defend traditional culture, and advised them to carry on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People. In other words, Chiang tried to diversify his use of chi to prioritize domestic unity over confrontation against foreign powers, particularly Japan. Facing China’s powerful and aggressive neighbor, Chiang had to shoulder chi, imbibe bitterness, and espouse military nonresistance even when Japan occupied Manchuria (Northeast China). Yet, he relied on the League of Nations for international arbitration and tried his best to strengthen his nation for future retaliation (70). Chiang Kai-shek tried to construct the Chinese national identity by utilizing chi, therefore launching the New Life movement and urging the Chinese to realize their national humiliation and remedy their behaviors. He encouraged a healthy, virtuous, and modern life without fighting, robbing, stealing, begging, and other kinds of misconduct that enflamed national disunity and baited foreign incursions. Chiang avoided intensifying coercive measures to militarize the Chinese; on the contrary, according to Huang’s interpretation, he continued to use persuasion to instill a sense of shame in his people (99). According to Huang’s study, Chiang’s underlying mission was to alert the Chinese to recognize their weakness by exposing their deviations in order to rally them to build a modernized nation...

Unspeakable Ecology: Eco-Science and Environmental Awareness Through Thick Inquiries, 1910S–1980S

Abstract: Abstract:In identifying the modern origin of ecological studies, scholarship on "ecological civilization" (shengtai wenming) should have engaged with the fundamental question, that is, What are the modern and contemporary modes of our ethical, political, and economic relationship with coexisting nonhuman species and the planet Earth? Or, more definitely, Can or cannot the possibility of that coexistence be conceived in modern and contemporary terms? This paper draws critical attention to the fact that the cultural and conceptual formation of ecology (shengtai), a distinctly modern historical invention, generates more inquiries than answers. Questioning the possibility of speaking about ecology from within the politics of Green rhetoric, this paper engages the contested ethical and epistemological principles that constituted the foundation of ecological knowledge as well as the conceptual orientations to ecology in China from the 1910s to the 1980s.