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A study of the lively street culture in Chengdu from 1870 to 1930, this book explores the relationship between urban commoners and public space, the role of community and neighborhood in public life, and how the reform movement and Republican revolution transformed everyday life in this inland city.
This book argues that a major part of the Chinese government’s road map, formulated in 2017, to modernise China comprehensively by 2049 is the process of social disciplining. It contends that the Chinese state sees that modernisation and modernity encompass not only economic and political–administrative change but are also related to the organisation of society in general and the disciplining of this society and its individuals to create people with “modernised” minds and behaviour; and that, moreover, the Chinese state is aspiring to a modernity with “Chinese characteristics”. The question of modernising by disciplining was extensively dealt with in the twentieth century by leading Western social scientists including Max Weber, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, who argued that disciplining, extending from external coercion towards the internalisation of restraints, is indispensable for achieving social order and thereby for “civilisation” –but defined from a European perspective, in relation to developments in Europe. This book therefore not only discusses the Chinese experience of social disciplining, but also, by looking at a non-Western society, identifies universal tendencies of societal change and social disciplining and separates them from particular occurrences.
When did China make the decisive turn from tradition to modernity? For decades, the received wisdom would have pointed to the May Fourth movement, with its titanic battles between the champions of iconoclasm and the traditionalists, and its shift to more populist forms of politics. A growing body of recent research has, however, called into question how decisive the turn was, when it happened, and what relation the resulting modernity bore to the agendas of people who might have considered themselves representatives of such an iconoclastic movement. Having thus explicitly or implicitly 'decentered' the May Fourth, such research (augmented by contributions in the present volume) leaves us with the task of accounting for the shape Chinese modernity took, as the product of dialogues and debates between, and the interplay of, a variety of actors and trends, both within and (certainly no less importantly) without the May Fourth camp.
"In 1911, Joseph Bailie, a professor at Nanjing University, often took his Chinese students to tour Nanjing’s shantytowns. One student, the son of a district magistrate, followed Bailie from hut to hut one rainy day, and was grateful that Bailie opened his eyes to the poverty in his own city. However, twenty years later, when M. R. Schafer, another Nanjing University professor, showed his students a film that included his own photographs of the poor quarters of Nanjing, his students were so upset that they demanded his expulsion from China. Zwia Lipkin explores the reasons for these starkly different reactions. Nanjing in the 1910s was a quiet city compared to 1930s Nanjing, which was by that time the national capital. Nanjing had become a symbol of national authority, aiming not only to become a model of modernization for the rest of China, but also to surpass Paris, London, and Washington. Underlying all of Nanjing’s policies was a concern for the capital’s image and looks—offensive people were allowed to exist as long as they remained invisible. Lipkin exposes both the process of social engineering and the ways in which the suppressed reacted to their abuse. Like Professor Schafer’s movie, this book puts the poor at the center of the picture, defying efforts to make them invisible."
The centre may hold, but borders can fray. Frontier Fieldwork explores the work of social scientists, agriculturists, photographers, and missionaries who took to the field in China’s southwest at a time when foreign political powers were contesting China’s claims over its frontiers. In the early twentieth century, when the threat of imperialism loomed large in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, these fieldworkers undertook a nation-building exercise to unite a disparate, multi-ethnic population. Andres Rodriguez exposes the transformative power of the fieldworkers’ efforts, which placed China’s margins at the centre of its nation-making process and race to modernity.
Engaged with the paradigms of cultural geography, local history, spatial politics, and everyday life, The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren unveils a Sichuan writer’s lifelong quest: an independent historical fiction writing project on Chengdu from the turn of the century through China’s 1911 Revolution. Kenny Kwok-kwan Ng's study illuminates the crisis of writing home in a globalized age by rescuing Li Jieren’s repeatedly revised but never finished river-novel series written from Republican to Communist China, struggling to liberate local memory from the national cum revolutionary currents. The book undercuts official historiography and rewrites Chinese literary history from the ground up by highlighting Li’s resilient geopoetics of writing that decenters the nation by adopting the place-based view of a distant province.
The French Religious Protectorate was an institutionalized and enduring policy of the French government, based on a claim by the French state to be guardian of all Catholics in China. The expansive nature of the Protectorate's claim across nationalities elicited opposition from official and ordinary Chinese, other foreign countries, and even the pope. Yet French authorities believed their Protectorate was essential to their political prominence in the country. This book examines the dynamics of the French policy, the supporting role played in it by ecclesiastical authority, and its function in embittering Sino-foreign relations. In the 1910s, the dissidence of some missionaries and Chinese Catholics introduced turmoil inside the church itself. The rebels viewed the link between French power and the foreign-run church as prejudicial to the evangelistic project. The issue came into the open in 1916, when French authorities seized territory in the city of Tianjin on the grounds of protecting Catholics. In response, many Catholics joined in a campaign of patriotic protest, which became linked to a movement to end the subordination of the Chinese Catholic clergy to foreign missionaries and to appoint Chinese bishops. With new leadership in the Vatican sympathetic to reforms, serious steps were taken from the late 1910s to establish a Chinese-led church, but foreign bishops, their missionary societies, and the French government fought back. During the 1930s, the effort to create an indigenous church stalled. It was less than halfway to realization when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. Ecclesiastical Colony reveals the powerful personalities, major debates, and complex series of events behind the turmoil that characterized the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experience of the Catholic church in China.
本书以简明清新的笔调，展示出西方思潮与本土文化的冲突、精英阶层与底层民众的冲突、国家权力与社会功能的冲突，不但表达了对民众及其所代表的文化的认同、对国家权力无限膨胀的担忧，还借由某个或某些特定的公共空间，在时代变迁的历史画卷中，描绘出自己对于历史与现实、国家与社会关系的理解。
The nine empirical studies in New Narratives of Urban Space in Republican Chinese Cities, organized under the general framework of urban space, examine three critical dimensions of the great urban transformation in Republican China—social, legal and governance orders. Together these narratives suggest a new perception of this historical urbanism. While modern economic development was a major drive for Chinese urban transformation, this volume highlights the dimension of the multilayered forces that shape urban space by looking into that less quantifiable, but equally important cultural realm and by exposing the ways in which these forces created new urban narratives, which became themselves shapers of urban space and of our perception of the Republican urbanity.
In The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven Mark W. Driscoll examines nineteenth-century Western imperialism in Asia and the devastating effects of "climate caucasianism"—the white West's pursuit of rapacious extraction at the expense of natural environments and people of color conflated with them. Drawing on an array of primary sources in Chinese, Japanese, and French, Driscoll reframes the Opium Wars as "wars for drugs" and demonstrates that these wars to unleash narco- and human traffickers kickstarted the most important event of the Anthropocene: the military substitution of Qing China's world-leading carbon-neutral economy for an unsustainable Anglo-American capitalism powered by coal. Driscoll also reveals how subaltern actors, including outlaw societies and dispossessed samurai groups, became ecological protectors, defending their locales while driving decolonization in Japan and overthrowing a millennia of dynastic rule in China. Driscoll contends that the methods of these protectors resonate with contemporary Indigenous-led movements for environmental justice.