AARON AVSHALOMOV AND NEW CHINESE MUSIC IN SHANGHAI, 1931–1947

Abstract

In this article, I position Russian composer Aaron Avshalomov (1894–1965) within the pre-1949 Shanghai music community at a crucial juncture in modern China’s cultural development. First, I examine Avshalomov’s eclectic background and identity as Chinese-acculturated foreigner, Russian-Jewish immigrant, and multifaceted musician, which uniquely situated him among Shanghai’s influential foreign artists for experimentation with new blends of Chinese and Western music from 1931 to 1947. Second, I discuss how this exploration facilitated his contribution to the forging of a new, “national” Chinese music. Third, I describe Avshalomov’s musical style by offering examples of Chinese-Western fusion composition. Finally, I demonstrate that Avshalomov was historically significant via the influence he had on Chinese musicians and through his foreshadowing of future musical developments. He thus serves as an individual exemplar of hybrid identity, creativity, and agency within a city and newly forming tradition that were also characteristically multivalent.     

“HEALTHFUL GOODS”: HEALTH,HYGIENE, AND COMMERCIAL CULTURE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY SHANGHAI

Abstract

This article examines the development of Shanghai’s household-chemical industry, which produced and sold soap, toothpowder, and toothpaste, and other personal hygiene items, and discusses how the ideas of health and hygiene became an integral part of the city’s commercial culture in the early twentieth century. Through various commercial strategies, Shanghai’s businessmen promoted their commodities and hygiene practices simultaneously. They also actively participated in mass movements organized by the Nationalist state, since such movements provided a marketing opportunity for them. This article argues that precisely because they were doing business, Shanghai’s small entrepreneurs successfully connected personal hygiene, national strength, and the act of buying.     

CIVIL SERVICE REFORM IN POST-1997 HONG KONG: POLITICAL CHALLENGES,MANAGERIAL RESPONSES?

One of the major reforms promoted by the new Special Administrative Region government of Hong Kong after the 1997 handover is that of the civil service. The March 1999 civil service reform consultation document outlined a number of proposed changes ranging from entry and exit, disciplinary measures, performance management, to performance-based reward system and training and development. This article examines the external and domestic forces (and crises) inducing the reform, and puts the discussion within the context of post-1997 political challenges to bureaucratic power. Given that the civil service stands at the outer firing line bearing the brunt of such challenges which interface with a mixture of legitimacy, accountability, probity and operational deficiencies, the significance of the present reform cannot be fully understood within a narrow managerial discourse of reform for greater efficiency and flexibility. The reform in fact represents managerial solutions to problems essentially of a “political” nature.     

SCIENCE,MEDICINE, AND CONFUCIANISM IN THE MAKING OF CHINA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA — LIM BOON KENG AND THE OVERSEAS CHINESE, 1897–1937

Abstract

Historians have argued for the importance of Japan and the United States in shaping the trajectory of science and medicine in Republican China, especially in the regions of North China. This article argues that another understated group of individuals—Overseas Chinese—were influential in leading institutions of Western medicine in China, as well as sharing the latest science knowledge they acquired in the West to audiences in China and Southeast Asia. An example was Lim Boon Keng, a doctor born in Singapore and educated at Edinburgh, who came to lead the first department of health in the Republican government as well as Xiamen University in pre-war China. Chinese reformers as Sun Yat-sen, Tan Kah Kee, Liang Qichao, and Kang Youwei were attracted by Lim’s medical expertise as well as his active participation in the reform movement in Southeast Asia, and invited Lim to participate in the development of medicine and politics in China proper. In addition, Lim’s unique blending of a historical view of Chinese Science and reformist notions of Confucianism help legitimate his participation as a credible Chinese intellectual. Together with other Overseas Chinese such as Wu Lien-teh and Robert Lim, they were influential in leading institutions of medicine across the country in Manchuria, Beijing, Kunming, and Xiamen in the first half of the twentieth century. Lim Boon Keng, in particular, promoted programs in science and medicine as well as the study of Confucianism during his tenure as the President of Xiamen University from 1924 to 1936. However, May Fourth intellectuals such as Lu Xun criticized Lim Boon Keng’s programs as conservative, authoritarian, and anti-humanities. Even though Lu Xun and other intellectuals soon eventually left Xiamen because of their disagreements with Lim, the university became a leader in the instruction of science and engineering. In sum, this article argues that the medical history of twentieth-century China should include the narrative on the Overseas Chinese bringing scientific knowledge and individuals to China, supplementing the Western ideas, people, and resources that came to China via Japan.     

THE MAKING OF NEW CHINESE BUREAUCRATS: THE CUSTOMS COLLEGE AND THE CHINESE CUSTOMS STAFF, 1908–1949

Abstract

This article examines how new Chinese bureaucrats were made at the Customs College to retrieve the Chinese Maritime Customs Service from the foreign staff in the Service. The policies of training new bureaucrats vacillated between three courses: generalist education, specialist training, and cadre cultivation. China’s assertion of control over the Service set the scene for four decades of political struggle between the Inspectorate of Customs, Chinese governments, and the Nationalist Party.

The article’s first section explores how China’s drive to self-modernization generated the needs for new bureaucrats, led to the College’s initiation, and shaped its educational program and policies. The second section examines how the Nationalist Party politicized the College’s education and discusses interrelations between the war decade from 1937–1949 and the decline of the College’s status. Finally, it concludes by discussing the continuity of the College in Mainland China and Taiwan after 1949.     

THE HEROIC AND THE BANAL: CONSUMING SOVIET MOVIES IN PRE-SOCIALIST CHINA, 1920S–1940S

Abstract

Soviet cinema as part of the socialist cultural landscape in Maoist China has been well recognized and extensively researched. This article looks at the earlier exhibition history of Soviet movies in pre-socialist China (from the 1920s to 1940s). It demonstrates that the early Chinese consumption and reception of this film culture involved two intertwined attitudes. On the one hand, Soviet movies were greeted as a much-needed Hero in the Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist discourses. On the other hand, the exhibition of Soviet movies operated commercially, and commercial sectors promoted the popular appeal of these movies to fulfill the carnal desire of spectators. By examining film reviews, advertisements, and censorship reports, this article explores the ways in which the Hero image and the banal side of the Hero were constructed in the pre-socialist milieu of China.     

CHINA’S NEW SORROW: WATER-MANAGEMENT POLICIES,ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION,AND SALAR-TIBETAN MINORITY RELATIONS IN QINGHAI PROVINCE, 1862–1978

Abstract

This article analyzes the effect of post-1949 policies on minority peoples in China’s watershed—Qinghai province. Salar and Tibetan peoples had lived in relative harmony for centuries in Xunhua County. Access to the Tibetan highlands and a monopoly on wool production had provided Tibetan herders with an upper hand. New policies that encouraged agricultural production over the course of the twentieth century not only brought radical changes to these long-standing relationships but also initiated new strains on the local environment. The Mao era saw a particularly rapid expansion of new water projects designed to tame the Yellow River. The resulting environmental catastrophe is a major contributing factor to the river’s current inability to flow to the Yellow Sea.     

Restricting Russians: language and immigration laws in Soviet Latvia, 1956–1959

In 1956, a prominent faction within the leadership of Soviet Latvia, the Latvian national communists, launched two ambitious initiatives designed to redress perceived Stalinist Russification polices – a language law and residency restrictions. This article examines and evaluates these two policies and asks if they were part of a “Latvianization” program that deliberately targeted Russians for denial of residency permits and required Russians to gain Latvian-language competency within a two-year timeframe or face the threat of dismissal. In an effort to restore the primacy of the Latvian language, the national communists created a law enforcing knowledge of Latvian and Russian for Communist Party and government functionaries and service sector personnel. Using the Soviet legal system, the national communists also attempted to halt the influx of predominantly Slavic immigration to the Latvian capital, Riga. By instituting passport restrictions on settling in the city, the national communists sought to limit Slavic migration in order to maintain Riga’s Latvian character and reduce pressure on the city’s housing supply and municipal services. Existing studies deem passport restrictions in other Soviet cities a failure. The author argues, however, that the national communists’ scheme was generally successful, dramatically curbing migration to Riga during its operation.     

PLACING CHINA IN THE COLONIAL WORLD ORDER: TRAVELOGUES IN THE CHENBAO FUKAN, 1921–1926

Abstract

Highlighting four themes in travelogues in an influential daily newspaper supplement in the 1920s, this article argues that Chinese travelers to the West and Japan at that time had mixed and conflicting impulses. Their observations of and reflections upon what they saw and experienced helped form and inform Chinese discourses of the time to construct or confirm, or sometimes destabilize, such notions as “the Chinese nation,” “national character,” “colonized people,” “civilization,” and “progress.” The discourse exhibited a Chinese internalization of the mega-narrative on modernity and Western superiority, even though alternative views were also voiced at times. What these travelogues signified was a Chinese subjectivity deeply conditioned by that historical moment. The said subjectivity cannot be easily categorized as colonial or anti-colonial or post-colonial consciousness, but rather an uneasy and ambiguous mixture of multiple, often conflicting, normative and cognitive subjectivities. The mixture itself reflected the colonial world order of the early twentieth century in which China was situated.     

ANTICIPATING INVASION: MILITARY TRAINING IN TAIWAN’S HIGH SCHOOLS, 1953–1960

Abstract

When the Guomindang retreated to Taiwan in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and party leaders feared an imminent Communist invasion. Lacking soldiers in the reserve army, Chiang turned to high school and college students to recruit and train for the armed forces. In 1953, the Ministry of National Defense Political Department implemented mandatory military training in all senior high schools on the island and soon began educating and dispatching military instructors (jiaoguan), both male and female, to gender-segregated schools. Boys received basic infantry training (such as target shooting) while studying GMD revolutionary and military history. Meanwhile, girls participated in similar exercises but also acquired nursing skills. As a result, compulsory military training became a powerful force in Taiwanese high schools throughout the 1950s, preventing student protests against the government and successfully mobilizing male and female youth under an increasingly militarized GMD state.     

THE DILEMMAS OF A CIVILIAN POLITICIAN IN TIME OF WAR: ZHOU FOHAI AND THE FIRST STAGE OF THE SINO-JAPANESE WAR,JULY–DECEMBER 1937

Abstract

History’s verdict on Zhou Fohai is that he was an arch-collaborator, the éminence grise of Wang Jingwei’s government. Yet Zhou’s political career in the 1930s as a member of Chiang Kai-shek’s factional network did not suggest his later activities as a highly placed collaborator. Prior to 1938, Zhou had little or no political connections to Wang Jingwei; indeed, prior to the outbreak of war he regarded Wang and his followers as bitter factional enemies. Zhou’s background, therefore, underscores the complexity and indeed contingency of collaboration in the Sino-Japanese War. This article examines three areas of Zhou’s activities in the Guomindang Party-State during the first six months of the Sino-Japanese War: his role as a Chiang Kai-shek loyalist helping to craft key policies; his involvement with developing the United Front after the Lushan Conference; and his part in efforts to seek a negotiated peace with the aim of preserving as much of China’s sovereignty as possible. The article argues that these peace efforts were not in themselves a harbinger of collaboration, but were in fact conducted within the framework of the Party-State and involved a variety of leading figures. Despite Zhou’s liaison with the communist representatives, he remained staunchly anti-communist and suspicious of their ultimate ambitions, a suspicion that only deepened with the Guomindang’s every military reverse. And in his efforts to effect peace negotiations, he faced insurmountable obstacles in Chiang’s decision to pursue the military option, in the failure of international mediation by the leading Western powers, and in Japan’s ratcheting up its demands as its army went from victory to victory. By early 1938, therefore, Zhou was profoundly pessimistic about China’s prospects in its war with Japan.     

An unlikely bulwark of Sovietness: cross-border travel and Soviet patriotism in Western Ukraine, 1956–1985

Focusing on the development of travel between the borderlands of Ukraine and Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, this article explores what it meant to be Soviet outside the Russian core of the USSR between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s. The cautious opening of the Soviet border was part of a larger attempt to find fresh sources of popular support and enthusiasm for the regime's “communist” project. Before the Prague Spring of 1968 in particular, official policies and narratives of travel thus praised local inhabitants who crossed the Soviet border for supposedly overcoming age-old hatreds to build a brighter future in Eastern Europe. By the 1970s, however, smuggling and cultural consumption discredited the idea of “internationalist friendship.” This encouraged residents of Ukraine to speak and write about the continuing importance of the Soviet border. The very idea of Sovietness was defined in national terms, as narratives of travel emphasized that Soviet citizens were inherently different from ethno-national groups in the people's democracies. Eastern Europe thus emerged as an “other” that highlighted the Soviet character of territories incorporated into the USSR after 1939, helping to obscure western Ukraine's troubled past and leading to the emergence of new social hierarchies in the region.     

Western Medical Education on Trial: The Endurance of Peking Union Medical College, 1949–1985

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, Beijing's Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) stood as a prominent symbol of Western medical science and education in China. After the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) took control of the College between 1952 and 1956.This article argues that the endurance of PUMC as an institute of scientific, Western biomedicine in China was largely contingent upon reforms that the PLA instituted there. Drawing on Chinese accounts, as well as the observations of North American and European physicians, it asserts that political campaigns under Army leadership vehemently attacked American influences on the College but avoided direct criticisms of Western medical science itself. This dynamic politically legitimized the Western medical education that the College embodied. It also permitted PUMC to contribute to the development of Chinese military medicine, suggesting a significant connection between civilian and military medical education in the early People's Republic.     

Economic sanctions and the rhetorical responses of totalitarian regimes: Examining North Korean rhetorical strategies, 1949–2010

This study investigates the impact of economic statecraft on the North Korean Government. As a totalitarian regime, which is characterized by a controlled mass media, the North Korean Government tries to contain potential problems caused by sanctions by using three types of political rhetoric: appeasement, backlash, and surveillance. Using time-series data from 1949 to 2010 derived from a content analysis of the New Year's Day addresses by Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un, the empirical results suggests that the North Korean Government does alter its rhetorical strategies in response to external economic sanctions. Negative sanctions cause the regime to use appeasement strategies (or calls for reforms and internal changes). It tends to use backlash rhetoric (or blaming the sanctioning powers) in response to, interestingly, positive sanctions. Surveillance rhetoric, or the call for internal vigilance against enemies, on the other hand, does not have any statistical connection with sanctions, rather driven by other factors, such as the Korean War, external instability, and so on.