BETWEEN STATE AND SERVICE INDUSTRY: GROUP AND COLLECTIVE WEDDINGS IN COMMUNIST SHANGHAI, 1949–1956

Abstract

Group weddings have commonly been associated with Republican China under Guomindang rule. Wedding ceremonies involving multiple couples, however, continued to be held in the People’s Republic of China throughout the 1950s and after. During the early 1950s, Shanghai’s commercial group wedding agencies marketed their services to local couples, and district governments organized what they termed “collective weddings,” hoping that couples would be more amenable to state marriage registration if they could participate in a ceremony. In 1956, the municipal government considered instituting a unified collective ceremony across Shanghai. By examining meeting minutes, letter exchanges, and records of internal government and business discussions, this article explores entrepreneurial and governmental attempts to standardize Shanghai’s group and collective weddings. Although commercial group weddings and state collective ceremonies served different purposes, their proponents faced similar organizational difficulties in the search for a standardized, economical wedding ceremony befitting “New China.”     

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.     

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.     

“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.     

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.     

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.     

Foes of our rebirth: Ukrainian nationalist discussions about Jews, 1929–1947

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, came into being in 1929 as an “integral nationalist” movement that set itself the goal of driving Polish landowners and officials out of eastern Galicia and Volhynia, joining hands with Ukrainians in other countries, and establishing an independent state. The OUN defined Jews, along with Russians and Poles, as aliens and enemies. There was no need, wrote an OUN ideologist in 1929, to list all the injuries that Jews caused Ukrainians. “In addition to a number of external enemies Ukraine also has an internal enemy … Jewry and its negative consequences for our liberation cause can be liquidated only by an organized collective effort”. The article examines archival documents, publications by OUN members, and recent scholarly literature to trace the evolution of OUN thinking about Jews from 1929 through the war years, when the German occupation of Ukraine gave the OUN an opportunity to stage pogroms and persecute Jews, and the prime minister of the state that the OUN proclaimed wrote that he supported “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine”.     

Violence from Below: Explaining Crimes against Civilians across Soviet Space, 1943–1947

The end of World War II brought little relief to the lands it ravaged most. Mass wartime violence continued in the Soviet space beyond the ‘false peace’ of 1945. Historians have sought to explain this violence in terms of the ‘wartime brutalisation’ of state and citizens alike, though this approach is limited in explaining how and why violence continued after 1945. This article shifts focus from psychology to social history to argue that the disintegration of Soviet state control is central to explaining the enduring violence after 1945 and understanding its emergence as much ‘from below’ as ‘from above’.     

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.     

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.     

Ripple effects: the groundnut scheme failure and railway planning for colonial development in Tanganyika, 1947–1952

While the reasons for the failure of the groundnut scheme are well understood, its effects on colonial development in Tanganyika are not. Drawing from the voluminous paper trail that development planning leaves in its wake, this paper traces the effects of the groundnut scheme demise on a contemporaneous plan to build a railway across Tanganyika to the Northern Rhodesian copperbelt. Tensions arose among the railway planners – civil servants, politicians, and consultants from Britain, Africa, and the United States – when, midway through the planning process, the scale of the groundnut scheme collapse became public. I demonstrate how this revealing crisis prompted planners to eschew the project's production-oriented impetus and embrace a welfare-oriented conclusion. By demonstrating the interlinked nature of development projects, this paper proposes a new angle for studying the history of development in an era characterised by the rapid proliferation of projects.     

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.