Biennial Conference of the Historical Society for Twentieth Century China
Past Futures and Future Pasts: Expanding the Horizons of Twentieth Century Chinese History
September 13-15, 2024, hybrid at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA and on Zoom *
Business Innovation Building (BIB)
201 E Packer Ave, Bethlehem, PA 18015
Rooms 220 and 221
Friday, September 13
10:15 am: Welcome from HSTCC president Shellen X. Wu
Webinar 1 and Room 220
10:30 am -12:15 pm
Webinar 1 and Room 220
- Memory and Space of China’s 20th Century in Contemporary Fiction
This panel explores contemporary fiction’s representation of and response to the enduring repercussions of China’s late twentieth century. While the series of neoliberal reform opened up economic opportunities through new international relations, it also initiated unbalanced development across the country, engendered political unrest culminating in 1989, and irretrievably plunged China into the currents of global capitalism with its vast wealth inequality. Fiction writing in the aftermath of the twentieth century often finds itself in a landscape shaped by a grand history that demands questioning and challenging, which is the shared subject of the three panelists.
Dorothee Xiaolong Hou’s paper investigates the historic making and cultural remaking of China’s northeast in Shuang Xuetao’s fiction and argues that the haunted encounters with history in the postsocialist cityscape offer alternatives to spatialized memory and possibilities for geocriticism. Yingying Huang reads Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide against the context of China’s waste import since the 1980s and shows that the novel mobilizes an “anti-tide” in the images of water and a neural network as resistance to the global circulation and recycling of e-waste, capital, and people. Anqi Liu’s essay compares the discourse of COVID-19 with post-Tiananmen criticism in Chinese diasporic writings through a reading of Qiu Xiaolong’s novel, contending that the pandemic has become a venue of expression for Chinese diaspora via remote witnessing. All three panelists address the problems of historical memory and a global or domestic space molded by China’s political and economic changes since the late 20th century. They expand the horizons by examining these themes in contemporary fiction.
Dorothee Hou, Moravian University
Industrial Ghosts: Investigating China’s Postsocialist Rust Belt in Shuang Xuetao’s Writings
In the 1990s, China underwent a massive state-owned enterprise reform as part of the “Reform and Opening-up Policy,” resulting in some 35 million blue-collar workers being laid off. This especially struck China’s Northeast, including Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, the former bastion of state-owned heavy industry. Thirty years after the reform, China’s northeast, once among the most modernized and urbanized regions in the country, has effectively become China’s “Rust Belt,” bearing one of the slowest economic growths nationwide. This paper examines Shuang Xuetao’s 2016 noir novella Moses on the Plain and other short stories, investigating both the historic making and the recent cultural remaking of China’s northeast. I’m particularly interested in the ghostly figures that “haunt” industrial ruins in Shuang’s stories, which, I argue, serve as a powerful antidote to the normative ways in which memory is spatialized. I also suggest that Shuang’s “Rust Belt writings” not only map the uncharted territories of China’s postsocialist cities, but also invite literary scholars to probe the theoretical landscape of geocriticism. In Shuang’s writings, past traumas are enfolded in landscapes and architecture. Through recollections and haunted encounters, he illustrates the “fundamental fictionality,” or more precisely, the ideological malleability of these places.
Yingying Huang, Lafayette College
The “Anti-Tide” in The Waste Tide
How does waste travel globally? According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, modernity became “liquid” thanks to its obsession with speed, sending capital on the move while accelerating the circulation, recycling, and dumping of postconsumer waste until it settles on the lower rungs of a global economy. These included China, who started importing waste in the 1980s and whose accession to the WTO at the turn of the century led to a surge in scrap imports, making the nation the world’s number one destination for trash.
This global travel has rarely been addressed in Chinese literature until Chen Qiufan’s science fiction novel, The Waste Tide (2013), which portrays e-waste trade as the spinoff of the engulfing tide of global capitalism. My paper investigates the travel of waste in Chen’s novel and traces the movement of the characters in relation to the politically charged trajectory of trash. I argue that The Waste Tide demonstrates sf’s unique capability to challenge reality by mobilizing an “anti-tide,” a movement in the “wrong” direction that debunks the narrative of progress and interrupts the toxic flow of capital, waste, and lives. Before China’s trash import ban of 2017, the novel envisions resistance in the image of a monsoon and a destructive neural network.
Anqi Liu, St Mary’s College of Maryland
From Diasporic Witnessing to Politicalized Becoming: Qiu Xiaolong’s Love and Murder in the Time of COVID
In the post-Tiananmen era, Chinese literary diasporas, positioned at a distance, depict the indescribable trauma, reconstruct historical events, and critique the excesses of Communist power. The contrast between the proliferation of diasporic narratives and the historical amnesia transmitted within China highlights a recurring trend in Chinese diasporic literature. Within this trend, Chinese literary diasporas assume a critical role in resisting the narrowing venue for free expression in China. Similarly, in the post-COVID era, Chinese literary diasporas once again seek to construct an imagined truth through their remote witnessing.
Through a close examination of Qiu Xiaolong’s Love and Murder in the Time of COVID (2023), this paper delves into how the COVID-19 pandemic becomes a synecdoche, a myth, and an allegory in the realm of detective fiction. In the face of this humanitarian crisis, Love and Murder in the Time of COVID not only exhumes muted voices and contributes to the ongoing construction of the global discourse surrounding COVID-19 but also reinforces Eric Hayot’s concept of the “hypothetical mandarin”—referring to the Western discourse of human sympathy and moral responsibility towards Chinese pain. Thus, a crucial issue addressed in this paper revolves around the epistemological predicament faced by Chinese literary diasporas, who are compelled to undertake an imaginary homecoming and can only speak for the unspeakable trauma.
Yijun Liu, Binghamton University
Science Fictional Representation of Imagined Histories in Twentieth Century China
Since the beginning of Chinese science fiction in the early twentieth century, topics pertaining to Chinese history and human history at large, either imagined or alternative, have been approached from diverse perspectives. Notable examples include Lu Xun’s modernized revitalization of stories from pre-historic mythology and historic records in his collection Old Tales Retold (《故事新编》, 1936), Jiang Yunsheng’s time traveler’s criticism and reflections on wars in his acclaimed work “Blood of Changping” (姜云生《长平血》, 1992), and Han Song’s philosophical and semi-realistic representation of particular mundane moments in “The Memory of Shanghai in 1938” (韩松《一九三八年的上海记忆》, 2006).
This paper takes those history-themed science fiction works, which offer diverse and raptured representations of history and temporality, as case studies. It examines the interrelations among science and technology, development, and modernity in an attempt to analyze the distinct ways of (re-)interpreting the estranged realities in or about twentieth-century China through science-fictional narratives.
Chair and Discussant: Tom Chen, Lehigh University
- Commemoration and Representation in Twentieth Century China
Webinar 2 and Room 221
Zhixin Luo, Binghamton University
“Orphan and widow, a thousand years of sorrow”: the funeral of empress dowager Longyu and the politics of the expression of sorrow in the early Republican China
This paper looks at the first national ceremony of the Republic of China, empress dowager Longyu’s funeral. The existing historiography views Longyu’s funeral as a public event on which political actors such as the Qing court and the Republican government attempted to capitalize. Yet how exactly the funeral was managed is rarely examined. This paper combines the records of the National Mourning Association, the agency that carried out the daily affairs of the funeral, with couplets, newspapers and diaries in order to demonstrate a complex emotional world of the Chinese public surrounding Longyu’s death. By viewing the funeral of Longyu as the republican government’s effort to legitimize itself and unify the nation, this paper argues that the over politicization of the management of the funeral failed to address the public’s emotional need to mourn the empress dowager. Such failure not only hurt the legitimacy of the Republican government, but also produced an opportunity for Qing loyalists, in this paper Liang Dingfen, to bridge the gap and fulfill the emotional need.
Qiang Zhang, University of Nottingham, UK
Rehabilitating Republican China: Historical Memory, National Identity and Regime Legitimacy in Post-Mao China
Described in the Chinese Communist Party’s orthodox historiography as a dark and repressive period and part of the “century of humiliation”, the Republican era has in recent decades undergone a significant reassessment in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In books, newspaper articles, documentaries and dramas, Republican China has sometimes been portrayed as a vibrant society making remarkable progress in modernization in the face of severe external challenges. This paper explores the origins of this surprising rehabilitation and examines in detail how the Republican-era economic legacies have been reassessed in the reform era. It finds that, while the post-Mao regime continues to use the negative view of China’s pre-communist history to maintain its historical legitimacy, it has also been promoting a positive view of aspects of the same period in order to support its post-1978 priorities of modernization and nationalism, a trend that has persisted under Xi Jinping despite his tightened ideological control. The selective revival of Republican legacies, though conducive to the Party’s current political objectives, has given rise to revisionist narratives that damage the hegemony of its orthodox historical discourses.
Xiaoliang Yang, University of Pennsylvania
Marxism, Shanghai University, and A Revolutionary between China and the West: Revisiting Qu Qiubai’s Educational Materials
In 1923, Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白, 1899-1935) – an early founder of the Chinese Communist Party and a prolific Marxist theorist – was invited to the newly founded Shanghai University and served as the head of the Sociology Department. Where he designed an undergraduate curriculum and specific textbooks. For long, Qu has attracted scholarly interest for being one of the first to systemize and retell Marxism in China, and research on his thoughts primarily focuses on his thematic articles on Marxism and debates with contemporaries. However, in this project, I contend that Qu’s commitments to higher education constitute valid data to approach his thoughts. Particularly devoted to Qu’s stance on the relationship between Chinese traditions and Western modernism, I will try to make a breakthrough in conventional boundaries between intellectual history and the history of higher education by inquiring: how does Qu’s curriculum reflect his belief that ideal Chinese revolutionaries should immerse themselves within both modern Western and traditional Chinese thoughts? What philosophies and texts can be representative of Western and Chinese thoughts according to Qu’s educational materials (syllabuses, textbooks, curriculum), and why? How could this training prepare students for Chinese social needs in general and communist revolutionary causes specifically? Hopefully, this project could both elevate consciousness of the complexities within Qu’s thoughts and be methodically innovative, in terms of appreciating historical materials on the university development through the lens of intellectual history.
Chair: David Luesink
12:30pm – 2:30pm – LUNCH in Linderman Library 200 with Presentation by Dongning Wang and Special Collections librarian Ilhan Citak
2:30 – 4 pm
- Transnational and Global Currents in Science in Modern China
Webinar 1 and Room 220
A growing wave of scholarship in recent years have situated science in modern China and elsewhere in transnational and global contexts. During the Republican era, an educated elite and a growing middle class of urban dwellers were extraordinarily open to new ideas and political forms and attuned to global trends. The political instability of the period, while limiting state support of the sciences and institutions, also created the room for a raucous public sphere, such that historian Frank Dikötter has termed it the “Age of Openness.” The extension of this trend backwards to the late Qing and forwards to the PRC period has been a welcome and not unexpected development –after all, top Chinese scientists in the early PRC had mostly received their training abroad in Europe and the United States. Their personal relationships and professional connections to international organizations and foreign scientists were both essential to China’s diplomatic efforts in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, many questions remain. The personal histories of many of these scientists show that, as individuals, they were also utterly dispensable to the new regime. This roundtable explores the points of tension in the narrative of science in modern China.
Yang Li, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Antibiotics, Atomic Bomb, and the Cultural Revolution: Reinterpreting PRC Political History through Science
This paper proposes a new rationality for the political transformations in the PRC through the lens of the history of science. Drawing on Bourdieu’s extended notion of capital and adopting a Marxist analytical framework, I posit that science functioned as a unique form of capital that underwent a process of nationalization in early PRC. By examining the development of antibiotic research and industry, this paper identifies three major sources of scientific capital: the legacy of Republican China, returning scientists from the West, and the Soviet Union. During the 1950s, particularly through the First Five-Year Plan (1953–57), the Chinese state systematically cultivated and nationalized scientific capital from these sources, facilitating rapid socialist industrialization. This process not only advanced China’s industrial modernization and independence from Soviet influence, but also consolidated the Chinese Communist Party’s control over the scientific and industrial sectors. Concurrently, the scientific contributions of West-trained scientists were increasingly dissociated from their bodies, transforming them from carriers of scientific capital into replaceable laborers, while a new generation of domestically trained scientists emerged, rendering the earlier West-trained scientists more replaceable and, therefore, more vulnerable. In other words, this period marked the proletarianization of scientists. Furthermore, this nationalization of scientific capital constituted a process of socialist primitive accumulation. The successful nuclear test in October 1964 symbolized a significant achievement in this socialist primitive accumulation of scientific capital, paving the way for the launch of the Cultural Revolution.
Shellen Wu, Lehigh University
The Entscheidungsproblem of Chinese Science
In this paper I propose to focus on three specific case studies of Chinese scientists in the 1940s: the meteorologist Zhu Kezhen (Co-ching Chu 1890-1974), the aerospace engineer Qian Xuesen (1911-2009), and physicist Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997). The choices made by these three scientists in the late 1940s figure into part of a larger project on the uses of GISciense and AI in historical narratives.
All three were trained in the United States. At the end of the civil war, Zhu chose to remain in China rather than follow Chiang’s government to Taiwan. In the 1950s, Zhu was appointed the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zhu’s extended professional networks contributed to China’s continued international presence in science during the Maoist years, during its period of greatest diplomatic isolation. During the Second World War, Qian Xuesen joined the Manhattan Project. In 1949, however, Qian was accused of harboring Communist sympathies and detained in California for years before he was allowed to return to China in 1955. Qian went on to head one of the signal scientific achievements of the Maoist era, the combined nuclear, rocket, and satellite program named “Two Bombs and One Satellite.” Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, considered one of the pioneering American women in science in the twentieth century, similarly contributed to the Manhattan Project. Unlike Qian, however, Wu remained in the US for the rest of her career and became the first woman to lead the American Physical Society as president in 1975.
Zuoyue Wang, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (virtual presenter)
Transnational Networks of Chinese Science
During the critical decade of 1945-1955, elite Chinese scientists formed transnational networks that included communities in mainland China, Taiwan, the United States, Europe and other parts of the world. Against the backdrop of the intensifying Chinese civil war and the early global Cold War, many of them found that they had to make fateful choices that would affect where they and their families would live and work. This paper examines the experiences of a number of these leading Chinese scientists in this period, drawing on recently available primary sources such as the diary of Zhu Kezhen, a leading Chinese meteorologist who maintained extensive contact with members of the global Chinese scientific elite, and files from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It argues that often such decisions were informed not just by a single factor, but by a combination of geopolitical, professional, and personal considerations and circumstances, with implications for not only their own scientific careers but also national science and technology policy, especially in China and the US.
Fa-ti fan, Binghamton University (virtual presenter)
Networks, movements, and boundaries: (trans)local, (trans)national, and (trans)regional science in 20th-century China
- War and Representation
Webinar 2 and Room 221
Yu Liu, UC Santa Barbara (virtual presenter)
Representing the People, Representing the Nation?: Nationality, Ethnicity and the Paradigm of Representation in Modern China
This paper examines the relationship between political representation and the formation of ethnic identity in China during the 1930s and 1940s. Utilizing diverse sources from the KMT archive in Taipei, including telegraphs from ethnic minority leaders, professional groups, and salt industry unions, it showcases a distinct model of representation within the Republican era’s political discourse. The study begins by exploring petitions from political elites of Tibet and Inner Mongolia regarding the representation of ethnic minorities in the National Assembly. Despite the Nationalist revolutionaries’ initial commitment to “Five Races Under One Union,” ethnic minorities continued to press the Nationalist government to fulfill its promises until 1946. By juxtaposing the demands of ethnic minorities with those of professional groups, the paper argues that the nuanced interplay between rights and responsibilities significantly influenced the strategies adopted by various groups seeking political representation. Furthermore, it investigates how different groups leveraged their contributions to the Nationalist government’s wartime efforts as a basis for demanding representation, thereby challenging the official representation discourse. Through analyzing ethnic minorities’ articulation of what, whom, and how to represent, the paper demonstrates that the constitutional discourse prompted both social and political mobilization, even in the absence of a functional representative democracy.
Chaoran Ma, University of Toronto
Adultery, Bigamy and Justice in the Rear Area during the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945.
This article investigates wartime laws on marriage and sexuality, as well as women’s endeavors to attain marriage freedom and sexual autonomy during the Total War. Using the newly opened archives of Bishan County Experimental Local Court in Chongqing (重庆璧山县实验地方法院), this article sheds light on a little-studied group of Chinese women: those who lived in the rear area amidst the Sino-Japanese War (抗战大后方). Because of extreme poverty, rapid social changes, and the absence of their husbands who were serving in the army, many women living in the rear area were involved in adultery, elopement, bigamy, and remarriage. To defend the stability of the family, the nationalist government issued a series of wartime statutes and attempted to enforce them through judicial experimentation, even at the cost of marriage freedom and sexual autonomy. As one of the most important sites of such experimentation, Bishan local court imposed mandatory mediation (强制调解) on marital disputes and rejected most of the divorce petitions from military spouses. However, despite facing significant constraints, some women persisted in voicing their perspectives on marriage and sexuality in petitions and court hearings, pursuing love, freedom, and justice in the most difficult times.
Matthew J Douthitt, Penn State
Clandestine China: Extraterritorial Violence and the National Revolution Abroad, 1895-1919
This talk explores seldom-discussed yet pervasive incidents of extraterritorial violence preceding and in the decade following the Xinhai Revolution of 1911. State-centric narratives tend to portray the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty as a relatively bloodless coup led by travelling nation-builders like Sun Yat-sen. This misguided assumption obscures the turbulent nature of partisan violence in favor of linear storytelling and the elevation of national heroes. In actuality, a clandestine network of Chinese émigrés enabled acts of extraterritorial violence across the wider Pacific region.
The anti-monarchial revolution was not a minor national affair; rather, it was a protracted global conflict with ethnonationalist aims. A transnational, clandestine network enabled the flow of fugitive revolutionaries and their anti-Manchu ideals across the Pacific. Overseas Chinese enclaves, therefore, served as workshops of revolution: important sites to distribute propaganda, acquire weapons, and exchange knowledge. Migrant workers that also traversed this network actively engaged with these ideals, actively participating in assassinations and smuggling operations. By using popular violence as a framework, my research seeks to recontextualize the revolutionary role of the migrant working-class, nonstate actors, and illicit organizations in the antimonarchical revolution.
Chair: David Luesink
4:00-4:30pm – Coffee BREAK
4:30 – 6 pm
- “Recentering Sino-Tibet in the Early Twentieth Century: Transregional Politics, Ideas, and People”
Webinar 1 and Room 220
Discussant: Benno Weiner, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, bweiner@andrew.cmu.edu
Tashi Namgyal, PhD Candidate, Pennsylvania State University
‘Destabilizing the Frontier: Qing’s Implementation of the Gaitu Guiliu (改土歸流) System in Kham and its Impact on Shaping the Local Attitudes and the Final Years of the Qing-Tibet Relations, 1900-1911’
Despite its waning power and influence in the imperial heartland at the dawn of the 20th century, the Qing exhibited great zeal in strengthening its control over the Sino-Tibetan frontier region of Kham through a grand scheme that sought to politically centralize the region’s administration and to sinicize the local populations culturally. To achieve this end, Qing introduced the System of Gaitu Guiliu (改土歸流), an elaborate imperial policy that disrupted the power dynamic of the region by eliminating the traditional influence of the Buddhist monasteries over the Khampa communities as well as the authority of the native chieftains. This presentation highlights the impact of this crucial Qing policy in shaping the political attitudes of the local Khampa communities as well as its role in calibrating the 13th Dalai Lama (1876–1933) and the Gaden Phodrang government’s complicated relations with the Qing in the twilight years of the empire. This history is set against the backdrop of the British military expedition to Central Tibet in 1904 and the subsequent transregional exile and travels of the Dalai Lama.
Scott Relyea, Associate Professor, Appalachian State University, atongchan@gmail.com (virtual presenter)
‘A Temple and an Inn: Remembering and Forgetting the Tibetan Presence in Chengdu’
As revolution challenged the Qing Empire in November 1911, Sichuan Province declared independence, proclaiming its new ‘Great Han Military Government’ would treat Manchu, Mongol, Muslim, and Han citizens equally. Missing, however, were Tibetans, who in the early twentieth century – and today – comprise a majority in western Sichuan and were the target of a ‘civilising mission’ led by Sichuan officials during the Qing’s last years. Following this curious erasure, this paper explores the history of Tibetan presence in Chengdu, focusing on two institutions which highlight the city’s centuries-old role as an important centre of contact and interaction between Tibetan and imperial (Han) Chinese societies in the commercial, cultural, and governmental realms. As early as the Ming, Lama Temple hosted religious tribute missions en route to Beijing from Tibetan and Himalayan rulers. During the Qing, Fenghuiguan served as an inn for indigenous Khampa rulers delivering tribute, facilitating their management by military officials. Employing historical Chengdu maps, historical and recent gazetteers, personal reflections published in Wenshi ziliao, tourist guidebooks from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and historical markers posted recently across the city, this paper analyses both the awareness and remembrance of this Tibetan presence among the largely Han population of Chengdu.
Zachary Clark, PhD Candidate, Pennsylvania State University, zac5055@psu.edu (virtual presenter)
‘Amdo Tibetan Buddhists and Educational Reform: Translation and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Xining, 1920-1938’
Throughout the Republican period in twentieth-century China, widespread movements, such as the May Fourth Movement in 1919, played key roles in empowering newly formed social, political, and intellectual organizations to seek divergent forms of modernity by adapting local/regional traditions. The analysis of widespread public educational reforms has tended to be centered around eastern urban centers such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, effectively displacing the more western regions from discussions of education’s transformation and print culture. In this presentation, I center the multiethnic municipality of Xining in China’s northwest Qinghai Province from 1920 to 1938. In 1920, the Qinghai government official Li Dan founded the Xining Tibetan Research Society, which played a pivotal role in integrating the diverse Mongolian and Tibetan communities into the Chinese state. Through translation of key Tibetan Buddhist texts into Chinese and Chinese school textbooks into Tibetan, the organization and surrounding local monasteries forged a new intellectual cross-cultural network that reshaped Xining educational reforms. Centering the cross-cultural and linguistic interactions of Tibetan Buddhists and the Ma family government in Qinghai expands our understanding of Chinese intellectual movements, as well as shows in China’s northwestern regions the process of modern Chinese state formation was a multiethnic pursuit.
- Contingent Pasts: Creating Role-Playing Games on Modern China
Webinar 2 and Room 221
This panel introduces role-playing games to have students embody historical characters and experience contingency firsthand. In addition to using existing games from the Reacting to the Past pedagogy, each panelist has developed their own games to teach Modern China surveys. Larissa Pitts is developing a game on Chinese responses to the opium crisis of the 1830s. Students can learn about Chinese court life and politics, as well as the social history of opium use. David Luesink has developed short games for moments in modern Chinese history, such as the Boxer Uprising and the May Fourth movement, that reveal the complexities of social pressures driving historical actors. Amy O’Keefe’s game is set in China’s National Christian Conference of 1922 and invites students to grapple with the interplays of imperialism, nationalism, theology, education, and gender. Yidi Wu has designed two games – one on the 1989 Tiananmen Protests, and the other on the Muslim minorities in contemporary Xinjiang. The former is based on dialogues between student activists and government officials, with counterfactual characters of intellectuals, workers and journalists. The latter asks students to come up with responses to government crackdowns as Hui, Kazakh and Uyghur Muslims. We will address the opportunities and challenges in creating historical role-playing games and incorporating students in the research process.
Organizer’s Name
Yidi Wu
Assistant Professor of History, Elon University
ywu3@elon.edu
Participants’ Names, Affiliations and Contact Information
David Luesink
Associate Professor of History, Sacred Heart University
luesinkd@sacredheart.edu
Larissa Pitts
Assistant Professor of History, Quinnipiac University
larissa.pitts@quinnipiac.edu
Amy O’Keefe (virtual presenter)
Independent Scholar
amyroxie@gmail.com
6:00pm – Reception Lobby of BIB
Saturday, September 14
9:00 – 10:30 am
- Marginal Actors and the Power Dynamics of Knowledge Making
Webinar 1 and Room 220
History of science in modern China conventionally prioritizes governments, international corporations, and foreign (and foreign-trained) experts, seeing them as the main agents of scientific “modernization.” This panel complicates linear narratives by exploring alternative perspectives. We highlight the roles of actors from the margin-animals, ethnic minorities, lay practitioners, etc.-in shaping disciplines making and social engineering, drawing particular attention to the power dynamics in knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
Shinyi Hsieh discusses how Formosan rock monkey became a crucial carriers of knowledge in a transnational network of natural history and medical research, pointing out that the treatments of primates shaped the logic of colonialism; Yichen Zhao investigates the diverse process of defining the “yellow race” in physical anthropology studies, showing that the modern understanding of the Chinese body was drawn upon the analysis of fossils, embryo and encounters with ethnic minority groups; Mengliu Cheng discusses the debates and negotiations between lay practitioners and technocrats over agricultural technological inventions, and how scientific authority and national sovereignty could be entangled especially in the cases of Nanjing and postwar Taiwan.
Showing a broad spectrum of actors and spaces of knowledge making-from humans to non-humans, from core to periphery, from professionals to laypeople-we reveal how racism, nationalism, (post)colonialism were embedded in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge, and how Chinese understanding of “science” were in fact profoundly shaped by those who have not taken a central stage in the historiography of modern science in China.
Shinyi Hsieh, Harvard University (virtual presenter)
Colonial Encounters and Scientific Transformations of Formosan Rock Monkey in Taiwan, 1900s — 1960s.
Science has a rich history with animals, serving both as carriers of knowledge and reflecting changing global power dynamics. In postwar Taiwan, the “Formosan rock monkey,” the island’s one and only indigenous monkey species, became a crucial subject in Sino-US cooperative research on infectious diseases. This article, inspired by recent scholarship in animal history and indigenous studies, examines the scientific formation of the Formosan rock monkey by tracing its historical interactions with Japanese zoologists and natural historians as well as Sino-US cooperative researchers. Throughout the paper, I argue that, the different forms of scientific engagement with Formosan rock monkey were carried out under and through the similar logic of coloniality. The Formosan rock monkey, as known as “Macaca cyclopis,” was differentiated from other Asian monkeys within the colonial taxonomy established by Japanese medical zoologists; these zoologists, alongside Japanese anthropologists, drew racial analogies between the species and the indigenous people of Taiwan. As Taiwan monkeys became diplomatic objects by the Chinese Nationalist regime during early postwar, this political agenda also led to the incorporation of the Formosan rock monkey into U.S. laboratory experiments in Taiwan, grounded in the epistemological accumulation of colonial science.
Yichen Zhao, Peking University
Knowing Chinese Bodies: The Physical Anthropology Studies at the Department of Anatomy, Peking Union Medical College (1917-1941)
This paper examines how the “yellow race” was perceived and defined through physical anthropology research at the Department of Anatomy in Peking Union Medical College (PUMC). It argues that racial knowledge in modern China was constructed through researchers’ encounters with certain forms of Chinese bodies, from dissected human remains and embryo specimens obtained by hospitals, to skeletal fossils and ethnic groups that researchers engaged with in fieldworks, often through certain power dynamics: for example, in order to secure enough bodies for dissection, PUMC required patients to sign a contract to agree with that before they could be sent into the hospital. These bodies, stripped of personal experiences and cultural backgrounds, were fitted into a novel analytical framework that utilized limited sample data to extrapolate inherited traits of broader populations, including mental ability. They facilitated ambitious studies that aimed at constructing the normal growth patterns of Chinese individuals, contrasting racial differences and contributing to a global discussion on human evolution.
Mengliu Cheng, University of Pennsylvania
Regulating the Rural Genius: Mass Innovation Campaigns and the Making of Agricultural Science in Republican China, 1911-1949
In contrast to the Maoist era, the historiography of agriculture in Republican China has been marked by a rather top-down narrative; new knowledge and technologies about farming were “diffused” from the West to the East, from research institutes to the masses. This paper redirects attention to grassroots agency, discussing how lay practitioners renovated farming methods to address China’s environmental crisis, with a focus on a series of state-initiated campaigns that encourage using vernacular expertise to counter China’s resources shortages and crippled industry. Coming up with newly invented farming equipments, crop varieties, fertilizer formulas, etc, these lay practitioners demonstrated a broad spectrum of understandings about nature and technologies. What’s more, their conflicts and cooperations with official scientists created knowledge scenes where concepts such as “experiment” and “pseudoscience” were debated and negotiated. Through evaluating, rejecting, or endorsing those informal expertise, especially by putting them to experiments, technocrats and research institutions defined the boundaries of “agriculture science” as an object of scientific inquiry, and established themselves as authority of knowledge. This scientific authority further mingled with the matter of sovereignty especially after WWII as technocrats in Nanjing began to handle applications from the newly restored Taiwan.
Discussant: Lijing Jiang, Johns Hopkins
- Infrastructures of Knowledge and Power
Webinar 2 and Room 221
Hongyun Lyu (PhD Candidate in History, University of Toronto)
The Cultural Revolution on the Power Lines: Technopolitics of the Electrical Infrastructure in North China
Based on the archives, internal reports, and newspapers, this paper investigates how the Cultural Revolution shaped the structure of electrical infrastructure in North China. In 1965, the electrical infrastructure in Baoding district was separated into two parts managed by different bureaus based on rural-urban divide: the Baoding Municipal Electrical Bureau, the branch of the Beijing Electricity Administration Bureau, managed the power lines above 35kV and 110 kV and industrial and urban consumption after the Baoding district connected to the Jing-Jin-Tang grid; the Baoding District Electrical Bureau became the institute in charge of the power lines below 10 kV and power consumption in the countryside. They shared the same dispatch office and worked in the same building from the start. However, the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution catalyzed the conflicts between these two bureaus. In 1974, the Baoding Municipal Electrical Bureau took all the staff of the dispatch office and moved to a new building. After that, the two bureaus cut off each other’s power lines and occupied each other’s substations and transformers, causing frequent blackouts and a decade of conflicts until the 1980s. This paper argues that the Cultural Revolution exacerbated the structural problems of the electrical infrastructure rooted in the rural-urban divide.
Aaron Gilkison, Stanford University and Maciej Kurzyński, Lingnan University, Hong Kong (virtual presenter)
Vectors of Violence: Legitimation and Distribution of State Power in the People’s Liberation Army Daily (Jiefangjun Bao), 1956-1989
From personal memoirs and cooking recipes to revolutionary agitation and war coverage, the People’s Liberation Army Daily offers a wealth of insights into the sociopolitical and affective realities of post-1949 China. One of the few major periodicals that continued publication during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the journal has received relatively scant attention from scholars. Combining close reading and historical analysis with quantitative conceptuality and text mining, we demonstrate how the PLA Daily legitimizes state violence differently through its representation of various soldier figures, the zhanshi, the junren, and the minbing. Whereas sociologists and political scientists have viewed war mobilization as key to the Communist Party’s rise in 1949, literary scholars and art historians have focused on affective political energy in revolution and nation-building. This has created a gap between sociopolitical and cultural analyses that we aim to bridge by exploring the mechanisms of affective distribution underlying legitimized violence in modern China. We show how quantitative approaches to texts can expand the methodological and theoretical horizons of historical research, offering new insights into violence, legitimacy, and agency in the journal, and in Maoist writing more generally, and showing how state-directed sentiments enhanced political propaganda through this important official publication.
Boyao Zhang, University of Toronto
The Abacus as Computer of Industry: Commercial Arithmetic and Clerical Numeracy in 20th-Century China, 1900s-1980s
The abacus, or suanpan, had traditionally been a means of numeracy for commercial clerks, who only needed to memorize a series of formulas to be able to work with numbers. The rise of modern financial reporting and cost accounting made accounting more dependent on statistics, and this entailed an increase of the use of complex arithmetic operations in the everyday clerical work of commercial calculation. Drawing from merchant manuals, technical journals, and pedagogical publications of abacus instructors, this paper will document how 20th-century business professionals, to adapt to the new realities of modern industry, sought to create a new approach to abacus calculation that would replace rote memorization with the mechanics of written arithmetic altogether.
This paper will argue that these new methods would transform the abacus from a means of numeracy into a calculative aid, as mastery of written arithmetic would now be the precondition for abacus manipulation. On the one hand, Chinese business professionals and clerks were able to adapt the abacus to the needs of 20th-century modern enterprises. On the other hand, the new methods of abacus calculation, in emphasizing comprehension through abstract arithmetic reasoning, raised the threshold of commercial numeracy. As a result, abacus calculation became an increasingly elitist skill, a situation that the Chinese Communist state would attempt to rectify during the years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Chair: Di Luo
10:30am-11:00am coffee break, lobby of BIB
Saturday, 11:00-12:30
- Present Pasts: Uneven Equality, Revolutionary Buddhism, and Sick Pigs
Webinar 1 and Room 220
Discussant: Viren Murthy, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison (virtual presenter)
Kelvin Ng, PhD candidate, Yale University, k.ng@yale.edu
Imperium in Imperio: Chinese Migration and the Labor Question in Colonial Malaya, 1920–1940
As growing numbers of Indian and Chinese laborers were recruited for the rubber and tin mining industries in British Malaya, its urban centers—including Penang, Kuala Lumpur, and especially Singapore—emerged as regional centers for the publication and circulation of texts in various vernaculars, ushering in a dramatic expansion of the public sphere. This revolution in mobility, often under profoundly unequal conditions, in turn lent credence to a novel ethical ideal: equality. Drawing on a range of vernacular sources in Chinese, Tamil and Malay, my paper examines the emerging social significance of labor to political arguments around equality in British Malaya. It argues that the connected experiences of these migrant communities gave rise to new forms of cultural reform, literary experimentation, and political activism in the colony. Focusing on early attempts by various thinkers at translating certain Marxist categories (including “value,” “capital,” and “labor-power”) into Chinese and Tamil, it traces an intellectual history of “equality”—understood as an ethical principle, claimed by several communist writers, and translated into the region’s various vernaculars— and concomitant critiques of colonial capitalism as intimately tied to the social history of mass migration and uneven development in British Malaya.
Yasser Ali Nasser, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, ynasser@utk.edu
Revolutionary Dharma: The Buddhist Association of China and Finding Socialist Pasts
How did narratives of the distant past inform revolutionary politics in the early PRC? Few tropes in China during the first half of the 20th century were used as often to skewer the supposed ‘backwardness’ of Chinese culture and tradition as that of Buddhist monks purportedly idling away in monasteries and temples. After Liberation, a progressive group of Buddhist laypeople and monastics at the head of the Buddhist Association of China sought to shed this image by highlighting the dharma’s potential as a vehicle for actualizing socialist ideals. They did so by drawing on the ancient Indian past: through creative retellings of stories about the Buddha’s life, the Buddhist Association cast him as an intrepid revolutionary and anti-imperialist and called upon Chinese Buddhists to restore the faith to its ‘Indian’ ideals. By using these historical narratives, the Buddhist Association argued to its state backers that the ideals of mass equality and revolutionary agitation were core Buddhist precepts which could strengthen the nation, hasten socialist reconstruction, and win friends abroad by reconnecting the Chinese sangha with Buddhist populations in neighboring countries. In return, they promised their audience that participating in the revolution meant that the socialist government would protect religious freedoms.
Niu Teo, PhD Candidate in History, University of Chicago, niuteo@uchicago.edu
Pig pandemic: A swinocentric study of global disease?
In 2018, when African Swine Fever (ASF) made its way into the country, China lost as much as 50% of its pig population which, at the time, made up about 50% of the world’s pig population. The unprecedented scale and rapidity of the spread had to do with the combination of how simultaneously populous and small-scale Chinese pig production was. The industry’s takeaway from the event was the need for greater ‘biosecurity,’ which meant cracking down on swill feeding and small-scale pig production, even though the root cause of the spread had more to do with the circulating trucks carrying feed and swine. In fact, the concentration of pig populations and the homogenization of pig feed has caused pig pandemics ever since the epidemics of hog cholera that plagued the corn-fed American pigs of the 1880’s, which, at the time, were produced at an unprecedented scale and density. However, the industry response on both sides of the Pacific has repeatedly been increased concentration. In tracing the causes, symptoms, and effects of pig pandemics from hog cholera to ASF, this talk explores the effect of globally circulating diseases and biosecurity measures which incentivize and enable the concentration and enmeshment of markets.
Ka Shing So, Binghamton University
Networks and Techniques of Gold Smuggling in Cold War Hong Kong: A Historical Analysis
This article delves into the intricate dynamics of gold smuggling in Cold War Hong Kong, focusing on the intersection between everyday life, state regulations, and global geopolitical structures. It explores the motivations, methods, and socio-economic implications of individual smugglers engaged in gold smuggling. Employing a micro-history perspective, the study reveals vernacular techniques utilized by smugglers, including the modification of everyday objects, cabins, and the human body, showcasing their resourcefulness and resilience within a highly regulated environment.
The research argues that these vernacular techniques were not only shaped by individual agency but were also influenced by interactions with other actors. This article, therefore, highlights the fluidity and ambiguity within the Cold War in Hong Kong. The adaptable nature of these smuggling operations underscores the complex web of interactions and negotiations in defining the format of vernacular techniques in the gold smuggling pattern. The multifaceted dynamics at within vernacular practices, illustrates the nuanced relationship between individual agency and broader socio-economic structures in Hong Kong. The pervasive influence of vernacular technology reveals the balance between evading detection and maximizing profits within a regulated environment, providing insights into the complex interplay between local technological ingenuity operations during this period.
- The Politics of Information, Knowledge and Propaganda in Modern China
Webinar 2 and Room 221
This panel brings together four scholars working on topics related to the themes of information, knowledge, and propaganda in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In each case, the speaker addresses textual sources that were self-consciously assembled for the purpose of informing readers about, or persuading readers of, political ideas. The degree to which politics were in the foreground of these textual projects varied considerably, as did the nature of the politics in question.
In Chris Reed’s paper politics are front and center. Reed concentrates on writings by Dai Jitao in the Nationalist Party (KMT) journal Central Weekly, whose texts were explicitly propagandistic, designed to inculcate political ideas and methodological approaches within the membership of Republican China’s leading political party, thereby laying the groundwork for a “tutelary,” or “pedagogical” state. Emily Mokros’ paper on the afterlives of post-Taiping Rebellion commemoration also focuses on political subject matter. In her work the politics involved shifting conceptualizations and uses of the past in the context of the politics of the early twentieth century present. Mokros makes use of a range of sources to discuss a de-centralized political and cultural history project. Whereas Reed’s and Mokros’ contributions are both centered in China, Rob Culp’s and Tim Weston’s papers situate China in a transnational context. Culp’s work is the most geographically transnational of the group, as it addresses the translation of Western and Japanese knowledge via a range of Chinese language texts disseminated in overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia by China’s two largest publishing companies. Culp investigates the early twentieth century construction of book and journal circulation networks flexible enough to accommodate ever-changing political contexts and to foster two-way intellectual traffic between Southeast Asia and wartime China. Weston’s paper is transnational insofar as it focuses on foreign actors in 19th century China who wrote in English about Chinese society and politics. In particular, he studies how foreigners made the case in English-language newspapers and magazines that they published in China that China needed a periodical press in order to break out of its isolation and join the modern world. Weston highlights the explicit and implicit politics that informed their advocacy of a Chinese press, as well as the conceptualization of the intellectual and political role of “the press” that it entailed.
The four papers in this panel each focus on knowledge and information as constructed entities, and on the various ways they traveled in both space and time. They are united in their attention to politics, though they come at “the political” from different directions. As a group, the papers cover a century of time, and focus on China in a domestic and transnational context.
Tim Weston, University of Colorado, Boulder
The West to China: Develop a Periodical Press and Join the World
By the 1830s, the critique that China was backwards and outside the flow of history was commonplace among foreigners. The corollary was that China needed to be opened up, by force, if necessary. But few sensible observers believed that challenging the Qing government militarily would in and of itself bring about the kind of thoroughgoing intellectual transformation that they were convinced China needed. Other means, mostly focused on education, were seen as the key to that transformation. One of the most consistent arguments made by foreigners from the early nineteenth century was that China needed to allow for the development of a modern-style press, to allow for the publication of newspapers and magazines.
Weston’s paper is transnational insofar as it focuses on foreign actors in 19th century China who wrote in English about Chinese society and politics. In particular, he studies how foreigners made the case in English-language newspapers and magazines that they published in China that China needed a periodical press in order to break out of its isolation and join the modern world. Weston highlights the explicit and implicit politics that informed their advocacy of a Chinese press, as well as the conceptualization of the intellectual and political role of “the press” that it entailed.
Rob Culp, Bard College
Circulating Translated Knowledge Transnationally: The Shanghai-Hong Kong-Singapore Network
Shanghai’s two largest publishing companies, Commercial Press and Zhonghua Book Company, were major sources of translated knowledge for Sinophone readers throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Monographs, series publications, textbooks, and periodicals provided both direct translations of seminal Western and Japanese works and synthetic formulations of particular academic fields and subjects. This paper explains how those works circulated not just to the domestic reading public in China but to the growing community of overseas Chinese readers in Southeast Asia, and it explores the implications of that circulation.
Shanghai publishers were able to reach huaqiao readers in Southeast Asia with translated modern knowledge by constructing a transnational distribution system through a tiered network that connected Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and smaller cities and towns throughout Southeast Asia. Starting in the 1910s, books compiled and printed in Shanghai were transshipped through Hong Kong to publishers’ branch offices and affiliated retailers in Singapore. Singapore branch offices and affiliated retailers in turn distributed books and periodicals to local bookstores and schools throughout the region. Starting in the late 1920s, however, many publications destined for the Southeast Asia market were printed in the companies’ Hong Kong-based printing factories and then directly distributed to Singapore. During the war and extending into the post-war period, Hong Kong further became a site for compilation and publication of books by the major Chinese publishers. Reconstructing these networks of production and distribution reveals the extent to which Chinese publishers were transnational ventures that constructed flexible networks between semi-colonial Shanghai and the colonial commercial cities of Hong Kong and Singapore to access new markets.
Extension of Chinese publishers’ products to overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia had profound implications for the production and dissemination of knowledge. For one, it meant that overseas Chinese communities in British, Dutch, and French colonies learned about the modern world, at least in part, through texts produced by Chinese intellectuals, who translated knowledge about the West and Japan for Chinese-language readers, thereby dampening the power of European cultural hegemony. Further, robust circulation of Chinese publications allowed overseas Chinese intellectuals in Southeast Asia to participate actively in Chinese intellectual life. For instance, the South Seas Study Society’s (Nanyang xuehui) signature monograph series was published by Commercial Press in Chongqing during the war, effectively “translating” knowledge about Southeast Asia for Chinese readers. In sum, the major publishers’ transnational publication and distribution networks facilitated the dissemination of modern Western and Japanese knowledge to overseas Chinese communities while also enabling the “translation” of knowledge about Southeast Asia back into the Chinese context. In both processes, Chinese intellectuals played a vital mediating role.
Emily Mokros, University of Kentucky
North China’s Taiping War in Memory, Monument, and Media
In 1904, when a revisionist history of the Taiping Rebellion entitled Taiping tianguo zhan shi 太平天國戰史 was published in Tokyo, fifty years had elapsed since the Taiping’s push north towards Beijing and Tianjin. Though the rebels failed to take any cities, their campaign had revealed the shortcomings of northern military leadership and incurred significant death and destruction in the capital region. After its conclusion, the northern war was memorialized in a patchwork fashion. The court minimized the social impact of the campaign in its official record, while celebrating the capture of the expedition’s leaders as a major military exploit. Localities enshrined upstanding officials and commemorated lost townsmen. Within twenty years, however, both valorous deaths and calamities had been subsumed into a general narrative of recent years of social, economic, and military upheaval. Finally, scholar-officials and military secretaries circulated anecdotes that were later re-compiled in “unofficial history” (yeshi 野史) compilations. In this presentation, I will examine the afterlives of postwar commemoration in the early twentieth century, focusing on newspapers, local gazetteers, new histories, and records of martyr’s shrines in North China.
Chris Reed, Ohio State University (virtual presenter)
Learning from a Wise Man: Dai Jitao (1891-1949), Nanjing’s Central Weekly 《中央週報》， and the KMT’s Pedagogical State, 1932-33
The paper examines a selection of articles published by Dai Jitao 戴季陶 in the Nationalist Party (KMT) journal, Central Weekly (中央週報 [ZYZB]). An internal circulation-only and machine-printed publication, ZYZB was published in Nanjing by the party propaganda department (宣傳部 [XCB]) from June 1928. During the Tutelage Phase of state-building, it provided China’s ruling party a means of educating its membership, particularly at the lower levels of party membership, in party ideology and history. In this way, it contributed to Republican China’s “tutelary” or “pedagogical” state with a focus on the party itself.
The KMT and Sun Yat-sen re-organized its early 1920s XCB in 1924. Four years later, with Sun dead, conflict with the Communists out in the open, and Nanjing proclaimed the new capital, this internal party propaganda department expanded its reach sufficiently to substitute for the party-state’s propaganda ministry. It did so partly by building and outfitting its own printing facility, which allowed the party to guarantee the confidentiality of ZYZB’s content.
Drawing on internal documents from Taipei’s KMT Archives, as well as on published articles attributed to one of the KMT’s leading “wise men,” the paper addresses issues of party-state organization, inner party dynamics, and mobilization in the early 1930s. The social history of official print culture also sheds light on state-building by China’s early pedagogical state and will contribute to discussions of elite circulation, power and governance, intellectual and cultural elites, and elite networks and institutions.
12:30pm-2:00pm – LUNCH – Lobby of BIB
Saturday, 2:00- 3:30
- Roundtable: Gateway to the East: Re-Exhibiting China at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair in 2024
Webinar 1 and Room 220
One of the key moments in the global history of the late Qing was the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, or St. Louis World’s Fair. A showcase for American imperialist ambition and cultural superiority, the 1904 fair was also an opportunity for Chinese cultural diplomacy in the wake of the Boxer Crisis and the New Policies Reform. In Spring 2024, a group of scholars and students, primarily based at Washington University in St. Louis, put together an exhibition – G_a_t_e_w_a_y_ _t_o_ _t_h_e_ _E_a_s_t_:_ _C_h_i_n_a_ _a_t_ _t_h_e_ _S_t_._ _L_o_u_i_s_ _W_o_r_l_d_’s_ _F_a_i_r_,_ _1_9_0_4_ _– on China’s participation in the 1904 fair. Based on two years of collaborative research and curation between historians, librarians, university students, and involving multiple local institutions and community groups, the exhibition was held in the Washington University Olin Library, close to some of the original sites of the 1904 exposition.
Using Qing archives, American newspapers, exhibition catalogs, bulletins and correspondences, and travel writings, the exhibition traced the experiences of Chinese diplomats, their American hosts, and members of the Chinese community in St. Louis and presented a fresh story of the 1904 exposition through multiple perspectives and a series of public-facing activities, including tours, a symposium, a scavenger hunt, and a public history book under preparation. On the 120th anniversary of the 1904 fair, this roundtable revisits the process of exhibiting China’s participation in the St. Louis exposition through discussing both the key historical figures highlighted in the exhibition as well as the project’s curatorial planning process as an Edu-Curation approach.
Zhao Ma, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History and Culture, Washington University in St. Louis (zhaoma@wustl.edu)
Topic: Leading a transdisciplinary and collaborative team of researchers to explore opportunities for immersive and community-based learning; disseminating research findings in genres including public-facing sessions, virtual programs, and exhibition materials
Lingran Zhang, PhD student in Museum Education, Dean’s Distinguished University Fellow, The Ohio State University (zhang.14213@osu.edu)
Topic: Edu-Curation and museum exhibitions as a “third place”; the lifecycle of Empress Dowager Cixi’s Portrait
Margherita (Maggie) Marchionni, Undergraduate Student, Washington University in St. Louis (m.maggie@wustl.edu)
Topic: The Undergraduate Humanities research experience; Investigating the Fair’s President David Francis and his role and goals in securing China’s Participation at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair
Chenguang Zhu, PhD in British History, Boston University (czhu91@bu.edu / cgzhu91@gmail.com) (virtual presenter)
Topic: The Chinese Pavilion on Pages: The Qing Maritime Customs Service and Its Role in Displaying China in St. Louis
Ke Ren, Assistant Professor of History, College of the Holy Cross (kren@holycross.edu)
Topic: Late Qing regional representatives as exposition critics and experts
- Internationalizing Knowledge in Twentieth-Century China: Culture, Institution, and Technology
Webinar 2 and Room 221
This panel brings together three papers with diverse themes and methodologies in the historical study of political knowledge in twentieth-century China. The papers highlight how the cultures, institutions, and technologies of political knowledge played an essential role in the internationalization of twentieth-century China.
Sean Han traces the anti-colonial knowledge production by the China-based Korean diplomat Cho Soang in the 1930s. By analyzing Cho’s representation of Korea’s traditional culture in sinographic writing, he highlights how Korean exiles in China mobilized anti-colonial knowledge in building alliances with China and the United States while maintaining an independent Korean identity.
Xiao Liu analyzes the institutional foundation for China’s global knowledge distribution networks in the 1950s. Focusing on Guozi Shudian and its operations in East and West Germany, her research highlights how the infrastructure of knowledge distribution contributed to Chinese cultural diplomacy within and beyond the socialist world during the Cold War.
Zhongtian Han reveals the internationalized origins and employment of the Chinese Communist Party’s radio institutions in 1927–1933. Putting Party, Nationalist, and Russian archives into dialogue, his research shifts scholarly narratives on the Party’s technology policies from mass line and self-reliance to the transnational diffusion of knowledge.
The three papers of this panel reveal how knowledge and information systems transcend political, cultural, and institutional boundaries in twentieth-century China. Taken together, this panel adds essential theoretical and methodological insights to the historical study of global China and the politics of knowledge in the twentieth century.
Dr. Sean Han, Assistant Professor, Department of History, The University of Alabama, shan30@ua.edu
“Fish in the Fish Trap”: Korea’s Sinographic Nationalism in 1930s China
Xiao Liu, PhD Candidate, University of Mainz, Germany, xialiu@uni-mainz.de virtual presenter
From Beijing to Berlin: Guozi Shudian and the Global Reach of Chinese Publications in Germany in the 1950s
Dr. Zhongtian Han, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History, Trinity University, hanzhongtian@gmail.com
Internationalized Origins of the Chinese Communist Party’s Radio Communications and Reconnaissance, 1927–1933
Discussant
Dr. Kristin Stapleton, Professor
Department of History, University at Buffalo, kstaple@buffalo.edu
4:00-4:30 pm Coffee Break
4:30 – 6 pm Keynote
Webinar 1 and Room 220
Dr. Mingwei Song, Professor, Wellesley College
New China Revisited: A Posthuman Perspective from the Twenty-First Century.
Sunday
9:00-10:30 am
- The Local in the Post-war: Disrupting Narratives of the State
Webinar 1 and Room 220
China’s victory over Japan in 1945 heralded a more assertive Kuomintang state eager to return to its formerly occupied regions. With the backing of international development projects, many party members and intellectuals were convinced that the country was entering a new post-war period of reconstruction. However, a closer look at local perspectives reveals the fragility of Kuomintang control over individual actors and localities unwilling to accept the narrative of the state. With existing scholarship primarily viewing post-war developments in China through the lens of the central Kuomintang state or national-level figures, this panel will present an alternative approach by focusing on local histories of the post-war. Through re-examining traditional narratives of demobilisation, post-war justice, and population displacement, the local perspectives presented in this panel challenge triumphalist accounts of Kuomintang postwar state building. Together, these papers argue local agency was able to disrupt and critique state narratives of a “peaceful handover”, “lawful punishment” and “patriotic refugees”. Surveying a diverse range of individuals and localities across China, this panel offers differing visions and narratives of a post-war landscape, rejecting the passivity often ascribed to locals and localities in the face of a dominating state.
Simon LAM, University of Oxford
A Tentative Victory: Rural Demobilisation in Shunde, 1945-1946
Dr Jiayi TAO, University of Vienna (virtual presenter)
From Patriots to Unwanted Refugees: Agency of Displaced Non-Elite Chinese in Second World War China
Dr Jonathan HENSHAW, Independent Scholar
Towards a Nanjing Narrative of the Second World War in China: Overcoming the Stigma of an Unspeakable Past
Discussant: Professor Kristin STAPLETON, University at Buffalo
- Frugality and Consumption in Modern China
Webinar 2 and Room 221
Haoran Ni, University of Kansas
Consuming American Lifestyles and Technologies
In Republican Shanghai, eating ice cream became a fashionable way for wealthy Chinese urbanites to refresh themselves in summertime. Among the various ice cream products available, Hazelwood Ice Cream, Henningsen Produce Co.’s signature product, dominated the Shanghai market because of the company’s state-of-the-art freezers and delivery methods. The Henningsen Co. advertised its use of these technologies to promote the idea that preventing ice cream from melting would ensure its freshness and hygiene. Accordingly, having a cup of Hazelwood Ice Cream made it possible for Chinese urbanites to showcase their modern identity. This paper argues that the use of the American modern lifestyle and advanced technologies in Henningsen’s marketing strategies were among the reasons for its success in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Specifically, to triumph over its competitors, the Henningsen Co. demonstrated American ways of life, such as mixed-gender swimming and going to cinemas, in its localized Chinese ads. In addition, the company actively promoted its use of freezers and refrigerated delivery vans, two imported advanced technologies from America, to preserve its ice cream and deliver it, still frozen, to its customers. These marketing techniques effectively embraced the American superiority of Hazelwood Ice Cream and made eating Hazelwood Ice Cream one of the exciting things that Shanghai urbanites could do to enjoy summertime. My research will both contribute to our understanding of transpacific trade in globalization and deepen our knowledge of the ways American technologies and the American lifestyle influenced Chinese urbanites’ perception of modernity.
Margherita Zanasi, Louisiana State University (virtual presenter)
Qinjian jianguo (勤儉建國): Frugality and Nation Building across 1949”
In this paper, I explore continuities in the deployment of frugality, as a mode of minimal consumption, in the plans for economic development of the Republican and early PRC governments. In both cases, frugality was presented as a solution for overcoming China’s economy of scarcity and fighting poverty. The promotion of frugal consumption, however, was primarily motivated by a choice to pursue a model of development that prioritized the state-led heavy industry sector over pursuing the improvement of the living standards of the people, which would have required a focus on the consumer industry. The Republican government’s attempts to promote frugality were hardly successful since it did not possess the PRC power for mass mobilization. The Communist state-controlled economy allowed for new and more effective ways of deploying frugality in support of state goals. As frugality campaigns swept the country, the “frugal and diligent” behavior of the individual became an expression of ardent nationalism and commitment to the revolution as well as the foundation for a Maoist path to Socialist nation building.
Huanjun Zhou, University of Toronto (virtual presenter)
The Dividing Line Between ‘Insignificant Feather’ [鸿毛] and ‘Mount Tai’ [泰山]: Contested Sino-Foreign Boundaries in Nationalist China
This paper revisits the contesting boundaries between foreign treaty ports and the Chinese nationalist regime. In June 1931, British citizen John Thorburn escaped from Shanghai to China’s interior. British consular officials’ pressure to discover his whereabouts received unwelcoming Chinese receptions. Supplementing the historiography of foreign presence in China from a transnational perspective, this paper argues that the Thorburn case was the peak of a heated Sino-foreign debate for China’s proper route to modernisation, where both sides accused the other of hindering China’s progress to this ultimate goal. With Chinese press accounts and recently declassified Chinese Foreign Ministry documents, this study visualises the working system of Sino-foreign divisions in Nationalist China, from which both parties felt insecure. Firstly, Thorburn’s decisions in his journey pointed to the coexistence of Sino-foreign administrations in the buffering zone of Shanghai’s neighbourhood. Secondly, extraterritoriality permitted treaty ports to exert influence beyond written and unwritten Sino-foreign borderlines. The two phenomena were receiving constant pressure from Chinese nationalists, who were also experiencing intellectual anxiety. The incident inflamed Chinese anger at their national humiliation, but given the Republican state’s weak national strength, Chinese nationalists found themselves compelled to swallow the bitter fruits of foreign presence in China.
Post-conference
11:15 am Guided tour of Bethlehem Steel factory led by former steelworker. Meet in parking lot of National Museum of Industrial History (602 E 2nd St, Bethlehem, PA 18015)
Call for Papers for the Biennial Conference of HSTCC 2022
2020 HSTCC Conference Program, Theme: China’s Engagement with the Modern World
HSTCC Mini-Conference-Denver 2019
2018-Arlington, VA Conference; Theme: “Security and Conflict in Twentieth Century China.” 2018 Conference Program; Call for Papers.
