Editorial

Reviewed by: An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China by David Strand Robert J. Culp An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China BY David Strand. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 387. $65.00. Few scholars' oeuvre has the high degree of coherence that David Strand's does. From Rickshaw Beijing, through his articles on the 1989 Tian'anmen protest movement,1 to the book reviewed here, Strand has explored dynamics of political action in twentieth-century China that continue to animate and inflect Chinese politics today. In particular, Strand has analyzed how Chinese political practice has been a medium of both authority and dissent, contributing to the formation of what could be called the "citizenship studies" subfield in the study of modern China.2 Further, he has tracked with great acuity the fluid interplay between culture and politics that modern China inherited from the late imperial past. Strand's latest book continues to explore these themes, with a particular focus on public speaking and its political implications. An Unfinished Republic analyzes the political dynamics of the first decade and a half of the Chinese Republic, reconstructing how they established many of the parameters of Chinese republicanism. Strand is most concerned with the growth of popular participation in politics during this period and how speech making became a key feature of Chinese public life. Even as highly anticipated new political institutions failed, Chinese republicanism flourished in the form of new modes of popular discourse and civic action. In Strand's words, "Within a few years the Republic became entrenched, not so much as a set of national political institutions, but as a political way of life in which citizens confronted leaders and each other face-to-face in a stance familiar to republics worldwide. Political equality as a value and an everyday practice stood in stark contrast to the inequality and hierarchy that long formed the spine of China's social and cultural order" (p. 1). [End Page 171] Strand portrays these emergent political dynamics through thematic chapters that focus, in turn, on the scope of political inclusion, through women's efforts to gain full citizenship in the new polity (Chapter 1), on the development of new modes of public discourse (Chapter 2), and on the dynamics of citizenship (Chapter 4). This thematically driven discussion is complemented by Chapters 3, 5, and 6, which focus on three individuals—Tang Qunying, Lu Zhengxiang, and Sun Yat-sen—who, Strand convincingly argues, shaped the development of Chinese republicanism through their words and actions. The thematic chapters chart in more systematic terms the parameters of popular participation and the emergent structure of direct address between political leaders and the people. The biographical chapters illustrate the terms under which particular Chinese political actors could enter public life by using new patterns of public discourse, and they evaluate the impact of those figures' speech and actions on the dynamics of Chinese politics. By focusing on political organizing and speech making in the first decade or so after the 1911 Revolution, Strand reveals the fluid and contingent nature of early Republican political action. Tang Qunying and other suffragettes were not immediately given speaking roles in the political system founded by the revolution they helped make. They first needed to take dramatic action—"slapping Song Jiaoren" (p. 13)—to claim any place in party politics and the polity. Lu Zhengxiang, as an elite diplomat with extensive experience in Europe, inherited key posts in Yuan Shikai's cabinets, but he badly flubbed a major speaking role before the Senate, in part because he misread the new political context and its requirements. In contrast, Sun Yat-sen, soon deprived by Yuan Shikai of a meaningful institutional base or audience as an official speaker during the early Republic, turned to address "the people" directly, whenever and wherever he could. In doing so, Sun fostered a form of Chinese populism on which Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, among others, would later build. By tracking the political action of these three figures and their contemporaries, Strand subtly illustrates how contingent acts of public address sedimented into a new culture of public...

TwentiethCentury China Volume 30, No.1 November 2004 Twentieth-Century China ISSN: 1521-5385 Published by the Center for Chinese Studies The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109© 2004 by Twentieth-Century China Editorial Board and The Regents of the University of Michigan. All rights reserved. Chief Editor: Christopher A. Reed, The Ohio State University Managing Editor: Anne Collinson, The Ohio State University Consulting Editor: Li Tuo, University of Michigan Twentieth-Century China is a refereed journal. Manuscripts for publication should be submitted as two hard copies and one electronic copy, double-spaced, with author's name on a separate title page. All manuscripts including endnotes should conform to the University of Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition. For submission questions and editorial matters, contact the editor: Professor Christopher A. Reed History Department, The Ohio State University 230 West 17th Avenue Columbus, OH 43210-1367 E-mail: For questions on subscriptions and back issues, contact: Center for Chinese Studies University of Michigan 1080 South University, Suite 3668 Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106 E-mail: Editorial Board Parks Coble (Nebraska), Sherman Chochran (Cornell), Prasenjit Duara (Chicago), Christina Gilmartin (Northeastern), Gail Hershatter (UC-Santa Cruz), John W. Israel (Virginia), Jeffrey C. Kinkley (St. John's), William Kirby (Harvard), Elizabeth Perry (Harvard), R. Keith Schoppa (Loyola), David Strand (Dickinson), Yamada Tatsuo (Keio), Wen-hsin Yeh (UC-Berkeley), Ernest P. Young (Michigan), George Tu Yu (Illinois ). Issues published in November and April of each academic year. Current subscription rates are as follows: Individuals-$ 25; Institutions-$ 50; Full-time Students-$ 15. Make checks payable to: "Twentieth-Century China, University of Michigan." Calligraphy on cover by Yan Bo CONTENTS Editor's Note Obituary: Stephen C. Averill ARTICLES 12 14 Margherita Zanasi Fostering the People's Livelihood: Chinese Political Thought between Empire and Nation 16 James Flath Temple Fairs and the Republican State in North China 139 Zhiwei Xiao The Expulsion of American Films from China, 1949-1950 164 Paul B. Foster Jin Yong's Linghu Chong Faces off against Lu Xun's Ah Q: Complements to the Construction of National Character 182 ANNOUNCEMENTS 1118 Twentieth-Century China disclaims any responsibility or liability for statements of fact or opinion expressed by contributors. 2 EDITOR'S NOTE TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA Like other phenomena, journals have their histories. This issue ends one era and starts a new one in the history of Twentieth-Century China. As revealed on the masthead of the journal's volume 29: 2 (April 2004) issue, Stephen C. Averill and I shared the editorial duties of the journal for a brief transitional period; Steve tied up the loose ends while giving me a free hand to plan the journal's future with his help and the guidance of the editorial board. With this new volume and issue, I am pleased to begin a five-year term as chief editor. Twentieth-Century China originated in 1975 as a newsletter issued by Lloyd Eastman, one of the American pioneers of Republican Chinese history. Eastman was also the journal's founding editor, bringing out in 1983 the first issue of what was then called Republican China. Following Eastman's stewardship , the journal was edited by John Israel, R. Keith Schoppa, Herman Mast III, Roger B. Jeans, and, then, from 1992, by Steve Averill. In 1997, reflecting the growing trend among historians and historically oriented social scientists to emphasize the historical continuities in China's twentieth-century experience (rather than adher-ing to the somewhat artificial categories of "Republican" and "People 's Republic" history), Steve Averill persuaded the board to rename the journal Twentieth-Century China. In light of growing levels of international scholarly interest in twentieth-century China, the journal's expanded chronological coverage , and the continuing liberalization of archival and research access in both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, there was every reason to believe that the journal would continue to draw an ever-wider and -deeper pool of submissions, a view that has been borne out since then. I would like to urge readers throughout the global community of modem Chinese scholarship to continue contributing to Twentieth-Century China through submission of your best-written, most insightful...

Reviewed by: Feng Youlan and Twentieth Century China. An Intellectual Biography by Xiaoqing Diana Lin Carine Defoort (bio) Xiaoqing Diana Lin. Feng Youlan and Twentieth Century China. An Intellectual Biography. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016. xii, 244 pp. Hardcover $135.00, isbn 978-90-04-30129-0. This monograph is a detailed intellectual biography of Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-lan) 冯友兰 (1895-1990), whom Diana Lin rightly identifies as "one of the preeminent Chinese philosophers of the 20th century" (p. 1). As Lin points out, his academic influence was not limited to China: his "early two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy was translated into English in 1948 by the eminent Sinologist Derk Bodde; its influence on the study of Chinese thought in the West was unmatched for decades" (p. 1).1 Indeed, when I started studying Chinese philosophy in the 1980s this was one of the few and almost omnipresent books on Chinese philosophy, not only in Sinology, but also at [End Page 72] Philosophy departments. Despite its enormous contribution in making Chinese thought known in the West, its success also had a serious drawback: it was soon taken as the uninspiring, established account of Chinese philosophy, one that was moreover strikingly un-Chinese. During the second part of the twentieth century, scholars were often disappointed in their search for an "authentic" understanding of Chinese philosophy in Feng's work. As Bryan Van Norden points out, "[I]n reality, Fung is one of the most Western-centric readers of Chinese thought."2 I also belonged to the generation of scholars who either neglected Feng Youlan's interpretations or chided him for presenting an uninspiring variant of unquestioned Western philosophy. In a switch from philosophy to intellectual history, this monograph shows how scholars have outgrown this critical stage and have cultivated a mature interest in the complexities of Feng's views. Due to the political turbulences since the Republican era, the psychological traumas of its intellectuals, and Feng's own choices during a near century-long life, this biography captures well the vicissitudes of twentieth-century Chinese politics. Many academic studies have been dedicated to both Feng Youlan and China's recent intellectual history,3 but this monograph is particular in its combined analysis of changing philosophical stances, political waves, and concrete events in Feng's life. Lin concludes by distinguishing two major philosophical frameworks in Feng's reflections on Chinese philosophy: in the 1930s he created a "philosophy in China," using Western notions such as intuition and logic to construe a cosmology-ontology for a world in flux; in the 1980s he attempted a restoration of "Chinese philosophy" in terms of correlative thinking to explain the interactions among humans and with nature (pp. 183-184). Her monograph, however, distinguishes between five periods corresponding with the five chapters that constitute its backbone. The first chapter shows how the young Feng (roughly from 1920s till 1934) is initially inspired by philosophers such as William James (1842-1910) and Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941) to make Chinese thought well structured and compatible with Western metaphysics. The second chapter mostly treats the six major works (written from 1938 to 1946) in which Feng builds his own metaphysical system influenced by New Realism and mathematical logic. In chapter 3, Feng turns toward Dialectical and Historical Materialism (roughly between the 1930s and the 1950s) and strengthens his focus on experience, social formation, and universal truth rooted in reality while sustaining mental space to reflect on China's "abstract inheritance." This intellectual luxury is threatened in the fourth period when social contextualization and class provenance dominates all philosophical analyses (roughly in the 1960s and 1970s). The fifth and final chapter introduces Feng's second major philosophical framework, namely that of "Chinese philosophy," when he rewrites his overview into a seven-volume New [End Page 73] History (1980-1990) combining materialism with humanism, historicism, and a stress on the Confucian notion of sincerity. The materialist inspiration lingers in Feng's attention for the political context of Chinese masters. A similar attention inspired Lin's own understanding of Feng Youlan explaining his meandering thoughts throughout the turbulent twentieth century. What makes this biography fascinating is that it describes many more...

Reviewed by: Islamophobia and the Question of Muslim Identity: The Politics of Difference and Solidarity by Evelyn Leslie Hamdon D. Lark Gamey Evelyn Leslie Hamdon . Islamophobia and the Question of Muslim Identity: The Politics of Difference and Solidarity. Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Publishing, 2010. 112 pp. $17.95 sc. Through an ethnographic case study of coalition building across collective and individual identity differences, Hamdon examines a Muslim group in Edmonton, [End Page 268] Canada that came together to challenge Islamophobia in their community. Islamophobia and the Question of Muslim Identity: The Politics of Difference and Solidarity is meant "to stir conversation" (9) by "disrupt[ing] stereotypes both within the community and on the part of the dominant community towards those who identify as Muslims" (23). Although Hamdon foregrounds the question of Muslim identity, there is much of value to others who find themselves in need of negotiating spaces of contested identities. The book is a good read for those interested in political activism and/or multicultural studies in general or Islamic studies in particular. The study is set in a Canadian post-9/11 context in Edmonton and documents the fledgling efforts of a coalition of Muslim organizations. Direct observation, personal interviews, and document analysis were used to reconstruct the evolution of the Coalition. Hamdon speaks with emic authority, herself a Muslim and "a member of the Coalition from the time of its first visioning workshops until it was about one year old" (12). Despite her insider status, Hamdon allows the voices of the participants to be fully heard in the frequent data bites incorporated throughout the text. In large part, the study is concerned with "identity ... how people organize, [and] coalesce across identity differences" (23) and as a result, draws on identity theories and theories of power. In addition, insights are taken from feminist and anti-racist literature, as well as pedagogies of difference. Although the catalytic events of 9/11 and its aftermath gave birth to the Coalition, members were motivated to negotiate their differences by a desire to learn about other Muslims, share common experiences, work on a common cause and reach out to other Canadians. The value of Islamophobia and the Question of Muslim Identity is not in reasons why the coalition came together but rather in the manner in which the members negotiated across difference of identities to find solidarity in purpose. Hamdon takes the reader inside the contested space where coalition members navigated their way through diverse identities, challenged the power of essentialism and represented the complexity and multiplicity of Muslim identities. She foregrounds questions of identity within a power dynamic by critiquing how difference and homogeneity are suppressed or privileged. Although "coalitional organizing holds great promise for communities in which complex and intersecting identities and oppressions require expression and redress" (61), it is not without personal struggles and varied emotional responses. The study also illustrates that the goal of a negotiated common space through more porous boundaries serves to include as well as marginalize. Nevertheless, Hamdon shows that the Coalition has been successful in developing initiatives that serve both the Muslim community at large and outside structures such as the university community and law enforcement. By placing two crescent moons, one left-facing, the other right-facing, tentatively linked together with a single star below foregrounded on a backdrop of geometric [End Page 269] tiling, John van der Woude, the cover designer of Islamophobia and the Question of Muslim Identity alerts potential readers to the contested identities to be presented. Evelyn Leslie Hamdon makes a substantial contribution to the discourse of Muslim identity by disclosing the complexity and multiplicity of what it means to be Muslim in Canada. In documenting the work of the Coalition, Hamdon presents "a prototype for which there has been no template in recent Canadian history" (57). The contribution of this work extends beyond the Muslim community to others hoping to bridge differences within and between radicalized groups and individuals. The book comes alive for a general readership through Hamdon's accessible writing style and the voices of those interviewed, many of which are presented in a font somewhat distinct from the main text. Although presenting participant voices in a...

Symposium Beyond Habermas: Text and ·Performance in the Making of·the "Public" in Late Qing and Republican China* Introduction* by Michael Tsin The term "public," or gong, has a venerable history in the Chinese political lexicon. From its origins in the classical texts, it has always carried the connotation of representing, in opposition to the realm of the personal (si), the interests of the collective. Just what exactly comprisedthecollectivewas,·.of course, subject to variations in context and changes in time and place. Prior to the latter part of the Qing, it was usually segments of the .literati elites who arrogated to themselves the role as the articulated voice of this elusive public. As with most aspects of everyday life in the late Qing, however, this traditional elite claim to be the arbiter of "public opinion" (gonglun) was confronted with significant challenges by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The quest for new forms of political and social organization was accompanied by an intensive process of reconfiguring the notion of the "public" in China; it is a shared interest in exploring the histories of that important process that has resulted in this symposium. Unlike earlier scholars who examined the issue through the prism of the development ofa civil·society or JiirgenHabermas' s concept of a "public sphere" of reason and rationality, the three authors here address the reconfiguration of the "public" withinthe context of the transformations in print and media technology, the forging of new avenues for the enhanced circulation -and consumption-of written texts and visual images, and the ways in which the process of reconfiguration mediated between the.(re)-articulation of social/moral norms and values and the logic of an expanding consumer economy. Their findings and arguments have important implications for our understanding of twentieth-century Chinese history and beyond. * The papers in this symposium were originally presented in a panel entitled "Politics and Culture of the 'Public' in Late Imperial and Republican China," held on 18 January 2003 at the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies held at Jekyll Island, Georgia. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 29, No.2 (April, 2004): 1-5 2 Twentieth-Century China Paize Keulemans' s study of the popularization of martial arts novels in the late Qing sets the stage for this process of reconfiguring the public. From their earlier incarnation as a form of art and entertainment that presupposed close and intimate interaction between the lone storyteller and the audience, these martial arts stories appeared increasingly in printed form by the latter part of the nineteenth century to cater to the need of a growing "middlebrow" Beijing audience . From there the marketing of these tales of knights-errant, moral integrity, and heroism spread to other parts of the empire, appropriated, as it were, by bannermen and Jiangnan literati alike for their own purposes. But it was the use of new printing technologies-lithography and metal type-that truly transformed the reach of these novels by the early twentieth century, enlarging the circulation and creating a new "reading public" in the process. By then the figure of the storyteller had been all but forgotten, yet the central motifs of these stories -heroic struggles and moral righteousness-were to endure as an integral part of the cultural repertoire of the newly reconfigured public, symbolized by the ever increasing number of urban consumers of these novels, in twentiethcentury China. Both Jan Kiely's article on the Communist hunger strikers and Eugenia Lean's essay on the fascinating case of the avenging assassin Shi Jianqiao demonstrate clearly the significance of these cultural motifs both in imagining and in the imagination of the new public. In their performance for the imagined public, both the Communist partisans and Shi Jianqiao made astute use of moral norms and values-justice, loyalty, integrity-to anchor their narratives and images for delivery to their potential audience. Just as Sheryl Kroen finds in her work on restoration France in the nineteenth century, these two articles together well illustrate the twin phenomena of "politics as theater" and "theater as politics"-to use Kroen's terms-in Republican China. 1 In his discussion of the resistance of Communist prisoners as a...

“What is the proper word for people like you?”: The Question of Métis Identity in In Search of April Raintree Sharon Smulders (bio) Beatrice mosionier (formerly Culleton) has said that while writing her landmark novel, In Search of April Raintree (1983), she conceived the issue of identity as “a Metis problem, or a problem for ... native people being brought up in white foster homes” (Interview with Garrod 85). As the manager of Pemmican Publications, she linked the question of indigenous identity to matters of self-representation by emphasizing the need to provide students with “access to adequate and accurate knowledge of the Indian, Inuit and Metis people” through books that “do justice to the Native people and ... give them a voice” (“Images” 51) Yet, according to Janice Acoose, Mosionier’s own work in In Search of April Raintree fails to “illustrate the Métis cultural identity” and, as a result, features a “dis-eased narrative voice” (228, 230). Consequently, insofar as the novel equates being Métis with being a culturally deprived survivor of foster care, it may “leave readers with mis-informed notions about the Métis” (Acoose 235). A further complication rests, however, in the lack of contemporary consensus on the constituents of Métis identity. By focusing on the question of identity, therefore, Mosionier not only addresses the impact of child welfare practices on Native people but also participates in a debate that has [End Page 75] preoccupied the Métis community for the last forty years.1 In the story of the Raintree sisters, Cheryl as well as April, she explores both what being Métis means in urban Canada in the decades following World War II and how writing literature functions in the production and transmission of culture. Generating its own aesthetic, one political as well as pedagogical, In Search of April Raintree thus conducts a historical and sociological inquiry into the terms of Métis identification that simultaneously modifies those terms so as to mediate the effects of cultural indeterminacy and dispossession while also examining possibilities for individual self-invention and national self-determination. In its broadest lineaments as a tale of two Métis sisters taken into foster care, In Search of April Raintree draws on Mosionier’s childhood experience as a ward of the Children’s Aid Society of Winnipeg. Writing the novel was, said Mosionier, “a way of trying to find answers as to why our family seemed to come up against all these things—why my parents were alcoholics, why we had to grow up in foster homes, and why two sisters committed suicide.... A lot of the writing brought answers, and one of the biggest was that I had been ashamed of being a native person most of my life” (Interview with Garrod 81). Indeed, as Joyce Carlson observes in the foreword to the revised edition, entitled April Raintree (1984), the novel “illustrates the difficulties which many Native people face in maintaining a positive self-identity” by making one “young woman’s search for identity” representative of “a much larger story—the story of the Metis” (vii). Even as subsequent critical discussions of In Search of April Raintree have emphasized its status as an identity quest, however, they have only glanced at its engagement with Métis identity politics. Noting that “Métis, in all its multiplicity, is only one set among a multitude of subject positions, not always commensurable, that [Mosionier] occupies,” Helen Hoy argues, for example, that the novel challenges “unitary and essentialist discourses of identity” (169,168). For Jodi Lundgren, on the other hand, Mosionier’s treatment of identity partakes of a cultural syncretism characteristic of postcolonialism; for Dawn Thompson, it posits an ethnic countermemory that resists and revises the official discourse of Canadian multiculturalism; [End Page 76] for Margery Fee, it provides the novel’s dual protagonists, April and Cheryl, with a strategy to endure and combat racism (“Deploying”); and for Dee Horne, it functions to create a template on which the author “maps the stereotypography of colonial discourse” (72). As useful as these insights are, however, they fail to place Mosionier’s treatment of identity against the emergent possibilities for Métis selfhood...

This chapter analyzes the evolution of “Western” international law as an intellectual and professional discipline in Republican China. It argues that statism and pragmatism define the major features of the Republic of China’s approach to the reception of international law. These characteristics transformed the law of nations into universally valid normative claims and galvanized China’s intellectual focus from Westphalian sovereignty to the civilized nation concept. By examining the professionalization of international law in modern China, this chapter offers insight into the educational transplantation of the new discipline. The cultivation of China’s first-generation international lawyer contributed to the legal capacity of the Foreign Ministry. Chinese jurists’ participation in international law societies and the Shanghai Mixed Court further strengthened the nation’s legalist approach to diplomacy. Hence, this research provides a valuable case study of twentieth-century international lawmaking in Asia.

A becomes important in politics to degree that it points to real processes about which society cannot even reach agreement on how they are to be conceived or interpreted, much less resolved, or to events that introduce which can no longer or not yet be contained within historical unities or narrative continuities through which society proposes to define itself. And perhaps there can be no genuine democracy unless society respects and provides room for emergence of questions of this type--questions raised problems and antagonisms that society generates. Indeed we may well ask: What is question of identity--the question of identity--today? --John Rajchman, Question of Identity (60) Almost every critic who has written on Audre Lorde has made argument that her work is transformational. AnaLouise Keating, who has written prolifically on Lorde, says that by speaking out [Lorde] begins constructing world she envisions; that is, she creates discourse enabling her to invent world in which those truths can materialize (157). (1) The majority of these arguments, however, have focused on Lorde's prose, and studies that do address her in large part approach it from angle of content only, rarely paying close attention to its form. While I agree that Lorde can produce or at least alternative language, particularly in midst of ever-strengthening hegemonic discourse of US liberal multiculturalism, (2) I argue that it is formal qualities of Lorde's poems and their use of what I define below as traumatic aesthetics that can be truly transformational allowing readers to become aware of limitations of dominant liberal multicultural discourse and its ways of representing identity and subjecthood. The poems speak to issues of political importance as defined Rajchman in that they are able to linguistically represent something which can no longer or not yet be contained within historical unities or narrative continuities through which [US] society proposes to define itself (60). Communication requires entering into and utilizing that preexists speaker. She cannot communicate without recourse to commonly shared discourse, and if she is able to use it to communicate ideas, it is only because that is at point at which it can express those ideas. I would argue, however, that one of functions of lyric is to speak dominant rhetoric differently, to open up different forms of expression and description. This, of course, does not mean that it does not have its own formal and communicative rules, only that those rules are not same as everyday, often narrative-based, communication. I mentioned that little work has been done on formal qualities of Lorde's poetry. There are, however, few notable exceptions. Amitai F. Avi-Ram has studied Lorde's use ofapo koinou, figure of speech in which a single word or phrase is shared between two distinct, independent units, to draw connections between Lorde and modernist poets and to argue that she uses this trope to develop new language which allows for an alternative constitution of subject in poetry (193, 206, 207). Lexi Rudnitsky employs similar methodology, reading syntactic ambiguity of Lorde's work in relation to her multiple identity positions, but arguing that Lorde's disruption of traditional syntax and grammar has the pointed objective ... of complicating subject position, undermining monolithic categories of identity, and demonstrating that difference can be source of creativity (476). Finally, Sagri Dhairyam examines Lorde's fraught relation to modernist poetic forms both because she has inherited them from white male tradition and because they invite readers to perform their own interpretations of Lorde's identity--often resulting in limited and exclusionary readings. …

Reviews 557 worthwhile read, and should appeal to tiiose with a growing curiosity about overseas Chinese matters. Donald A. Jordan Ohio University, Athens DonaldJordan ¿5 aprofessor ofhistory specializing in Republican China and its relations with Japan. im Michael Sullivan. Art and Artists ofTwentieth-Century China. London, Berkeley, and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1996. xxvii, 354 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-520-07556-0. For those of us who studied modern Chinese art before 1980, Michael Sullivan's Chinese Art in the 20th Centurywas one of the few English-language resources available at that time. Other books that address twentieth-century Chinese art have been written since then, but generally they are devoted to a particular time period or artistic medium. Indeed, it is a daunting task to chronicle this fascinating but confusing period in China's art history; however, in his new book Art and Artists ofTwentieth-Century China, Michael Sullivan has done just diat. In this greatly expanded (354 pages), lavishly illustrated (ninety-four color plates and 278 black-and-white figures) new publication, Sullivan has borrowed only six pages from his previous book. The author admits that tiiis new effort represents more a personal view than a definitive study of the topic. Still, he has provided his readers with an abundance ofboth subjective observations and objective information as he recounts the rebirth and evolution of Chinese art in the twentieth century under the influence ofWestern art and culture. Beginning his study in the late nineteenth century and ending in the early 1990s, Sullivan traces the emergence ofWestern art in China and the evolution of its various media and styles, and he documents the series ofongoing confrontations between the practitioners ofWestern and traditional Chinese art. Art in twentieth-century China cannot be divorced from China's political history, and Sullivan acknowledges this. Consequently, he has selected for discussion some y mversity works 0f^1 for pUreiv aestiietic reasons, while others were chosen for what they illustrate about the politics of a particular period. The book is divided into five sections. Four are devoted to specific and important time periods, and die fifth, "Odier Currents," explores the evolution of ofHawai'i Press 558 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 Chinese art outside the People's Republic. Each section is divided into chapters that address, among other items of interest, specific artistic schools, various media , and trends in die Chinese art world. Sullivan is at his best in "Part One: 1900-1937: The Impact of the West" and "Part Two: 1937-1949: War and Civil War," covering historical periods that he has researched extensively. In "Part One," Sullivan explores the revival of traditional painting in the early part of the twentieth century, discusses the two important centers of traditional art in Beijing and Shanghai, and introduces the leading masters and dieir students. However, he also acknowledges the limitations of traditional Chinese painting in its ability to reflect accurately the history of this period. In truth, traditionally trained Chinese artists could not ignore the challenges of Western art. By the early twentieth century, Western drawing and painting were a compulsory part of the curriculum in all Chinese schools and university art departments. This reform went hand in hand with the vision of regenerating Chinese culture that was held by the outspoken minister of education, Cai Yuanpei. Cai was such an enthusiastic supporter ofWestern art that his zeal alone prompted many an artist to go abroad and study it firsthand. Sullivan documents the impact of artists who turned to the West for inspiration as well as the major centers of modern Western art in China. He explores the problems of artists practicing Western oil painting in the early part of the twentieth century and the often formidable obstacles they faced. Ironically, Chinese oil painters encountered many of the same problems during the 1980s, including an uninformed public, a dearth of art critics, the cost of the new materials compared to the traditional ink and paper, and being in the difficult position ofpracticing Western oil-painting styles no longer considered part of the cutting edge. An entire chapter is devoted to the Lingnan School in Canton, which introduced into China the...

This article draws attention to the cultural and social specificities of women’s agency in Republican China and suggests a way to rethink the polarizing impacts of revolution- and war-related deaths on women’s lives. Analyzing a number of petitions submitted by widows of martyrs, this article explores the transformation in family-state and gender relations during the Republican era. I argue that the Nationalist martyr compensation law perpetuated the imperial-era standards for the feminine virtues of chastity and sacrifice, circumscribing women’s social and political roles in twentieth-century China. Under the new equality-promoting legal regime and in the absence of familial patriarchs, women had new opportunities to venture outside their domestic quarters and to engage with the state. Yet, the Republican state often made exceptions to the law based on petitioners’ display of feminine virtues. By entering into this negotiation of virtue with the state, Chinese women defined themselves primarily through their performance of moral qualities.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA 33 OUT OF PLACE: EDUCATION AND IDENTITY AMONG THREE GENERATIONS OF URBAN PANYU GENTRY, 1850-1931 STEVEN B. MILES, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN SAINT LOUIS In 1920 a group of Cantonese scholars gathered to revive Xuehaitang (學海堂 Sea of learning hall) quarterly examinations in Confucian texts and classical literature. Lauded as Guangzhou’s preeminent Confucian academy since its founding in the 1820s, the Xuehaitang had been closed in 1903 with the imperially mandated transformation of academies (書院 shuyuan) into new-style schools (學堂 xuetang). The 1920 revival got off to an unpromising start, as the former academy grounds were occupied by troops associated with the Guangxi clique of militarists then controlling Guangzhou and, ironically, sponsoring the Xuehaitang examinations. Consequently, academy organizers were forced to use a new library across town. The revived Xuehaitang seemed to be operating on borrowed time as well as space. As in the nineteenth century, eight co-directors were selected to administer the examinations.1 But the group chosen in 1920 ranged in age from those in their midfifties to at least one in his upper seventies. All eight had won juren degrees in provincial examinations under the old Qing regime; two had gone on to earn jinshi degrees in the national examinations. Nor were the examinees particularly young: several for whom we have information were in their mid-forties and the youngest in his mid-thirties. The revival of the Xuehaitang lasted only through the winter examination of 1921, before academy operations were discontinued, surely seen as an unnecessary financial burden by the revolutionary regime that had since displaced the Guangxi warlords.2 This quixotic revival of the Xuehaitang seems to confirm Wen-hsin Yeh’s observation that “[c]ultural traditionalism … made allies of provincial militarists and cultural conservatives who sought to perpetuate their claim to legitimacy through the manipulation of traditional symbols. The alliance, paradoxically, contributed to the demise of that tradition through its petrification.”3 As far as traditional symbols go, This article has benefited greatly from suggestions and comments from Joseph Dennis and the anonymous reviewers for Twentieth-Century China. Robert Culp and Christopher A. Reed devoted a great deal of time to improving this paper. 1 The eight co-directors were He Zaoxiang, Lin Henian, Pan Yingqi, Shen Zetang, Wang Zhaoquan , Wang Zhaoyong, Yao Yun, and Zhou Chaohuai. Wang Zhaoyong, Weishang laoren ziding nianpu (Chronological autobiography of Wang Zhaoyong) (n.p.: Wang Jingdetang, 1949), 41. 2 Huang Rongkang, Qiuqianzhai wenji (Collected prose from the Seeking-Contentment Studio) (n.p.:n.p., n.d.), 4:6a-7a; Wang, Weishang laoren ziding nianpu, 42, 44. 3 Wen-hsin Yeh, Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 29-30. April 2007 STEVEN B. MILES 34 however, the Xuehaitang did possess a certain amount of cachet in early Republican Guangzhou, at least among the older generation of the urban Cantonese elite. The early Republic was a time of intense activity among this older group of scholars who had emerged from the premier academies of Qing Guangzhou. Finding themselves out of power and loosing prestige, these scholars busied themselves creating spaces and publishing books that celebrated the scholarship and literature associated particularly with the Xuehaitang, but also more broadly with the Cantonese urban elite culture that had lost its institutional basis with the closure of Confucian academies and the subsequent demise of the Qing and creation of the Chinese Republic in 1912. Through such activities, the elite culture represented by the Xuehaitang took on more relevance for these scholars than it had in the Qing, becoming for some of these displaced scholars an integral part of their identity in a new age. Five of the eight co-directors selected in 1920 were registered residents of Panyu (番禺) County, which, during the Qing, shared jurisdiction of Guangzhou with Nanhai (南海) County.4 These five were members of the “Panyu gentry” described by Edward Rhoads in his study of Guangzhou in the decade leading up to the 1911 Revolution.5 But this group can be characterized in even more specific terms as a sojourning urban administrative and cultural elite. Most members of the Panyu gentry involved in academy education belonged to in...

This article examines how the first Chinese-run travel agency, China Travel Service ('Zhongguo luxing she ) and its travel magazine (luxing zazhi) marketed the new idea of pleasure travel, the new roles of service industry and client, and the new location of a modern tourist site during the Republican era. Two populations were targeted: middle-class mainland Chinese and Asian overseas Chinese. The article first explores how the China Travel Service created a service industry and a network of services, and then uses magazine travelogues to examine the marketing process and site development in two sites with different characteristics: (i) Huangshan, a traditional site visited by mainland Chinese, and (z) South and Southeast Asia, places few mainland Chinese visited.

Reviewed by: The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern Chinaby Emily Baum Hsuan-Ying Huang (bio) Emily Baum. The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. ix, 267 pp. Hardcover $112.50, isbn978-0-226-55842-0. Paperback $37.50, isbn978-0-226-58061-6. The Invention of Madnesstraces how Chinese society, with its traditional notions of madness, evolved to accommodate and, to some extent, assimilate [End Page 179]the new conceptions of mental illness during the first three or four decades of the twentieth century. Author and medical historian Emily Baum proposes the term "invention" as a useful heuristic device for analyzing the introduction and reception of modern psychiatry in non-Western societies—in this case in the city of Beijing. Madness, she contends, underwent "an ongoing process of becoming" (p. 187) during the period; its associated ideas and practices were created and re-created along the way according to the interests and needs of local actors who were brought into contact with the condition. Emphasizing concrete actions that involve knowledge production and identity formation across time, space, and society, she challenges the common imaginary that psychiatric modernity can be transplanted or adopted in a new environment as a whole and ready-made package. Baum uses new materials unearthed from several archives, the most important of which are the Beijing Municipal Archive and that of the Rockefeller Foundation. The story of the Beijing Municipal Asylum—China's first public asylum and later a hospital where the country's initial institutionalization of psychiatry occurred—constitutes a major thread through the book. Established under the auspices of the city's police department, it eventually morphed into the Beijing Psychopathic Hospital with the aid of the Rockefeller Foundation-affiliated Peking Union Medical College (PUMC). However, the book is far from an institution-centered account; it explores beyond this unique asylum-hospital, foraying into other parts of the therapeutic landscape and Chinese society. Medical anthropologists would feel at home reading this book as it tacitly endorses medical pluralism, the model proposed by the discipline's founders for the health care landscape of a socially and politically complex society. Arthur Kleinman, for instance, divides the medical system in 1970s Taiwan into professional, folk, and popular domains, each of which is culturally shaped and furnished with a distinct explanatory model that constructs its clinical reality. 1Baum seems to have turned this synchronic model into a diachronic one. The book begins and closes with two apparently different yet similarly heterogeneous pictures, one set in the late Qing dynasty and the other during the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. The intervening chapters offer multiple snapshots of the time line spanning the two periods, with considerable attention focused on the overlaps between seemingly incompatible domains where inventions and reinventions happened. The outcome is a historical narrative that is dynamic and remarkably kaleidoscopic. Chapter 1 (Contracting the "Mad Illness") examines an era still unaffected by Western psychiatry, a world in which madness—or more precisely "mad illness" (fengbing)—was not a discrete illness category but an epiphenomenon with a plurality of somatic, emotional, moral, and supernatural etiologies. [End Page 180]Chinese medicine considered the heart as the locus of cognition and recognized an association between madness and mucous congestion, whereas folk religious healers invoked demonic possession as the cause. The Qing law dictated that home confinement of the insane was the responsibility of the family, but its lax enforcement made wandering patients a common street scene that Western missionaries found deplorable. The state, as chapter 2 (The Birth of the Chinese Asylum, 1901–1918) describes, shifted toward a paternalistic stance with the founding of the Beijing Municipal Asylum in 1908. This institution, initially a subsidiary of the Municipal Poorhouse, was administered by the police; it was nowhere near a modern hospital, although Chinese medicine did play a marginal role in it. Incarceration was its main function, as the police began to take those perceived as mentally deranged and threatening to the public order into custody. Through...

Reviewed by: On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China by Emily Sun Shuyu Guo (bio) Emily Sun. On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China. New York: Fordham, 2021. Pp. x + 176. $105.00 hardcover / $30.00 paperback / $29.99 eBook. In On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China, Emily Sun examines the literary affinities between British Romanticism and Republican China (1912–49), the latter representing a transitional period that links the imperial regime to modern republicanism. In analyzing the texts written by authors such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles and Mary Lamb, and Lu Xun, Sun explores the common ground between British Romantic literature and modern Chinese literature while paying attention to historical actuality and the local details that animate respective languages. Indeed, the notion of world literature provides the framework for analyzing literary histories and literary modernities across multiple time periods and locations. The “world” of “world literature” is continually “activated and reactivated in processes of exposure and exchange” (3). Through four sets of comparative analysis, she investigates how particular literary forms of modernity serve as the testing grounds for the enactment of sociopolitical forms of life, and how various aesthetic and literary endeavors play a role in the formation of world modernity across linguistic and geographical boundaries. Chapter 1, “Literary Modernity and the Emancipation of Voice: Defenses of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lu Xun,” begins with discussions of literary manifestos—a form of solidarity and poetic emancipation—with an emphasis on the problem of voice. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley shows “the principle of cyclicity” (41) and how it plays a role in poetry that “takes place as reorigination” (40). In 1821, he wrote Defence of Poetry, which showed how poetic voices worked as emancipatory power. Shelley was partly inspired by the tradition of mythology. Likewise, 鲁迅 Lu Xun composed his 摩罗诗力说 “On the Power of Mara Poetry” that assimilated the impacts from the European Mara poets. In the text, Lu Xun looks for the power from the renewal of classical poetics and languages. Besides, 破恶声论 “Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices,” written in classical Chinese that mixes new neologisms with “an archaic style” (34), exemplifies the possibilities of language itself. In his manifestos, Lu Xun expresses his own xinsheng 心声 (voice of the soul) in classical Chinese. Through reading the Japanese translations of Shelley, Lu Xun’s [End Page 461] poetics was heavily influenced by Shelleyan mythmaking in terms of the emancipation of voice. He “combines elements of the ethereal aestheticist Shelley with the convention-defying aspects of the Byronic hero” (25). The transcultural and translingual nature of Lu Xun’s poetic voice is consistent with that of modern Chinese literature which has been affected by world literatures. Their literary manifestos perform “the work of emancipatory renewal within and across literary modernities” (49). On the horizon of world literature, the concept of literary modernity is deeply global and mediated; it suggests, rather than denying the common ground between literatures. Translation facilitated resonances across languages and the process of forming world modernity; Lu Xun read Shelley in Japanese and Lu Xun’s work was later translated into various languages. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales are known for their literary characterization of social structures. The Tales were translated into Chinese in 1904, entitled Yinbian Yanyu 吟边燕语, by ᷇林纾 Lin Shu. The text was adapted to the classical Chinese narrative form of chuanqi 传奇 (transmission of the strange) with a new episodic structure, supernatural narratives, and exotic hints. In chapter 2, “Shakespearean Retelling and the Question of the Common Reader: Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Lin Shu’s Yinbian Yanyu,” Sun argues that Lin’s retelling manipulates the form of the tale collection to address an imagined “common reader” in “heterogeneous, asynchronous, but connected scenes of global literary modernity” (51). Chuanqi previously existed in Chinese traditional operas and dramas and had not been employed in literary texts. On the one hand, though Lin’s domesticated translations nonetheless mediate each retelling of Shakespeare, the idiosyncratic form chuanqi—a stylistic alternative— will not hinder common readers’ understanding of the...

Reviewed by: Chinese Utopianism: A Comparative Study of Reformist Thought with Japan and Russia, 1898–1997 Viren Murthy (bio) Shiping Hua. Chinese Utopianism: A Comparative Study of Reformist Thought with Japan and Russia, 1898–1997. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. 208 pp. Hardcover $35.00, ISBN 978-0-804-76161-1. Among the many changes that occurred during the transition from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century, one could count a general shift away from revolutionary utopias. Of course, in the final decades of the twentieth century, people already criticized utopian thought and doubted the search for alternatives to the world of global capitalism, and so we can understand the pessimism of the twenty-first century as continuing a larger trend. However, during the greater part of the twentieth century, people in China and elsewhere showed a faith in [End Page 439] utopia and the possibility of a different future. Hence, it is particularly interesting now, from the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, to look back from a comparative point of view at the different utopian projects that pervaded the previous century. This is exactly what Shiping Hua does in his book, Chinese Utopianism: A Comparative Study of Reformist Thought with Japan and Russia, 1898–1997. Hua compares governmental policies and ideologies of reform in Japan, China, and Russia and argues that political changes in these three countries occurred as ruling elites implemented reforms in response to structural problems, but emphasizes that the resulting trajectories were influenced by cultural traditions. The author’s focus is on twentieth-century China. He has divided the book into six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter is titled “Theory and Method”; the second provides a general discussion of utopianism in Japan, Russia, and China; the third chapter concerns modernizing reforms in Japan and China; the fourth is titled “Reforms within Communism: The Soviet Union”; the fifth is titled “Reforms within Communism: China”; and the sixth is titled “Reforms out of Communism: China and the Soviet Union.” The conclusion is titled “Hopefulness toward the Future as Nature, Supernatural, and the Product of Human Endeavor.” In the second chapter, he lays out a major point in the book, specifically, that Chinese utopian thought is connected to the prevalence of the Taoist small kingdoms with limited population, a tradition of peasant rebellions, and especially, the Confucian ideas of the grand harmony (datong). Hua shows the importance of the concept of the grand harmony in Chinese thought by comparing the Meiji reforms to the late Qing reforms, namely the Hundred Days Reform during the late Qing. In chapter 3, the author compares the Meiji thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) to the late Qing philosopher Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and contends that both were representative of the political culture of their respective societies. In general, Hua argues that by comparing Kang and Fukuzawa, we can conclude that the Chinese were more radical than their Japanese counterparts. He cites Kang: “[S]low reform is not as good as rapid reform; little change is not as good as wholesale change” (p. 33). A few pages later, he explains the difference in terms of culture. “The traditional Japanese notion of accepting life as it is, as discussed in Chapter 2, probably explains why the Meiji leaders adopted moderate strategies with limited goals, while the Chinese traditional belief that striving will lead to a better life for the group may explain the impatience and greater ambition of the late Qing reformers” (p. 36). Hua continues this mode of analysis in his treatment of reforms during the communist period and interestingly points out that reformers of Mao’s China, such as Chen Boda, were inspired by the idea of datong (p. 76). In discussing the Great Leap Forward, he notes that in 1958, “Mao visited the People’s Communes in Xu Shui County, Hebei Province. The leaders from the CCP Central Committee’s Department of Peasant Affairs were asked to bring Kang Youwei’s Datongshu with [End Page 440] them ‘as the guideline for the People’s Commune’ ” (p. 76). Moreover, in what could be described as an invocation of Confucius, Mao claimed that one should rely on...