After the 1980s, the world started addressing the challenges posed by economic globalization, and the protection of cultural diversity became a widely discussed topic. Today, China is experiencing problems in defining the relationship between the past and present, as well as that between tradition and modernity. Since the 1990s, China’s opening-up policy, the advent of globalization, and an increase in cross-cultural communications strengthened the country’s need to preserve its cultural heritage. Many Chinese scholars reflected on the past and examined the potential of archaeological materials, inscriptions, myths, and ancient legends to explain the relationship between tradition and modernity. The birth and evolution of the long 龍, or the Chinese dragon, remains at the core of such international studies. These studies highlighted the necessity of promoting discussions on and demystifying the long. This new perspective facilitates a connection between various theories on the origin of the Chinese dragon and the contemporary identity discourse, which has attracted the attention of Chinese scholars. This paper bridges the gap by introducing reliable theories on the origin of the mythical animal and focusing on typology issues, classification, latest debates on the distinction between the long and the dragons of other cultures, and finally, main theories on the visual representation of the Chinese long.
Although “The great famine in 1877–1878” breaking out in the early years of Emperor Guangxu’s reign has mainly struck North China areas, it has also great social impact on another important area—Jiangnan. The past surveys in academic circle basically ignore the meaning of this drought from the aspect of localism in Jiangnan. When an important movement of drought relief in modern China is mentioned, that is, the rise of charity relief in the late Qing Dynasty, the judgment is not totally accurate. In fact, when they were purely facing the drought, Jiangnan produced various responses carrying a firm stand of localism to protect their county and land. Among these responses, drought relief in the north of Jiangsu launched by gentries from Jiangnan is essentially a continuity of traditional drought relief in Jiangnan since the Ming and Qing dynasties.
This article re-examines the formation of the Qing state and its nature from a global perspective. It underscores the key roles of geopolitical setting and fiscal constitution in shaping the course of frontier expeditions and territorial expansions, unlike past studies that have centered on the dynasty’s administrative institutions and the ruling elites’ ideologies or lifestyles to defend or question the thesis of “Sinicization” in Qing historiography. This study demonstrates the different motivations and varying strategies behind the Qing dynasty’s two waves of military conquests, which lasted until the 1750s, and explains how the Qing state’s peculiar geopolitical interests and the low-level equilibrium in its fiscal constitution shaped the “cycles” in its military operations and frontier building. The article ends by comparing the Qing with early modern European states and the Ottoman empire to discuss its vulnerability as well as resilience in the transition to modern sovereign statehood in the nineteenth century.
Many historians of China and the world have long worked within certain paradigms that are increasingly recognized to be excessively Eurocentric, linear, and teleological. This article draws on both primary and secondary sources to propose a theory of Chinese history that is more sinocentric, cyclical, and open-ended. The theory takes seriously the well-known Chinese emphasis on establishing and maintaining cultural centrality and Chinese interest in learning from the past to influence the present and shape the future. It argues that these concerns have resulted in a spiral or helical pattern of Chinese historical development. It goes on to suggest that the Chinese spiral might help us to conceptualize world history in a way that respects all peoples of the world and all periods of history from the origins of our subspecies to the present. History is in one sense what actually happened in the past and historiography is how people interpret it to meet present needs and realize future aspirations. Given acceleration in the pace of change and expansion in the arena of action, historians can tell us little about what to expect in the future, but they may enhance the range of possibilities by bringing to light various past experiences. In this article I examine how the Chinese experience might assist us in fashioning a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world order.
This essay explores the history of the scholar’s robe as a nexus of material culture and political power. It focuses on the controversial garment —called ren 衽—found pervasively in the Confucian canon and confirmed in archaeological findings. But for hundreds of years there have been disagreements and changes concerning which specific term is identified with which part of the robe, especially involving the use of ren in the scholar’s robe. The bulk of my analysis deals with two prominent scholars’ monographs on the robe: Huang Zongxi’s Investigation of the Robe (Shenyi kao ) and Jiang Yong’s pointed rebuttal titled Mistakes in “Investigation of the Robe” (Shenyi kao wu ). The intellectual and political configurations of both works are analyzed in depth in order to contrast two options of cultural identity: Chinese superiority versus cosmopolitan universalism.
In this paper, I trace the post-war Japanese genealogy of studies on China’s tribute system (imperial China’s relatively tolerant approach to its foreign relations) in relation to the English-language work of historian John King Fairbank (1907–91). I emphasize that, together with the sporadic Chinese studies into China’s tribute system prior to the 1950s, it was the post-war research of Japanese historians that inspired Fairbank, who, in turn, further stimulated critical debates on the topic in Japan. I first concentrate on post-war Japanese debates concerning an “East Asian world order” based on a “system of investiture/tribute.” This notion, developed by the Japanese historian Nishijima Sadao in 1962, precisely corresponds to Fairbank’s 1941 understanding of the “tribute system” or “Confucian world-order,” but contrasts with Fairbank’s later, controversial understanding of a “Chinese world order” as proposed in 1968. In the second part of this paper, I introduce Japanese historian Hamashita Takeshi’s 1980s and 1990s arguments on the “tribute trade system” as representative of the younger generation within this genealogy, contrasting it with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank. In the third part, I locate this Japanese genealogy within the wider historical context of post-war Japanese intellectual cultural politics. This means that I examine Japanese historians’ arguments both from the angle of historiography and from the perspective of post-war Japanese intellectual history.
This essay examines two sets of reports in the Qing-dynasty Jiaqing and Daoguang periods (respectively 1796–1820 and 1821–45) in order to understand better the perceived reality of the Tiandihui. The first set, found among the papers of Jiangxi governor Xianfu (1809–14), allows a comparison of a criminal gang that invoked the Tiandihui ceremony with one that did not. The second set includes the diary of Taihe county magistrate Xu Dihui (in office from 1824) that recorded various events which came to be reported to the senior officialdom as having been conducted by secret societies. By collating the incidents as reported in the diary and memorials to the emperor, the authors argue that the pressure of the administrative process was responsible for the ultimate acquiescence by the Hunan governor Han Wenqi (in office 1825–29) in the perception of an indisputable connection of the incidents with secret societies. Moreover, both sets of reports show that participants in secret-society ceremonies and officials who suppressed them knew that the acclaimed networking of the Tiandihui as implied in its folklore was very far from the reality.
This article proposes a new way of viewing Republican-era warlords. Through an examination of the life of Li Dequan, the second wife of warlord Feng Yuxiang, it displaces Feng from his typical military and political context, scrutinizing instead the ways that Feng and Li interwove the private intimacies of love, marriage, and family life into their public and political lives. In the Republic, Feng and Li, like many prominent figures of the time, shared elements of their private lives with journalists and, through them, a broader reading public, posing for photographs with their children on their way to school and inviting reporters to family events. Feng and Li utilized this newfound intimacy between public and political leaders to cultivate public sympathy and support. By the early PRC, Li—following Feng’s sudden 1948 death—was named the first Minister of Health of the People’s Republic of China and her roles as wife and romantic object fell away. Instead, she focused on mothering the nation. By the late twentieth century, emphasis on the Li and Feng romance reappeared in writings about the couple, and while these narratives drew on the Republican-era stories, it was made to seem that Li’s feminism rather than Feng’s modernity had facilitated their true love. Though the warlords have often been seen as destructive, exploring Feng’s and Li’s lives demonstrates that factional militarists and their families contributed to a new political culture grounded in a gendered national narrative that intertwined family and nation.
This article explains British measures against food hawking in the emergent city of Victoria, Hong Kong during the Opium War. It argues that British interest in the long-term development of Hong Kong can be traced back to the establishment in May 1842 of the Central Market in Victoria specifically to prevent food peddling. It was a time when Hong Kong was still under military occupation and its status as a British colony was uncertain. Although Hong Kong’s public markets were associated with many of the problems that came with early British rule in the territory, the British administrators of Opium War Hong Kong intended that the Central Market, the first public market in Victoria, benefit both the Western and Chinese communities. This article also argues that the founding of the Central Market to eliminate food hawking exemplifies the overall manner that the British authorities took in dealing with the urban Chinese population. In addition to strictly prohibiting Chinese peddling, which often obstructed roads and streets, the authorities encouraged Chinese food hawkers to move to the orderly Central Market. While the British authorities exercised some direct control to maintain social order inside the Central Market, the government appointed a better-off Chinese person to oversee its routine operation. The 1842 Central Market was one of the earliest urban Chinese “elite organizations” in British Hong Kong where Chinese elites managed the affairs of the Chinese community of Victoria city.
As the biggest tax payer in China during the Ming and Qing dynasties, Suzhou was the most prominent center to provide tax, money and grain for the country. It was known for its commodity production of silk, cotton, and printed materials. Suzhou’s wood manufacturing and processing industry were also unrivaled. Meanwhile, Suzhou was famous for jade carvings, embroidery, mounting, lacquer, musical instruments and other processing industries of copper, iron, gold, silver, etc. As a world-famous center of commodity production and processing, Suzhou exported the local commodities and imported various kinds of raw materials. Suzhou was also a transportation center in China, transporting goods and materials across the country and balancing the market. Financial institutions such as banks and exchange shops were established in Suzhou as well, where the circulation of silver and copper coins was voluminous and the use of foreign silver coins started early. With advanced financial settlement methods, Suzhou absorbed the capital from towns and cities nearby, profited from high cash turnover, and became a highly developed financial center. As far as the economic aggregate, commodity production and circulation were concerned, Suzhou was a far more advanced urban center than Hangzhou which was another industrial and financial city.
Cattle slaughter and beef consumption are barely mentioned in the literature on Chinese economic, food, or animal history. This is possibly due to the widely held popular and scholarly assumption that beef was avoided and even considered taboo in the daily diet of Chinese people in premodern times. This article investigates the tangible regulation and practice of cattle slaughter in Qing China—the period when the beef taboo was argued to be formally subsumed into Chinese morality. I ask the following questions: To what extent did the Qing state ban cattle slaughter? How was the ban enforced in the localities? Did Chinese people slaughter cattle for consumption? Were there lawful beef markets in Qing China proper? How did increasing beef-eating Western sojourners since the mid-19th century impact this sector? Accordingly, I demonstrate that with the leeway provided by the state, the cattle slaughter industry developed in many regions of China proper, especially large cities. In this sector, Chinese Muslim merchants played a dominant role, even though the Han merchants could outnumber them. Their efforts have prepared the state and Chinese merchants to better cope with new circumstances since the mid-19th century. Broadly, this paper sheds light on how different religious, ethnic, and national groups affected the economy and the practice of law in the Qing dynasty.
This paper focuses on the investigators of rural society in the Republican period, specifically research made through fieldwork on the Gowned Brothers (or, Paoge) in 1940s Sichuan. It takes up one such investigator, Shen Baoyuan—a student at Yenching University; her youthful work never became published or recognized. The present study reveals how the pioneers of Chinese sociology and anthropology, who called themselves “rural activists,” tried to understand rural China. It argues that the developments in those fields in China of the 1920s and 1940s made it possible for us today to have a better understanding of the contemporary rural problems. The investigators played an important role in the Rural Construction and Rural Education Movements in Republican China. They show us how Western sociology and anthropology were localized in order to answer “Chinese questions” and to solve “Chinese problems.” As source material, these investigations have given us rich records, which in turn have become precious sources and historical memories of rural China’s past.
Under the stimulus of developing commercial economy and overseas trade, the social customs characterized by prevailing luxury and extravagance was gradually formed in Fujian Province from the mid-Ming Dynasty on. The transformation started from the material culture and later spread to people’s mental attitudes including the public ethics and human relations. Compared with what happened in the Jiangnan area (the Yangtze River Delta), the change in Fujian Province was less profound and thorough, but it highly surpassed the North China society, where many sub-prefectures and counties remained unchanged till the end of the Ming Dynasty. However, there were also some coastal or interior regions in Fujian which continuously maintained a simple and unspoiled social atmosphere for the unbalanced economic development.
This article examines the intense debates over the New Criminal Code of Great Qing (Da-Qing xin xinglü) in the National Assembly (Zizheng yuan) during the Qing empire’s New Policy Reform (1901–11). The focus is on the conflict between those who drafted and supported the new code and those who expressed reservations, especially over reform of the laws on filial piety and fornication. The issue of reconfiguring the family and social order through law was closely related to the overarching agenda of twentieth century legal reform in China—making an empire that “ruled through the principle of filial piety” into a modern nation-state that had direct relationships with its citizens. More importantly, an analysis of the late Qing debate over family law enables this article to problematize such concepts as “Chinese” and “Western” during this crucial moment of China’s empire-to-nation transformation. It showcases the paradox of China’s modern-era reforms—a contradiction between imposing Western-inspired order with a largely indigenous logic and maintaining existing sociopolitical order in the name of preserving national identity.
Many previous thinkers have imagined that there was a glorious or harmonious period in the past better than the world of their own time, but Thucydides and Sima Qian do not describe the early stages of human society as a Golden Age. I suggest that Sima Qian marks a separation between the mythical stories and the historical spirit in China, just as Thucydides did in Greece. Further, they both presented a modified cyclical view of human history. For a better understanding of the basic characteristics of Greek and Chinese historiographies, this paper discusses the cyclical views of human history underlying ancient Greek and early Chinese historiographies through a comparative study of Thucydides’ and Sima Qian’s texts. I analyze some similarities and differences between the two great historians’ conceptions of historical process, and I conclude that Thucydides believes human intelligence develops through a historical spiral, while Sima Qian focuses on dynastic cycles with a strong moral concern.
Although Eileen Chang, one of China’s most popular twentiethcentury writers, never visited Nanyang (lit., the South Sea, referring principally to Southeast Asia), Nanyang and huaqiao (Chinese sojourners) are mentioned frequently in her writings. This essay first analyzes Chang’s images of Nanyang and huaqiao , and then discusses the societal and individual contexts of her literary conceptualizations by tracing her direct and indirect knowledge of these themes. Chang’s imagination of Nanyang and huaqiao , examined within the historical context of Sino-Nanyang interactions, provides a valuable opportunity to discuss the emergence of a nationalist-driven huaqiao community and the expansion of Sino-Nanyang interactions before the Pacific War.
This article explores nineteenth-century Penang’s Hokkkien merchants and their secret society or hui —the Kian Teik Tong (Jiande Tang)—which had a variety of roles and an extensive network. It contextualizes the merchants’ secret society as a transnational socioeconomic and political organization rather than as an overseas Chinese criminal group in the wider Penang area. By recovering Kian Teik Tong and its network, it can be shown how these merchants secured and mobilized labour, capital, and allies in a way that cut across linguistic, ethnic, class and state boundaries in order to establish control of coolies and the lucrative opium, tin, and rice businesses, in order to exert political influence in the colonial and indigenous milieus of the nineteenth-century Penang region. They established a social contract through their Kian Teik Tong relief activities and initiation rituals, and thus were able to recruit thousands of members who were mainly labourers. With such a substantial social force, the merchants launched organized violence against their rivals to attain dominance in opium revenue farming and tin mining businesses in Penang, Krabi, and Perak. The widespread and strategic location of the Kian Teik Tong in Burma also enabled the same merchants to monopolize the Penang-Burma rice trade. The versatility of the Kian Teik Tong’s functions allowed them to operate as an alternative political order vis-a-vis the colonial and indigenous powers. This arrangement allowed the Hokkien merchants to gain significant political clout in confronting the Siamese and Dutch authorities.
The most famous road built during the Qin dynasty was the Zhidao, literally, the Direct Road. The Direct Road connected Ganquan, near the capital, with the northwest corner of the empire, and historians have discussed it since ancient times. Yet the earliest sources do not give any information about the Direct Road’s specific route, leaving this question open to debate. In recent decades, there has been a controversy among historical geographers and archaeologists about the path the Zhidao took, and numerous articles have been published proposing variations of two main possibilities. This article gathers relevant historical materials, reviews the scholarship on both sides of the debate, and discusses the difficulties that emerge when scholars seek to integrate history and archaeology.
During the May Fourth New Cultural Movement, three debates on new/Western and old/Chinese cultures were respectively carried out between the journal New Youth and Lin Qinnan, Chen Duxiu and Du Yaquan, as well as Zhang Dongsun and Fu Sinian. New Youth, Chen Duxiu and Zhang Dongsun were regarded as the “new school,” whereas their opponents “the old new-intellectuals.” The difference between them lies in their attitudes towards traditions instead of their new or old knowledge. After three heated debates, New Youth won a total victory in big cities, because the so-called “urban youths” needed a radical cultural reform plan and a simple guide for action. On the contrary, “town youths” who lived in small cities and towns did not care about the attitudinal difference of two sides. They paid more attention to absorbing new knowledge from both sides and were more sympathetic to tradition.
The myth of Manchu origin was narrated in different versions with the same theme and variant details. Based on Manchu documents, the myth of Manchu origin has two early versions that were written in Manchu with minor differences in the narration of the story. From the earliest version of 1635 to the version compiled in the nineteenth century, all the authors highlight that the origin of the Manchu people as coming from a heavenly being, with the purpose of reinforcing the Qing dynasty’s legitimacy as coming from the heaven, as was officially declared by the Qing government throughout the dynasty. This article makes a comparative study based on evidential research on the facts contained in different versions of the myth and the time periods of composition.
Most previous studies have held that the system of Tubo gaoshen (an honorary identity mark) was an imitation of a similar system in the Tang dynasty, referring to the latter’s official costume decorations for its stratified office-holders. These studies have not given due attention to the characteristics of the title itself. From the perspective of the change of the Tibetan name and based on existing research results and historical records in both Tibetan and Chinese, this article tries to offer a new understanding and preliminary discussion on the development of Tubo gaoshen and several related issues. We find that there are two paths in the evolution of its name: One is from Sug to Yi Ge or Yig, the other is from Yig tsang to Yig tshangs. The former is used to denote a concrete gaoshen and can be added as a prefix while the latter denotes the abstract idea of gaoshen and no attribute can be used before it. When the two are used together, the latter is used before the former, such as in: yig tshangs pa ni zangs kyi yi ge gtong/ (As to the gaoshen [yig tshangs], [he] is awarded a bronze yi ge).