Dujiangyan irrigation system of more than 2000 years history is a symbol of originality of Chinese ancestors both in its conception and project mode. It is still working well and benefit Chengdu Plain nowadays while other comparable water conservancy projects of the same or later age have vanished and been forgotten. More than just a world-famous cultural heritage, it shows the harmonious relationship between man and nature. And it also reveals us how to solve problems in the era of economic globalization, such as the constantly silt up of the dams, the exhaustion of the energy and the crisis of the deterioration of ecosystem. The inspirations it gives us range from technology to humanities, from economy to various aspects in social life. In a word, Dujiangyan irrigation system demonstrates the wisdom and creativity of Chinese people and has a universal significance despite the change of time and space.
“Bare branches,” the name given to unmarried men in China, have historically posed a great threat to social stability in that country. Based on historical records and literature, the findings in this study reveal that female infanticide, coupled with the practice of polygyny, meant that during the Ming and Qing dynasties and the Republican Era, up to twenty percent of males remained single. As a result, underclass bare branches turned to less socially accepted marriage practices. And if they were still unable to find a suitable marriage partner, they would turn to prostitutes, adultery with married women, or might even resort to sexual assault. Humiliated by their social status, bare branches tended to drift away from their hometowns and form brotherhoods, secret societies, bandit gangs and even military groups, posing a real threat to social stability. In extreme cases, they engaged in armed conflict, taking over government offices, clashing with government forces, destroying social infrastructure, and helping to topple dynastic regimes. Such extreme violence and disorder led to the reduction of local populations by the thousands or even millions, creating a subsequent negative effect on social development.
One of the most iconic expressions in the last one hundred years associated with Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution of China has been “The Overseas Chinese are the Mother of the Revolution.” This paper traces the hazy origin of the slogan in its particular, well-known form as well as through paraphrases by examining its linkages to Sun Yat-sen and a wide body of writings from different periods. It highlights the waxing and waning of its usage, pointing to a period of high currency in the early 1930s, fading out in the 1940s, emergence as a Cold War coinage in Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1980s, and its surfacing as a focus of scholarship in the mainland of China after 1978. The final sections of the essay explore the more recent transformation of the saying in Nanyang popular culture through museum displays, theatre performance, and film. Over time, the saying, in its various configurations, serves to use it as an umbilical cord connecting the Chinese diaspora with its ancestral land.
The discourses of classical scholars during the eighteenth century reinforced a shift from Song-Ming rationalism to a more skeptical and secular classical empiricism. By making precise scholarship the source of acceptable knowledge, Qing classicists contended that the legitimate reach of ancient ideals should be reevaluated through comparative delineation of the textual sources from which all such knowledge derived. This turn to empirically based classical inquiry meant that abstract ideas and rational argumentation gave way as the primary objects of elite discussion to concrete facts, verifiable institutions, ancient natural studies, and historical events. In general, Qing classicists regarded Song and Ming “Learning of the Way” as an obstacle to verifiable truth because it discouraged further inquiry along empirical lines. The empirical approach to knowledge they advocated placed proof and verification at the heart of analysis of the classical tradition. During this time, scholars and critics also applied historical analysis to the official Classics. Classical commentary yielded to textual criticism and a “search for evidence” to refortify the ancient canon. Representing a late imperial movement in Confucian letters, Qing classicists still sought to restore the classical vision. The early modern power of their philology, however, yielded the forces of decanonization and delegitimation as modernist trends, which went beyond the intellectual limits they had imposed on their own writings.
In this article, we explore the way men and women used the idea of violence to transform their broader political roles in their desired new Republic. We argue that the espousal of violence, whether or not actually undertaken, became an important part of the accoutrements of progressive political forces in China at this time. Violent action was perceived as virtuous rather than villainous among reformers and radicals in the late Qing and early Republic. We demonstrate that the impact and significance of this turn to violence differed for men and for women. For men, the ability and willingness to take violent action symbolized a break with the effete literati of the imperial past by their envisaging of a muscular Confucianism; for women, it provided a platform on which their claims to equal citizenship with men could be performed. The gendered nature of the virtue of violence within this rapidly changing political context produced unexpected results for both male and female political aspirants.
This article offers a critical review of literature in the area of modern Chinese business history from 1978 to 2008. It focuses on four interconnected topics: (1) the evolution of industrial capitalism, (2) the adoption of corporate hierarchies and/or social networks, (3) the change of financial institutions and monetary system, and (4) the development of state-owned industries and the formation of the (central) state enterprise system. The review reveals not only significant growth of the field of modern Chinese business history over the last three decades but also the existence of major gaps. The article concludes by considering the implications of its findings for understanding the political economy of business enterprises and enterprise systems in different national and historical contexts.
The paper seeks to grasp the conditions under which the idea of the multi-national state developed in twentieth-century China. Although the idea of multiple nationalities was taking hold at the beginning of the twentieth-century in Europe—especially in Eastern Europe, it first found institutional expression in the Chinese Republic declared in 1912. While the grounds for the emergence have to do with the transition from empire to nation-state in many countries of the world, the idea in China also drew from imperial Chinese conceptions of an imperial federation. Moreover, the impact of the multi-national state in China was long-term and we can find an important dynamic of Chinese politics in this formation.
During the period of the Eastern Jin, the Sixteen States, the Southern dynasties, and the Northern dynasties, population movement caused the conflicts both between the Han and minorities in the north and immigrants and natives in the south. The traditional method of estimating the immigrants was based on the households of migration prefectures, subprefectures and counties recorded in local gazetteers, which is actually different between the actual distribution of immigrants and those registered in local gazetteers. Thus, the migration population and their descendents need to be recalculated. In fact, migrations in the Sixteen States were largely for military and agriculture purposes, while in the Northern dynasties, particularly the Northern Wei, population movements were mostly to fill the capitals, the boundary and inland areas, both were enforced by the governments. Population migration often determined government policies, enriched cultural contents, promoted economic developments, and changed the intellectual trends and social structure in certain dynasties, especially in the Eastern Jin and the Southern dynasties.
The construction of “citizen-state” relations in the intellectual world of modern China and the establishment of individual citizenship in political discourse have opened up a political and discourse sphere for modern women to strive for new identities, wherein some intellectually advanced women have managed to establish their individual identity as “female citizen” by carrying the debate on the relationship between women and the state with regard to their rights and responsibilities, and on the relationship between gender role and citizenship. Though the idea of “female citizen” was not provided with a political theory of practical significance, the subject identity of women, however, was repeatedly spoken about and strengthened in brand-new literary practices, resulting in a dynamic discourse of “female citizen”; in the meantime, disagreements concerning the concepts of “female rights,” “civil rights,” and “natural rights” have all helped create significant tension inside the related discourse sphere.
The pneumonic plague, which spread over Northeast China during the winter of 1910 and the spring of 1911, caused a great many deaths and brought about severe social turmoil. After compulsory quarantine and other epidemic preventative measures were enforced by the Russian and Japanese colonial authorities in both north and south Manchuria, the local government of Northeast China, lacking similar quarantine and epidemic prevention procedures, was under the threat of forced intervention. It had to establish modern public health agencies in a short time following the compulsory quarantine and epidemic prevention methods of the Russian and Japanese colonial authorities, although they caused many social conflicts and confrontations. In this respect, the quarantine and epidemic prevention measures that were implemented at that time can never be simply and absolutely labeled as “progressive.” However, a “sympathetic understanding” can be upheld for the sufferings of the common people, for the various unpleasant but necessary measures taken by the Chinese government in order to safeguard sovereignty and prevent Russian and Japanese intervention, and also for the transformation of public health systems later carried out because of lessons learned from this painful experience.
Family division is the way of reproduction of Chinese families and the starting point of building new families. Reasons of family division in the Republic of China include bad terms among sisters-in-law, among brothers, between father and sons, between mother-in-law and daughters-in-law, or working outside. There are three patterns of family division: one-time thorough division, serial division, and special types of division. The circumstances of family division include: inheritance while parents are alive or after their death; equal inheritance among brothers hosted by their uncle (mother’s brother), inheritance rights attributed to the eldest son or grandson, and special principles of property distribution. The rite of family division is quite solemn; documents of family division definitely need to be made with specific regulations. There are three ways of supporting for the eldly, among which leaving some land to parents is popularly adopted in rural China during the Republic period.
The Young Companion, an important representative of Republican Shanghai’s popular magazines, organized a Healthy Baby Contest from August 1926 to March 1927. Though its slogan, “Strong babies promise strong people, strong people guarantee a strong nation” expressed a nationalistic spirit, this contest was rather a commercial activity organized by a popular magazine and its commercial sponsor exploiting nationalistic discourse. Such an integration of nationalistic discourse and commercial interests profoundly influenced mass culture and ultimately promoted China’s modernization and its development as a nation. With this contest as an example, this paper sheds light on the relationship between popular journals and the making of a nation.
By looking at one particular case, this study determines what resources were available to local governments in order to finance local economic development in the reform era. It finds that although local finance expanded tremendously in this era, and extra-budgetary revenue also increased, those two things did not produce much financial surplus for capital construction and fixed investment. The only source at the local government’s disposal was cheap land expropriated from local peasants. Land thus becomes the key to understanding local finance during the reform era.
How new was the New China? This article explores the experience of Beijing tailors in the early years of the PRC in light of this question. After 1949, many long-established tailors simply continued to ply their trade in their old business premises, giving a strong impression of continuity in the social fabric of the city. They were increasingly challenged, however, by newcomers to the industry, including petty entrepreneurs who chose to invest in a socially useful trade, and the graduates of newly established sewing schools, usually women. Policy shifts from the New Democracy period through the “three anti” and “five anti” campaigns to the eve of the socialist transformation in 1956 affected old and new businesses, men and women, in different ways. Overall, the reduction in entrepreneurial freedoms that characterizes this period of Chinese business history was, in this sector of industry and commerce, most strikingly manifest in limitations on what tailors were licensed to make, which had effects on what Beijing people wore. From these various perspectives, 1949 can be seen to be a rather clear dividing line in the history of Beijing, but it was possibly a rather faint line at first, becoming darker and thicker as the 1950s progressed—or should that be “regressed?”
National heroes are important in the development of nationalist thinking. One important figure in this context is General Yue Fei (1103–42), who unsuccessfully fought the invading Jurchen in the twelfth century. Shortly after his execution, a temple was built in his honour in Hangzhou. Local chronicles show that this temple was constantly renovated in later dynasties. Due to his continuous worship as a loyal warrior—even during the Qing dynasty—his temple became a powerful site of identity. His veneration as a national hero in the course of the twentieth century has, however, posed a problem to a post-1911 China that felt compelled to sustain a multi-ethnic nation-state, whilst at the same time facing the difficulty of not being able to do without General Yue Fei. This article shall make it apparent that his resurrection as a national hero in the twentieth century was possible because of certain narrative strategies that had already been propagated by the Manchurian rulers of the eighteenth century.
Some elements of Puritanism in Chinese tradition are obviously different from the well-known intellectual phenomenon in the West; in the Neo-Confucian ambit the key question concerns “order–disorder,” “harmony–disharmony” in society and inside one’s personality, rather than “sin” and “purity” in personal morality. Yet we also find that chastity is involved in the contrast between the two concepts of purity and pollution and the idea of “obscene” (meaning “inauspicious,” “ill-omened,” “profane”) allows us to uncover a darker side to sexual representation. Death seems another source of active or passive pollution: this effect occurs after contaminational contact with human or animal remains. Thus death is the source of “desecration,” or of “contamination,” especially when it is the consequence of violence. This means that in Chinese culture, a sense of impurity seems to be driven by the horror of death and the fear of being overwhelmed by the passion of love; respectively, thanatos and eros. Other topics may also be associated, such as mental insanity referring to what is different, abnormal, strange, and socially subversive. The clean–unclean distinction originally responded to a basic visceral feeling—horror and repulsion/disgust—that is typically associated with hygienic worries and matter that is perceived as repugnant and inedible. But these basic ideas seem to have been symbolically extended to cope with the subconscious and metaphysical spheres: the horror of death and the fear of being overwhelmed by passion, the mysteries which lie behind these emotions, and the attempt to sublimate such fears into an impulse to transcend the red dust of our limited existence.