Known primarily for his reformist proposals in the areas of military affairs, foreign policy, the salt monopoly, and the grain tribute system, the influential early nineteenth-century literatus Bao Shichen 包世臣 (1775–1855) also made throughout his life numerous suggestions regarding the improvement of agricultural practice and of rural life. Contrary to the arguments of his older contemporary Hong Liangji that the empire was facing an imminent demographic and provisioning crisis, Bao argued that there was ample possibility for increasing crop yields, and improving popular livelihoods, if a more rational approach was taken to cropping decisions, farm labor allocation, agricultural commercialization, and local-level social organization. Bao was fond of quantification, and, far more than Hong, employed statistical analysis (albeit crude) to bolster his arguments. Fundamentally committed to increasing the power and wealth of the imperial state in the face of threats both foreign and domestic, Bao was highly optimistic that this could be achieved simultaneously with fulfilling his other basic commitment, relieving what he saw as widespread popular immiseration.
In the decades before the full-scale war with Japan in 1937, a robust series of institutions connected the bourgeois with intellectuals (which included professionals and journalists, as well as academics) in Shanghai. Collectively, these institutions can be understood as forming an urban “cultural nexus of power” that allowed non-state actors to effectively control aspects of Shanghai’s political life. This bourgeois-intellectual alliance was not inevitable; no similar bonds existed between these same two groups in Beijing. It was forged in Shanghai due to the city’s unique historical position as a Treaty Port and its dynamic economy, which included an extensive structure of private higher education and a market-based publishing industry. Unlike the rural “cultural nexus of power” originally described by Prasenjit Duara, this urban nexus grew stronger during the political and economic changes of the early twentieth century. War and revolution in the 1930s and 1940s, however, destroyed the connections between the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, ending the vibrant urban environment they had created.
Mobilizing men to serve in the army was one of the fundamental tasks of the Nationalist government during the Anti-Japanese War (1937–45). Using ground-level conscription cases from counties around Chongqing, this paper examines wartime rural administration. In interior areas, the draft rested on rural administrators, the recently revived baojia system. The baojia heads were in a difficult position: the state demanded full quotas of draftees, while residents tried to leverage bureaucratic discipline by filing accusations against them with higher ups. Their divided loyalties produced both predation and protection. Alongside the familiar stories of predatory extortion and press-gang conscription, baojia leaders also acted in ways that were protective of their neighbours and communities. The patterns of draft-related cases in rural Sichuan revise our picture of baojia leaders as unchecked bullies and thus throw new light on both the KMT’s war effort and its state-making.
This article proposes the concept of policy blending to improve our understanding of the densely interactive quality of political initiatives in early 1950s China. Using three cases studies, I argue that policy blending, defined as the process by which previous political experiences shaped the implementation and interpretation of those subsequent to them (sometimes in ways contrary to the government’s intentions), occurred frequently during this period, to the extent that people’s understanding of the first years of Chinese Communist Party rule cannot be separated from this phenomenon. Using examples from marriage registration, the Marriage Law and the national discussion of the 1954 draft Constitution, I advance the historiographical argument that the early 1950s should not be demarcated by, or taught mainly with reference to, “temporally encapsulated” policies with clear beginnings and ends (i.e., policy “a” occurred in year “b,” followed by policy “c” in year “d”). Rather, policies seeped into each other, producing a blurry—but sometimes accurate—“impression” of state power. I further suggest that the concept of policy blending can be helpful in understanding subsequent political initiatives as well.
This paper follows the life of an idea, a fundamental concept in modern Chinese intellectual life: socialism. It explores this idea as an alternative form of Chinese cosmopolitanism, drawing from Pheng Cheah’s identification of two kinds of Chinese cosmopolitanism: mercantile and revolutionary. If part of what we mean by cosmopolitanism is the local use of an external, or international, or otherwise “independent” (relative to local power and practice) ideology or discourse to promote an agent’s sense of social good at home and connection to the world, then the ways that socialist thought, ideology and praxis have been employed in China in the twentieth century constitute one such strain of cosmopolitanism. Shehuizhuyi (socialism) meant related but significantly different things to Chinese in the twentieth century. This essay argues that Chinese socialism can be viewed as a version of vernacular cosmopolitanism through two examples: Wang Shiwei in the 1940s and Deng Tuo in the 1960s, as well as the discourse of Pan-Asianism before and after the Mao era. Chinese socialism was as much a terrain of debate and contestation about what it means to be “Chinese and modern” as it was a shared vocabulary and set of aspirations. All along it has been able to play the role of cosmopolitan thought for some influential Chinese thinkers and doers—connecting China to the world in order to pursue universal values.
This lecture is concerned with some historical issues of “China,” “territory,” “culture” and “identity” that are placed against the background of politics, culture and scholarship in contemporary China. I want to draw attention to the question of how historians understand and interpret “China.” It addresses the following questions. First, where did the idea of “China” come from? and how did it become a topic of scholarly research? What kind of dilemmas does “China” confront in its current condition and historical interpretation? Second, how do various new historical theories and methods in international academic circles enrich our understanding of “China”? Third, how does China’s history and reality challenge the theories of “empire” and “nation-state”? Fourth, is it possible to write “East Asian history”? Does “national history” prove still effective in describing China or East Asia?