Hutments—a term used to designate “beggars’ villages,” “straw- house villages” or more bluntly “slums”—became a standard feature of Shanghai’s urban landscape in the early 1920s. Located in peripheral areas, they became a central object of concern by the authorities that governed the foreign settlements in the city. Over time, due to economic crisis and above all war, “hutments” slowly colonized the whole urban space and became a massive housing issue and a problematic historical legacy after 1949. This paper argues that hutments arose mostly from the turmoil of the Civil War period. Their nature changed little from the time of their appearance in the 1920s to the early 1950s. Yet, perceptions and policies over three major periods under study here varied significantly. They were strongly influenced by the discursive constructions and distorting lenses the local administrations formulated around issues of nuisance, public health, and city beautification. Each era carried over the concerns and prejudices of the previous period. Yet, each municipal institution also brought in new cultural and political postures that changed the overall discourse and treatment of hutment dwellers.
This paper attempts to investigate the decline of Chinese guilds in the early 1950s and to show how political change altered economic life in China. Although the socialist transformation of private ownership started in 1954, the new government used state power to gradually weaken private ownership far before that time, building a foundation for the full-scale socialist transformation later. The reorganization of the Teahouse Guild in Chengdu reflected the general policies of the Communist Party that changed traditional social and economic organizations. The new guild almost became a representative of the government in the teahouse profession, which no longer maintained the nature of the traditional guilds. Actually, the guilds existed in name only after the reorganization of the early 1950s, and the teahouse guild disappeared after 1953. The death of the guild was a result of decline among social organizations and the growing strength of state power.
This essay explores the impact of governance on the Chinese religious landscape during the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) through a case study of the Young Buddhist Association (YBA) of Shanghai. Despite the official atheist ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, during this era of New Democracy the YBA experienced Communist governance in practice as a process of political incorporation rather than coercive eradication. As its Buddhist youth movement not only survived the Communist takeover in 1949 but gained momentum well into the 1950s, the YBA was propelled to the forefront of the Buddhist community in Shanghai and became the most active and influential grassroots Buddhist organization in the early PRC. The case of the YBA demonstrates that incorporation into the new political order of the 1950s had transformative effects on the spatial construction, identity formation, and social dynamics of religious communities that cannot be reduced to steps toward their eventual elimination during the Cultural Revolution.
Most studies of Christianity in the early PRC have focused on the politicization of religious practices under the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, explaining how the Christian faith empowered people to resist the state’s atheistic propaganda. In fact, both Communist officials and Christians invoked ideas about transcendent power and moral purpose, blurring the boundary between secular and religious concerns. The state-sanctioned patriotic religions had greatly impacted the political and theological orientations of Chinese Christians in the Maoist era. This article looks at the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Shanghai, one of the first Protestant denominations to be denounced in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. When the state infiltrated the Adventist institutions, some of the pro-government Adventist leaders worked with the officials to bring the church closer to the socialist order. Most of the Adventists, however, resisted the state and organized themselves into a diffused network of house churches. This study highlights the fluid and complex political environment that the Adventists experienced, and the ways they interacted with the Maoist state. The reorientation of theological concerns, the new strategies for evangelization, and the growth of autonomous church networks enabled the Adventists to be a fast-growing religious movement.
This paper examines the relationship between the state and art collectors during the 1950s and 1960s in Shanghai. It explores how the state gained control over art and collecting, by building state museums, by co-opting connoisseurs and their collections, and by extending “socialist transformation” to the antiquities market in 1956. However, state control was far from complete, and some trade in antiquities continued outside of official channels. To crack down on this illegal trade, cultural authorities in Shanghai launched a Five-Antis Campaign in 1964 to punish alleged art speculators. Through its cultural institutions and political campaigns, the state controlled culture but did not monopolize it.