At the turn of the 18th century, the Kangxi emperor initiated a large project to map the vast territories of the Qing. The land surveys that ensued were executed by teams of Qing officials and European missionaries, most of them French Jesuits first sent to China in 1685 and actively supported by the French crown. Early 18th century Jesuit publications foster a much-heralded claim that these missionary-mapmakers drew on their status of imperial envoys during the surveys to locally advance the position of the Catholic church. This article strives to explore the formation of such local networks by these missionaries as they passed through the cities and towns of the Chinese provinces. On the basis of archival material, details emerge of contacts with local Qing administrators and Chinese Christians, and of attempts to purchase and recover local churches. This is then discussed against the background of the Rites Controversy, in an attempt to evaluate how such local networks relate to the rivalry between missionaries of different orders. The article emphasizes that there was (and perhaps is) no such thing as “pure science” by underscoring that important technical achievements such as the Qing mapping project are often shaped by complex networks and historical contingencies.
Medical charity in northeast China evolved through the confluence of three processes: the foundation of state medicine, the legal and political transformation of private charities, and the militarized competition for influence between China and Japan. Following the plague of 1910, a series of Chinese regimes began building medical infrastructure in areas under their control, but their ultimate inability to establish a comprehensive public health program left private charities to fill the gaps. In contrast, the Japanese administered concessions in Kantō and along the South Manchuria Railway instituted a farsighted and multivalenced medical policy. The Japanese model did not merely tolerate medical charities, it reserved for them a very specific role in the larger strategic framework of healthcare provision. Under the client state of “Manzhouguo,” the Japanese model further evolved to channel medical voluntarism into a hybrid state-charitable sector.
In early 1919, people like Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu were regarded as members of an ivory-tower “academic faction” (xuepai), embroiled in a debate with an opposing “faction.” After the May Fourth demonstrations, they were praised as the stars of a “New Culture Movement.” However, it was not obvious how the circle around Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu was associated with the May Fourth demonstrations. This link hinged on the way in which newspapers like Shenbao reported about the academic debates and the political events of May Fourth. After compartmentalizing the debating academics into fixed xuepai, Shenbao ascribed warlord-political allegiances to them. These made the Hu-Chen circle look like government victims and their “factional” rivals like the warlords’ allies. When the atmosphere became hostile to the government during May Fourth, Hu Shi’s “faction” became associated with the equally victimized May Fourth demonstrators. Their ideas were regarded as (now popular) expressions of anti-government sentiment, and soon this was labeled the core of the “New Culture Movement.” The idea and rhetoric of China’s “New Culture Movement” in this way emerged out of the fortuitous concatenation of academic debates, newspaper stories, and political events.
After entering Beijing in January 1949, the Communist Party immediately sent cadres to local factories in order to mobilize female industrial workers into a women’s movement and to establish the idea of “revolutionary citizenship.” The Party wished to nurture this idea in both the local political arena and in women’s lives inside and outside the factories. This article demonstrates that a host of factors defined revolutionary citizenship, including party directives, choices in revolutionary strategy, cadres’ interpretations of directives and their own initiatives, and workers’ reactions to mobilization. It was in this complex mix of mobilization, women’s strategies to protect and advance their own interests, and the politics of group representation in the revolution, that female workers came to understand the meaning and impact of revolutionary citizenship and the shape of labor-state relations in the emerging socialist China.
This article explores the enduring effect of a narrative model known as suku (“speaking bitterness”) in the post-Mao era, and in particular its gendered effect when women adopted it to represent their own lives. Using the oral life-story of a woman who lived through the Mao era as an example, the article explores the ways suku operates as a master script in people’s narratives about their lives. It argues that the adoption of the model in a certain sense resulted in the de-narration of gendered experience, as well as the de-narration of life in the post-Mao era, it further demonstrates that the suku narrative model limited not only the representation of certain experiences but also the construction of gender subjectivity. Furthermore, in the post-Mao era, instead of being the master script, the suku model often has to negotiate with other scripts, being revised, extended, redirected, and in some cases, replaced. One of these encounters, between the suku model and a feminist script, will be examined. The article argues that such encounter has the potential to challenge the master script and to create narrative space for women to narrate their gendered experience, and to construct a self-defined, more adequately articulated gender subjectivity.
This article presents a rare inside view of a unique project currently underway in China to study and preserve the memory of possibly the single most seminal event in Chinese modern history, the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45). The article introduces a multi-faceted program to preserve the wartime cultural heritage; the work is ongoing in the thriving western metropolis of Chongqing, once China’s bomb-torn wartime capital and international Allied command center. It describes how, seven decades after World War II, scholars, cultural workers, government experts, and artists in China are joining hands in an unprecedented, all-encompassing project to record, restore, and recount the extraordinary legacy of China’s War of Resistance in its local, as well as national and global contexts.