The late imperial Chinese state made a concerted effort to regulate the bodies of the dead. The statutes and substatutes of the Qing Code not only specified how and when corpses were to be buried, but they also criminalized the exposure, manipulation, alteration, and destruction of dead bodies. Through an examination of legal cases related to the crime of “uncovering graves” (fazhong ), this article explores the uses and abuses of corpses in early nineteenth century China. It argues that dead bodies presented a unique problem for the state. On the one hand, laws related to uncovering graves were intended to keep corpses in their proper places. Once a corpse was buried, it was supposed to be fixed—ritually, materially, and spatially. Unfortunately, this ideal could never be fully realized, since corpses were always in motion. They decomposed; they shifted in the earth; they were exposed by soil erosion; and they were subjected to degradation over time. Moreover, they were disturbed, moved, manipulated, gathered, divided, circulated, and even consumed medicinally by others. In other words, many corpses had interesting and eventful social lives. This article explores some of these lives in an effort to illuminate how the state attempted to manage and control intractable bodies during the nineteenth century.
Lacking a centralized fiscal administration to manage taxation collection and transfer before 1904, the Qing court relied solely on the palace memorial system to enforce overland silver shipment when transferring provincial revenues. However, after 1860 provincial officials gradually discarded the conventional procedure for overland silver shipment and employed third-party private financiers to deliver provincial revenues. After four failed campaigns against private financial firms’ interference in imperial fiscal affairs, the palace memorial system became inefficient for the implementation of public financial policies at the local level. The Qing dynasty’s prolonged and uneasy financial transformation from a minimalist Confucian agrarian empire to an expanding modern fiscal state from 1860 to 1904 was the underlying reason for the declining effectiveness of the palace memorial system in supervising public finance and the ultimate reason for the empire’s increasing financial vulnerability during that period.
While ecclesiastic and state authorities in Europe largely abolished medieval cults of saints because of their “heterodoxy,” late-imperial and modern Chinese Catholic communities in Shanxi still promulgate local cults dedicated to women and men who are believed to have performed posthumous miracles or who represent heroic virtue. Although constrained beneath the scrutiny of imperial, ecclesial, and modern political ideas of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” two Shanxi Catholic villages, Dongergou and Liangquandao (Liuhecun), have managed to preserve and promote Sister Maria Assunta Pallotta and Father Wang Shiwei as contemporary versions of traditional local cults. One of the manifest characteristics of these two Chinese Catholic local cults is how they have been transformed by traditional Daoist cults and have successfully survived in a liminal space between “orthodox” and “heterodox.” Relying on archival materials from the former Taiyuan Catholic Diocese Archive, records held in Roman archives, and oral testimonies, intricate patterns of accommodation and resistance to political and church authorities can be discerned as means for these remote Catholic villages to construct identity and cultivate social cohesion.
During the 1940s, the Chinese Communist revolutionary bases in North China experienced a sharp increase in divorces in which wives cast off their husbands. This was due in great part to the promulgation of a series of marriage regulations and to the Party’s extensive mobilization of women. Examining both the public and private domains in terms of changes affecting tradition, revolution, and gender, the authors investigate the ways that marriage transformation intertwined with national wars, political changes, and gender liberation. Our analysis reveals that marriage institutions experienced a severe crisis as traditional needs and new longings, such as marriage freedom, wartime needs, and the stability of rural traditions, family, and social structures, intersected. The Chinese Communist regime carried out successive adjustments in marriage policies as they affected women. With Party support, the paradigm of “wives divorcing husbands” became de facto marriage policy in order to adapt to resolve conflicts between emotions and the law and to meet the requirements of rural society and military stability. Seeking to shake off the traditional “oppression–liberation” paradigm, the research in the present article tries to combine the study of female existences, marriage, and the relevant emotions with rural traditions and the historical background of wartime China, so as to explain the changes in women’s marital status and the nature and significance of their so-called liberation in wartime revolutionary bases in North China.
Despite serious difficulties caused by the civil war in China and the military confrontation in Korea, over 1,200 Chinese students and scholars returned from the United States (U.S.) to their homeland in the 1950s. While the effort made by the returnees and the Communist regime has been studied, the role played by the U.S. government remains unclear. Relying mostly on archived government documents and published individual recollections, this paper shows that Washington provided most of its assistance to the Chinese students through the emergency aid program, which not only covered all the educational costs for about three quarters of them, but also paid travel expenses for about two thirds of the returnees. In addition, Washington assisted many students in obtaining visas from the British government for their transfer in Hong Kong and offered them room, board, and other services while they were waiting for their transportation in San Francisco. The examination of the helping hand extended by Washington to these returning Chinese students can enhance our understanding of the complex and dynamic nature of Sino-American relations during the Cold War.
The creation of the classic 1960s film Liu Sanjie was a complex process, and the intentions and meanings quite varied. In essence, the localized, marginalized, and decentralized folk legend about Liu Sanjie was discovered and transformed into a representation of the Guangxi area and even of China proper—a product of its era’s emphasis on folk culture and state-sponsored policies in the 1950s concerning the production of art and literature. Liu Sanjie underwent a series of adaptations from folk legend to Guangxi caidiao opera, music and dance opera, and finally to film. It was not just a product made under those policies, but also Liu Sanjie became a model for later revolutionary operas. This paper applies a textual narrative strategy to examine how artists, guided by the literature and art policies, incorporated, adapted, and reiterated the legend of Liu Sanjie to express gender awareness and class struggle.