This paper focuses on the investigators of rural society in the Republican period, specifically research made through fieldwork on the Gowned Brothers (or, Paoge) in 1940s Sichuan. It takes up one such investigator, Shen Baoyuan—a student at Yenching University; her youthful work never became published or recognized. The present study reveals how the pioneers of Chinese sociology and anthropology, who called themselves “rural activists,” tried to understand rural China. It argues that the developments in those fields in China of the 1920s and 1940s made it possible for us today to have a better understanding of the contemporary rural problems. The investigators played an important role in the Rural Construction and Rural Education Movements in Republican China. They show us how Western sociology and anthropology were localized in order to answer “Chinese questions” and to solve “Chinese problems.” As source material, these investigations have given us rich records, which in turn have become precious sources and historical memories of rural China’s past.
In recent years, with the spread of the internet and the booming auction markets, combined with our new age of so-called “picture-reading,” paintings and photographs concerning Qing justice have overwhelmed our view. Scholars and nonscholars are attracted by them, and believe them to be showing real historical scenes. Pictures seemingly facilitate our grasp of the world more than mere facts do, but they actually demand readers’ careful discrimination. The author of the present article has discovered that the initial British construction of a discourse about the cruelty of China’s criminal punishments was related to this topic having been exposed by Chinese themselves. The seemingly real images or pictures have an unknown back story, and even contain a serious distortion of the truth. Such imagistic constructions by foreigners in fact directly or indirectly served the establishment and maintenance of foreign extraterritoriality in China. The living images recorded by foreigners’ cameras not only constructed Western impressions of China and Chinese people as distant, thus strengthening contemporary Westerners’ mental images of Chinese culture, but still urge us Chinese today to interpret the past in the light of such images. An icon of a blood-thirsty Qing legal system constructed through painting and photographic procedures became an objective fact, a collective consciousness that penetrated people’s hearts and eventually led to modifications of those Qing laws. The mental construction of an icon influenced actual institutional movement.
Located on Dongshan Island, off the coast of Fujian province, is a typical rural village called Tongbo. On May 10, 1950, 147 men were abducted by the KMT army on its way to Taiwan. Since a majority of the men were already married, overnight, their wives became “widows,” and most would remain so for the rest of their lives. Consequently, Tongbo village became more widely known as Widow Village. The first objective of this paper is to document the tragic experiences of men and women in Tongbo village, focusing on these forced separations in 1950, the possibility of reunion after 1987, and the struggle to cope with the difficulties in between. The second objective of this paper is to argue that while heartbreaking, the experiences of this village are not extraordinary in the context of the Chinese Civil War. What made the men and women in Tongbo extraordinary is not their collective suffering, but how these villagers suffered less, not more, than in many other places, because of the actions of three key figures.
In recent years, religion in China has attracted increased attention, both domestically and internationally. A core aspect of this attention has been the role of church real estate, a contemporary issue with historical origins. After the Second Opium War, France—the self-proclaimed protector of Catholicism—took on the cause of obtaining additional rights and freedoms for Western missionaries in China, albeit with only mixed results. Constant disagreements between China’s central and local governments made it difficult to implement nation-wide regulations.
Students of modern Chinese history, and modern Shanghai history in particular, tend to view Shanghai as having been a lone islet during the Pacific War, when it was cut off from other parts of the world. This article, however, argues that Shanghai was still well connected to areas under the control of the Japanese throughout the war. Using the Sikh community in Shanghai as a case, it demonstrates how the Indian National Army used both a Japanese-initiated military highway and the long-existing Indian diasporic network in Southeast and East Asia to facilitate a certain kind of mobilization. It further sheds light on how the Sikhs in Shanghai were influenced by and responded to the Indian National Army’s endeavors.
The series of A Cultural History of Imagery in China (100 vols.) does not treat images as a point of departure just for language, or the relationship between images and language. Rather, the editors focus on the descriptions, analyses, and interpretations of images in order to decode the formal aspects of “meanings” and the signification of “images in China” by analyzing their construction The series stresses “culture” in the broadest sense to reconsider the value of images from the angle of civilizations.