This article uses case studies to examine the rainmaking activities of provincial military governors during a historical period when a decentralized China suffered from frequent droughts. On the one hand, it analyzes why their rainmaking has been interpreted in a very negative light and demonstrates that progressive intellectuals writing in the Republican-era (1912–49) print media were crucial to fostering misunderstandings of the rainmaking activities of these “warlords” as superstitious and backward. On the other hand, it argues that public ceremonies of praying for rain served as a crucial venue for the military governors to perform their local authority and make a claim to political legitimacy. Some of them pursued efficacy by all possible means, including experimenting with Western “scientific” rainmaking techniques of concussion and fire, which suggests that their rainmaking efforts were not merely a utilization of traditionalism, but drew from a complex and eclectic rainmaking culture emerged in early twentieth-century China. In an age when truly effective weather modification methods had not yet been discovered, the highly visible public rainmaking activities of warlords, regardless of results, constituted an integral and important dimension of their local governance, particularly in desperate times, amidst prolonged and severe droughts when popular feeling was unsettled and volatile.
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century China faced a grave national crisis resulting from intense foreign pressure and a rigid political system that was incapable of adapting to the challenges of the modern world. China’s decline did, however, lead to a wave of nationalism that swept across Chinese society. Set against this backdrop, a new generation of patriotically minded intellectuals, one with relatively broad exposure to Western thinking and academic methods, turned its focus to enlightening the oppressed masses as a means of bringing about national salvation. These intellectuals pursued this forward-looking aim by looking to the past for inspiration. More specifically, they looked to folk culture as a means of connecting with the common people and weaving together a new discourse that promoted national unity. Under these circumstances, a group of professors at Peking University, including Zhou Zuoren, Liu Fu, and Gu Jiegang, began to search for vernacular works in folk culture. This article examines folklore studies at Peking University expanding from folksongs to folk customs and other forms of folk literature. It focuses on early folklorists’ activities, folklore organizations, and primary publications. Under the university’s influence, folklore studies appeared in various newspapers and other research institutions in Beijing and Shanghai in rapid succession.
The judicial system in Qing Beijing integrated both Ming and Manchu institutions. In the Ming judicial system, the first level of courts in Beijing included the Ministry of Justice and the Censorate, and on the second level was the Court of Judicial Review. During the Ming, however, this system became heavily disrupted by the intelligence security apparatuses, like the Eastern Depot. In the Manchu system, on the first level of courts was the banner company captains and on the second level was the Ministry of Justice. After 1644, the Ming’s institutional legacies and lessons remained so important to Manchu rulers that they eventually created an integrated legal system that primarily drew from the Ming system. This integration reflected the Qing dynasty’s endeavor to adopt Ming institutions. Prince Regent Dorgon insisted upon judicial separation on the first level of the courts—Censors of the Five Wards could not settle cases involving banner people, nor could the banner system handle cases involving civilians—while the Shunzhi emperor and his successors wanted judicial unity in Beijing and ordinary banner people and civilians to be adjudicated by the same courts.
This article examines disability as a contested notion of social inclusion by focusing on the blind songstress (guji) in early twentieth-century Guangzhou (Canton). Through personal memoirs, the print press, and institutional documents, this article reconstructs the social life of guji as their experiences intersected with professional community, workplace, and charity. First, I show that the adoption of blind girls from families into training guilds managed by veteran guji was a chosen kinship strategy for blind women since the late Qing period. Second, the commercial sponsorship of guji following the establishment of the Republic not only expanded working opportunities for blind women but also exposed their vulnerability to male-dominated entertainment spheres. Third, the reformist critique of guji as an inappropriate form of sex-related consumption pushed the nascent military government to collaborate with foreign missionaries in “rescuing” blind girls from their professional households. The experiences of guji thus reveal competing ideas of what qualified a disabled person to become a member of society at the beginning of the twentieth century, as work-based inclusion gave way to charitable inclusion as an outcome of shifting social attitudes toward the employment of women with disabilities.
This article serves to analyze the role and history of philology within modern Chinese humanities-based scholarship, using the work of Fu Sinian and the establishment of the Institute of History and Philology as a framework with which to observe the changing status of philology as a practice within contemporary Chinese humanities. Despite its critical function within the Western scholarship and cultural development that inspired modern Chinese scholars as well as its centrality to Fu Sinian’s groundbreaking efforts, philology has been all but ignored in recent years, and its purpose has been rendered niche and peripheral. Additionally, the ambiguity that has surrounded the term “philology” itself since its earliest days within the Chinese academic world has only intensified over time, thereby exacerbating the field’s marginalized status. The author’s goal is to call attention to the complexity and importance of philology that has been so critically overlooked in recent times by outlining six distinct yet interrelated categories of philology/philological study, ranging from a basic academic “love of words, text, and learning” to a broad life view. By providing a detailed, segmented glimpse into the otherwise vaguely-defined phenomenon of philology, its vital function as mankind’s sole means of comprehending the past is made clear, and a “return to philology” is advocated in order to preserve those specific academic fields that draw their origins from philology and avoid a collapse of scholarly humanities study as a whole.