Spaces and their boundaries—geographical and otherwise—are socially constructed. Travel is a major means for the engendering of geographical spaces. Humans travel for a great variety of reasons, producing different types of spaces, and corresponding knowledge. Particular spatial organizations embody the specific reasons for and the manner in which sojourners undertake travel. This paper examines the role of long distance travel in the production of specific knowledge of the Chinese empire for two different groups during the late Ming period—the shi (literati-officials) and the shang (merchants). As reflected in the merging of publications for merchants and literati, the act of travel and the very need for it brought these two groups closer together socially. The shi in late Ming China traveled great distances for three major reasons: to take civil service exams, to assume official duties, and to take up teaching or writing jobs. Merchants traveled for business reasons: to acquire materials and products, to sell goods, to negotiate contracts, and to operate shops. But increasingly, these two groups crossed paths with greater intensity and frequency. The travel they undertook brought them into closer social interaction. The knowledge they needed converged so much that commercial publishers found it logical to publish travel guides for both constituencies under one cover. This new genre of publications also provided ethical prescriptions and practical information that both merchants and literati needed. The different levels of literacy among literati and merchant communities prompted publishers to adopt a writing style that mixed the classical style of the literati and a simple plain style easily comprehensible to the merchants. The increase in the use of the term shishang in book titles that included travel guides and other types of knowledge attested to the subtle shift in the production of geographical knowledge, which was no longer organized primarily by imperial interests.
One of the most iconic expressions in the last one hundred years associated with Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution of China has been “The Overseas Chinese are the Mother of the Revolution.” This paper traces the hazy origin of the slogan in its particular, well-known form as well as through paraphrases by examining its linkages to Sun Yat-sen and a wide body of writings from different periods. It highlights the waxing and waning of its usage, pointing to a period of high currency in the early 1930s, fading out in the 1940s, emergence as a Cold War coinage in Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1980s, and its surfacing as a focus of scholarship in the mainland of China after 1978. The final sections of the essay explore the more recent transformation of the saying in Nanyang popular culture through museum displays, theatre performance, and film. Over time, the saying, in its various configurations, serves to use it as an umbilical cord connecting the Chinese diaspora with its ancestral land.
By examining the four reprints of Robert Morrison’s Wuche yun fu (Five wagonloads of words) produced during the second half of the nineteenth century, this paper outlines the emergence and evolution of Chinese-English bilingual dictionaries and their role in spreading standard English to a wider literary audience in the treaty port of Shanghai. In the language mosaic of treaty port society, bilingual dictionaries highlighted the gap between spoken pidgin and written English, demarcating two linguistic repertoires commanded by two different groups. In exploring the socio-historical background of the publication history of these dictionaries, this paper also sheds light on the publishing market, especially English study aids in late nineteenth-century Shanghai.
This paper focuses on the Shanghai Moral Welfare Committee (renamed the Shanghai Moral Welfare League in 1920), which was founded on May 16, 1918, following a decision made by seventeen foreign religious and secular charities of the Shanghai International Settlement. In 1919–24, the Municipal Council of the Shanghai International Settlement declared a five-year timeframe for gradually shutting down all the brothels under its administration. The few previous studies of this topic by European and American scholars mainly concentrated on the aspect of venereal disease prevention and the prohibition of prostitution, as well as the construction of gender, but they paid little attention to the Moral Welfare Committee as a primary advocate of this reform. As such, this event has been misrepresented as yet another story about the modernization and spiritual salvation of Chinese society by Western municipal authorities and moral reformers. However, the Committee, created by foreign moral reformers in Shanghai, was primarily focused on white males with venereal diseases and white prostitutes, in order to reestablish an image of the Western Christian countries as civilized in Chinese eyes. Underlying this effort was a strong sense—among foreign communities in China at that time—of superiority over Chinese society in both civilization and morality. However, this arrogance was rife with insecurities; foreign reformers lacked necessary confidence in their civilized image and in their capacity to set themselves up as a model for the moral discipline and salvation of the Chinese people.
“New Woman” and “Modern Girl” discourse prevailed in China in the early twentieth century. The left-wing cinema of the 1930s engaged in this discourse and created a filmic space in which to negotiate gender and modernity. Focusing on three films directed by Sun Yu (1900–90): Wild Rose, Little Toys and The Highway, this paper compares Sun Yu’s new women with those in two other films: Lessons for Girls, a lesser known but interesting caricature of “new” women, and the New Woman, the best known of the “new woman” genre, both of which depict how urban, petty bourgeois women failed in their struggles for independence. In sharp contrast, Sun Yu used poetic realism to create a series of refreshingly independent working class women characters that successfully combined traditional moral values and modern patriotism and resisted the radical anti-traditionalism of the new woman discourse. This paper offers a differentiated analysis of the diverse and complex ways in which China’s left-wing cinema negotiated gender and modernity in the 1930s.
The paper seeks to grasp the conditions under which the idea of the multi-national state developed in twentieth-century China. Although the idea of multiple nationalities was taking hold at the beginning of the twentieth-century in Europe—especially in Eastern Europe, it first found institutional expression in the Chinese Republic declared in 1912. While the grounds for the emergence have to do with the transition from empire to nation-state in many countries of the world, the idea in China also drew from imperial Chinese conceptions of an imperial federation. Moreover, the impact of the multi-national state in China was long-term and we can find an important dynamic of Chinese politics in this formation.
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