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Civil Society and Urban Change in Republican China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Extract

From the 1950s to the 1970s, historians′ approach to Republican China was informed by a predominant concern for Revolution. Scholarly priorities were focused on the early history of the Chinese Communist Party and on the socio-economic analysis of the countryside where the Chinese revolution had achieved its first success. Few publications were devoted to urban China. The Maoist regime until its end was seen to maintain a strong anti-urban stance. Great ex-treaty port cities were condemned for their past co-operation with foreign imperialism. In the West, the Republican era was often perceived as a confused interregnum between the Qing dynasty and the Communist Empire. And more than a few historians shared the views of their Chinese colleagues and featured big cities of the 1920s and 1930s as outposts of foreign economic exploitation and political oppression, as citadels of cultural arrogance.

Type
Reappraising Republican China
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1997

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References

1 Rhoads, Murphey, The Outsiders: The Western Experience in China (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press,1977).Google Scholar

2 For a brief presentation of these achievements, see Xiong Yuezhi, “Zhongguo chengshi shi yanjiu gaikuang (1979–1994)” (“General view of the research on urban history in China”), unpublished manuscript, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of History, 1995.

3 Among many other examples, see: “Wenhua bian” (“Section on culture”), in Zhang Zhongli (ed.), Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu (Research on Modern Shanghai) (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1990)

4 Ma Shu-yun, “The Chinese discourse on civil society,” The China Quarterly, No. 137 (March 1994), pp. 180–193.

5 Edward Said,Orientalism(New York:Random House,1979)Google Scholar

6 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London:Gollancz, 1963); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modem France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

7 E. P. Thompson, “Folklore, anthropology, and social history,” Indian Historical Review, Vol. 3 (1977), pp. 247–266, as quoted in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 53–54.

8 Cf. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretations of Cultures (New York: 1973) and Hunt, The New Cultural History, pp. 74–75

9 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, Gift, Favors and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 287. However, one should note that Yang prefers not to apply this interpretive framework to an understanding of China

10 See remarks by Gordon White, “Prospects for civil society in China. A case study of Xiaoshan City,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, Vol. 29 (January 1993), pp. 63–68.

11 For such an approach, one may see Tony Saich (ed.), The Chinese People′s Movement: Perspectives on Spring 1989 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); or Arthur Rosenbaum (ed.), State and Society in China: The Consequences of Reform (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992)

12 Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989)

13 See Marilyn Levine′s review of Christian Henriot′s book, Shanghai 1927–1937, Municipal Power, Locality and Modernization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), in China Review International, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 109–111

14 See Ming Chan′s review of Elizabeth Perry′s book, Shanghai on Strike. The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), in China Review International, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1994), p. 208: “The picture she presents and the conclusion she draws are valid for more than Republican Shanghai. Considerable similarities and parallel developmental patterns can be found in the case of North China (Tianjin), Central China (Hunan) and, to a lesser extent, Guangdong.”

15 Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919–1927 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969).

16 Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers. Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

17 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 11

18 Perry, Shanghai on Strike

19 Wellington K. Chan, Merchants, Mandarins, and Modern Enterprise in Late Ch′ing China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Parks M. Coble, The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Joseph Fewsmith, Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China; Merchant Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985); Susan Mann, Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

20 Hao Yen-p′ing, The Comprador in Nineteenth Century China, Bridge Between East and West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) (esp. ch. 8: “Non-economic activities of the compradors”); Marie-Claire Bergere, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1917–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) (esp. ch. 3: “The new entrepreneurs in the city”; and ch. 4: “The social structure of the new bourgeoisie”); William Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), and Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–1895 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation. Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)

21 Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960; John Israel, Student Nationalism in China, 1927–1937) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).

22 Yeh Wen-hsin, The Alienated Academy; Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990), p. xi

23 Ibid pp. 5, 253

24 Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China. The View from Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 9.

25 Alain Corbin, Women for Hire. Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

26 Christian Henriot, Belles de Shanghai. Prostitution et sexualite en Chine aux XKe–XXe siecles (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1997).

27 Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and The Shanghai Badlands. Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime f4937–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

28 Brian Gerard Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang. Politics and Organized Crime 11919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

29 Robert A. Bickers, “Changing British attitudes to China and the Chinese, 1928–1931,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1992.

30 Robert A. Bickers and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Shanghai′s ′dogs and Chinese not admitted‘ sign: legend, history, and contemporary symbol,” The China Quarterly, No. 142 (June 1995), pp. 444–466

31 Research on British residents is carried on by Robert A. Bickers. Franchise Kreissler is preparing a these de Doctorat d’ Etat on the Jewish refugees from Central Europe in Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese war.

32 Cf. Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Jonathan N. Lipman and Randall Stress (eds.), Remapping China. Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)

33 Cf. Frank Dikotter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China. Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (London: Hurst., 1995), p. 9

36 Aletta Biersack, “Local knowledge, local history: Geertz and beyond,” in Hunt, The New Cultural History, pp. 72–96, quotation p. 80

37 Randall Stress, “Field notes from the present,” in Hershatter et al., Remapping China, pp. 261–274, quotation p. 264

38 Cf. Goodman, Native Place, City and Nation

39 Cf. Wasserstrom, Student Protest; and Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Liu Xinyong, “Student associations and mass movements,” in Deborah Davis et al. (eds.). Urban Spaces in Contemporary China. The Potential for Autonomy and Community in post-Mao China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 362–39

40 Dikotter, Sex, Culture and Modernity, p. 13

41 According to Christian Henriot (Belles de Shanghai, p. 24), this kind of “timeless” analysis led Gail Hershatter to confuse 19th and 20th-century categories of Shanghai prostitutes and to blurr historical perspectives in her otherwise very interesting studies: “The hierarchy of Shanghai prostitution, 1870–1949,” Modern China, Vol. 15, No. 4 (October 1989), pp. 463–498; and “Prostitution and the market in early twentieth-century Shanghai,” in Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey (eds.), Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 256–285.

43 Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, p. viii

44 Ibid p. 175

45 Honig, Sisters and Strangers, p. 248

46 Perry, Shanghai on Strike, p. 2.

47 Alain Roux, Le Shanghai ouvrier des annies trente (Paris: l'Harmattan, 1993), pp. 308–310

48 Goodman, Native-Place, City, and Nation, ch. 2: “Foreign imperialism, immigration and disorder: Opium War aftermath and the Small Sword Uprising of 1853.”

49 Wasserstrom, Student Protests, p. 15; Wasserstrom and Liu Xinyong, “Student association and mass movements.”

50 Cf. Review of the 18th International Congress of Historical Sciences, “L‘histoire s’est arretee a Montreal,” Le Monde, 8 September 1995, “Le Monde de Livres,” p. viii

51 Bergere, The Golden Age, p.

52 Mark Elvin, “The gentry democracy in Chinese Shanghai, 1905–1914,” in Jack Gray (ed.), Modern China′s Search for a Political Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); Mary Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China: Zhejiang Province, 1865–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society.

53 Elvin, “The gentry democracy,” p. 42.

54 Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society, p.

55 Rankin, Elite Activism, p. 16.

56 Mary Rankin, “The origins of a Chinese public sphere: local elites and community affairs in the Late Imperial Period,” Etudes chinoises. Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 13–60; William Rowe, “The Public Sphere in Modern China,” Modern China, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 309–329

57 Frederic Wakeman, “Civil society and public sphere debate,” Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 2 (April 1993), pp. 108–138.

58 Bergere, The Golden Age, pp. 132–134. Marie-Claire Bergere, “The Shanghai Bankets‘ Association, 1915–1927. Modernization and the institutionalization of local solidarities,” in Wakeman and Yeh, Shanghai Sojourners, pp. 15–34.

59 Bergere, The Golden Age, pp. 222–225

60 Ibid p. 225

61 Ibid p. 223

62 Ibid p. 225

63 Xiao Xiaohong, “La Societe generate d′Education du Jiangsu et les problemes de la modernisation, 1905–1914,” these de l′lnstitut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientates (presented in June 1997).

64 Cf. for example, Nathalie DelaJande, “Une culture d′inge′nieur. Origine de l‘architecture moderne de Shanghai,” Me’moire de DEA d‘histoire de 1’architecture, Universite de Paris I, September 1994, 2 vols., pp. 128 ff.

65 Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang

66 David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing. City People and Politics in the 1920′s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

67 Ibid p. 197

68 Wen-hsin Yeh, “Progressive journalism and Shanghai′s petty urbanites. Zou Taofen and the Life Weekly, 1926–1945,” in Wakeman and Yeh, Shanghai Sojourners, p. 195. On the building up of a “national network of authors, readers and distributors of iconoclastic journals” after the May Fourth Movement, cf. Wen-hsin Yeh, “Print capitalism and the rise of radical policies in Shanghai in the 1920′s,” paper prepared for “Urban Progress, Business Development and the Modernization of China,” Conference at the SASS, Shanghai, 17–20 August 1993, pp. 14–15.

69 Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, p. 284.

70 Ibid p. 196

71 Wakeman and Yen, Shanghai Sojourners, p.

72 Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937, pp. xvii, 291

73 Pransenjit Duara, Culture, Power and the State. Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

74 Elizabeth Perry and Ellen Fuller, “China′s Long March to democracy,” World Policy Journal (Autumn 1991), pp. 663–685; Wasserstrom, “Student associations and mass movements.”

75 This problem is briefly addressed in Philip H. Kuhn, “Civil society and constitutional development,” paper prepared for the American-European Symposium on “State and Society in East Asian Tradition,” Paris, 29–31 May 1991.

76 Goodman, Native Place, City and Nation, pp. 45–46.

77 For a criticism of this construct, cf. Philip C. Huang, “Public sphere/civil society in China? A third realm between state and society,” Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 2 (April 1993), pp. 216–24

78 Bergere, The Golden Age, p. 61; Coble, The Shanghai Capitalists

79 William Rowe, “Civil society in Late Imperial China,“ Modem China, Vol. 19, No. 2 (April 1993), pp. 107–148

80 Goodman, Native Place, City and Nation, p. 302.

81 Alain Roux, Greves et Politique a Shanghai. Les Disillusions (Paris, Editions EHESS, 1995), partie HI, ”La paradoxale vitalite du mouvement ouvrier.”

82 Henriot, Shanghai 1927–1937, pp. 81–82, 283–84

83 Goodman, Native Place, City and Nation; Perry, Shanghai on Strike; Yang, Gifts, Favors and Banquets

84 Rankin, “The origins of a Chinese public sphere,” p. 55.

85 Goodman, Native Place, City and Nation, p. 40.

86 This concept of multicultural modernities has been put forward by authors such as Tani E. Barlow who, as editor of the magazine Positions, argues that “East Asian representations are neither disfigured nor unsuccessful replications of any prior... concept from another place or time.... Asian modernities perform their own recoding of the discourses of modernity....” Positions. East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1993), p. vi. It has also been put forward by Dikotter, attempting to trace “the emergence of a plurality of intertwined modernities” (Sex, Culture and Modernity, p. 12). Bryna Goodman′s view of the problem has been shifting. As expressed in the conclusion of her book Native Place, City and Nation, p. 311 (where she proposed to rethink “the idea of a public sphere” as a “developing public realm... specific to China”), it is more relativistic than the one to be found some 300 pages earlier in the introduction of the same book (p. 40).

87 The implications of cultural relativism on Chinese modern studies and more generally on contemporary social sciences are critically assessed by Yves Chevrier, “La question de la soci6te civile, la Chine et le chat du Cheshire,” Etudes chinoises, Vol. XIV, No. 2 (Autumn 1995), pp. 53–251.