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Urban agency in early modern and modern China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2016

WILLIAM T. ROWE
WILLIAM T. ROWE*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
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Extract

I am what Chinese would call a waihang (outsider to the guild) in this discussion, neither a specialist in European urban history nor up-to-date on the body of critical social theory that informs much of the discussion in the roundtable. Therefore, I see my role here as primarily presenting a comparative case – China – and only incidentally engaging with the theoretical aspects of the discussion.

Type
Special Section on urban agency
Information
Urban History , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 123 - 129
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 Weber, M., The Religion of China, trans. H.H. Gerth (New York, 1951)Google Scholar, and The City, trans. D. Martindale and G. Neuwirth (New York, 1958). For a professional sinologist's adoption of Weber's model, see, among many others, Murphey, R., ‘The city as a center of change: western Europe and China’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 54 (1954), 349–62Google Scholar.

2 Rowe, W.T., Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (Stanford, 1984)Google Scholar; Rowe, W.T., Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–1889 (Stanford, 1989)Google Scholar.

3 Hartwell, R.M., ‘A cycle of economic change in imperial China: coal and iron in northeast China, 750–1350’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 10 (1967), 102–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wrigley, Compare E.A., ‘A simple model of London's importance in changing English economy and society, 1650–1750’, Past and Present, 37 (1967), 44–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For example Olivova, L.B. and Bordahl, V. (eds.), Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou (Honolulu, 2009)Google Scholar; Hershatter, G., Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar.

5 Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community.

6 Goodman, B., Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.

7 Rowe, W.T., ‘The public sphere in modern China’, Modern China, 16 (1990), 309–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rankin, M.B., ‘The origins of a Chinese public sphere: local elites and community affairs in the late imperial period’, Études Chinoises, 9 (1990), 13–60 Google Scholar.

8 Rankin, M.B., ‘Managed by the people: officials, gentry, and the Foshan charitable granary, 1795–1845’, Late Imperial China, 15 (1994), 1–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See the various articles in Esherick, J.W. (ed.), Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950 (Honolulu, 2000)Google Scholar; and Cochran, S. (ed.), Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, 1999)Google Scholar.

10 Otter, C., ‘Making liberalism durable: vision and civility in the late Victorian city’, Social History, 27 (2001), 1–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tsin, M., ‘Canton remapped’, in Esherick, (ed.), Remaking the Chinese City, 19–29 Google Scholar.

11 Rogaski, R., Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley, 2004)Google Scholar; Stapleton, K., Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937 (Cambridge, MA, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 There is a large literature on this in Chinese and Japanese. In English, see Fuma, S., ‘Late Ming urban reform and the popular uprising in Hangzhou’, in Johnson, L. Cooke (ed.), Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China (Albany, 1993)Google Scholar; von Glahn, R., ‘Municipal reform and urban social conflict in late imperial China’, Journal of Asian Studies, 50 (1991), 280–307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fei, S., Negotiating Urban Space: Nanjing and Late Ming Urbanization (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar.

13 Esherick, J.W., Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (Berkeley, 2000)Google Scholar.

14 Older historiography (influenced by Trotskyism) identified the Guomindang's class basis with China's new capitalist class, see Isaacs, H., The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (Stanford, 1961; orig. edn 1938)Google Scholar. Subsequent scholarship has tended to deny this, more often associating the party's class basis with the urban petty bourgeoisie; Fewsmith, J., Party, State, and Local Elites: Merchant Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890–1930 (Honolulu, 1985)Google Scholar. Almost everyone agrees, however, that the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang) was primarily urban in orientation, with its miserably failed attempts to resolve the country's manifest ‘agrarian crisis’ a product of the party's combination of disinterest and unfamiliarity with rural conditions.

15 Amidst a large and growing literature, see, for the early modern period, Chow, K., Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, 2004)Google Scholar; and Brokaw, C., Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Cambridge, MA, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For urban middle-brow reading habits in the early twentieth century, see Link, E.P., Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley, 1981)Google Scholar; Yeh, W., ‘Progressive journalism and Shanghai's petty urbanites’, in Wakeman, F. and Yeh, W. (eds.), Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar; and Dong, M., ‘Who's afraid of the Chinese modern girl’, in Modern Girl Research Group (ed.), The Modern Girl around the World (Durham, NC, 2008)Google Scholar.