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The Sick, the Weak, and the Perilous: Colonial Stereotypes and Martialized Intellectual Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Jun Lei

in Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s-1930s

This chapter examines how the literati deployed racial politics to gain leverage in shaping the Chinese male gender and reinvented new gender identities as part of an anti-Orientalist project. It has ... More

This chapter examines how the literati deployed racial politics to gain leverage in shaping the Chinese male gender and reinvented new gender identities as part of an anti-Orientalist project. It has highlighted their paradoxical incorporation of physical aggression and martial qualities into the reconfiguration of literary men. In particular, it analyzed the affirmation and negation tactics in their political essays, with which they maneuvered colonialist logic and gender politics deeply embedded in the widely circulated Western racial stereotypes of Chinese men as weak, sick, and perilous. The chapter concludes that Chinese intellectual discourse turned the colonial logic embodied in these racial stereotypes on its head and transformed these seemingly paradoxical choices into strategic reinventions of China and Chinese men.Less

Interpretative and investigative: the emergence and characteristics of modern scholarly personae in China, 1900–30

Q. Edward Wang

in How to be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800-2000

Intellectual life experienced a dramatic change in China after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), leaving an indelible impact on the shaping and structuring of the scholarly persona among Chinese ... More

Intellectual life experienced a dramatic change in China after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), leaving an indelible impact on the shaping and structuring of the scholarly persona among Chinese historians. Examining the careers of four scholars – Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936), Liang Qichao (1873–1929), Hu Shi (1891–1962) and Fu Sinian (1896–1950), this chapter discusses two types of persona that at once reflected and embodied the transformation of historical scholarship, and intellectual life in general, in modern China. Blending traditional and modern elements, these two personae were shown not only in where and how the scholars conducted their research and teaching, but also in how they pursued and displayed sociopolitical virtues through their scholarly careers. The author notes that while internal disposition played a primary role in forming a persona, it also negotiated with external factors, resulting in the alternating appeal of a particular persona in a given period while a scholar adjusted his/her predisposed interest in and inclined aptitude for scholarship.Less

Play 游戲大觀‎

Christopher Rea

in Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China

In the 1890s, the word youxi (play) came to stand for a culture of amusement involving experimentation with literary form and modern devices. It remained a prominent symbol of fun for about thirty ... More

In the 1890s, the word youxi (play) came to stand for a culture of amusement involving experimentation with literary form and modern devices. It remained a prominent symbol of fun for about thirty years, until a decade and a half after the Republican Revolution. Newspapers and magazines offered readers a steady diet of parodic essays, humorous poems and stories, puzzles, cartoons, caricatures, and novelty photographs. New “playthings” were also appearing: cameras, lenses, spectacles, scopes, mirrors, and other gadgets and machines. These feature in novels of the 1900s like Liang Qichao’s The Future of New China and Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone, as well as in urban amusement halls, photography studios offering “split-self images” and costume fantasies, and trick cinematography in slapstick films. As a type of comic amusement, youxi was closely tied to parody and allegory, and to many, adopting a playful attitude toward modern changes was a way to find China’s future.Less

The 1897–98 Shanghai Campaign for Women’s Education

Nanxiu Qian

in Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui (1866-1911) and the Era of Reform

One of the major themes of the 1898 reforms was women’s education, yet for leading male reformers women’s issues tended to be subordinated to larger nationalistic concerns. They expected women to ... More

One of the major themes of the 1898 reforms was women’s education, yet for leading male reformers women’s issues tended to be subordinated to larger nationalistic concerns. They expected women to abandon their age-long intellectual adherence to the writing-women tradition and turn to more pragmatic professional training, so as to change “useless” women into laborers to empower the nation. In contrast, women reformers gave priority to self-improvement over national empowerment, as exemplified in the 1898 Shanghai campaign for women’s education. The campaign established the first women’s association in China (Nü xuehui), published the first Chinese women’s journal (Nü xuebao), and opened the first Chinese school for young elite women (Nü xuetang), all run by women. Via this triad, women instigated debates on reform with men and among themselves to promote their own agenda, agency, organizations, and specific strategies for achieving self-cultivation and national strengthening.Less

Where Knowledge Creates Its Own Object: Yan Fu and Liang Qichao on “The Study of Groups” (Qunxue)

Leigh Jenco

in Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West

This chapter examines the concept of qun, a term used to translate the new idea of “community” or “grouping” seen as central to the economic and political strength of Westerners. Liang Qichao, Tan ... More

This chapter examines the concept of qun, a term used to translate the new idea of “community” or “grouping” seen as central to the economic and political strength of Westerners. Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong, and Yan Fu urged a specialized “study of communities” (qunxue) to create qun in the process of studying them as objects of learning. In community-building projects such as reformist study societies (xuehui), qunxue inaugurates a “bootstrapping” process that tacks between the existing reality of a community and the knowledge that eventually comes to be produced about as well as within it. In contrast to accounts which view communities as marking the limits to the application of knowledge generated elsewhere, these reformers argued that communities can be created or transformed to broaden the circulation and application of knowledge—and vice versa.Less

Broken Tools

Michael Gibbs Hill

in Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture

By the turn of the twentieth century, both the methods of translation Lin Shu and his collaborators employed and the language they used to write their translations had come to be regarded by many as ... More

By the turn of the twentieth century, both the methods of translation Lin Shu and his collaborators employed and the language they used to write their translations had come to be regarded by many as inadequate for the tasks they faced. They were, it seemed, broken tools of limited use in the mighty labors of acquiring modern knowledge and promoting political and cultural reform. By moving beyond the disavowal of these purportedly failed practices and engaging with their historical origins, this chapter lays the groundwork for understanding how Lin Shu and his collaborators built up institutional and cultural positions and how the literary writings they produced reflect back on the questionable means employed to make them. In the cases of both “tandem translation” (duiyi) and ancient-style prose (guwen), the chapter places the problem of their legitimacy as tools for transmitting and apprehending knowledge in a global context with links to other colonized and semicolonized spaces in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world.Less

Schools, Politics, and Reform in the Nineteenth Century

Timothy B. Weston

in The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929

Western learning is an omnibus term, used to refer to academic subjects studied in Europe, the United States, and, more recently, Japan. Sun Jia'nai implied that educational reform itself required a ... More

Western learning is an omnibus term, used to refer to academic subjects studied in Europe, the United States, and, more recently, Japan. Sun Jia'nai implied that educational reform itself required a reorganization of China's approach to systems of knowledge. In his plan, it was understood that the university would be oriented toward the production of talent for official use and that its students would go to work for the government upon graduation. Liang Qichao proposed that Chinese and Western learning be stressed equally and that Western learning be a portion of what the Imperial University students study, but not the whole. Liang's plan suggested the prospect of a new conceptualization of modernity, one that differed from the dominant Western model then sweeping the globe. The politics and the opening of the Jingshi daxuetang are elaborated. Conservative officials still managed to find fault with the Jingshi daxuetang.Less

Asia Rethinks Its Relation to the World

Xu Guoqi

in Asia and the Great War: A Shared History

This chapter concentrates on the boundary-crossing movement of ideas and the development of pan-Asianism during and after the war. Many Asians, probably most, saw the Great War as simply a war of ... More

This chapter concentrates on the boundary-crossing movement of ideas and the development of pan-Asianism during and after the war. Many Asians, probably most, saw the Great War as simply a war of white people, a European war, and a war between Western countries. But they got involved, and the war and its aftermath forced them to think about who they were and what kind of positions they held in the world. Indians, Chinese, and Japanese were all consumed with rethinking the relationship between Asia and the West, between Eastern civilizations and Western civilizations, and what direction they should move in after the war. The war and its destruction had discredited the moral values of Western civilization, and what happened at the Paris Peace Conference fundamentally diminished Asians’ expectations and respect for the Western Powers. This chapter addresses the cultural effects and civilizational significance of the Great War for Asians.Less

Another Chinese Contribution and Korea’s Gaehwa Group

Eric Helleiner

in The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History

This chapter discusses the ideologies of Chinese neomercantilist Liang Qichao and the emergence of neomercantilist thought in Korea. Liang's idea of neomercantilism rejects the notion of nationalism ... More

This chapter discusses the ideologies of Chinese neomercantilist Liang Qichao and the emergence of neomercantilist thought in Korea. Liang's idea of neomercantilism rejects the notion of nationalism as a stepping stone towards a cosmopolitan future while coming into terms with Western and Japanese neomercantilist influences and Chinese intellectual tradition. The chapter notes a group of Gaehwa thinkers promoted neomercantilist views following Korea's economic opening due to external pressure. Additionally, Gaehwa thinkers drew on Silhak reformist thought. The chapter mentions how East Asian neomercantilism placed heavy emphasis on export-led growth and more ambitious kinds of government economic activism than Friedrich List did.Less

Chinese Intellectuals’ Discourse of International Law in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Tian Tao

in Morality and Responsibility of Rulers: European and Chinese Origins of a Rule of Law as Justice for World Order

This chapter focuses on the history of the period from the 1860s to the fall of the empire in 1911–12. The chapter details through minute analysis of books, journals, and the press, the extent to ... More

This chapter focuses on the history of the period from the 1860s to the fall of the empire in 1911–12. The chapter details through minute analysis of books, journals, and the press, the extent to which the wider Chinese community distanced itself from any belief that Confucian values could be matched by Western international law that could have a simple ethical foundation. All that counted in international relations was military power, and the industrial strength which grounded it. Confucian ideals of world order, above all Kang Youwei’s, were too idealist. The other great intellectual of the turn of the century, Liang Qichao, believed that international law was a product of power.Less

‘Tagore and China’ Reconsidered: Starting from a Conversation with Feng Youlan

Yu-Ting Lee

in Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s

This chapter re-examines the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore and China, which was previously understood through the poet’s 1924 controversial trip to China and thus subject to rather fixed ... More

This chapter re-examines the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore and China, which was previously understood through the poet’s 1924 controversial trip to China and thus subject to rather fixed interpretation. It argues that while it is important to explore how Tagore’s contemporary Chinese thinkers responded, usually emotionally, to his proposal of the ‘revival of Eastern culture’ according to their respective stances, more depth and dimensions can be restored to the event to sustain a fuller understanding of how cultural debate was conducted in the early twentieth-century world. To this end, starting from a thought-provoking conversation between Tagore and Feng Youlan, a to-be prominent philosopher who was a PhD researcher at Columbia University in 1920, this chapter seeks to demonstrate a philosophical reading of ‘Tagore and China’ and goes further to expand the intellectual web, covering both Chinese and Western thinkers of distinction, to reveal the world historical significance of Tagore’s uneasy interaction with China.Less

Lighting Out for the Pacific: Mark Twain’s Posthumous Journey Across China

Selina Lai-Henderson

in Mark Twain in China

This chapter explores the socio-historical and political background in China into which Twain was first introduced. Brought to Chinese readers by Liang Qichao during his exile in Japan in late Qing ... More

This chapter explores the socio-historical and political background in China into which Twain was first introduced. Brought to Chinese readers by Liang Qichao during his exile in Japan in late Qing China, Twain’s work indispensably contributed to the early process of transnationalism in the Chinese literary community across China, Japan, and the US. Huckleberry Finn, in particular, was used to revolutionize literature, language, and society in China as the nation was undergoing a series of westernization reforms and as a political tool during the Cold War era. Nevertheless, the travels of Huck Finn from the Chinese Mainland to Hong Kong and Taiwan during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) suggests that translating Twain’s work in these places functioned in part as a means of distancing themselves from communism and Chinese civilization as it was being constructed in the Mainland at the time.Less

Epilogue

Shellen Xiao Wu

in Empires of Coal: Fueling China's Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920

This chapter discusses the implications of the book and its significance for the literature on Chinese industrialization and modern Chinese history

Introduction

Anne Witchard

in Lao She in London

The introduction situates Lao She in relation to China's New Culture movement and the protest movements of May Fourth. It is 1928 and during the four years that Lao She has spent in London he has ... More

The introduction situates Lao She in relation to China's New Culture movement and the protest movements of May Fourth. It is 1928 and during the four years that Lao She has spent in London he has published two novels in China's prestigious Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) and is working on a third, Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Er Ma, 1929). Unlike the first two, with their nostalgically detailed evocations of life in Peking, this novel will be an indictment of British imperialist ideology and a Chinese wake-up call. Lao She came to work in London through the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS). This was the period seen as the apex of high modernism in Britain and Lao She's early fiction registers this interaction in ways that suggest we rethink his reputation beyond that of his proletarian classic, Rickshaw Boy (Luotuo Xiangzi, 1937). ReadingLao She as an incipient modernist, initiating in China new subject matter and new styles of writing in the endeavour to remake the sensibility of the Chinese people, serves to unsettle Eurocentric considerations of literary modernism as exclusively Western, its place of origin unquestionably the metropolitan West.Less

Paper Money in Qing China: Exactly How Common and Reliable Was It by the Early Twentieth Century?

Niv Horesh

in Chinese Money in Global Context: Historic Junctures Between 600 BCE and 2012

Western sources by and large did not provide an incisive answer as to the question of precisely why government and privately-issued paper money went into decline in China through much of the late ... More

Western sources by and large did not provide an incisive answer as to the question of precisely why government and privately-issued paper money went into decline in China through much of the late imperial era: how and precisely when privately issued notes reemerged and how important a component they were within the late imperial monetary system. Neither did they explain in great detail whether the gradual reemergence of privately issued banknotes in China—which could be traced back to the latter part of the eighteenth century at the earliest—had anything to do with global financial stimuli. This chapter is designed to correct the gap in the academic literature on these issues.Less