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Synopsis: The chapter describes Chinese nationalism's confrontation with missions, and how Marxist revolution continued that confrontation, culminating in Mao's New China. The chapter examines the Cultural Revolution, the Protestant Three‐Self movement, the Catholic Patriotic Association, and the phenomenon of registered and unregistered churches to account for the religious ferment in post‐Maoist China. China's Marxist revolution found resonance among progressive Western voices who called for appeasement and accommodation. The chapter describes the ordination of Florence Lei as lightening rod for debate about women's role in church and society, and the ensuing controversy at the 1948 Lambeth Conference. Catholic and Protestant fortunes revived after the thaw in 1986, and the chapter discusses the role of charismatic groups and the Catholic renewal in China's global role. The chapter concludes with a look at religion as a dimension of civil society, and the importance of the growing Chinese diaspora.

This chapter discusses China's condition after the Japanese invasion, after the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists, and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China. In this chapter, the account of the so-called emerging New China is told and narrated through the visit of Stanley Kwan to his native homeland. Embarking on a journey back to his homeland, Kwan saw a stark contrast between the People's Republic of China and the British colony of Hong Kong. While Hong Kong's economic conditions improved after the war, the so-called New China was in stagnation, frozen in time even after the efforts to revive the economic conditions of China. While China had began to forge friendships with other countries, particularly with the U.S. who was in good relations with the government of Taiwan (the ousted China's government), China had on a few occasions struggled to fight the diminished yet still proliferating Cultural Revolution. When the Cultural Revolution was finally contained, China began to pave its path as one of the leading manufacturing places in the world. With Britain's lease about to expire and with the increasing ties of Hong Kong to mainland China, many of the businesses in Hong Kong started to return to their mainland roots. Combining the economic development of China and the China-Britain initiated talks that would return Hong Kong to its motherland, several businesses moved to China. This posed a great problem for the Hang Seng Bank. With its affiliation with the Americans and British and with its “keep China at a distance” policy, Hang Seng was caught in a tug of war; between its relations with foreigners and with its need to forge relations with the now developing China. Despite an uneasy situation between Britain and China, Hang Seng celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 1983.

This chapter takes a tour to the Western Imperial City. The tour of the Western Imperial City starts at a place that is strictly off limits for commoners. On the north side of Tian An Men Avenue, the New China Gate is the formal entrance to the Zhong Nan Hai Compound. At the time of writing, Zhong Nan Hai is still a forbidden city in the literal meaning of the term. In line with this, a description of its sights is given. During the reconstruction of Peking, Yong Le enlarged the gardens and dredged the ponds. In 1949, Derk Bodde came across an incident that sparked some symbolic hope for the future of New China. The emotions stirred in the summer of 1900 are still strong, and the ghosts of its victims are under siege again. On October 1, 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized several Catholics martyred during the siege. The Chinese news agencies responded by declaring that they “deserved to die”.

Every form of laughter surveyed in this book survived, in some form, the succession of events that ended the 1930s heyday of humor. The declared war with Japan that began in 1937, the civil war that resumed in 1945, and the establishment of the Communist party-state in 1949 eclipsed some comic cultures and nurtured new ones. A crop of female writers known for their comic talents emerged during the war against Japan. Mao Zedong enshrined satire as an approved literary mode in the 1950s and condoned the use of abusive devil-invective in Communist political campaigns. The Reform and Opening period that began in the late 1970s and the internet age have both seen the renewal of comic styles popular in the early twentieth century. The humor polemics of the 1930s also echo in contemporary debates about the morality of laughter, including those involving Nobel Laureates Liu Xiaobo and Mo Yan. If recent trends are any indication, the early twentieth century was modern China’s first, but not last, age of irreverence.

This chapter considers the early lives of the Hsiungs amid the dramatic social, cultural and political changes occurring in the ‘New Culture’ period following the May Fourth movement of 1919. It examines their place among a generation of intellectuals who began to reject traditional Chinese culture defined by Confucianism and sought to ‘modernize’ the nation. It focuses on how the Hsiungs’ lives were shaped by a global flow of culture, politics and economics and they moved between their hometown Nanchang, and Beijing and Shanghai, two hubs of the new China movement. While Dymia's experience points to the contradictions of the ‘sexual liberation’ of women, Shih-I Hsiung, as a new entrepreneur, ran cinemas, screening Hollywood films and hosting live semi-nude dances by White Russians. The chapter discusses Hsiung's early translation work in the context of the introduction of European and American drama in China. As well as Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, he translated the works of George Bernard Shaw and James Barrie among others. Life in China was shaped by worldwide connections, but opportunities were also determined by global inequalities. Without a degree from the west, Hsiung was unable to fulfill his ambition to become a university professor, and left for Britain.

This chapter focuses on two key figures in modern Chinese painting: Lin Fengmian and Xu Beihong. In particular, it explores how Lin modernized Chinese painting through “lyricization,” as opposed to the realism of Xu from the late 1920s to the founding of New China, as well as the discursive exchange between the two and its relevance to the literary field. It also considers the lyrical experimentation Lin undertook during the Second Sino-Japanese War and afterward, suggesting that his idiosyncratic pursuit brought a polemical thrust to Chinese modernism amid historical crisis. This change points to the dialectic between textual and visual re-form of reality and the political agency thus created.

This chapter explores the genesis of modern Chinese lyrical poetics from the turn of the last century to the first decade of the New China. It first considers Shen Congwen's letter to his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, and two sons, dated January 25, 1952; in his letter, Shen comments on Sima Qian's book The Record of the Historian. Shen concludes that a great history has to be a literary history in the first place, inscribed by language as well as feeling. The chapter then discusses the genesis of modern Chinese lyrical or shuqing discourse, particularly its conflation with and development beyond the discourse of romanticism and revolutionism. It also analyzes the contested soundings of lyricism in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the polemics of poetic agency when a heated debate over “exiling lyricism” versus “lyricizing China” arose during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Finally, it reflects on the rise of “political lyricism” in New China.

This chapter considers how ideas of the ‘foreign’ and discourses on China and ‘Chineseness’, shaped by racial, colonial and national ideologies, determines the cultural productions of racialised migrants. Tracing Hsiung's early days as a student in London up to the production of his play Lady Precious Stream, it shows how his translation work in China helped him to penetrate London's elite literary circles and befriend, among others, James Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Sir James Stewart Lockhart, Allardyce Nicoll, Sir Barry Jackson, Lascelles Abercrombie and Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, co-founder of the PEN society. While Hsiung had arrived in Britain seeking to stage a modern realist play however, his new associates advised him to ‘try something really Chinese and traditional’. This chapter thus explores how Hsiung sought to negotiate Orientalist stereotypes circulating in wider British society in the writing of his play and highlights the role of the British in shaping the work that shot him to fame and came to represent ‘Chineseness’ worldwide.