Editorial

Abstract

Editorial Margherita Zanasi This October 2022 issue presents four articles spanning the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and addressing varied themes including the impact of the global commercial trends on Chinese performing arts (Yu Shi), the construction of the huaqiao (華僑 overseas Chinese) identity (Rachel Leow), the socialist transformation of the Chinese bicycle industry (Yujie Li), and the experience of rusticated youth in Maoist China (Yi Ren). Shi analyzes 1907 recordings of Chinese folk performers by the French company Pathé Records to explore the tensions between the global “modern commercial media and Chinese native performers.” Shi argues that the process of selecting which performers to highlight in the recording project reflected the logic of global capitalism and technological advances in the recording industry. Ultimately the “grand, linear, and progressive narrative of modernity” that inspired the Pathé recordings led to the marginalization of female performers as they came to be increasingly identified with eroticized courtesan singers. Through an exploration of the work of the prominent sociologist Chen Da (陈达 1892–1975) on Nanyang Chinese communities, Leow’s article offers an insight into the construction of the idea of huaqiao in the early twentieth century. Leow argues that despite Chen’s call for more rigorous studies of Chinese society based in social sciences, his work betrays “deep racial and gendered assumptions about the huaqiao.” As a result, Chen produced a unifying understanding of immigrant communities as sharing patriotic and patriarchal values that overlooked more nuanced and diverse realities. The third and fourth articles shift their focus to the early decades of the People’s Republic of China. Li explores the transformation of the Shanghai bicycle industry from the early 1950s to the 1960s as local independent factories merged into a single, state-owned industry better suited for a centrally planned economy. Li focuses on the experience of private owners of bicycle factories, mostly small-scale proprietors highly involved in production and repair work. Ultimately, Li argues, these “entrepreneur-technicians” came to be condemned as “petty capitalists” and lost their identity as businesspeople, even as their technical skills continued to be valued. They, in fact, proved crucial to successfully standardizing manufacturing methods and laying the groundwork for later mass production. The article contributed by Ren also addresses the issue of the socialist transformation of social identities: moving away from industrial Shanghai, Ren explores the experience of the rural educated youth sent back to their countryside homes in Southeast Shanxi between 1961 and 1965. Yi’s article contributes to complicating a narrative that emphasizes the returned youth’s hardship in readjusting to the rural environment and their growing discontent at the lack of opportunities there. Yi argues that, by participating in [End Page 221] the rural clubs (农村俱乐部 nongcun julebu) organized by the government to facilitate their reintegration into rural life, Southeast Shanxi returned youth were actually able to leverage “their literacy for better positions in the party, wielding their education as a tool for self-emancipation.” Contributing under the Note on Archives and Sources rubric of Twentieth-Century China, Covell F. Meyskens comments on a recently published collection of archival documents titled Xin zhongguo xiao sanxian jianshe dangan wenxian zhengli huibian (Compilation of archival documents about New China’s Small Third Front; Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu wenxian chubanshe, 2021), which Meyskens describes as a “rich resource for the study of political dynamics and socioeconomic patterns in Mao’s China and the early years of the Reform era.” Three book reviews are available at Project MUSE (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/390). Finally, Rachel Leow is the author featured for this issue in our interview series, available at http://hstcconline.org/interviews-with-authors/. The interview includes a link for free access to her article. [End Page 222] Copyright © 2022 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc