1920s China Research Articles

Misinterpretation and Misplacement in Intercultural Theatrical Communications between China and Japan: Ichikawa Sadanji’s and Morita Kanya’s Kabuki Tours in 1920s China

Misinterpretation and Misplacement in Intercultural Theatrical Communications between China and Japan: Ichikawa Sadanji’s and Morita Kanya’s Kabuki Tours in 1920s China

Management thought and practice in 1920s China

This article significantly revises our understanding of ‘scientific management’ in 1920s China. First introduced in 1911 via transpacific networks, scientific management gained traction among Chinese elites of the 1920s as a method of both national industrialisation and social change in line with the May Fourth spirit of ‘Mr. Science’ and ‘Mr. Democracy’. As such, Chinese discourse re-interpreted Taylorism as a capacious but progressive tool to encourage the ‘scientific spirit’ among ordinary Chinese. Industrialists around greater Shanghai engaged with these re-interpretations and more of their firms experimented with these ideas than previously thought. Yet, they did so in diverse ways that reflected managers’ layered commercial, political, and intellectual motivations.

Revisiting the Stardom of Yang Naimei: The Typecast, the Modern Girl, and the Femme Fatale

Abstract This paper aims to revisit Yang Naimei’s stardom by discussing her as China’s most famous femme fatale of the 1920s. She was the first Chinese film actress to be typecast according to her public persona, and the first to be cast in a series of anti-heroes. In my discussion, I treated her as an extreme case of the 1920s film actresses through which we could see more clearly their ambitions, their talents, their situations, and their struggles. I would like to argue that she is an extreme locus of modern femininity in 1920s China, where being a modern girl, a film star, or a femme fatale is one and the same thing. As a modern girl in search of her subjectivity, she exerted a vibrant energy in the search for visibility through performing stardom. This paper also examined the bense discourse that has been popular in China for almost a century, and in particular discussed why the film actress is always closely tied between her on-screen image and her off-screen image, as a response to an essentialist idea, attitude, and assumption that surrounds Yang Naimei, that she can effortlessly play a femme fatale on screen simply because she is a femme fatale herself.

Objective Humanities, Reflexive Humanities

Objective Humanities, Reflexive Humanities

Bertrand Russell, Fu Tong, and the Emergence of Scientific Secularism in Early 1920s China

Abstract In the May Fourth period (1917–1921), the Chinese intellectual world saw the emergence of various forms of secularism, which culminated around the year 1922, when a nationwide non-religious movement was formed. The Western-educated philosopher Fu Tong influenced and contributed to the discourse on science and religion in the early 1920s, and his philosophy of religion served as a conduit for the introduction of Bertrand Russell’s ideas about religion into Chinese public and intellectual discourses. This article establishes a connection between Fu and the lectures on religious belief that Russell delivered in Peking in January 1921 and documents the transfer of ideas from Russell to Fu’s philosophical writings on religion between 1921 and 1922. In its central analysis, the article focuses on Fu’s philosophy of religion and his theory of scientific secularism, which he developed as a critique of the Marxist-led non-religious movement from 1922 onward. The discussion also sheds light on the network of intellectual connections underlying the emergence of the notion of scientific secularism in 1920s China.

Interpreting for Tagore in 1920s China: a study from the perspective of Said’s traveling theory

ABSTRACT This article will study how Xu Zhimo interpreted Rabindranath Tagore’s theory during Tagore’s trip to China in 1924. Taking Said’s traveling theory as a model for the structure of this analysis, I explore Xu Zhimo’s decisions by analyzing parallel texts and paratexts through four Saidian phases – that is, from the perspectives of point of origin, distance traversed, resistances and final accommodation. The study reveals that Xu, an interpreter making his own self-directed decisions, acted as a trailblazer for the spread of Tagore’s theories in 1920s China, restoring Tagore’s image and defending Tagore’s values despite suffering an array of harsh criticisms.

Empire of Artifacts: U.S. Epistemological Colonialism in 1920s China

Empire of Artifacts: U.S. Epistemological Colonialism in 1920s China

The Problems of Democracy: Zhang Taiyan and the Federalist Moment in 1920s China

This essay discusses the problems of democracy by examining the writings of the Chinese thinker Zhang Taiyan (1868–1939). The goal of this essay is not to promote Zhang’s political philosophy as a panacea to the problems of democracy. Instead, it uses Zhang’s struggle with Chinese political problems to clarify the complex nature of democracy—its source of power, its modes of participation, and its institutions to channel the people’s voice. Focusing on Zhang’s attempts to balance three competing claims of democracy—the protection of the people’s rights, the expression of the people’s voice, and the prudent exercise of power in taking care of the citizens’ needs—this article elucidates a “Buddhist-Daoist” model of democracy that is different from the American model of local autonomy and the French model of a strong state.

What is Obscenity? Morality and Modernity in 1920s China

This paper examines the debates over the meaning of obscene (yin 淫) in 1920s China. Although the censorial category yinshu (淫书 obscene books) long existed in imperial China, in the late 1910s and 1920s, commonly known as the May Fourth era, the meaning and content of this genre underwent intriguing changes following Chinese intellectuals’ quest for enlightenment and modernity. As Kendrick Walter has insightfully remarked in his study of pornography in Western modern culture, “Pornography names an argument, not a thing” (1987: 31). The argument over the meaning of yin offers a unique perspective into the complicated relationship between science, morality, and modernity in Republican China.

God and Man at Yali College: the short, troubled history of an American College in China

ABSTRACTYali College, a four-year institution operating under the aegis of Yale University, offered a US-style undergraduate education in China’s Hunan province from 1914 to 1927. It developed a robust curriculum and an impressive physical plant but collapsed after a little more than a decade. This paper, drawing on new archival research, focuses on the circumstances leading to that collapse. It argues that a deep divide emerged over Yali’s form and function, pitting modernisers at the institution’s helm against its tradition-minded faculty and trustees, eventually crippling the college. The case of Yali helps us understand the perils of ideological misalignment in education, especially when it occurs in challenging sociopolitical contexts like 1920s China.

New Scholarship

New Scholarship

Woodlands, Warlords, and Wasteful Nations: Transnational Networks and Conservation Science in 1920s China

AbstractThis article investigates the production of conservation science at nodes of transnational networks of encounter through an examination of field studies conducted during the mid-1920s in North China's Shanxi province by the American forester and soil conservation expert Walter C. Lowdermilk with his student, colleague, and collaborator Ren Chengtong. Even in the politically fragmented China of the 1920s, their research on deforestation, streamflow, and erosion benefited from alliances with Shanxi's regional powerholder, Yan Xishan, and produced environmental knowledge that furthered the agenda of harnessing natural resources to strengthen the state. By paying attention to two-way interactions between Chinese and foreign actors in the construction and transmission of knowledge about nature, the article speaks to the global context of the early twentieth-century conservation movement and adds to recent scholarship that recasts China's encounter with modern science as one of active appropriation, translation, and innovation rather than passive reception.

Kristin Stapleton (2016). Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family.

There are few resources amongst contemporary Chinese literary criticism that manage to weave such insightful literary readings and incisive historical research as Kristin Stapleton’s Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family. The book accomplishes three feats, as set out by Stapleton in her introductory chapter, simultaneously incorporating a history of twentieth-century Chengdu (and its relevance to the developments in China during this period, more broadly) alongside the author’s biography of Ba Jin’s formative years in the city and the historiographical context of his novel Family. Such an undertaking by a less skilled author would have, perhaps, produced a work which simplifies the rich historical underpinnings of Ba Jin’s Family to supplementary readings of the novel, coupled with incidental evidence of the political and social machinations of the city in which its author grew up. Not so under Stapleton’s careful guidance. By reading the social and economic development of early twentieth-century Chengdu as much as its fictional counterpart in Ba Jin’s Turbulent Stream trilogy, Stapleton provides a perceptive reading of Family which invites the reader to consider how fiction can enrich and enliven our understanding of history.

Emancipation in Everyday Life: Women’s Singleness and Feminism in 1920s China

Emancipation in Everyday Life: Women’s Singleness and Feminism in 1920s China

Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin's Family. By Kristin Stapleton. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. ix + 280 pp. $25.95 (paper).

Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin's Family. By Kristin Stapleton. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. ix + 280 pp. $25.95 (paper).

The Adaptation of Kuroiwa Ruikō's NoNoHana in 1920s China: Focusing on the Cinematization

The Adaptation of Kuroiwa Ruikō's NoNoHana in 1920s China: Focusing on the Cinematization

Kristin Stapleton. Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family.

Kristin Stapleton. Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family.

Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family. By Kristin Stapleton

Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family. By Kristin Stapleton

Margaret Sanger in Translation: Gender, Class, and Birth Control in 1920s China

During her first and only successful lecture tour in China in 1922, Margaret Sanger set out to enlighten Chinese audiences by sharing information from the West about the modern, scientific practice of birth control. But the lines of communication were not so transparent, and her Chinese interlocutors were not only passive recipients in the process. This article highlights how gender and class identities critically affected the translation of Sanger’s message about birth control, through an analysis of Sanger’s autobiographical writings and coverage of her visit in Chinese periodicals. Although Sanger was keen to limit the fertility of lower-class Chinese women, for the most part her contraceptive message resonated among educated, middle-class Chinese men. Focusing on the influence of these varied gender and class identities allows us to delimit the boundaries of birth control discourse for educated Chinese women, who are otherwise largely absent from the historical record.

Christian Women’s Education and the Problem of Marriage in 1920s China:

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