1930s China Research Articles

Leaves, Silkworms, Yue Fei: Ways of Imagining the Territory in 1930s China

Abstract: During the Nationalist period (1928–1949) in China, the notion that China’s territory mirrors the shape of a begonia or a mulberry leaf gained wide recognition. This analogy ingrained itself into public perceptions of modern China’s boundaries and was often assumed without question. As foreign forces—symbolized by silk-worms—encroached upon the leaf-like territory, the leaf trope emerged as a platform for various patriotic appeals during wartime. This research explores the evolution of the leaf trope for China’s territory in the 1930s, probing the historical and cultural connotations embedded in it. The discussion expands to incorporate intellectual resources associated with the Song-era military commander Yue Fei and the leaf trope, as they jointly influenced the portrayal of China’s territory across textual and visual mediums. In this light, territorial conceptualizations in modern China were shaped by ideological constructs envisioning a future rooted in the past.

Treading on the Tiger’s Tail: Chinese Wuxia and Japanese Jidaigeki Action Films Reacting to State Censorship in the 1930s and 1940s

This article highlights the relationship between wuxia (martial heroes) and jidaigeki (period drama) action films and state censorship in the 1930s and 1940s. I first introduce readers to key East-Asian literary conventions that portray righteous warriors who incarnate their moral codes with swords. I then illustrate the political contexts in 1930s China and 1940s Japan which caused the popular film genres of wuxia and jidaigeki to become politically problematic and therefore strictly censored. I closely examine director Bu Wancang’s 1931 wuxia film A Spray of Plum Blossoms and Kurosawa Akira’s jidaigeki 1945 film Treading on the Tiger’s Tail, investigating creative solutions each director found in order to release their respective films despite censorship pressures. There are three inventions both directors pioneered in their work, namely “ostensible exactness” in setting; “patriotic warriors” in characterization; and “swordless fights” in presenting spectacular action scenes. I argue that although these solutions failed to restore both genres back to their former popularity, Kurosawa’s film paved the way for the success of his world-class jidaigeki in the 1950s, and Bu’s wuxia led to the emergence of kung fu films in the 1960s. My critical analysis underscores the innovative creativity of Chinese wuxia and Japanese jidaigeki films while calling attention to the artistic and cultural legacies of these two popular cinematic genres. The comparison demonstrates how film censorship may undermine or even destroy traditions that have a long history and deep cultural roots.

Collision and Challenge: Influences of Sociocultural Contexts in Early 20th Century China on Storm Society Artists Exploration and Practice of Western Modern Art

This essay engages with the topic of Chinese modern artists introduction and adaptation of Western modern art. This essay conducts its analysis on a modern artist group named the Storm Society (JuelanShe) active in 1920s and 1930s China. Inspired by a social art historical approach, this essay places its focus on the sociocultural contexts specifically present during the active years of Storm Society artists. Three factors are identified to be influential challenges in these artists efforts of exploring and introducing Western modern art to China: Cultural conservatism, inhospitable social environment, and Japanese Invasion in World War II. On the level of academic study about Chinese modern art, this essay highlights the importance to take into account specific cultural and social contexts in analysis of its history.

The Secrets of a Loyalist Soul

In the 1930s, Peking Union Medical College oversaw the most advanced neuropsychiatric unit in China. Li, a married twenty-two-year-old college student, sought treatment there in 1937 for his anxiety disorder. In ten months with therapist Bingham Dai (1899–1996), Li worked out his secret desire for homosexual and extramarital relations. Dai, trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, interpreted Li's condition in terms of the psychology of wartime collaboration. Drawing on this case study, this article accomplishes three objectives. First, it reassesses the historical relationship between psychoanalysis and homosexuality in a non-Western context. The particular dynamics of Sino-Japanese relations advances a rethinking of the global history of sexual science. Second, the essay aims to elucidate the multiple currents of psychodynamic thinking in 1930s China. Dai integrated psychoanalysis into a clinical setting and stressed the unlocking of Chinese cultural factors as the key to successful therapeutic outcome. What distinguished Dai was his interest in the epistemological overlaps between the neo-Freudian and Confucian approaches to social relations and interpersonal dynamics. Finally, the article discusses how Dai's treatment of Li raises subversive questions about the fragile position of the therapist himself, with respect to both sexual orientation and nationalist identification.

Building the nation on 16mm: Film formats and the institutionalization of cinematic portability in 1930s China

This article examines the role played by the 16 mm format in shaping ideas of portable projection in 1930s China. Drawing on research into the Chinese educational film movement, I argue for a format-oriented approach to cinema history that tracks heretofore neglected aspects of how the state—as well as non-state actors—exercised power on and through cinema. As a portable format, 16 mm extracted cinema from urbanized film culture while offering its users access to a broader ‘national’ audience. Educators built a mobile 16 mm network connecting schools and mass education sites and formulated a discourse that sought to codify the place of ‘small scale cinema’ in the Chinese nation and in global media hierarchies. Small scale cinema was deeply contradictory. While promising to make cinema broadly accessible to the Chinese masses, 16 mm also restricted that access. While seemingly liberating cinema from the sway of global film culture and China’s treaty-port cosmopolitanism, 16 mm subjected mass education to other patterns of asymmetrical development. By examining how educational cinema was formed at the intersection of global film technologies and local institutional discourses, I formulate an approach to cine-governmentality that shows how the state’s control of cinema worked from the bottom up, as actors on multiple scales negotiated chaotic circulations of films, equipment, and ideas.

Between Philosophy and Mathematics

This article studies some central developments in the propagation and teaching of mathematical logic in 1930s China. Focusing on the emergence of a twofold disciplinary approach to mathematical logic, namely as a discipline studied and disseminated by Chinese philosophers on the one hand and mathematicians on the other, this paper explores one of the key turning points in the development of the academic notion of mathematical logic in China. Apart from casting some light on the teaching of mathematical logic in the framework of both philosophical as well as mathematical spheres of inquiry, this article also provides some preliminary insights into the circumstances surrounding the first systematic introduction of mathematical logic into the modern standardized system of education, which gradually took shape over the late-1920s and early 1930s in China.

A Cultural Response to a Rural Crisis: Educational Films for Rural Society in INterwar China

In the 1930s, educational film was a popular medium for mass education in Republican China, especially in rural society. This article argues that the use of educational film in rural China served not merely to increase the knowledge of the peasant population, but reflected a cultural response by the Chinese government to solving the rural crisis – a response that reflected the atmosphere of national zeal prevailing at that time. The article first analyses the discussion among Chinese politicians and scholars on the topic of the rural crisis and examines how mass education was adopted as a means of solving the problem. It then probes the question of why educational films became a popular tool among mass education teachers. Taking three films as examples, the article proposes that the information they contain emphasized their technical aspects but ignored the conflicts and corruption uncovered by the elites. A final section approaches the phenomenon of educational film from the perspective of the history of the socialization of rural society and of education in 1930s China, asserting that Chinese educational film at that time essentially provided a new medium for an old ideology.

Credit and social unrest: Evidence from 1930s China

Do credit contractions trigger social unrest? To answer this question, we turn to a natural experiment from 1930s China, where the 1933 U.S. Silver Purchase program acts as a shock to bank lending. We assemble a hand-collected data set of loan contracts between banks and firms, labor unrest episodes, and underground Communist Party penetration. The Silver Purchase shock results in a severe credit contraction, and firms borrowing from banks with a larger exposure to it experience increased labor unrest and Communist Party penetration among their workers. These findings contribute to understanding the socio-political consequences of credit shocks.

1930年代中国のマッチ製造業と日本 : 生産・販売カルテルをめぐって

1930年代中国のマッチ製造業と日本 : 生産・販売カルテルをめぐって

Education as a Continuation of Revolution: Everyday Life and the Communist Education of Petty Urbanites in 1930s China

This paper explores the context and the process by which culture became integral to revolution in the early years of the Chinese Communist Revolution. It draws attention to the educational program that a group of urban-based Communist intellectuals initiated among urban laborers and other workers after the Nationalist Party’s suppression of the Communist labor movement in 1927. Rather than an economic and political revolution, these Communists envisioned a “cultural and thought movement” that would transform laborers’ ways of seeing and living everyday life. By guiding workers’ literary writings and provoking social scientific and philosophical discussions, they worked to transform workers’ consciousness about their everyday experiences. They believed this consciousness would engender resistance to capitalist oppression in incremental and concrete ways and that a political and economic revolution would emerge from these daily actions at an opportune time.

International Liquidity Shocks, the Real Economy, and Social Unrest: China, 1931-1935

What are the social consequences of liquidity shocks? We answer this question relying on a natural experiment from 1930s China, where the money supply contracted as a consequence of the 1933 US Silver Purchase program. Using a novel, hand-collected data set of loan contracts to individual Chinese firms and labor unrest, we find that the resulting bank liquidity shock led to a widespread, large credit contraction. We also find that firms borrowing from banks with a larger exposure to the monetary shock were more likely to experience labor unrest. These findings support Milton Friedman’s (1992) conjecture that the US Silver Purchase program exacerbated social tensions in 1930s China, and contribute to our understanding of the (unintended) social consequences of liquidity shocks.

Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China by Grace Yen Shen

Reviewed by: Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China by Grace Yen Shen Lijing Jiang Shen, Grace Yen. Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 309 pp. $45.00 (cloth), $36.00 (ebook). Unearthing the Nation provides a lucid account of the uneasy development of modern Chinese geology within China and the discipline’s shifting priorities before 1949. Weaving together scientific literature, biographical materials, and institutional records, Grace Yen Shen shows the complex ways through which Chinese geologists conceived of and represented China as an object for loyalty or as an object for study, depending on their evolving scientific goals and political orientations. In her careful analysis, Shen offers the novel interpretation that internationalizing national science and China’s scientific community was a crucial strategy for promoting domestic geology in 1920s and 1930s China. She also argues that continued development during the Second Sino-Japanese War surprisingly consolidated earlier gains in Chinese geological independence and scaled up the practice of geological surveys despite the harsh conditions of the time. Recently, the question of how native development of science interplayed with Chinese nationalism and contributed to global science has been the topic of several edited volumes as well as monographs focusing on particular disciplines such as biology and paleoanthropology.4 Shen’s book, in this context, is a long-awaited contribution that covers the development of modern geology in China. Perhaps more importantly, the book engages long-lasting questions such as what was nationhood in Republican China and how it related to science at a time when an uncontroversial, centralizing state regime had not been formed. Shen’s answer echoes the voices of Chinese geologists, a group of scientists whose profession dealt with the land itself. By doing so, the author avoids the troubled definition of Chinese nationhood and, instead, clearly depicts how Chinese geologists used the term “China” in flexible and “enabling” ways to justify a domestic science independent from foreign or political manipulation, to argue for the importance of fieldwork, and eventually to motivate projects on petroleum prospecting during the war. These depictions bring us back to an epistemology of the nation held by real scientists and was historically in flux. For geologists, China sometimes denoted the state, but more often, it was about the physical structure of the land, its history, and territory. In addition to this central focus, Shen’s rich historical narrative shows how geologists improvised with material, finance, and pedagogy to promote geology in concrete local and historical conditions. Chapter 1 introduces, with broad strokes, how attention to the structure and resource distribution of the land shifted from evidential studies and compilations of gazetteers in the seventeenth century to an urgent call for geological studies about Chinese land voiced by patriots such as Gu Lang and Zhou Shuren by the early twentieth century. These shifts took place in parallel with the advance of imperial powers that continued to encroach on Chinese natural resources. As foreign studies about Chinese geography and geology multiplied, Chinese intellectuals realized that an essential prerequisite to claiming real ownership of the land was to grasp modern geological knowledge about it. This wake-up call served as motivation for the first generation of geological students to study abroad. After these Chinese geologists returned from abroad, they framed fieldwork as a form of labor that could reform Confucian intellectual ideals and facilitate a collective renewal of the nation through changing its major intellectual method. Chapter 2 introduces the geologists central to the rest of the book: Zhang Hongzhao, Ding Wenjiang, Weng Wenhao, and Li Siguang, who were trained in Japan, Scotland, Belgium, and England, respectively. In 1913, Zhang established a Geological School at Peking University, which Weng and Ding joined the next year. They promoted fieldwork as a new form of intellectual habit of mind and body while training a corps of geological researchers and developing a thriving school of geology by the mid-1920s. Chapter 3 depicts the cosmopolitan ethos of geological developments in the 1920s. The steady growth of the Geological School led to the establishment of its own survey, its journal, the Bulletin of the...

Tao Xingzhi’s Non-Communist Mass Education Movements in 1930s China

Tao Xingzhi’s Non-Communist Mass Education Movements in 1930s China

The Heart-of-Mind Method

This article uses theory developed in the study of NRMs to analyze strategies of legitimation employed by the Chinese Buddhist Wang Xiangliu (1876–1937) as he sought to spread a new form of esoteric Buddhism in 1930s China. It discusses the specific historical and religious context in which Wang was operating in order to identify the particular tensions between the new Heart-of-Mind Method and the dominant culture. This context resulted in the specific issues that Wang focused on in arguing for the legitimacy of this nascent tradition, which included: 1) claims in society that esoteric Buddhism is “superstitious;” 2) changing cultural and political attitudes toward Japan and Tibet, which were the sources of much esoteric teaching in circulation in China during that period; and 3) the religious demand that any esoteric lineage be based upon a legitimate, traditional lineage which had the potential to undermine apparently sui generis traditions like Wang’s.

Print Capitalism, War, and the Remaking of the Mass Media in 1930s China

This article explores the intricate relationship among print capitalism, war, and the popularization of newspapers in 1930s China by analyzing the motivations for publishing the Libao 立报 and the reasons behind its success. Most of the print capitalists publishing major broadsheet newspapers in Shanghai in the early 1930s did not have a strong financial motivation to popularize such broadsheets especially because of the relatively small circulation of printed materials, the underdevelopment of communications infrastructures, the low level of literacy, and the small size of the middle class. However, this study of the Libao published in the mid-1930s demonstrates that the simultaneity of the commercialization of print media and the outbreak of the national crisis in the 1930s gave rise to the expansion of a politicized reading public and to popular nationalism, and provided print capitalists with financial motives to popularize and politicize newspapers.

Human capital, migration, and a ‘vent’ for surplus rural labour in 1930s China: the case of the Lower Yangzi

A farm survey conducted in a prosperous Chinese county (Wuxi) in the Lower Yangzi region in the 1930s shows that a ‘vent’ existed for surplus farm workers to obtain off‐farm migrant employment and that the slack in farming created by this migration process attracted those from the lower‐wage districts, resulting in the creation of a hierarchy of labour markets differentiated by education and skills. Our analysis also reveals that there were crucial links between education, migration, and income, and it refutes the claim that migration was caused by land deficiency and favoured those who lived near the urban core.

Fictions of Natural Democracy: Pearl Buck, The Good Earth, and the Asian American Subject

This essay offers a new reading of the American author Pearl Buck, focusing on her cultural concept of "natural democracy." It does so by critically reconstructing and examining this concept through three linked contexts: 1930s China, the novel The Good Earth, and the 1943 Chinese Exclusion Acts Repeal hearings. The essay argues that natural democracy enabled the emergence of a U.S.–China, trans-Pacific cultural sphere that helped to facilitate the rise of the postwar Asian American subject.

Material women, 1750-1950: consuming desires and collecting practices

Contents: Introduction: consumption as a gendered social practice, Beth Fowkes Tobin Consuming Desires: 'The things I so indispensably needed': material objects as a reflection of Mary Shelley's life, Pamela Siska Material women: the department-store fashion poster in Paris, 1880-1900, Ruth E. Iskin Nostalgic appetites: female desire and wartime rationing in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts and Noel Streatfield's Saplings, Andrea Adolph. Home and Consumption: A touch of distinction: furnishing French aristocratic homes in the 19th and 20th centuries, Elizabeth C. Macknight 'Novel and ingenious': innovative graphic arts in the women's magazines of the 1840s and the construction of middle-class taste, Cynthia Patterson The woman's paradise: the American fantasy, home appliances, and consumer demand in liberation France, Rebecca J. Pulju Talking points: advertising female telephone identity, Emily Bills. Dress: Gendered and Political Identities: Trans-coding nationalism: subjectivity and military themes in Regency women's dress, Ellen Kennedy Johnson 'The beauty of her hands': the glove and the making of middle-class body, Ariel Beaujot Made for maharanis: aesthetics of courtly women in colonial princely India, Angma D. Jhala Harmony and concealment: how Chinese women fashioned the qipao in 1930s China, Wessie Ling Women, clothing and politics in Senegal in the 1940s-1950s, Dior Konate. Collecting, Displaying, and Creating Value: The duchess's shells: natural history collecting, gender, and scientific practice, Beth Fowkes Tobin Woman of letters: Elizabeth Gaskell's autograph collection and Victorian celebrity, Pamela Corpron Parker The women of Liulichang: female collectors and bibliophiles in the late Qing, Shana J. Brown Japanese objects in Impressionist women's art: collecting culture and creating identity, Jennifer T. Criss The female past and modernity: displaying women and things in New Zealand department stores, expositions, and museums, 192

The Country, the City, and Visions of Modernity in 1930s China

AbstractThe 1930s saw new research and extended debates over the nature of the countryside in China and its socio-economic and historical role. Those on different sides of these debates, many drawing on historical materialism, tended to recreate modernist assumptions. These included assumptions that history was unilinear, and that what was Western was also modern, universal, urban, and objective, while what was not Western was traditional, local, rural, and subjective. The modern nation state, made up of modern citizens, was the outcome of, and the active subject in, a progressive history.Yet other approaches, focusing on the role of the countryside in China's development, challenged not only aspects of modernity but the assumptions in which the debates were couched. The philosopher and social activist Liang Shuming (1893–1988) focused on the countryside as the creative field in China. He envisioned a new form of community that, instead of the state, would be the active locus for change. Liang's new, village communities would draw on but not reproduce cultural traditions across a ruptured history and form the basis of a non-capitalist industrialisation. Rather than appropriate the dominant image of modernity, Liang revisited its basic assumptions. In so doing, he generated fresh visions, opening up a different set of possibilities and recasting the relation of the country to the city, the nation and the future.

The Making of a Public: Emotions and Media Sensation in 1930s China

The Making of a Public: Emotions and Media Sensation in 1930s China