Early PRC Research Articles

Treatment of Kienbock’s Disease by an Experimental Conservative Approach: Case report

Kienböck’s disease is characterized by avascular necrosis of the lunate bone. There are four stages due to the severity of the disease. A 52-year-old woman was referred to the Tehran Healthcare Clinic to treat the stage II Kienböck’s disease according to the clinical finding and MRI report. Her main complaint was a painful feeling in the dorsal wrist, decreased range of motion of the wrist, and reduced grip strength for one year. The treatment was achieved after completion of our conservative course by special vibration therapy in less than two months. Even though the conservative approaches are generally not recommended in treatment of Kienböck’s disease and in many cases surgeon’s preference (radial shortening osteotomy for early disease and PRC in later stages), our theory is that the aggressive procedure should be the second choice of treatment, especially in the early stages (I and II).

Markets under Mao: Measuring Underground Activity in the Early PRC

AbstractIn this article we develop and analyse novel datasets to retrace the persistence and scale of underground market activity in Maoist China. We show that, contrary to received wisdom, Chinese citizens continued to engage in market-based transactions long after “socialist transformation” was ostensibly complete, and that this activity constituted a substantial proportion of local economic output throughout the Maoist era. This helps to explain, in part, why, when markets were officially reopened in China, private economic activity took off. We arrive at these findings through the development and analysis of novel datasets based on unconventional historical sources – namely, a collection of 2,690 cases of “speculation and profiteering” that were recovered from flea markets in eastern China. We show how these grassroots sources can be systematically analysed and used, in lieu of official statistical aggregates, to develop new insights into the macro workings of the Maoist economy.

Parameters of Ethnic Minorhood

Abstract The current crisis in China’s ethnic frontiers is animating intense discussion as to whether the present moment is a déjà vu of antecedents or an aberration of the Chinese ethno-political normative. Whereas the bulk of new scholarship focuses on the post-Mao era, few studies exist to elucidate the visuality of ethnic relations in the early PRC when state-building was still unfolding in the ethnic frontiers. This paper investigates how an ethnic hierarchy based on a majority-minority binarism was visually constructed during the formative decade of the socialist era (1949–59). Examining several films featuring Inner Mongolia and the socio-political interaction between Mongol indigenes and Han expeditionary personnel, this paper contends that constructing the visuality of Han superiority as adult guardian overlooking ethnic minors who must answer the interpellation of attaining the likeness of the Han was the centrepiece in substantiating a majority-minority binarism beyond a static ethno- demographic condition.

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965

Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965

Red Star over Medicine: Redefining Doctor-Patient Relationship in Early CPC History (1930s–1960s)

How did the Communist Party of China (CPC) redefine the social and political roles of medicine and doctors as it developed from an illegitimate or minority party to the ruling political power? From the 1930s to the 1960s, decades replete with ideological shifts, political upheavals and wars, the formula CPC developed for its anti-imperial movements and state-building enterprise changed not only the political and economic fundaments of China’s statehood, but also people’s perception of physician-state-patient relationship. The article will start with a medical dispute that signifies a nostalgic idealization of doctors’ social roles in the 21st century. Following an overview of the major shifts in medical regulations that define doctors’ roles in the early ROC and the CPC regimes, the discussion then highlights three interrelated elements in CPC’s wartime medical experiences: an extremely high standard of morality for medical practitioners; de-commodification of medical services; and mobilization of medical practitioners to support the CPC’s political agenda. The CPC’s wartime medical experiences at the regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive levels are essential to our understanding of the institutionalization of medicine in the early PRC and the changing physician-state-patient relationship in contemporary China.

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. xvi, 260 pp. DOI: 10.3998/mpub.9969070. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 978-0-472-05430-5.

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, . xvi,  pp. DOI: ./mpub.. Paperback $., ISBN ----. This short history book about a spooky subject takes first its readers to a dark corner of the history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: How did a kunqu 昆曲 “ghost play” (guixi 鬼戏) by a veteran communist writer named Meng Chao 孟超 became one of the earliest targets of what will be known later as the “Gang of four,” even before the attacks on the plays of the far more famous intellectuals Wu Han and Tian Han? If one of the merits of this study is to shed a new light on the attacks on culture that constituted the premises of the great turmoil of the late ’s—but the author had already publicized this historical “scoop” in an article from  —it is not the main point that this book-length study wants to make. This book has the wider ambition to retrace the resilience of an apparently forbidden topic in the early PRC, the “superstitious and feudal” ghost’s theme. The public appearance of this topic on the stage of the contemporary traditional Chinese theater (xiqu 戏曲) and, more in general, its enduring presence as a subject of heated debates is also explored. Let us first recall the play at the center of the book: the story of Li Huiniang 李慧娘, first appearing in the early Ming Qu You’s 瞿佑 collections in literary Chinese Jiandeng xinhua 剪灯新话, became well known to the Chinese public through the chuanqi 传奇 play “the Prunus pavilion” Hongmei ge 红梅阁. It tells how Huiniang, a concubine of the evil southern Song minister Jia Sidao 贾似道, is slain by her jealous and violent master for having looked tenderly at a young literati near Hangzhou’s West Lake. However, as Jia Sidao prepares to also harm the would-be lover of the late concubine, her ghost appears, chases the assassin away, and scares and humiliates the evil minister. Before coming to the story of Li Huiniang itself, Greene first analyses what happened after the initial chilling ban on a group of twenty-six “superstitious plays,” most of them ghost plays, in the early ’s. Greene shows how the ban initiated a time of confusion. Troops and local authorities were quite puzzled about what was allowed, while intellectual circles began to deploy a salvaging strategy of some of the traditional supernatural themes by drawing a Review©  by University of Hawai‘i Press distinction between permissible “mythological” plays and damnable “superstitious” or “fearsome” works. The second chapter begins with the attempt by a playwright with an impeccable proletarian pedigree, Ma Jianling 马健翎, to produce a “politically correct” version of the story. In his  qinqiang 秦腔 play “Wandering West Lake,” You Xihu 游西湖, Ma does not present a ghost, but still uses the ghost element by staging a ghost-like character, making Huiniang pose as a ghost without being dead. To the author’s surprise, this attempt at a “ghostless ghost play” (which may be found in other genres of the same period, for example in some Hong Kong leftwing movies ) was greeted with harsh criticism in the higher intellectual circles of the PRC by several authors who, while voicing critiques on esthetic grounds against Ma’s play, expressed opinions that amounted to justifications of keeping “real” ghost on the Chinese traditional opera stage. The  relaxing of the initial ban on ghost plays encouraged troops to resume performances. Ma later reintroduced the ghost in the play, without receiving much more understanding from his critics. Chapter  takes the reader right to the middle of the complexity of the Hundred flowers’ time. It compares two contemporary productions, the anthology of classical tales “Stories not to be afraid about ghosts” (Bu pa gui de gushi 不怕 鬼的故事) and the rewriting in  in the kunqu opera form of the Prunus pavilion story by Meng Chao under the title “Li Huiniang.” While the first book, ordered by Chairman Mao himself, gave a new voice to ancient ghost stories by playing on a rhetoric associating ghosts with old and new class enemies (a rhetoric which won’t be forgotten during the Cultural Revolution), Meng Chao created with his “Li...

중화인민공화국 초기의 호텔 관리 — 1950년대 베이징 서교호텔의 사례를 중심으로 —

This article explores the hotel management in the early PRC through an analysis of a hotel case in Beijing. In the early days of the PRC, the party-state was scheduled to plan and host various meetings and events, but the supply of large-scale hotels in the capital Beijing was not sufficient due to long-term confusion. Accordingly, the government has built a series of hotels that can accommodate people participating in meetings and events, and the Xijiao Hotel covered in this article was one of them. Xijiao Hotel was led by managers under the control of higher-level organizations, but workers also participated in some hotel management, actively expressing their opinions at the staff and workers’ congress. While hotel guests were specially invited for political and diplomatic purposes, most of the hotel workers were not familiar with the hotel space. However, the hotel tried to meet the national intentions and times by paying attention to the safety of customers and the services to be provided. Xijiao Hotel was operated in a public manner and management pressure was relatively weak, but it tried to reduce fixed costs through hotel asset control, saving, and production activities under the direction of the central and local governments who wanted corporate management.

Good Girls and the Good Earth: Shi Lu’s Peasant Women and Socialist Allegory in the Early PRC

During the most robust years of his career, 1949 to 1964, the artist Shi Lu 石魯 (1919-1982) frequently painted young rural women. The appearance of peasant women in the art of the early Maoist period ostensibly demonstrates the suitability of the subject for visualising state policies that promoted social transformation and women’s liberation. While participating in these nation-building efforts, Shi Lu’s images of peasant women were also a product of global art historical influences, namely allegorical depictions, that manifested subtle influence on the development of twentieth-century Chinese art. The identity of the artist, a Yan’an cadre who provided creative and administrative support to the official art system, reveals how artists navigated political expectations as state functionaries while simultaneously defining them through artistic exploration. Through the case study of Shi Lu and the hybridised global artistic traditions that gave rise to the subject of young peasant women in Maoist China, this article reveals the porousness of an era that has been considered isolated from global currents outside of the Soviet sphere.

To Confront the Totality: A Critique of Empiricism in the Historiography of the People's Republic of China

AbstractMost recent research on the first three decades of the PRC has avoided theoretical reflection on the period, instead claiming an empiricist fidelity to the heterogeneity of lived experience. Yet the refusal of theory allows unexamined conceptualizations to structure the findings—conceptualizations whose plausibility arises not from the archive but from the historian's own historically situated sensibilities. This article identifies a deep orientation at work in an otherwise highly diverse set of scholarship on the early PRC. A research paradigm privileging the individual over the collective, civil society over the state, diversity over homogeneity, contingency over necessity, and fragmentation over totality has achieved important advances, but it has also foreclosed essential new directions for research. The article then sketches an alternative approach that does not simply reverse these binaries but aims to encompass both sides through a reappropriation of classical social theories such as those of Marx, Durkheim, and Freud. Building on long-neglected aspects of these theories, such as their varied approaches to a co-constitutive relation between social appearance and essence, would not displace careful empirical investigation but deepen it by revealing the full complexity of the sources.

Made in Manchuria: The Transnational Origins of Socialist Industrialization in Maoist China

Abstract With its high concentration of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in heavy industry, Manchuria (Northeast China) functioned as a symbol of the “socialist industrialization” in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–). Many Manchurian SOEs nevertheless originated as Japanese colonial enterprises founded before 1945. Drawing on archives and interviews in Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian, I trace industrial Manchuria’s transformation before and after the Communist Revolution with a particular focus on Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang). I argue that the industrial legacies of imperial Japan and Nationalist China in Manchuria facilitated China’s transition to a Soviet-style socialist planned economy under Mao Zedong’s leadership (1949–76). The early PRC developed a new system of socialist industrialization by simultaneously learning from Soviet economic planning and deploying physical assets, human resources, and economic institutions left by the Japanese and the Nationalists. My findings expand on recent scholarship on the pre-Communist origins of the early PRC by elucidating the significance of the Japanese influence. More broadly, I also argue that China’s socialist industrialization was decisively influenced by the global spread of state-directed developmental visions during the interwar period, thereby demonstrating the fundamental interconnectedness between capitalism and socialism in the twentieth century.

Mao’s Steeltown: Industrial City, Colonial Legacies, and Local Political Economy in Early Communist China

This article examines the construction of industrial cities in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC; 1949-) by focusing on Anshan—a major steel city in Manchuria (Northeast China) that had been constructed by the Japanese prior to 1945. I demonstrate that the PRC industrial cities embodied the nature and limits of the new socialist regime’s vision of industrialization. The early PRC overwhelmingly focused its resources on heavy industry, which translated into the financial and bureaucratic superiority of industrial enterprises to city governments. The early PRC industrial cities drew from not only the Soviet urban-planning model but also the legacies of pre-revolutionary regimes, even including imperial Japan. The construction of industrial cities was driven by negotiations among various actors including city officials, enterprise managers, and domestic migrants. Building on the multi-layered local, national, and transnational forces, the industrial city of Anshan was a microcosm of the early PRC.

중화인민공화국 초기 도시 공공 공간 관리 - 北京의 公園을 중심으로 -

중화인민공화국 초기 도시 공공 공간 관리 - 北京의 公園을 중심으로 -

The Politics of Reproductive Health in Twentieth-Century China

Abstract Dr. Lin Qiaozhi (1901-83) was China’s foremost female physician whose career reflects the country’s reproductive health policies from the Republican era to the early People’s Republic. This article examines the interconnections of politics and reproductive health campaigns in China, from Republican reliance on foreign philanthropic support, through the early PRC alliance and subsequent break with the Soviet Union, to China’s reforms in the 1970s. Lin’s life illuminates the many central shifts and tensions across the twentieth century: as a Western-trained physician, Lin represents the role of biomedicine in a modernizing China and the importance of reproductive health in forming a robust body politic. As an establishment intellectual, Lin was a model propagandist supporting government policy while using her power as a platform to serve her own goals. As a lifelong single woman with no children, Lin’s life manifests the ongoing conflict between the traditional values of wife and mother versus a woman’s independence, liberation, and the pursuit of a challenging and fulfilling career. Lin’s legacy continues into the twenty-first century as she remains an icon for young women and a role model for members of the medical profession.

The People’s Living Guanyin Bodhisattva: Superstition, Entrepreneurship, Healthcare, Rural Economic Control, and Huidaomen in the Early PRC

During the Republican era and the PRC, both regimes labeled religious practices outside official institutionalized religions as “superstition” (mixin). In the early PRC, the CCP labeled superstitious activities with mass participation as “mass superstitious incidents.” This article examines a mass superstitious incident in Chongqing in 1953 in which more than fifty thousand people participated. In this case, local residents, especially local merchants, advertised an old woman as a Living Guanyin Bodhisattva with supernatural disease-curing powers to expand their economic interests. The incident was also a result of poor healthcare infrastructure management. Key organizers in the incident were severely punished, in part because they were scapegoats for the problems of the new national policy of State Monopoly for Grain Purchase. The incident also had a strong contagion effect that led to various similar “superstitious incidents” in the vicinity that were eventually suppressed under the name “huidaomen.”

Supporters of Working Mothers, Daycare Teachers: Women Who Sustained the Childcare Program in the Early PRC

Supporters of Working Mothers, Daycare Teachers: Women Who Sustained the Childcare Program in the Early PRC

Proposal for the Implementation of Labor Contracts for Migrant Construction Workers

Research Article| May 01 2019 Proposal for the Implementation of Labor Contracts for Migrant Construction Workers: Follow the Mass Line and Achieve the Chinese Dream of Labor Contracts for Migrant Construction Workers Wang Hui; Wang Hui Wang Hui is a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing and has held visiting professorships at many universities in the US and Europe. Perhaps the best- known internationally of contemporary Chinese intellectuals, and an extremely prolific scholar and writer, he has published on Chinese intellectual history, political theory, modernity, and many other topics. To date, five of his books have been translated into English. In 2016, a major collection of his short writings from the 1980s on, Diandao (Overturned), with a preface by poet Bei Dao, was published in Beijing. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Lennet Daigle; Lennet Daigle Lennet Daigle is a translator and PhD student in literature at UC Santa Cruz. His previous graduate work was at Shanghai International Studies University, where he wrote a thesis on the translation of poststructuralist theory. His forthcoming dissertation, “Ethical Exemplarity and Historical Hermeneutics in the Early PRC,” is a study of Chinese historical fiction and its connection to the intellectual origins of the Cultural Revolution. He lives in Munich with his partner and son. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Christopher Connery Christopher Connery Christopher Connery is professor of literature and cultural studies at UC Santa Cruz and is Ziqiang Professor of Cultural Studies at Shanghai University. He has published on imperial Chinese literary culture, capitalist oceanic geographies, the global 1960s, and contemporary Chinese intellectual politics. He is currently working on a book project on Chinese neoliberalism. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2019) 46 (2): 209–217. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-7497160 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Wang Hui, Lennet Daigle, Christopher Connery; Proposal for the Implementation of Labor Contracts for Migrant Construction Workers: Follow the Mass Line and Achieve the Chinese Dream of Labor Contracts for Migrant Construction Workers. boundary 2 1 May 2019; 46 (2): 209–217. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-7497160 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsboundary 2 Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2019 by Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Dossier: Wang Hui / Three Proposals to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference You do not currently have access to this content.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

We Love Peace: Photographic Affect and Chinese People’s Volunteer Force Soldiers in the Korean War

This paper examines We Love Peace, a poster that became exceedingly popular among Chinese People’s Volunteer Force soldiers and essentially the iconic image for the Korean War. The poster was based on a photograph initially published in the People’s Daily, and it continued to circulate in various formats, including a pirated version of black-and-white photographs. Focusing on the production and reception of the image, this paper contextualizes the propaganda of the Korean War in the early PRC visual culture. By bringing attention to the active engagement of We Love Peace by the CPVF soldiers, this study attempts to approach the soldiers’ affective responses as a window to the complicated relationship between the control of the state and the agency of its subjects.

Contesting Remedies: The Debate on STD Treatment Therapies in the early PRC

During the early years of the People's Republic of China, sexually transmitted diseases (STD) were almost eliminated nationwide for a period. In the STDs eradication campaign, "political correctness" became a ruling policy. During the prevention and treatment of the STDs, the choice of therapy depended on the "political correctness" policy rather than medical effectiveness. With this political background, three competing treatments of STDs emerged (especially for syphilis): penicillin treatment, arsenic and bismuth mixed and intermittent treatment, and traditional Chinese medicine treatments. The argument between treatments was a vivid microcosm of the love-hate political relationship between China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The traditional Chinese medicine treatments for syphilis were used as a tool by the authorities to prevent the national medical system becoming more and more westernized. The penicillin treatment, the winner of this battle, won because it catered to the political themes of the time, the "Great Leap Forward" . Overwhelming state power had a strong influence and control over the medical system and medical practice, with the initiative and independence of doctors being limited in an unprecedented fashion.