Early Republican China Research Articles

“Rule by Man” and “Rule by Law” in Early Republican China: Contributions to a Theoretical Debate

“Rule by man” and “rule by law” are frequently invoked categories in Chinese political discourse past and present, but their theoretical scope and possible interpretation remain highly controversial. Seeking to gain analytical traction on these categories, the author revisits an early Republican debate over whether virtuous men or well-designed institutions were more essential to securing political stability and social transformation in the aftermath of China's 1911 Republican Revolution. Focusing on the work of Liang Qichao, Zhang Shizhao, and their interlocutors, the author shows how “man” and “law” not only play roles in legitimizing one or another form of rule, but also help formulate questions about the interaction between individual effort and institutional influence. Viewed from this theoretical rather than historical angle, the debates become important not only for understanding wider issues in early Republican political discourse, but also for critically interrogating their contemporary variants from Chinese—rather than Western liberal-democratic—perspectives.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Foreign Intervention and the Limiting of Fragmentation in the Late Qing and Early Republic, 1893-1922

This article examines why and how persistent political fragmentation existed alongside continued centralization in late Qing and early Republican China. By analyzing new archival material and existing scholarship, the piece argues that external intervention helped preserve the viability of a single Chinese state even as the same phenomenon also spurred ongoing fractionalization. Because major powers' governments generally saw China as an area of secondary strategic import, they tried to avoid armed conflict over the polity and seek accommodation. Since outside powers diverged in their objectives, they settled on sponsoring indigenous partners, notably various militarists as well as the Chinese Nationalists, to sustain a degree of central government rule alongside substantial regional autonomy. In reconsidering the effects of foreign intervention, this article engages the discussion on political consolidation in the late Qing and early Republic, and suggests that overly stressing integration or division tends to present incomplete accounts of the issue.

From Borderland to Heartland: The Discourse of the North-West In Early Republican China

The issue of the North-West, its developmental potential and significance as a national place, gained great attention in early and mid-1930s China. Early twentieth-century Chinese understandings of the North-West as a geographical region derived from Qing imperial order in the Inner Asian frontier lands of the empire but the term became more complex semantically in the Republic and by the 1930s it had gained a range of different meanings. Such complexity bespoke some of the tensions involved in conceptualizing the relationship between former Qing Inner Asian frontier lands and the Chinese heartland within the new territorial form of the Chinese Republic. This article traces changing meanings and uses of the term from the late Qing into the 1930s. It identifies and examines key areas of its discursive content and reveals the growing centrality of ideas of the frontier and North-West in Chinese nationalist discourse. This research highlights the importance of the frontier in post-imperial Chinese visions of the nation.

From Borderland to Heartland: The Discourse of the North-West in Early Republican China

The issue of the North-West, its developmental potential and significance as a national place, gained great attention in early and mid-1930s China. Early twentieth-century Chinese understandings of the North-West as a geographical region derived from Qing imperial order in the Inner Asian frontier lands of the empire but the term became more complex semantically in the Republic and by the 1930s it had gained a range of different meanings. Such complexity bespoke some of the tensions involved in conceptualizing the relationship between former Qing Inner Asian frontier lands and the Chinese heartland within the new territorial form of the Chinese Republic. This article traces changing meanings and uses of the term from the late Qing into the 1930s. It identifies and examines key areas of its discursive content and reveals the growing centrality of ideas of the frontier and North-West in Chinese nationalist discourse. This research highlights the importance of the frontier in post-imperial Chinese visions of the nation.

From Borderland to Heartland: The Discourse of the North-West in Early Republican China

AbstractThe issue of the North-West, its developmental potential and significance as a national place, gained great attention in early and mid-1930s China. Early twentieth-century Chinese understandings of the North-West as a geographical region derived from Qing imperial order in the Inner Asian frontier lands of the empire but the term became more complex semantically in the Republic and by the 1930s it had gained a range of different meanings. Such complexity bespoke some of the tensions involved in conceptualizing the relationship between former Qing Inner Asian frontier lands and the Chinese heartland within the new territorial form of the Chinese Republic. This article traces changing meanings and uses of the term from the late Qing into the 1930s. It identifies and examines key areas of its discursive content and reveals the growing centrality of ideas of the frontier and North-West in Chinese nationalist discourse. This research highlights the importance of the frontier in post-imperial Chinese vi...

Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia (review)

Reviewed by: Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia Selcuk Esenbel Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia. By Erik Esselstrom. University of Hawai'i Press, 2008. 248 pages. Hardcover $59.00. Crossing Empire's Edge, by Erik Esselstrom, is part of the new field of transnational history, which looks at border-crossing issues and experiences that researchers working within the boundaries of the nation-state have frequently neglected. The work sheds critical light on the participation of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimushō) in prewar imperialism and militarism in the context of the political intelligence role the ministry's police force played during the twentieth century. Making rigorous use of both published and unpublished ministry records and the available research on this aspect of Japanese imperialism—little known, especially in English-language scholarship—the book convincingly argues against remnants of the official view that, emerging from the Tokyo War Crimes Trial following World War II, has relegated responsibility for Japanese militarism solely to the army and a few radical Asianist extremists. As he states early in the book, Esselstrom takes issue with the [End Page 408] standard view of postwar scholarship, which has often characterized the Foreign Ministry as a liberal and progressive element that clashed with the Imperial Army, whose unilateral security prerogatives and reckless ideological ambition led to the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and its aftermath. The author challenges the so-called villains-and-victims view of prewar Japanese imperialism and militarism and its vindication of the American destruction of that polity and exoneration of "ordinary" Japanese from responsibility. By showing the involvement of the Foreign Ministry, the book provides insight into that institution's participation at each stage of Japan's colonial and imperialist project. In five concise chapters rich with solid evidence, Esselstrom discusses the activities, spanning roughly sixty-five years, of the consular police force organized under the Japanese Foreign Ministry and deployed, through a controversial interpretation of extraterritorial privilege, on the Asian continent as part of Japan's informal empire. Originally a small security force, the consular police evolved to become a "full-fledged political intelligence apparatus devoted to apprehending Korean, Chinese, and Japanese purveyors of dangerous thought" (p. 2). Active in China's treaty ports, North China, and Manchuria along the Korean border, at its peak in 1936 the consular police force numbered 1,794, or just over 70 percent, of the Foreign Ministry's 2,557 total personnel overseas. Beginning with a discussion of patterns of Japanese police work in late Chosŏn Korea, the first chapter recounts the origins of Japan's earliest quasi-colonial organization in northeast Asia as Japanese consular police institutions in Korea. The force stationed in Korea illustrates the part played by the Foreign Ministry in facilitating that country's annexation, a development in which Japanese residents were deeply involved. The second chapter looks at Japanese consular police in late Qing and early Republican China, and in Manchuria. Responsible for the protection of local Japanese civilians and Koreans, who were considered to be Japanese subjects, the consular police stationed in the Jiandao region (on the Manchurian/Korean border) became a source of jurisdictional ambiguity and led to clashes with Chinese police forces throughout this period. Chapter 3 sheds light on the history of Japanese intelligence, tracing the development of Japanese consular activities in this area as a means of guarding against ideological threats to the imperial state, whether posed by nationalists or Communists, by Koreans or Japanese. Here we see the background to Imperial Japan's prewar anti-Communism, which would form the basis for collaboration between the United States and former members of Japanese army intelligence during the Cold War years.1 The discussion of Japan's anti-Communist ideology during the 1920s and 1930s rightfully places Japanese history in the context of twentieth-century imperialism and patterns of global power relations. One interesting example, reminiscent of patterns in modern global power behavior up to the present, is the prewar collaboration between the French and Japanese Foreign Ministry offices, which exchanged information about political opposition groups, including Vietnamese nationalists, in the case...

The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the “Old Schools” during Late Qing and Early Republican China. By Jon Eugene von Kowallis. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2006. xvi, 299 pp. $20.00 (paper).

The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the “Old Schools” during Late Qing and Early Republican China. By Jon Eugene von Kowallis. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2006. xvi, 299 pp. $20.00 (paper).

Overlapping Histories: Writing Prison and Penal Practices in Late Imperial and Early Republican China

It has often been said that the Chinese prison and penal reform in the early twentieth century was part of a global circulation of Western institutions and practices and signified China's entry into the modern era. The process has also been described as an example of how the local (China) interacted with the global (the West). By moving back in time to locate some fragments of the histories of penal practices and their representation from earlier periods, the objective of this article is to trace the trajectory in which the histories of prison and penal practices became intertwined with the politics of European expansion, and to suggest that the "modernity" of the reform was as much about the reframing of the multifarious histories of the past as a new history of difference as it was about the adoption of Western institutions and practices. In doing so, it also seeks to demonstrate how the global and the local can best be conceptualized as historical temporalities rather than specific locales.

The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the “Old Schools” During Late Qing and Early Republican China. By Jon Eugene von Kowallis. pp. viii, 299. Berkeley, University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, 2006.

The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the “Old Schools” During Late Qing and Early Republican China. By Jon Eugene von Kowallis. pp. viii, 299. Berkeley, University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, 2006.

On Party Politics in Early Republic of China and Modern Political Civilization

A tide of party foundation and activity appears in early Republic of China. During this period, party politics differs from that in western capitalism countries in its growth and decline, which is derived from China’s special economic and political features after the 1911 revolution. By studying the growth and decline history of parties in early Republic of China, we find that: the fundamental problem of party politics in early Republic of China is that parties can not satisfy the requirements of modern political civilization.

:Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity.

Part 1 Introduction Part 2 Part One: Commercial Printing and Language Reform Chapter 3 1. Culture, Capital and the Temptations of the Imagined Market: The Case of the Commercial Press Chapter 4 2. Canon Formation and Linguistic Turn: Literary Debates in Republican China, 1919-1949 Part 5 Part Two: Gender and Family Chapter 6 3. The Theory and Practice of Women's Rights in Late Qing Shanghai, 1843-1911 Chapter 7 4. Freeing the Mind through the Body: Women's Thoughts on Physical Education in Late Qing and Early Republican China Chapter 8 5. Generational and Cultural Fissures in the May Fourth Movement: Wu Yu (1872-1949) and the Politics of Family Reform Part 9 Part Three: Nation, Science, and Culture Chapter 10 6. The Politics of Fengjian in Late Qing and Republican China Chapter 11 7. How Did the Chinese Become Native?: Science and the Search for National Origins in the May Fourth Era Chapter 12 8. Nationalizing Sound on the Verge of Chinese Modernity Part 13 Part Four: Modernity and Its Chinese Critics Chapter 14 9. Buddhism, Literature, and Chinese Modernity: Su Manshu's Imaginings of Love (1911-1916) Chapter 15 10. From Babbitt to Bai Bide: Interpretations of New Humanism in Xueheng Part 16 Epilogue Chapter 17 11. The Other May Fourth: Twilight of the Old Order

The Cultural Practices of Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma by Francesca Tarocco (review)

198 Journal of Chinese Religions “free-floating” or “leisurely”). I have since been converted to Benjamin Elman’s rendering of the title as “Remaining Points on Dream Interpretation,” as it fits very well with the alreadymentioned intention of bringing order to the unsystematic world of dreams. 4 Elman’s translation should at least been have been mentioned as an alternative, irrespective of the crucial question whether zhi 旨 should be “principles,” “points,” or “references.” Overall it must be said that this otherwise useful book adopts a rather too self-absorbed attitude and often simply ignores just those issues that should stimulate our curiosity. Sinology should not be satisfied with “lofty translations.” MICHAEL LACKNER, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg The Cultural Practices of Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma FRANCESCA TAROCCO. London & New York: Routledge, 2007. xii, 183 pages. ISBN 978-0-415-37503-0. US$ 150.00 hardcover. The development of Buddhist art and music, literature and publishing during the twentieth century has so far received little scholarly attention. Francesca Tarocco attempts to fill this gap by presenting her brief overview of The Cultural Practices of Chinese Buddhism during the first half of the twentieth century. Her main contention “is that Buddhism was more relevant to people’s lives during the Republican period than is usually acknowledged, and deserves more attention than it has so far received from scholars of modern China” (p. 25). The book is divided into an introduction and two parts: Part 1 deals with “The cultural practices of Buddhist modernity”, and part 2 is titled “The sound of modern Buddhism.” In her introduction, Tarocco attempts a critical assessment of past research on modern Chinese Buddhism, pointing out various misconceptions which have prevented scholars from recognizing the cultural importance of Buddhism in modern China. The author seeks to “eschew accepted dichotomies of modern versus traditional, revival versus decline, reformist monks versus traditional monks” by “placing Chinese Buddhists … firmly within their sociocultural and historical context, and focusing on what I call ‘cultural practices,’ including printing and music-making” (p. 15). She attempts to reconstruct in this book the “multi-vocal, multi-dimensional conversation about Buddhism” (p. 2) that took place in early Republican China. Her analysis is “based on the reading of a diverse range of printed matter, including 4 Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 329. Book Reviews 199 largely untapped printed sources,” and “looking at images, including photographs and drawings” (p. 18). Although various activities and institutions are mentioned, the real focus of part 1 is the publishing and printing activities of Buddhists in Republican-era Shanghai. There are brief accounts of the work of the artist Feng Zikai 豐子愷, the role of the lay Buddhist Yang Wenhui 楊文會, and the writer Su Manshu 蘇曼殊. The author traces the development of book printing and the publication of periodicals by Buddhists during this period, mentioning many astonishing facts. In part 2, Tarocco analyses how Chinese Buddhists reacted to and were influenced by the new, predominantly Western forces on the musical landscape during the first part of the twentieth century—“a time when all strata of society listened to and experimented with modern songs” (p. 121). Focusing on the works of the famous monk Hongyi 弘一 (Li Shutong 李叔同), the chapters elucidate the interplay between the complex factors which contributed to create that distinct kind of Buddhist singing and musical performance characteristic of contemporary Chinese Buddhism. This study will help to understand important aspects of contemporary Chinese Buddhist cultural activities, especially in Taiwan, within their historical context. However, appearing in the Critical Studies in Buddhism series, this study should have paid more attention to problems of theory and method in order to be really critical. Though containing a wealth of information and intriguing observations, the content of the loosely connected chapters does not really add up to a convincing argument. The problem that earlier generations of scholars seemingly overlooked or misinterpreted the scope and influence of the cultural aspects of modern Chinese Buddhism is not merely a result of cultural or personal bias, or of insufficient observation. It was also caused by the perspective and focus provided by the conceptual tools chosen. Although the...

A Study of Regionalism in Early Republican China

A Study of Regionalism in Early Republican China

Synthesizing Citizenship in Modern China1

AbstractThis article reviews the recent scholarship on citizenship in early twentieth‐century China and presents a conceptual framework for analyzing citizenship, there and elsewhere, as a complex formation of ideas and practices. The article asks why citizenship became so important in late Qing and early Republican China and why Euro‐American scholars have been so attentive to it during the last two decades. It then draws on the rich historical literature to characterize four distinct dimensions of modern Chinese citizenship. In discussing national identity, political participation and civil rights, cultural citizenship, and social membership, the author reflects on possible axes of comparison between Chinese and Euro‐American approaches to citizenship. Finally, the article argues that these four aspects can be viewed as part of a composite whole that identified Chinese citizenship with active participation in concrete tasks to contribute to national welfare.

Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (review)

Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (review)

The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the "Old Schools" during Late Qing and Early Republican China (review)

The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the "Old Schools" during Late Qing and Early Republican China (review)

Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China By Theodore Huters

HistoryVolume 92, Issue 307 p. 372-373 Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China By Theodore Huters PAUL BAILEY, PAUL BAILEY University of EdinburghSearch for more papers by this author PAUL BAILEY, PAUL BAILEY University of EdinburghSearch for more papers by this author First published: 15 June 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.2007.401_6.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume92, Issue307July 2007Pages 372-373 RelatedInformation

Women Suffragists and the National Politics in Early Republican China, 1911–1915

The Chinese suffragists in the early 1910s attempted to inject gender into early Republican politics. They employed a new rhetoric of citizens’ civil rights and new institutional practices to do so. Suffragists acquired power and authority in the public sphere, questioned the authority of the National Assembly and Legislature, and interfered with the merger of the Nationalist party. They defined the nature of the Republic and defended women’s place in it by challenging the political dominance of men. The suffrage movement shaped the modern politics of nation building, democracy and subjectivity in China.

Print the Province: Liansheng Zizhi and Hangzhou Newspapers in the Early 1920s

On April 1, 1914, Zhijiang ribao (River Zhi Daily), one of Hangzhou'fs leading newspapers in early Republican China (1911-1949), celebrated its first anniversary. The daily'fs interest in covering national affairs was evident in one of its editorials: Although our newspaper is a regional one, [our] journalists'f outlooks transcend one area. Whatever we focus on is relevant to the current situation [in China]. The editorialist then proceeded to discuss banditry in Henan and political unrest in the Northwest, both of which, according to the editorial, were concerns of the daily. On Zhijiang ribao'fs tenth anniversary, by contrast, its editors felt compelled to exclusively serve readers in Zhejiang: In the past decade… Zhejiang was able to preserve its territory and narrowly escape the sufferings of wars. Our colleagues can therefore relish the chance to… [celebrate] this moment (the tenth anniversary).… From now on, we will do nothing but try our best not to let Zhejiang people down.… [Let'fs] rely on thirty million people in the province to build an ideal new Zhejiang.

王國維（1877ー1927）在清末民初中國學術轉型中的貢獻

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 本文是張廣達教授於2005年2月23日在香港浸會大學中文系所作的學術講演。文中論述了清末民初社會環境的特點，以及中國學術發展的傳統理路所遭遇的挑戰。認爲王國維在中國學術轉型中的貢獻在於：他是首先認識到“工具概念”並運用概念化理性思維的學者。特别是在歷史理性思維方面，爲中國學術提供了新的研究範式。同時也指出了王國維在具體治學方法上的成功經驗及其在意識形態方面的不足之處。The present article is based on a lecture given at Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Hong Kong Baptist University on February 23, 2005. It presents a discussion of the essential characteristics of the social conditions of Late Qing and Early Republican China, and the severe challenges confronted by the traditional scholars who followed conventional paradigms during this transitional period. The author points out that Wang Guowei’s most important contribution is that he was the first Chinese scholar who adopted the concept of an “instrumental apparatus” and applied it in rational thinking. It was Wang who provided a paradigm of the exercise of rationalism in historical studies for Chinese scholars. This paper also summarizes the remarkable merits of Wang’s conceptual and methodological attempts, as well as exploring his ideological deficiencies.