Early Twentieth-century Shanghai Research Articles

The female image in calendar posters and advertisement posters in early twentieth century Shanghai

Yuefenpai flourished in early 20th and beautiful young women were the core image of yuefenpai. Besides, there are many advertisement posters appeared as women images. This paper is designed to study the female image in calendar posters and advertisement posters in early twentieth century Shanghai and explore the social recognition of female image and how female image reflect the reality. Apart from satisfying consumer’s needs, it is necessary to study female images based on social background. I think the effects female advertisement on reality still has some room to study, not only change people’s notion by advertisement but also can influence social recognition of female image, consumer behavior and cultural value.

‘Loving nation’ and ‘subjugated nation’: Popular narratives of the nation in early twentieth-century Shanghai

Abstract This article examines the nationalist discourse in Shanghai popular print media during the late Qing and the early Republican period, focusing on the literary representation and imagination of ‘loving nation’ (aiguo) and ‘subjugated nation’ (wangguo) in popular fiction. It discusses the popular nationalism through ‘patriotic stories’ (aiguo xiaoshuo), a fiction genre promoted by Shanghai popular media in the 1910s, which, on the one hand, responded to the external plights of the newly established Republic of China, while on the other shaped the popular imagination of a new national identity and modern nation state. I argue that ‘patriotic stories’ contributed to this national imaginary through a discovery of sentimentality, female emotionality and an increasing fancy of the ‘other’, while simultaneously producing the competing narratives of romantic love and patriotic feelings, and private and public realms. This sentimental narrative was also inextricably interwoven with the narratives of trauma and humiliation, and an imagination of wangguo in popular fiction. Viewing patriotism as a cultural production constructed through memory, imagination and reinterpretation, I suggest that the popular imagination of nation generated a hybrid and uniquely powerful mode of nationalistic narrative, one conjoining sentimentalism, patriotism and commercial interests in early twentieth-century China.

Digging Up Lost Billboards: A Photographic Archaeology of Outdoor Advertising in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai

This paper proposes a photographic archaeology in order to explore the material, visual and social impact of outdoor advertising in early twentieth-century Shanghai. Combining statistical analysis with photographic series and multimedia sourcing, the archaeological approach helps excavate the multilayered texture of advertisements. As material artifacts, advertisements are interwoven with urban spaces and municipal policies, closely tied to the social life of commodities and the companies’ strategies. Although outdoor advertisers played a significant role in reshaping commercial cultures and urban society in early twentieth-century Shanghai, photographic evidence complicates the picture of the growing commercialization of the city, the increased commodification of residents’ everyday life and the rise of a “consumer society” in modern China. The photo-archaeological method offers a fresh perspective on modernity, consumption, urban culture and visuality in modern Chinese history.

Nina Lee Aquino, Ed. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary AsianCanadian Drama

NINA LEE AQUINO, ed. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary Asian-Canadian Drama. Volumes I and II. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. Vol. I xi + 307pp; Vol. II xi + 279pp. NINA LEE AQUINO and RIC KNOWLES, eds. Asian Canadian Theatre: New Essays on Canadian Theatre. Volume I. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2011. xvi + 276pp. The twelve plays collected in two-volume set of Love + Relasianships, first comprehensive collection of Asian Canadian drama, vary widely in terms of their stories, aesthetics, and production histories. Many of them are what editor Nina Aquino describes as theatrical milestones (ix): for example, M.J. Kang's haunting Noran Bang: The Yellow Room was first play written in North America depicting contemporary Korean diasporic experience. Miss Orient(ed), a biting satire of Filipino beauty pageants by Nina Lee Aquino and Nadine Villasin, marked entry of Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop into realm of professional Toronto theatre. And pioneering playwright R.A. Shiomi's detective story Yellow Fever was first professionally produced Asian Canadian play (first staged in San Francisco in 1982, play received its Canadian premiere in 1983, by Canasian Artists Group in Toronto). These and other dramatic works bring us into broad terrain of contemporary Asian Canadian politics, raising formative questions of exclusion and racial violence, diaspora and immigration, transnational community, gender and sexuality, and stereotyping and media. Winston Christopher Kam's Bachelor-Man addresses queer identities and masculinity in context of 1923 Exclusion Act and bachelor communities of Chinese labourers. In The Plum Tree Japanese Canadian internment leaves its scar on present-day characters and defines their sense of home, land, and country. Jean Yoon's whimsical valentine to Yoko Ono, Yes Yoko Solo and Leon Aureus's hard-hitting Banana Boys both explore how cultural stereotype and expectation affect young identities and relationships. The range of stories attests to fact that there is no one definitive Asian-Canadian experience, and raises important questions about theatrical representation of diverse and multinational identities. Set in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Marjorie Chan's China Doll imagines how Ibsen's A Doll House might inspire a young woman with bound feet. Hiro Kanagawa's riveting Tiger of Malaya depicts Manila War Crimes trial of General Tomoyuko Yamashita. The complexities of intimacy, recognition, and communication are poignantly staged both in Betty Quan's family drama Mother Tongue and David Yee's engagingly varied vignettes, Paper Series. Such unruly identities and stories don't fit neatly into any one ethnic or racial box. At same time they test easy claims about universal human experiences by emphasizing how racial, ethnic, cultural, and national differences matter. In Marty Chan's Maggie's Last Dance neither concerns nor identities of thirty-something characters dealing with romantic fallout of their high school years are recognizably Asian Canadian; at same time, characters compare their anxieties about love to Quebec separatism, referencing most visible fracture in Canada's national identity. This subtle allusion to disunity is openly interrogated in anthology of critical essays, Asian Canadian Theatre. Its essays reflect how politics of race in present-day Canada are shaped by policies of contemporary multiculturalism, and how questions about representation and visibility are markedly different from those of a generation ago. Editors Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles note how official multicultural script (ix) demands a certain kind of conformity: the very mechanisms of visibility that allow it to emerge also paradoxically might undercut its power to change and critique (viii). …

"Healthful Goods": Health, Hygiene, and Commercial Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai

"Healthful Goods": Health, Hygiene, and Commercial Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai

Ways of Seeing the Nation: Chinese Painting in the National Essence Journal (1905 – 1911) and Exhibition Culture

This paper explores the uneasy position of painting in an early twentieth-century Shanghai publication, the National Essence Journal (Guocui xuebao, 1905–11), published by the prominent and influential Society for Preservation of National Learning (Guoxue baocunhui). The publication is like international expositions and museums in peculiar ways; the Chinese paintings in it, devoted to the nation, are paradoxically invisible. In the article I explore how and why, establishing the ways in which painting was newly understood to matter in the modern era.

Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (review)

Reviewed by: Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 Peter J. Carroll Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 By Wen-hsin Yeh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 305. $39.95. For the past twenty-five years or so, Shanghai has been the exemplar of Chinese modernity in Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. Wen-hsin Yeh’s Shanghai Splendor provides a deft, literate, state-of-the-field synthesis of much of this work, while also succeeding as a novel scholarly monograph on Republican-era economic sentiment and commerce. It traces the propagation and transformation of economism—a state of mind and view of life in which economic matters not only are central to society and the nation but also constitute a calculus of morality and social value— from the wake of the Opium War through the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. This agenda would be ambitious for any study, especially one as slim as this one. Yet through bold declarative writing, strategic choices, and artful montage, Yeh achieves her aim. Unlike the majority of studies on early twentieth-century Shanghai, which explore the circumstances of political and commercial elites, college students, workers, prostitutes, storytellers, or others at the extreme ends of the social spectrum, Yeh’s book focuses on middling types, the so-called petty urbanites, such as shop assistants, office clerks, bank tellers, accountants, and other desk workers in the city’s modern firms. Her book successfully connects economic and business history, which often focus on intellectual and institutional questions, to social-cultural history. As anyone familiar with her other [End Page 497] works, such as The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1819–1937,1 will appreciate, Yeh possesses a marvelous facility for exemplifying key arguments by choosing telling details and narrative strands from an astonishingly diverse body of materials. In the interest of brevity, she sketches some points rather than fully explicating them with supporting evidence. This strategy keeps the narrative flowing, but sometimes I desired the opportunity to explore more of Yeh’s underlying evidence and analysis. Shanghai Splendor is one of the few scholarly monographs that I would wish to be longer. Consisting of an introduction, seven thematic chapters, and an epilogue, Shanghai Splendor narrates a dramatic two-part transformation. The introduction and first five chapters describe the rise of economistic thinking and the petty urbanite’s celebration of capitalists as beneficent patriarchs and social models whose success demonstrated the scientific rigor and national importance of economic growth as a core facet of urban modernity. The last two chapters relate the unraveling of this consensus and the transubstantiation of economism, showing how petty urbanites first critically reevaluated Shanghai’s capitalists as social and economic stewards of their interests and those of the nation, and then shifted their allegiance to communist-inflected visions of the national economy and social justice. Chapter 1 sketches the development of commerce in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Shanghai. In light of the nascent view of commerce as a form of war, and the promotion by officials and businessmen of domestic commerce as a means of national strengthening, capitalists and others came to perceive and promote the new concentration of urban wealth in Shanghai as patriotic, scientific, and democratic. Chapter 2 traces the advent of commerce as a subject of scientific knowledge and study, along with the concomitant rise of a new petty bourgeoisie elite primarily composed of advanced degree holders from overseas universities, shareholders, traders, and advertisers. Yeh argues that the establishment of influential bodies like the Chinese Society for Vocational Education (CSVE), as well as the general development of commercial learning, were both a product of and reagent for the transformation of business from a suspect undertaking to a laudatory, [End Page 498] socially essential endeavor in which success, in the form of wealth, was equated with superior knowledge, skill, and patriotism. The national significance of commerce made the late Qing and Republican states increasingly interested in the promotion and regulation of commercial studies, such as accounting, which was viewed as the epitome...

Daoist modern: innovation, lay practice, and the community of inner alchemy in Republican Shanghai

This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880-1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, with its focus on monastic decline, clerical corruption, and popular superstitions, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival. Between the 1920s and 1940s, Chen lead a group of urban lay followers in pursuing Daoist self-cultivation techniques as a way of ensuring health, promoting spirituality, forging cultural self-identity, building community, and strengthening the nation. In their efforts to renew and reform Daoism, Chen and his followers became deeply engaged with nationalism, science, the religious reform movements, the new urban print culture, and other forces of modernity. Since Chen and his fellow practitioners conceived of the Daoist self-cultivation tradition as a public resource, they also transformed it from an 'esoteric' pursuit into a public practice, offering a modernizing society a means of managing the body and the mind and of forging a new cultural, spiritual, and religious identity.

Private Tutorial Art Schools in the Shanghai Market Economy

Drawing on school archives and other primary sources, this article looks at a category of art schools in early twentieth-century Shanghai that has long been ignored in modern Chinese art history studies, namely the early private tutorial art schools. It focuses on the early history of the Shanghai Art School ( Shanghai meizhuan ) as a typical case. It argues that, in contrast to government schools, which represented national ideals and were involved in “the Chinese response to Western influence,” the beginning of early private tutorial art schools was a product of new market demand for commercial art. In the 1910s, they were extensively involved in Shanghai's commercial art scene and in its mass culture. In this unique way, they contributed to the modernization of culture in China.

Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai. By Ellen Johnston Laing. Honolulu: University of Hawai's Press, 2004. x, 305 pp. $45.00 (cloth).

Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai. By Ellen Johnston Laing. Honolulu: University of Hawai's Press, 2004. x, 305 pp. $45.00 (cloth).

Marcia Reynders Ristaino. Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xxxi, 369 pp.

This book compares two uneasily related exile communities in early twentieth-century Shanghai: the Russians and the Jews. Although traders, including some Jews, had drifted down from Siberia from the mid-nineteenth century, the Russians in Shanghai, for a time the city's largest foreign community, were mainly remnants of Admiral Kolchak's “White” army who fled Vladivostok in 1922–23, with a rag-tag group of camp followers, aboard what remained of the former imperial fleet. Most settled in the French Concession district and worked as small shopkeepers. The Jewish refugees from Germany and Central Europe who followed in the period 1938–41 had little in common with the Russians, some of whom regarded the Jews as commercial rivals, and many of whom were deeply infected by the traditional anti-Semitism of the Russian extreme right.

Law Without Law, or Is 'Chinese Law' an Oxymoron?

In this essay, which is part of a larger genealogy of legal Orientalism, I analyze the conceptual and historical relationship of China to the idea of 'rule of law,' and vice versa. I first consider why it is that China is generally viewed as lacking a tradition of rule of law. I then look at one historical example of Western efforts to transplant the rule of law in China, and the lessons it has for our understanding of law more generally.I begin by examining the nature of the rule of law as a political ideal, and then turn to its implicit, less analyzed counterpoint, the 'rule of men.' Insofar as the definition of the rule of law is a negative one - the rule of law means precisely 'not the rule of men' - this dichotomous understanding threatens always to condemn 'Chinese law' to the status of an oxymoron, for historically Chinese legal institutions have been built on the ideological premise of rule of men (that is, men of either Confucian or socialist virtue). As a case study of the construction of Chinese law as congenitally lawless, and of the concomitant Western mandate to export law to China, I examine Thomas Stephens's monograph 'Order and Discipline in China,' a study of the jurisprudence of the International Mixed Court in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In theory, this court was charged with applying Chinese law in the so-called International Settlement, a semi-colonial foreign enclave in Shanghai. Although originally a Chinese tribunal, after 1911 the Mixed Court was controlled by the foreign residents of the International Settlement. Contrasting what he calls the adjudicative and disciplinary models - essentially an instance of the rule-of-law/rule-of-men dichotomy - Stephens argues that the Mixed Court had no claim to legality by the standards of the Western adjudicative model. Ironically, given the foreign control of this court, the 'Chinese law' that Stephens condemns as lawless was in fact a Chinese law fabricated by foreigners. Using Stephens's analysis as an illustration, the essay concludes that the problem is not simply that 'Chinese law' is an oxymoron, but that the category of 'law' is itself a contradiction, an unstable mix of elements of adjudication and discipline, rule of law and rule of men. While we are capable of accommodating this Legal Realist insight at home while maintaining our commitment to law's rule, we are far more uncompromising in evaluating legal traditions elsewhere. In the end, the rule-of-law/rule-of-men distinction is too moralistic and too black-and-white to be analytically useful. For the sake of a better comparative understanding of Chinese law, we ought to replace it with more modest and more definable concepts instead. Any observations and criticisms we have of another are best made in terms of the substantive content of specific laws and the institutional structures for their enactment and enforcement.

Remnants of power behind the Bund: Shanghai's IBC and Robert Dollar Buildings, 1920–22

Two buildings constructed in early twentieth-century Shanghai, one by a U.S. bank, the other by a shipping company, and both designed by a New York architect reveal the complex aesthetic and cultural issues that architecture must address in a global setting. These issues go beyond the buildings' facades to their construction, use, layout, leasing, and imagery. These two examples suggest that more comprehensive analyses of early twentieth-century commercial buildings in many global settings should lead to a clearer understanding of their significance.