Nanjing Decade Research Articles

China's contested capital: architecture, ritual, and response in Nanjing

When the Chinese Nationalist Party nominally reunified the country in 1928, Chiang Kai-shek and other party leaders insisted that Nanjing was better suited than Beijing to serve as its capital. For the next decade, until the Japanese invasion in 1937, Nanjing was the of Nationalist China, the center of not just a new regime, but also a new modern outlook in a China destined to reclaim its place at the forefront of nations. Interesting parallels between China's recent rise under the Post-Mao Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist era have brought increasing scholarly attention to the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937); however, study of Nanjing itself has been neglected. Charles Musgrove brings the city back into the discussion of China's modern development, focusing on how it was transformed from a factional capital with only regional influence into a symbol of nationhood--a city where newly forming ideals of citizenship were celebrated and contested on its streets and at its monuments. China's Contested Capital investigates the development of the model capital from multiple perspectives. It explores the ideological underpinnings of the project by looking at the divisive debates surrounding the new capital's establishment as well as the ideological discourse of Sun Yat-Sen used to legitimise it. In terms of the actual building of the city, it provides an analysis of both the scientific methodology adopted to plan it and the aesthetic experiments employed to construct it. Finally, it examines the political and social life of the city, looking at not only the reinvented traditions that gave official spaces a sacred air but also the ways that people actually used streets and monuments, including the Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum, to pursue their own interests, often in defiance of Nationalist repression. Contrary to the conventional story of incompetence and failure, Musgrove shows that there was more to Nationalist Party nation-building than simply paper plans that never came to fruition. He argues rather that the model capital essentially legitimised a new form of state power embodied in new symbolic systems that the Communist Party was able to tap into after defeating the Nationalists in 1949. At the same time, the book makes the case that, although it was unintended by party planners who promoted single-party rule, Nanjing's legitimacy was also a product of protests and contestation, which the party-state only partially succeeded in channeling for its own ends. China's Contested Capital is an important contribution to the literature on twentieth-century Chinese urban history and the social and political history of one of China's key cities during the Republican period.

Nationalist China's “Great Game”: Leveraging Foreign Explorers in Xinjiang, 1927–1935

The expeditions of foreign explorers and archaeologists along China's borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been a lightning rod for debates over cultural sovereignty, imperialism, and nationalism. This study attempts to move beyond such cultural and moral glosses by placing the expeditions of Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin to the northwestern province of Xinjiang back into the domestic geopolitical context of the Nanjing Decade (1927–37). Newly available archival material demonstrates how the discourse of cultural sovereignty, far from sabotaging such expeditions, instead became the handmaiden of domestic geopolitical competitors who attempted to turn Stein and Hedin into exploitable resources for their own agendas. The logistical pragmatism revealed in these sources relegates principled nationalist intellectuals and their imperialist targets to the background, and shows how a new approach to a familiar topic can help paint a fuller portrait of some of the most contested episodes of transnational cultural interactions throughout Eurasia.

Communication Technology and Mass Propaganda in Republican China

This article analyses the policies and plans of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, GMD) regarding wireless radio broadcasting, arguing that they laid the foundations for the development of a national-level modern cultural institution aimed, for the first time in China, at mass propaganda and education. During the Nanjing decade, notwithstanding its limits beyond the most developed urban areas, the Nationalists’ approach was the extensive use of radio broadcasting for the ‘partyfication’ (danghua) of Chinese state structure and the Chinese people’s social and cultural life. Nevertheless, their aspirations were greater than their ability to transform the plan into reality. Unable to impose an effective state monopoly on radio communication and broadcasting infrastructures, the Nationalists’ aims to exert stronger control and to gain a hegemonic position in the Chinese ‘ether’ could be achieved only by resorting to technical, administrative and legal measures whose efficacy was rather limited, because it was subordinated to a capacity to have them implemented. The Nationalists’ main accomplishments were the establishment of a powerful national radio broadcasting station under the control of the Party in Nanjing and of a central-level commission aimed at coordinating the work of the different state, Party and military bureaucracies involved in radio broadcasting propaganda.

Routes into abyss: coping with the crises in the 1930s

Introduction Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner Chapter 1. Crisis and Workers' Movements Ferdinand Lacina Chapter 2. The Significance of February, 1934 in Austria in both National and International Context Helmut Konrad Chapter 3. Avalanches of Spring: The Great War, Modernism, and the Rise of Austro-fascism Roger Griffin Chapter 4. Der italienische Faschismus im Spannungsfeld zwischen Reaktion und Moderne Karin Priester Chapter 5. Hitler's Dictatorship: His Role as Leader in the Nazi Regime Hans Mommsen Chapter 6. The Second Spanish Republic: The Challenges Facing a Democracy in Troubled Times Vicent Sanz Rozalen Chapter 7. The Crisis in the 1930's and the Rise to Power of the Swedish Social Democrats Bengt Schullerqvist Chapter 8. The United States in the Great Depression: Was the Fascist Door Open? Nelson Lichtenstein Chapter 9. Turkey in the first World Crisis: From Authoritarianism to Totalitarianism Erik-Jan Zurcher Chapter 10. Brazil in the 1930s: State Building, Nationalism and Working-Class Agency Alexandre Fortes and Paulo Fontes Chapter 11. Labour, Organisation and Gender: The Jute Industry in India in the 1930s Samita Sen Chapter 12. Japan's Way Out of the Crisis of the 1930s as a Strategy for Overcoming Modernity Hiroko Mizuno Chapter 13. Reappraising the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937): Modernizing China during the World Economic Crisis Zhu, Weigelin-Schwiedrzik List of Contributors Bibliography Index

The Korean Valentino: Jin Yan (Kim Yŏm), Sino-Korean Unity, and Shanghai Films of the 1930s

This essay examines the involvement of Korean-born ethnic star Kim Yŏm (Chinese name: Jin Yan) in Shanghai’s left-wing, resistance film movement during the 1930s. In addition to reading Kim’s persona as an ideal screen embodiment of “athletic, modern youth,” which was being promoted by the official screen policy during the Nanjing decade (1927–1937), the author offers a close analytical interpretation of director Sun Yu’s masterpiece The Big Road ( Da Lu , 1934). In this film, Kim plays a revolutionary martyr who leads a group of construction workers building new roads for the Chinese army resisting the invasion of Japanese imperialists. Employing a transnational star studies paradigm, the author interprets The Big Road as an allegory of Sino-Korean unity, one that was founded upon a common resistance against the Japanese Empire at the time of the film’s release.

An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China by David Strand (review)

Reviewed by: An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China by David Strand Fabio Lanza (bio) David Strand. An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. xiv, 387 pp. Hardcover $68.95, isbn 978-0-520-26736-7. The early Republican period, from the Double Ten revolution to the eve of the Nanjing decade, is canonically viewed as a long series of political failures: from the demoralizing spectacle of a corrupt and inefficient parliament to the assassination of Song Jiaoren, from Yuan Shikai’s attempt at imperial restoration to the descent into warlordism. It is difficult to think of the Republican experiment from 1912 to 1927 as nothing more than a painful process toward political awareness. Eventually, this process led to the building of a more centralized and autocratic form of statehood under a Leninist party—first the Guomindang (GMD), then the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). References to that period, by contemporaries and historians alike, usually take a lamentable tone for lost opportunities in terms of democracy, equality, state, and a republic that failed. [End Page 203] In his beautiful An Unfinished Republic, David Strand successfully challenges this established view and shows how, despite the fledging forms statehood and government took before 1927, the Republic of China existed. It existed, Strand argues, “not so much as a set of national political institutions,” but as a “political way of life” (p. 2), a series of acts, gestures, fashion statements, and attitudes that, despite the quasi-collapse of the Republic as a state body, colored and informed the everyday life of people, thus marking them, in daily practice, Republican citizens. In this sense, it was not that important that the republican senate was ineffectual, divided and impotent. Crucial was the fact that the kind of public discussion and animated debate that took place in that largely dysfunctional body mirrored what was happening at every level of educated society—in student dorms, public parks, and native-place associations. Republicanism, in short, existed as practice, and specifically, Strand tells us, as rhetorical practice. The “social technology of citizenship” of the Republic was built primarily on the act of making a speech and defending an argument in public, thus entering into a dialogue with an assembled group, an audience. Furthermore, the necessary precondition for that rhetorical act was the recognition that everybody in the audience shared with the speaker and with each other an equal right to some form of common citizenship. The many characters, often vividly drawn, in Strand’s book are almost always depicted in the act of “getting up on the stage and giving a speech” (dengtai yanshuo), an act that could make or break them as public figures but one that also and always presupposed the “political equality idealized by modern citizenship” (p. 6). In this sense—and here lies a second, subtler part of Strand’s argument—the Republic not only existed but also endured. It endured in the absorption of that repertoire of Republican citizenship under the Leninist forms of the party-state, Nationalist or Communist, when meeting and speech became often comically formalized and regimented, as in the “kaihui regime” of the CCP. However, it also endured precisely because that repertoire was always potentially open to being used for reversal and transformation, because the “common ground of citizenship” (p. 6) persisted, albeit dormant, in the Leninist state, ready to be awakened when citizens repossessed the weapons of debate and dialogue—as they did, for example in 1956, 1966, and 1989. The stubborn return of spontaneous dissent and spontaneous public participation in the decades after 1949 is, in Strand’s analysis, a sign of the continuity of the legacy of Republicanism. One of the most enjoyable and interesting aspects of An Unfinished Republic is precisely the connections Strand draws—always in passing but throughout the volume—between aspects of republican life in the 1910s and 1920s and events of much later periods in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The volume is organized with three loosely biographical chapters, interspersed with two more directly analytical ones. The first chapter, “Slapping Song Jiaoren,” works...

Militia Training and State Control in Republican Hu’nan

Abstract This study of Hunan province during China’s Nanjing decade (1927-1937) shows how militia training could play a key role in the extension of state control both over local militia and through militia into local society. Provincial authorities in Hunan used an argument for the need to increase the efficacy of militia through more rigorous military training to justify an activist intervention in local militia organizations. This training goal then provided a means of extending increased state control over militia as provincial personnel were dispatched to “supervise” local militia training, as local militia leaders were evaluated on the basis of their ability to provide this training, and as training content was expanded to include political indoctrination as well as military skills. Meanwhile the government strengthened ties with local militia officers through extended training programs in the provincial capital or in army units. While many of these efforts focused on standing militia forces and their officers, training programs were also instituted for the mass membership of lower-level “volunteer corps.” More than just political indoctrination, the regimentation instilled by regular training programs also worked to increase the state’s control over the lives of its citizens.

Wu Yaozong and the YMCA: From Social Reform to Social Revolution, 1927-1937

The Republican-era Chinese National YMCA is often depicted as a business-friendly, evangelically motivated, Kuomintang-supporting organization which advocated Western-style gradual reform. All of this is true – but not of Wu Yaozong, one of the most prominent YMCA national secretaries of the period. If Wu, who studied at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, is known at all in the West, it is for his later role in organizing and leading the government-sponsored Three-Self Protestant Church after 1949. But during the 1930s,Wu encouraged the YMCA’s constituency and Protestant churchmen to consider progressive views of social reform, and toward the end of the Nanjing decade, to take a new look at communism, especially the Communist vision of social revolution.

Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity by Rebecca Nedostup (review)

128 Journal of Chinese Religions Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity REBECCA NEDOSTUP. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2009. Harvard East Asian Monographs 322. xiv, 459 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-03599-7. US$45.00,£33.95, €40.50 hardcover. In Superstitious Regimes, Rebecca Nedostup sketches the history of secularism during the Nanjing decade of the Republic of China, from 1927 to 1937. In the opening of the book, she evokes how miraculous signs, reported by the press following the victory of the Northern expedition in 1928—a chicken laying an egg with a twelve-pointed KMT star on it; a crab with the markings “unite all under heaven” (統一天下)—caused a malaise among secular KMT officials. While such signs were the auspicious omens of a new dynasty’s mandate of heaven, the new republican regime could only claim the mandate of the people, not of heaven—and so, one official, Zhang Zhenzhi 張振之, glossed the reports as signs of the hopes and expectations of the “psyches” 心 理 of the people (pp. 2–3)—recasting the traditional, spiritual legitimation into an expression of the peoples’ will. This story shows the dilemmas faced by the KMT, as it attempted to build a new nation on foundations entirely alien to those which had integrated and legitimized the Chinese empire and local societies for over 2000 years—unable to brush away the old forms of legitimation, it could only try to recast them into its own mold. On the one hand, this project entailed applying the Westernderived concepts of “religion” and “superstition,” institutionalizing the one and eradicating the other—the temples, rituals, and religious specialists which had been essential components of the social fabric. Superstitious Regimes provides a meticulously researched account of this process of elaborating new categories and imposing them on society, as it played itself out in debates among intellectuals, religious activists and politicians; as it found bureaucratic expression through surveys and regulations on temple registration and ritual specialists; as it influenced redemptive societies such as the Daoyuan 道院 and the Tongshanshe 同善社; and as its implementation encountered the resistance and creative adaptations of local communities. On the other hand, this was also a sacralizing process, involving the elaboration of new rituals and sacred places and times, to mould the citizens of the nation into a new “affective regime.” But, since the nation could not be built in a vacuum, it could only have recourse to elements of past tradition, on the condition that they be purged of their position within the traditional cosmology, and recast within the limits of the secular ideology of the nation-state. Figures such as the Yellow Emperor, Confucius, and Guan Yu 關羽 could thus be honored, but only as “worthies” and “heroes,” intended to be remembered as symbols of the nation, but which people continued to worship as spiritual powers for themselves and their Book Reviews 129 families. Nedostup considers the imposition of the new, Gregorian calendar and the banning of the Chinese lunar calendar, the New Year celebrations, the Ghost festival, funerals, cemeteries, and commemorative ceremonies for ancient heroes and sages of the nation. But, as she aptly points out, “the ritual environment in China, centered as it was on the concept of efficacy, raised a very particular question regarding nationalist ceremony: what would it do?” (p. 284). The desired “efficacy” of the nationalist rituals was, of course, to give body and life to the nation, through its own self-representation. Nedostup’s account, and the questions she raises, may lead us to reflect on how the KMT were, in fact, Durkheimian modernists. Recall that Durkheim argued that religion is the expression of social unity, it is society’s worship of itself; the deity or totem is the society’s unconscious self-representation. And he implied that a modern society, conscious of its own reality, would be able to assure its cohesion through a civil religion, eliminating the need for a supernatural reference. The KMT project thus appears as an attempt to engineer such a civil religion as an expression of a self-referential nation, replacing the ancestors and deities who were the expression of family, clan, local and regional...

Unmaking the Chinese Nationalist State: Administrative Reform among Fiscal Collapse, 1937–1945

AbstractThe defeat of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang) in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 is often explained as a consequence of Nationalist fiscal incompetence during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which led to the collapse of the Nationalist state. In this paper, I argue that from 1937 until 1940, GMD fiscal policy managed to preserve a degree of relative stability even though, by early 1939, the Nationalists had already lost control over ports yielding 80 per cent of Customs revenue which, during the Nanjing decade (1928–1937), had accounted for more than 40 per cent of annual central government revenue. The loss of this revenue forced the Nationalists to introduce wartime fiscal instruments, taxation in kind, and transit taxes, both previously condemned as outdated and inequitable by the Nationalists. Further territorial losses led to the introduction of deficit financing, which in turn became a cause of hyperinflation. The introduction of war-time fiscal instruments led to administrative changes in the revenue-collecting agencies of the Nationalist state, and to the demise of the Maritime Customs Service as the pre-eminent revenue-collecting and anti-smuggling organization. The administrative upheavals of the war facilitated the rise of other central government organizations nominally charged with smuggling suppression, which in fact frequently engaged in trade with the Japanese-occupied areas of China. Hence, administrative reforms at a time of fiscal collapse, far from strengthening the war-time state, created one of the preconditions for the disintegration of the Nationalist state, which facilitated the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) victory in 1949.

Way Down East, “Way Down West”: Hollywood Cinema and the Rise of Conservatism in 1920s China

This article investigates the distribution and consumption of Way Down East (directed by D. W. Griffith, 1920) in Chinese cities in the 1920s in an attempt to explore the impact of foreign films on early Chinese filmmaking in particular and on Chinese society in general. Griffith’s Way Down East highlights a young woman’s trials and tribulations caused by male tyranny and deception. Such films by D. W. Griffith struck a chord in China in the 1920s, when the concerns of women and the loss of family values after the May Fourth movement found expression in film. The embracing of Way Down East in China, particularly among progressive intellectuals, indicates the existence of an anti-May Fourth conservatism. Chinese intellectuals were inspired by Way Down East to deny Chinese women’s subjectivity as new women who could control their own destinies; such a denial thereby rejected romantic love as a means of women’s emancipation and enlightenment. The intellectual class’s jettisoning of the rhetoric of “free love” and free marriage and re-emphasizing family values in the 1920s were conducive to the Nationalist Party’s conservative agenda to discipline individuals and Chinese society in the late 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, the “partification” of China during the Nanjing Decade (1927–37) was a direct outgrowth of a conservative consensus that followed upon May Fourth.

Editorial

Editorial James Carter The themes present in this issue may be familiar, but each of the four articles makes an original contribution to its subject and will, I think, challenge readers to reconsider ideas about gender equity, the growth of the middle class, leadership techniques, and regional identity. Lisa Tran's "The ABCs of Monogamy in Republican China" takes as its focus a single phrase: yifu yiqi zhi. Often translated simply (and Tran would argue, simplistically) as "monogamy," this phrase in its various translations provides a powerful entrée into law, popular culture, and social analysis. Few issues cut to the heart of a social order more than marriage and other forms of partnership. Tran's detailed and thorough analysis of the way successive Chinese regimes managed this interplay between tradition and modernity finds echoes across a range of other institutions. Accompanying the changes Tran documents was the transformation—or at least the development—of China's middle class. Miriam Gross's article, "Flights of Fancy from a Sedan Chair," complements Tran's work well, taking a similarly archival approach to the development of the tourism industry in the Nanjing decade. The nascent leisure travel industry shows early twentieth-century China in a light not often seen: separated from the political, social, and economic calamities that characterize textbook descriptions of the era. The article also provides fascinating insights into the creation of tourist destinations, a process that has only accelerated as time has passed. The same class of people at the center of Gross's work are also a focus of Grace Huang's reconsideration of Chiang Kai-shek's political leadership. Like Tran's article on marriage custom and law, Huang takes as her point of departure a single phrase, in this case a single character: (chi). Translated variously as "shame" or "humiliation" among other possibilities, this Confucian concept underpins much of Chiang's rhetoric about the Chinese nation and the crises it endured under his leadership. Huang's careful reading of Chiang's official diaries shows the political power of this concept and the way that Chiang strategized to make defeat an asset in his political struggles with both the Japanese and the communists. These first three articles all take as their subject what might be considered the traditional core of Twentieth-Century China: social and political history of the Nanjing decade, and the years preceding and following it. The fourth article in this issue, Mark Gamsa's "Writers from Anhui and Provinciality in Modern China" extends those boundaries considerably, right to the present day (although the article's roots are firmly in the May Fourth era). Gamsa takes on questions of identity, stereotype, regionalism, and modernity (among others) as he seeks the meaning of being from Anhui throughout the twentieth century. Labeled a backwater, Anhui can claim, in one form or another, many of China's most [End Page 97] progressive and influential figures, yet neither side seems to suffer (or benefit) from the association. Local histories are always dogged, it seems, by questions of relevance: what can the particular say about the general? In this case, Gamsa's analysis of the changing identity of Anhui speaks volumes about China, its changes from the 1920s to today, and particularly the interaction between the cosmopolitan coast and its less-privileged inland relations. Issue 36:2 should be appearing in your mailboxes just a few months after issue 36:1, after a gap of nearly a year separating 35:2 from 36:1! My apologies for the uneven production schedule, which accompanied the transition to our new publisher and the transition from an academic-year to a calendar-year production schedule. From here on, issue one of each volume should be mailed the first week of January, with each subsequent issue (remember, frequency is increasing to three issues per year in 2012) appearing at regular intervals. [End Page 98] Copyright © 2011 Twentieth-Century China

The Legislative Process in Republican China: The 1930 Nationalist Family Law and the Controversy over Surnames for Married Women

This article investigates the legislative process that produced the 1930 Nationalist Family Law Book of the Republican Civil Code, focusing in particular on the debate over married women's surnames. In the accompanying discussion, Guomindang (GMD) lawmakers, legal experts, educators, women’s rights advocates, and others grappled in a remarkably open manner over how best to address the surname question in light of their concerns with Party consolidation, legal modernisation, gender equality, social stability, and individual identity. Although the outcome of the legislative process affirmed customary surname practices (albeit with progressive overtones), the process itself was uniquely radical, with participants thoroughly reevaluating one of the oldest and most fundamental patriarchal institutions in Chinese society. The legislative and post-legislative debate over surnames illuminates the Nanjing Decade as a singular transitional period in the history of Chinese law and gender during which law was subject to revision and amendment rather than orthodoxy, and GMD policy toward women was subject to deliberation rather than dictated by ideology.

The Legislative Process in Republican China: The 1930 Nationalist Family Law and the Controversy over Surnames for Married Women

This article investigates the legislative process that produced the 1930 Nationalist Family Law Book of the Republican Civil Code, focusing in particular on the debate over married women's surnames. In the accompanying discussion, Guomindang (GMD) lawmakers, legal experts, educators, women's rights advocates, and others grappled in a remarkably open manner over how best to address the surname question in light of their concerns with Party consolidation, legal modernisation, gender equality, social stability, and individual identity. Although the outcome of the legislative process affirmed customary surname practices (albeit with progressive overtones), the process itself was uniquely radical, with participants thoroughly reevaluating one of the oldest and most fundamental patriarchal institutions in Chinese society. The legislative and post-legislative debate over surnames illuminates the Nanjing Decade as a singular transitional period in the history of Chinese law and gender during which law was subject to revision and amendment rather than orthodoxy, and GMD policy toward women was subject to deliberation rather than dictated by ideology.

J. Megan Greene, The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization

The primary goal of this book “is to investigate how and why the ROC [Republic of China] state built institutions and initiated policies of the sort that we associate with developmental states” (p. 2). In doing this, Megan Greene criticizes many of the luminaries in the field including Robert Wade and Alice Amsden among others. For Greene, a developmental state is both strong and proactive. It has two key groups, political leaders and technocrats, who do not necessarily operate with the same interests (pp. 9-10). Green argues that “propitious moments” enhanced the development of science and technology policies in the ROC state both on the mainland and in Taiwan (p. 141). Thus, during the Nanjing Decade, pressure from Japan and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war led to stronger science policies. In Taiwan, Greene argues, very little was done for two decades from 1945 to 1965. In fact, during this period greater emphasis was placed on the preservation of Chinese culture. A shortage of funds and the brain drain left Taiwan a scientific desert. In 1965, however, new developments took place stimulated in part by the Chinese Communists’ successful testing of a nuclear weapon in 1964. In addition, several key American advisers made important inputs. Yet even then and despite some budget increases, science in Taiwan remained a backwater. A second “propitious” moment occurred during the 1970s as Taiwan left the United Nations and many countries recognized the People’s Republic. At the same time, Chiang Ching-kuo, a very different leader from his father Chiang Kai-shek, came to the fore. Thus, in 1978 another advance took place. It should be noted that when Chiang Ching-kuo became president in May 1978, Sun Yun-suan also became Premier. Although Greene mentions the importance of domestic politics, she underestimates the contribution of this new leadership team. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI (2011) 16:115–116 DOI 10.1007/s11366-010-9136-9

Trial of modernity: judicial reform in early twentieth-century China, 1901-1937

CONTENTS Preface000 Abbreviations000 Introduction Part I:Envisioning Reform from the Center 1 Western Models and Chinese Practices: the New Policy Decade 2 Judicial Modernity as Performance of Formality: the Beiyang Period 3 Justice under Party-State: the Nanjing Decade Part II: Provincial Setting and Financial Constraint 4 Provincial Institutions and Judicial Reform in Jiangsu 5 Judicial Finance: Nation, Province, and County Part III: County Judicial Process 6 Social Ecology of County Judiciary 7 Power and Justice in Local Society 8 Prison Reform and County Jails Part IV: Between Formalization and Informal Practices 9 Quick Justice: Punishing Robbers and Bandits 10 Praxis of Petition and Economy of False Accusation Conclusion Notes References Glossary Index

Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (review)

Reviewed by: Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement Rossella Ferrari (bio) Xiaobing Tang . Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xii, 300 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-52-024909-7. With this impeccably researched and beautifully illustrated volume, Xiaobing Tang has written the definitive account of a significant yet understudied topic within English-language scholarship on China: the modern woodcut movement that revolutionized Chinese art in the early 1930s. Tang traces its genesis and subsequent dissemination through the Nanjing decade (1927-1937), specifically, from the inauguration of Nanjing as the new Nationalist capital in 1928 to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. The first three chapters reconstruct the historical and institutional context of the early decades of the twentieth century, addressing the key artistic movements and personalities that populated the cultural-artistic field of modern China in the prewar era. Alongside visual artists such as Liu Haisu, Lin Fengmian, and Xu Beihong, the activities of prominent public intellectuals and writers such as Cai Yuanpei, Tian Han, Ouyang Yuqian, and Guo Moruo are also surveyed. One chief protagonist of Tang's engaging narrative is Lu Xun, who is widely acknowledged as the "spiritual patron of the woodcut movement" (p. 4). All three chapters begin with the year 1928, a crucial historical moment in which artistic production started to be institutionalized by the newly-established Nanjing government. They vividly flesh out the excitement, energy, intellectual diversity, and animated spirit of discussion of the time—especially in the commercialized and cosmopolitan environment of Shanghai. Chapter 1 examines various proposals for art instruction on a national scale, in particular Cai Yuanpei's advocacy of "aesthetic education" (meiyu), and traces the emergence of a notion of "art movement" since the second half of the 1920s. Tang details the major debates of the period relating to the modernization of the Chinese visual arts and highlights the decisive role played by Chinese students in Japan and Europe in the introduction and dissemination of foreign styles and aesthetic concepts. The question of function or purpose of the artwork, which constitutes a central aspect of avant-garde theory, is repeatedly addressed in this and other chapters, and so are related notions of autonomy and "art for art" (the "ivory tower") as opposed to "art for life" (the "crossroads," p. 35). This moment was critical in the history of Chinese art, as new trends and schools emerged and cultural producers constantly redefined their historical mission and social role. The "meaningfulness and consequentiality of art" became persistent concerns (p. 3), and increasingly greater emphasis was laid on art's closeness to life praxis and on the artist's direct involvement in social reform. The woodcut movement, [End Page 271] too, came to address questions of function and purpose, but their responses and approaches to contemporary events "would be critically different" (p. 4) from those of other promoters of aesthetic modernity and cultural reform. This difference, along with its anti-institutional disposition, political drive, and innovative visuality, became the key marker of distinction of the modern woodcut community as "a truly avant-garde movement" (p. 218). Chapter 2 deals specifically with the literary field and its intersections with the visual arts. The intellectual journeys of Tian Han and Guo Moruo from Japan to China, their subsequent involvement with the Creation Society, and its shifting ideological orientations testify to the increasing appeal of left-wing political theories and artistic conceptions since the late 1920s. Emergent notions of proletarian and revolutionary art and literature, also shaped by Marxist movements in Japan, paved the way for the advent of the first generation of modern printmakers in the early 1930s. Chapter 3 introduces Lu Xun's long-standing involvement with the visual arts field, his interest in modern Japanese and European prints, and his advocacy of the "creative woodcut" (chuangzuo muke) as a truly modern, vigorous, and revolutionary art form—a belief that would direct his unremitting patronage of this medium until his death in 1936. The key artists, exhibitions, and publications that contributed to the flourishing and expansion of the movement are comprehensively surveyed in chapters 4 and...

Gender, politics, and democracy: women's suffrage in China

i. Introduction I 2. Anti-Qing Rebels: Conceiving Women's Citizenship, 1898-191z 31 3. Women's Search for Political Equality in the New Republic, 1912-1914 65 4. Suffrage and Provincial Constitutions: Building a New Culture, 1919-1923 103 5. Nationalists, Communists, and the National Assembly Movement, 1924-1926 139 6. Feminists in the Nanjing Decade, 1927-1936 168 7. Realizing the Power of Difference: Quotas, War, and Elections, 1936-1948 195

Disciplining the state: virtue, violence, and state-making in modern China

What are states, and how are they made? Scholars of European history assert that war makes states, just as states make war. This study finds that in China, the challenges of governing produced a trajectory of state-building in which the processes of moral regulation and social control were at least as central to state-making as the exercise of coercive power. State-making is, in China as elsewhere, a profoundly normative and normalizing process. This study maps the complex processes of state-making, moral regulation, and social control during three critical reform periods: the Yongzheng reign (1723-1735), the Guomindang's Nanjing decade (1927-1937), and the Communist Party's Socialist Education Campaign (1962-1966). During each period, central authorities introduced - not without resistance - institutional change designed to extend the reach of central control over local political life. The successes and failures of state-building in each case rested largely upon the ability of each regime to construct itself as an autonomous moral agent both separate from and embedded in an imagined political community. Thornton offers a historical reading of the state-making process as a contest between central and local regimes of bureaucratic and discursive practice.

The ‘New Virtuous Wife and Good Mother’: women intellectuals’ group identity and the Funü Zhoukan (Women’s Weekly), 1935–1937

This article, in seeking to explore women’s lives in Republican China during the Nanjing decade, offers a case study of the Funü Zhoukan (Women’s Weekly), the supplement of Guomindang’s Central Daily News, between April 1935 and August 1937. After its foundation, the Nanjing Guomindang government set a benchmark for women to be good national subjects by taking on the role of the ‘virtuous wife and good mother’ instead of the ‘modern woman’ who had emerged among middle and high class families in major cities. While the Women’s Weekly promoted the discourse of the ‘virtuous wife and good mother’, women intellectuals argued that women could take on such responsibilities only through education, participation in the professions and politics and by gaining a degree of economic independence. Thus, the idea of a woman’s place being solely at home was defeated in the Nanjing period, but the issue of women’s full role in society was left unresolved because of women’s confusion about the dual responsibilities of home and society.