scholarly journals FROM TRAITOR TO MARTYR: DRAWING LESSONS FROM THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF WANG JINGWEI, 1944

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-158
Author(s):  
Jeremy E. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
National Government ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Specific Event ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
History Of

AbstractBased on recently reopened files and publications in Nanjing, as well as published and newsreel accounts from the 1940s, this paper represents the first scholarly analysis of the rituals surrounding the death and burial of Wang Jingwei in Japanese-occupied China. Rather than locating this analysis purely in the literature on the history of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), however, this paper asks what Wang Jingwei's Re-organized National Government might tell us about personality cults in the political culture of modern China. While Wang's burial drew heavily on the precedent of Sun Yat-sen's funerals of the 1920s, it also presaged later spectacles of public mourning and posthumous commemoration, such as Chiang Kai-shek's funeral in 1975 in Taipei. In focusing on this one specific event in the life of a “puppet government,” this paper hopes to reignite scholarly interest in the study of “dead leaders” and their posthumous lives in modern Chinese history more generally.

The Social Life of Opium in China, 1483–1999

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yangwen Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opium Wars

The history of opium is a major theme in modern Chinese history. Books and academic careers have been devoted to its study. Yet the question that scholars of the opium wars and of modern China have failed to ask is how the demand for opium was generated. My puzzle, during the initial stage of research, was who smoked opium and why. Neither Chinese nor non-Chinese scholars have written much about this, with the exception of Jonathan Spence. Although opium consumption is a well-acknowledged fact, the reasons for its prevalence have never been fully factored into the historiography of the opium wars and of modern China. Michael Greenberg has dwelt on the opium trade, Chang Hsin-pao and Peter Fay on the people and events that made armed conflicts between China and the West unavoidable. John Wong has continued to focus on imperialism, James Polachek on Chinese internal politics while Opium regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, the latest work, has studied the political systems that controlled opium. But the political history of opium, like the opium trade and the theatre of war, is only part of the story. We need to distinguish them from the wider social and cultural life of opium in China. The vital questions are first, the point at which opium was transformed from a medicine to a luxury item and, secondly, why it became so popular and widespread after people discovered its recreational value. It is these questions that I address. We cannot fully understand the root problem of the opium wars and their role in the emergence of modern China until we can explain who was smoking opium and why they smoked it.

Seneca the Elder, the Controuersia Figurata, and the Political Discourse of the Early Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-150
Author(s):  
Matthew Leigh
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Specific Event ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Seneca The Elder

This paper studies examples of how exponents of Roman declamation could insert into arguments on the trivial, even fantastic, cases known as controuersiae statements of striking relevance to the political culture of the triumviral and early imperial period. This is particularly apparent in the Controuersiae of Seneca the Elder but some traces remain in the Minor Declamations attributed to Quintilian. The boundaries separating Rome itself from the declamatory city referred to by modern scholars as Sophistopolis are significantly blurred even in those instances where the exercise does not turn on a specific event from Roman history, and there is much to be gained from how the declaimers deploy Roman historical examples. Some of the most sophisticated instances of mediated political comment exploit the employment of universalizing sententiae, which have considerable bite when they are related to contemporary Roman discourse and experience. The declamation schools are a forum for thinking through the implications of the transformation of the Roman state and deserve a place within any history of Roman political thought.

scholarly journals Purloined letters: History and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 691-723 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT BICKERS
Keyword(s):  
Central Core ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Treaty Ports ◽  
Purloined Letters ◽  
China Coast

For John King Fairbank the establishment of the foreign inspectorate of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service was a key symbolic moment in modern Chinese history. His landmark 1953 volume Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast culminates with the 1854 Inspectorate agreement, which, he argued, ‘foreshadowed the eventual compromise between China and the West—a joint Chinese and Western administration of the modern centers of Chinese life and trade in the treaty ports’. Without the CMCS, he implied, there could be no modern China. It was the ‘the institution most thoroughly representative of the whole period’ after the opening of the treaty ports down to 1943, he wrote. By 1986 he was arguing that it was the ‘central core’ of the system. ‘Modernity, however defined, was a Western, not a Chinese, invention’, he claimed, and Sir Robert Hart's Customs Service was its mediator.

scholarly journals Catholic Seminary Education in China

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-241
Author(s):  
Buke Francis Fang
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Seminary Education ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Education In China

This paper will give an introduction to Catholic seminary education in China. After briefly narrating the political and social changes in modern Chinese history, seminary education will be discussed. Our discussion will focus on restoration, development and decline of Catholic seminaries in China from1982 to the present. Shanghai Sheshan Seminary will be particularly introduced as an example.

Policing Chinese Politics: A History

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Xu
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Chinese Politics ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Duke University

Policing Chinese Politics: A History, Michael Dutton, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. xiii, 411.This book is an empirically rich illumination of Carl Schmitt's notion that “the political” rests ultimately on a friend/enemy distinction. It depicts “the birth, life and death cycle” of this ever-shifting dynamic in modern Chinese history (303–4), through the lens of the coupling of the political with policing. The result is a tale that must enhance the reputation of this already-respected political scientist.

Sir Robert Hart and the Writing of Modern Chinese History

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-126
Author(s):  
Chihyun Chang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Inspector General ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Modern China ◽  
Academic Debate

AbstractThis article examines the conflicts in writing the imperial modern history of China among various stakeholders, particularly Chinese and American historians, and their dealing with a set of personal documents of Sir Robert Hart, Inspector-General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Services (CMCS) during the Qing period. This set of documents is called “Hart Industry” and contains Hart's personal papers and seventy-seven volumes of diaries, among others. Revealing the imperial Inspector-General's view on “westernization” in modern China, the Hart Industry played a key role in the development of the history of modern China throughout the twentieth century. From around 1957 until 1995, the diaries became a source of a highly politicized academic debate between Chinese Communist historians of the People's Republic of China and western historians of the Hart Industry. By providing a “study of studies” on the historiography of the colonial modern history of China, this article argues that the Hart diaries were critical to historians’ understanding of their own academic discourse.

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