scholarly journals The making of a littoral minzu: The Dan in late Qing–Republican intellectual writings

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Gary Chi-hung Luk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Republican Era ◽  
The 1950S

Abstract Tracing the assumption behind China's nationality identification that the Dan constituted a littoral minzu, this article examines the rise and circulation of “Dan” as a racial entity in writings by Chinese thinkers, reformers, and scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. It explains how “Dan” emerged as a zu, minzu, zhongzu, and renzhong in late-Qing political polemics and pedagogical texts, and how this notion was combined with Republican-era scholarship on the Dan within and across the disciplines of popular literature, folklore, ethnohistory, and anthropology. Both Western and imperial Chinese scholarly trends and racialist ideas shaped pre-1949 Dan studies. Modern intellectuals presented the Dan as a non-Han minority based on various nationalist concerns as well as their Han and regional identities. From a historical perspective, this article redraws the geoethnic landscape of modern China by taking transregional littoral fringes into consideration and calling for attention to those identified as non-Han before the nationality investigation in the 1950s but as Han afterward.

Discourse, Reality and Rural Society: The Case of Tenancy and Employment Relationships in the Early Twentieth-Century Jianghan Plain

Rural China ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-99
Author(s):  
Jiayan Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rural China ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Jianghan Plain ◽  
Employment Relationships ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Republic

According to class struggle theory, rural China before 1949 featured two contrasting classes, the exploiting class and the exploited class. Some current research tends to—from the perspectives of market relations and moral economics—focus on the harmonious aspect of the rural society of that time. Based on different surveys and their associated discourses on tenancy and employment relationships in the Jianghan Plain in the late Qing, the Republic of China, and the 1950s, this article argues that different discourses emphasized different aspects of rural society. The surveys of the late Qing and some surveys of the Republic are closer to reality, while the CCP surveys of the 1950s and the gazetteers compiled in the 1950s, influenced by political propaganda and policy, are heavily loaded with ideological biases and exaggerate the landlord-tenant conflict. This kind of influence has gradually weakened since the 1980s, and the gazetteers compiled afterward are closer to reality. Those new studies that deny exploitation and evil landlords are overcorrecting. The Jianghan experience of tenancy and employment relationships demonstrates that in the early twentieth century, exploitation among classes, market competition, and moral economics all existed at the same time. Because the Jianghan Plain was prone to frequent water calamities, we also need to add the specific influence of the environmental factor to our understanding of tenancy and employment relationships in this region.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 298-310
Author(s):  
Fei-Hsien Wang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Knowledge Economy ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Changing Knowledge

This chapter retraces the curious and crooked journey of copyright in modern China from the translingual transplantation of copyright/hanken/banquan in East Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century to Shanghai booksellers' customary banquan regulation and their private antipiracy policing in the late Qing and early Republican period. It also revisits the fading away of the very term banquan and its associated practices in the communist 1950s. The chapter illustrates how the internationalizing legal doctrine was reshaped and appropriated in China's local contexts as a powerful means for authors and publishers to create new orders of ownership in a changing knowledge economy. Challenging the conventional notion that the Chinese were forced to adopt the alien legal doctrine under foreign pressure reveals that Chinese booksellers and authors, no less than the foreign powers, were zealous in exercising banquan/copyright to justify and exclusively secure the profit their works generated. Copyright was introduced in China at a particular moment when China's cultural market and knowledge world were undergoing an intellectual paradigm shift at the turn of the twentieth century.

Frontiers of Visibility

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Popular Images ◽  
Cinematic Technology

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.

Historical perspective

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Lorino
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Common Language ◽  
The Common ◽  
Relative Decline

The pragmatist intellectual trend started as an anti-Cartesian revolt by amateur philosophers and became a major inspiration for anti-Taylorian managerial thought. In the early days of the pragmatist movement, a small group of friends fought idealist and Cartesian ideas. The influence of classical pragmatists Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, and some of their closest fellow travellers (Royce, Addams, Follett, and Lewis), grew in the first decades of the twentieth century. Some misunderstandings of the central tenets of pragmatism later led to its distortion into the common language acceptance of the word “pragmatism” and contributed to a relative decline in the 1930s, precisely when pragmatism began to inspire an anti-Taylorian managerial movement. Finally the chapter narrates how “the pragmatist turn,” a revival of pragmatist ideas, took place in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 734-743
Author(s):  
Laura U. Marks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Guerrilla Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Arabic Speaking

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.

Gender and Social Exclusion in European Migration Crisis

2018 ◽  
pp. 658-676
Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Other ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
The One ◽  
European Migration

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.

Revolutionary Christian Attitudes toward Women and Family in Late Qing and Republican-Era China

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Anneke H. Stasson
Keyword(s):  
Women's Education ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Attitudes Toward Women ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Parent Child Relationship ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Self Selection ◽  
Child Relationship ◽  
Republican Era ◽  
Parent Child

Abstract In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Chinese Christian familial ideals were traditional and revolutionary at the same time. They were traditional in wanting to preserve some role for parents in forming the marriages of their children and in seeing wives as primarily responsible for the care of children. But Christians were revolutionary in encouraging women to develop their personalities and work outside the home. They advocated women’s education and associated education with women’s empowerment and independence. Christians taught that marriage should be based on love and that daughters were just as important as sons, even if they chose to be single. Singleness, spouse self-selection, prioritizing the husband-wife relationship over the parent-child relationship, and pursuing a companionate model of marriage were all ways that Christians helped revolutionize familial ideals in China.

scholarly journals CORPSE ADMONITION: WU KEDU AND BUREAUCRATIC PROTEST IN LATE QING CHINA

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Ying-kit Chan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Unintended Consequence ◽  
Late Imperial China ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Arbitrary Power ◽  
Late Qing China ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Further Development

AbstractIn late imperial China, an extremely small number of bureaucrats adopted corpse admonition (shijian尸諫) to protest with their death what they regarded as inadequacies or failings in the imperial structure. This article introduces the case of Wu Kedu 吳可讀, who killed himself to protest the designation, by the late Qing empress dowagers Ci'an and Cixi, of Guangxu as the emperor, and as the adopted son of Xianfeng and not as the heir to Tongzhi. The article argues that Wu Kedu's suicide, which was highly praised during and after its time, was an attempt to sway bureaucratic opinion to put a check on the arbitrary power of empress dowagers, but instead had the unintended consequence of reinforcing it. More importantly, Wu Kedu's corpse admonition was a precursor of the outpouring of voices of remonstrance over political issues at the turn of the twentieth century, leading to further development of the Chinese “constitutional agenda.”

scholarly journals THE SILENT HALF SPEAKS

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-210
Author(s):  
Shellen Wu
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Chinese Revolution ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Liang Qichao ◽  
History Of ◽  
Kang Youwei ◽  
History Of Modern China ◽  
Qiu Jin

It wasn't so long ago that histories of China's rocky transition to modernity featured a small and entirely male cast of characters. In the works of the first generation of American Sinologists, from John King Fairbank to his most famous students such as Joseph Levenson, a few men, from late Qing statesman Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 to reformers and revolutionaries like Kang Youwei 康有為, Sun Yatsen 孫中山, and Liang Qichao 梁啟超, loomed large over the narrative of the Chinese revolution. Into this lacuna Mary Rankin's rediscovery of the late Qing female martyr Qiu Jin 秋瑾 came as a thunderbolt. Her work opened up the possibility that perhaps the problem wasn't the absence of women in China's revolution but the failure of scholars to look for their contribution. Rankin's 1968 article on “The Tenacity of Tradition,” and her subsequent bookEarly Chinese Revolutionariespaved the way for a far more nuanced and complicated new social history of modern China.

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