The Concept of Rendaozhuyi in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Cultura ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-117
Author(s):  
Ke ZHANG
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Great War ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Chinese Tradition ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
The Great War

This paper examines the concept of Rendaozhuyi in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Appearing as early as 1903, Rendaozhuyi is the Chinese rendering of both humanism and humanitarianism. For the Chinese intellectuals during the Late Qing and Early Republican period, “rendao” itself represented a modern value of humanity and human dignity. In the wake of the Great War, Rendaozhuyi gained tremendous popularity among the May-Fourth scholars. Some of them held it up as a universal ideal and tool to critique Chinese tradition, while others respectfully disagreed, worrying it would undermine the collective morale of “strengthening the nation”. Finally, the late 1920s saw the rapid ebb of the discussions of Rendaozhuyi.

Colonial Stereotypes and Martialized Intellectual Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China

Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042097660
Author(s):  
Jun Lei
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Chinese Men ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Liang Qichao ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
And Gender

This article adopts an intersectional approach incorporating gender, race, and colonialism to illuminate a martial trend among Chinese men of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. Within the late Qing reformist intellectual discourses championed by Liang Qichao, it analyzes three racialized colonialist stereotypes: the “effeminate” Confucian literatus, the “Sick Man of East Asia,” and the “Yellow Peril.” The purpose is to reveal these stereotypes as collateral elements of the ideological reconfigurations of the Chinese nation and Chinese masculinities. I argue that although the homology of Western colonialist logic and gender politics powerfully manipulated narratives on Chinese masculinities, male Chinese intellectuals did not passively adopt orientalized images of “Chinamen.” Rather, they strategically reappropriated these stereotypes and invented a new homology of racial and gender politics in order to address abiding concerns with race, nation, and male sexual potency.

Lu Xun, Returning Home, and May Fourth Modernity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk A. Denton
Keyword(s):  
Subject Formation ◽  
Chinese Modernity ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
Returning Home ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
The Individual

Leaving home was the quintessential modern act for Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century, as home had come to represent cultural backwardness and oppression by the early Republican period. At the same time as they wrote of leaving it, however, modern Chinese writers also often wrote of returning home. This chapter analyzes the complex relationships between the individual and his home in Lu Xun’s first-person reminiscences. As representations of the return of a repressed past, literary representations of returning home complicate facile narratives of modern subject formation and suggest that the experience of modernity in this period of transition was an ambivalent and uneasy one. A closer look at such narratives of returning home suggests that the relationship with tradition in Chinese modernity is far more difficult and conflicted than the paradigm of “May Fourth iconoclasm” and its discourse of modernity’s radical rupture with tradition allows.

scholarly journals Swiss Enchantment

Asian Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-164
Author(s):  
Federico Brusadelli
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Liang Qichao ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
Kang Youwei ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
Institutional Model ◽  
The Ideal

A vast and hyper-centralized Asian empire built on the premise of an alleged cultural homogeneity. A small, federalist Alpine state sustained by the ideal of coexistence of different languages and religions. The differences between China and Switzerland could not be wider, and it is therefore understandable that the Swiss confederacy has been fascinating Chinese intellectuals in both the modern and contemporary era. In the late Qing and early Republican period, Switzerland was mentioned by prominent figures like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who praised its democracy, and in the 1920s the Swiss political system became a source of inspiration for “provincial patriots” in Hunan or for Chinese federalists such as Chen Jiongming. The present paper intends to survey these political encounters and perceptions, focusing on the transformation of the Swiss institutional model and historical experience into a “political concept”, and on the reasons for its final rejection as an unrealistic utopia unsuited for China.

Envisioning an Ideal Christian Family in Republican China

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-215
Author(s):  
Yun Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Active Role ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Chinese Christians ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Family ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Domestic Roles ◽  
Theological Thinking

Abstract Amid debates and discussions on the institution of the family in Republican China, foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians played an active role in promoting an ideal Christian family. This article investigates the three waves of prominent theological thinking that underpinned changing ideals of the Christian family throughout the Republican period: Chinese society’s encounter with the gendered ethics of the Christian community in the early Republican period, discussions of domesticity by Chinese Christians amid the social gospel movements of the 1920s, and discussions of domesticity during the National Christianizing the Home Movement. An exploration of Christian publications on domesticity points to a gendered perspective on women’s domestic roles as well as a male-dominated theological construct that attempted to reconfigure the notion of the Chinese Christian family. The discourse on the ideal Chinese Christian family had both secular and spiritual dimensions, shaped by the dynamic transnational flow of ideas and the development of local theological thinking.

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