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.

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.

Japanese Modernization and the Emergence of New Fictwn in Early Twentieth Century China: A Study of Liang Qichao

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 817-840 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroko Willcock
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Small Circle ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Liang Qichao ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
Artistic Quality

Inspired by Japanese influences among others the late Qing period saw a great surge in the writing of fiction after 1900. The rate of growth was unprecedented in the history of Chinese literature. The great surge coincided with rapid socio-political changes that China underwent in the last fifteen years of the Qing Dynasty. At the psychological level, the humiliating defeat by Japan in 1895 gave rise to a feeling of urgency for reform among some progressively minded Chinese intellectuals. Those reformers came to view fiction as a powerful medium to further their reform causes and to arouse among the people the awareness of the changes they believed China most urgently required. Fiction was no longer considered as constituting insignificant and trivial writings. It was no longer the idle pastime of retired literati composed to entertain a small circle of their friends, or written by a discontented recluse to vent a personal grudge through a brush. The role of fiction came to be defined in relation to its utility as an influence on politics and society and its artistic quality was subordinated to such a definition.

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.

Gutenberg in Shanghai. Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937. By Christopher A. Reed. [Vancouver, Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. xvii, 391 pp. ISBN 1206-9523.]

2005 ◽  
Vol 182 ◽  
pp. 443-445
Author(s):  
Andrea Janku
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Wood Block ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
University Of British Columbia ◽  
Chinese Characteristics ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Print Capitalism ◽  
Early Republican

Gutenberg in Shanghai is a book about the industrial revolution in China's print culture and the ensuing rise of print capitalism ‘with Chinese characteristics.’ It offers a coherent and unique account of the introduction, adaptation and eventual imitation of modern, i.e. Western, print technology in China, with the aim of establishing the material basis on which to study the transition of China's ancient literary culture into the industrial age. It reconstructs the history of print technology from the first cast type matrices to the adaptation of the electrotype process, from photo-lithography to the colour-offset press, from the platen press to the rotary printing press, and tells the stories of three of the most dominant lithograph and letterpress publishers of the late Qing and the early Republican period respectively. This is a worthwhile undertaking, exploring an aspect of modern publishing in China, which hitherto has not received the attention it deserves. The study is based on missionary writings, personal reminiscences, collections of source materials, documents on the early book printers' trade organizations from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, and oral history materials (interviews conducted during the 1950s with former printing workshops apprentices). The bibliography also lists a couple of interviews, but unfortunately it is not clear how relevant they are to the story told in the book.The introduction of lithography into Shanghai by Jesuit missionaries in 1876 plays a pivotal role in this account. Lithography, especially photolithography coming a few years later, was a technology particularly suited to Chinese needs and cheaper than traditional wood-block printing.

Virtus Romana

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catalina Balmaceda
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Political System ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Ideal

The political transformation that took place at the end of the Roman Republic was a particularly rich area for historical analysis. The crisis that saw the end of the Roman Republic and the changes which gave birth to a new political system were narrated by major Roman historians who took the Roman idea of virtus as a way of interpreting and understanding their history. Tracing how virtus informed Roman thought over time, the book explores the concept and its manifestations in the narratives of four successive Latin historians who span the late republic and early principate: Sallust, Livy, Velleius, and Tacitus. Balmaceda demonstrates that the concept of virtus in these historical narratives served as a form of self-definition which fostered and propagated a new model of the ideal Roman more fitting to imperial times. As a crucial moral and political concept, virtus worked as a key idea in the complex system of Roman socio-cultural values and norms which underpinned Roman attitudes about both present and past. This book offers a re-appraisal of the historians as promoters of change and continuity in the political culture of both the Republic and the Empire.

THE BOURGEOIS HOUSEWIFE AS LABORER IN LATE QING AND EARLY REPUBLICAN SHANGHAI

NAN Nü ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constance Orliski
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Financial Burden ◽  
Female Labor ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Liang Qichao ◽  
The Family ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

AbstractDuring the late Qing and early Republic, Chinese reformers, such as Liang Qichao, argued that because all women were "consumers" and not "producers," they had weakened the state by posing a financial burden to the family and a collective impediment to economic development. This article examines the diverse responses inspired by this construction of womanhood as they appeared in the burgeoning female press of the period. Deploying this new medium of communication, the women and men who endeavored to define nügong, female labor, embedded in their representations of "women's work" contrary interpretations of what it meant to be a productive citizen, an industrious member of the middle class, and an educated woman who labored in public or private. Thus, nügong discourse not only considered new characterizations of female labor in the context of a society and an economy in transition, but it also acted as a site for negotiating competing and intersecting conceptions of nationalism, class, and gender.

Training Scholars not Politicians

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 919-954 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu Li
Keyword(s):  
National Consciousness ◽  
Research School ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
Liang Qichao ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Kang Youwei ◽  
Deep Meaning ◽  
Politically Active

Conventional wisdom dictates that Chinese literati in the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), like their forerunners in previous dynasties, were politically active. Chinese Marxist historians tend to portray the Qing literati as politicians rather than scholars. Tang Zhiju, a China-based historian and the author of a book with an explicitly political title, Jindai Jingxue yu Zhengzhi (Modern Classical Learning and Politics), argues that the forefather of the Qing Evidential Research School, Gu Yanwu (1613–1682), used classical learning to maintain the Han people's national consciousness, and that the founders of the Gongyang New Text School, Zhuang Cunyu (1719–1788) and Liu Fenglu (1776–1829), applied the ‘sublime words with deep meaning’ in the Gongyang Chunqiu (Gongyang Commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals) to justify the Manchu's tianming (mandate of heaven). In late Qing, Tang contends, the New Text scholars Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929) studied the classics with the intention of political reform, while the Old Text scholar Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936) developed the tradition in Confucianism of jingshi (managing the world) for anti-Manchu revolution.

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