Session 97: Individual Papers: Cities and Urban Culture in Modern China

Organizer and Chair: Kristin Stapleton, University of Kentucky

Growing from the Outside: The Path of Urbanization of Late Imperial Jining and Its Modern Setback

Jinghao Sun, University of Toronto

Western scholarship traditionally identified Chinese cities as primarily political and military centers, but historians of China now pay greater heed to the role of rural-based commercialization in fostering urbanization in late imperial China. But other factors, such as improvements in transportation and communication, also encouraged urbanization. As one example, Jining’s emergence as an urban center in southwest Shandong, a predominantly agricultural region, suggests that in certain cases urbanization was not generated from within, but imposed from without.

This paper examines the urbanization of late-imperial Jining in relation to the effect that Grand Canal transportation had in stimulating trade and commercial production in Jining and driving its urban expansion. The city’s intermediate role in north-south interaction meant that urbanization could occur in the absence of rural-based commercialization. Not only that, but Jining’s dependence on the canal profoundly shaped the culture of local politics and economy that urbanization induced. Its urbanization experience oriented it southward, not just to the markets of Jiangnan, but to its cultural styles as well, removing Jining from the northern cultural ethos that would otherwise have marked it. When government maintenance declined in the late 19th century, so did the city.

The paper also explores why Jining, unlike other northern Grand Canal cities, was not completely marginalized thereafter. Jining’s open-minded gentry elites sought to integrate local traditions and an active commercial character in order to stave off peripheralization.

An Urbanized Gentleman: Zheng Guanying and His Shanghai

Guo Wu, SUNY, Albany

How did the urban environment of late Qing Shanghai change the life of a failed Confucian student and make him a prominent reformist thinker? Analysis of Zheng Guanying (1842–1922) provides a case study for examining the rise of Shanghai’s intellectual and cultural urban space as well as the development of one of the late Qing’s most significant thinkers. Author of the influential Words of Warning, Zheng was a successful merchant engaged in myriad endeavors, but he had not even earned a civil service degree. Although his hybrid social identity alone is worthy of examination, what most makes Zheng Guanying stand out was the contrast between his weak traditional educational background and the intellectual depth he achieved, and the transformative role the city played in this process. This paper will combine the methodologies of urban history, cultural history and intellectual history to examine the formation of Zheng Guanying’s thoughts and career in his early years as a case study of late Qing China’s urban cultural space. Based on the polemics of Benedict Anderson and Zhang Guanying’s own writings, I will pay special attention to the rise of modern print media and demonstrate how newspapers such as the earliest Shenbao provided a channel for Zheng Guanying to express his political opinions as a marginalized junior company clerk. Furthermore, I attempt to explore the formation of the cultural space in Shanghai where newspapers played a role alongside the rise of modern education, enterprise and social networks. I argue that it is this urban cultural space during the 1870s that forged the first generation of the modern Chinese intelligentsia and their tentative break from tradition.

The Circulation of English in Nineteenth-Century Shanghai: Language Transformation and Its Historical Stimuli to New Local Ideology

Jane Jia Si, University of Pennsylvania

This paper examines how the English language and ideas influenced the native social life in the foreign settlements of Shanghai from the 1840s to the 1920s. Following dramatic social changes after the opening of treaty ports, an upsurge of language transformation was bound to affect the way people came to accept newly emerging technologies and ideas. It is not surprising that in Shanghai, Chinese compradors, office boys, printers, policemen, coolies, etc.—more or less everyone on the trading chain—spoke English. However, it is not clear how they spoke and what they used such a "new language" for. Moreover, the research about the formation of the modern Chinese language often ignores the relationship between language and social history. Questions such as to what extent foreign words and expressions entered the thoughts and minds of Chinese people, and how much of the population achieved the so-called modernity through language and cultural contact remain, for the most part, unexplored. In response to this lack, this paper will explore not only official documents and travel accounts, but also vernacular poems and glossaries, to show how language transformation became one of the historical stimuli that helped re-shape the early modernization of new China.

Carving a Gendered Public Space: Chinese Women’s Print Media in the 1930s

Yuxin Ma, Armstrong Atlantic State University

In the mid-1930s, the Nanjing government wedded nationalism to the cultivation of traditional values, promoting the New Life Movement for the purpose of nation-building. Women were construed primarily as mothers for the country and were supposed to cultivate the virtues of chastity, domesticity, and respectability to serve the nation. Despite the state efforts to reintegrate women into the family, women journalists employed the print media to propose broader political opportunities and public roles for women.

Diversified along political, feminist and class lines, women writers struggled for women’s political representations and legal equality, defending women’s rights and dignity in their print media. GMD women writers were very responsive to the promotion of conservative nationalism though they did not always agree with the state policies towards women. They struggled for women’s political representation and equal legal rights. But liberal feminists, left-wing women, and Christian women asserted their own feminist beliefs and political views different from those promoted by the state. They had dialogues and debates with each other, while contesting with men and state culture in defending women’s interests. Women’s media writings shaped a critical voice to the state gender policies, capitalism, male hypocrisy, and social prejudices against women.

The paper uses Chinese women’s periodicals in the 1930s as the primary sources, studying Chinese women’s agency in appropriating nationalist discourse to propose feminist aspirations, and carving new subject positions for women. It analyzes the importance of women’s public media and its social and political functions, reconstructs women writers’ feminist concerns and social practices, and demonstrates the diversity of Chinese feminism and the complexity of women’s movements in the 1930s.

Governing Social Space in Urban China: Courtyards, Compounds, Danweis, and Gated Communities

David Bray, University of Cambridge

In recent years China’s cities have undergone large-scale redevelopment programs that have dramatically transformed the urban environment. While the new cities reflect a new economic logic, they also pose new problems for Chinese authorities: namely, how are these rapidly transforming urban environments to be governed? In this paper, I place contemporary questions of urban governance within an historical context by examining the relationship between governance and urban spatial form in China’s past. Building upon insights developed by poststructuralist scholars in urban studies, I argue that techniques of urban governance have always been closely linked to the actual physical form of city space.

In pre-modern China, urban space was dominated by the traditional walled courtyard home, which reproduced the hierarchical relationships of the patriarchal family in spatial form. In turn, the Confucian family became the model upon which governance throughout society was founded. After 1949, the communist government centered its strategies of governance on the organization of collective labor and rebuilt the urban environment into a multitude of factory communities. The work unit (danwei) thus rapidly became both the basic unit of urban governance and the basic module of urban space. In recent years the decline of the work unit has been accompanied by a vast new wave of urban transformation. In response, authorities have shifted the focus of governance from the workplace to the residential compound (gated community) as they attempt to meet the complexities of the new city by governing through "community building" (shequ jianshe).