Religious philanthropy has grown steadily as a social force in post-Mao China. This article explores the interactions between religious policy and religious philanthropy to understand the transformations at the levels of the state, religious groups, and individuals. State policy toward religion has shifted significantly since the 1980s; however, religious groups initiated philanthropic practices in various forms long before state policies were in place. Recent regulations calling on the "religion sector" to contribute to the larger society have not only aimed at shedding the burdens of the socialist state but also demanded more transparency and accountability of religious groups. Based on fieldwork in Jiangsu province from 2006 to 2014, this article argues that religious groups have experienced increasing bureaucratization and professionalization with this turn to philanthropy, and these same processes have led individuals to participate in new forms of religious moral subject-making that draw on and go beyond "doing good deeds."
Diaoyan (investigation and research) occupies a special place in the politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The concept can be broken down into two distinct types: symbolic diaoyan, and standard diaoyan. The former refers to the phenomenon of top leaders promoting and initiating the coordinated implementation of a particular political line. Leaders first promote their ideas through symbolic trips and speeches, and observe the extent of support for their political line within the ranks of the party elite. If support is forthcoming, the leader will then mobilize other central leaders to carry out standard diaoyan. This refers to investigation carried out by the central leaders into their own area of political responsibility within the scope of this overarching political line, with the aim of accumulating information and model experiences to inform specific policy decisions. These two types function in tandem: symbolic diaoyan promotes an abstract political line, and standard diaoyan fleshes out its substance. This article uses the term "adaptive mobilization model" to denote the use of diaoyan in the CCP’s policy making, and discusses two specific cases of Hu Jintao’s Scientific Outlook on Development and Xi Jinping’s China Dream to illustrate how regime adaptation and legitimization of the political line occur through the process of diaoyan.
Drawing on interviews with 97 retirees from different cities, this article reinterprets power relations in state-owned enterprises during the Mao era, centering on an analysis of day-to-day interactions between factory cadres and workers and between the elites and the ordinary among workers. The main issues addressed in this study include how cadres exercised discretion in administrative activities that directly affected workers’ material and nonmaterial interests, such as wage raises, housing allocations, party membership, promotions, and political awards; to what extent workers developed personal dependence on their supervisors; and whether or not workers were split into two antagonistic groups of activists and nonactivists. Without denying the instances of favoritism and personal dependence in cadre-worker relations under certain circumstances, which became increasingly noticeable in the early reform years, this study underscores the constraints of formal and informal institutions on cadres and questions the validity of the clientelist model in explaining micro-political realities on the factory floor in Chinese industry before the reform era.
Autocrats may try to generate regime support in order to remain in power, but do they get the results they intend? This article analyzes the causes and consequences of regime support in China. We show two key findings. First, as in previous studies, we find significant differences in levels of support and trust for central and local political institutions, what we refer to as the "local legitimacy deficit." The factors that produce support and trust in the central state have dissimilar impacts on local levels of the state. Second, rising prosperity, normative values, and institutional ties to the state—when analyzed together instead of viewed in isolation—do not influence regime support in the way expected by conventional wisdom. These findings have direct implications for state-society relations in contemporary China and for the sustainability of authoritarian regimes more generally.
The very existence of the new state of Manchukuo was contested throughout the 1930s. Despite its colonial reality, its form as a nation-state necessitated an attempt to generate legitimacy, and its best hope lay in performance legitimacy as a modernizing and developmental state delivering public goods and offering honest and efficient government. Less than a year after its establishment, the new state faced a crisis caused by large-scale floods in the north of the region. This article examines how it attempted to build performance legitimacy even in a quasi-colonial situation by establishing institutions and raising funds to mount a relief effort, providing food, shelter, and medical care, and in the longer term restoring state capacity by maintaining order, reopening communications, and instituting flood prevention measures. At the same time, it generated a narrative that linked that effort to its broader ideological claims to legitimacy.
This article explores how Taiwanese people construct and recount their experiences of dementia in factual and fictional stories. It compares the narrative meanings in Taiwanese stories with those of analogous mainland Chinese and Hong Kong accounts. The article finds that the Taiwanese stories differ from their mainland Chinese and Hong Kong counterparts in three ways. First, the onset of dementia is largely an unforeseen calamity for the Taiwanese storytellers, while it is an anticipatable life circumstance for the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong storytellers. Second, the Taiwanese storytellers tend to locate the cause for the deterioration of their elderly family member in illness, while the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong storytellers tend to explain away the deterioration of their elderly family member as normative aging. Third, the Taiwanese storytellers maintain their existing identities when faced with the newfound challenge of family caregiving in dementia, while the mainland Chinese and Hong Kong storytellers commonly appropriate the former culturally embodied identity of the family member whom they now care for.
This article surveys the performative function of criminal justice practices in contemporary China. It explores this function in the context of the Harmonious Society agenda and its accompanying Stability Maintenance imperative in the decade of the 2000s. It examines three initiatives connected to promoting the harmony and stability agendas that were promulgated by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) and Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP). These initiatives carried distinctive messages about how justice authorities were expected to dispense justice under the banner of Harmonious Society and Stability Maintenance. They provided a rhetorical framework, a new visual and conceptual space, for the SPC and SPP to promote the imperatives of stability and harmony-building. Overall, the article observes how this performative role is integral to maintaining the close link between law and politics and to sustaining the politico-legal culture upon which justice practices are based in China.
From a cultural approach and a feminist perspective, this article analyzes a gendered narrative of official corruption in China through news reports of "keeping a second wife." Moreover, it engages the lived experiences and perceptions of the message receivers. Drawing upon feminist discourse analysis, interviews, and digital ethnography, this study shows that a cultural script derived from the Chinese storytelling tradition of "women are a source of trouble" serves as a contemporary narrative of corruption in the state media. Nevertheless, the media narrative has generated a vigorous audience counternarrative, which disconnects the media linkage between "second wives" and corruption.
If You Are the One, the most watched dating show in China, caused a heated public debate following its debut in 2010, resulting in two government notices being issued regarding the regulation of dating shows. Using textual and intertextual analysis of the show and the public debate surrounding it, this article scrutinizes the transformation, following government regulation, of the construction of masculinity on the show. Drawing on Lisa Rofel’s narrative of "desiring China" and Robert P. Weller’s concept of "responsive authoritarianism," this article shows how the tension between the market logic of the Chinese media and their political ownership is played out through the negotiation and mobilization of the meaning of gender. This article therefore also sheds light on larger political, economic, and sociocultural configurations in contemporary China.
Wenan county in Hebei province was "North China’s plastic waste recycling capital," home to around ten thousand informal enterprises that together processed millions of tons of waste plastic annually until they were finally shut down in 2011. Based on fieldwork in North China’s informal recycling sector and data from gazetteers, government documents, news articles, and Chinese blogs, this article sketches how the informal waste sector developed in Wenan since the 1980s and analyzes how local government approaches to the sector changed as the devastating pollution and health effects of the industry became increasingly apparent. While the 2011 crackdown finally eliminated the sector from Wenan county, it predictably resulted in scattering these polluting enterprises throughout the region to work in more covert conditions, contributing to a "race to the bottom" dynamic in the sector. The conclusion proposes an alternative policy approach to the problem and briefly evaluates a national-scale initiative against the sector being planned for 2016.
This article offers a glimpse into the mutually constructive process of the making of class, family, and state in a new material world. Relying on a decade of field research, I illustrate that a middle-class lifestyle in China, increasingly associated with a car, is deeply embedded in, and in turn reproduces, the multigenerational familial relationship contoured by state reproductive policies and the new political economy. Built upon the notions and practices of care and emotions, family values are at the core of the ethical conduct of being properly middle class. Yet, familial practices, unintentionally, resonate with the state agenda that seeks to reassert traditional values as a way to deal with an aging population and to establish its soft power on the global stage. The refocus on the family is not to deny the phenomenon of individualization, but rather to emphasize that it is merely part of the complex processes and assemblages in China’s own trajectory toward modernity.
The 1999 relief plan for China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee (called, for short, the dibao)—originally designed to assist all of the urban poor—changed by the mid-2000s, emphasizing employment, not handouts, for the able-bodied impecunious. Also, the center ordered that cities should subsidize just the most ill and needy. We find that only some Chinese cities—the less well-endowed and politically less prominent—responded to this shift by cutting back their percentage of merely unemployed recipients and increasing the percentage of the truly needy among their dibao beneficiaries. We suggest that two factors could account for this disparity: politicians in wealthier cities have greater autonomy; and they are closer to fulfilling a momentous career goal—stepping up to a post in the central government, and are thus more ambitious. It could be that in prosperous cities—where politicians have control over their budgets and where their trajectories have already positioned them near the peak of the mobility channel—leaders choose to keep the unemployed from protesting by continuing their allowances. This suggests that when two central concerns (redirecting the dibao and social stability) collide, officials in richer cities make different choices than do those in poorer cities.
This article traces and analyzes the longitudinal changes in the operative structure, rules, and practices of the Chinese Communist Party’s disciplinary institution not for the purpose of appraising its performance in corruption control but to demonstrate how the party regulates its own enforcement agency through institutionalizing the disciplinary decision-making process. To that end, this article identifies and explains the exact measures the party has used to delegate authority to the party’s disciplinary institution in a systematic and institutionalized manner without losing control over disciplinary outcomes. It also identifies three features of the institutionalization process: concentration and centralization of disciplinary power and further depoliticization of disciplinary activities.
Despite some progress in the past three decades, China’s rural economy still suffers from a lack of sound financial intermediation in terms of the coverage, quantity, and quality of financial services. This article offers a study of the political economy of rural finance in China, a historical and political analysis of the reform process on a systemic level, as well as an assessment of China’s reform strategies and programs. We argue that the path of China’s rural finance reforms has been a transition from state predation that centered on the state’s extraction of rural financial resources to finance its industrialization program, to market extraction that saw the market system continue to drain rural funds into the urban economy. Given the failure of the existing strategies, we suggest that policy makers look beyond the market-centered framework and establish a system of vertical cooperation that can systematically integrate policy, cooperative, and commercial elements of both formal and informal institutions.
The trend of metropolitanization—rapid growth of the largest cities, horizontal sprawl, and pursuit of economic competitiveness—in China has attracted much attention from scholars. Whereas existing research generally portrays local governments as the key agents behind metropolitan-style development, this article emphasizes the active role higher-level governments play in shaping urban growth. I use the case of the Xi’an-Xianyang area in Shaanxi province to explore the political forces behind metropolitanization, tracing efforts since 2000 to build a larger, more integrated Greater Xi’an. I argue that provincial-level authorities in particular favor urban development that is focused on leading cities but crosses different jurisdictions, which helps them reap economic benefits from urban scale while limiting its political costs. Driving development from above is contentious, however, and requires significant clout on the part of provincial governments. In Xi’an, metropolitan growth has accelerated as Shaanxi has become economically and politically stronger, yet urban governance problems have persisted.
The account books of the Tong Taisheng 统泰升 grocery store in Ningjin county of northern China in 1800–1850 constitute the most complete and integrated surviving archive of a family business in premodern China. They contain unusually detailed and high-quality statistics on exchange rates, commodity prices, and so on. Utilized once in the 1950s, the archive had been left largely untouched until our recent, almost accidental rediscovery. This article introduces this unique set of materials and traces the personal history of the original owner and donor. The story of this archive encapsulates the history of modern China and how the preservation and interpretation of evidence and records of Chinese economic statistics were profoundly impacted by the development of political ideology in modern and contemporary China. We briefly discuss the historiographical and epistemological implications of our findings for the current Great Divergence debate.
China is the world’s largest aquaculture producer, accounting for 63% of global output by volume. However, since the 2000s, the reputation of China’s seafood has been tainted by a series of drug residue incidents. The need to ensure food safety, combined with the state’s determination to fulfill its responsibility for animal epidemic control in the aftermath of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and avian flu, forced the government to launch a veterinary system reform. This reform sought to transform quasi-public rural vets into market-sensitive and technology-savvy licensed professionals who can discipline unruly fish farmers. However, the vets encountered many dilemmas in balancing food safety versus drug profits, animal health versus human health, and regulatory imperatives versus the practical exigencies of farmers themselves. The article demonstrates how the neoliberal program of cultivating rational and responsible veterinarians redistributes rather than minimizes the risks that result from market-oriented aquaculture production.
This article examines three narratives about ghost beliefs in China, including those of ancestral time, the state, and certain Tibetan Buddhist masters. It focuses on the ghost experiences of Chinese Tibetan Buddhist practitioners and examines how their conceptualizations of ghosts may both overlap with and differ from those of the state and their Tibetan Buddhist masters. Just as ghosts have traditionally symbolized both a fear of being forgotten and of malevolent reprisals after death, these respective narratives also selectively remember and forget elements of ghost beliefs and stories in order to propagate a wider agenda. Chinese practitioners, who have often been exposed to the state and modernist Tibetan Buddhist narratives, as well as a narrative of ghosts according to ancestral time, appear to mark out a space between these three narratives, revealing their own ambivalence, caught between "tradition" and "progress," and "superstition" and "scientific rationalism."
Effective policy implementation is a core component of the Chinese political system’s adaptability and stability. A thorough investigation of local implementation mechanisms, however, is often hindered by an almost exclusive concentration on implementation efficiency. This article introduces a new analytical framework and suggests focusing on the interactions between the different administrative tiers—counties, townships, and villages—to understand local policy implementation in terms of procedural and outcome effectiveness. It argues that the triangle of central policy design, institutional constraints, and strategic agency of local implementers explains cases of effective policy implementation that can be observed throughout China. By way of studying the "Building of a New Socialist Countryside" in four cases, this article shows how effective policy implementation can be the result of what students of local governance have so far rather treated as obstructive factors, namely performance and cadre evaluation, financial scarcity, limited public participation, and the focus on models.
A unique form of rural tourism has been booming over the past two decades in China. This Chinese version of rural tourism, popularly called nongjiale, involves peasant families hosting urbanite guests in their farm guesthouses, providing them with rustic food and lodging that symbolize something quintessentially rural, familial, authentic, eco-friendly, healthy, and traditional. The space of nongjiale farm guesthouses provides a significant locus of rural-urban encounters, social-boundary making, and identity politics between peasant hosts and urbanite guests. Focusing on the space of nongjiale farm guesthouses, this article explores how urbanite guests and peasant hosts imagine and experience China’s countryside and how this articulates with diverse social processes, discursive systems, and material and symbolic forces in the rapidly changing field of meanings and rural-urban power relations in post-Reform China.
This article examines protest, petitioning, lawsuits, open letters, blogging, and other forms of activism by Chinese veterans. Moving beyond images of heroic soldiers in the official media, and the near absence of reporting on veterans’ problems, we draw mainly on blog posts and military websites where veterans share their experiences of post-army life. We find that, overall, veterans have had difficulty adjusting to the economic, social, cultural, and political changes of the reform era, with many of them finding themselves left behind as other groups have leapt ahead. Veterans complain about poverty, unresolved medical problems, and lack of respect for their contributions to the nation. Not a few have experienced terrible indignities at the hands of security officials and a leadership that is bent on preventing any interest group formation that might ameliorate veterans’ problems.
Factional conflicts in China’s provinces from 1966 to 1968 have long been identified as a split between "conservative" and "radical" groups, with the former more supportive of the status quo and the latter more supportive of fundamental change. Accounts of the Guangzhou case consistently identify the Red Flag faction of 1967 as "radical" and the East Wind faction as "conservative." A closer look at this rivalry with the more abundant sources available today suggests a very different interpretation. The split between the Red Flag and the East Wind was between former allies who were united in the movement against the provincial authorities in 1966. Their split originated in tactical disagreements and evolved into an intense rivalry over a power seizure that excluded one wing of the rebel movement. This generated a competitive rivalry within the ranks of the rebels, expressed as different attitudes toward the military forces ordered by Beijing to "support the left," which in turn led them into different alliances with forces in Beijing. The famous Guangzhou factions were not interest groups with different orientations toward the status quo ante, but rival rebels who became entangled in factional divisions in Beijing, raising the stakes of their rivalry and intensifying the conflict.
In recent years, China scholars have often debated the meaning and definition of the Chinese Revolution. While some studies reveal discontinuity or radical and transformative change, others show continuity or gradual and evolutionary change. This article contributes to the debate by examining how the connective tissues in Guizhou’s regional economic institutions—the regional economic bureaucracy and regional state enterprises as well as enterprise organization, management, and incentive structures and mechanisms—emerged, grew, broke down, and were replaced over the period 1937 to 1957. Specifically, it focuses on the creation and expansion of Guizhou’s regional state enterprises, the transformation of enterprise authority structure, the transplantation of the Soviet economic accounting system, the appropriation of the Western accounting system, and the development of social service and welfare institutions. Drawing extensively on heretofore unavailable archival and published material, this study demonstrates that the changes in Guizhou’s regional economic institutions were both radical and transformative and gradual and evolutionary. In the process, Guizhou’s regional state enterprises came to be defined by bureaucratic enterprise governance, Chinese Communist Party control over enterprise employees, and distinctive enterprise management and incentive mechanisms.
In the twentieth century, paper-cuts have been variously regarded as a domestic craft, a site of rural purity, a marker of Chinese civilization, and more recently, a national intangible cultural heritage. This article analyzes paper-cuts not merely as a cultural practice but as a medium of articulation through which Chinese urban intellectuals have understood the countryside and traditions at specific historical moments. It also explores paper-cuts as a cultural medium through which urban elites have expressed their visions of the nation’s path to modernity and women’s liberation. During the Yan’an period (1937–1947), paper-cuts served as a Communist marker to distinguish an "art form of healthiness and honesty" from urban decadence under Nationalist rule. Since the 1980s, however, the art and practices of paper-cutting have come to share new discursive spaces: as the site of recovery of a lost Chinese civilization, an urban nostalgia for vanishing rural ritual practices, and most recently, a discourse of capital, profit, and personal success. By analyzing the shifting meanings assigned to paper-cuts, this article explores the relationship among the state, culture, and capital as it has been actively manufactured and negotiated through this folk practice.
This article revisits Chinese intellectual discourse on the Indian nationalist movement during the Republican period and argues that interest in the Indian National Congress cut across ideological divides. By examining a range of published sources from the 1920s to the 1940s, this article shows that leading intellectuals took seriously the political movement Mohandas Gandhi led as a distinct model of revolutionary politics, spiritual resistance against Western industrial modernity, and an uneasy alliance between the national bourgeoisie and emerging subaltern groups. It demonstrates that unfolding events in India facilitated articulation of competing views on what decolonization entailed for China and other colonized societies. The Republican period was a unique moment when, in contrast to both the late imperial and postsocialist periods, the Chinese elite considered India as a potential exemplar of a new form of revolutionary politics that held not only national but also global significance.
This article examines anti-missionary rumors that prevailed in nineteenth-century China and led to the Tianjin Missionary Case of 1870. Relying on archival sources, it shows that many rumors were fueled by Protestant missionaries’ medical practices in addition to political conflicts. Furthermore, the rumors were framed in spatial concepts. The rumors arose and persisted not because the missionaries deliberately hid information, but rather because the visibility of their daily activities, the accessibility of the space they inhabited and practiced in, and the spatial placement of their living quarters contradicted cultural norms in nineteenth-century China and therefore prevented the Chinese from acquiring correct information about the missionaries. The ambiguity of information that caused the rumors was the result of the confrontation between two ways of understanding space.
This article considers cultural hierarchies that may shape practices of dating and partner choice among young women and men in contemporary Beijing. Our research is mainly based on 43 in-depth interviews conducted in Beijing over the past six years. The distinction between Beijingers and waidiren (lit., outsiders) here serves as a framework to examine the cultural and socioeconomic differentiation of dating practices. We further complicate this framework by highlighting the internal heterogeneity of waidiren, including four groups: college students, New Beijingers, young professionals without Beijing hukou, and rural migrant laborers. We argue that our participants’ narratives reflect a desire for autonomous partner choice and fulfilling love relationships; we also demonstrate how the hukou system, competition in the neoliberal market place, differential access to education, and the rural-urban division may interact to create opportunities and obstacles for young people’s personal choices. Drawing on recent work by Yan Yunxiang (2009, 2010), our analysis further substantiates arguments about the individualization of contemporary Chinese society.
This article draws on a wide variety of sources and recent scholarship on citizenship to reconceptualize the Chinese National Salvation movement in the 1930s. Instead of emphasizing partisan manipulation or intellectual advocacy as past research has done, it argues that broadly based civic activism was vital for national salvation. In Hong Kong, where national salvation activism emerged in a time of political repression but developed under forced tolerance by the British authorities, widely shared commiseration with their fellow Chinese became a motivating and unifying force that cut across social and class divides. Built upon traditions of charity by the rich and of anti-foreign protest by the laboring population, civic activities for national salvation in the 1930s had a transformative effect in this British colony and affected developments in Hong Kong for decades thereafter.
Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a county in Southeast China, this article identifies three tendencies that have appeared in the revitalization of temple-based popular religion in the post-Mao period. These three tendencies—women taking more central roles in popular religion, the bifurcation between the ever increasing popularity and prosperity of a small number of temples and the decline in the majority of small village temples, and the tendency of popular religion temples to acquire Buddhist features—have consequently caused the character and terrain of popular religion to diverge greatly from the pre-1949 past. To explain these changes, the article argues that we have to come to terms with the two faces of popular religion: the communal/mandatory dimension and the individual/voluntary dimension that is largely associated with female devotees. All three tendencies have been taking place when popular religion temples’ bonds with village communities attenuated and their voluntary dimension moved to the forefront. The article attributes the weakening of the communal dimension of popular religion temples to the restructuring of rural society by the Maoist political campaigns and the post-Mao marketization.
This article examines the role of the League of Nations, particularly in the 1920s, in the foreign relations of the Republic of China (ROC). ROC diplomats targeted their activities in the League toward achieving two long-standing Chinese national aspirations: achieving formal legal equality with other states and thereby ending disadvantageous treaty relations, and gaining recognition for China’s self-assessed identity as a once and future great power. On the first issue, these figures wished the League to act indirectly on their country’s behalf, by supporting Chinese diplomatic activities in other venues and enhancing the authority of international legal regimes. On the second, they sought to have the League’s organizational structure directly reflect China’s self-perceived rightful status as an important nation. Examining their arguments helps to shed light on how these figures construed the nature of great power status, and on their sometimes contradictory views of equality and hierarchy among nations. It also illuminates mindsets that continued to shape Chinese attitudes toward international relations and international institutions in later years.
Deriving evidence from Neican (Internal Reference), this article demonstrates that labor unrest in the 1950s was rooted in inherent tensions in the state’s efforts to reconstruct state-labor relations. With the state’s increasing control over industry and the emerging paternalistic institutions, workers came to see the state, as it presented itself, as the patron of their interests, and they expected its economic protection. Consequently, the discrepancy between the state’s socialist promises and some of the policies and the practices of its agencies often disappointed and disillusioned workers and became a major source of grievances, triggering protests. Labor protests in the 1950s signified the rise of a new pattern of worker reaction to adverse economic conditions, one in which workers held the government responsible for their grievances. This was a pattern that would be seen more clearly more than forty years later when market reform led to massive protests by laid-off workers.
Using materials from police reports to song chapbooks, this article traces the experience of and discourse about sexually explicit media in late Qing and early Republican Beijing. Although explicit representations of sex and efforts to control them had a long history in China, two new forces converged in this period: ideas about reproductive bodies and technologies of reproducing information. These factors injected unprecedented volatility into the parameters of legitimate sexual representation, allowing them to be truly and widely contested for the first time. Existing Euro-American scholarship takes both the "invention of pornography" and the rise of modernity as peculiarly Western phenomena. Fin-de-siècle Beijing presents a corrective case: the fusion of mass-circulated media and sexuality not only casts a telling light on China in the twentieth century but has also embedded Chinese experiences ever more tightly in a complex ongoing saga of global modernities.
During the legal revision process of the late Qing and Republican eras, basic homicide categories were condensed from six to two, resulting in a simpler categorization than had been in place during the Qing. One of the categories that remained was guoshi killing, defined as negligent homicide in the Republican era. This article compares the treatment of guoshi killing in both the Qing and the Republic in legal codes, commentaries, and cases. It finds that the streamlining of Republican homicide categories brought crimes of intent and negligence into confusion for the first time. The troubles the Republican-era courts encountered as a result help to illuminate the nuance and sophistication of the system that had come before.
This article explores the intricate relationship among print capitalism, war, and the popularization of newspapers in 1930s China by analyzing the motivations for publishing the Libao 立报 and the reasons behind its success. Most of the print capitalists publishing major broadsheet newspapers in Shanghai in the early 1930s did not have a strong financial motivation to popularize such broadsheets especially because of the relatively small circulation of printed materials, the underdevelopment of communications infrastructures, the low level of literacy, and the small size of the middle class. However, this study of the Libao published in the mid-1930s demonstrates that the simultaneity of the commercialization of print media and the outbreak of the national crisis in the 1930s gave rise to the expansion of a politicized reading public and to popular nationalism, and provided print capitalists with financial motives to popularize and politicize newspapers.
Chinese dictionaries have long been an important tool for promoting the political agenda of the state. Not much has changed in the twenty-first century. A conventional assumption is that dictionary compilation has been controlled by the state. An examination of the history of the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary 现代汉语词典 suggests that such a claim is exaggerated. While the state was indeed actively involved in the compilation of the dictionary before the 1980s, the presumed propagandistic content of the dictionary in the twenty-first century has been more a result of the profit-seeking behavior of its publisher, the Commercial Press 商务印书馆, than direct state control. In order to defend the market share of its product, the Commercial Press needs to struggle with rival publishers to present to the public a close affinity with the state, which has the authority to define linguistic correctness. Consequently, the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary has been revised in accordance with the changing political agenda of the state and thus continues to support its nation-building project. This finding revises the conventional wisdom on several scores, particularly by deepening the analysis of language politics and reaffirming its importance in contemporary China.
In a collective action to reclaim the label of the Eastern Queendom—a legendary matriarchal kingdom—the villagers in Suopo township, Danba county, Sichuan take advantage of the media and a newly founded tourism association to press their claims by highlighting their political marginality in Danba and condemning the local state for its favoritism and partisanship. In consequence, a struggle over the "ownership" of the queendom has both manifested and generated the reconfiguration of grassroots politics on this part of the Sino-Tibetan border: exacerbated society-state relations, diversified societal and state sectors, and enhanced political participation of both elites and villagers. The locals are simultaneously engaged in an identity politics to define their manifold identities along the lines of Chinese citizenship, inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic sameness and differences, regional/local ties, professional/peasant status, marginality/majority perceptions, and (other) political stances such as loyalty to the party-state.
Research on the Chinese media has concentrated on understanding party-state control over an increasingly commercialized industry. And it has usually focused on reporting issues over which the central party-state has a clear and unified position. This article explores how the Chinese media reported a domestic policy issue—health reform—on which the party-state had no unified position. It examines three print publications during a major health care system review and consultation between 2005 and 2009 to see how much diversity there was in the reporting, what the principal narratives were, and which actors had voice. It finds the media took diverse positions, with narratives centering on market and state roles in health, but a vocal minority of pro-market articles challenged the dominant pro-state reporting. But pro-state positions were populist and paternalist, speaking for "the people" rather than giving them a direct voice. The neoliberal, pro-market challenge, meanwhile, was elitist, with the media venturing only at the margins to demand rights for vulnerable people and greater public participation in policy making.
This article examines guohua societies established in Republican Shanghai to show how the young generation of artists appropriated discursive practices to institutionalize and legitimatize guohua in the face of political and cultural upheaval. In the early Republican period, artistic practices underwent significant change as a result of major changes in the larger cultural and social context: the blooming of new media, the reform of the educational system, and the rise of urban culture. This article explores various aspects of guohua societies within a sociocultural context: the structure, the societal activities, the membership, and the attitudes toward art practice. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of artistic field, it argues that the transformation in the attitude toward guohua as well as the practice of art in general in modern China is not merely the result of the Western impact but a major consideration of the rules of the artistic field.
Feng Youlan (1895–1990), a preeminent philosopher of twentieth-century China, tried to build a modern Chinese metaphysics that was at once universal and based on a structure of traditional Chinese concepts such as li/principles and qi/vital energy. His intellectual borrowings included New Realism, an early twentieth-century school of philosophy that attempted to provide a scientific basis for metaphysics. New Realism’s affirmation of the objectivity of a priori logical relationships in the universe enabled Feng to construct a metaphysical structure of philosophy in China without becoming bogged down in the debate of the priority of practice over principle in Chinese history. While most published work has treated Feng’s famous "negative method" as the "more Chinese" part of his work in contrast to his writings influenced by New Realism, this article argues that Feng’s logical/metaphysical construct of philosophy in China sought to build a metaphysical discourse of experience by employing both a logical/analytical and a "negative" nonverbal method resembling Chan Buddhist practices.
In the wake of a major mutiny by warlord forces in 1921 that left much of the Yangzi port city of Yichang in ruins, a group of Chinese citizens appealed to the foreign diplomatic community to turn the city into a foreign concession under foreign protection. In a statement that seems shocking in the context of the burgeoning anti-imperialist sentiment that followed the May 4th incident of 1919, the petitioners concluded that if their wish was granted, "they would make no complaint, even if we become slaves without nationality." This incident suggests that in at least some cases many Chinese did not hesitate to make common cause with the foreigners in their midst against a mutual threat. The article seeks to retrofit John King Fairbank’s concept of synarchy to explain how the Chinese people may have both perceived and negotiated the uneven and interpenetrated power relations of the central government, warlord authorities, and foreign powers in the Republican era.