{"title":"Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919 by Ghassan Moazzin (review)","authors":"Peter Thilly","doi":"10.1353/tcc.2024.a917207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2024.a917207","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42116,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139539244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Solving the \"Religious Problem\": The Great Leap Forward of \"Religious Work\" and Protestant Communities in Pingyang, Wenzhou in 1958","authors":"Xiaoxuan Wang","doi":"10.1353/tcc.2024.a917212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2024.a917212","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Chinese Christians have long held that the central government sought to eliminate religion in the Wenzhou region of Zhejiang Province in 1958 and even attempted to promote the Wenzhou experience nationally. Yet, to this day, details of the plight that religious communities endured in Wenzhou during the Great Leap Forward remain obscure. This article examines the origins, development, and after-math of the local campaign to solve the \"religious problem\" in Wenzhou in 1958, focusing on the experience of Protestant communities in Pingyang County. I argue that the antireligious movement in Wenzhou during the Great Leap Forward was not a central initiative. Instead, what happened was that local state agents seized the opportunity offered by the Great Leap Forward to crush religious communities, especially Christian communities, with which they had long had tensions. The result was an antireligious movement that went far beyond what the central government had originally envisioned.","PeriodicalId":42116,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139537991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thought Reform in Daily Life: Revolutionary Ideology and the Self of a Chinese College Student, 1951–1953","authors":"Haolan Zheng, Letian Zhang","doi":"10.1353/tcc.2024.a917211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2024.a917211","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article reexamines China's Thought Reform campaign in higher education through a college student's daily experience. Unlike previous research, which has examined the ideological effects of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on faculty members, we focus on college students' thoughts, emotions, and behavior before, during, and after the Thought Reform campaign. On the basis of in-depth analysis of personal diaries and official archives, this article examines how a college student understood, accepted, and practiced revolutionary values and the conflicts that occurred during these practices. We argue that students selectively practiced revolutionary values following personal motivations, mainly focusing on the specific values that matched their daily concerns and interests. We also argue that, although the Thought Reform campaign consolidated the CCP's power in colleges and universities, it had little effect on individuals' desires to pursue personal interests and happiness in their daily lives.","PeriodicalId":42116,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139539907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisiting Women's Cinema: Feminism, Socialism, and Mainstream Culture in Modern China by Lingzhen Wang (review)","authors":"Lin Li","doi":"10.1353/tcc.2023.a905563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2023.a905563","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the rich scholarship on socialist Chinese cinema, few scholars have examined it through a feminist lens. Through an in-depth study of four female directors and their films, Revisiting Women’s Cinema critically fills this lacuna by examining the shifting Chinese feminist and mainstream cultural practices during two periods: the Mao era (1949–1976) and the post-Mao era. The broader political and intellectual contexts that Revisiting Women’s Cinema engages with are China’s rapid integration into the world economy since the late 1970s, the dismissal of socialist feminism, and the global ascendence of Western liberal feminism. Influenced by liberal feminism’s emphasis on individualism and essential sexual difference, post-Mao Chinese feminism has long dismissed socialist women’s liberation as “imposed or bestowed from above by the party-state and men” (126) and works by female directors in Maoist China as mere propaganda. Arguing against the “global repudiation of socialist practice” (3), Revisiting Women’s Cinema reveals “the critical relevance of socialist institutionalized feminism and mainstream women’s cinema to contemporary feminist media practice” (4). Two concepts central to Lingzhen Wang’s analysis are “socialist feminism” (社会主义女性主义 shehuizhuyi nüxingzhuyi) and “mainstream culture” (主流文化 zhuliu wenhua). According to Wang, women’s liberation can only be achieved when other political-economic and sociocultural issues are taken seriously—an argument at the core of socialist feminism. Moreover, refuting post-Mao feminists’ dismissal of mainstream culture as “intrinsically conservative and patriarchal” (10), Wang holds that mainstream culture in Maoist China “played the most critical role in combatting traditional conservative ideas and bourgeois ideology and promoting socialist visions and ethics” (14). Together, these two terms constitute the main theoretical framework through which Wang examines Chinese women’s cinema. Organized chronologically, Revisiting Women’s Cinema consists of seven chapters. The first three chapters focus on the period of the 1950s and the 1960s, while the last four chapters examine the period from 1978 through the 1980s. Beyond its chronological ordering, Revisiting Women’s Cinema can be divided into two thematic sections: whereas chapters 1, 4, and 5 explain the changes in Chinese socialist mainstream culture in response to China’s political and economic transformations, chapters 2, 3, 6, and 7 each provide a detailed analysis of one Chinese female director and her films, revealing Chinese women’s crucial role in producing and diversifying mainstream culture. Chapter 1 provides a “revisionist history of Chinese socialist feminism” (17). Wang traces the widespread negative attitude toward Chinese socialist feminism to scholarship published in the United States in the 1980s. Using Judith Stacey’s Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China1 as an example, Wang offers a thorough critique of Stacey’s interpretatio","PeriodicalId":42116,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42905601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ping-Liu-Li Uprising of 1906 Up Close: Its Local Context and Its National Significance","authors":"Xi He","doi":"10.1353/tcc.2023.a905567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2023.a905567","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Ping-Liu-Li (Pingxiang, Liuyang, and Liling) uprising of 1906 is often said to have been led by revolutionaries, to have been supported by secret societies, and to have drawn support from two provinces (Hunan and Jiangxi) and three counties. This article argues that the events of the uprising have to be read in the light of disunified local gangs who had turf to protect, their interest in obtaining arms from the revolutionaries, and a very tense political situation that might indeed have evolved out of contact between revolutionaries and the gangs. However, the significance of the incident was magnified because of the proximity of the location to the high-profile Pingxiang Coal Mine in Jiangxi. The importance of the mine drew strong reactions from the court and the most senior provincial officials. In the process, guns, the telegraph, the railroad, and the newspapers all came into play in pushing the event to national prominence.","PeriodicalId":42116,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47008486","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Making of \"Evil Tyrant Landlords\": A Microhistory of Moralized Class Division during Land Reform in Beijing's Suburbs, 1949","authors":"Shaofan An","doi":"10.1353/tcc.2023.a905565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2023.a905565","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Class division represented arguably the most crucial stage of the land reform campaigns mounted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it not only divided the land but also the political power of rural Chinese society. Based on newly available local archives, this case study of class division during land reform in the suburbs of Beijing argues that the making of \"evil tyrant landlords\"—and the struggle against them—played a decisive role in conceptualizing the \"landlord\" as both a figure of Marxist economic exploitation and the morally stigmatized rural elite during land reform and the building of the party-state. After the collapse of the existing rural ruling class, the \"struggle against tyrants\" movement immediately turned toward enacting formal class division. As a consequence, the discourse of class struggle based on a clear-cut landlord-peasantry dichotomy was, unsurprisingly, allowed by the CCP to infiltrate rural China's post-1949 political culture.","PeriodicalId":42116,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44135829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia by Victor Seow (review)","authors":"Judd C. Kinzley","doi":"10.1353/tcc.2023.a905562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2023.a905562","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42116,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47670822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"How I Am Brought into the Light\": Representations of Childhood by Missionary Schoolgirls in East China, 1917–1930","authors":"Jennifer Bond","doi":"10.1353/tcc.2023.a905568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2023.a905568","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores how missionary-educated Chinese schoolgirls applied childhood pedagogy that they learned at school to what they perceived to be the pressing demands of Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century. Although there have been many studies of Christian schools in China from the missionary perspective, we know much less about how Chinese women themselves made sense of the education they received at missionary schools. Based on a study of two elite mission schools for girls in Republican-era East China, this article explores how girls applied child-rearing practices, hygiene, and domestic education to the children whom they taught in the vicinities of their schools. Like their missionary educators before them, they carved out new roles for themselves by claiming authority to speak for a downtrodden \"other\": Chinese children. In doing so, missionary schoolgirls created new knowledge about Chinese childhood in the early twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":42116,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46868906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"This Absolutely Is Not a Hui Rebellion!\": The Ethnopolitics of Great Nationality Chauvinism in Early Maoist China","authors":"Benno Weiner","doi":"10.1353/tcc.2023.a905566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2023.a905566","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Through the 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) considered nationality disunity to be a product of \"great Han chauvinism.\" But what happens when history's bad guys are not Han? In parts of China's Northwest, the party identified Hui Muslim elites as the main agents of nationality exploitation and Tibetans as their principal targets. It therefore declared Tibetans of all classes to be victims of nationality exploitation and ordered that \"good\" Muslims be distinguished from \"bad,\" a task made more urgent by a string of uprisings that engulfed several Muslim-majority areas of the Qinghai-Gansu Highlands from 1949 to 1953. While echoes can be found in the late Qing state's response to Muslim rebellion, this article argues that the CCP's approach to the \"Hui question\" must be viewed as part of a particular practice of minoritization and a framework for conceptualizing the new socialist nation-state that would leave Muslims and other non-Han communities susceptible to majoritarian-state violence.","PeriodicalId":42116,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century China","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44713953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}