Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond

by Wen-hsin Yeh (Editor)

Overview

This volume evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The contributors, all leading researchers, argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. Further, they show that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness should serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume of cultural history provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy.

Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist essays focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. The volume makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520924413
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/15/2023
Series:	Studies on China , #23
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	445
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Wen-hsin Yeh is Professor of History and Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937 (1990) and Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (California, 1996).

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
Introduction: Interpreting Chinese Modernity, 1900-1950
Wen-hsin Yeh 
PART ONE • THE CITY AND THE MODERN
1. The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai:Some Preliminary Explorations
Leo Ou-fon Lee 
2. Marketing Medicine and Advertising Dreams in China, 1900-1950
Sherman Cochran 
3· "A High Place Is No Better Than a Low Place": The City in the Making of Modern China
David Strand 
4· Engineering China:
Birth of the Developmental State, 1928~1937
William C. Kirby 
5· Hierarchical Modernization: Tianjin's Gong Shang College as a Model for Catholic Community in North China
Richard Madsen 
6. The Grounding of Cosmopolitans:Merchants and Local Cultures in Guangdong
Helen R Siu 
PART TWO ·THE NATION AND THE SELF
7· Zhang Taiyan's Concept of the Individual and Modern Chinese Identity
Wang Hui 
8. Crime or Punishment? On the Forensic Discourse of Modern Chinese Literature
David Der-wei Wang 
9. Hanjian (Traitor)! Collaboration and Retribution in Wartime Shanghai
Frederic Wakeman Jr. 
10. Of Authenticity and Woman: Personal Narratives of Middle-Class Women in Modern China
Prasenjit Duara 
11. Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualizations of China's War of Resistance
Paul G. Pickowicz 
GLOSSARY 
CONTRIBUTORS 
INDEX