China Archives - Page 2 of 3

China Today: Communism for Americans in the 1930s

China Today was a monthly periodical and the official organ of the American Friends of the Chinese People (AFCP), an organization formed by a group of American Communist Party members and left-leaning intellectuals devoted to introducing the Chinese communist revolutionary movement to Americans. Located in New York, the AFCP also organized public talks on Chinese politics and economics. The journal never became widely popular, with its highest monthly sale of a mere 7,000 copies, yet it remained influential among left-wing intellectuals who shared a concern for events in China.

The Communist Party USA’s Workers’ Bookshop, at its headquarters on 13th Street, between University Place and Broadway, New York City. Posters in the window advocate for a U.S. invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, to open a “second front” in 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The editors included Philip Jaffe and a secret Communist Party member and graduate student at Columbia University, Chi Ch’ao-ting, using the pseudonym Hansu Chan. Chi joined the Communist Party in America, and together with a few other Chinese students, formed the Chinese Bureau of the Communist Party of USA. With the help of Moscow, Chi was able to receive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, which became an important source for articles in China Today. Chi later returned to China and acted as an undercover agent inside Kuomintang (KMT) government, the main enemy of CCP. Chi eventually became a prominent trade official in Mao’s China in the 1950s. Philip Jaffe, a successful leftist businessman, became well known because of the “Ameraisa” spy case in 1945, in which he and several other Amerasia editors were accused of espionage, after US intelligence agents found classified government documents in their office. The espionage charge was later dropped due to lack of evidence, and they were only punished with fines. Jaffe supported the journal financially since China Today was never an economically profitable enterprise and he gave the journal some credibility. Jaffe became interested in China well before the launch of the journal and, although a leftist, Jaffe never joined the Communist Party, sometimes even criticizing the orthodox Moscow-dominated communist movement.

Philip Jaffe, Owen Lattimore, Zhu De and Agnes Jaffe in 1937 (via Wikimedia Commons).

There were two reasons behind the launch of China Today. First, American Leftists were curious about the Chinese revolutionary movement. Classical Marxism predicted that communist revolutions would sooner or later sweep the world and liberate the whole of humankind. The founding of Soviet Union seemed to confirm the inevitability of the spread of communism globally giving hope to leftists. Many intellectuals believed that China would be the crucial next step in the global enterprise of revolutionary human liberation. A journal dedicated to introducing the Chinese communist revolution would perfectly fit the niche. Second, the journal sought to compete with reactionary news outlets and spell out the Communist perspective on Chinese events for the Anglophone world. China Weekly Review, a prominent pro-KMT government newspaper based in Shanghai was their direct target. Given its limited circulation, it appears China Today only partially fulfilled this object.

What gave this China Today a special advantage was its ability to procure Chinese communist documents. Because of KMT government censorship, people both inside and outside China had difficulty accessing undistorted political messages of the CCP. China Today offered such an opportunity when publishing original political manifestos or decrees of Soviet China. Chi was the crucial link as he was secretly receiving documents from China.

Three reports from China Today give an indication of the character of the journal. The three articles center on Chinese communists’ activities in Szechwan Province during the war between the Nationalist government and the communist insurgency that resulted in the Long March (1934-36) and the ascendancy of Mao Zedong. The first two articles give a detailed account of the origins of Szechwan Soviet Base (1929-35) and the military campaigns conducted by its main force, the Fourth Red Army. The third article surveys the communist military movements towards the latter stages of Long March.

Mao Zedong on the Long March (via Wikimedia Commons).

These articles contain important material not available elsewhere and they offer perspectives on the ways Chinese history, in this case the history of the Long March, was framed for an American audience. The heroism and sacrifice of Chinese communists portrayed in these articles are helpful in writing a more nuanced and comprehensive history of Communist China in America. The article on the Fourth Red Army, which occupies a unique position in Chinese revolutionary history, offers both valuable information and a case study in the political shaping of the past. The Fourth Red Army was led by a prominent Chinese communist leader Zhang Guotao (Chang Kuo-tao) who had a huge policy disagreement with Mao Zedong during Long March and even tried to kill Mao in late 1935. Szechwan was the base area controlled by Zhang at that point in time. The Fourth Red Army subsequently was defeated by government troops and suffered huge losses. Zhang lost his power base and eventually defected to KMT. As a result of this internecine fighting, official Communist Party history tends to erase the achievements attained by Zhang in constructing Szechwan Soviet Base. But these China Today articles were published just after the Zhang-Mao split, when the Fourth Red Army was still praised. Given the poor communication during Long March, the editors of China Today were probably still not aware of the inter-party struggle and therefore their account was more accurate and informative than later assessments of Zhang Guotao.

These news reports were about the events occurring during the epic Long March, but the reporters never explicitly mentioned the term Long March or the supposed goal of Long March: to go to North China to fight with Japanese invasion. This is a call to rethink the narrative of Long March. Chinese official history tends to frame Long March in a way that emphasizes the CCP’s superb strategical capabilities and nationalist political agenda. The Long March was considered to be a strategic retreat that has a clear purpose and destination. We can hardly glean any convincing evidence in articles in China Today that support this characterization. The Communist forces acted more opportunistically, striving to fend off government forces and find a favored location for building a new base. This was in fact for a long time a distinct pattern of Chinese communist guerrilla warfare before Long March. Thus, these news reports open a window to scrutinize pro-communist narratives of CCP activities from 1934-36 before a full-fledged account of Long March came into being.

Route of the Long March (via Wikimedia Commons).

The articles in China Today provide useful information regarding both historical facts and narrative building. We still need to be cautious about overstating the achievements of the Fourth Red Army, but in this case, considering interpretations of Long March narratives, the journal’s ideological bias are not an obstacle, but instead a valuable asset.

Sources:
China Today is part of the Philip J. Jaffe Collection of Leftist Literature in Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

Stephen Averill, Revolution in the Highlands: China’s Jinggangshan Base Area (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)

Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

This essay mainly uses Wide-Giles Romanization System to denote Chinese names and places following its usage in the historical sources being analyzed, except for some well-known Pin-yin names such as Mao Zedong.

A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore

By Sandy Chang

On the eleventh floor of the National Library of Singapore, I sit with a pile of large, gray boxes stacked high on a trolley. I am hoping to be transported to the island’s past. The boxes are filled with legal documents from the British colonial era, mainly affidavits, writs of summons, bills of costs, and occasionally testimonies from witnesses in the Straits Settlements. The pages are sepia-colored, some speckled with mold – a reminder of the gulf of time that separates me from the people who produced these very documents I now hold in my hands. To be a historian is almost always to be cognizant of the passage of time and the changes that accompany it.

Koh Seow Chuan Donor's Gallery Courtesy of National Library, Singapore

Koh Seow Chuan Donor’s Gallery (via National Library, Singapore).

For historians, archives are portals into the past. They offer tantalizing, if partial, glimpses of a different era; snapshots of those who inhabited a world different from our own. Engaging with primary sources, in the words of historian James Warren, entails the experience of “’passing over’…a crossing over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another human being” and to return with a deeper understanding of the past. Of course, historians know that our sources are not unmediated versions of history nor do they contain self-evident truths about the lived experiences of others. Nonetheless, we search longingly for that one document, one photograph, or one artifact that we hope will bring us closer, back in time, to the worlds we study.

The papers I rifle through are part of the Koh Seow Chuan Collection, named after its donor, a retired Singaporean architect. Koh was one of the founders of DP Architects, a company responsible for the design of the famous Esplanade Theaters by Marina Bay. He also happened to be an avid collector of stamps, art, and historical artifacts. In 2009, he donated 1,714 heritage items to the National Library Board of Singapore, consisting of rare maps and photographs, old letters and envelopes, and legal documents dating back to the early nineteenth century. The legal documents in Koh’s personal collection include records from the Straits Settlements Supreme Courts and District Courts, filling over four hundred boxes. In them, historians can locate the records of many prominent members of the Straits Chinese community, including Lim Boon Keng, Lim Nee Soon, and others.

The_Esplanade,_Theatres_on_the_Bay_(3751455311)

The Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay, Singapore (via Wikimedia Commons).

I am, however, using these documents to search for traces of Chinese migrant women who sailed across the South Seas and settled in British Malaya in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far from the thrilling adventure I had anticipated, the process feels tediously dull. Combing through the dense law cases and reading the highly formulaic legal rhetoric for evidence of migrant women can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. In the first week, I encountered a gamut of historical characters: planters and traders, merchants and bankers, manufacturers and small shopkeepers, pineapple preservers and cake-makers. While some of their stories offered delightful anecdotes, I could not help but notice the absence of women. It made me wonder, were these documents appropriate sources for my research or did I need to change the questions I was asking altogether?

With time and patience, the women in these documents gradually became visible to me. At first, their appearances were elusive: a woman sued by her father-in-law for jewelry; a sister embroiled in a legal battle with her half-brother over the administration of their father’s estate; and six women petitioning the court to be legally recognized as the wives of one Chinese man. These were exciting discoveries, but I was baffled by how I would piece together these scraps to construct a coherent narrative of the past. How could I make sense of the “smallness” of these stories within the broader context of a rapidly changing regional maritime economy and of Chinese labor migrations into and around the British Empire in Asia?

Bil of goods - transaction between a trader and opium shopkeeper, 1913 Source: Koh Seow Chuan Collection, National Library, Singapore

Bill of goods; transaction between a trader and opium shopkeeper, 1913 (via Koh Seow Chuan Collection, National Library, Singapore).

The fragments of these women’s stories emerged slowly, but collectively they gathered momentum. A marked pattern became clear: women almost never appeared in colonial Supreme Court records, either as plaintiffs or defendants, unless they were widows. Of course, the colonial records of the Police or District Courts in the Straits Settlements tell a different story. But, in the colonial Supreme Court, women were first and foremost recognized by the state as conjugal subjects. In case after case, the marital statuses of Chinese women were meticulously recorded: “married woman,” “widow,” or “spinster.” Not all women, however, had equal access to legal recourse via the Supreme Court. Lengthy legal battles, expensive civil litigations, and the practical challenges of serving writs of summons to individuals in a highly transient and mobile colonial society meant that only the very wealthy could take their disputes to court. As such, the women in these records were almost always propertied individuals with substantial wealth.

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

In Koh Seow Chuan collection, I encountered widows who appealed to the colonial state for maintenance; others who sued for outstanding debts owed to their husbands; some who battled one another for the distribution of the family estate. Their stories reveal a fascinating and complicated relationship between conjugality and wealth, gender and colonial law. Collectively, they demonstrate how migrant Chinese women increasingly utilized colonial legal institutions as one way of resolving transnational family disputes concerning inheritance, succession, and property rights. At the same time, their stories also shed light on their vulnerability within the colonial legal process itself – a process that was in many ways arbitrary and precarious.

Statement of claim by a Chinese widow 1893 Koh Seow Chuan Collection National Library Singapore

Statement of claim by a Chinese widow, 1893 (via Koh Seow Chuan Collection National Library Singapore).

Historians often dream of finding that one treasure trove that will unveil the secrets of the past; that one document from which we could write a whole chapter. Sometimes, we are given four hundred boxes instead. Their contents, which at first appear to be “run-of-the-mill,” require us to scour through them carefully. Only then does the past come momentarily into focus. In the digital age, we are often tempted to shuffle through our sources quickly for relevant finds and discard those that don’t “fit” the scope of our research; there’s a temptation to photograph first and read later. But, practicing patience in the archives and learning to sit still with the sources we are given can yield surprising rewards. It enables us to “pass over” to the other side and to see patterns that arise only when we attend to both the absence and presence of women’s lives in the colonial legal archive.

You may also like:

History faculty recommend Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders.
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Mark Lawrence discusses a CIA Study: “Consequences to the US of Communist Domination of Mainland Southeast Asia,” October 13, 1950.

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

By Kazushi Minami

History is a contested area of politics in any country. Particularly so in China, where the Chinese Communist Party defines the national history. In the 1980s, in a period of reform, China started to open up its archives and archivists generously helped researchers find documents they needed. The Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive used to be a mecca for historians of Chinese foreign policy. Then in the early 2010s the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, abruptly introduced much tighter restrictions, presumably because of the international dispute over the territoriality of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Now, the Foreign Ministry Archive is virtually closed, and historians have turned to provincial and municipal archives scattered throughout China. Between the fall of 2015 and the summer of 2016, I visited seven Chinese archives as part of my dissertation research on Sino-American bilateral exchange in the 1970s and witnessed the Chinese politics of history in motion.

Guangdong Provincial Archive (via author).

Each Chinese archive has its own rules and regulations. The Shanghai Municipal Archive, for instance, has relatively liberal policy and scholars can read and transcribe anything they can find in the on-site computer database. They even allow visitors to photocopy documents—but not any document. In my case, the Shanghai Archive usually denied photocopying of foreign policy related materials, including reports of American visitors after Richard Nixon’s February 1972 trip to China. Chinese researchers told me that the archival staff would not give us any physical document on a potentially sensitive topic with their official stamp on it. The Guangdong Provincial Archive, once a must-go place for historians, now has a much more restrictive policy and researchers cannot even look at most documents produced in the 1970s. Documents on seemingly harmless issues, including the American track and field delegation in 1975, are no exception. Considering Guangzhou’s proximity to Hong Kong, China’s gateway to the Western world, the Guangdong Archive’s stringent policy detracts much from the scholarship on history of Chinese foreign relations.

Although foreign scholars usually travel to large coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, Chinese archives in the remote hinterland sometimes possess surprisingly richer collections. Such was the case with the Shaanxi Provincial Archive in the ancient city of Xi’an. Unlike other archives, the Shaanxi Archive has made available most documents of the Office of Foreign Affairs, which administered hundreds of American visitors in the 1970s. Whenever Americans traveled to Xi’an, the Chinese hosts meticulously planned their itinerary and activities for propaganda purposes. They took American visitors to communes, factories, and schools to show off their socialist achievements, which did impress many Americans who were fed up with social ills back home, including racism, sexism, poverty, inflation, unemployment, and juvenile delinquency.

Richard Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai while on a visit to China in 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Among various targets of archival restrictions in China, the history of culture illuminates the sensitive politics of the past. All the archives I visited had tight restrictions on documents of the Office of Cultural Affairs in the 1970s. One archival assistant explained to me that this was because “the old policy was different from the current policy.” During the Cultural Revolution, the notorious Gang of Four, who pursued leftist radicalization of Chinese foreign and domestic policies, controlled a large part of cultural life in China. For instance, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao Zedong’s wife and the leader of the Gang of Four, used famous revolutionary ballets “The White Haired Girl” and “Red Detachment of Women” to drum up support for her radical agendas. The politicization of Chinese culture, therefore, makes it difficult for us to dig up documents on China’s cultural exchange with foreign countries in the 1970s.

The Red Detachment of Women ballet premiered in 1964 (via Wikimedia Commons).

All restrictions notwithstanding, Chinese archives still hold numerous sources that reveal how the Chinese masses saw the United States, their deadliest Cold War enemy, in the 1970s. In the wake of the Nixon trip, communes, factories, and schools throughout China held study meetings, where government officials justified the sudden turn in Chinese foreign policy as a tactical move to defeat the United States in the future. Chinese people, however, remained unconvinced of the virtue of making friends with “the U.S. imperialists” that they had fought in Korea and Vietnam. In the late 1970s, when China embarked on the so-called four modernizations in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology, Chinese people—scientists at universities or peasants in the countryside—enthusiastically embraced the assistance of the United States. Nevertheless, they never completely shook off the long-held suspicion of the United States, as seen in another round of study meetings after the normalization of bilateral relations in January 1979.

Today, there is no sign of an immediate relaxation of Chinese archival policy. It will be years, if not decades, before we gain even partial access to the Foreign Ministry Archive, let alone the Central Archive of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese provincial and municipal archives, however, still offer valuable materials that help us understand Sino-American contacts on the eve of the reform era.

Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we have been posting their suggestions throughout the month. This is our last set of book recommendations; this week we feature books on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia.

Huaiyin Li recommends:

Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999)

Focusing on the life stories of five prominent women activists in twentieth-century China, this book examines Chinese feminism in the Republican era and its fate under the socialist state. Its depiction of the feminists’ pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation contrasts sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of women’s liberation under its leadership.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011)

Based on interviews with 72 village women in Shaanxi province, this book shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s policy reshaped women’s agriculture work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting from the 1950s through the 1970s. It also addresses the intriguing questions of how memories are gendered and how gender figured in the making of socialism in Chinese agriculture. (Reviewed on Not Even Past).

Nancy Stalker recommends:

Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan (2014)

(Bloomsbury, 2016) is an engaging new work that reveals gender roles and gender politics in the 1950s through close readings of diverse popular media. Focusing on newsworthy events centered around women, such as the wedding of the imperial prince to a commoner and Japan’s first Miss Universe title, Bardsley reveals the media construction of the “housewife” embedded within discourses on postwar democracy, Cold War geopolitics, and US – Japan relations.

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (2012).

This book combines historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to track the fate of South India’s devadasis, originally Hindu temple dancers who came to be regarded as prostitutes as India was transformed by colonial modernity. Typically unmarried and residing in quasi-matrilineal communities, devadasis often served as concubines or courtesans for elite men but came under increasing condemnation by social reformists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; they were officially outlawed in 1947. Soneji goes beyond the standard narrative of social change in colonial India by including an extensive examination of the role of dance in Indian royal courts and a sensitive exploration of the memories of ex-devadasis in this innovative, well-written work.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Asian American Immigration: Read More

By Madeline Hsu

Liping Bu, Making the World like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century (2003).

Entwining education, missionary, and international history, Bu traces the overlapping influence of these constituencies in the evolution of international education programs in the United States. The YMCA and the privately run, foundation funded Institute for International Education set the ground rules and institutional practices for fostering international education in the United States with the goal of promoting U.S. influence abroad, agendas and strategies coopted by the Department of State after World War II.

Gordon Chang, Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China (2015).

Since colonial times, Americans have been fascinated by the promise of great fortune and material prosperity through trade and other kinds of relations with China. Even the discovery of the American continents was driven by the European quest for more direct routes to acquire Chinese silks, porcelains, and tea. China’s ancient civilization attracted admiration even as its seemingly irreconcilable differences drew disdain and contempt. As skillfully depicted by senior historian, Gordon Chang, this love-hate has evolved across several centuries of contested friendship and enmity, and characterizes early 21^st century fears and hopes even as China ascends again to world power status.

Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (2003).

Klein scrutinizes “middle-brow” American culture at the mid-twentieth-century to reveal how such popular entertainments such as Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, James Michener novels, and Pulitzer Prize winning plays such as “Sayonara” convey U.S. efforts to display and persuade of American integration of Asians and Pacific Islanders and its benevolent domination of the Pacific world.

Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (2006).

This vivid cultural history of the rapid transformation of Japan from America’s deadly foe to best friend in Asia after World War II. American views of Japanese shifted from rejection of male labor competitors and fascist military enemies to embrace of ultrafeminine geishas, wives, and prostitutes stemming from the US military occupation (1945-1952) of Japan. These changing relations produced not only new immigration influxes of war brides and professional class shin issei, but also secured the close economic and political partnership of the two former enemies.

Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (2014).

This comparative study tracks the remaking of outcast Chinese and Japanese Americans after World War II through government programs and media representations that emphasized their positive cultural traits such as family values, hard work ethic, self-sufficiency, and respect for law, even though both communities still faced significant issues such as high rates of juvenile delinquency, under and unemployment, poor health outcomes, and other forms of urban blight. Wu argues that such campaigns to position Asian Americans as “definitely not-black,” in contrast to their pre-war condition as “definitely not-white,” has fed the model minority image as a form of rebuke to minority populations associated with lower levels of attainment.

Reinventing Modern China

By Huaiyin Li

Since the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals and political elites have written about China’s “modern history” with various, often conflicting, explanatory narratives. Looking back over the last century shows that historical writing on “modern China” has evolved primarily in response to the historians’ present concerns.

Chinese soldiers marching past peasants. Chinese Stamp, 1952 (Wikipedia)

To write about modern China was to trace the historical roots of the country’s current problems in order to legitimize their solutions rather than seeking to reconstruct the past as it actually happened. From the 1930s through the 1990s, two master narratives rivaled each other to dominate history-writing in China. One is the narrative of revolution, which tells modern Chinese history as the grand process of Chinese people engaged in a century-long struggle against feudalism and imperialism, beginning with the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century and culminating in the Communist Revolution in the 1920s through 1940s.

Cultural Revolution poster- Propaganda Group of the Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai No. 3 Ink Factory, 1969 (Wikipedia)

This historical narrative centers on the economic and social changes brought about by the encroachment of foreign capitalism. It accentuates the worsening livelihood of the peasantry, the vulnerability of the emerging modern economic sector, and subsequently the necessity of a political revolution for China’s healthy development. It exalts collective violence against feudal and imperialist forces and downplays the role of reformist elites and foreigners in China’s progress. In this telling, modern Chinese history lead inevitably to the Communist revolution and China’s transition to socialism.

A Chinese school for girls Che-foo China c. 1902

A school for girls in Che-foo, China, 1902 (Wikimedia Commons)

The other dominant narrative is the history of modernization, which is diametrically opposite to the revolutionary account. It sees modern Chinese history as the long-term transformation of China from an insulated, backward civilization into an industrialized and democratized society under the positive influences of the West and the reforms by enlightened elites. It necessarily leads China to the establishment of a capitalist system and Western-style democracy.

Governor General Li Hongzhang (L) and Commissioner Lin Zexu (R)

These two competing narratives give rise to contradictory accounts of individual events and assessments of historical figures. While Governor-General Li Hongzhang, for instance, was depicted in the modernization historiography as an open-minded statesman who was committed to China’s “self-strengthening” by borrowing from the West, the same person was denounced by the revolutionary historians as a traitor who was preoccupied with the aggrandizement of his own clique at the expense of China’s national interest. On the other hand, Commissioner Lin Zexu appears in the revolutionary narrative as a patriot because of his heroic acts of confiscating and destroying the opium from English traders, but the same figure is depicted in the modernization histories as an unrealistic, arrogant mandarin who cared more about his personal reputation than the security of the country.

Historians Fan Wenlan (L) and Jiang Tingfu (R)

A fundamental problem with history writing in modern China, as these instances suggest, is the politicization and teleology found in both the revolutionary and modernization literatures. For the leading historians in twentieth-century China, whether affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party or the Nationalist Party, writing about the nation’s recent history was not for the purpose of reconstructing the past as it actually happened, but “using the past to serve the present” (gu wei jin yong). Historians reinterpreted the past in order to legitimize the agendas and goals of the political forces they favored. This was true for Fan Wenlan, the most famous historian of the Chinese Communist Party, and Jiang Tingfu, a leading Nationalist historian, in the 1930s and 1940s. It was also true for almost all of the Chinese historians in the Mao era, despite the resistance of a few who adhered to the principle of “objectivity” in history-writing at the cost of their lives during the Cultural Revolution. It was even true in the 1980s and 1990s, when modern China was reinvented to render support to the reform and opening up policies of the post-Mao leadership.

Since the late 1990s, Chinese scholars have increasingly lost their interest in the grand narratives revolution and modernization and instead have shifted their attention to social and cultural histories, in particular, the history of the subaltern. In the absence of a master narrative, historical writing has become increasingly “fragmented” (sui pian hua). The in-depth study of historical events at the micro level is often achieved without making sense of the new findings in larger contexts of historical developments and theoretical debates.

Three shots from the films made in the 1980s about Long Bow village: a bride, preparations for Lunar New Year, and a Catholic village doctor. One Village in China

To overcome the problems of teleological and fragmented history, I propose a new approach to rediscovering modern China, which I term as a “within-time and open-ended history.” It is “within time” because it looks at a specific event in modern China from the point of view of the time when the event was taking place, when different possibilities for the development of the event existed simultaneously, and when participants in the event were not as conscious of its results as were historians of a later period. It is “open-ended” because it rejects the teleological historiography of revolution or modernization, in which the “ending” of the history was clearly defined on the basis of ideological assumptions. Historical representation can be closer to the realities of the past only after we overcome the results-driven, teleological approach inherent to twentieth-century Chinese historiography; and it can be more meaningful only after we put the fragmented pieces of the past back into a larger whole.

Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing
University of Hawaii Press, 2013

For more reading on Chinese history click here.

Student Showcase – Violating the Rights of Humans: One Child Policy in China (1979)

Sarah Zou
Sartartia Middle School
Junior Division
Historical Paper

Read Sarah’s Paper

In 1979, the Chinese government announced a new “birth planning program” under the reformist leader Deng Xiaoping. Intended to curb China’s explosive population growth, the policy mandated that each married Chinese couple (with some exceptions) have no more than one child. Birth Planning Commissions began monitoring the birth rates in towns and cities across the country to ensure adherence to the law. Those who disobeyed faced stiff fines, job loss or the revocation of benefits such as health care. In many instances, the consequences were even worse: commissioners have also used forced abortions, sterilization and infanticide to enforce the policy.

Sarah Zou, a student at Sartartia Middle School, researched this controversial law and wrote a paper for Texas History Day on its significance in world history. You can read her full research paper by clicking the link above. Sarah outlines the program’s history and asks a simple question: was all this really necessary?

A woman sits on the sidewalk in China holding twins, 1987

Imagine being in a world where couples are only allowed to have one child, where parents will suffer severe consequences if they had a second. Imagine a world without siblings. Imagine a world where newborn infants are thrown out into the street, due to their gender or disabilities. Imagine a world filled with infanticide, forced abortions, and sterilizations. This is the world Chinese citizens have been living in since the Chinese government established family planning or the one-child policy on September 25, 1979. Because of its gigantic population of 1.3 billion, the largest in the world, the Chinese government enforces family planning or the one child policy to slow the population growth. Even though there are exceptions, having children should be a natural and unalienable right that should not be dictated by the government. Yes, the responsibility of the government is to ensure a sustainable population that has an adequate amount of resources, but it also has the responsibility to respect the natural rights of people.

Government sign in Tangshan Township: “For a prosperous, powerful nation and a happy family, please practice family planning. Please for the sake of your country, use birth control.” (Wikimedia Commons)

Sure the one-child policy successful in decreasing the population, but was the decrease in population really necessary? With Deng Xiaoping’s numerous economic reforms before family planning was established, China was already getting back on its feet. With the increase in economic productivity a large workforce was actually needed. Along with the need of a larger workforce, new farming techniques allowed farmers to harvest more crops and therefore China was and is actually capable of feeding a large population. And if there was a famine or a shortage of food, with the power of transportation food could be imported from other countries. As for the shortage of land, many young adventurous Chinese scholars immigrate to other countries to study and live and raise a family. But one things for sure, without the one-child policy the problems listed above would not be at large. Would China have survived without family planning? I guess we will never know, but it certainly could not be any worse than China today.

The latest terrific work from Texas high school students:

A documentary on one man’s attempt to fight injustice in World War II America

A research paper on the balance between public health and personal liberty

And a website on the benefits and perils associated with off-shore drilling

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (2008) by Yasheng Huang

by Zhaojin Zeng

China’s two-digit annual economic growth since 1980 has been seen as a modern economic miracle. But the China story does not seem to conform to standard academic theories of economic development, which emphasize the importance of secure property rights, free market, and economic and political institutions. A widely accepted explanation is that China’s takeoff relies on its specific context, which incorporates an immature market economy, state control, and rampant corruption. All these factors together lead to efficient economic outcomes under apparently inefficient policies and institutions. As a result, China has often been treated as an outlier in development economics studies.

In Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Yasheng Huang challenges this conventional view by offering a detailed account of the policy reversal in the 1980s and the 1990s. He argues that private entrepreneurship, facilitated by access to capital and microeconomic flexibility, was at the center of China’s takeoff in the 1980s. However, in the 1990s the Chinese state reversed many of its previous policies. Capitalism in China changed from a market-driven, rural-based, entrepreneurial system to an urban-biased, state-led capitalist system that is anti-poor and anti-private capitalists. This change was not reflected in GDP numbers, but it showed up in the welfare implications for the Chinese population. Since the 1990s, as Huang notes, household income lagged behind the growth of economy and the labor share of GDP also fell.

Huang starts with a detailed analysis of the ownership structure of China’s township and village enterprises (TVEs), which were thought to spearhead the rapid growth of the Chinese economy from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. Many Western and Chinese scholars believe that TVEs, as their name indicates, were owned and run mainly by the local government, which means they were under collective or public ownership. By digging deep into bank documents unexamined before, Huang finds that the Chinese definition of TVEs only refers to their location, not their ownership status. TVEs were located in the countryside, but most of them were completely private. Huang reveals that in the 1980s China saw an explosion of indigenous private entrepreneurship in rural areas. These private businesses were mainly engaged in the industry and the service sector. So, he claims that a rapid rise of rural entrepreneurship characterized the economic development of China in the 1980s, which established the actual, but often neglected, foundation of the China miracle. Huang calls it “the Entrepreneurial Decade.”

Huang then presents a detailed analysis of the policy reversal in the 1990s. As is well known, 1989 was a year of political turmoil in China as well as in other former socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the era from 1989 onward, there was a significant policy reversal, which was first and foremost manifest in rural finance. Credit for rural entrepreneurs contracted and loans for rural private industrial enterprises were tightened. Other policy changes included centralizing the administrative and fiscal affairs of rural governance and repressing private informal loans. TVEs also started to decline in the deteriorating national policy environment no longer friendly to rural private entrepreneurship. Huang says that in the 1990s China continued to march toward capitalism but toward one different from the capitalism in the 1980s. Before 1989, China was developing a market-driven, small-scale, and welfare-improving rural entrepreneurial capitalism. However, since 1990, it was state-led capitalism, featured by substantial urban bias, heavy investments in state-owned enterprises and infrastructures, favoring FDI over indigenous private capitalists, and subsidizing the urban boom by taxing the rural population. Huang looks specifically at the case of Shanghai, the best example of urban Chinese, state-led capitalism. Contrary to the economic growth driven by entrepreneurial activities, Huang argues that, the state-led GDP growth as evidenced in Shanghai is neither sustainable nor welfare-improving. He further points out that in Shanghai model, GDP grows rapidly, but private entrepreneurial activities are repressed and personal income lags.

Most economists and China observers claim that economic reforms continued and even expanded in the 1990s and 2000s, because China’s GDP kept growing rapidly. Huang counters this view by evaluating the Chinese economy based on its benefit to human welfare. His evidence shows that the policy reversal in the 1990s resulted in the adverse welfare impacts: the illiterate population rose again in the 1990s and the growth of personal incomes lagged behind the rapid GDP growth. In comparison, personal incomes grew faster than GDP in the 1980s. He argues that economic growth under the entrepreneurial capitalism in the 1980s was broad-based and thus benefited the vast majority of the population, while the rapid growth under of state-led capitalism in the 1990s did not.

In the end, Huang cautions that the policies of the 1990s directed China onto the wrong path and he calls for fundamental institutional reforms so as to sustain high speed economic growth as well as to resolve mounting social problems. Overall, Huang offers a nuanced analysis of China’s economic growth. His explanation departs from the prevailing gradualist perspective of the China miracle, revealing the decisive policy change between the 1980s and the 1990s and its crucial impacts on Chinese people’s welfare.

More on Asian economies on Not Even Past:

Mark Metzler on Post-War Japan

A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552-1610, by R. Po-chia Hsia (2010)

by Shery Chanis

Hsia’s book on Matteo Ricci expands the traditional narratives of the Age of Expansion and transforms our understanding of them. Beyond the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, early modern Europeans, Jesuits among them, also ventured to Asia. Published on the four-hundredth anniversary of Matteo Ricci’s death, Ronnie Hsia’s biography of the Jesuit also marks part of a larger effort to commemorate one of the most important figures in the history of Christianity in China. In addition, this book shows a shift in focus to China by Hsia, who has produced an abundance of works on German social and cultural history during the Reformation era.

Hsia departs from other Ricci biographies with a more down-to-earth and rounded portrayal of the Jesuit missionary. Rather than claiming Ricci to be a saint or a pioneer cultural accommodationist who allowed Chinese converts to continue certain Chinese rituals, Hsia examines the context in which Ricci operated in two new ways. First, Hsia includes many other Jesuits in his book, illustrating that Ricci was part of a greater effort of the China Mission. Hsia discusses many Chinese figures along Ricci’s path, some of whom helped the Jesuit mission, some debated with the Jesuit, some were converted, and some collaborated with Ricci on various works. Second, Hsia discusses Ricci’s emotions at various stages of his mission. Although Ricci was highly successful in China, Hsia shows that he also experienced melancholy and sadness in his tenure in China.

After a creative prologue about Ricci’s death and burial, Hsia outlines Ricci’s life, from his birth in Macerata, Italy to his burial in Beijing, China. Hsia traces Ricci’s education and training in Europe and his journey to Asia before settling in China. Hsia devotes a chapter to each Chinese city where Ricci lived – Macao, Zhaoqing, Shaozhou, Nanchang, Nanjing, and Beijing –to illustrate Ricci’s northward movement within the Chinese empire moving towards the capital, his ultimate goal. Hsia follows this with a discussion of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, which he argues is Ricci’s most important work. Hsia concludes his book with an Epilogue, witha brief historiography of works on Ricci in the four centuries since his death, from Nicholas Trigault to Jonathan Spence to Chinese scholars including Lin Jinshui and Sun Shangyang.

Detail from the China section of Matteo Ricci’s 1602 map, the “Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography” (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Hsia’s innovative approach continues with his attention to Michele Ruggieri, Ricci’s fellow Italian Jesuit and partner at the beginning of the Jesuit mission in China. Not only does Hsia devote an entire chapter to Ruggieri, he also includes a legal case against Ruggieri in his appendix. Hsia’s inclusion of Ruggieri, who is usually seen only in Ricci’s shadow, helps expand our knowledge of the Jesuit mission in China.

Hsia’s increasing focus on China in his scholarship is also reflected in his incorporation of many Chinese sources in his book. In addition to Ricci’s extant letters and published works, Hsia includes such Chinese materials as local gazetteers, tax records, poems, and letters. This offering of a more balanced perspective between Europe and China makes his focus and methodology less Eurocentric, which is also a strength of this book. Hsia’s inclusion of photographs he has taken in some of the cities Ricci had lived also serves as a great addition to the book.

ILLUSTRATION DEPICTS JESUIT FATHER MATTEO RICCI

Matteo Ricci in the traditional garb of a Chinese literatus (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Hsia’s micro-historical approach of focusing on one Jesuit does not provide a full account of the Jesuit mission in China which can be viewed as a weakness of the book. In addition, the book title might be somewhat misleading, since Hsia is interested in not only Ricci in Beijing, the Forbidden City, but also in other places. Nonetheless, Hsia has provided an intriguing account of an important figure in the Jesuit China mission who was also part of the larger narrative of the Age of Expansion.

Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American

by Madeline Hsu

How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was the earliest popular, English-language guide to Chinese cooking. First published in 1945 and reprinted several times, it remains in wide use today. The author, Dr. Buwei Yang Chao, wrote the cookbook at the urging of fellow faculty wives in New Haven, in particular Agnes Hocking, wife if the idealist philosopher William Hocking. Trained as a physician, Dr. Chao reassured American housewives that she could teach them the complex and exotic art of Chinese cooking because she had learned as an adult herself while a student in Japan.

In addition to providing straightforward and simple directions together with suggestions for obtaining ingredients and alternatives, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese presents its guidance with wit and whimsy provided by Dr. Chao’s husband and translator, the famous linguist Dr. Yuen Ren Chao, who created terms now in common usage such as “stir fry” and “potsticker.” Footnotes add humorous asides that explain family disputes over translations and descriptions for Chinese cultural practices. For example, in the introduction, the language specialist Yuen Ren Chao cannot resist adding a footnote to the otherwise commonplace, “Really, you should not have put yourself to so much trouble!” to explain that this translation is inaccurate because Chinese lacks the “subjunctive perfect.”

Dr. Buwei Yang Chao’s cookbook was so successful that the well-known author, Pearl Buck, who wrote one of its prefaces from the point of view of an American housewife, urged Chao to pen the story of her life. Autobiography of a Chinese Woman appeared in 1947. With great charm, Chao made a persuasive case for the educated, cosmopolitan Chinese family to be accepted as American. The success of Dr. Buwei Chao’s publications bridging Chinese and American peoples underscores the intrinsic relationship between popularizing ethnic food and the assimilation of ethnic and racial minority groups. As Donna Gabaccia wrote in We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, after World War II, ethnic foods such as Chinese and Italian, would win broader appreciation as part of a more general expansion of the boundaries of mainstream American culture and society.

User-friendly ethnic cookbooks such as How to Cook and Eat in Chinese brought once alien cultures and foodways directly into the kitchens and homes of Euro Americans. According to Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads by Sylvia Lovegren, family meal preparation was not only a commonplace form of domestic labor, but one that provides keen insights into broader historical trends. During the Cold War and the Civil Rights era, these shifts emerged in part through the growing popularity of ethnic foods and cookbooks. Dr. Buwei Chao was an early forerunner of the trends that by the late 1960s and early 1970s mobilized leading figures in the food publishing business, such as Judith Jones, Julia Childs’ editor at Knopfand Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food critic, to recruit cooks with ethnic food expertise, personality, and writing ability to introduce general audiences to their cultures.

Jones’ discoveries, sometimes promoted in conjunction with Claiborne, included southern chef, Edna Lewis of Café Nicholson who authored The Edna Lewis Cookbook (1972) and The Taste of Country Cooking (1976); scholar Claudia Roden and A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968); the late Marcella Hazan and The Classic Italian Cookbook (1973); and restaurant owner Irene Kuo with The Key to Chinese Cooking (1977). Claiborne’s entry into the Chinese cookbook field was The Chinese Cookbook (1972) which he co-authored with Virginia Lee. Both Hazan and Lee attracted Jones and Claiborne’s attention when they began offering cooking lessons out of their homes.

America’s immigrant population and the broad acceptance of ethnic cultures and communities have boomed along with the popularity of ethnic restaurants, cookbooks, cooking shows, and personalities. For an understanding of the early roots of this business and cultural phenomenon, revisit Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.

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