For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History. So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class […]
Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development under the Commune by Joshua Eisenman (2018)
by Horus Tan The People’s Commune was both a collective farm and a local institution that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. It was introduced in China in 1958 and abolished in 1983. Many scholars suggest that the People’s Commune was unproductive because its remuneration system was too egalitarian. According to […]
China Today: Communism for Americans in the 1930s
By Fei Guo 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)
Seventy-two ordinary women, living in four different villages in central and southern Shaanxi Province, mostly born during the 1920s or 1930s, witnessed the rise of the new Communist regime in 1949 and experienced dramatic life transformations as a result.
Past and Present in Modern China
It is no wonder that we cannot agree on China’s future; we cannot even agree on its past. In fact, how to interpret the past is a heavily disputed subject in China, because history has always been a tool to promote one’s political agenda at present. Huaiyin Li’s Reinventing Modern China and Zheng Wang’s Never Forget National Humiliation analyze the complex politics surrounding modern Chinese historiography.