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From Academic Nitpicking to a “New Culture Movement”: How Newspapers Turned Academic Debates into the Center of “May Fourth”
Elisabeth Forster
Front. Hist. China. 2014, 9 (4): 534-557.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-003-014-0037-2
In early 1919, people like Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu were regarded as members of an ivory-tower “academic faction” (xuepai), embroiled in a debate with an opposing “faction.” After the May Fourth demonstrations, they were praised as the stars of a “New Culture Movement.” However, it was not obvious how the circle around Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu was associated with the May Fourth demonstrations. This link hinged on the way in which newspapers like Shenbao reported about the academic debates and the political events of May Fourth. After compartmentalizing the debating academics into fixed xuepai, Shenbao ascribed warlord-political allegiances to them. These made the Hu-Chen circle look like government victims and their “factional” rivals like the warlords’ allies. When the atmosphere became hostile to the government during May Fourth, Hu Shi’s “faction” became associated with the equally victimized May Fourth demonstrators. Their ideas were regarded as (now popular) expressions of anti-government sentiment, and soon this was labeled the core of the “New Culture Movement.” The idea and rhetoric of China’s “New Culture Movement” in this way emerged out of the fortuitous concatenation of academic debates, newspaper stories, and political events.
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Female Workers, Political Mobilization, and the Meaning of Revolutionary Citizenship in Beijing, 1948–1950
Zhao Ma
Front. Hist. China. 2014, 9 (4): 558-583.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-003-014-0038-9
After entering Beijing in January 1949, the Communist Party immediately sent cadres to local factories in order to mobilize female industrial workers into a women’s movement and to establish the idea of “revolutionary citizenship.” The Party wished to nurture this idea in both the local political arena and in women’s lives inside and outside the factories. This article demonstrates that a host of factors defined revolutionary citizenship, including party directives, choices in revolutionary strategy, cadres’ interpretations of directives and their own initiatives, and workers’ reactions to mobilization. It was in this complex mix of mobilization, women’s strategies to protect and advance their own interests, and the politics of group representation in the revolution, that female workers came to understand the meaning and impact of revolutionary citizenship and the shape of labor-state relations in the emerging socialist China.
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In the Shadow of Suku (Speaking-Bitterness): Master Scripts and Women’s Life Stories
Xin Huang
Front. Hist. China. 2014, 9 (4): 584-610.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-003-014-0039-6
This article explores the enduring effect of a narrative model known as suku (“speaking bitterness”) in the post-Mao era, and in particular its gendered effect when women adopted it to represent their own lives. Using the oral life-story of a woman who lived through the Mao era as an example, the article explores the ways suku operates as a master script in people’s narratives about their lives. It argues that the adoption of the model in a certain sense resulted in the de-narration of gendered experience, as well as the de-narration of life in the post-Mao era, it further demonstrates that the suku narrative model limited not only the representation of certain experiences but also the construction of gender subjectivity. Furthermore, in the post-Mao era, instead of being the master script, the suku model often has to negotiate with other scripts, being revised, extended, redirected, and in some cases, replaced. One of these encounters, between the suku model and a feminist script, will be examined. The article argues that such encounter has the potential to challenge the master script and to create narrative space for women to narrate their gendered experience, and to construct a self-defined, more adequately articulated gender subjectivity.
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Recalling the War in China: The Dahoufang Project in Chongqing and the Restoration of a Legacy
Yong Zhou,Vincent K.L. Chang,Xiaohui Gong
Front. Hist. China. 2014, 9 (4): 611-627.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-003-014-0040-0
This article presents a rare inside view of a unique project currently underway in China to study and preserve the memory of possibly the single most seminal event in Chinese modern history, the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45). The article introduces a multi-faceted program to preserve the wartime cultural heritage; the work is ongoing in the thriving western metropolis of Chongqing, once China’s bomb-torn wartime capital and international Allied command center. It describes how, seven decades after World War II, scholars, cultural workers, government experts, and artists in China are joining hands in an unprecedented, all-encompassing project to record, restore, and recount the extraordinary legacy of China’s War of Resistance in its local, as well as national and global contexts.
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