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Painting and Photography in Foreigners’ Construction of an Image of Qing Dynasty Law
Shiming Zhang
Front. Hist. China. 2017, 12 (1): 32-74.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-006-017-0002-8
In recent years, with the spread of the internet and the booming auction markets, combined with our new age of so-called “picture-reading,” paintings and photographs concerning Qing justice have overwhelmed our view. Scholars and nonscholars are attracted by them, and believe them to be showing real historical scenes. Pictures seemingly facilitate our grasp of the world more than mere facts do, but they actually demand readers’ careful discrimination. The author of the present article has discovered that the initial British construction of a discourse about the cruelty of China’s criminal punishments was related to this topic having been exposed by Chinese themselves. The seemingly real images or pictures have an unknown back story, and even contain a serious distortion of the truth. Such imagistic constructions by foreigners in fact directly or indirectly served the establishment and maintenance of foreign extraterritoriality in China. The living images recorded by foreigners’ cameras not only constructed Western impressions of China and Chinese people as distant, thus strengthening contemporary Westerners’ mental images of Chinese culture, but still urge us Chinese today to interpret the past in the light of such images. An icon of a blood-thirsty Qing legal system constructed through painting and photographic procedures became an objective fact, a collective consciousness that penetrated people’s hearts and eventually led to modifications of those Qing laws. The mental construction of an icon influenced actual institutional movement.
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From Tongbo Village to Widow Village—The Legacy of the Chinese Civil War
Joshua Fan
Front. Hist. China. 2017, 12 (1): 75-92.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-006-017-0003-5
Located on Dongshan Island, off the coast of Fujian province, is a typical rural village called Tongbo. On May 10, 1950, 147 men were abducted by the KMT army on its way to Taiwan. Since a majority of the men were already married, overnight, their wives became “widows,” and most would remain so for the rest of their lives. Consequently, Tongbo village became more widely known as Widow Village. The first objective of this paper is to document the tragic experiences of men and women in Tongbo village, focusing on these forced separations in 1950, the possibility of reunion after 1987, and the struggle to cope with the difficulties in between. The second objective of this paper is to argue that while heartbreaking, the experiences of this village are not extraordinary in the context of the Chinese Civil War. What made the men and women in Tongbo extraordinary is not their collective suffering, but how these villagers suffered less, not more, than in many other places, because of the actions of three key figures.
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