History

posts related to modern Chinese history

The Oscars of archaeology

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Source: SCMP (4/17/24)
The Oscars of Archaeology: China unveils its top 10 discoveries of 2023
One discovery unearthed some of the oldest people to ever live in China. While another used extremely modern technology to create a breakthrough
By Kevin McSpadden

The Oscars of Archaeology: China unveils its top 10 discoveries of 2023. Photo: SCMP composite/National Cultural Heritage Administration

Every industry has that one annual event that stands apart as the premier award ceremony. For Chinese archaeologists, the best discoveries of the year awarded by China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration is the industry’s Oscars.

The agency says it looks for revelations that “inspire important discussions, offer new perspectives, and take archaeology in a novel direction.”

“The projects selected as the ‘top 10 new archaeological discoveries’ in 2023 are outstanding representatives of field archaeological work from the past year. These new archaeological discoveries vividly demonstrate China’s long history and vast civilisation and are the foundation of self-confidence and a source of strength,” the agency said in its announcement.

The projects range from uncovering prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies to surveying beautiful porcelain cerematics work, and even include a great achievement in China’s burgeoning industry of underwater archaeology. This year’s crop also happens to be a particularly old set of sites, with only two coming from after the BC-AD timeline shift.

It is important to note that many of the recipients were rewarded for the artefacts discovered over the course of years-long excavation projects, and most of the sites were first discovered prior to 2023.

So here they are, the “Oscars of Archaeology” – the National Cultural Heritage Administration’s top 10 most important excavations of 2023. Continue reading The Oscars of archaeology →

Rethinking Cold War Culture and History in Taiwan

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Rethinking Cold War Culture and History in Taiwan
2024 UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative Conference
Friday, April 19, 2024 – Saturday, April 20, 2024

Rethinking Cold War Culture and History in Taiwan

Image Credit: 作者 (Photographer)：余如季 (Yu Ru-ji)。《蚵女》拍攝現場採訪照 (Interview Photo from the filming of “Oyster Girl”)。典藏者：余立。數位物件典藏者：中央研究院數位文化中心、國家電影及視聽文化中心。創用CC 姓名標示-非商業性-相同方式分享 3.0台灣（CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 TW）。發佈於《開放博物館》[https://openmuseum.tw/muse/digi_object/6262314d95bf7f0b4f4528ae98bd1ec4#211035]（2024/02/06瀏覽）

Image for RSVP Button

Organized by Shu-mei Shih (Irving and Jean Stone Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA) and Faye Qiyu Lu (Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA), the Rethinking Cold War Culture and History in Taiwan conference is presented as part of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative, a partnership of UCLA and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) that aims to create research synergies to promote cutting-edge research in Taiwan studies.

Over the past decades between the “old” and the “new” Cold Wars, the (in)significance of Taiwan in world culture and history has often been determined by ideological assumptions that are overly simplistic. Yet not only have approaches to Taiwan studies in Taiwan experienced drastic changes (from area studies to postcolonial to settler colonial critiques), the positionality of Taiwan has also demonstrated unique potential for relational comparisons with the world. This conference examines ways of rethinking Cold War culture and history in Taiwan as well as the implications of the global Cold War culture and history for Taiwan studies from interdisciplinary and transhistorical perspectives. How do philosophical thought, literary and cultural productions, and geopolitical relations intersect when we situate Taiwan in the global Cold War? What does “being human” mean in Cold War Taiwan, taking into consideration Sinophone and transpacific entanglements? How is Cold War cultural politics negotiated in the developments of literary, cinematic, and media genres? What does the practice of rethinking Cold War culture and history in Taiwan do to better our understanding of Taiwan, China, and the world at the current moment with the formation of what may be called the Second Cold War? Continue reading Rethinking Cold War Culture and History in Taiwan →

From Qing Dynasty to Republican China–cfp

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International Summer Seminar “From Qing dynasty to Republican China: continuities and ruptures
« La Vieille Perrotine », Saint-Pierre d’Oléron (France)
8-14 September 2024

Coordination and pedagogical team
Luca Gabbiani (École française d’Extrême-Orient), Marie-Paule Hille (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Stéphanie Homola (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), Catherine Jami (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), Coraline Jortay (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), Sara Landa (University of Heidelberg), Xavier Paulès (École des hautes études en sciences sociales).

Financial support
Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Centre d’études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, École française d’Extrême-Orient, LabEx Tepsis, University of Heidelberg.

Application deadline
5 May 2024.

Presentation
This Summer Seminar programme is aimed at students from different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, dealing with Chinese historical studies. The selected period stretches from the Qing dynasty to the Republic (first half of the 20th century). It offers an optimal stage for the study of large-scale processes and syntheses in link with world history. By focusing on this period, the Summer Seminar’s approach will aim at providing a new comparative meaning to Chinese history and the humanities in a global perspective. The programme will place a strong emphasis on sources to facilitate better knowledge and access to the different types of documents in an interdisciplinary perspective. Continue reading From Qing Dynasty to Republican China–cfp →

Pleas and Appeals

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Source: China Media Project (3/22/24)
Pleas and Appeals
After it went viral in China this month, video footage of a woman wailing before the altar of Bao Qingtian, an 11th-century official who has become a popular symbol of justice, drove a debate online about the difficulties of seeking recourse for official wrongs.
By Alex Colville

Women kneeling before an image of Bao Zheng.

Footage of a woman wailing on her knees before a memorial to a Song-dynasty official went viral on the Chinese internet last week. Despite popular demand for more information, a lack of any press follow-up has instead let rumors fill the void. The question of why she would be kneeling before the image of an official who lived almost a thousand years ago goes to the heart of present-day questions of corruption, malfeasance, and social justice.

Bao Zheng (包拯), the historical figure at the heart of this mystery, who can also be referred to as Lord Bao (包公) or Justice Bao (包青天), was famed for his honesty and upright ways following his death in the 11th-century. Bao Qingtian (as he has come to be popularly known) served as magistrate for the Song capital in present-day Kaifeng, Henan province. Bao initiated judicial reforms that let petitioners lodge complaints against corrupt local administrators — and for this reason his name has become a byword for justice and good governance.

Some nine and half centuries later, the unknown woman appealing to Bao at his memorial temple in Kaifeng is believed to be a petitioner herself, eager to present some grievance to a higher official who can help her seek justice — and what higher official than a celestial one?

But the highest appeal here may also be to the internet and social media. Continue reading Pleas and Appeals →

Jewish Culture and Nationalism in Shanghai–cfp

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CALL FOR PAPERS: Between East and West: Jewish Culture and Nationalism in Shanghai
When: Sept. 11-13, 2024
Where: Shanghai
Submission Deadline: June 1, 2024
Notification: July 1, 2024

During the first half of the twentieth century, members of the Jewish national movement reimagined Jewish identity in various ways, with influences received and transmitted within different cultural contexts across the globe. While the range of influences and identities was robust, the stress in the current historiographical picture is on Western and Westernizing influences, while Asian influences, together with Jewish interest in, and even longed-for attachment to “The East” and “Eastern” cultures, has received comparatively little attention.

SIGNAL Group and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences invites scholars and researchers from around the world to submit proposals for participation in a pioneering academic workshop and conference in Shanghai to take place in Sept. 2024, that will explore Shanghai’s Jewish communities in Shanghai and other cities in China, with a special emphasis on the Baghdadi Jewish community of Shanghai and its remarkable newspaper, Israel’s Messenger (IM), published from 1904-41. Shanghai’s Baghdadi Jewish community secured support for the Jewish national movement in the Land of Israel from the father of modern Chinese nationalism, Sun Yat Sen, while IM brought Jewish national identity into dialogue with the aspirational vision of Asian identity that was articulated by the Nobel Prize winning poet and polymath, Rabindranth Tagore. The Baghdadi Jewish activity was marked by the vibrant and cosmopolitan environment of early twentieth-century Shanghai, and constituted a unique voice in that multi-vocal and multifaceted city which has yet to receive the scholarly attention that it deserves. Continue reading Jewish Culture and Nationalism in Shanghai–cfp →

Echoes of Harbin

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NEW BOOK: Dan Ben-Canaan, Echoes of Harbin – Reflections on Space and Time of a Vanished Community in Manchuria (Lexington Books) is being published and will be available in early March 2024.

Echoes of Harbin: Reflections on Space and Time of a Vanished Community in Manchuria deals with Harbin, a Chinese city that was established by Russians in 1898 and was a home for more than 38 different national ethnic communities for over 60 years. Among the communities, and second in size, was the Jewish community. This book exposes several areas that have contributed to the Jewish experience in China, particularly in Harbin, and paints a revealing picture of what a Jewish community in an alien land was and how it functioned in a space that was shared with other communities. While it starts with a unique space called Manchuria that had its mark on the town of Harbin, it uncovers the active and productive life of a community that wished for a haven but found unrest and hostilities and had to look for it elsewhere.

A blurb on the back cover:

“While much international attention has been focused in recent years on China’s northwest (Xinjiang and the Uyghurs), the study of modern northeast China, which was a considerably more important historical and strategic arena, has been somewhat marginalized. Focusing on Harbin, this book provides a vertical and horizontal analysis of northeast China since the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, underlying the role of Jews in comprehensive, virtually encyclopedic details never discussed before. As such, it is an outstanding lifelong achievement.” —Yitzhak Shichor, professor emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Posted by: Dan Ben-Canann <canaan@inter.net.il>

Youth in Chinese History project

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Youth in Chinese History: bibliography and video-papers

The research project ‘Youth in Chinese History: Education and Representations of Young People in Chinese Sources between Tradition and Modernity,’ coordinated by Giulia Falato (University of Parma, former Oxford University) and Renata Vinci (University of Palermo), included the organization of the Youth in Chinese History Workshop at the China Centre, University of Oxford, in September 2023. From this rich moment of exchange and dialogue, the idea arose to create digital resources to make the research of project participants available to the academic community and a broader audience.

On the project’s website, you can consult a thematic bibliography and a video-papers series produced by project participants on topics related to education and the representation of young people in imperial times. Both resources are constantly updated, so we invite you to visit the website and subscribe to the Youtube channel. You will already find the first four video-papers, and by subscribing to the channel, you will receive a notification whenever a new video is uploaded.

Project website: www.youthinchinesehistory.com

Direct link to the thematic bibliography: https://www.youthinchinesehistory.com/bibliography/

Direct link to the video-papers series: https://www.youthinchinesehistory.com/ych-video-series/

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@YouthinChineseHistory

For further information, you can contact the coordinators at info@youthinchinesehistory.com

THIS RESEARCH PROJECT IS SUPPORTED BY THE BRITISH ACADEMY AND LEVERHULME TRUST SMALL RESEARCH GRANT.

Posted by: Renata Vinci renata.vinci@unipa.it

Shih Ming-teh dies at 83

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Source: NYT (1/23/24)
Shih Ming-teh, Defiant Activist for a Democratic Taiwan, Dies at 83
He spent 25 years in prison for campaigning for Taiwan’s independence and democratization. After his release, he led protests to oust one its presidents.
By Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien, Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan

A black and white photo of Shih Ming-teh in a suit jacket over an open-collared shirt as helmeted police officers escort him toward a courtroom. He is smiling, and his hands are in his pockets.

Shih Ming-teh being taken into court in 1980 to face trial after he helped lead a pro-democracy protest in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, that was brutally broken up by the police. Credit…CNA

Shih Ming-teh, a lifelong campaigner for democracy in Taiwan who spent over two decades in prison for his cause and later started a protest movement against a president from his former party, died on Jan. 15, his 83rd birthday, in Taipei, the island’s capital.

The cause was complications of an operation to remove a liver tumor, said his wife, Chia-chiun Chen Shih.

Mr. Shih helped lead a pro-democracy protest in 1979 that was brutally broken up by the police and that is now viewed as a turning point in Taiwan’s journey from authoritarianism to democracy. When he stood trial over the confrontation, he smiled defiantly to the cameras, although his original teeth had been shattered years before under police torture, and delivered a groundbreaking argument for Taiwan’s independence from China, an idea banned under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek and then his son, Chiang Ching-kuo.

“I was imprisoned for 25 years, and I faced the possibility of the death penalty twice, but each time I came out, I instantly plunged back into the whole effort to overthrow the Chiang family dictatorship,” Mr. Shih said in an interview with The New York Times in 2022. “I’m someone who never had a youth.” Continue reading Shih Ming-teh dies at 83 →

Xinjiang’s Ominous ‘Looking Back Project’

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Source: Bruce-humes.com (12/30/23)
回头看工程 — Xinjiang’s Ominous “Looking Back Project”
By Bruce Humes

Uyghur poet’s memoir recalls the Xinjiang administration’s retrospective hunt for unPC content in textbooks once commissioned, edited and published by the state:

Following the Urumchi incident in 2009, the regional government had initiated the Looking Back Project. The Propaganda Department organized special groups to go over Uyghur-language books, newspapers, journals, films, television shows, and recordings from the 1980s to the present. These groups were tasked with identifying any materials that contained ethnic separatist themes or religious extremist content.

. . .  Several years later, as one result of these investigations, half a dozen Uyghur intellectuals and officials were arrested for editing Uyghur literature textbooks for grades one through eleven. The textbooks had been used in schools for over a decade before the “problem” with them was discovered in 2016.  

Word spread that similar “problems” had been found in nearly all Uyghur historical novels, and that they would soon be banned. The government had even banned a popular historical novel by Seypidin Ezizi, the highest-ranking Uyghur official in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. If the work of such a trusted party veteran could be banned, there was little question what the future held for other Uyghur writers.

(Excerpted from Waiting to be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua  Freeman)

Omerta on history

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Source: China Digital Times (12/20/23)
Party-State’s Omerta on History Mutes Popular Book Series, Academic Discourse, and Genghis Khan
By Cindy Carter

Some recent restrictions placed on historical books, museum exhibits, and academic discourse have brought renewed attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to rewrite history, control the historical narrative, and combat what the Party perceives as “historical nihilism.”

Earlier this month, acclaimed historian and Xiamen University professor Yi Zhongtian’s 24-volume series on Chinese history was pulled from bookstore shelves after the publisher announced it was making revisions to the long-running series in order to “comply with official requirements.” “Yi Zhongtian’s History of China” (《易中天中华史》Yì Zhōngtiān Zhōnghuá Shǐ), which encompasses prehistoric China to the modern age, is the product of Yi’s decades of scholarship, as well as his popular history lectures on CCTV-10’s “Lecture Room” series. Overseas political analyst Liang Jing (梁京) once praised Yi Zhongtian for subverting the historical distortions of Chinese officialdom, and imbuing the telling of Chinese history “with the spirit and values of modern civilisation.”

An article from WeChat public account 进击的熊猫 (jìnjī de xióngmāo, “Attack Panda”) examines the political sensitivities behind the current “crisis” in the publication of history books, and suggests three possible reasons why the Party-state might have objected to Yi Zhongtian’s approach to Chinese history. The first is Yi’s argument that true Chinese civilization took hold approximately three and a half millennia ago, in contrast to the “5000 years of Chinese civilization” frequently quoted by state media and Party propagandists. The second is the fact that Yi’s assessments of historical figures and events often diverge from orthodox CCP interpretations, causing some to accuse him of “using the past to satirize the present.” The third reason is Yi’s lively, humorous, vernacular writing style, and his frequent use of contemporary slang and internet buzzwords to help modern readers relate to events in the distant, and not-so-distant, past. Some of Yi’s critics see this approach as disrespecting and belittling—or even distorting and tampering with—the serious business of Chinese history. Continue reading Omerta on history →

China Unofficial Archives

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Official Launch of the China Unofficial Archives 民间档案馆 www.minjian-danganguan.org
Online Event 13 December 2023 1pm GMT
Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster

Register here, zoom link will be sent to all registered participants nearer the date.

Join us for this special edition of our Conference, Deconstructed to mark the official launch of China Unofficial Archives. We will have a panel discussion with Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future and Shao Jiang, author of Citizen Publications in China Before the Internet to discuss a significant and unique new online archive which will be launched at this event.

Billed as the first independent archive of unofficial citizen histories, 民间历史 in Chinese, China Unofficial Archives (CUA) spans 75 years of samizdat magazines, books, and movies. It currently features over 860 items but has plans to grow ten-fold in the coming years as it scans and makes available online material that is in the public domain (and thus not-IPR protected). The site is curated, with introductions to the items, and fully bilingual. Aimed at global audiences, its goal is to show the span and breadth of Chinese people’s efforts to write their own history, free of political control.

Following a short presentation by each speaker, they will field questions, advice and constructive criticism from the audience. The event will be chaired by Gerda Wielander.

Registration link: Official Launch of the China Unofficial Archives Tickets, Wed 13 Dec 2023 at 13:00 | Eventbrite

Posted by: Gerda Wielander <g.wielander@westminster.ac.uk>

Chongzhen Emperor book withdrawn

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China Digital Times (10/18/23)
Xi Parallels Suspected behind Withdrawal of Book on Ill-Fated Chongzhen Emperor
By 

On October 16, it was reported online that a recent reprint of the historical biography “The Chongzhen Emperor: Diligent Ruler of a Failed Dynasty” (《崇祯：勤政的亡国君》Chóngzhēn: Qínzhèng de Wángguó Jūn, ISBN 9787549640775) had been recalled by the book distributor Dook Media Group (读客文化, Dúkè Wénhuà). A notice from the distributor stated that due to an unspecified “printing problem,” the book was being recalled from the shelves of all online booksellers, Xinhua bookstores, and private bookstores. At present, the cover image of the book is no longer displayed on online platforms, and the hashtag #Chongzhen has been search-censored on Weibo, with searches only showing content from verified users.

Continue reading Chongzhen Emperor book withdrawn →

Chinese Revolution in Practice

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New Publication
Chinese Revolution in Practice: From Movement to the State, by Guo Wu
Routledge, 2023

Description:

This book employs multiple case studies to explore how the Chinese communist revolution began as an ideology-oriented intellectual movement aimed at improving society before China’s transformation into a state that suppresses dissenting voices by outsourcing its power of coercion and incarceration.

The author examines the movement’s methods of early self-organization, grass-roots level engagement, creation of new modes of expression and popular art forms, manipulation of collective memory, and invention of innovative ways of mass incarceration. Covering developments from 1920 to 1970, the book considers a wide range of Chinese individuals and groups, from early Marxists to political prisoners in the PRC, to illustrate a dynamic, interactive process in which the state and individuals contend with each other. It argues that revolutionary practices in modern China have created a regime that can be conceptualized as an “ideology-military-propaganda” state that prompts further reflection on the relationships between revolution and the state, the state and collective articulation and memory, and the state and reflective individuals in a global context.

Illustrating the continuity of the Chinese revolution and past decades’ socialist practices and mechanisms, this study is an ideal resource for scholars of Chinese history, politics, and twentieth-century revolutions. Continue reading Chinese Revolution in Practice →

Underground Historians

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Source: NYT (9/21/23)
China Keeps Trying to Crush Them. Their Movement Keeps Growing.
By Ian Johnson (Mr. Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent two decades in China)

Credit…Illustration by Linda Huang; source photograph by Tsering Dorje

In 1959, a group of university students in the northwestern Chinese city of Tianshui embarked on a quixotic plan. China was in the midst of the Great Famine, a catastrophe caused by government policies that would kill as many as 45 million. These young people had witnessed farmers starving to death and cannibalism; they also saw how the government had brutally punished or killed people who appealed for help. They felt someone needed to do something to spread word of what was happening. They decided to publish a journal.

The students called it Spark, after a Chinese expression, “xinghuo liaoyuan,” or “a single spark can start a prairie fire.” They hand-wrote the essays onto plates and, with the help of local officials, used a mimeograph machine to run off copies.

At just eight pages, and with no photos or graphics, Spark looked primitive. But it was filled with articles that got to the heart of China’s authoritarian politics — then and now: Farmers weren’t allowed to own property, all of which belonged to the state; top leaders brooked no opposition; corruption was endemic; and even critics loyal to the regime were persecuted. The lead article on the first page set the tone: Continue reading Underground Historians →

Kingdom of Characters review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Gina Anne Tam’s review of Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/gina-tam/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Kingdom of Characters:
The Language Revolution That Made China Modern

By Jing Tsu

Reviewed by Gina Anne Tam

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2023)

Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern New York: Riverhead Books, 2022. xix + 314 pp. ISBN: 9780735214736​ (Paperback); 9780735214729 (Hardcover); 9780735214743​ (E-book)

Jing Tsu believes that Americans do not understand China well. With an eye on deteriorating US-China relations in the past several years, the prolific literary scholar has repeatedly made public her concern about the information gap between China and the West, a reality she sees as increasingly dangerous. Scholars who have deep, lived experience in China, she contends, have an increasingly important responsibility. She states that the “days of armchair scholarship are over,” instead imploring fellow specialists to do all we can to help readers understand China on its own terms—as a place that is textured and complicated, not a two-dimensional caricature of a dangerous and threatening hegemon.[1]

It was to further this goal that Tsu wrote Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, a work that has topped best-seller lists and gained widespread attention by mainstream audiences around the world. The book is a history of Chinese language modernization as told through several compelling biographies placed vividly into the context of the tumultuous history of China’s twentieth century. It is meant, Tsu purports, to help bridge the understanding gap between the average American and citizens of China. Language, she believes, is a vector through which we can understand China today—from the state processes that control and shape culture, to the economics of technological advancement, to ideas about foreignness, nativity, and power. Continue reading Kingdom of Characters review →