Section G — Modern History

Existing treatments of the Self-Strengthening Movement present a narrative of abortive modernization during the late nineteenth century, yet in the economic realm the Qing state demonstrated a surprising capacity for institutional innovation. With the cooperation of the private sector, government officials developed a network of guandu shangban, or parastatal enterprises to boost economic production, broaden the state’s revenue base, and arrest foreign encroachment on the empire’s economic sovereignty. This paper contends that in the decades after 1870 firms such as the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company served as effective instruments of neo-mercantilist statecraft by recovering a significant portion of the shipping trade from foreign control. Within five years of its establishment, the CMSNCo. had driven its primary Western competitor to bankruptcy, emerging as the largest steamship line operating in Chinese waters after 1877. At the same time, the firm earned annual profits averaging more than 10% between 1878 and 1893, developed a diversified investment portfolio, and achieved a significant degree of vertical integration through investments in marine insurance, coal mining, and warehousing facilities. In sum, the empirical findings of this paper point to two principal conclusions. First, an implicit concept of economic sovereignty began to reshape Qing statecraft as early as the 1870s, developing in later years into a call for “commercial warfare” against the European powers. Second, the effective performance of the steamship line casts doubt on the prevailing interpretation of the Self-Strengthening Movement and suggests instead the need for a new paradigm that recognizes the partial success of reform efforts.

Wai Ling Fion So: A Sketch of Shandong in 1898

Already in 1861, the harbour of Yantai was opened for foreign trade. In 1898, Qingdao was declared German colony. In 1904, the harbour of Qingdao and Shandong railway started operating. Thereafter, the governor of Shandong, Zhoufu proposed to open some more treaty ports along the railway’s mainline in the province. The economic and market structure of Shandong was therefore changed drastically. Prior to 1898, shipping was still very active in Yantai and it was one of the more important entrepôts in North China. An alternative trading route was the land route from the inner region of Shandong province via Shanxi to Tianjin and Manchuria. Tobacco, salt and cotton were the major items of export. After Germany declared Qingdao as her colony, the centre of business and economic activities was gradually shifted to Qingdao as the result of the infrastructural development in the colony. This paper aims at illustrating the traditional economic structure of Shandong prior to 1898 through the case studies of some established Shangbang (merchants’ organization) and their organizations in the province. A panorama of Shandong would be pictured through the descriptions from difangzhi (local gazette). British and German consulate reports and other travel diaries in German language would be studied.

Mark Gamsa: The Many Faces of Hotel Moderne in Harbin

This paper, part of an ongoing research project on Harbin, the city in Manchuria (Northeast China) founded by tsarist Russia in 1898 as headquarters of the Chinese Eastern Railway, focuses on Harbin’s oldest and most famous hotel, the Moderne (currently known as Modern Hotel in English and Madie’er binguan in Chinese). We approach the hotel as a building with a contested and complicated history; as both the port of call of an international clientèle and a city institution with different social functions for Harbin’s ethnic communities; as an architectural and stylistic symbol and as an urban legend, occupying a particular place in collective memory today. Finally, there will be need to consider the early twentieth-century idea of “modernity”, embedded in the hotel’s French-sounding name.

Panel G1b — 1870-1900: Modernization in the Late Qing II

Chair: Mark Gamsa; 353 (Hall 21); Thursday, July 15th, 16:00-18:00

Elisabeth Kaske: Office Selling, the State and the End of the Qing Dynasty

Scholars studying the fate of the elites during the last decade of the Qing dynasty have focused on the abolition of the civil service examination, the establishment of new schools and the upsurge of a foreign based education. They have hardly paid attention to the problem of office selling except for the fact that it has been made responsible for the moral decline and final downfall of the regime. The paper examines the scathing criticism directed against office selling in the press and popular novels after the turn of the 20th century and puts this criticism into perspective by correlating it to the actual history of office selling as seen in official sources. It is argued that office selling during the late nineteenth century still had an active role to play – at least from the perspective of the state – to accommodate the wealthy elites who were otherwise barred from social advancement by the severe limits of the civil service examinations. The danger for the regime lies less in the practice of office selling itself than in its abolition and the general demise of the symbolic capital embodied by official status which started only after 1900. This study is important to deepen our understanding of social change in early 20th century China.

Dong Wang : The Boxer Protocol and International Law Studies in China

The Boxer Movement, taken as one of the single most significant international events in modern China, has engaged the sustained attention of both Chinese and foreign observers over the last one hundred years. This strong focus has provided scholars with fertile ground for understanding the implementation of the Boxer Protocol of 1901 (Xinchou heyue) and the negotiations surrounding it, among other dimensions of the Boxer Uprising. Probing the boundaries of a new research frontier, this essay examines the immediate uptake of the Boxer Protocol by Chinese as a legal issue in the early twentieth century. Through textual analysis of influential printed media on the Protocol, I take a closer look at the Boxers’ propaganda prints (jietie), the periodicals Zhongguo xunbao, Waijiaobao and Minbao, Young John Allen’s Wanguo gongbao, and the similarly church-sponsored newspaper Huibao.

Based on an analysis of these publications, several conclusions can be drawn involving a wide diversity of social participants. For ordinary peasants, their opposition to the Protocol did not go much beyond frank expressions of resentment – much less a systematic comprehension of the terms of the Protocol. On the other hand, the intelligentsia read the treaty as non-reciprocal, unfair and extraordinary, and as a violation of China’s sovereignty. Their responses were one of the factors leading to the fomenting of Anti-Manchu dissent which heralded the 1911 Revolution. As the effective pioneers of international law studies in China, they provided the framework for a fundamental understanding of China’s position on the world scene that was to have repercussions for decades to come. Such awareness, however, was sporadic, and among ordinary Chinese there was a notable lack of consciousness of China’s legal standing in relation to the foreign powers. As a result, the early 1900s’ media treatment of the Protocol was far less explosive – politically, socially and legally – than was the case in the 1920s.

Panel G2 — 1920s: Organizing and Reforming the Young Republic

Chair: Hajo Frölich; 353 (Hall 21); Thursday, July 15th, 16:00-18:00

Monica De Togni: Political Participation in Collaboration with the Local Government: the Case of the Local Council of Shehong (Sichuan) at the Beginning of the Republic of China

In the past two decades we have witnessed a tendency to orientate the studies on China towards local scopes as the awareness of some misinterpretations of Chinese history due to its stretching through unsuited patterns has been growing. Thus, acknowledging the necessity to reconstruct the history of China based on the variety of what its society expressed, and curbing as much as possible generalizations, this paper will analyze the activities of the local council in Shehong, a Sichuan county now counting more than one million inhabitants, during the first years of the Republic of China. This will be accomplished using, among other sources, the photo static copies of the documents from the County Archives of Shehong pertinent to the local councils up to the beginning of the 1920’s (the archivists kindly provided a copy of what, surviving the disasters of the XX century, has been classified and made public in those Archives). Those materials are particularly useful to follow up on the question left open by Roger R. Thompson in its China’s Local Councils in the Age of the Constitutional Reform 1898-1911 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995) on the actual establishment and political effectiveness of the local councils introduced with the 1908’s constitutional reforms by the Qing.

Moreover, this analysis joins in the rectification of the so far current historiographical interpretation that considers 1911 as the watershed, in order to show that the changes at the beginning of the Chinese Republic often have their roots in the last years of the Qing dynasty, as Wang Di has shown for Chengdu in his work Street Culture in Chengdu. Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003).

Felix Boecking: The Cost of Nationalism: Tariff Autonomy, International Trade and Chinese Businesses, 1925-1937

In every published statement by Guomindang leaders about the aims of Nationalist tariff policy, these aims are stated as both increasing government revenue and promoting the growth of the national economy. In this paper, I will use evidence from the records of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service to investigate the actual effect of Guomindang tariff policy on the development of Chinese business. The evidence indicates that, of the two aims, increasing government revenue to finance expenditure and manage public debt was the more important one, and was pursued by the Nationalist Government at the cost of economic growth as well as socioeconomic hardship for Chinese consumers. Because of this, it had an adverse impact on the consumption of imported goods. Demand for imported goods proved to be highly price-elastic; hence, increased tariffs led to a decline in quantity and value of imports. Rather than just encouraging the growth of domestic business, the protectionist effect of these high tariffs also led to the flourishing of an illicit economy on the borders of the Nationalist Government’s area of political and economic control, though, which challenged Chinese economic interests. Hence, high tariffs during the Nationalist period were good for fiscal stability, but not always for the development of Chinese business.

Julia Schneider: The “Assimilative Power of China” – Chinese Nationalism and Historiography

Recent events have made it obvious that the appraisal of the PRC as a multi-ethnic state contradicts the effective tension between Han Chinese and so called shaoshu minzu (minority nationals). In fact, such tensions by reasons of nationalist ideas and the building of a Chinese nation-state started much earlier. They became especially threatening after the decline of the Qing dynasty which had reigned an empire with large areas inhabited by non-Chinese people. Nevertheless, nearly all early Chinese nationalists wanted to establish the Chinese nation-state in the borders of this empire. This had geopolitical and power political reasons, but it was also a habit to envision China in such ways. Thus Chinese nationalists faced a problem: on the one hand, they favoured nationalism to build a powerful China, on the other hand, just the same nationalism legitimized non-Chinese people to build their own nation-states.

To prevent this Liang Qichao turned to the new for old idea of assimilating these people, thereby giving them Chinese identity and depriving them of their wish to separate. He enlarged the ancient concept of "yong Xia bian Yi" (using Chinese ways to transform barbarians) and developed his new idea of "Zhongguo tonghua li" (assimilative power of China). To proof the existence of this power he turned to historical examples of non-Chinese people who he claimed to have been sinicized.

In the course of the twentieth century Liang Qichao’s rather political hypothesis has become a historical concept which is commonly used until today, especially in official PRC historiography, but also in Western sinology.

In my talk I want to reveal the process of reinterpretation (reimagination, reinvention) of East Asian history until 1949 by turning to texts by Chinese political thinkers and historians like Liang Qichao, Fu Sinian, Liu Shipei and Liu Yizheng.

Panel G3 — Constructing China and its Image of the Outside World

Chair: Elisabeth Kaske; 353 (Hall 21); Friday, July 16th, 09:00-11:00

Federica Casalin: Descriptions of Rome for the Qing Readers: a Plurality of Sources and Perspectives

What idea did the Chinese have of the Western world? This important topic in the history of Sino-Western relations has been addressed by numerous scholars at different times and from various points of view. This research will focus on the case of Rome.

According to existing studies on Sino-Italian relations, the first descriptions of the Italian peninsula in Chinese date back to the late Ming, but it was during the Qing dynasty that a plurality of sources concerning Italy and its major cities became available to the Chinese readers. Such sources include texts written by foreigners for the Chinese, the majority of them being books on world geography compiled from the 17th to the 19th century, and texts written by the Chinese for their fellow-countrymen. Most of the latter date from the late Qing and range from collections of geographic works to travel diaries written by officials and travellers who saw the “eternal city” with their own eyes.

Thanks to translations and to first-hand accounts, at the beginning of the 20th century various descriptions of Rome were available to the Chinese. What was the resulting picture? Did the ups and downs of the history of Rome influence the perception the Chinese had of it as an ancient capital of power and culture? To what extent did different narrators contribute to modify the image of Rome through the centuries? Based on the recollection and analysis of some previously neglected sources, this research hopes to provide new answers to such questions.

Alexandra Prats Armengol: Cultural Strategies in the Incorporation of Yunnan into China during the Ming Dynasty

Because of its geographical situation, Yunnan province is a territory which constitutes a meeting point between different cultural realities. Located in the south-western corner of China, in this region come together and contact the Chinese world, Southeast Asia, India and Tibet. This explains why, despite having belonged to the Chinese-influenced area for 2,000 years as a borderland, it was not until the Ming Dynasty when the region began to be effectively incorporated into the Chinese empire and, even today, is a place full of peculiarities that differentiate it from the rest of the country.

During the process of incorporation of Yunnan, the Chinese state developed some strategies, partly new and partly inherited from previous dynasties. Political and military processes, which are those that offer more immediate results, stand usually above the rest. However, cultural strategies that seek long-term results are often more effective and durable. So the aim of this presentation is to focus on cultural strategies implemented by the Chinese state, as well as observing the process of assimilation between Chinese culture and local culture. This study will be carried out by analyzing the texts of the Ming

Shilu, the most comprehensive source of information for this period, which allows a chronological and comprehensive monitoring throughout the entire dynasty.

Panel G4 — Local Governance in 20th Century China

Chair: Jens Damm; 353 (Hall 21); Friday, July 16th, 11:30-13:30

Hajo Frölich: Inventing a Public Good – Education in Guangdong Province, 1898 to 1912

From a bird’s eye view, everything changed in China’s educational system after 1900. Until then, schooling had largely been a private undertaking, the content of which was influenced by the state only indirectly via the civil examinations. Then Beijing embarked on the so called New Policy, which aimed at modernizing the empire’s modes of governance. Now, with the examination system abolished in 1905, the government-set curricula alone were to determine the content of formal education throughout the empire, in schools set up according to Beijing’s rules. In its drive to modernize, the imperial state had taken over an area hitherto outside its domain. Education had been reinvented as a public good – or so it seemed.

This paper, however, tells the story from a local perspective, and it tells it differently. I present urban case studies of schools in Guangdong province which make clear that a good deal of continuity needs to be added to the above story of change, not only – as others have stressed – in rural, but also in urban areas. By analyzing the modes of governance which were employed to turn the ambitious edicts of the time into reality, I argue that the new educational system largely drew on existing patterns of local state-society cooperation, while simultaneously it added new features which contributed to the overthrow of imperial rule in 1911. The state had set a goal for which to realize it needed the elite’s cooperation and initiative. At the same time, this elite’s growing power was a source of constant concern. The reinvention of education as a public good thus turned out to be a double edged sword. For reformers, revolutionaries, conservatives, students and missionaries alike, questions of public mindedness and representation of the public now gained importance, and they would not be answered easily.

Mechthild Leutner, Izabella Goikhman: Food Supply and Security in Guangdong (1912-1928): New Perspectives on Warlord China

Most existing research portrays the “Warlord era” (1912-1928) as a period of “state disintegration” and strong fragmentation. It has even been dubbed “the darkest period of China’s modern history”, one characterized by great instability and the collapse of social welfare. However, there is some evidence that amid the frequent changes in power, public services and goods were provided through cooperation between different actors: the warlords themselves, corporations of traders and craftsmen, clans, philanthropic societies, labor unions, peasant associations, workers' militias, networks of the Guomingdang and the Communist Party, the Komintern, missionary societies etc. Since the governance approach concentrates on the provision of just such goods and services through the collective efforts of state and non-state actors, it can be used to challenge the dominant research narrative. This paper discusses the research design of a project investigating two specific public goods – food supply and security – in the province of Guangdong. We assume that in spite of both the strong disintegration at state level and the unstable political situation in Guangdong, food supplies and security at the local and provincial levels were assured through certain – mainly non-hierarchical – modes of governance. We address several questions about activities at the local level: What was the role of different actors in those constellations? How were the local actors involved in the governance process? How were the “old” (Confucian) and “new” (socialist and nationalist) moral concepts used as modes of discursive steering? Finally, we try to synthesize the results from the macrohistorical perspective by asking: Is it possible to establish a general patterns from the different local modes in relation to the state building processes, which concluded in the establishment of the national government in 1928?

Lauri Paltemaa: The Maoist Urban State and Crisis – the Tianjin Great Flood in 1963 and Disaster Management Through Campaigns

This paper analyses disaster management in Maoist China using the Hebei Province great flood in 1963 in Tianjin City as its case. The analysis shows how Maoist socio-political structures and techniques of governance, namely the danweis and mass campaigns, played key roles in the relatively successful urban disaster management. At the same time, the paper highlights how safeguarding these and other socio-political structures of Maoist society such as the segregation of rural and urban residents and command economy was one of the principal tasks in disaster management, not only limiting physical damages and supporting recovery after hazard. It is shown how these structures could be temporarily relaxed as part of measures undertaken to solve problems in disaster relief and reconstruction, but also how the return to normalcy in physical conditions meant a return to normalcy in Maoist socio-political structures as well. Especially conducting disaster management through linked mass campaigns is analysed.

Outi Luova: Charitable Organizations and the Governance of Social and Catastrophe Relief in Contemporary China

Charitable organizations re-emerged in China in the 1980s, and since then, their number and scope of activities have expanded immensely. Currently, there are over 400 000 charitable organizations in China that collect funds and goods or arrange volunteer activities to help people in need. The presentation follows the gradual expansion of the field from the 1980s until the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008.

The specific goal of the presentation is to explore changing modes of governance in a crucially important, and fast growing sphere of social and catastrophe relief. The Chinese government is facing increasingly complex demands of relief work, and since the 1990s it has gradually re-organized the country's relief administration along neo-liberal lines. Amidst these changes, how have the roles of the different charitable organizations changed within the system of relief governance? What specific tasks and responsibilities have they been given? In which ways have they acted as innovators and active agents within the system?

Panel G5 — Chinese Legal Reform

Chair: Discussant: Jerôme Bourgon; 353 (Hall 21); Friday, July 16th, 15:00-16:30

Pär Cassel: From Imperial to National Sovereignty: Chinese Constitutionalism 1900-1954

Building on insights in new Qing history and recent scholarship on Chinese constitutionalism, this paper explores the concept of sovereignty from the first constitutional drafts of the Qing dynasty through the first PRC constitution in 1954. Rather than focusing on the concept of sovereignty as an import from Western "international law", this paper inquires the subtle shifts in the contents of sovereignty as expressed in Chinese constitutions. The paper argues that the current emphasis on China's territorial integrity and sovereignty is historically peculiar from a Chinese constitutional point of view and is rooted in early Republican debates on Chinese legal and institutional reform.

Aglaia De Angeli: Extraterritoriality and Revision of the Criminal Code: Two Commissions at Work 1921-1935

The work of the Commissions on Extraterritoriality in China and for the Revisions of the Criminal Code was strictly linked together. In fact, the abrogation of the extraterritorial system in China induced the revision of the criminal law.

The Commission on Extraterritoriality established in 1926 had to put into force the resolution V of the Conference on the limitation of armaments of 1921. The task was to improve existing conditions of the administration of justice in China, and to assist and further the efforts of the Chinese Government to effect such legislation and judicial reforms as would warrant the several powers in relinquishing their extraterritoriality. On the other hand, the Commission for the Revision of the Criminal Code established in 1931 was charged with the revision of the Criminal Code put into force in 1928. Once its work was completed with the promulgation of a new criminal code, China could transform into a country in which there was no need to continue the extraterritorial system. The work of the first commission therefore evidently laid the foundation for the latter committee’s success.

Both commissions were made up of Chinese experts on law, both collaborated with foreign advisors and both were chaired by Wang Chonghui (1881 – 1958), three times Minister of Justice and twice Minister of Education. The close links between the tasks and the components of these two commissions is the focus of this presentation. The paper aims a) to analyse the connection and achievement of the commissions; b) to compare their methods and work; c) to research the role and background of their Chinese members. Finally, the paper intends to analyse the inner politics of China and frame it into Chinese foreign politics of the inter-war period.

Jennifer Altehenger: Legalizing New China: Law Committees and the Marriage Law 1950-1953

In May 1950, the government of the People’s Republic of China promulgated “New China’s First Law”: the Marriage Law. Between 1950 and 1953, several attempts were made to popularize the law’s stipulations across the country. In 1953, the entire month of March was dedicated to a “Campaign to Fully Implement the Marriage Law.” Special committees accompanied these efforts. The Legal System Committee, a branch of the central Politico-Legal Committee, supervised the Marriage Law’s initial promulgation and dissemination. It published lengthy explanations on genesis and merit of the new law with the aim of inciting fundamental social changes. Its efforts, however, were largely futile. By December 1952, in preparation for a nationwide Marriage Law campaign, a second committee was convened. Its task was to ensure a more successful implementation than had been achieved in the summer of 1950. This included producing propaganda guidelines, supervising the legal training of local cadres, and facilitating communication between localities and the central government.

This paper discusses organization and work of the two committees. Special attention is paid to their respective historical contexts: the Legal System Committee’s work was a product of a government still struggling to consolidate its rule less than a year after the PRC’s establishment. Conversely, the Marriage Law Committee was formed after the first wave of fierce political campaigns shortly before New Democracy abruptly gave way to socialism. Comparing the two committees permits a better understanding of legal work at the governmental centre before the promulgation of the constitution in 1954. Committee members’ biographies illustrate the multitude of, often conflicting, expertise that influenced the Marriage Law and early PRC legal work in general. Clashes of legal professionals, advocating the supremacy of law, and politicians, emphasizing policy and party line, anticipated similar conflicts that resurged during the Anti-Rightist Campaigns.

Panel G6a — Social Change, Science and Economy in the 20th century I

Chair: Dong Wang ; 353 (Hall 21); Saturday, July 17th, 09:00-11:00

Guoguang Wu: Protests against Prosperity: The Centenary Chinese Dilemma of Economic Achievement vs. Political Discontent

This article challenges the conventional view that regards material poverty and socioeconomic stagnation as the major cause of protest in modern China, disputes the materialistic, economically deterministic interpretation of Chinese revolutions, and argues that economic prosperity often fuels political discontent in the process of China’s pursue of modernization. It sketches three cycles of Chinese history that each starts from a crisis of the existing institutions triggering reforms, through the reforms that create prosperity, to the social conflicts stirred by economic achievements, as those demonstrated in the Cixi reform of the 1900s, the ‘New Deal’ of the nationalist Nanjing decade, and the recent rise of China as a global power. With the rediscovery of forgotten prosperity, it re-examines the connections between economic conditions, on one hand, and social discontents and political protests on the other.

Hideo Fukamachi: The Kuomintang's New Life Movement and China's Tradition

The New Life Movement was the first nation-wide mass movement led by the Chinese authorities to transform the Chinese people into a modern nation. By pursuing “orderliness” and “cleanliness” of their countrymen’s food, clothing, shelter and traffic, the Kuomintang leaders aimed to improve the Chinese people’s image in foreigners’ eyes and raise the international status of China. However, it was also emphasized that the movement should succeed to the moral ideas of ancient China. Here arises a simple question — do such behavioural codes as “Button up,” “Wash your hands,” “Clean up,” “Do not spit” really coincide with traditional Chinese teachings? In other words, can etiquette and manners of the modern world be extracted from millennium-old classics? This paper analyzes how the New Life ideologues tried to demonstrate those disciplinary and hygienic rules’ succession to and compatibility with traditional Chinese moral ideas.

Panel G6b — Social Change, Science and Economy in the 20th century II

Chair: Dong Wang; 353 (Hall 21); Saturday, July 17th, 15:00-16:30

Xiaotao Li: When the Chinese Traditional Medicine Meet Science - the Wrestling of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Science on the “May Fourth Movement” Context

Before and after “May Fourth Movement”, the "science" has become the important criterion to judge right or not. Modern western medicine introduced to China was promoted because of "science", whereas Chinese traditional medicine was doubted and abandoned for "non-science" by some people. Thus Chinese and Western medicine were on the controversy. For survival, Chinese traditional medicine went onto the road of self-innovation, in which the “scientization of Chinese traditional medicine” movement was one. This movement advocated to study Chinese traditional medicine by scientific methods, which to some extent changed the confrontation between Chinese traditional medicine and science.

Izabella Goikhman: Keeping It in the Family? Knowledge Sharing in Soviet-Chinese Academic Relations in the 1950s

The Soviet-Chinese science and technology transfer of the 1950s is considered to be one of the most remarkable in modern history. Knowledge was transferred through different channels: exchanges of publications and research materials, academic cooperation between institutions, personnel exchanges, joint research projects and expeditions, etc. While Soviet and Russian sources have always emphasized socialist internationalism as the basis for these Soviet-Chinese interactions using the metaphor of the socialist “family”, where the “elder brother” was devotedly helping the “younger”, Chinese sources have long portrayed Soviet aid as a tool of influence and refer to Soviet policy as “social imperialism”. The USSR is said not to have shared its most advanced and strategic knowledge. Furthermore, Soviet specialists repeatedly reported to their supervisors on Chinese refusing to share important knowledge.

Based on Chinese and Russian archive materials, published sources, memories and diaries of contemporary witnesses, this paper seeks to examine the levels of policy formulation and implementation, in order to identify what “family” – the international socialist one or the one within national boundaries – was considered to be more important from both the Soviet and the Chinese perspective. The main questions to be answered are: What were the limits of knowledge sharing set in different laws and directives? How were these laws and directives implemented by the individuals involved in academic interactions? What changes can be observed during the 1950s?

Answering these questions will provide important insights into not only the motives behind Soviet and Chinese cooperation in the academic arena, but also the processes of knowledge sharing as well as the mechanisms for the strategic utilization of knowledge.

Panel G7 — 1927-1949: Different Roles in Society: Muslims, Young Criminals & a CCP Organizer

Chair: Izabella Goikhman; 353 (Hall 21); Saturday, July 17th, 17:00-18:30

Wlodzimierz Cieciura: 50 Million Muslims? Demographics and politics in China from Empire to the People’s Republic

This paper discusses how the issue of Muslim population in China was used as a political tool in the Sino-Muslim efforts to redefine their position within the Chinese state at the time of historical transformation from the imperial system to the national republic and on to the communist state. It also examines how the major political forces of the period approached this demographical data and how they reacted to their own findings politically. These include the early republic and its ideal of the ‘unity of five minzus’, the Guomindang after 1927, the Japanese and the Communists. The wildly overblown estimate of 50 million strong Muslim population in China was being used by almost all major sinophone Muslim modernist activists in the late Qing and throughout the Republican era to forward their political claims and strengthen the Muslim positions vis-à-vis the state in all its incarnations. It was also used in the Chinese Muslim dealings with their coreligionists in the Middle East to prove that China and its Islamic population were crucial to the Muslim struggle with colonialism and western imperialism. By claiming that they formed a considerable part of the entire Chinese population, the Chinese Muslims hoped to convince both China and the Muslim world of their great importance and at the same time strengthened their own cultural identity. By analyzing how the issue of population was discussed in the Chinese Muslim press and social science of Republican China it is possible to see how they perceived and imagined their own community and the role they hoped it was to play in the Chinese nation state and the modern world.

Flavia Solieri: From Northeast to Whole China: Aspects of Chen Yun's Activities in Late 1948 - Early 1949

As it is well known, the successful conclusion of the Liaoxi-Shenyang campaign (November 1948) meant for the Chinese Communist Party a dramatic événementielle acceleration, implying from many points of view a whole range of difficulties. As a matter of fact, those difficulties were eventually overcome: nevertheless, or just because of that, the way they were perceived and overcome still deserves attention and research.

Chen Yun laid the foundations for the successful takeover of Shenyang, a major industrial and urban context, and timely took into consideration the implications of an approaching victory on a national scale: tasks, responsibilities, practical priorities. The presentation focuses on Chen Yun’s activities in late 1948-early 1949, that is before in May 1949 he began in Beiping to organize financial and economic work at central level: his moves and suggestions in those crucial weeks provide some interesting clues to the role Chen Yun then played, as well as to the complexity of that historical passage.

The paper is based on primary and secondary historical sources, in Chinese and in western languages. Particularly, starting from recent most authoritative Chinese documentary sources and memoirs, it takes into account also declassified intelligences and materials from American archives.

Note: this is a preliminary version of the conference programme and is subject to changes.

Last update: July 17, 2010, 11:43 EET