Wen-hsin Yeh | University of California, Berkeley (original) (raw)
Papers by Wen-hsin Yeh
Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor. Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843-1949, B... more Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor. Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843-1949, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, 304 pp.This study looks at the daily life of employees in Shanghai and the ways in which they tried to establish the respectability of their professions and, more generally, of the modernisation effort to which they were allied. The emergence and social and cultural evolution of this new middle class of "petty urbanites" is charted over a long period - from the Opium War (1839- 42) until the 1949 revolution. Closely linked to and subject to employers' whims at first, the middle class distanced itself when confronted with the effects of the Sino-Japanese war: submission to paternalistic patrons was replaced by confrontations with capitalists deemed predators and willing collaborators with the enemy. The author points out that Shanghai, which emerged as the centre of economic modernisation as well as the place from which the new urban culture took shape and spread, owes its pre-eminence to the emergence of this new middle class.The book contains seven chronologically and thematically arranged chapters. After setting out what she calls "the material turn" in Chinese society as it opened itself to more materialistic and rational conceptions of the world, the author goes on in the second chapter to describe the development of the science of management (shang xue), at first on the initiative of institutions and social networks - chambers of commerce, associations, technical colleges - and then, from 1927, under the direction of the Nationalist government, which placed special emphasis on standardising accounting procedures.The third chapter, "Visual Politics and Shanghai Glamour," picks up themes already considered at length in works such as Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai: 1900-1945, edited by Sherman Cochran (Ithaca, New York., 1999) - advertising, the growth of department stores, new sales techniques, new ways of consumption, and adoption of concepts and products through anti-foreign boycotts and campaigns favouring "national products" (guohuo). Then follows an evocation of the daily life of employees, governed by clockwork corporate discipline. The straitjacket this put them in was such that employees, confined to residential areas built and run by enterprises such as Bank of China, were obliged to follow their bosses' precepts even in planning their leisure. The paternalistic ideology that buttressed such social control, at once Confucian and modernist, was disseminated by the press. One of the most influential press organs in this respect, the Shenghuo zhoukan (Life Weekly), is examined in the sixth chapter.However, the press also echoed the mounting difficulties faced by "petty urbanites" during the 1930s. …
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, Dec 1, 2013
ONE The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations Leo O... more ONE The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations Leo Ou-fan Lee The issue of Western modernity has been thoroughly treated—and critiqued—in recent scholarship; however, that of Chinese modernity remains to.
The American Historical Review, Apr 1, 2013
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2012
The American Historical Review, 2005
Visualising China, 1845-1965, 2013
In Visualizing China, the authors launch a broad inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of ... more In Visualizing China, the authors launch a broad inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of the story of visuality in modern China. The essays cluster around several nodal points including photographs, advertising, posters and movies, from the 1840s to the 1960s.
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2015
In this special issue of Cross-Currents, the contributing authors look at how business linked Chi... more In this special issue of Cross-Currents, the contributing authors look at how business linked China and the world from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and how Chinese and foreign companies interacted with one another, as well as with political power, long before today. Some authors concentrate on material connections, including shipping, banking, the building of railroads, the spread of the motion picture industry, international treaties, and the formation of knowledge, while others investigate the role of business culture and how entrepreneurship and networks of trust crossed borders. Both of these aspects are set against the backdrop of simultaneous Chinese state-building efforts that became evident in the state creation of a national market and the formation of political borders. All of the authors collected here draw on case studies of individual entrepreneurs or companies, just as they draw on the new historical and theoretical scholarship summarized above to f...
The Alienated Academy, 2000
Wartime Shanghai, 1998
... We forge our communal bond on the basis of mutual loyalty and reciprocal obligations. 3 The ... more ... We forge our communal bond on the basis of mutual loyalty and reciprocal obligations. 3 The core group of the early Tewu chu, known as the Blue Shirts (Lanyi she), consisted of a League of Ten whose members were ... The day happened to be Chinese New Year's Eve. ...
Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor. Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843-1949, B... more Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor. Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843-1949, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, 304 pp.This study looks at the daily life of employees in Shanghai and the ways in which they tried to establish the respectability of their professions and, more generally, of the modernisation effort to which they were allied. The emergence and social and cultural evolution of this new middle class of "petty urbanites" is charted over a long period - from the Opium War (1839- 42) until the 1949 revolution. Closely linked to and subject to employers' whims at first, the middle class distanced itself when confronted with the effects of the Sino-Japanese war: submission to paternalistic patrons was replaced by confrontations with capitalists deemed predators and willing collaborators with the enemy. The author points out that Shanghai, which emerged as the centre of economic modernisation as well as the place from which the new urban culture took shape and spread, owes its pre-eminence to the emergence of this new middle class.The book contains seven chronologically and thematically arranged chapters. After setting out what she calls "the material turn" in Chinese society as it opened itself to more materialistic and rational conceptions of the world, the author goes on in the second chapter to describe the development of the science of management (shang xue), at first on the initiative of institutions and social networks - chambers of commerce, associations, technical colleges - and then, from 1927, under the direction of the Nationalist government, which placed special emphasis on standardising accounting procedures.The third chapter, "Visual Politics and Shanghai Glamour," picks up themes already considered at length in works such as Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai: 1900-1945, edited by Sherman Cochran (Ithaca, New York., 1999) - advertising, the growth of department stores, new sales techniques, new ways of consumption, and adoption of concepts and products through anti-foreign boycotts and campaigns favouring "national products" (guohuo). Then follows an evocation of the daily life of employees, governed by clockwork corporate discipline. The straitjacket this put them in was such that employees, confined to residential areas built and run by enterprises such as Bank of China, were obliged to follow their bosses' precepts even in planning their leisure. The paternalistic ideology that buttressed such social control, at once Confucian and modernist, was disseminated by the press. One of the most influential press organs in this respect, the Shenghuo zhoukan (Life Weekly), is examined in the sixth chapter.However, the press also echoed the mounting difficulties faced by "petty urbanites" during the 1930s. …
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, Dec 1, 2013
ONE The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations Leo O... more ONE The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations Leo Ou-fan Lee The issue of Western modernity has been thoroughly treated—and critiqued—in recent scholarship; however, that of Chinese modernity remains to.
The American Historical Review, Apr 1, 2013
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2012
The American Historical Review, 2005
Visualising China, 1845-1965, 2013
In Visualizing China, the authors launch a broad inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of ... more In Visualizing China, the authors launch a broad inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of the story of visuality in modern China. The essays cluster around several nodal points including photographs, advertising, posters and movies, from the 1840s to the 1960s.
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2015
In this special issue of Cross-Currents, the contributing authors look at how business linked Chi... more In this special issue of Cross-Currents, the contributing authors look at how business linked China and the world from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and how Chinese and foreign companies interacted with one another, as well as with political power, long before today. Some authors concentrate on material connections, including shipping, banking, the building of railroads, the spread of the motion picture industry, international treaties, and the formation of knowledge, while others investigate the role of business culture and how entrepreneurship and networks of trust crossed borders. Both of these aspects are set against the backdrop of simultaneous Chinese state-building efforts that became evident in the state creation of a national market and the formation of political borders. All of the authors collected here draw on case studies of individual entrepreneurs or companies, just as they draw on the new historical and theoretical scholarship summarized above to f...
The Alienated Academy, 2000
Wartime Shanghai, 1998
... We forge our communal bond on the basis of mutual loyalty and reciprocal obligations. 3 The ... more ... We forge our communal bond on the basis of mutual loyalty and reciprocal obligations. 3 The core group of the early Tewu chu, known as the Blue Shirts (Lanyi she), consisted of a League of Ten whose members were ... The day happened to be Chinese New Year's Eve. ...