The Rise of Political Intellectuals in Modern China (original) (raw)
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The China Quarterly, 2004
Timothy Weston's study of Beijing University (hereafter, “Beida”) spotlights how modern Chinese intellectuals positioned themselves politically and socially in the early 20th century. Weston relies on the Beida archives, dailies, journals, and many other sources, to make four contributions. First, Beida's early history shows how literati humanists repositioned themselves during a period of great uncertainty. New style intellectuals had influence because they mastered Western and classical learning. Secondly, Beida's complex history did not break sharply with the past. Earlier accounts of the May Fourth movement obscure the efforts of intellectuals since 1898 to redefine their role. Weston suggests that May Fourth amplified a continuing progression of new and old ways of doing things. Thirdly, political tensions emerged when the university increasingly radicalized after 1911. No more than 20 per cent of Beida students were involved in the New Culture movement. A strong co...
The China Quarterly, 2016
the practice of discrimination according to class background by 1937, under Mao, it persisted until the Cultural Revolution. The last third of the book is devoted to Walder's masterful analysis of the Cultural Revolution. After the debacle of the Great Leap Forward, Mao never felt confident of the loyalty of comrades like Liu Shaoqi, Peng Zhen and Lu Dingyi. The Cultural Revolution was both a massive purge of "people in authority taking the capitalist road," and the destruction of the party-state bureaucracy by mobilizing student Red Guards against it. Walder's detailed account highlights significant facts: that the Red Guards were directed by the small group of Mao's loyalists (originally headed by Chen Boda, Mao's Yan'an tutor); that Red Guard factionalism was produced by this top-down manipulation rather than more deeply rooted conflicts among social groups; and that half of the Cultural Revolution's violent deaths (total of 1.2-1.6 million) occurred during 1968 when military-led organs of local power anxious to prove their own loyalty carried out a massive witch hunt including confessions forced by torture. The tragic consequences of Mao's rule for Chinese society come through vividly on every page of Walder's dispassionate and authoritative account. I hope that current and future generations of Chinese youth, who have been deprived of knowledge about Mao's China by parental reticence and politicized schooling, will have the chance to read it.
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2000
RésuméAu début du XXe siècle, la Chine connaît une crise dramatique. La nécessité d'une modernisation devient urgente. Une mobilisation des élites locales se développe alors dans un contexte de coopération entre certains hauts fonctionnaires ministériels ou provinciaux et des réformateurs du milieu privé : industriels, marchands, lettrés. Malgré les réticences du pouvoir impérial, les élites locales imposent leur participation à l'élaboration de nouvelles structures de coopération et de partage des responsabilités entre l'État et la société. Une reconstruction politique s'ébauche ainsi. Elle aboutira à l'instauration d'un pouvoir régional, malheureusement brisé, en 1913, par le coup de force de Yuan Shikai.
The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History
Cambridge: Cambirdge University Press, 2015
This narrative history of Chinese intellectuals and public life provides a guide to making sense of China today. Timothy Cheek presents a map and a method for understanding the intellectual in the long twentieth century, from China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese war in 1895 to the 'Prosperous China' since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Cheek surveys the changing terrain of intellectual life over this transformative century in Chinese history to enable readers to understand a particular figure, idea or debate. The map provides coordinates to track different times, different social worlds and key concepts. The historical method focuses on context and communities during six periods to make sense of ideas, institutions and individual thinkers across the century. Together they provide a memorable account of the scenes and protagonists, and arguments and ideas, of intellectuals and public life in modern China.
Culture, Politics, and Society in Late Imperial China (Autumn 2016)
This advanced undergraduate seminar explores key questions and problems in late imperial Chinese history from the end of the Ming dynasty until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. We will examine a wide array of themes, from the historiography of modern China to the history of mercantilism, global trade, and the rise of European imperialism, as well as debates about the East/West divide and the problem of metageography, Qing governmentality and foreign relations, and Qing expansion along the frontiers of the empire. We will then turn to examine the colonial encounter, internal unrest and rebellion, regional conflict and military modernisation, and how the Qing state endeavoured to confront these pressing challenges to its sovereignty. We will also explore themes such as the late imperial city, the social construction of gender, literary culture, the rise of nationalism, civil society and the public sphere, as well as late Qing reforms and the role of intellectuals within society. The aim of the course will be to help students develop a critical perspective on late imperial and modern Chinese history, and to understand the diverse approaches scholars have historically taken towards the field. We will therefore be reading a variety of academic books and articles that provide contrarian and contradictory viewpoints, and students will be encouraged to discuss and debate the relative merits of their positions.
Journal of Modern Chinese History, 2016
Among the most promising developments in the study of contemporary China has been the booming migration of historians across the 1949 divide to pioneer the new and dynamic field of the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Only a few years ago post-1949 China was regarded as the exclusive terrain of social scientists (political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and psychologists). Now, lured by an array of previously inaccessible primary sources, a growing number of historians have embarked on the study of the PRC. 1 To date, the main focus of their research has been on grassroots society in the pre-Great Leap Forward period, but we can anticipate both temporal and sectoral expansion as the field matures. 2 An outstanding example of work being produced by historians of the PRC with the aid of heretofore untapped archival and other sources is Zhang Jishun's Yuanqu de dushi (A city displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s). 3 The core chapters of Professor Zhang's book are case studies of (1) the transformation of Shanghai neighborhoods, (2) the role of the urban underclass in the PRC's first general election, (3) the conversion of newspapers from private to public media, (4) the accommodation of educated elites to the new political order, and (5) the influence of cinema on the formation of a mass urban culture. While the Shanghai Municipal Archives provide the bulk of Professor Zhang's primary sources, she supplements these official materials with interviews, newspaper accounts, visual media, and other sources. The result is a more personal and human view of the effects of the Communist revolution on China's largest and most cosmopolitan city than previous scholarship had afforded. Understood from the vantage point of Shanghai residents who lived through the initial years of the PRC, including workers and shantytown dwellers as well as journalists and intellectuals, Professor Zhang's illuminating account demonstrates that 1949 marked not only a moment of rupture and new beginnings but also a continuation of many earlier practices. Moreover, different members of Shanghai society-even two brothers with virtually identical family and educational backgrounds such as Huang Jiade and Huang Jiayin-could interpret and respond to revolutionary initiatives in surprisingly different ways. 1 See http://prchistory.org/ for evidence of this trend. 2 Kirby, "Continuity and Change in Modern China," was a seminal work, stressing similarities between the PRC and the Republic of China prior to the mainland's departure from the German/Soviet model of economic planning with Mao's launch of the Great Leap Forward. While Kirby examined state industrial policy, more recent work has focused on local society.