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The Alienated Academy
Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919-1937
Wen-Hsin Yeh
Harvard University Press, 1990

The enormous changes in twentieth-century Chinese higher education up to the Sino-Japanese War are detailed in this pioneering work. Yeh examines the impact of instruction in English and of the introduction of science and engineering into the curriculum. Such innovations spurred the movement of higher education away from the gentry academies focused on classical studies and propelled it toward modern middle-class colleges with diverse programs.

Yeh provides a typology of Chinese institutions of higher learning in the Republican period and detailed studies of representative universities. She also describes student life and prominent academic personalities in various seats of higher learning. Social changes and the political ferment outside the academy affected students and faculty alike, giving rise, as Yeh contends, to a sense of alienation on the eve of war.

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Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China
Kaleidoscopic Histories
Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2018
This volume features new work on cinema in early twentieth-century Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China. Looking beyond relatively well-studied cities like Shanghai, these essays foreground cinema’s relationship with imperialism and colonialism and emphasize the rapid development of cinema as a sociocultural institution. These essays examine where films were screened; how cinema-going as a social activity adapted from and integrated with existing social norms and practices; the extent to which Cantonese opera and other regional performance traditions were models for the development of cinematic conventions; the role foreign films played in the development of cinema as an industry in the Republican era; and much more.
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The Limits of Change
Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China
Charlotte Furth
Harvard University Press, 1976

The Limits of Change disputes the impression that the conservative ideas and styles of China's Republican period were neither strong nor persuasive enough to counter the ideas or the revolution of Mao. As the contributors to the book point out, these conservative movements reflected a modern outlook and shared a framework of common concepts with the radical movements they opposed.

In these essays we see the broad range of responses that conservatism in the Republican period took--from a new nativist historical consciousness, to quasi-Fascist theories of political mobilization, to efforts at a revival of Confucianism as a moral faith. Individual writers analyze the early Republican National Essence movement, the new Confucian humanism of the 1920s and afterwards, political ideology under Republican military dictatorships, and the ideas of modern literary conservatives. Two major interpretive essays placeChinese trends in the context of worldwide conservative responses to industrialization, political modernism, and the challenge of secularism.Through its far-reaching, detailed, and sympathetic assessment of the role of conservative ideology in China's modern intellectual experience, Limits of Change makes a distinguished contribution to Chinese studies.

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The Rural Modern
Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China
Kate Merkel-Hess
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution.
 
In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.
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Saving the Nation
Economic Modernity in Republican China
Margherita Zanasi
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Economic modernity is so closely associated with nationhood that it is impossible to imagine a modern state without an equally modern economy. Even so, most people would have difficulty defining a modern economy and its connection to nationhood. In Saving the Nation, Margherita Zanasi explores this connection by examining the first nation-building attempt in China after the fall of the empire in 1911.

Challenging the assumption that nations are products of technological and socioeconomic forces, Zanasi argues that it was notions of what constituted a modern nation that led the Nationalist nation-builders to shape China’s institutions and economy. In their reform effort, they confronted several questions: What characterized a modern economy? What role would a modern economy play in the overall nation-building effort? And how could China pursue economic modernization while maintaining its distinctive identity? Zanasi expertly shows how these questions were negotiated and contested within the Nationalist Party. Silenced in the Mao years, these dilemmas are reemerging today as a new leadership once again redefines the economic foundation of the nation.

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State and Economy in Republican China
A Handbook for Scholars, Volumes 1 and 2
William C. Kirby
Harvard University Press, 2000

This manual for students focuses on archival research in the economic and business history of the Republican era (1911–1949). Following a general discussion of archival research and research aids for the Republican period, the handbook introduces the collections of archives in the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan that contain materials in the areas of economics and business, with data on the history of the archives, descriptions of their holdings, and publications on their collections.

The second half of the work consists of guided readings in Republican-era documents, such as government decrees, regulations, and business letters, with complete vocabulary lists and explanations of terms. Also included with the handbook are facsimile reproductions of these documents.

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Unearthing the Nation
Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China
Grace Yen Shen
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Questions of national identity have long dominated China’s political, social, and cultural horizons. So in the early 1900s, when diverse groups in China began to covet foreign science in the name of new technology and modernization, questions of nationhood came to the fore. In Unearthing the Nation, Grace Yen Shen uses the development of modern geology to explore this complex relationship between science and nationalism in Republican China.
           
Shen shows that Chinese geologists—in battling growing Western and Japanese encroachment of Chinese sovereignty—faced two ongoing challenges: how to develop objective, internationally recognized scientific authority without effacing native identity, and how to serve China when China was still searching for a stable national form. Shen argues that Chinese geologists overcame these obstacles by experimenting with different ways to associate the subjects of their scientific study, the land and its features, with the object of their political and cultural loyalties. This, in turn, led them to link national survival with the establishment of scientific authority in Chinese society.

The first major history of modern Chinese geology, Unearthing the Nation introduces the key figures in the rise of the field, as well as several key organizations, such as the Geological Society of China, and explains how they helped bring Chinese geology onto the world stage.
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