Abstract
The study of Chinese cities has truly flourished in the past decade or two. Dozens of outstanding monographs have explored the history of major cities—such as Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Tianjin, Hankow, Chengdu—as well as less prominent but significant cities such as Harbin and Nantong. Many aspects of urban life—governance, commerce, communities, entertainment, and culture—have been explored, and Chinese urban history has joined the ranks of European and American urban history whose works have been abundantly reflected in the articles and reviews in this journal. Yet the studies of Chinese cities differ from the studies of other cities: while individually focused, they are to an exceptional degree embedded in the constantly evolving and contested political narratives of Chinese history. While the studies of great and small cities of Europe and America are for the most part dedicated to the city itself, no history of a Chinese city can avoid contributing, either implicitly or explicitly, to the grand debates over the history of China in general, especially from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Since ancient times China had boasted great imperial capitals such as Chang’an, the capital of the Western Han (206
While such a claim reflected an Orientalist or, at the very least, a Eurocentric perspective, even in the 1970s, when American scholars began to pay serious attention to studying Chinese cities, the historian Frederick W. Mote argued that cities in traditional China had not possessed a distinct self-identity or urban culture, but there was instead an urban–rural continuum in social values and cultural practices. Urban elites did not necessarily identify with the city in which they lived but considered their rural native places to be their homes. Unlike Balazs, however, Mote urged the study of Chinese cities on their own terms. 2
After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, cities were highly suspect and not favored in economic and social policies because they had been the centers of capitalist and foreign influence, whereas Mao’s revolution had been based on a rural strategy. After Mao’s death in 1976 and the shift toward economic reforms that followed, cities gained the center of attention. Concurrently there was an intense interest—among intellectuals in China and among some academics in the West—in discovering whether there had been any historical roots of civil society or capitalism in traditional Chinese cities. In the 1980s, the American historian William T. Rowe took on this challenge in his two-volume work on commerce and society in the important city of Hankow, presenting evidence of vigorous trade at this port on the central Yangzi in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 3 Rowe emphasized the large role of local merchants and local elites in urban society. Subsequent work on other cities focused on possible premodern antecedents to civil society and social organizations and, most particularly, on their modern expressions in Shanghai in the early twentieth century.
The older view held that Shanghai became China’s most modern city precisely because it was a treaty port, dominated by an International Settlement and French Concession. Rhoads Murphey’s Shanghai: Key to Modern China expressed this idea in academic literature, but it was also the widespread popular view, both foreign and Chinese, that China’s political and economic modernization would not have occurred without Western stimulus. 4 As a treaty port, Shanghai was largely free from Chinese government interference, and new types of institutions and practices could flourish. The recent wave of scholarship, however, has viewed Shanghai from a Chinese social perspective—foregrounding the development of education, Chinese capitalism, the labor movement, popular culture and the press, and so on, rather than the Western context. Scholarship on other cities has followed. Based on a 1996 conference “Beyond Shanghai,” a volume edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950, presented studies of other cities engaged in the modernizing process. 5 Several recent monographs (on Chengdu, Suzhou, Nantong, Harbin, etc.) have shown that other cities besides Shanghai, some not treaty ports, also engaged in extensive modernization of the urban infrastructure in the early twentieth century, introducing paved roads, trolleys, public parks, public buildings in Western-style architecture. They were inspired by a new nationalism that saw modern cities as an emblem of China’s progress. 6
The three books reviewed here advance the scholarship on Chinese cities by engaging these ongoing issues of traditional and modern urban identity. Si-yen Fei’s Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing takes as its focus Nanjing (“southern capital”), which served as the capital of the Ming dynasty (1368–1643) until 1421, when the court moved to Beijing (“northern capital”). After that date, Nanjing continued to be the secondary capital but was no longer central to the political life of the court and bureaucracy. It remained an important economic and cultural center, however, ranking with Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Yangzhou as one of the famous and attractive cities of the Jiangnan, or Lower Yangzi, region. Using previously little explored sources about Nanjing, the author’s goal is to paint a picture, not just of the particular city of Nanjing but of a general change of attitudes toward urban space and urban life in the late Ming. The book’s purpose is to present “a study of urbanization that explores how the expanding roles and functions of cities led the idea of city to be reinvented, contested, and reconceived in the late Ming empire” (p. 1).
In Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850, Antonia Finnane paints a picture of Yangzhou, a jewel of a city, prized for its monuments and beautiful gardens. The wealth of salt merchants, who energetically engaged in conspicuous cultural consumption, shaped the city. In turn, the most famous literati of the Qing period celebrated its beauty in poetry and painting and appreciated each other’s company in social gatherings. Yangzhou’s reputation was greatly bolstered by the emperors Kangxi (r. 1662–1722) and Qianlong (r. 1736–1795), for whom Yangzhou was a major destination during their Southern Tours. In contrast to Fei’s approach to Nanjing, Finnane argues for Yangzhou’s exceptional characteristics rather than using it to suggest broader urban trends.
The jointly authored volume The City and Chinese Modernity (Cong chengshi kan Zhongguo de xiandaixing) is the product of a conference convened in 2007 by the Institute of Modern History of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Dealing principally, but not exclusively, with Shanghai, this volume examines China’s urban history through the perspective of “modernity,” a term carefully chosen to distinguish itself from “modernization,” which the editors of the volume feel is too closely related to the agenda of economic development. The exact definition of modernity is not clear, the editors acknowledge, but the book’s studies of state-society relations, public sphere and civil society, consumerism and popular culture suggest some criteria.
The books on Nanjing and Yangzhou directly address the question of urban identity in the premodern period. In the late Ming and early Qing periods, it is widely known that cities changed to become more economic in their functions than before. Fei in particular argues that the functions and identity of cities experienced a change in the late Ming. In one chapter, “To Wall or Not to Wall,” she describes a case of 1635 in which the residents of Gaochun—a county in the Nanjing Prefecture but not part of Nanjing City—successfully resisted a plan to build a city wall. In China cities that were administrative centers (cheng) had walls, but the more recently established market towns (zhen) did not necessarily have them. Gaochun’s status had been raised from zhen to county city (xiancheng), but residents did not want their commerce to be constrained by city walls and gates. In another chapter, “We Must Be Taxed,” she describes a popular movement of 1609 when Nanjing residents took the initiative to survey local properties and compile tax registries that were used as the basis for a new urban property tax. Previously urban residents had been subject to a levy for night patrol and fire-watching services, but this corvée obligation was arbitrary and onerous. Cities in China had no regular form of taxation that was the functional equivalent of the land tax. In Nanjing, residents sought to register their own urban properties so that they could be taxed in silver in a systematic way and eliminate the corvée obligations. Fei sees the Nanjing tax-me residents as part of an urban movement that sought to bring cities under the more direct attention and regular administration of the Chinese central bureaucracy.
The city of Yangzhou might present the strongest example of leadership by merchants rather than by local “gentry” (the scholar-bureaucratic elite). As described by Ping-ti Ho in his classic article, “The Salt Merchants of Yang-chou: A Study of Commercial Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century China,” Yangzhou was a city of extraordinary wealth. 7 He and other historians have described a “blurring” of social boundaries between gentry and merchants in the Qing period, which the Yangzhou salt merchants exemplified to a great degree. In Speaking of Yangzhou, Finnane argues that, because of the special trust placed in the salt merchants by the emperors, the salt trade in effect became “gentrified.” “The Lianghuai salt administration made the strongest of claims that the salt trade was equivalent to the land in its significance for the economic, cultural, and ethical workings of the empire” (p. 119). During the imperial visits, the powerful merchants established personal relationships with the emperors, who in turn bestowed titles and favor on them. Not only did the salt trade provide the government with an important source of revenue, the merchants themselves were often called on to “contribute” financial support for military campaigns or public works. In these ways “salt officials and salt merchants played roles in Yangzhou that elsewhere were performed by local officials and gentry” (p. 244). Nevertheless, Finnane asserts, in Yangzhou the distinction between merchant and gentry was still clearly maintained. “The boundaries did not blur, but they shifted” (p. 263).
Perhaps the most unusual characteristic of Yangzhou was that an outsider or “immigrant” group formed its rich and powerful elite, not the “natives” of the city, who remained socially and economically inferior throughout the period of Yangzhou’s greatest prosperity and cultural prominence. The salt merchants of Yangzhou hailed from the city of Huizhou, about 250 miles away. Huizhou merchants were found at work in other key trade centers in the Yangzi area, but only in Yangzhou did they play such a dominant role in shaping the material environment of the city, in patronizing the arts and education, and in sponsoring philanthropic activities. Here, one might add, the term “local elite” acquires a rather unusual meaning.
Finnane contrasts Yangzhou with the even more celebrated city of Suzhou in the Jiangnan (south of the Yangzi River) region. Aside from its longer period of cultural prominence, Suzhou drew deeply from the abundant resources around it: silk, tea, handicrafts of various types were among the characteristic products of this region. Yangzhou, by contrast, was almost entirely separated from its immediate hinterland. The area of Jiangbei (north of the Yangzi River) was characteristically poor in resources, and women did not spin and weave cotton as they did in Suzhou, Hangzhou, and other cities of Jiangnan. These contrasts, Finnane argues, show that Yangzhou was a city full of paradoxes. “It was a wealthy city in a poor region. The city produced many talented scholars and artists, but few members of the bureaucracy. It was strategically located at the junction of two great commercial routes, . . . but in a period of flourishing interregional trade, Yangzhou people had no obvious presence in other great commercial cities” (p. 11).
If cities were possibly taking on a more commercial identity, could it also be said that cities were becoming culturally identified as cities? Were cities in the late imperial period seen for their cultural urbanity, distinct from their rural life, contrary to Mote’s assertion? In Negotiating Urban Space, Fei argues that this was the case. A literary form called ketan (conversations with guests) was one venue in which the city was reimagined in the late Ming period. The collections of such conversations about Nanjing by the urban elites were a product of the “increased fluidity and fast-paced exchanges of urban life,” while at the same time “expressing the amorphous lived experience of a highly mixed and mobile urban population” (p. 191). Ketan represented the “increasing engagement of urban elites with city life” and a quest for “Nanjing-ness” (p. 211).
Guidebooks, atlases, and local gazetteers in the late Ming provided many venues in which the city was viewed in print. When Nanjing was still the sole Ming capital, illustrations found in gazetteers, or in collections such as Jinling tuyong (Illustrated odes on Nanjing), reflected the imperial vision, showing where government offices, academies, temples, and shrines were located. Such maps became schematic, projecting “a panoramic view and a highly politicized urban space, one detached from actual lived experiences” (p. 147). When it ceased being the primary capital, Nanjing’s scenic spots (jing) became the focus of tour guides, maps, and illustrations. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, touring became an important literati activity, and armchair touring through literary descriptions could serve as a substitute for the real thing. “Literati came to adapt social tourism into a prized venue for literati networking. . . . Sightseeing became . . . a public display of talent and status” (p. 161).
Yangzhou was another favorite destination of touring literati. In the seventeenth century, after the recovery of the city from Qing devastation, the rebuilding of its famous monuments—temples, halls, and bridges—was an activity of collective local memory, as well described by Tobie Meyer-Fong in Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou. 8 Finnane’s Speaking of Yangzhou shows that in the eighteenth century the focus of attention shifted to the gardens that had been developed by the nouveau literati merchants. The new gardens were visible to the public unlike the older gardens that were surrounded by walls. Many businesses developed to accommodate tourist interests, such as restaurants, teahouses, bathhouses, and the like. Commercialized painting developed for the tourist market.
The flourishing of literati touring highlights the importance of particular cities as sites of religious, cultural, or natural beauty. Fei’s fascinating discussion of maps, gazetteers, and guidebooks presents a strong case for Nanjing consciousness. Yet the quest for “Nanjing-ness,” the essence of Nanjing, or “Yangzhou-ness,” which stressed the exceptional features of these famous cities, does not present an entirely convincing case for a growing consciousness of cities qua cities. After all, the most popular destinations and sights were famous natural landscapes or culturally significant monuments, many of which were outside the city walls. The images of these scenic sights (jing), like landscape painting, Fei acknowledges, reduced “natural landscape or built environment into a chosen set of recognizable icons.” On the other hand, inhabited by people, the jing was also a “lived space, where people played, worked, or just passed by in their daily life” (pp. 172-75).
In the Ming and Qing periods, travel to famous sites was not restricted to the elites. Religious pilgrimages involved ordinary people and especially women. 9 Jen-shu Wu’s article, “From Travel to Tourism: Tourist Activities and Changes in the Space of Suzhou from 1500 to 1930,” in The City and Chinese Modernity describes the emergence of tourism as an aspect of consumerism. There were some hints of modernity in traditional travel, but Wu shows that modern tourism in the twentieth century was thoroughly commercialized, with travel agencies established in the 1920s. For the new middle class, there was now a concept of leisure and vacation time, which promoted tourism, whereas traditional travel had often been connected to traditional holidays. The railroad made favorite destinations more accessible. At Suzhou, always the most popular destination, “culture” had become a commodity that could be purchased. Yet one may observe that the commoditized culture still focused on the jing of natural landscapes or iconic monuments, not on an urban lived environment per se.
The City and Chinese Modernity offers other examples of commercialization and commodification, but most often under conditions of cultural hybridity, or what the editors call “multiple urbanity.” The articles—individually described here because they might otherwise remain inaccessible to the English reader—aim in different ways to decouple some of the polarities usually associated with discussion of cities in the early modern and modern periods: East and West, state and society, and tradition and modernity.
Hui-min Lai’s “Foreign Goods and Everyday Life among the Beijing Bannermen from 1736 to 1820” provides a fascinating view of the popularity of Western goods in China prior to the Opium War and the opening of treaty ports. Cotton piece goods and glass objects of various types were among the most important goods shipped to Canton by the British East India Company. 10 Contrary to the old idea that there was no market in China for foreign goods until opium was introduced, Lai argues that there was such a strong demand for Western goods that it amounted to a “consumer revolution.” She sees the creation of a consumer society in which anyone having money could buy such goods. Yangwen Zheng’s article, “The Circulation of yanghuo [foreign goods] and the Emergence of the yang [foreign] Urban Mosaic during the Qing Dynasty,” describes shops specializing in foreign goods that appeared in some cities in the late Ming, and in other cities in the eighteenth century. Chiming clocks were probably first introduced by the Jesuit missionaries in the late Ming period and much valued and collected at the Qing court. Eventually in the nineteenth century the use of clocks and watches spread to the commoner population. Other commodities included foreign cloth (also discussed by Lai), opium, and beer. 11
At Shanghai, institutions from the West were transformed in the Chinese context. Ling-ling Lien’s “Commodification of Gender: Department Stores in Republican Shanghai” treats consumerism in a feminist perspective. The subject of department stores—based on a Western model of marketing—has been studied by several historians, 12 but Lien gives the topic a different twist, writing about women as consumers, but at the same time seeing women themselves as the object of consumption. Department stores provided a space for the modern woman to be independent, but women themselves became commoditized, either directly through serving as department store workers and sex workers or indirectly through advertising and marketing. Ning Zhang’s “A Match of Minds: Jai Alai in Republican Shanghai” shows that jai alai, a racquet sport popular in Latin America, became a kind of craze when it was introduced to Shanghai in the 1930s. Appealing to Chinese of all classes, it became a lucrative nighttime entertainment. Unlike horse racing, which the British had introduced and which remained firmly associated with the Western community in Shanghai, jai alai had an international and popular appeal.
The most popular entertainment for the male urban population in Shanghai and other cities was prostitution—which did not need to be introduced from the West. Much has been written about Shanghai courtesans and prostitutes. 13 Prostitution flourished in all cities—wherever there were large numbers of sojourning males living away from their families for long periods as well as a large number of wealthy local patrons. Yangzhou, for example, was famous for its beautiful women. In the Ming and Qing concubines and prostitutes were highly visible and their services readily available. Their important role in the local economy was enhanced by their clothing styles, a “Yangzhou style,” as Finnane shows.
Prostitution was an entertainment for men and a livelihood for the women involved at different levels, but it was also an economic activity that local governments in the twentieth century came to exploit for income. Peter J. Carroll’s “The Place of Prostitution in Early Twentieth-Century Suzhou” focuses on the politicization in the 1930s of the prostitution trade in Suzhou, long a key urban attraction as it had been in Yangzhou. In the Republican period, local authorities exploited the sex trade as a basis for economic development. “Prostitution, whether legal or not, underlay the political economy of a variety of cities and towns, large and small . . ., and [served as] a stimulus to commerce and source of vitally needed state revenue” (p. 153). In the Republican period (1912–1949), local and national governments alike saw that social reform was part of modern urban development as well as modern nationalism. Yet the need for more revenue usually led to promoting vice rather than suppressing it. This moral compromise was dramatically at play in Shanghai, but we see here that Shanghai was not unique in experiencing the mixed messages of modernity. 14
During the Republican period, local authorities not only sought to profit from the income of certain lines of work but also used organizations, such as professional groups, as intermediaries. In “The Relationship between Professional Organizations and Local Governments in Republican China: A Case Study of the Chengdu Teahouse Guild,” Di Wang shows how professional associations (hanghui) began to differentiate themselves from the more traditional occupational guilds and native place organizations (huiguan). They did not represent purely “private” interests as opposed to the state but served to mediate the interests of the local government and teahouses and other local businesses. In the course of the Republican period, Wang sees the state’s control over the professional associations increasing, but the “state” was embodied in local authorities, not the central government. 15 Hui-min Sun’s “Tenant Associations and the Rent Control Movement in Shanghai, 1921–1927,” shows how renters formed tenant associations to protest steadily rising rents against their landlords. Starting in 1910, there had been previous successful petitions and strikes in which the Shanghai International Settlement authorities in effect sided with renters against landlords because they wished to encourage more people to settle in Shanghai. Sun situates these disputes in an international context; rent reduction movements were seen in New York, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and other cities in the early twentieth century. They were an aspect of urban modernity.
The rise of professions and professional groups posed both an opportunity and a challenge to local authorities. Xiaoqun Xu’s “Professional Theater and Urban Culture: the Emergence of Chinese Spoken Drama during the 1920s–1930s” traces the transformation of Western-style theatrical performance from amateur productions that started at elite missionary schools, like St. John’s, to commercial theater productions. The professionalization and commercialization of dramatic performance in Shanghai, the author argues, contributed to the widening gap between urban life and rural society—where drama was part of village or folk culture. May-li Lin’s “The Expansion of Chinese Accountants Business in Modern China: A Case Study of the Practice of Pan Shu-lun & Co., 1927–1945” analyzes the emergence of accounting as a profession. New tax and other business legislation under the Nationalist government created a need for accountants to help businesses comply with the new demands. Conversely, the government trusted the accountants to serve as a bridge between the state and private enterprise. However, it was precisely this connection with both business and the Nationalist government that brought all professional groups under suspicion after the establishment of the Communist government in 1949. Kazuhiro Iwama’s “Between Performance and Propaganda: The Reorganization of the Private Enterprise Staff Class and Mass Movements in Shanghai, 1949–1952” analyzes the fate of these professional groups during the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns of 1951 and 1952. Although the first campaign directly targeted former officials and party members and the second capitalists, both had the effect of destroying independent professional organizations. Although Iwama sees this as another chapter in the tortuous history of modern urban society, these two campaigns can also be seen as a setback to urban modernity and the development of modern cities in the Mao years.
Modernity is usually associated with secularism and rejection of tradition. The lives of three well-known figures, respected members of Shanghai’s Westernized elite, challenge the conventional assumption that elite activists were motivated by secular and largely Western-influenced convictions. Some Chinese reformers were indeed inspired by Christianity to engage in philanthropic and educational projects, but these studies show that when a biographical approach is taken, it is clear that individual motivations were very complex, and also that traditional religious beliefs and practices were not incompatible with civic initiatives often associated with secularism. Chen Yingning (1880–1969) was a leader of a network of intellectuals and professionals that promoted the Daoist practice of inner alchemy. In “Cultivating the Self and Saving the Nation: Lay Urban Practice, Print Culture, and Daoist Inner Alchemy Communities in Early Republican Shanghai,” Xun Liu shows that Chen not only sponsored publications and employed modern technology to disseminate knowledge of Daoist practice but also found that modern science, in which he was educated, was helpful to Daoist alchemy. He even saw Daoist self-cultivation practice as vital for developing Chinese nationalism because it embodied the true essence of Chinese tradition. 16
An even more dramatic evidence of the role of traditional religious belief in the modern and urban Chinese world is found in the figure of Zheng Guanying (1842–1922), described in Chunwu Fan’s “The Flying Phoenix, Self-Cultivation, and Philanthropy: Zheng Guanying and Shanghai’s Religious World.” Zheng was an important comprador, who worked for decades for Western trading companies such as Dent and Co. and Butterfield Swire, and later headed the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, one of China’s earliest government-sponsored enterprises. In the history of modern China, he is best known for his advocacy of political reform. His book Warnings to the Seemingly Prosperous Age (Shengshi weiyan) inspired the young Guangxu emperor (whose Hundred Days’ Reform was quickly suppressed) and the reform movement. As it turns out, this figure who represents modernity and Westernization for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China was a devoted practitioner of Daoist rituals including alchemy. He was an active organizer of organizations that promoted Daoist practice, and his philanthropic activities such as famine relief were motivated by religious conviction.
Paul R. Katz’s “The Religious Life of a Renowned Shanghai Businessman and Philanthropist, Wang Yiting” nicely matches Fan’s article except that Wang Yiting was a devout Buddhist, not a Daoist. Yet the parallels are clear. Wang Yiting (1867–1938) was a prominent and respected member of the Shanghai elite, playing many different roles during his lifetime. Predominantly a talented painter, he nevertheless also served as a comprador to a Japanese shipping company and was also a businessman in his own right. He was for a while active in the revolutionary movement and served as a government official in the Republican period. But throughout his many activities, Wang was a devout Buddhist and an active organizer of Buddhist activities, including “spirit-writing” movements and charitable campaigns. In Katz’s view the life of Wang Yiting shows that it was not necessary to choose between religion and science, nor between tradition and modernity; all these could be embodied in the same person, and the urban environment of Shanghai allowed such diverse paths to historical change. 17
As a conference volume, The City and Chinese Modernity succeeds remarkably well because of its thematic coherence and the uniformly high quality of the individual contributions. It expands knowledge and understanding of topics of ongoing interest such as consumerism, social activism and civil society, and business and professions. Negotiating Urban Space and Speaking of Yangzhou both contribute abundantly to the knowledge of cities in the premodern era. 18 Fei’s claim to generality needs to be tested with other cities, while Finnane’s denial of any generality speaks to an excess of caution. All three books, implicitly or explicitly, however, address agendas set by an older generation of scholars. The next generation of historians of Chinese cities may look forward to newer approaches, perhaps global in perspective and less bound up with the ideological battles and assumptions of an earlier era, although it may be a long time before Chinese historians get away from Sinocentric perspectives.