Browsing by Subject "Asian history"

What is a hot pot? As a Chinese cooking method, prepared with a simmering pot of soup stock at the dining table, containing a variety of East Asian foodstuffs and ingredients, hot pot is not just one dish. This thesis is aimed at using the booming hot pot catering industry in over the last three decades as an entry point to examine the shift from the socialist asceticism to the capitalist abundance in contemporary urbanities in PRC and attempt to address the following questions: first, in which ways does a hot pot express the post-socialist Chinese society? Second, how does the transformation and increasing popularity of hot pot represent the modern middle-class lifestyle? Third, what can hot pot tell us about the spread of a food trend via mass media and popular culture? Combining the ethnographical engagement with the physical restaurant space exemplified by Dong Lai Shun and Hai Di Lao, and an anthropological approach towards the cultural and historical representations of hot pot, this thesis argues that hot pot represents the postmodern feature in the post-socialist China.

The dissertation explores the artistic and cultural histories behind Egyptian national monuments and museums that were built and renovated by North Korean artists and architects. Archival materials from the American University in Cairo, Seoul National University, and the North Korean Research Center are used to contextualize these cultural sites within the broader history of diplomatic exchanges between the two nations. Such exchanges are framed as part of the international Cold War and inter-Korean competition. By piecing together resources such as government documents, artworks, and media coverage, the dissertation provides a history of exchanged aesthetics, ideologies, and methods of memorialization connecting the Korean Peninsula to the Middle East. The dissertation attends to questions of representation and national identity as they pertain to national monuments, museums, and cultural sites.

The dissertation begins by outlining the cultural and political developments between Egypt with North and South Korea from 1956 to present, complicating Cold War as a concept and extending beyond outdated geographic and temporal limitations. Then the dissertation uses Egyptian news coverage to trace the history of three buildings resulting from Hosni Mubarak’s 1983 diplomatic tour in Asia; the Japanese-funded Cairo Opera House (1988), the North Korean-designed October War Panorama (1989), and the Chinese-built Cairo Conference Center (1989). Next, the study theorizes the function of North Korean museums in Egypt and questions the implications of importing nationalistic aesthetics. Subsequent analysis addresses paintings by North Korean artists in the Egyptian National Military Museum that take inspiration from international films set in Egypt through the ages, from antiquity to the colonial era. The dissertation concludes with an exploration of the relationship between North Korean Juche ideology and the display of diplomatic gifts at the International Friendship Exhibition.

This paper seeks to contribute to the study of early postwar Japanese women’s history by focusing on rural women, a group that has received relatively less attention in recent scholarship. It aims to understand the changes in the lives and worldviews of Japanese farm women from 1945 to 1950 as shaped by the ambitious initiatives of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), the Japanese government, and the local reception and internalization of new ideologies. Through the lens of women-and-lifestyle-related content in Ie no hikari 家の光 (Light of the Home), the most influential rural family magazine in prewar and postwar Japan, this paper intends to explore how the magazine tailored official campaigns to the rural context with the help of local activists and farm women themselves, leaving both tangible and intangible impacts on the daily lives of women and their families. It also investigates the various ways in which local women responded to and interacted with the official new life campaigns that promised them concrete improvements in material lives and social status. As the magazine served as a middle ground where top-down initiatives intersected with local efforts to internalize official languages in the late 1940s, it also provides access to the local voices of farm women at the time. These precious voices, however limited, allow us to better situate rural women within the tabulating social milieu of early postwar Japan and to delve deeper into their daily lives.

This thesis examines colonial exhibitions as imperial propaganda tools in Taiwan, particularly the 1935 exhibition The Taiwan Exposition under Japanese rule, and compares it with fascist Italy's 1940 Mostra d’Oltremare and Korea's 1929 Chosun Exposition. Among the research on Taiwan's history during the Japanese colonial period, this study delves into a nuanced analysis of how Japan, aspiring to match Western imperial powers, adopted and adapted the concept of exhibitions to compete with the West and to project its imperial ambitions. It contextualizes Japan's engagement with museum and exhibition culture as part of its broader modernization and imperial agenda. By delving into the exhibitions' function in manifesting the regimes’ ambitions through carefully curated displays, artwork, and spatial designs, the analysis underscores The Taiwan Exposition as not merely strategic embodiments of political power and ideology but also as cultural spectacles designed to engender a colonial fascination. This approach subtly packages and presents these exhibitions in a way that ideologically shapes colonial subjects, molding their perceptions through the awe-inspiring experiences they offer, thereby spotlighting The Taiwanese Exposition's pivotal role in this intricate process. By juxtaposing The Taiwan Exposition with its counterparts, the study seeks to unravel the layered expressions of colonialism, nationalism, and cultural exchange, offering insights into the WWII colonial discourse.

As Carlos Ginsburg pointed out, “What is much harder to reject in principle (but also as much harder and more laborious to achieve) is an analytical reconstruction of the intricate web of minute relations that underlies the production of any work of art, however simple” , my project will zoom in the process of visualization of the socialist China and post-socialist China from a cultural-microhistorical perspective—propaganda poster, stamp and philately, political pop art—to figure out the continuity and discontinuity of this process, and the relations of art and politics. In a micro level, the trajectory of this thesis will follow the discussion of the visualization history of socialist China and post-socialist China, and the relation between art and politics in Mao and post-Mao era. Rather than simply using the visual analysis as main research method, based on the primary archives and secondary resources, I will choose artwork, art collector, and artist as the three typical cases with different research methodologies, including iconography, gender studies, etc. From discussing the propaganda posters’ positive and negative influences to political movements in 1950s and 1960s (Chapter 1), further to the complicated roles of stamp collector and how it embedded with official and individual discourses in 1960s and 1970s (Chapter 2), finally to the mislabeled political pop art of Wang Guangyi’s work in 1980s and 1990s (Chapter 3), this thesis aims to offer a possible way to understand the politicalizing art process in modern Chinese history.

This dissertation examines the visual production of capital in socialist realist images during the Maoist era (1949-1976). By deconstructing the pseudo-opposition between capitalism and socialism, my research demonstrates that, although the country was subject to the unchallenged rules of capital and its accumulation in both domestic and international spheres, Maoist visual culture was intended to veil China's state capitalism and construct its socialist persona. This historical analysis illustrates the ways in which the Maoist regime recoded and resolved the versatile contradictions of capital in an imaginary socialist utopia. Under these conditions, a wide spectrum of Maoist images played a key role in shaping the public perception of socialism as a reality in everyday lives. Here the aesthetic protocols of socialist realism functioned to create for the imagined socialist world a new currency that converted economic values, which followed the universal laws of capital, into the fetish of socialism. Such a collective "cognitive mapping" in Fredric Jameson's words - which situated people in the non-capitalist, socialist world and inserted them into the flow of socialist time - rendered imperceptible a mutated capitalism on the terrain of the People's Republic of China under Mao. This research aims to build a conversation between the real, material space subordinated to the laws of capital and the visual production of imaginary capital in the landscapes of socialist realism, for the purpose of mapping out how uneven geographical development contributed to activating, dispersing, and intensifying the global movement of Soviet and Chinese capital in the cultural form of socialist realism. This study also illustrates how, via the image-making process, socialist realist and Maoist images influenced by Mao's romantic vision of the countryside were meant to neutralize this uneven development in China and mask its on-going internal colonialism. Through this analysis, I argue that, in the interesting juncture where art for art's sake and art for politics intersected, Maoist visual culture ended up reproducing the hegemony of capital as a means of creating national wealth.

The literati stereotype of Modern Chinese Art began as a conservative adaption of Chinese nationalist reform during the early twentieth century. Modern stereotypes provided an intuitive, common-sense way of acting and negotiating the complexities of difference. The Fantastic Theater of Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century chronicles an alternate history of Chinese émigrés’ embrace of the stereotypical image of literati culture. That stereotype was a modern form of visibility and recognition of Chinese identity. From China to diverse Western locales—Geneva, London, France, New York, and California—the literati stereotype reconciled the dual undesirable conditions of Westerners’ absent understanding and negative misunderstanding of China. The stereotype was a positive compromise of optics, expectations, and self-presentation.The visual archive of the literati stereotype examines literati scholars and their associations with learning, philosophy, and ink painting. Sculpture, books, design, advertising, ceramics, photography, architecture, and personal ephemera allow me to assemble a new approach to the artists Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), Lang Jingshan (1892-1995), Zhang Shuqi (1900-1957), Yu Jingzhi (1900-1980), and Wang Jiyuan (1893-1975), to write a different history of the Bollingen Foundation, the lives of the Chew Family and their China Art Center in Carmel, and Mai-mai Sze, the little-known translator of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting.

In 1808, Charles Fourier published Theory of the Four Movements, a utopian socialist manifesto describing the emergence of a fundamental rupture between man and nature, the consequence of a metabolic disruption of material, natural, and social flows. As a remedy, he prescribed the construction of phalansteries, self-contained and economically autarkic communal structures seamlessly uniting spaces of both production and consumption, overcoming the division between town and country. The term phalanstère was a neologism of Fourier’s, a combination of “phalanx” and “monastery” intended to conjure up images of both the hivelike coordination of the Greco-Roman military machine and the spiritual purity of the isolated monastery. By the advent of the twentieth century, Fourier’s ideas had spread; the explosive growth of industrial capitalism in hitherto ‘undeveloped’ corners of the world spurred a generation of imitators, critics, and revolutionaries who, influenced by this legacy of agrarian utopianism, sought to actualize plans of their own. This thesis considers the reception and reinterpretation of utopian socialist communal movements by Chinese reformers and revolutionaries during the first three decades of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on how these figures understood the construction of experimental communities like communes and model villages as a potential solution to the geopolitical crisis of China’s subordination to Euro-American-Japanese imperialist powers. Beginning with an initial survey of Euro-American utopian movements, this thesis then turns to Atarashiki-mura, a Japanese utopian village community founded by Saneatsu Mushanokōji, an aristocratic left-wing intellectual. Through an analysis of essays and accounts published by Zhou Zuoren, a leading Chinese intellectual who visited Atarashiki-mura, this thesis then considers debates over the “New Village Movement” (xincun yundong 新村運動), Zhou Zuoren’s attempt to establish similar model communities in China. Following these debates through the following years, this project then turns to the Work Study Mutual Aid Corps (gongdu huzhu tuan工讀互助團), an experimental mutual aid society established by a Beijing-based student named Wang Guangqi during the height of May Fourth Movement-era activism. Through an analysis of the collapse of the Work Study Mutual Aid Corps, I reconsider why many left-wing socialists turned away from utopian communalism towards revolutionary mass politics. In their stead, a number of less overtly ideological rural reform programs, such as Yan Yangchu’s Mass Education Movement (MEM) (quan guo shi zi yundong 全國識字運動), were established; the architects of these projects sought to dramatically transform rural society yet avoid a revolution. Following links between these organizations and leading military figures of the 1920s and 1930s, I move a decade forward to consider the history of Xingan Land Reclamation Zone (Xingan tunken qu 興安屯墾區), a combination model village, military installation, and autarkic factory-farm that was the pet project of the warlord Zhang Xueliang (張學良). I argue that, despite the radically different political visions of their architects and the circumstances of their conceptualization, these commune projects shared a similar logic of reform: the creation of experimental, spatially-bound living facilities would make possible the emergence of a new sort of Chinese citizen-subject, an individual capable of universalizing the commune model and bringing about a new national community. But, as I attempt to demonstrate, in shifts from Zhou Zouren’s fantasies of a pacifistic and agrarian socialist movement to the weaponization of the model village ideal in pursuit of settler colonial frontier expansion, each element within this reform equation was transformed. The ideal subject at the heart of the commune space moved from urban intellectuals and students to destitute peasantry and finally conscripted soldiers, while the physical location of these experimental communities shifted from the countryside to urban metropolises like Beijing and ultimately the frontiers of Manchuria. These projects, initially socialistic in conception—seeking to produce a space outside of capitalism—would instead be bent towards the exigencies of capital’s ceaseless expansion. Fourier’s neologism is thus illustrative of the opposing social forms these communities tended to take in twentieth-century China: monastic millenarianism on the one hand and a fascistic embrace of military mobilization on the other. Zhou Zuoren had intended the communal New Village to be a space beyond the sphere of capitalist production, an alternative path to modernity, but when the dream of rural reform was seized upon by warlords and reform bureaucrats, this space “outside” of capitalism would instead become the tip of its spear, penetrating into the frontier countryside. In the hands of the Kuomintang (KMT), Fourier’s phalanstère was far more phalanx than monastery. Despite the practical failures of these projects, this thesis concludes by arguing that utopian communalism possessed an enduring legacy: though many of these rural reform schemes fell short of their goals, they were central nodes through which new narratives of nationality and modernity were disseminated.

From 1931 to 1945, during The Sino-Japanese War as officially defined in China, a group of American journalists and military personnel in China created long-form documentary reportage works on the theme of Chinese society in the Sino-Japanese War. These works did not only show the battle scenes of major battles, but also focused on the social situation in the rear of China, as well as the Sino-Japanese War in China's modern history, to analyze the causes of the outbreak of the war, the problems of Chinese society exposed in the war, and the political trend of China after the end of the war. This article argued that in this series of reportage, with the United States joining the Allies as a turning point, the focus of the author's creation has changed. In the early stages, the author's attention focused on the front-line positions, and several battlefield sketches were completed. Writers tended to be hopeful about a unified China destined to win the war during this period. But as China and the United States forged an alliance after Pearl Harbor, U.S. personnel in China gained more access to information about China, and the creators of reportage followed the government and turned their focus to China's domestic political party issues rather than fighting Japan. In their works, these authors show a sympathetic attitude toward the Chinese Communist regime and try to influence U.S. policy toward China through public opinion. These attacks on U.S. Policy in the Far East reflect the idealistic side of the writer, but their fundamental political logic remained the recognition of U.S. participation in the internal political management of the Third World after World War II. War reportage, after participating in war propaganda, showed a political rather than an objectivity.

In keeping with the recent paradigm shift, this dissertation approaches the indigenization of Christianity in China from a different perspective. Rather than conceiving indigenization as the devolution of missionary power to indigenous leaders, the study focuses on the emergence of Chinese Protestant intellectuals and their ability to engage the public space—how they have historically engaged their religious tradition to address the broader public during crises. It does so by examining the lives and works of several Chinese Christian intellectuals as they negotiated with the most transformative events in twentieth-century Chinese history: modernizing reforms in the 1910s and 1920s, prolonged resistance against the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and 1940s, and ideological domestication after 1950. With transnational and indigenous resources, these people created a captivating vision of national salvation for their country.

The first three chapters of this work reconstruct the intellectual development among mainstream Chinese Protestants in Republican China by tracing the rise and unraveling of the liberal consensus that integrated three spheres of emphasis in Christianity to lead China in progress. Such endeavor offered an inspiring message of national salvation by individual moral improvement, social implementation of reformist ministries, and transcendence of national boundaries for world solidarity. However, starting in the 1930s, a group of Christian intellectuals’ continued exploration led to increasing ideological affinity to socialism and organizational closeness to the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, another group turned to conservative theology and began to advocate for a national as well as spiritual deliverance that could not be reduced to morality and social service.

The last three chapters document these Christian intellectuals’ response to an unprecedented challenge: a centralized and ideologically charged state. During the Civil War, the Christian socialists saw the Communist triumph as an eschatological victory of “light” over “darkness,” while the conservative group struggled to create Christianity’s continuing relevance in China. Despite their adaptability and courage in the early 1950s, the totalitarian regime soon engulfed public space, and these intellectuals found themselves marginalized through either bureaucratization or exile, thwarting their nation-saving longings. Failing to achieve the public intellectual mission haunted them in their last years. It also prompted many to return to the Christian faith as they tried to reorient themselves to China’s unfinished quest for modernization, which seemed yet to reveal its hidden directions.

Overall, English monographs on Chinese Protestant intellectuals are few. This dissertation aims to narrate a story of the intellectual odyssey of Chinese Protestantism in the twentieth century, from the birth of Republican China in 1911 through the height of ideological fanaticism in the Cultural Revolution. Using case studies, the dissertation shows that the evolving perspectives of these Christian intellectuals have never escaped the gravitational pull of the grand narrative of national salvation, for which they infused highly transnational influences into active public engagement. Eventually, despite seemingly within the seekers’ grasp, the vision of deliverance proved fleeting as it became co-opted by the power of the state, yet without failing to throw subsequent followers into new cycles of hope and violence propelled by the ever-present pressures for change.