UC San Diego

My dissertation studies the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement in 1911. What I see in this movement is the invention of the new rhetoric and the new political repertoires (such as mass media, demonstrations, public meetings, speeches, and numerous revolutionary pamphlets) that emerged in China during the first decade of the twentieth century. The rhetoric centered on the issue of "quan," which included both political rights and economic rights. The discourse of tax became linked to notions of mastership (zhu) of the polity. Drawing upon archival sources, diaries, memoirs, correspondence, transcripts of meetings, bank reports, account books, and propaganda pamphlets and newspapers, I argue that the Railway Protection Movement in Sichuan entailed unprecedented grassroots participation. The movement experience was filtered through the media to create a new political community, which transformed the ways in which politics were conducted in China. To be more specific, the old, bureaucratic imperial political culture was abandoned in favor of a popular republicanism in which elected assemblymen, students, intellectuals, and other local elites collaborated and competed in creating a new polity and a new understanding of the Chinese nation. In a broader sense, my dissertation contributes to the understanding of how the world became a world of nation states and how Chinese people responded to that transformation