The Sichuan Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) is always a popular topic in Chinese academia, while the Western historians rarely discuss its significance. When I first begin my research two years ago, I tried to restore the significance of the Sichuan Army to make it recognized to the Western scholarship. However, after searching the primary sources of the army, I realized that they were simply portrayed as nationalistic and patriotic. I began to deepen my research by combining the materials from the Communist Government, the Nationalist Government, the local archives, and the oral history from both educated and uneducated soldiers. Upon my research, I find that the Sichuan Army is a complex subject to explore. In fact, besides the contribution to the war, the Sichuan Army reveals not only the political struggle between Chiang Kai-shek and the warlords from the top level, but also the reactions of the Sichuan Army personnel to the war from below.

The formation of a unique identity, the obstacles to retaining culture in a new country, and the American government’s role in these issues during and after the Vietnam War are topics that have been widely examined by scholars of Vietnamese American history. However, these works have often overlooked the early and essential concerns of the community upon their entrance into the United States, as well as taken the differences between the first and second waves of refugees for granted. This paper will seek to discuss the Vietnamese American experience in the 1970s and 1980s with a specific focus on a few concerns Vietnamese refugees had in these years. Specifically, I will be looking at Vietnamese American periodicals published in this time period in order to show these concerns through their coverage in printed material. I will also use several oral history interviews with Vietnamese refugees of the second wave to help corroborate their prevalence. I argue that Vietnamese Americans were primarily interested in three points, adaptation, immigration, and politics, during their initial settlement in the United States, and that these concerns were more apparent with the second wave of immigrants that arrived from 1978 to 1980 than their previous counterparts. In conclusion, this paper, by examining select periodicals published by the Vietnamese American community and oral histories, highlights the often undervalued aspects of early Vietnamese American history that were crucial to the diaspora’s survival and assimilation into American society.

After founding the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reluctantly realized that its traditional way of governing – relying on revolutionary cadres to directly mobilize the masses – was no longer sufficient for its new identity as the ruling party of China. As a result, the Party made a compromise between its Marxist ideology and the actual need to utilize technocrats. It did so by forming the “three-in-one mode.” This mode comprised of the CCP, the technocrats, and the masses, and was applied to various fields, including industry, agricultural production, literature, and education. The mode’s success in practice was also credited by Chairman Mao as the key to eliminating snail fever, a symbolic health campaign in Maoist China. Utilizing newly available primary sources from Guangdong, one of the endemic provinces, this thesis provides a critical reexamination of the mode’s actual practice in the deworm campaign. It argues that practicing the three-in-one mode was a crucial part for the Party to construct the socialist state, but it encountered dilemmas when it tried to simultaneously utilize and control various insubordinate agents and failed to keep compromise between upholding its political agenda while not intervening in scientific pursuits. As this thesis shows, facing these challenges, the Party consolidated its leadership position and overcame inertia in local society by politicizing the campaign, thus derailed the mode from its initial design and brought notably high costs to the campaign starting in late 1958.

This dissertation examines how multiple imperial powers in Chinese treaty port cities interacted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It centers on China’s two largest treaty port cities: Tianjin and Shanghai, two cities that were divided into several colonial concessions alongside the Chinese districts from the 1860s to 1940s. Historically, while Shanghai was characterized by its tripartite division of governance—the British-dominated International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese municipality, Tianjin was home to up to nine foreign-controlled concessions (British, American, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Belgian, Austro-Hungarian, and Italian). This dissertation inquires into how these multiple imperialisms shaped, and were shaped by, these two cities. Situated at the intersection of modern Chinese history, empire studies, and urban history, this dissertation investigates how the multi-pronged and multifarious interactions between various imperial powers shaped the urban politics of these two cities, as well as their urban development. While much scholarship on colonial history has focused on the bilateral relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, my research reveals the multiplicity, multilateralism, and multilayered trajectories at the heart of the colonial experiences of both imperial powers and the Chinese. Drawing on a wide range of multi-lingual historical materials located in different parts of the world, this dissertation underscores the density and concentration of crisscrossing imperial trajectories within cities while situating Chinese colonial history within a global comparative framework.

This dissertation argues that children have contributed significantly to the rise and longevity of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) power. Utilizing a broad and varied source base—including cadre work reports, newspapers, and wartime primary school textbooks—it asks and answers three broad questions. First, prior to China’s War of Resistance (1937-1945), how had individuals associated with the Chinese Communist movement historically conceptualized children and childhood? In short, what was their ideal-type “communist child,” and what type of childhood should this young individual experience? Second, during the war, what institutions did adults devise in order to realize their ideal-type “communist child” in the flesh? Third, what was the lived experience of children who grew up during this critical period? How did they respond to adult prerogatives? To what extent, if at all, did they become “communist children”? Relying on close readings of government directives, cadre work reports, newspapers, pedagogical journals, wartime primary school textbooks, and many other primary source materials, this project aims to contextualize and excavate rural children’s life experiences. In doing so, it argues that children made critical contributions to multiple war efforts, as spies, sentries, and saboteurs, and to building Communist Party hegemony as agents of revolutions. It concludes that a focus on children as historical actors highlights the centrality of their labor to the CCP’s military success, state-building efforts, and ascendance to political power. Finally, by juxtaposing the bourgeoning party-state’s ideal-type “communist child” with accounts of what actual children did and said, this project moves the historiography of Chinese children from one focused solely on the intellectual history of childhood to, instead, the first generation of children to be fully raised with the Chinese socialist system.

Since its enactment in 1979, the One Child Policy—which in theory limited Chinese couples to one child each—has made global headlines and been the focus of publications in a wide array of fields from public health to political science. Nevertheless, the majority of these works privilege the perspective of the state. Such accounts give little consideration to the decades leading up to the policy’s implementation and reaffirm the monolithic official narrative that radical state intervention was critical for reducing population growth and enabling rapid economic development.

This dissertation seeks to emphasize the part played by individuals in shaping their own reproductive futures, granting users of birth control agency in a scholarly discourse dominated by top-down policies. Drawing on both archival and oral history, I examine birth control and abortion practices in the longue durée, beginning with the consolidation of Nationalist Party rule (1927-1949) and ending with the 2015 implementation of the Two Child Policy, which allows for two children per couple. In particular, I focus on the 50-year period preceding the enactment of the One Child Policy, drawing on the lived experience of birth control and abortion practices in three cities to complicate and challenge official narratives.

My findings reveal that birth control and abortion had been utilized in urban China from at least as early as the Republican period (1912-1949), and that throughout the twentieth century, contraceptive practices differed according to class, location, gender, and other markers of identity. Furthermore, despite the introduction of an elaborate matrix of mechanisms to deepen state control over reproduction both before and during the One Child Policy era, this process was fraught with obstacles and inconsistencies. The result was that individual and familial considerations continued to shape reproductive decisions even amidst intensifying family planning campaigns. Contributing to interdisciplinary studies of medicine, the history of reproduction in China, and gender and sexuality studies, I highlight the coexistence and syncretism of traditional, Western, and folk contraceptive methods, reliance on abortion as a primary form of contraception, and the endurance of gendered reproductive responsibilities.