Zhao Cuier was a creation of elite male fantasy, as Wu Changyuan tells it, capable of ensnaring audiences—both lay and clerical—in the illusionary world of the eighteenth-century Chinese stage. Zhao Cuier is the lead character from the play The Garden of Turquoise and Jade (Feicui yuan). The play tells the story of a poor scholar’s attempt to protect his land from annexation by a ruthless official. The scholar, Shu Depu, is assisted by a winsome vagabond seamstress, Zhao Cuier, and a bumbling deputy of the law, Wang Steamed-Bun. This trio of righteousness is held up as the moral antidote to the destructive power of masculine privilege.

This MA thesis traces how “ethnic Koreans” in northeastern China (chaoxianzu) reshaped their perception(s) of “ethnicity” over the course of the great political and social upheavals from Manchukuo to the People’s Republic of China. By looking into less-explored memoirs and oral histories, this research is interested in dissecting the interrelations between memory-formation and ethnic imagination. Chapter 1 lays the theoretical groundwork for my memory-centered approach, through which I historicize the ethnic Koreans’ conceptualization(s) of “ethnicity” as a process, rather than a self-evident precondition. Chapter 2 reveals the ethnic Koreans’ ambiguous and fluid sense of ethnicity under Manchukuo’s ideology of minzu xiehe (concordia of ethnos). Chapter 3 examines the cultural construction of “Korean ethnicity” advocated by the Chinese Communist Party during the Chinese civil war. Chapter 4 investigates the contestations between the Party-state’s revolutionary narrative and the bottom-up ethnic discourse in the early socialist era. This thesis argues that memory comes to be a mediator reifying the fluid, contingent, and sometimes-contested process of ethnic imagination in between the boundaries of nation-states.

In this project, I explore the life of my grandfather, Zhang Mingde, who served as a village cadre in Hebei Province for over three decades, witnessing profound changes under socialism. While he dutifully implemented the state’s agenda, he also maintained a distinct spiritual worldview, blending folk religion, Daoism, and Buddhism. His writings reveal a man who claimed to be a committed communist but credited his achievements to his faith. This study uncovers the concept of “socialist syncretism,” presenting a complex cultural landscape where local beliefs coexisted with, and sometimes enhanced, the state’s goals. Relying on personal records, oral histories, and local archives, I argue that while the socialist state sought to eradicate local religious beliefs, the villagers’ adaptable belief system played a crucial role in maintaining the harmonious community idealized by the state. This project seeks to deepen our understanding of how ordinary people experienced and navigated radical historical changes.

Shanrendao, or The Way of Goodness, founded by Wang Fengyi (1864-1938), an illiterate peasant from Chaoyang County, Liaoning Province, is one of many hundreds of religious cults in Northeastern China that proliferated in the late Qing. Defined by Prasenjit Duara and Shao Yong as either a redemptive society or a secret society, both designations fail to capture Shanrendao’s identity prior to its absorption into the Wangguo daode hui (Universal Moral Society) in 1928.

Through close reading of Volume 3 of the Shanrendao text, Wang Fengyi yanxing lu (The Words and Deeds of Wang Fengyi), this study explores the formative stage of Fengyi’s doctrines and activism to improve moral customs, circa 1890-1909. Frustrated by a perceived prevalence of moral corruption and desperate to make sense of a seemingly collapsing society, Fengyi borrowed from local customs and reworked Neo-Confucian morality to craft both a metaphysical explanation for the social disorder and a morality-healing technique to ameliorate the ills of his rural neighbors. As Fengyi began to institutionalize his redemptive activism, he incurred the watchful eye of the state; he further faced financial constraints that limited his initiatives. These twin constraints pushed him to join forces with the more socially exalted Daodehui, lending Shanrendao both greater legitimacy and economic resources; as revealed through later volumes in Wang Fengyi yanxing lu, this came at the cost of the founder’s agency.

Using Shanrendao as a case study, this project reveals the circulation of socio-cultural repertoires across classes. Fengyi, by weaving together vernacularized Neo-Confucian ethics and grassroots practices, constructed his metaphysical approach to redeeming the socio-moral order; as his reputation grew within Northeast China, his pastiche of Shanrendao doctrines came to be reintroduced to elites and officials, demonstrating both the persistence and the malleability of “traditional” culture in a modernizing world.

This dissertation captures a critical moment in China’s history when the interest in opera transformed from literati divertissement into an emerging field of scholarly inquiry. Centering around the activities and writings of Qi Rushan (1870-1962), who played a key role both in reshaping the modes of elite involvement in opera and in systematic knowledge production about opera, this dissertation explores this transformation from a transitional generation of theatrical connoisseurs and researchers in early twentieth-century China. It examines the many conditions and contexts in the making of opera—and especially Peking opera—as a discipline of modern humanistic research in China: the transnational emergence of Sinology, the vibrant urban entertainment market, the literary and material resources from the past, and the bodies and identities of performers.

This dissertation presents a critical chronology of the early history of drama study in modern China, beginning from the emerging terminology of genre to the theorization and the making of a formal academic discipline. Chapter One examines the genre-making of Peking Opera in three overlapping but not identical categories: temporal, geographical-political, and aesthetic. It argues that it is within the context of emerging theatrical genres and heated debates on drama in early twentieth-century China that a “researcher mode” of theatrical appreciation became meaningful for Qi Rushan and his contemporaries.

Chapter Two and Three study the link between the urban theater and the emergence of modern drama research in China. Chapter Two examines from a material point of view how studies on China’s native theater were shaped by the local conditions of Republican Beijing. It investigates how the city’s well-established cultural market, unique thriving opera scene, and long-standing performing community fueled the collecting of theatrical materials, thereby providing a solid basis of research artifacts in the transnational competition for texts and things pertinent to Sinological studies. Chapter Three explores the urban theater from the production side and revises the assumption of a linear temporal sequence between theatrical knowledge and production with attention to the local conditions (audiences preferences and entertainment fashion) of the site where the theatrical art develops. It shows that Mei Lanfang’s signatures plays were responding to contemporary market trends rather than being the materialization of any pre-existing aesthetic ideas. It was not until these productions were translated to contexts different from the entertainment market in 1910s and 1920s China that they came to be identified as illustration of an aesthetic representing Chinese theatrical art.

Chapter Four examines the formation and transition of theatrical knowledge through discussion of two kinds of performer education: for career actors and for amateurs. The discussion on education for career actor uncovers a tension between aspiration for full-rounded preparation and the economic and social restraints encountered, while the controversies surrounding amateur performers were windows onto the identity-claims of insiders and outsiders to the performing business. This chapter shows that it was in the course of contemporaneous discussions on what and how to learn about opera performance that the scope and content of theatrical knowledge came into shape.

Chapter Five discusses Qi Rushan’s effort to stabilize an understanding of Chinese theatrical art by writing a history of Chinese opera with textual resources from Chinese antiquity and the early imperial dynasties. It shows how Qi theorized Chinese opera with the constructed gewu—song-and-dance—notion and how he depicted an unbroken genealogy of the Chinese performance tradition dating from the ancient period to recent times. For Qi, gewu was the guiding principle to connect the past and present of Chinese theater and to make an aesthetic that attested to the superiority of Chinese theatrical art.

The concluding chapter reflects the irony of knowledge production about an art form dislocated from its native place and ponders the links between the birth of a scholarship and the loss of the thing being studied. Reviewing Qi Rushan’s immigrant years on Taiwan after he moved there in 1947, it argues that the “geographical” rupture due to the Chinese Civil War engendered new incentives to nationalize the interest in opera in service of the party-state. When theatrical connoisseurs and researchers relocated to Taiwan because of the loss of their homeland, their indulgence in opera was finally accepted as “elegant.”

My dissertation analyzes the representations of gender in cartoons and popular literature in 1920s and 1930s Guangzhou as a window onto the intersection among gender, humor, and identity construction in Republican-era (1911-1949) China. During this period, Guangzhou, among other cities, saw a proliferation of comical works that created an affective community in which both authors and audiences could enjoy, question, or escape from their urban experiences. The scenes and stories represented often exploited gendered characters, motifs, and tropes to express political dissent, to advocate for modern progress, or to caution against moral decadence. While previous scholarship explores the ways in which issues such as footbinding and prostitution became discursive fields in which nationalism and modernity were debated in early twentieth century China, the role that humor played in various gendered debates has been largely overlooked. My study fills this void by emphasizing the ways in which humor was mobilized to respond to changing relations between men and women, the private and the public, state and society, local and national cultures, and China and the global community.

Through close reading of a wide assortment of textual and visual materials—newspapers, popular fiction, cartoon magazines, local opera scripts, and advertisements—I reconstruct the competing discourses on gender ideals and urban life lying below the surface of playful banter or satirical sketches. In particular, I focus on the locally specific elements of humor, such as the use of Cantonese dialect and cultural phenomena particular to the city, to demonstrate the ways in which such commentary participated in, withdrew from, or competed against the conception of a broader national entity at different historical moments. I also use the iconic Modern Girl (and the Modern Boy, her male counterpart) as a category of analysis to reveal not only the masculine construction of local humor and identity, but also the shared but uneven colonial influence and channels of global exchange that linked different cities around the world commercially, visually, and ideologically. My project contributes to the field of modern Chinese history by interrogating the interplay between humor and gender in the conceptions of cosmopolitan modernity and China’s place in the world in local society.

This dissertation studies the contemporary Chinese feminist movement, as it was unfolding in multiple faceted ways from 2015 to 2018, placing it within both the deeper historical context of gender struggles in China’s long twentieth century and within the context of both Chinese and global educational systems. It focuses on Chinese feminists of the post-89 generation, who were largely born between 1985 and 1995, have had no experience of participating in significant social movements and protests that marked China’s highly controversial modernization in the last century, and grew up after 1989 in a commodified and depoliticized social-educational environment. The processes in which they become feminists are interpreted in this study as alternative educational paths.

Although the post-89 cohort of feminists claim to continue the unfinished liberation of Chinese women from the twentieth century, particularly by inheriting the historically constructed term fun�, meaning women as state subjects, they have detached themselves from what may seem to be their immediate historical precedents. It is because in their usage of fun� is no longer predominantly illustrative of class struggle, but instead is de-historicized to serve poststructuralist cultural politics. This nuanced change demands that the post-89 generation feminists and their movement be studied not through the ideas that influence them, but through the ways in which they, as politicized students, embody those ideas in everyday life. This framework puts the contemporary Chinese feminist movement in line with the student protests in twentieth-century China.

The purpose of this study is, in part, to address the underlying educational philosophy of some of the major feminist actions in China that has yet to be discussed in a systematic manner. Works on the politics of pedagogy by Jacques Ranci�re, Augusto Boal, and Gert Biesta shed light on the deeper thinking of social inequality and sex-based injustice that the post-89 generation feminists inject into their consciousness-raising activism. Another important goal, however, is to draw attention to some unexamined assumptions within this movement that may be contradictory to the philosophy of emancipatory education. The new attempts to break through this impasse have unveiled new horizon of feminist education in China.

My project investigates Peking opera actresses playing male roles, or kunsheng, in Republican-era mainland China and in postwar Taiwan. I examine these gender performances through the lens of eroticism, which positions me to consider public affective experiences surrounding kunsheng. To date, Peking opera historiography has emphasized the practices of actors cross-dressing to play women or actresses’ gender-straight acting but rarely pays attention to women cross-dressers. I make critical interventions into existing opera history literature by illuminating the uniqueness and the multiplicity of kunsheng from various aspects of opera performance and everyday life. In this project, I demonstrate how kunsheng actresses as transgressive figures appropriated strategic performances that were inspired by male actors to win over audiences and obtain commercial and artistic achievements, while resisting oppression that patriarchal structures imposed. Through this analysis of kunsheng, I ultimately trace China’s sociocultural and political transformation from an early modern empire to a modern nation-state.

I am trained in both Performance Studies and Chinese cultural and gender history. My project thus brings together Chinese opera history, gender history, Sinophone Studies, performance theory, Queer Studies, and Digital Humanities. This study scrutinizes the different approaches to kunsheng in Republican-era mainland China and in postwar Taiwan to analyze the political and cultural dynamics that resulted in the waning of the practice of cross-dressing in mainland China and its continuation in Taiwan. This comparative analysis fills a lacuna in the scholarship on Peking opera, further demonstrating how the practices of cultural and gender performances in Taiwan challenge the historiography of a hegemonic China and a marginalized Taiwan.

This project is organized into four chapters—all of which draw on an array of archival documents from libraries in Taipei, Shanghai, and Beijing to address a historical transformation or theoretical theme surrounding kunsheng’s gender performances. In Chapter One, I investigate the transformation in public perception of kunsheng’s virtues from 1880-1920. Chapter Two centers on well-known kunsheng Meng Xiaodong (1908–1977) and showcases how media sensation simultaneously challenged and strengthened conventional gender discourses in modern China from 1920-1950. In Chapter Three, I delve into Republican women cross-dressers’ homoerotic desires, arguing that the same-sex love of kunsheng parodied elite men’s same-sex love, and in doing so liberated female desire from the long-standing euphemistic trope of sisterhood. In Chapter Four, I analyze the way Taiwanese Peking opera kunsheng performers have taken advantage of mainland China’s male performers’ artistic legacy to “legitimize” and “effeminize” Taiwan’s Peking opera in postwar Taiwan. Together, these chapters illuminate the ways in which kunsheng, opera critics, and audiences perceived, consumed, and negotiated the public culture of erotica, fluid gender identities, and heterogenous gender roles.