This dissertation examines the relationship between state visions of penal reform and actual conditions in women’s prisons in the coastal cities of Shanghai and Tianjin during a quarter century of political change encompassing Nationalist political control, Japanese occupation, civil war, and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. In particular, my research addresses a body of literature on the “woman problem,” a topic of heated public debate centered on the status of women and their proper role in twentieth-century China. I ask the following question: what was the place of problem women — the unruly, the indigent, and the criminal — within the woman problem? Even though women criminals were among the most disenfranchised members of Chinese society, their lives touched on important issues of national debate about women’s purported inherent weakness and its relationship to national weakness. Government reformers and planners believed that the reform of criminal women — who were often compelled to serve sentences in modern prisons — played an integral role in successful state building.

This dissertation demonstrates how industrializing policies of the Chinese socialist state and grassroots practices of industrial employees constituted a new kind of urban space in China after 1949, shaped by shifting social narratives about the differences between the rural and the urban and between the factory and the city. It considers the ways in which factory cadres promoted a gendered order of factory space, emphasizing women’s selfless contribution to production and their families and drawing women’s labor toward the developmental goals of the factory and the state. Utilizing internal factory documents, factory and local gazetteers, oral history, and ethnographic observations, this study analyzes how industrial space was regulated by state officials and formed by the needs and demands of factory employees and their families. In centering space as symbolic, concrete, and lived, this work develops a new understanding of the history of urban space in China, one that accounts for the contradictions and unevenness in how it evolved and the labor and actions of those who made it possible. My research weaves together a story about space with the making and unmaking of China’s state-owned factories and, in so doing, elucidates the intimate collective experiences of Chinese socialism and its afterlives.

In 1897, the Japanese government began its effort to make modern Japanese citizens out of Han Taiwanese schoolgirls in its first overseas colony, Taiwan (1895–1945). As a latecomer and the only non-Western empire, Japanese leaders showcased educational efforts in Taiwan to cast Japan as a benevolent colonizer. Educational efforts in Taiwan targeted the masses, including girls, in contrast to most European colonies in Africa and Asia where only elites received education. Through the public education of girls, the Japanese leadership implemented its version of modern female citizenship – “good wives, wise mothers” who were essential for producing loyal and healthy male citizens necessary for building a strong empire. The education of girls was a national and colonial project as Japanese leaders embarked on nation-building and empire-building efforts.

Using a combination of archival research and interviews, this project investigates how Japanese colonial education of girls shaped the daily lives, self-perceptions, and memories of Taiwanese girls. My research suggests three patterns. First, a discrepancy existed between the intentions of the colonists and the impact on the colonized: while the colonial government intended to train Taiwanese girls to become loyal wives and mothers of the Japanese empire, the colonized sought education as a way to increase family income or enhance their daughters’ marriageability. Second, experiences in colonial schools and the impact of public education depended on one’s nationality, gender, and socioeconomic status as Japanese colonial policy restructured and redefined communities and divisions. Finally, the colonial legacy lingers on as Taiwanese women and men used their Japanese educational experiences to construct colonial nostalgia and critique the postwar Chinese Nationalist government. Compared to Chinese and Koreans who suffered from Japanese imperialistic aggression, Taiwanese are known as the most pro-Japan people in East Asia. An examination of schoolgirls’ memories helps explain this phenomenon and furthers our understanding of the current geopolitics in East Asia.

"Marriage Laws and Practices in South China, 1930-1980" traces and compares different models of state regulation of marriage via laws and campaigns and people's responses over five decades. It focuses on twentieth-century South China, a time and place in which successive regimes in China and a colonial government in Hong Kong each tried to reform marriage customs, with differences in scopes and methods across the Hong Kong–China border. In China under the Nationalist and collaborationist regimes and under the Communist Party in the People's Republic of China, the national government and its provincial counterpart adopted an active agenda to reform marriage, in contrast to the laid-back approach by the post-war colonial government in Hong Kong. Through analyzing changes in marriage customs in the context of three marriage laws--the Nationalist Civil Code in 1930, the People's Republic of China Marriage Law in 1950, and the Marriage Reform Ordinance in Hong Kong in 1971, this dissertation crosses the chronological divides of the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. It suggests that regime changes or political campaigns had a real but limited effect on changes in habits and customs. Furthermore, the regional specificity of South China and cross-border marriages in China and Hong Kong during the Maoist era made marriage governance more challenging for the state, as the people were less receptive to the state's message of frugal weddings and transaction-free marriage. Gradually the state in China evolved into a regulatory behemoth, and its people's ability to act outside the law gradually diminished as state capabilities to regulate marriage expanded between the 1950s and the 1970s. Nonetheless, urban and rural residents frequently found ways to manipulate politics and policies while interacting with multiple levels of the Chinese state (local, provincial, national) and the colonial state in Hong Kong to retain their marriage practices and customs despite relentless campaigns from the top.

This dissertation undertakes a historical examination of twentieth-century maritime Manchuria (Northeast China) to explore the role of seaborne interactions and coastal labor activities in shaping East Asian integration as well as social and environmental crises. "Maritime Manchuria" refers to the Bohai/Yellow Sea Rim, the area that runs along Manchuria, tracing the edge of east and north China and the Korean Peninsula, and extending into the corner of the Pacific. It is composed of port cities, less urbanized coastal villages, and the sea. The rim is not just a physical space, but also a space defined by social and economic relations. Questions animating this dissertation concern the kinds of human activities required to bring this rim into existence, the types of people who lived along the rim, and how they contributed to the development of the region.

The dissertation has two major goals: to highlight the transnational networks of commercial, cultural, and knowledge exchanges in the region, and to take full account of the everyday lives of local laborers, including male dock workers, women who grew seaweed and collected shellfish on shore, fishermen, students who were sent down to the coastal rural villages, and entrepreneurs. Its underlying argument is that region-making, nation-building, and environmental transformations require attention to those who made their living along the Manchurian coast. It shows the dialectic of transnationalism and modernity, which entailed the convergence of ideas, the circulation of commodities, and confrontations centered on labor displacement and marine environmental crises.

“Inventing the Socialist Child” illustrates the thinking, institution-building, and daily practices by which childhood was reformulated and shaped in the context of socialist nation-building in urban China from 1949 to 1966. This project draws on archival and published documents, mostly from the cities of Shanghai and Tianjin, to demonstrate that, despite numerous and overlapping political campaigns, unstable foreign relations, and rapid policy changes during the decades following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, one area in which the state had a remarkably consistent policy was its efforts to foster a specific kind of socialist childhood. Although the officials of the Maoist state believed children should be reared by their families, their goal of producing cooperative, revolutionary citizens required efforts to constrain non-state “bad influences.” State officials’ wariness about the values imparted by family and community members was compounded by the mobilization of women for production, which took many adult women out of the home and had the potential to leave children unsupervised for long periods. The desire to supplement or supplant inadequate supervision of children caused the state to intrude in family structure and child-rearing in new and important ways. “Inventing the Socialist Child” helps scholars understand how the shift to socialism brought major changes to every area of life, including gender roles, family life and child rearing, and the everyday experience of childhood during a time of revolutionary change. “Inventing the Socialist Child” enters broader conversations about childrearing and family-state relations in the postwar era around the world, and demonstrates that China used children in a tool of its postwar stabilization and nation-building efforts, deploying images of children in domestic and international propaganda, as well as actual children as agents of state-directed change—both ideological and practical—within families and society.

This dissertation examines the historical development of dentistry and the discourse of oral hygiene in China from the late imperial era to contemporary times. It traces the development of dentistry from a marginal part of the colonial project ofNorth American medical missionaries to its establishment as a distinct field combining US surgical technology, Soviet medicine, and traditional Chinese medical theories under the People's Republic. Focusing on the connections between dental development, the discourse of oral hygiene, and everyday life, this study reveals how teeth and mouths transformed from intimate body parts into subjects of scientific study, consumerism, and healthcare in modern China.

To excavate a history that has not been told about dentistry in a non-Western context, the study focuses on two main themes. First, examining how dentistry became institutionalized and professionalized in modern China and to what extent its development diverged from that of Western medicine, the dissertation offers a new layer of complexity to the Western-China medical encounter. It highlights the transnational nature of knowledge production and circulation in the formation of modern Chinese dentistry. Second, the study historicizes the shifting perception of teeth in relation to the body. It analyzes the impact of oral hygiene on the formation of self-identity, its importance within the state public health initiatives, and how it reconfigured the body as a revolutionary subject.

By analyzing the historical trajectory of dentistry in China, this dissertation provides insights into the transformation of dental practices, the discourse of oral hygiene, and their meanings for different groups of people within Chinese society. It contextualizes the history of dentistry in China's twentieth-century revolutions, tracing its co-evolution with nation-state building, changing social norms of hygiene and personal image, and everyday consumption patterns. It thus establishes connections between the history of dentistry and the broader social and cultural history of modern China.

My dissertation explores the roots of China’s environmental consciousness through the lens of Northeast Chinese (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) forestry conservation and wildlife protection. It is conventional wisdom that the Maoist state neglected environmental protection in favor of a drive to harness the environment for socialist construction. Only after Mao’s death, scholars assert, were laws promulgated to protect the environment, and it was not until the 1980s that China began to concern itself with environmental consciousness. My dissertation contests the prevalent idea that China in the 1950s and the 1960s was environmentally unfriendly and ignorant by showing that the discussion of environmental protection in could be dated back to the 1950s and the 1960s.

It places an exceptional emphasis on the role of scientists, who actively participated in national and international discussions on environmental science, in the process of conservation policy-making. Moreover, my dissertation suggests that diverse and complicated factors such as bureaucratic compromises, the local economy, and the government’s relationship to indigenous Northeast peoples were behind the environmental degradation of the People’s Republic. Local struggles over the implementation of the state’s environmental policy in Northeast China suggest that current issues of Chinese state-initiated conservation have long historical roots dating back to Maoist China. These include lenient regulation of human utilization of natural resources and insufficient state control of the illegal trade in animals, a practice that was blamed for enabling the recent coronavirus outbreak.