What are the continuities and changes of student activism throughout twentieth-century China? How did students carry out contentious politics during political campaigns of the Maoist era? Scholarships on Chinese student activism have concentrated on two major events: the 1919 May Fourth Movement and the 1989 Tiananmen Protests. Others have also paid attention to student protests in the Republican era, as well as the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. However, studies of student activism in the 1950s have been missing, a decade which was presumably dominated by Communist political campaigns, thus leaving little space for social dissent. There has been no short of research on elite politics regarding the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1956-57, though a bottom-up approach to the topic would reveal a different picture of the events.

My dissertation fills the gap by investigating the spectrum of college student participation in the political campaigns of 1957, including activists, loyalists and those who stayed silent, from Peking University, Wuhan University and Yunnan University. My sources come from declassified archival documents, digital database, documentary films, student journals, official newspapers, memoirs and oral history interviews I conducted in 2014-15 with 65 college students from the late 1950s. I use social movement theories to treat this episode of student activism as contentious politics, and look at student repertoire, organization and mobilization, framing technique, and political opportunity and constraint.

Overall, my dissertation argues that Chinese students in 1957 carried out and passed on similar repertoire and framing technique in comparison to other episodes of student activism, but what made it distinctive was the ambiguous political opportunity and divisions among students that consumed the brief yet intense activism. My dissertation contributes to the ongoing scholarly challenge of the 1949 divide by connecting student activism in the Republic era and the Communist reign, and sheds light on grassroots contentious politics in the Maoist era. As 2017 commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns, student activism of 1957 deserves a bright spot because it has been forgotten for too long.

What was the decisive element for activists’ different individual choices during the Democracy Wall Movement? In other words, what were the primary factors for the Democracy Wall activists adopting either a moderate or radical position? This work employs the studies of factionalism of the Red Guard Movement to investigate the divisions among the Democracy Wall activists. Through analyzing the intentions of activists’ inner- and inter-organizational divergences, across three different phases, mobilization, divergence, and two parallel movements, this thesis argues that political access to educational and career opportunities was the decisive factor for activists’ inter-organizational divergences, which determined whether an activist adopted either a moderate or radical position on a macro-scale. Furthermore, access to higher political status within different organizations was the primary factor for their inner-organizational divergences, which determined whether an activist adopted either a moderate or radical position on a micro-scale.

My dissertation explores the role of race, class, and gender in the political and cultural

interactions between the African Diaspora and China. I examine the official and unofficial racial

discourses produced and practiced during the Republican Period and in the People’s Republic of

China, drawing attention to continuities as well as shifts in racial thinking in China across the

1949 divide and its impact on the political and cultural relationships of Black and Chinese

peoples. Most of this research focuses on the impact of Chinese racial discourse on visits and

other interactions with people of the African Diaspora, particularly African Americans in China

as well as analyzing the Chinese cultural productions of blackness. From the mid-1920s to the

late 1960s a continuous flow of African Americans traveled to and lived in pre and post-

Communist China. This study finds that long-term anti-Blackness in China has led to uneven and

negative relations despite the Sino-Black Solidarity that was expressed in the wake of World War

II and African independence movements.

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.

Until the late nineteenth century camphor, extracted from the camphor tree cinnamomum camphora native to southeast China, Taiwan, and Japan, was a luxury commodity used for religious and medicinal purposes. That changed with the invention of celluloid plastic, the world’s first man-made plastic. From around 1870 forward camphor was used as an important industrial input to make celluloid, first for a variety of household goods, and then later as a backing for photographic roll film.

Current literature on camphor only mentions its modern industrial uses in passing, while literature on celluloid often omit its Asian origins. This dissertation seeks to fill that gap by relying on Qing dynasty records, British Parliamentary papers, archival materials from the Celluloid Manufacturing Co. and Eastman Kodak, as well as Republican-era Chinese periodicals. I argue that camphor was an essential commodity for the development of the twentieth century modern world, and that the supply of camphor was dependent upon the political and economic conditions of imperialism in East Asia.

This dissertation, a history of the development of an institutional body at the Northeast Military Academy in the early twentieth century, sets out to show that focusing on regional military institutions such as this school can shed light on how, in addition to shaping the political landscape of early twentieth-century China through their actions, the military men of this time also influenced notions of what was progressive, masculine, and modern, and what kinds of visual, material, and institutional forms Chinese masculinity would take. By closely examining the fragmentary documents produced by the Northeast Military Academy, this dissertation explores the ways in which the men affiliated with the school affirmed their membership in an elite military cohort and their connection to the school and to each other. The school sought to train officers who would be physically fit, psychologically astute, technically skilled, but most importantly of all, act as leaders in battle and embody a source of pride and support for other soldiers, a task that was only partially realized. The textual and visual archive of the Northeast Military Academy chronicle the efforts of instructors and students to absorb, implement, and improve upon new military skills and an effort not simply building strong bodies in the form of its graduates, but also creating bodies that could properly digest specific kinds of knowledge and make it their own. The dissertation attempts to reconstruct their fragmentary experiences by taking the reader on a journey through the rapidly shifting political terrain of Northeast China in the early twentieth century.

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.

The present dissertation deals with how a specific kind of modern political discourse and practice, which was associated with an American style approach to public administration, was introduced, experienced, and then adapted during the 1930s and 1940s in China. The research focuses on local officials who graduated from the Central Politics School, an institution established by the Nationalist Party to train professional public administrators. These individuals were supposed to modernize the entire system of Chinese local governance, making it more rational by bringing it inline with the precepts of scientific knowledge and the scientific method. The actions of the school’s graduates in various counties expose the failure of orthodox public administration methods to deal effectively with Chinese political reality, due to a tendency to underestimate the importance of variable human factors. It was, ironically, only when some of the school’s best former students broke with the precepts of their training and use innovative strategies, which took local realities into account and made use of ideas derived from China’s own statecraft traditions, that they achieved success. This dissertation thus suggests that researchers need to pay more attention in future to Chinese statecraft and its assumptions regarding the importance of sensitivity to human nature and variability, as well as imported ideas concerning rationality and scientific methods, when trying to understand trends in Chinese politics and governance. Moreover, the historical meaning of the rise and deviation of public administration is by no means a story only of frustrated modernization or periodic revivals of “tradition.” Rather, it represents an important case study of how non-scientific indigenous resources are deployed in the face of drives in settings outside the West to impose a form of political modernity, which has the potential to overcome the problems insurmountable in the current political conceptual framework.

In the aftermath of the tumultuous Taiping Civil War (1851-1864), Qing officials began imagining a reconstruction of Chinese post-war society through broad programs that resettled refugees, demobilized the army, and rebuilt temples, roads, and academies. This was an ambitious program and unprecedented in the annals of Chinese history, seeking to radically restore Chinese society through government intervention. At the center of their plans, was an administration, the Reconstruction Bureau, that blurred the boundaries between state and elite circles to achieve their common goals of reconstructing order in the war-torn landscape. At the center of this project are a few important questions: how did they understand what they were doing? Why was it necessary to do this? What were their priorities? And above all else, what did reconstruction mean to them?