Organizer: Mingzheng Shi, University of Houston
Chair: Madeleine Zelin, Columbia University
Discussant: Frederic Wakeman, Jr., University of California, Berkeley
The papers proposed for this panel deal with state-society relationships in the three largest urban centers of China during the early twentieth century. Each paper focuses on different modern public institutions emerged in the late Qing and the early Republic: public utility companies of Beijing, medical associations of Shanghai, and the Chamber of Commerce of Tianjin. Mingzheng Shi argues that the public utility firms constitute a public sphere where they interacted with forces of the government and the urban public to protect their special interests. The combination of opportunities and constraints ultimately explains the slow but sustained progress in the provision of urban services to early-twentieth-century Beijing. It also reveals the inter-dependence of the state, modern businesses, and city people in a modernizing urban society. By examining the rivalry between native medicine and modern medicine in Shanghai, where both professional groups sought the recognition and support from the government because state sanction would lend legitimacy to their claim for professional privilege with society at large, and where they were capable of association-building, government-lobbying, and public opinion-shaping, Xu Xiaoqun points to the emergence of a nascent civil society and the creation of an intermediate public space in Republican China. Through a case study of the Chamber of Commerce in Tianjin, however, Xiaobo Zhang tries to address the question of why the dramatic expansion of public associations in the early twentieth century China fail to develop into civic power powerful enough to check the state power as the bourgeois public sphere did in early modern Europe. He maintains that the most important reasons for the failure of the Chinese bourgeoisie, are their economic dependence on the state and their narrow and excessive concerns with immediate business interests. All based on archival materials uncovered during recent research trips to China and Taiwan, the three papers, in their unique approaches and focuses, address the relationships and interactions among the state, modern institutions and the urban public in early-twentieth-century Chinese cities. They contribute not only to our understanding of the complexity of urban Chinese society, but also to the on-going scholarly debate over state and society in modern China.
Mingzheng Shi, University of Houston
The Beijing Waterworks, Electric Lighting, and Streetcar Companies were public utility firms founded in the late Qing and the early Republic to offer urban services to Beijing. Sanctioned and franchised by the state, they were established as public share-holding companies with initial capital often secured by foreign loans. These business ventures provided city people with electric lighting, potable water, and streetcar services based on mechanized and electrified rather than on human and animate power. They fulfilled the demand among residents for urban amenities created by rapid population growth, and answered the call from urban reformers to adopt Western technologies to modernize Chinese cities. Outgrowing traditional constraints, the firms played an important role in promoting public health and improving urban life in the early-twentieth-century Chinese capital.
This paper examines the relationships between the utility firms and the state on the one hand, and between the firms and urban residents on the other. By their very nature, these utility companies constitute a public sphere where they interacted with forces of the government and the urban public to protect their special interests. By bringing Western capital, technologies and management into a Chinese city, the firms' stake for profits was high. Also by carrying out large-scale infrastructural projects, they affected the lives of millions of city people, who were on the receiving end of urban services. Because of their special interests and critical functions, the government exercised various means of control, ranging from financial interests in the firms, to government overseers in the management, to issuance of rules and regulations. The majority of urban public, themselves divided among social and economic lines, were also vociferous for efficient services at reasonable prices. The combination of opportunities and constraints ultimately explains the slow but sustained progress in the provision of urban services in early-twentieth-century Chinese cities. It also reveals the inter-dependency of the state, modern businesses, and city people in a modernizing urban society.
An examination of the diverse political and economic interests and actions in Beijing not only enables a deeper appreciation of the complexity of urban China, but also helps to bring the debate over state and society to a higher and more sophisticated stage.
Xiaoqun Xu, Francis Marion University
The long-existing rivalry between native medicine and modern (Western) medicine was intensified as the modernization process was quickened in pre-war China. On the one hand, Western-trained or modern doctors advocated national salvation through science and denounced native medicine as superstitious and unscientific, an impediment to the development of medical science in China. On the other hand, native medical practitioners insisted that what they learned and practiced was part of the national essence and should be protected against the cultural invasion of imperialism including Western medicine. The business competition between the two groups apart, this rivalry and its implications epitomized a burning issue of the day: whether China's modernization meant Westernization and whether a respectable position for China in the modern world was to be achieved through Westernization or preservation of what was regarded or claimed as national heritage. At the same time, a close look at the way these two groups waged the battle provides valuable insights into the state-society interaction in Republican China.
This study will show how Chinese native physicians, with Shanghai as the center of their political and professional activism, fought off the assault of modernists in the name of science by using symbols of cultural nationalism and by swinging government policy through organized collective action. It will document the following patterns of behavior: Both native physicians and modern doctors sought the recognition and support from the government because state sanction would lend legitimacy to their claim for professional privilege with society at large. Both groups were capable of association building, government-lobbying, and public opinion-shaping. Both groups were clearly fighting for their professional interests or group interests, but both would and did argue that their group interests were identical to the interest of society or the nation-the people's livelihood and health care, nationalism, and modernization. These patterns of behavior were typical of civil society, even if a nascent one. The fight between the two groups therefore points to the way state and society interacted and thereby created an intermediate public space in Republican China.
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