Organizer: Madeleine Yue Dong, University of Washington
Chair and Discussant: Sherman Cochran, Cornell University
This panel discusses the issues of consumer culture and urban consciousness, focusing on Shanghai, Hangzhou and Beijing in the early twentieth century. The development of consumer culture was conditioned by the particular history of a locality. Many aspects of Hangzhou's businesses, for example, the choosing of location and styles of hotel decoration, were formed to meet the needs of the newly emerged middle-class tourists. Tourism in turn shaped consumers' "taste." In republican Beijing, a new market system emerged as a result of the transformation of an imperial capital into a republican city. Permanency and the amount of industrial goods became the determining factor of the status of a market. The seasonal element of temple fairs was gradually dropped, and rural handicraft products were only sold at less permanent markets.
Contemporary discourses on urban consumption reflected efforts to adapt to an emerging consumer culture that often appeared threatening. Contrasting a storytelling script of Zhang Henshui's Fate in Tears and Laughter with the original novel, Benson discusses the storyteller's emphasis on one theme in the novel: how vainglory damaged the two qualities, empathy and reciprocate, that defined humanity. The storytelling adaptation reveals contemporary ambivalence about the effects of an emerging consumer society on its members, especially women. This ambivalence was also reflected in debates on prostitution in Hangzhou.
The three papers argue that development of urban consumption played important roles in the formation of urban consciousness.
Tourism and Consumer Culture in Republican Hangzhou
Liping Wang, University of California, San Diego
The 1911 Revolution triggered massive changes in Hangzhou's spatial layout. The city wall was pulled down and the bannermen garrison on the lake side, the symbol of Manchu conquest, was demolished. With these barriers removed, Hangzhou and the West Lake were united and the commercial center quickly moved to the lake shore. In a matter of a few years, government planning and Hangzhou business interests, motivated by profit and tax revenue, turned Hangzhou into one of the first modern tourist cities in China.
The changes that took place in Hangzhou in the 1910s and 1920s amounted to what Eric Hobsbawm calls "the invention of tradition." In Hangzhou, "responses to novel situation" took the form of "reference to old situations." A new tourist culture was created around scenic West Lake, celebrating and revitalizing the sophisticated lifestyle and aesthetic tastes of the departed gentry. The city was repackaged to sell its antiquity. This required packing the space with all kinds of new modern amusement. But the smooth juxtaposition of "modernity" and "tradition" in Hangzhou was accomplished partly by suppressing popular cultural traditions. Old customs and religious ceremonies, many of them central to peasant culture, were either downplayed or eliminated. While the new tourism was geared to cater to the nearby Shanghai new middle class, the gap between Hangzhou and its rural hinterland became wider. The peasant pilgrims were no longer the concern of the new urban elite of the Republic who viewed popular belief as superstition.
Pronouncing the Dangers of Vainglory in 1930s Shanghai: The Storytelling
Adaptation of Fate in Tears and Laughter
Carlton Benson, Pacific Lutheran University
This paper examines Lu Dan'an's adaptation of the best selling novel, Fate in Tears and Laughter, for the tanci audience in 1930s Shanghai. It demonstrates how Lu produced a script that was largely faithful to the novel, but also altered its content to fulfill the requirements of a performance genre. For example, he painted the characters in black and white, included numerous arias, and emphasized the novel's didactic content. At the same time, however, he also made the story especially relevant to the Shanghai audience by making its characters match local stereotypes, and by highlighting a message that resonated in contemporary Shanghai. The arias, in particular, provided a running commentary on the story's events by repeatedly pronouncing the dangers of xurong, or vainglory. Vainglory captivated young women and extinguished their fundamental human qualities-namely, their qing, or sensitivity, and their capacity to bao, or reciprocate human acts of kindness-with disastrous results. An analysis of Lu's script therefore reveals a culturally conservative audience that recognized a dehumanizing potential in the Western-oriented consumer society that was emerging by the 1930s.
Organized Consumption: The Formation of a New Market System in Republican Beijing
Madeleine Yue Dong, University of Washington
This paper studies changes in the distribution of key markets in Beijing during the republican period, the causes for these changes, and their social and cultural implications.
During the republican period, markets which directly served the needs of the Qing court or emerged as a result of the specific Qing economic system declined; so did temple fairs which followed seasonal and festival rhythm. At the same time western style stores and permanent markets developed. The hierarchy of this market system was determined by the level of permanency of the market and types of goods sold there. Wangfujing became the most prestigious shopping center, benefitting from the foreign community living close to it. Xidan prospered following Wangfujing's example. Facing these competitions, Qianmen gradually declined and lost its old prestige. Tianqiao served many functions of temple fairs but differed fundamentally from temple fairs as a daily, rather than seasonal market. Wangfujing and Xidan prospered by selling antiques to foreigners or industrial products; handicraft products from the suburbs were left in temple fairs; and Tianqiao became a "center of recycle" selling second-hand goods to the city's poor.
The changes in Beijing's market system reflected the emergence of a new style of urban consumption. As an essential part of everyday life, the market system of a city both reflects and channels people's relationships to the city, playing a crucial role in the formation of urban consciousness.