Organizer: Timothy Weston, University of Colorado, Boulder
Discussant: David Strand, Dickinson College
This panel focuses on Beijing during the early twentieth century. Because it was the capital of a conservative dynasty which asserted strong control over the metropolis, Beijing was slower to modernize than other important Chinese cities. When modernization was begun in the early twentieth century, the city went through a period of dramatic and wrenching change. In different ways, each of the papers addresses this process of change, and in each case Beijing's changed political status after 1911 is taken into account.
Mingzheng Shi's paper focuses specifically on those who led the modernization effort in Beijing, and on the relationship between city planning and social reform. Richard Belsky's paper discusses the changing nature of Beijing's native-place lodges in light of the city's constantly shifting political status. Timothy Weston's paper examines the ways cosmopolitan intellectuals thought about and lived in Beijing as the city became decreasingly cosmopolitan in character.
Whereas Chinese cities, especially modern Shanghai, have received considerable scholarly attention in recent years, Beijing remains understudied. This is surprising given that it was the undisputed political and cultural capital of China during the late imperial era, and that it has been China's capital for most of the twentieth century. While none of the papers on this panel is explicitly comparative in nature, it is our hope that they will nevertheless stimulate greater interest in comparative urban history.
Remaking Beijing: Urban Reformers in the Early Twentieth Century
Mingzheng Shi, University of Houston
This paper examines the role urban reformers played in the spatial and social transformation of Beijing in the early twentieth century. I will focus on local government officials of the newly created Police Board of the late Qing and the Municipal Council in the early Republic. I will discuss impulses for modernization which led to the establishment of these municipal institutions. I will identify key figures in the city government by discussing their backgrounds, their beliefs, and their connections with national politics. I will emphasize how the new official elite, exposed to Western learning and advised by Western-trained technocrats, differed from their traditional counterparts in their perception of the function of the city. I will examine the vigorous public works campaigns launched by these reformers to reconstruct Beijing's ancient built environment to modernize urban services and bring about social change. I will conclude by arguing that the elite reformers' articulation of urban policies reflected a new vision for a city based on Western thinking, but their efforts to effect change were hampered by the limitations of their own politically progressive and socially conservative ideologies.
In conjunction with the other two papers on this panel, which deal with urban intellectuals and sojourners respectively, this study on municipal reformers contributes to a better understanding of urban life in an important Chinese city. This paper also makes a contribution to the debate over state-society relations by demonstrating the increasingly important role played by the government in urban affairs. The growth of the official sphere in the sense of local bureaucratization and supervision of public works gave rise to spatial and social change in Chinese cities. It also ushered in a long period of political centralization which characterized much of China's twentieth-century history.
Sojourners and Huiguan in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing
Richard Belsky, Harvard University
This paper will examine various transformational tendencies among Beijing native-place lodges (huiguan) during the early twentieth century.
Beijing huiguan occupied a special social and political niche in the late-imperial capital, and were distinguished from the majority of regional associations elsewhere by their exclusive scholar-official character. The unique utility of huiguan in Beijing traditionally was reflected in (among other things) their extraordinary number. The five hundred or so huiguan operating in Beijing during the waning years of the nineteenth century, far outnumbered those of any other city.
Twentieth-century events such as the abolition of the examination system, the founding of the republican government, and the removal of the capital to Nanjing, radically transformed the social and political context in which huiguan functioned. Faced with these changes, Beijing huiguan took on new roles, served new clientele, reformed their administrative structure, but, by and large, continued to operate. This paper will examine the evolution of huiguan functions and the changing significance of huiguan within the sojourning community. Special emphasis will be given to changes in the social (e.g., banquets, opera), ritual (e.g., sacrificial and funerary ceremonies), and political (regionalist and nationalist meetings) functions of huiguan.
This paper should prove both a valuable contribution to our understanding of Beijing during this period and of the sojourning phenomenon in China more generally.
Intellectuals in a Fading Capital: Living and Writing in Republican Beijing
Timothy Weston, University of Colorado, Boulder
Before 1911, Beijing's political centrality assured that it would attract the greatest academic and cultural talent in China. The political fragmentation that ensued after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty reduced Beijing's singular importance, however, thus undercutting the long-standing linkage between that city's political and cultural power. Yet the capital's glory faded only gradually, and throughout the first two decades of the Republican era southern intellectuals, especially academics attracted to Beijing's elite universities, continued to move north in large numbers.
In this paper, I will draw upon memoirs and literary essays to examine how cosmopolitan intellectuals lived in and characterized Beijing during this period of decline. Their writings tended to convey ambivalence, often mixing praise for the city's famous historical sites with statements about its current shabby appearance and glaring social problems. A once unrivaled imperial capital thus increasingly registered in the minds of intellectuals as a regional outpost whose native population was as culturally and financially impoverished as other urban populations in China.
These accounts also reveal that Beijing's cosmopolitan intellectuals clung to a privileged lifestyle reminiscent of that which their imperial-era predecessors had enjoyed. As the city's symbolic status slipped and its social problems grew more pronounced intellectuals tended to pursue a way of life far removed from that of the majority of Beijing's residents. In so doing, they were both denying the most urgent political and social realities confronting the country and assuring that they would be marginalized by them.