China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Qin Shao, College of New Jersey
Chair: Mary B. Rankin, Independent Scholar
Discussants: William T. Rowe, Johns Hopkins University; Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University
Sociability—the habit and practice of gathering in public spaces—both mirrors and affects social change. In the China field, studies of sociability have mainly been confined to the realms of popular culture and anthropology. With this back-to-back, interdisciplinary panel we seek to broaden our perspective on sociability by comparing institutions of leisure in two key periods of rapid social change in Modern China—the early Republic and the post-Mao era.
To provide a range of analytical arenas, this panel examines a variety of public spaces—teahouses, brothels, restaurants, theme parks, dance halls, and open streets—in several urban locales. Highlighting the nexus between sociability and identity formation, part one deals with the struggle of new urban elites to define themselves in the early Republic; part two focuses on the impact of a newly commercialized culture on leisure consumption in the age of market reform. While modernity in the early Republic carried strong moral overtones, the current reform epitomizes the rise of a mass consumer culture. Contrasting these two periods, the panel sheds light on the impact of social change on the manners and mores of human sociability. More importantly, it provides a comparative perspective on the distinctive characteristics of Chinese modernization in the opening and closing decades of the 20th century.
Scholars commonly suggest that individuals and groups do not have a single identity, but rather multiple, overlapping identities whose relative salience changes depending on circumstances and contexts. The first part of this panel explores various aspects of this issue.
The collapse of the imperial system and the intrusion of foreign influences brought social dislocation and cultural change to early republican China. Many individuals, groups, and communities struggled to establish a sense of self which inevitably colored their view of others. Such struggle was captured in social interactions in public spaces. Dong shows that the pursuit of a new vision of manhood led to change in men’s taste in and association with prostitutes in Beijing brothels. Shao analyzes the attack on teahouse culture in Nantong as local elites and new professionals eagerly sought to fashion an identity for themselves that embodied their views of modernity and progress. Stapleton describes how Chunxi Road in Chengdu, intended by city administrators as a symbol of modern culture, encouraged a rather harmonious juxtaposition of new and old social practices.
These studies demonstrate that the desire to be "modern," although sometimes ambivalently felt, spurred elites to create new self identities, providing them with a moral imperative to reconfigure their patterns of sociability.
Madeleine Yue Dong, University of Washington
In 1912, the new republican government outlawed male prostitution in Beijing based on the rationale that no men should be sex objects because all men were equal citizens in the Republic. Female prostitution, however, was legalized at the same time. This reversed the situation in Qing Beijing when male prostitutes were deemed as higher class than female prostitutes and female prostitution was suppressed. The first seventeen years of the Republic became the heyday of high-class brothels in Beijing mostly due to the patronage of politicians and other "men of the public"—journalists, professors, and university students. The brothel became a space in which many of these men’s social activities took place.
These activities at brothels contributed to the construction of the identity of "men of the public," which involved not only activities on the political stage, but also the formation of a new definition of masculinity. Holding social functions at brothels became the norm, while inviting male prostitutes to banquets at private residences became a symbol of decadence associated with the fall of the Qing. Sexuality served as an indicator of one’s relation to political regimes and history.
These phenomena reveal that gender relation was fundamental to republican politics and the construction of the concept of "public." In the brothel, a space usually recognized as based on women’s subordination, the republican "men of the public" supplemented their sense of status and authority with gender hierarchy. This commercialized, gendered space provided a stable cornerstone in an extremely unstable political moment.
Qin Shao, College of New Jersey
As elsewhere in late imperial China, teahouses were popular gathering places in Nantong county, Jiangsu province. But in the early republican period teahouses became frequent targets of bitter criticism in local newspapers. Why?
This paper locates teahouses within the context of an emergent bourgeois culture represented by a rising elite class of urban professionals, social reformers, and the new literati in Nantong. Examined through the lens of new urban elite values, teahouses appeared decadent, totally outmoded, and harmful to the emerging new order. Therefore, as part of efforts to define for themselves a distinctive cultural identity commensurate with their social status, the new elites used local newspapers they controlled to mercilessly denigrate teahouses and their patrons as "the other"—atavistic, uncouth, and unruly. Employing such fashionable concepts as self-improvement and productivity, they redefined the idea of leisure, bringing to it a new sense of cultural sophistication and superiority. They also promoted novel alternative public spaces such as sports arenas and Western-style parks.
While none of these innovations fatally undermined the appeal of teahouses to the lower classes, the creation of new public spaces and new social boundaries by a self-conscious elite clearly helped to sharpen the distinction between modernity and tradition.
Kristin Stapleton, University of Kentucky
In 1924 a new street was laid in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Modeled on Nanjing Road in Shanghai, Chengdu’s Chunxi Road was planned as a commercial and entertainment district in the city center. Within a few years it became the liveliest street in Chengdu and has remained so since.
This paper examines the motivations of the developers of Chunxi Road, as well as its reception by the people of Chengdu. For the militarist who sponsored the project, Chunxi Road’s smooth, rickshaw-welcoming surface symbolized progress toward modern civilization. Others found the new space useful for their own purposes: peddlers gained a centralized night market, intellectuals gathered at the bookstores clustered along the street, the YMCA’s sports facilities attracted new users, and the brotherhoods of military officers that proliferated in Sichuan in the early Republic assembled in comfort at spacious teahouses and restaurants. These forms of sociability were not new, but Chunxi Road allowed them to occur on a larger scale than before and concentrated them in one zone. Chunxi Road became Chengdu’s civic center.
As the symbolic heart of the city, Chunxi Road at first comfortably accommodated a wide range of users—cultural conservatives as well as those committed to "modernizing" the city. In later years, however, with the influx of refugees from eastern China during the war, the relatively peaceful coexistence of different ideals of social organization that had characterized Chengdu was shattered, and Chunxi Road became a site of violent contestation.