Organizer: George C. X. Wei, Susquehanna University
Chair: William T. Rowe, Johns Hopkins University
Discussant: Mary B. Rankin, Independent Scholar
Public life is a new domain in research of social and cultural history. It contrasts with private life and contains human activities across space and time. It involves people’s work, study, discourse, entertainment, behavior, social relations and activities, and so forth. Public life is gendered, and women’s seclusion and participation constituted an important portion of it. Public life is class specific, because elites and commoners adopt distinctive life attitudes, languages, manners, and living styles. It is also a mirror of social relations and institutions, and a ground of confrontations between the state and the individual.
The subject of this panel is related to the controversy of public sphere, as bourgeois public engagement formed a sort of public life. It is also a contribution to the discussions of public space, for public space serves as a social stage for different life performances. The panel comprises of three papers: Di Wang’s street culture and folk poetry in Chengdu, and George Wei’s women’s lifestyle in Shanghai. Wang’s paper reveals that ordinary people in Chengdu used public space to make a living and developed a colorful urban plebeian culture. Cheng’s paper examines the establishment of girls’ schools in Beijing and explores the issues of how women entered public domain and what new roles they played. Wei’s paper describes Western-affected women’s lifestyle in Shanghai and analyzes its cause and significance in deconstructing Confucian domination and social structure.
Based on primary Chinese sources, each paper focuses on a typical Chinese city and provides new issues and facts for comparative studies. For instance, Di Wang has analyzed the relationships between the authors of folk poetry and social environment they lived, between popular culture and elite culture, and between commoners and elites. He attempts not only to discover the colorful urban public life but also understand more social and cultural changes in the Chinese cities. In Cheng’s research of Beijing women, however, one aspect of the public life was a new venture of elitist females who were quite self-disciplined and accommodating toward governmental management. The young school girls, nevertheless, accepted more foreign influence and pursued unorthodox paths of life in the public. Wei’s paper traces a subtle but sweeping change in Shanghai women’s daily life, which was paradoxically driven by both tradition and modernity. Despite diversity, conformities can be found in all the three researches. All the papers, for instance, provide a balanced Western-Chinese perspective. They all prove that as the official social control was weak and China opened to the West during the late Qing and the early Republican period, marginal social groups gained more freedom and power in the urban public life. These ordinary people challenged Confucian norms, resisted against governmental regulations and restrictions, and presented social tendencies.
The panel is interdisciplinary, for all the three authors implement new theories and methodologies from social history, literary and arts history, gender studies, and anthropology. It fits into new directions of historical studies. It will draw wide interest from scholars in women’s history, urban history, cultural history, and Asian history in general. The panel participants have no doubt that this panel will trigger active discussions with such provocative questions as how public life is defined, how to deal with class, gender, ethnicity, geographical distinctions in public life, how to connect the transformation of public life with social-economic trends and foreign influences, etc.
The Rhythm of the City: Folk Poetry and Public Life in Late-Qing Chengdu
Di Wang, Texas A&M University
"Bamboo-branch poetry" (zhuzhici) was a traditional style of folk literature, in which local intellectuals often described various aspects of everyday life and expressed their feelings and opinions. Whereas official records and most of other historical documents have little material on urban residents’ daily life, these folk poems contain rich information of that. Unlike most other sources of literature, bamboo-branch poetry was very close to city dwellers’ real life. By using those folk poems, this paper seeks to explore public life of Chengdu people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper will analyze the relationships between the authors of folk poetry and social environment they lived, between popular culture and elite culture, and between commoners and elites. It argues that the early twentieth century was an important transitional period in the urban history of Chengdu. The cultural fabric of the era was interweaving the old with the new as well as the popular and the elite, though the traditional and the popular still dominated the culture of the streets and other public spaces. From those folk poems, one can not only discover the colorful urban public life but also understand much social and cultural changes in the Chinese cities.
Teaching and Learning in Public: Women’s Education in Late Qing Beijing
Wei-kun Cheng, California State University, Chico
The remarkable establishment of girls’ schools during the late Qing dynasty was a turning point in Chinese women’s history. Scholars, however, interpreted this new trend as an institutional breakthrough or a male leadership, narrowing their attention to the governmental policies or local gentry’s activism. This article, focused on Beijing area, for the first time examines the issue of women’s education from a comprehensive perspective. It emphasizes women’s educational efforts, including their participation in the public debate over the issue of women’s education, their contribution to the founding of girls’ schools, their journalist and organizational activities, and their educational ideals and strategies. It also analyzes three responsible social forces: the Manchu government, male reformers, and female activists. In this joint educational enterprise, male reformers intended to build a new womanhood on literacy, pragmatic skills, and civic virtues, and coached girls to serve the nation through fulfilling their responsibilities in the home. The government, upholding the worship of female domesticity, regulated, supervised, and restricted girls’ schools. Female educators were elitist, moderate and cautious. They made compromise between Confucian legacies and Western culture, and preferred separatism to protect women’s interest. They adopted reformist stance because of their close connections to the bureaucracy, the governmental restraints, the Japanese educational model, and the nationalist mentality. Education gave women opportunities to develop group identity and achieve personal freedom and economic independence.