By the mid 1940s, amateur radio operators in China proudly identified themselves as huotui, or hams, and this paper explores several questions related to this phenomenon. Who promoted this collective identity, and why? What did it mean to act like a ham, or which activities and characteristics distinguished the huotui? And who actually adopted this sobriquet, which was closely linked to America? A close look at archival documents and periodicals devoted to amateur radio reveals competing visions of the amateur radio operator in the late 1920s and early 1930s. On the one hand, contemporary amateurs usually adopted their futuristic hobby to entertain themselves and the public by sending and receiving broadcast transmissions of speech and especially music. Radio promoters, however, energetically advanced through clubs and publications their own vision of the amateur radio operator as an American-style ham, who relied on his engineering skills and Morse code to build a cosmopolitan network of freedom-loving explorers, advance scientific knowledge, and serve their threatened nation. By 1937, I argue, these promoters had successfully fashioned a well-organized community of proud amateurs who were united by their adherence to an American model, their mastery of an important new technology, and their dedication to the noble cause of engineering in the national interest. These amateurs were thus prepared to contribute their skills to the Guomindang in China’s War of Resistance.

Haini Guo, Yale University

The military is among the most powerful of masculine institutions, and women’s entrance into and interaction with it present difficulties, problems and dangers. As in many other societies, the perception that men are warriors and women cannot be combatants persisted in China. In the early twentieth century, Chinese women found themselves caught in a historical moment of great national crisis which engendered a radical and politically creative response from them. While soldiering had over centuries been a life experience for a few Chinese women, constant warfare in the twentieth century assured women more opportunities to show, willingly or unwillingly, their considerable skills in combat.

The issues facing women who joined the military forces were numerous: why did women join the military forces and what molded them into soldiers? When they joined the army, did they go into combat as full and equal members of their armies or were they just performing symbolic roles? How did they address their personal questions, frustrations and fears on a changing battlefield? How did their presence affect groups of fighting men used to being in an all-male force? Was integration—or rather the lack of it—a big issue?

These are the basic questions I seek to answer in this paper examining Chinese women’s road to soldiering and combat in the years between 1911 and 1927. My paper attempts to sketch a portrait of women involved in warfare, bringing their personal stories to life and their own voice to history.

Joshua Howard, University of Mississippi

The question of why China’s labor movement failed to produce a revolutionary working class has long dominated scholarly inquiry. Certain historians have concluded that the structure of economic and political power during the 1920s crushed labor, and this would have lasting consequences. A more recent historiography has focused instead on how internal rifts within the working class based on gender, skill and region impeded working-class formation.

Rather than implicitly ask why the labor movement was not more radical, this paper examines how the labor movement within the Nationalist defense industry could become as radical as it actually did. Despite enforcing some of China’s most militarized and disciplined work regimes, arsenals became intensely political arenas during the 1937–1946 period.

In part, the CCP’s mobilizing efforts influenced workers’ class consciousness and their political activities. Forced underground by 1941, the Communists’ only legal channel, New China Daily, became critical to the worker-Party alliance by providing workers a forum to reassess social relations and an organization to express their grievances. As important as Communist activities were in politicizing the arsenals, workers often acted independently and used their own organizations, which were based on an ethical code of mutualism, to advance their separate interests. The tactical shift to underground work pushed local working-class activists into the forefront of the labor movement The development of this sub-elite together with Communist cadres’ adherence to the united front help explain why worker militancy during the strike wave of the mid 1940s would outpace the CCP.

Sarah E. Stevens, Indiana University

This paper examines the training of women’s bodies in the early Republican decades. Political discourse used the rhetoric of modernization and nationalism to advocate the education of women as an essential step towards a new, stronger China—symbolized by a physically strong and pure Chinese woman. Such goals were projected somatically onto women’s bodies in a process which created intense debate around issues of physical education, coeducational schools, hygiene education and sex education. By popularizing and legitimizing various views of the female body, these debates are closely related to contemporary understandings of female sexuality. This paper focuses on the impact of such bodily education and its relationship to establishing the ideal (read: desirable) female body. Primary texts include a broad variety of articles, letters, and opinion pieces from widely published periodicals on education and women’s issues, as well as historical information about the educational content of school curricula. This approach aims to investigate education as both a discourse and a practice, just as sexuality must be viewed as both bodied and em-bodied, physical and discursive. In addition to utilizing mixed sources, the paper draws its strength from a variety of different perspectives, blending together the approaches of literary studies, history, gender studies, and anthropology of the body. Throughout the paper, the understandings of female sexuality gained from examining educational discourse are placed into political and social perspective. The paper concludes by comparing such images to differing views of female sexuality found in literature, pictorial magazines, and other alternative sources.

Natascha Vittinghoff, Gottingen University

Studies on Late Qing newspapers agree upon the assumption that Chinese journalism of the nineteenth century was immature in terms of journalistic standards and insignificant in terms of political and social value. According to this narrative newspapers as an imported Western medium gained maturity only with the reform press after 1898.

A close reading of the earliest newspapers of Hongkong and Shanghai supplemented by historical and anecdotal sources and archival documents allows a rather different interpretation of journalistic activities. Operating in internationally structured networks, Chinese journalists succeeded in entering a hitherto officially monopolised domain of public discourse on politically and socially relevant matters. Style and content of reader contributions forced the papers to develop journalistic standards in order to protect the new profession. Moreover, Qing officials did not only react with repressive interference, as suggested by newspaper historians, but joined the arena with semi-official newspaper enterprises as early as 1874.