Session 18: In Search of New Agents of Mediation and Control in Changing Local Societies: Late Qing and Early Republican China in Transition

Organizer: Yamin Xu, Le Moyne College

Chair and Discussant: Edward A. McCord, George Washington University

Keywords: China, Qing, Republican era, history, state, society.

This panel seeks to understand the collapse of China’s long-standing imperial system from local perspectives. It explores how deep structural changes gradually dissolved traditional communities and resulted in intense communal strife, giving great urgency to the search for new institutions to mediate civil tensions at the local level.

Yamin Xu begins by investigating the process of the destruction of traditional Qing Manchu families and neighborhoods as communal mediation and control mechanisms in Beijing, and how this provided a social basis for the expansion of Republican and Communist state local control institutions. Monica De Togni examines the rise of self-government organizations in Sichuan during the late Qing-early Republican period. Rejecting that these institutions were merely "hollow shells," she analyzes the complex response of local elites to these centrally-imposed self-governing institutions.

Grant Alger considers local level responses to technological transformation during the Republican period by studying the resistance of sailboat workers to the growing riverine steamboat trade in Fujian during the 1920s. Such conflicts pushed the state into a new role as mediator between often fractious technology-based interest groups. Finally, Joseph Lee analyzes how Chinese Protestant leaders in eastern Guangdong responded to the immediate post-Qing social and political context. They initiated social reform and mediated warlord conflicts, while striving to reconcile their own religious and national identities.

Highlighting dynamic linkages between state officials and local elites, this panel examines various strategies and resources that different governmental and extra-governmental actors employed to establish a new social and political order at the grassroots level.

Reconfigured Neighborhoods and the Expansion of State Institutions: Social Structural Changes in Beijing and Their Implications, 1800s–1930s

Yamin Xu, Le Moyne College

The natural growth of the Manchu population of Beijing reached such a level in the mid-Qing that active policies of residential control had to be implemented. This halted the expansion of the Banner system and gradually transformed Manchu neighborhoods as their members were frequently relocated to other regions. The continued deterioration of Manchu livelihoods also forced many families to sell their houses and move out of their designated residential quarters. All these factors, together with a constant influx of immigrants that steadily increased the portion of non-native residents, slowly but irreversibly dissolved traditional Manchu families and lineages. Reflecting these developments, most of the city’s former single-family courtyard houses had been transformed into dazayuan (mixed multifamily living compounds) by the early 1930s.

In the end, Beijing’s Banner neighborhoods became increasingly heterogeneous in nature while their inhabitants evolved into a broader "general public" who were freed from the internal regulations of traditional social institutions that had once bound them together. When disputes and conflicts arose, no effective community mediation mechanisms were readily available to reduce communal tensions. Subsequently, "wicked people" and "unruly" social groups emerged and began to dominate both public and private lives. Promoting a political and cultural discourse of republicanism, Beijing’s Republican municipal government, as a self-claimed public authority and universal regulator, launched hard battles on the ruins of the imperial local system to subjugate these forces. Its efforts later would inspire the Communists to embark on even more violent struggles to establish a new local order in Beijing.

From State to Society, and Back: An Attempted Dialogue between Government and Local Society in Sichuan during the Imperial-Republican Transition

Monica De Togni, University of Venice

At the end of the Qing dynasty, the Court painfully acknowledged the need to modify local government institutions for a society that had already undergone many structural changes. The result was a state-building process involving structural reforms aimed at making local administration more effective. Through the creation of new local self-government organs, the central government also formally recognized the pre-existing but unsystematic involvement of local notables in local administration for the entire country.

While late Qing self-government organs have generally been seen as hollow shells, the increased availability of archival documents from the PRC, combined with local gazetteers, now allows a more in-depth analysis of these institutions through the examination of real and specific cases.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the process behind the constitution of self-government organs from the late Qing to the early Republic in Sichuan province in order to deepen our understanding of state responses to the changes inside Chinese society. This will be followed by an analysis of the response and reactions of the local society, i.e., the local elite, to the structural changes imposed by the central government in order to show the extent to which they played a more active role in the political arena than normally assumed and why this trend toward a stronger involvement ultimately came to an end.

Unsafe at Any Speed? Technological Transformation and State Mediation in Republican Fujian

Grant Alger, Independent Scholar

Among the structural changes China experienced during the Republican period was the steady integration and nativization of steam-powered technologies that first arrived from the West during the final years of Qing rule. This paper analyzes how contested this process could become at the local level by studying the opposition and promotion by different groups of steamboats on the Min River in Fujian province during the late 1920s. It examines how the influx of new technologies in local communities complicated the relationship between society and the state, as the local government was thrust into a new role as mediator between newly formed technology-based interest groups.

Sailboat worker associations in Fujian resisted the growth of steamboats not only by physically obstructing their operations, but also by disrupting people’s ideological acceptance of these machines. They highlighted the dangers of steamboats and mobilized history to their cause by calling for the preservation of Fujian’s centuries-old heritage of skilled boatmen on the Min River system. In response, steamboat entrepreneurs worked with merchant associations to extol the modernizing benefits of steamboats’ speed and efficiency. They further argued that steamboats merely added a new facet to China’s local economic operations without displacing older work regimes. Amid this dispute the state often served as a surprisingly neutral moderator. Despite the Republican government’s avowed commitment to rapid technological modernization, local officials shared some of the concern prevalent among their Qing predecessors of placing the preservation of the livelihoods of all workers above the pure embrace of new technologies.

God and Country: Christianity and State Building in Republican Chaozhou, South China

Joseph Tse-hei Lee, Pace University

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Qing imperial order collapsed and the new modern state had not yet been established, so there was an opportunity for Chinese to search for new ideas of modernization and state building. This paper examines the relations between Protestant Christianity and state building in the turbulent Chaozhou-speaking region of Eastern Guangdong where collective violence had been prevalent throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores the internal contradictions and external challenges that had shaped China’s transformation into a modern state during the Nationalist and early Communist eras. It argues that to search for a new basis for the Chinese state and nation, Chinese Protestant church leaders drew on a wide range of political and cultural resources, foreign and native, national and local, modern and traditional, revolutionary and moderate. They sought to make Christianity an integrated part of the state-building process through the efforts to initiate social reform, mediate warlord conflicts, provide welfare, and reconcile their religious and national identities. They effectively employed the Christian missionary resources to achieve modernity by Western standards while maintaining a distinctive Chinese identity and pursuing their local agendas. This pattern of Christian religious activism highlights the role of human agency in the process of state building in early twentieth-century China.