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Interlinking the Community, Nation, and World
Organizer: Xin Zhang, Indiana University at Indianapolis
Chair: Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California at Berkeley
Discussant: Hanchao Lu, Georgia Institute of Technology
The urban experience has been examined from many different angles in the past, including consumption, culture, community, conflict, identity, and public space to name a few. Recently, however, a great deal of scholarly interest has been placed on issues relating to globalization. As we begin to reconceptualize time and space in the globalizing world, we are faced with the challenge of redefining the community and discovering the link beween its changes with that of the nation and the world. For that purpose, this panel is designed to investigate how the local community was recreated, transformed, and reconfigured due to changes on national and global scales and how changes in the community help reconstruct its members’ senses of the nation and the world. In order to discern important patterns, the researchers assembled here will cover the entire period between the late 19th century and the present.
Xin Zhang’s paper will deal with the issue of how the local business community itself was transformed through meeting the challenges of industrialized technology during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Di Wang’s paper will examine how teahouses became a de facto community center during the War of Resistance in World War II. Qin Shao’s paper will look at a rather large community of “dispersed” small stock-holders and how their interest in the value of stocks led them to pay close attention to world issues. All papers here will suggest that changes in the community are not just a localized phenomenon, but are instead interralated with that of the rest of the world. The community, the nation, and the world are all interwined.
Global-Local Nexus: the Steamboat Scenario
Xin Zhang, Indiana University at Indianapolis
The arrival of steamboat technology in the mid-nineteenth century posed serious challenges to the business community in the city of Zhenjiang by bringing both a loss of profits as well as a threat to the traditional way of running the river transportation business. Although the initial response from the community was to resist the technology, some local leaders not only realized that the adoption of the technology was inevitable, since it represented a more efficient way for transportation, but they also perceived this adoption as a matter of preserving national interest. They therefore rose to the challenge by forming new business entities in the name of promoting industry and agriculture (ban shiye) in order to compete with foreign companies backed by transnational capital. Through their endeavors, the power structure of the community itself was reconfigured while the influence of the community was broadened. The community itself was thus forever transformed.
This paper aims to capture these changes by using information from local newspapers, various archives, and rare documents. The research will relate this topic to broader issues, such as community building, local identity, nationalism, and globalization. Rather than viewing these changes as Western imperialism vis-à-vis Chinese resistance, the paper will examine them as an active engagement between industrialized technology and Chinese local society. I will argue that this very engagement was an integral component of China’s own struggle towards modernity, which hastened globalizing its society into one where local communities were no longer separate from the rest of the world.
From “Don’t Talk about National Affairs” to “Teahouse Politicians”: Teahouses and Political Culture in Wartime
Di Wang, Texas A & M University
The teahouse was the center of public life and communication in a community, later also becoming a political arena. During the War of Resistance, the national crisis brought community life closer than ever before to national politics, and the teahouse became a link that tied people with nation together. In addition, the war brought global issues to the teahouse, where people discussed international affairs. Thus, the local community was connected with the world through the teahouse. By using this public space, the government wanted to accomplish several goals through the teahouse: to mobilize people, inspire patriotic zeal, suppress activities that threatened authority, and enforce its absolute power in wartime. The war, however, could not change everything; in fact, at the teahouse, people still conducted public life as before. Although a public notice stating “Do not talk about national affairs” (Xiutan guoshi) was posted in many teahouses, local and national political developments were always in evidence in the teahouse and teahouse life. All kinds of people played roles in the ongoing drama of politics in the teahouse. Remarkably, the teahouse also created a kind of amateur politician, known as “teahouse politicians” (chaguan zhengzhijia. From this study we can see that there were three kinds of politics shown in the teahouse: mass politics by ordinary people, elite politics by reformers, and state politics by the government. These three kinds of politics co-existed in the teahouse and interacted with each other, making teahouse politics more complicated and colorful.
A Community of the Dispersed: the Culture of Neighborhood Stock Market in Shanghai
Qin Shao, The College of New Jersey
Bucket shops—brokerage offices of various securities companies of the stock market—first emerged in urban China in the early 1990s. By 2004, there were about five hundred such shops spreading all over Shanghai’s neighborhoods. Their main function was to provide services for people to trade. But they were much more than that. According to some newly fashioned urban legends, the bucket shops helped cure boredom, improve literacy, and even prevent Alzheimer’s disease. The majority of the daily visitors to the bucket shops constituted sanhu, the small, dispersed investors. Most of them were disadvantaged by the reform and jobless. These otherwise marginalized people found in the bucket shop a space to interact and exchange information with each other. As a result, they not only gained a sense of community, but also became well informed about national and global issues, as the Chinese market is controlled by government policy, and also increasingly integrated to, and thus affected by, the global economy. While they were often disappointed with the market performance and thus with the state, they also had a shared interest with the state in China’s economic well-being and social stability. By the same token, they felt the linkage between their investment and global affairs, and had an opinion on issues from Middle East conflict to US war in Iraq. This article sheds light on the formation of a localized urban community in a neighborhood public space and its connection to national and global developments.