A review of The Standpoint of World History and Imperial Japan, by TAKESHI KIMOTO. “This dissertation,” Takeshi Kimoto writes at the outset of his work, “will reread the intellectual history of the Japanese empire from the perspective of sekaishi or ‘world history’” (p.1). Beginning his introduction with an epigraph from Takeuchi Yoshimi on the 1942 symposium on “Overcoming Modernity,” Kimoto immediately locates this rereading in relation to a distinguished tradition of scholars who have used notions such as “overcoming modernity” to rethink the discursive limits and...

A Review of “No Smoking” for the Nation: Anti-Cigarette Campaigns in Modern China, 1910-1935, by WENNAN LIU. This brilliant, meticulously researched dissertation by Wennan Liu, graduate from Fudan University in Shanghai and recent PhD from Department of History at University of California, Berkeley, considers three major anti-cigarette campaigns in modern China: the first initiated by American missionary Edward Waite Thwing (1868-?) in Tianjin in 1910, the second led by retired Qing official Wu Tingfang 伍廷芳 (1842-1922) in Shanghai on the eve of the Revolution in 1911, and the third...

A review of Mobilizing the “Junior Nation”: The Mass Evacuation Of School Children In Wartime Japan, by Gregory Scott Johnson. In his dissertation on the Japanese wartime evacuation of children and youth (gakudō shūdan sokai) from 1944 to 1945, Gregory Scott Johnson fills a substantial gap in scholarship addressing the impact of the Fifteen Year War on Japanese children and offers insight into the continuity between wartime evacuation policies and contemporary social management and educational policies regarding Japanese children at present. In Chapter 1, Johnson articulates the overall...

A review of Balancing Rites and Rights: The Social and Cultural Politics of New-Style Weddings in Republican Shanghai, 1898-1953, by CHARLOTTE LUCIA COWDEN. In her dissertation, Charlotte Cowden traces the evolution of new-style weddings between the last decade of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the first years of Communist rule. A new-style wedding may vary in form, but to Cowden, it has to involve free choice of one’s own spouse and elimination of a dowry.  She places the introduction, popularization and codification of new-style weddings in the context of China’s struggle for modernity,...

A review of Christianity in the Japanese Empire: Nationalism, Conscience, and Faith in Meiji and Taisho Japan, by EMILY ANDERSON In 1979, Matsuo Takayoshi’s articles on Japanese Protestants in Korea shed light on the religious concomitants of Japan’s imperial expansion, creating an impetus for new research. After three decades, Emily Anderson has taken up the challenges and questions touched upon by Matsuo, added critical, new comparative information about Japanese Protestants beyond Japan’s early empire, and linked all this back to socio-political stances and actions of Protestant...

A review of Contending States and Religious Orders in North China and in East Asian Context, 906-1260. By JESSE D. SLOANE. Thoroughly reexamining the religious policies and administrations of the Liao, Northern Song, and Jin states, Contending States and Religious Orders in North China and in East Asian Context, 906-1260 successfully provides us with a whole new understanding of the history of the “conquest dynasties” and North China from the 10th to 13th centuries. The religious policies of the “conquest dynasties” have long been considered as manifestations of the excessive...

A review of Bodies, Numbers, and Empires: Representing “The Prostitute” in Modern Japan (1850-1912), by ANNE MARIE LYN DAVIS. “The discursive production of the prostitute often revealed more about the political and social concerns during this era than about the realities of pleasure work during the same period,” writes Ann Marie Davis (pp. 3-4). It is these political and social concerns that Davis seeks to elucidate in Bodies, Numbers, and Empires. To this end, Davis organizes material on pleasure workers into four “chapters/sites,” with each chapter analyzing a media genre (site)...

A review of Searching for the Self: Zhang Shizhao and Chinese Narratives (1903-1927), by YE BIN. Where do nation, modernity, and tradition intersect?  This is the question that frames Ye Bin’s beautifully crafted dissertation about the “Chinese quest for a new political and ethical order” in the first decades of the twentieth century (p. 1).  Ye returns to what Benjamin Schwartz called “the ubiquitous dilemma of modern nationalism,” the tension between the drive to follow seemingly universal paths to progress and the desire to preserve national, cultural identity (p. 219).  Born in...

A review of Working through Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan. By JOSEPH DOYLE HANKINS. Joseph Hankins explores contemporary Buraku efforts to achieve a new status under international human rights mandates as subjects of occupation- and descent-based discrimination, and therein to push for uptake of the notion that Japan now constitutes a “multicultural state.” Buraku refers to a community whose historical and contemporary bases of association cannot be adequately circumscribed by pre-existing rubrics of race, ethnicity, class, culture, or caste. Instead Buraku belonging...

A Review of Chasing Snails: Anti-Schistosomiasis Campaigns in the People’s Republic of China, by MIRIAM GROSS. At the heart of Miriam Gross’ investigation there lies a curious paradox concerning the relationship between the practice and the collective memory of mass mobilizations in China during the 1950s and 1960s. Gross focuses exclusively upon the anti-schistosomiasis campaigns, but her analysis and conclusions will shape how we understand other public health campaigns from that same period. The PRC’s anti-schistosomiasis campaigns are generally deemed to be powerful examples of...

A Review of Beyond the Han Miracle: Soccer, Soap Operas, Stem Cells, and Sanitation, by YOON CHOI. Yoon Choi’s dissertation, Beyond the Han Miracle: Soccer, Soap Operas, Stem Cells, and Sanitation, focuses on bureaucratic engagements with discourses of national globalization by investigating sites of cultural production in South Korea. Choi’s is an innovative ethnography of the relationship between state ideologies of globalization and cultural institutions dedicated to the realization of global aspirations. The dissertation works to demonstrate “how variously positioned actors —...

A Review of Tales for Tarō: A Study of Japanese Children’s Magazines, 1888–1949, by NONA L. CARTER. In Tales for Tarō: A Study of Japanese Children’s Magazines, 1888–1949, Nona Carter narrates the history of children’s magazines in Japan from their inception in the 1880s to their decline in the late 1950s. The main theme of the dissertation is that children’s magazines played an important role in the construction of the modern Japanese nation-state. Publishers and government bureaus aimed to orient young minds towards nation-building, but their prescriptions changed with the...

A review of The Culture of Disputes in Early Modern Japan, 1550-1700, by DAVID ANTHONY EASON. In his original and profusely documented dissertation, David Eason fundamentally rethinks the ways in which scholars have framed the historical divide between medieval and early modern Japan.  He does so by focusing on what he calls a “culture of disputes” (p. 7), and on the ways in which efforts at regulating it became central to the rhetoric and policies employed by rulers—first the warlords vying in the civil war of the mid-sixteenth century; then the new regimes that unified and pacified the...

A review of Modern Homes for Modern Families in Tianjin, China, 1860-1949, by ELIZABETH LaCOUTURE. Elizabeth LaCouture’s dissertation is structured around the multiple meanings of jiating (家庭)—family, house, and home—and the complicated interweaving of those meanings as China struggled in the early twentieth century to redefine society and nation. Drawing together formerly disparate bodies of scholarship on reform of the family (particularly xiao jiating 小家庭), changing house design, and aesthetics for home furnishing and decorating, LaCouture argues that, as it morphed from...

A review of Buddhists Discuss Science in Modern China (1895-1949), by ERIK J HAMMERSTROM.  Buddhists Discuss Science in Modern China is an innovative and fascinating exploration of the many ways Chinese Buddhists struggled to come to terms with the ever-increasing influence of science and scientism during the late Qing and Republican periods. The dramatic impact of largely European discourses of modernity on the political and social development of China during these formative decades has already been examined from numerous perspectives—intellectual history, political theory, economic...

A review of The Householder Elite: Buddhist Activism in Shanghai, 1920-1956, by JAMES BROOKS JESSUP.  This dissertation studies the role that Shanghai’s elites played in constructing a new lay Buddhist identity in China from the 1920s to the 1950s. Jessup uses social history to examine the status of religion among Shanghai elites, investigating the social networks and the political and business connections within which such elites operated. This work brings together two distinct spheres of historical inquiry, and offers something to each: On the one hand, social histories of Republican...

A review of Buddhist Empires: Saṃgha-State Relations in Tenth-Century China, by BENJAMIN BROSE.  Benjamin Brose’s dissertation is path-breaking in producing a history of Buddhism during the pivotal tenth century. Brose’s temporal focus is based on the premise that understanding the profound changes affecting China across the Tang-Song transition requires a better grasp of the interregnum between the two dynasties in question. His prosopographic approach (using collections of biographies of monks) allows him to place developments in Buddhism in a particular sociocultural context. As...

A review of Yudahua: The Growth of An Industrial Enterprise in Modern China 1890-1957, by JUANJUAN PENG.  This dissertation revisits the early industrialization and business history of modern China through a case study. First, by outlining the history of Yudahua, a Wuhan based industrial enterprise, from its inception as a late Qing self-strengthening movement project to its forced incorporation into the communist economic system in the 1950s, the author seeks continuities to challenge the fragmented picture presented in the existing historiography of modern Chinese industrialization. Second,...

A review of “Give Me a Day, and I Will Give You the World”: Chinese Fiction Periodicals in Global Context, 1900-1910, by DUN WANG.  Give Me a Day analyzes early 20th-century serialized Chinese “new fiction” that ran in periodicals and addresses their relationship to the social and intellectual currents of the period, especially in an international context. Wang’s introductory section muses on his perceptions of the dualities temporality and spatiality and the relationship between the dawn of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Overall, he presents a...

As I opened the New York Times on January 26, 2010, I was excited to see an article about how the Beijing Municipal Archive (BMA) had opened sixteen new volumes of files dating from the Cultural Revolution period. I shared the journalists’ happiness at increased official openness, but I was surprised that they did not seem to realize that vast quantities of rich archival material from the Cultural Revolution have been publicly available for more than a decade. As government, state-owned, and collective work units have disbanded, reorganized, or relocated in recent years, reams of files dating...

A review of Organizing Shanghai’s Youth: Communist, Nationalist, and Collaborationist Strategies, 1920-1942, by KRISTIN MULREADY-STONE.  Kristin Mulready-Stone’s dissertation documents the organization and activities of party-affiliated youth organizations in Shanghai from 1920-1942. Consisting of six chapters plus an introduction and conclusion, the dissertation traces the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD), and wartime collaborationist governments attempted to harness the energies of young Chinese activists from the May Fourth Movement...

A review of On the Run: Women, City, and the Law in Beijing, 1937-1949, by ZHAO MA.  Zhao Ma opens with several cases of “deserting wives” who used their women-centered social networks in 1940s Beijing tenement courtyards to leave dissatisfactory husbands. Their dissatisfaction stemmed in one case from recurrent beatings (p. 46), but hunger was the most common culprit (pp. 40, 48). Zhao contrasts the late Qing, Nationalist, and Japanese occupation governments’ tightly regimented baojia mutual surveillance system, with lower-class women’s unorthodox social networks to illustrate their...

A review of Saintly Brokers: Uyghur Muslims, Trade, and the Making of Qing Central Asia, 1696-1814, by KWANGMIN KIM.  Kwangmin Kim’s dissertation is a significant contribution to multiple scholarly debates regarding the Qing dynasty’s identity as an imperial state and an important player in the global economy of its time. It consists of a précis within a preface, introduction, six body chapters, conclusion, bibliography, and five appendices with quantitative and qualitative information about Ming and Qing administration of the region presently known as Xinjiang, including tax figures...

A review of International and Wartime Origins of the Propaganda State: The Motion Picture in China, 1897-1955, by MATTHEW DAVID JOHNSON.  Last autumn, the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China was marked not only by an elaborately choreographed parade, but also by an epic film, “The Founding of a Republic” (Jianguo daye). Funded by the state-owned China Film Group and featuring a gratuitously star-studded cast including Andy Lau, Zhang Ziyi, and Jackie Chan, “The Founding of a Republic” recounted for its domestic audience, yet again, the Civil War that brought the...

A review of Stretching the Skin of the Nation: Chinese Intellectuals, the State, and the Frontiers in the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937), by ZHIHONG CHEN.  In Stretching the Skin of the Nation, Zhihong Chen offers a meticulously researched, cogently presented and empirically rich analysis of the “Go to the Frontier” (dao bianjiang qu) movement during the Nanjing Decade. Through a careful examination of key Republican era journals, books and professional activities related to the “frontier” (bianjiang), Chen convincingly argues that Han Chinese elites actively “territorialized”...

A review of Gu Hongming and the Re-invention of Chinese Civilization, by CHUNMEI DU.  This dissertation illuminates the life and thought of Gu Hongming (辜鸿铭 1857-1928), a cosmopolitan scholar of the late Qing and early Republican period who has been forgotten or, at best, simply stigmatized as an anachronistic conservative in Chinese intellectual history. Chunmei Du approaches this task by crossing national, cultural, ideological, and disciplinary boundaries, while renouncing paradigms based on either a linear development of tradition to modernity or an essential discrepancy between...

A review of Marginal Constituencies: Qing Borderland Policies and Vernacular Histories of Five Tribes on the Sino-Russian Frontier, by LORETTA KIM. Recent scholarship on late imperial Chinese history has examined how the Qing state devised distinct strategies to manage its heterogeneous population. Loretta Kim’s dissertation contributes to this on-going debate by focusing on the “Five Tribes” along the northern frontier with Russia: the Dagur, Heje, Oroqen, Sibe and Salon. Her objectives are twofold. First, she analyzes the Qing state’s changing policies toward the Five Tribes from the...

A review of Crossing the Urban-Rural Divide in Twentieth Century China, by JEREMY BROWN. In this well-written and extensively documented dissertation, Jeremy Brown tackles the daunting and demanding topic of urban-rural relations in twentieth-century China through the case of Tianjin, focusing on the years 1949 to 1978. He argues that the fraught and mutually defining relationship between city and country, though framed by institutional structures and administrative fiat, formed from continuing personal interactions that reified difference even as they spanned those two zones. Chapter One...

A review of Law and Sensibility of Empire in the Making of Modern China, 1750-1900, by LI CHEN. Li Chen’s dissertation title is too modest. The dissertation goes a long way toward demonstrating not just how law (British) and sensibility (British) made and remade modern China (a significant accomplishment), but also how law (Chinese) and sensibility (Chinese) made and remade modern Britain and the British empire. Or rather, that it was the circulations of a discourse of law and sensibility, backed by competing imperial assertions of sovereignty, which remade Qing China and Britain. The argument...