A review of The Boundaries of the Interesting: Itineraries, Guidebooks, and Travel in Imperial Japan, by Kate L. McDonald. In a beautifully written dissertation, Kate McDonald tells a story of Japanese colonial tourism in the aftermath of World War I. Interestingly, it turns out that it is a story less about defining colonized populations (as was the case with the British and French) and more about shaping perceptions of the colonized place. Taking for granted that colonial administrations used tourism for political purposes, McDonald focuses on how Japanese travelers and colonial residents used...

A review of Worlds on View: Visual Art Exhibitions and State Identity in the Late Cold War, by Nicole Holland. In her dissertation, Nicole Holland shows how the two superpowers during the late Cold War relied on art as a form of soft diplomacy. International exhibits represented an apolitical “zone of neutrality” to disseminate changing conceptions of national identity as the US and USSR were growing closer together in the late-80s. More broadly, she argues that the consumption of national identity at work during Cold War-era international exhibits drew from earlier modes of exhibitions...

A review of To Return Home or “Return to Taiwan”: Conflicts and Survival in the “Voluntary Repatriation” of Chinese POWs in the Korean War, by David Cheng Chang. The most destructive phase of Korea’s unending civil war began with a North Korean invasion in 1950 and ended with a 1953 armistice. Almost all of the dramatic exchanges of territory, including the four falls of the Korean capital Seoul to invading armies, took place in the course of the first year as American-led UN and Chinese forces flooded onto the peninsula. During the two years of stalemate and bitter...

A review of Culturing Revolution: the Local Communists of China’s Hainan Island, by Jeremy Andrew Murray. In Culturing Revolution, Jeremy Murray provides a history of the Communist takeover of Hainan Island. His dissertation, which spans the period from the late Qing until the early 1950s, emphasizes two complementary themes, while also connecting to the wider history of East Asia. Firstly, he draws attention to the importance of local studies of the Communist revolution, and in doing so contributes to a body of scholarship that is gradually teasing out the complicated history of how the...

A review of Empire Besieged:  The Preservation of Chinese Rule in Xinjiang, 1884-1971, by Justin Jacobs. In comparison with its neighbor Tibet, the plight of twentieth-century Xinjiang has failed to capture the public’s imagination and, with notable exceptions, serious scholarly consideration. Yet, between the fall of the Qing Empire and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the collapse of central authority, the emergence of ethno-political consciousness, and the maneuverings of foreign powers could easily have wrested the overwhelming non-Han region permanently from the...

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...

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 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 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...