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This article examines critiques of concubinage in the early Chinese Republic and their fruition in the anticoncubinage movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to Japan, concubines remained a public preoccupation long after China's legal embrace of monogamy. After examining the question of concubinage in missionary and Chinese Christian endeavors and egalitarian reconceptualizations of society, the article turns to concubine abolition movements. The class prejudices of female activists fractured their conceptualization of the modern category of "woman" and created exclusionary ideas of female personhood. These fractures suggest the enduring imprint of the hierarchic principles of polygyny on ostensibly egalitarian formations of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the conservative/radical polarity by which we classify May Fourth intellectuals originated in the New Youth group's polemical stratagem of depicting the intellectual landscape in terms of a "New Culturalists vs. the rest" divide. In this stratagem, those who later became "the conservatives" were lumped together for dissenting from the New Culture movement and largely defined by who they were not. Historiographically, the establishment of this polarity scheme sidelined alternative mappings of the intellectual scene. Drawing on the case of the Critical Review (1922–1933)—a journal of "cultural conservatism"—and its polemics against the New Culture, this essay explores one such alternative mapping that grouped "conservative" thinker Liang Shuming (1893–1988) with the New Culturalists. Taking this paradigm as one of many that existed before the mid-1920s, the essay discusses the juxtaposition of multiple schemes of grouping as a strategy for superseding the polarity mode of classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1939, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders designated May 4 "National Youth Day," emphasizing its patriotic legacy. Subsequently, the CCP adapted May Fourth spirit to its political agenda and to historical changes. This article examines how the CCP's May Fourth public commemorations constructed a linkage between May Fourth and youth as historical and political agents in CCP discourse and discusses meanings of youth articulated in commemorative articles and editorials from 1939 to the early People's Republic. May Fourth commemoration became a site for articulation of a youth discourse that inherited the spirit of national salvation/rejuvenation and of concrete political action and evolved in response to changing sociohistorical circumstances. In 1939, youth received attention as a new force against Japan. With the creation of the socialist state, youth assumed unprecedented significance as children of New China, symbols of a new beginning, and privileged agents of socialist transformation and modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Republican China, new dictionaries promoted several aspects of the project to make Chinese culture compatible with science and to introduce democratic ideas. As inexpensive reference works, dictionaries also embodied the modernist principle that rational, secular knowledge could be made broadly available. As a result, new dictionaries both recorded and helped to define an emerging sense of Chinese national and scientific modernity during the May Fourth era. As part of the project of "scientization," they contributed to fundamental and wide-ranging cultural change. In addition, for the two largest publishers of Republican China, dictionaries proved to be popular and profitable titles that supplied vital revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wei Baqun, leader of the influential Donglan Peasant Movement in southern China in the 1920s and 1930s, was attacked by his Nationalist enemies as a real and dangerous Communist long before he joined the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, some of his Communist comrades were reluctant to admit him into the Party or to recognize him as a genuine Communist even after he joined the Communist Party. But after his death, they all began to promote him as a perfect Communist. Through an analysis of Wei Baqun's life and revolution, this article shows how controversial and conflicting perceptions of the political identity of a political leader could exert strong influence on the political career of the leader and on local and national politics in revolutionary China. The article also attempts to explain why the confusion and controversy over Wei Baqun's identity dissipated after his death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kang Youwei’s successive visits to Canada from 1899 initiated a reformist movement among the worldwide Chinese diaspora for over a decade. But his Canadian experience has long been neglected, and the overseas Chinese movement has often been downplayed as an extension or even regression from the abortive 1898 Reform. The rise and fall of the movement have been ascribed respectively to Kang’s reformist mobilization for monarchist patriotism and to the political challenge of the anti-Qing revolutionaries. This article, however, argues that Kang’s diasporic experience, especially his interactions with the Chinese in Canada, greatly radicalized and expanded his reforms. His new program for reform of both China and the Chinese diaspora enabled his movement to spread from Canada to the global arena. This movement also began to decline from Canada around 1909 because of Kang’s clashes with leaders of Canadian Chinatowns. Nonetheless, it caused unprecedented politicization and integration of overseas Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Taiping Rebellion, eastern Zhejiang was a key battlefield. Drawing upon fresh data from literati writings, government records, and local gazetteers, this paper explores how different types of local elites in the Ningbo-Shaoxing region acted and how their practices interacted with and gradually changed the local political structure. This paper argues that the Taiping Rebellion was not simply a conflict between rebels on one side, and local elites plus the Qing government on the other. Eastern Zhejiang's Taiping Rebellion was chiefly a civil war between two types of local elites. The suppression of the rebellion cannot be interpreted solely as the Tongzhi restoration policies of the central government; in fact, victory in eastern Zhejiang resulted from the new activism of the Ningbo elites, who applied various resources to ensure the Qing triumph. Finally, patterns of local dominance changed: an independent and separate sphere of local activism emerged, and economic capital became increasingly important compared to cultural capital as a source of power. All of these factors corroded the foundation of the "Confucian" way of dominance and gave rise to the independent authority of the local elite, which set in motion the political transformation that was to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores on the rise and fall of the Number One Work Study Mutual Aid Corps in Beijing, China. The proclamations of the Number One Corps, the coverage it received in the periodical press, and the memoirs of key participants, allow researchers to examine not only the intentions of its founders, but also the activities of the Corps and the relationships within it. It tends to reflect on the historical studies that focus on the political aspect of the movement, and literary studies that focus on its cultural aspect. The article seeks to recreate, in as much as possible, the workings of one particular slice of May Fourth idealism and activism and to convey the significance of those heady times for the participants.

The article explores different clusters of performances that shape the migrant workers' social movements in an attempt to weigh their impact on state-society relations in China. All the legal aid centers surveyed reported a notable increase in the number of migrants seeking advice on how to take legal action against their employers. There are cases of migrants who have been physically abused for seeking salary compensation. However, the opening of state institutions, courts, and party organizations to migrant workers enabled them to experience their contention with the state which claims for the first time to serve them.

The article examines the action orientations of a resistance movement to protect the rights of peasants in Hengyang County, Hunan Sheng in China. The peasants and the peasant leaders in this county who have organized this resistance movement have already influenced the Chinese government agricultural policies. Peasants use the law as a kind of weapon in the resistance movement to protect their rights. And when determining the bounds of their actions, sometimes they adopt blurred tactics.

Focuses on the resistance of the Chinese New Left against globalization. Ideological dispute between liberalism and the New Left in the last part of the 1990s; Anxieties over the future of China; Shift from the socialist planned economy to the capital-governed market economy; Change in the roles of intellectuals; Western sources for the Chinese New Left ideology; Social and cultural problems existing in contemporary China; Social injustices.

A longstanding thesis on the Chinese revolution is that the peasants embraced the Communist movement because the brutalization by the invading Japanese Army aroused the village people, making it possible for the Communist Party to organize them and to appeal to their nationalist aspirations. A theoretical exploration of peasant mobilization and revolutionary war in the T'aihang Mountain-North China Plain revolutionary base suggests different reasons. The peasants there embraced the Communist movement mainly because the Communist Party 8th Route Army helped them regain their basic rights to subsistence in their struggles with landlords and local governments before the Japanese invasion. The armies of the Japanese and the Kuomintang exerted tremendous pressures on the peasant movements in the base area, and there was a negative correlation between the presence of these intruding forces and the emergence of a viable Communist political order. The revolutionary army won the War of Resistance and the War of Liberation largely by averting and ameliorating the burdens the peasants were encountering. In all of the revolutionary processes, the peasants placed greater value on the performance of the party in enhancing their livelihood than on the nationalist propaganda of the revolutionary movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on Chinese workers' rights advocate Han Dongfang's receipt of the 2005 International Activist Award. Services provided by Han's China Labour Bulletin