by Cook, James A. ,Goldstein, Joshua,Johnson, Matthew D. ,Schmalzer, Sigrid
2. Charles Musgrove, “The Nation’s Concrete Heart: Architecture, Planning, and Ritual in Nanjing, 1927–1937” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2002).
3. For relationships between tombs, monuments, and nation-building, see George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975) and Edwin Heathcote, Monument Builders: Modern Architecture and Death (West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1999).
4. “Sun Zhongshan yu Wang Jingwei tanhua” [Sun Yat-sen’s conversation with Wang Jingwei], Minguo ribao, March 16, 1925. Also see Wang Liping, 26.
5. Sun resigned in an effort to complete a compromise arrangement that would preclude civil war between the southern revolutionaries and northerners who favored the leadership Yuan Shikai. For more on Zhu Yuanzhang’s efforts to build Nanjing as the capital see F.W. Mote, “The Transformation of Nanking, 1350–1400,” in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977).
6. For more on Chinese imperial tombs see Lawrence G. Liu, Chinese Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), chapter 7. For a description of the architectural features of Ming-era imperial tombs in Beijing (which were modeled on Zhu’s tomb), see Ann Paludan, The Ming Tombs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
7. Ceremonial vessels located outside the sacrificial hall and in the gate tower served as a symbolic reminder of ancient times when rituals were held out in the open air, but otherwise they were not used in the actual rites, Paludan, 10, 38.
8. Zhu Yuanzhang yu Ming Xiaoling, 59–64.
9. Zhu Yuanzhang yu Ming Xiaoling, 102–103. Till, 143–144.
10. Ye Zhaoyan, Lao Nanjing, 215.
11. Zhu Yuanzhang yu Ming Xiaoling, 147–148.
12. For a brief description of the ceremony, see Harrison, 41–42.
13. This translation is provided by Till, 144–145. Also see, Sun Zhongshan quanji [Collected works of Sun Yat-sen] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), vol. 2, 94–97.
14. See, Evelyn Rawski, “The Imperial Way of Death: Ming and Ch’ing Emperors and Death Ritual,” in James Watson and Evelyn Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
15. Though Sun clearly viewed the Manchus as foreigners and used such views to whip up pro-revolutionary sentiment, after the Qing were overthrown, he struggled to avoid so narrowly defining the Chinese nation, recognizing that to consider the Manchus foreigners would imply the loss of northeastern provinces which had served as the Manchu homeland. Ultimately, he arrived at a view of Chinese nationhood as the cooperation of the “five races”: Han (ethnic Chinese), Mongol, Manchu, Hui, and Tibetan.
16. The term ideology in this paper refers to the concerted effort to integrate theories and goals into a sociological program. During the 1920s and 1930s, ideologists in China were mainly divided between those who favored an explicitly socialist ideology (as with the Chinese Communist Party) and those (like the GMD) who favored the more vaguely defined ideology of Sun Yat-sen, which advocated social reform but not class antagonism. Within the GMD there was also great debate about how to define Sun Yat-sen’s often contradictory statements about social reform.
17. Bergere, 378–381.
18. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925. His remains were temporarily interred in a temple at the Western Hills. After the GMD established its nominal authority of Beijing in 1928, preparations were begun to remove Sun’s remains to their permanent resting place at Purple Mountain.
19. Ye Chucang and Liu Yizheng, eds., Shoudu zhi [Capital gazetteer] (Nanjing: Zhengzhong shuju, 1935), 261.
20. The concept of the “people’s livelihood” shared similarities to ideals espoused by Chinese Communists at the time. For example, it called for the equalization of land rights. However, this was to be accomplished through progressive taxation, not through forced land redistribution. See Bergere, 167–172.
21. Lu Yanzhi, “Nanjing yu Guangzhou zhi Sun Zhongshan xiansheng jinian wu” [Sun Yatsen memorials in Nanjing and Guangzhou], Mile pinglun bao: xin Zhongguo tekan, October 10 1928, 21.
22. This revolutionary outfit was modified and then became known as the “Mao jacket,” for it was common apparel during the Maoist era.
23. For more on imperial rituals see James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds. Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). For the “orthodox” version of the rituals performed in households, see Chu Hsi’s Family Rituals, trans. Patricia Ebrey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
24. For analyses of the interplay of imperial-era state ritual and local practices, see chapters by Joseph McDermott and David Faure in Joseph McDermott, ed., State and Court Ritual in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). In particular, McDermott’s chapter, “Emperor, elites, and commoners: the community pact,” describes the expansion of ritual practices that had been the exclusive domain of officials to public ceremonies performed by local communities to honor the emperor during the Ming, but the material focus of the ritual was on a tablet of imperial instructions, not on an actual spirit tablet, as would be the case in ancestral rites.
25. These masses were organized into groups that participated in the parade that brought Sun’s remains to the tomb. By contrast, imperialera rituals had been replicated by officials in the provinces in their capacity as representatives of imperial power. Commoners were not official participants in imperial state rituals.
26. “Zongli ling guanhui chengli tonggao” [Announcement on the establishment of the Party Leader memorial park management committee], July 3, 1929, Zhongshan ling dang’an, 403. See also Ye Chucang and Liu Yizheng, eds., Shoudu zhi, 258–9.
27. Ye Chucang and Liu Yizheng, eds., Shoudu zhi, 297.
28. “Rebuilding Nanking as a Capital II,” North China Herald, May 25, 1929, 305.
29. In February 1953, Mao visited the mausoleum, where he bowed and sat silently for a few minutes. Shi Ping, “Mao Zedong ji du dao Jinling” [Mao Zedong’s several trips to Nanjing], Nanjing shi zhi 30 (1988), 3.
Chapter 6
“The Me in the Mirror”
A Narrative of Voyeurism and Discipline in Chinese Women’s Physical Culture, 1921–1937
Andrew D. Morris
In 1931, a Shanghai woman named Dai Mengqin wrote a short article for The Life Weekly on her recent conversion to a healthy exercise-filled life. Dai opened her piece by providing “historical background” that employed modern stereotypes of Chinese women’s essential and unchanging weakness:
Our nation’s women have always sat around, just keeping an eye on the home, and not being accustomed to movement. Except for women working in the fields, they all were practically just Lin Daiyu [the female protagonist of Dream of the Red Chamber, famed for her weak feminine beauty], possessing beautiful features but lacking a healthy body.1
Dai described how she personally exacerbated this already sorry heritage by dismissing her husband’s positive ideas about exercise. It was not until Dai examined in this same Life Weekly magazine some of its frequent “Healthy and Beautiful” pictorials, that she saw the light:
I started to understand that a body’s features and look are not unchangeable, that one can use one’s own power to change oneself. My soul was extremely moved. That night I went to a bookstore and bought an American sports magazine, and after reading through it I realized that my interest was growing even stronger. I decided that I would learn how to exercise. The next day I bought a swimsuit and came back home to put it on before a mirror. I looked like a woman with a healthy body, but upon closer examination I noticed some major faults: (1) I had too much body fat, (2) my thighs were too thick, (3) my chest was too skinny, (4) my arms were a little bit too large.
Determined to correct these faults, Dai began practising sixteen types of exercise that her husband taught her. Enthusiastic about this modern technology of the self,2 Dai explained how she always took this exercise while
“examining myself in the mirror. The me in the mirror is like my companion, and also like my strict teacher.”3
Chinese women’s physical culture during the Republican era (1912–1949), and especially during the prewar 1930s, presents a very complicated historical problem. Women, especially urban women like Dai, were objectified more and more by three main forces: a conservative and reactionary morality (purportedly “Confucian” but actually very modern), an invasive and exploitative media, and the crisis mentality of a government staring down the barrel of imminent war with the Japanese. The world of sport and physical culture (tiyu) can serve as a perfect microcosm of the pressures and demands placed on certain members of Chinese society during this era.4 Others have written about the liberating aspects of athletic activity for women in China;5 however, this is only one part of the story.
Dai’s inspiring confessional above can serve as a very clear window on many aspects of women’s physical culture of the time:6 Women were blamed for their heritage of a “female weakness” which supposedly had also rendered China’s children sick and weak for centuries. Female physical culture was dominated by the voices of men bent on creating a new healthy and strong Chinese Woman who could do her part to “strengthen the race and strengthen the nation.” The popular media was saturated with images of buxom, healthy, and wealthy Western women with whom Chinese women were encouraged to compare their own physiques in the mirror. In many ways, we can read this as an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese women to explore and publicly express their sexuality. In others, we can see how women often were asked to internalize patriarchal and nationalistic imaginations of the worth and uses of their own bodies. This perfectly characterizes a modern pattern of power relations—expressed through visuality—that is known by many scholars as “the male gaze.” An issue of the women’s magazine Linglong published in April 1932 included a startlingly erotic photo of a nude Western woman reclining in ecstasy on the beach; its caption read: “A healthy figure that all would envy.”7 Such authoritative and normalizing statements made it clear how women should feel about the fitness of their own bodies as well as those of others.
Women’s sports and physical culture were understood as part of a self-justifying narrative of women’s liberation, where the freedom to exercise, even if under a male Nationalist command, could seem obviously superior to the “traditional confinement” of women to the inner sphere of the home. And physical culture was one more way in which modern citizens were to learn how to discipline themselves, to serve as one’s own “strict teacher,” and examine oneself in the mirror for any faults, all the while feeling grateful for this chance to become more healthy and physically fit in the service of the nation. Dai’s account bears close witness to the weight of the burden that the modern sporting culture could place on women during the 1930s.
Women’s Sports as National Games, 1930s
China’s Fourth National Games, held in Hangzhou in April 1930, were the first to include women’s sports (track and field, basketball, volleyball, and tennis) as medal categories.8 The 2,000-plus athletes participating in these Games included 448 women from 18 cities and provinces across China.9 And it was here that China’s first true female athletic star, a sprinter from Harbin named Sun Guiyun, emerged. (Figure 6.1, website). Sun set national records in the 50-meter and 100-meter contests, and all female track athletes would be measured for years to come against her speed and beauty.
By the early 1930s, the sporting world and Chinese media treated women’s sports as truly worthy competition, not just the old colorful and lively distraction and novelty provided in the past. In the Fifth National Games held in Nanjing in October 1933, women’s swimming, softball and martial arts (guoshu) were added to the schedule. There were now seven women’s events, just one less (soccer—thought to be too “intense” for women10) than the eight events joined in by the male athletes, and more than 800 of the 2,000-plus athletes in attendance were women. It was not necessarily a coincidence that at the same moment women’s sporting uniforms revealed more and more flesh, women’s sports won a position of more authenticity and value vis-à-vis modern dreams of the fit body and the proud nation. The official National Games program, published by the Shenbao newspaper, seemed to frame women’s sports totally within bourgeois fantasies of sexual trespass. Shenbao readers apparently understood very well the symbols involved in images like Figure 6.2 of women’s athletic bodies and the apparent sexual availability conveyed.
Not only were imaginations of female bodies and sexuality easily appropriated as a national endowment, but they were commodified with ease as well; witness the advertisement for My Dear Cigarettes hovering over the National Games cover girl’s bared thighs in Figure 6.2. Laurel Davis has analyzed the phenomenon of the Sports Illustrated “Swimsuit Issue” in late-twentieth-century America, describing it as a way for men to secure heterosexual status through forms of public consumption.11 It is easy to extend this analysis to commodified and sexualized images of “sport” like that above. However, one difference would be that while Sports Illustrated in our time, according to Davis, “contain[s] only tokenistic coverage of women athletes,”12 media coverage of the 1933 National Games paid much more attention to the competing women athletes. “Real” photos of women athletes from the Games also showed much flesh (for the time), although (as in Figure 6.3, below; and Figures 6.4 to 6.5, website) this display was often and importantly mitigated by positioning it within the context of virtuous teamwork, that loftiest of modern Nationalist collective virtues.
Figure 6.2 The flirtatious pose and expression of this figure from the cover of the Shun Pao magazine’s All China Olympic Special Edition is typical of many cigarette advertisements and calendar posters from this era. What marks it as supposedly more appropriate to a sports issue is that the young woman is wearing a swimsuit. From: Shenbao quanguo yundonghui jinian tekan (The Shun Pao All-China Olympic Special Edition) (Shanghai, 1933), front cover.
Figure 6.3 Shanghai women’s 400-meter relay team, 1933 National Games. From: Ershier nian Quanguo yundong dahui zongbaogao shu [1933 National Games Official Report] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1934), n.p.
This new focus on women’s sports, however, fixed all the pressures of a growing and exploitative urban media and the conservative demands of a crisis-ridden national government on any women who entered the public athletic realm. Again, Davis’s analysis is relevant, as she describes Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue as a form of backlash against feminism and its threat to hegemonic forms of American masculinity.13 In the case of 1930s China, it seems that owing to a similar fear that the emergence of strong and healthy women athletes could undermine the macho claims that men’s sports made on the nation and national strength, the popular media was quick to categorize any up-and-coming female athletes into some type or another. These could include the sweet and loyal family girl, the fashionable makeup-wearing “modern maiden,” the timid and fragile girl whose sporting spirit was just not enough to overcome her organic Chinese feminine weakness, or the woman who married and left (that is, betrayed) the sports world, among other types.
Also disturbing was a voyeuristic convergence of prurience and nationalism in a practice that might be called “ogling for the nation.” Here men could now, through the gaze of the modern print media, leer at the necks, arms, and legs exposed by these women athletes’ swimsuits and uniforms, and get away with it. In this moment of national crisis, it seemed easy enough to justify their gazing in terms of simple patriotism—after all, were not healthy women’s bodies crucial to producing a strong Chinese citizenry of the future? (Figure 6.6, website.) Again, this question becomes more complicated when one considers women’s own agency in this process. For example, we can witness a woman’s new freedoms to publicly display one’s body and sexuality. We also see the new means available for women (like Mrs. Dai in the introduction to this article) to consume and even fetishize (in the OED definition, “to pay undue respect to, to overvalue”) these images.
Once again though, Davis’s suggestion that Sports Illustrated has worked to label a clearly heterosexual/masculine discourse as merely “sporting,” and indeed this heterosexual masculinity as natural and normative, helps us to complicate this issue further.14 Clearly, then, we must pay attention to these elements of the 1930s women’s sporting story that are ignored or erased by narratives focusing solely on notions of “liberation” through athletic exertion.
National Crisis and Men’s Roles in Women’s Sports
By the 1930s, the Guomindang’s popular anti-imperialist line and the continuing Japanese encroachment over Chinese territory, economy, and sovereignty combined to create a tense atmosphere surrounding this once-fun realm of tiyu, or physical culture. In this time of national crisis, physical culture was not merely about sport, but also about national defense and strength—developing a physically fit citizenry, both male and female, that could fight the Japanese invaders. It was now a discourse that required and reinforced complete faith in the nation as the embodiment of the people’s will, and as the sole subject and agent of progress.
The inclusion of women was on these terms as well: they were to be awarded measures of “liberation,” repaid with the right to make sacrifices for the national project. This all would be on terms defined by these patriotic men, who of course took credit for the whole endeavor. As Wang Xiangrong, Vice Chairman of the Fifteenth North China Games in 1931, said in his closing ceremony address,
These entire Games have been a great success. . . . There was an increase in the number of female athletes participating. Of course [this percentage] is still not up to the standards of the advanced sporting nations of the world, but seeing this progress in women’s athletics truly gives everyone cause to congratulate themselves and rejoice.15
Men involved in the sporting world took pride in serving as appropriate and imposing figures of authority; their presence in many team photos (Figures 6.7 and 6.8, website) seemed to infantilize the young women who ordinarily radiated much more confidence and presence.
