Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
Page 16
This complicated conclusion is captured most vividly by the words ofMrs. Dai Mengqin with which I began this paper. Dai was a woman with so many of the freedoms which a modern narrative of progress and liberation would reify so: she was literate, urbane, modern- and open-minded, participated in the “public sphere” of the modern media, had purchasing power, and sought to get in touch with and gain control over her body and sexuality.
However, efforts to critique this Chinese modernity can offer a different perspective. Dai’s idea that “the me in the mirror is. . . like my strict teacher” rings so clearly of the ways in which modern disciplining power works. This new measure of discipline that Dai imposed on herself (being her own strict teacher, examining herself for any faults) jibes perfectly with the goals of the modern state, which, as Takashi Fujitani writes, aims to discipline the individual subject-citizen via the “positive deployment of power into the soul of the individual.”44 The joy and subjectivity which Dai now felt as she regulated and conditioned her own body, an act surely taken of her own free will after all, speaks to the relevance of Fujitani’s formulation. The popular media’s and the modern state’s many layers of hegemonic influence in modern physical culture, the doctrine of “science,” and the wisdom of Dai’s husband provided Dai with the new self-understanding and the desire to analyze, classify and rectify her own faults, to normalize herself.45 And Dai’s knowledge of the West, gained via photos of healthy, buxom, modern Western women so often featured in Chinese periodicals, bespeaks the media’s use of these images to construct conceptions of what the New Chinese Woman was supposed to be and look like.
However, at the same time, we would be wise to remember American photographer Diane Arbus’s evocative observation that “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”46 As historians, we must ask ourselves if it is right to concentrate only on these more pernicious aspects of Chinese women’s physical culture—especially when one can identify so many similar patterns in our own media and culture today. One recent example can be seen in a photo shoot of women athletes at the University of Massachusetts in 2007. The “Sisters in Sports” photo essay in the university magazine—of pairs of sisters who excelled in UMass swimming, track and field, and lacrosse—was so popular that it merited its own “Behind the Scenes” feature online.47 The photos, which show the women smiling, showing their “game faces,” and striking sporting poses, also highlight the young women’s athletic physiques. Although there is nothing that strikes the modern viewer as prurient about these photos, this explicit fascination with the act of photographing the athletic female body is still compelling. It reminds us of all of the ways in which women in our own society today are taught to see and discipline the fitness and beauty of their own bodies. At the same time, it is also a simple illustration of all of the freedoms that these women enjoy to display and exert publicly their bodies in ways unimaginable in many parts of the world.
Therefore, when we engage in our keen critiques of this past moment in Republican China, what kind of historical injustice might we commit against the Chinese women of the 1930s who happily made the choice to involve themselves in modern sporting culture? In Arbus’s words above, what “secrets” about these women may we be missing when we come to our conclusions some eight decades on? Indeed, as Kracauer explained in 1927, “[i]n a photograph, a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow.”48
By looking at the ways in which the state, media and popular morality worked to constrain, classify, define, and name these women, are we just restating an ahistorical “Chinese tradition” of the oppression of women where there perhaps is not one?49 And, indeed, do postmodern philosophy and social theory, with their notions of the “male gaze,” also ironically work to exclude consideration of how women contemplate and identify with active images of other women?
Figure 6.23 Students of the Southeastern Women’s Physical Education Normal School, Shanghai. From: Qinfen tiyu yuebao [Diligent Struggle Sport Monthly] 2.2 (November 1934), front cover.
These photos (especially ones like Figure 6.23) and other sources ask us to see the ways in which these women sought to mitigate these obstructions and avoid becoming mere “victims” by finding their own meanings, expression, and exploration in the bodily culture they pursued.
Notes
1. Dai Mengqin, “Jianshen jianguo de tujing” [The Way to Build a Healthy Body and a Healthy Nation], Shenghuo zhoukan [The Life Weekly] 6.26 (20 June 1931),p. 535.
2. Foucault uses this phrase to discuss regimes of self-examination, obedience, and sacrifice of the self. Michel Foucault, et al., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 45.
3. Dai Mengqin, pp. 535–536.
4. On this topic, see two important recent books: Yunxiang Gao, Sporting Gender: Women Athletes and Celebrity-Making During China’s National Crisis, 1931–45 (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 2013); Yu Chien-ming, Yundongchang neiwai: Jindai Huadong diqu de nüzi tiyu (1895–1937) (On and Off the Playing Fields: A Modern History of Physical Education for Girls in Eastern China [1895–1937]) (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2009).
5. For example, see Fan Hong, Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom: The Liberation of Women’s Bodies in Modern China (Ilford, Essex: Frank Cass Publishers, 1997).
6. For comparison to questions of women’s body images in our own era, see, for example, Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, andthe Body, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Virginia L. Blum, Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
7. Linglong 48 (27 April 1932), p. 1964.
8. At the Third National Games, held at Wuchang in 1924, female teams competed in basketball, volleyball, and softball, but only as demonstrations and not medal events. The Far Eastern Championship Games, a (mostly) biennial sports festival that rotated between China, Japan, and the Philippines from 1913 to 1934, also featured women’s tennis and volleyball as demonstration events beginning with the Sixth Games held in Osaka in 1923. Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 87–91.
9. Quanguo nü yundongyuan mingjiang lu [Roll of Famous Chinese Women Athletes] (Shanghai: Qinfen shuju, 1936), pp. 33–35.
10. For example, famed educator Wang Huaiqi had written in 1928, “Soccer has a very intense quality to it; young men naturally are quite interested in this type of competition. But children or weak women surely cannot bear this kind of excitement. . . . Men’s and women’s bodies are naturally different, so their exercises and sports have to correspond to these different levels [of endurance].” Wang Huaiqi, Xingqiu guize [Starball Regulations] (Shanghai: Zhongguo jianxue she, 1928), pp. 2–3.
11. Laurel R. Davis, The Swimsuit Issue and Sport: Hegemonic Masculinity in Sports Illustrated (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 51–54.
12. Davis, p. 59.
13. Davis, pp. 55–56.
14. Davis, pp. 30–31.
15. Di shiwu jie Huabei yundonghui [The 15th North China Games] (n.p., 1931), p. 121.
16. Wu Yunrui, “Wuguo minzu fuxing zhong nüzi tiyu zhi zhongyao” [The Importance of Women’s Physical Education in the Revival of Our Nation’s People], Tiyu zazhi [Physical Education Magazine] 1.1 (4 April 1935), p. 1.
17. Quanguo nü yundongyuan mingjiang lu, pp. 4–5.
18. Pei Shunyuan and Shen Zhenchao, Nü yundongyuan (China’s Girls Athletic Champions) (Shanghai: Tiyu shubaoshe, 1935), n.p.
19. Liang zhounian gongzuo zongbaogao [Two Year Anniversary Official Work Report] (Qingdao: Qingdao Tiyu xiejinhui chuban weiyuanhui, 1935), p. 41.
20. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 86.
21. Quanguo nü yundongyuan mingjiang lu, p. 1.
22. Pei and Shen, n.p.
23. In 1936, Yang would be the star attraction at a Shanghai Aviation Association Swim Meet held to raise money to buy warplanes in honor of Chiang Kai-shek’s birthday. Yiru, “Jiangxi shuishang yundonghui” [The aquatic meet in Jiangxi], Qinfen tiyu yuebao [Diligent Struggle Sport Monthly] 1.11 (August 1934), pp. 26–29; Fujian sheng difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Fujian shengzhi: Tiyu zhi [Fujian provincial gazetteer: Chronicle of physical culture] (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1993), p.134; Wu Ningxing and Gu Qingfang,“‘Meirenyu’ quanjia Jinling yongtan xianji ji” [A record of the performances presented on the Nanjing swimming stage by “The Mermaid” and her entire family], Jiangsu tiyu wenshi [Materials from the history of Jiangsu physical culture] 6 (January 1988): 49–50; “Yi yue lai zhi yundong bisai” [Competitive sports this past month], Qinfen tiyu yuebao [Diligent Struggle Sport Monthly] 3.10 (July 1936), p. 949; Feng Shaoer, “‘Meirenyu’ Yang Xiuqiong zai Shanghai” [“The Mermaid” Yang Xiuqiong in Shanghai], Shanghai tiyu shihua [Items from the history of Shanghai physical culture] 24 (September 1989), p. 48.
24. Wang Zhenya, Jiu Zhongguo tiyu jianwen [Glimpses of physical culture in the old China] (Beijing: Renmin tiyu chubanshe, 1987), pp. 159–160.
25. “Yang Xiuqiong zuo pingqi de yaochuan” [Rumors that Yang Xiuqiong will be wed], Qinfen tiyu yuebao [Diligent Struggle Sport Monthly] 1.3 (10 December 1933), p. 75.
26. For more on Yang, see Gao, Sporting Gender, pp. 166–207.
27. Quanguo nü yundongyuan mingjiang lu, p. 32.
28. Pei and Shen, n.p.
29. Quanguo nü yundongyuan mingjiang lu, p. 3.
30. Sun Hebin, “Ping Di wu jie Quanguo yundonghui nüzi tianjingsai” [On the Fifth National Games women’s track and field competition], Qinfen tiyu yuebao [Diligent Struggle Sport Monthly] 1.2 (November 1933), p. 6.
31. Pei and Shen, n.p.
32. Jiangjun, “Wang Yuan nüshi xiajia panni ji” [The Story of Wang Yuan’s Being Married to a Traitor], Tiyu pinglun (The Sports Review) 16 (21 January 1933), p. 10; Pei and Shen, n.p.
33. Pei and Shen, n.p.
34. Michael G. Chang, “The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s–1930s,” in Yingjin Zhang, ed., Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 129, 131, 150.
35. Madeleine Y. Dong, “Who Is Afraid of the Modern Girl?” in The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, eds., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 201.
36. Pei and Shen, advertisements on inside front cover and back cover.
37. Davis, pp. 26–29.
38. Pei and Shen, advertisements on inside back cover.
39. Liang zhounian gongzuo zongbaogao, photo before p. 1; Quanguo nü yundongyuan mingjiang lu, p. 24.
40. Dong, “Who Is Afraid of the Modern Girl?” p. 208.
41. “Xiao Hua” [Humorous Story], Tiyu pinglun (The Sports Review) 56 (4 November 1933), p. 169.
42. Sheng, “Wanguo lanqiu” [International Basketball Competition], Tiyu pinglun (The Sports Review) 22 (11 March 1933), p. 34.
43. Mei, “Nü yundongjia tuiyin” [Female athlete retreats into hiding], Tiyu pinglun (The Sports Review) 25 (1 April 1933), p. 47.
44. Takashi Fujitani, “Technologies of Power in Modern Japan: The Military, The ‘Local’, the Body,” Shisô 845 (November 1994), p. 14.
45. Michel Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 200–203.
46. Patricia Bosworth, “Illusions of Arbus,” Vanity Fair 552 (August 2006), p. 155.
47. “Behind The Scenes Of A UMass Magazine Photo Shoot,” from site “University of Massachusetts - Official Athletic Site—Women’s Lacrosse,” 17 May 2007 (accessed 21 May 2007), http://umassathletics.cstv.com/sports/w-lacros/spec-rel/051707aac.html.
48. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), in Thomas Y. Levin, trans. & ed., The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 51.
49. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 1–4.
Chapter 7
Rethinking “China”
Overseas Chinese and China’s Modernity
James A. Cook
At a 1922 meeting of the Manila Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the “Cotton King” of the Philippines, the overseas Chinese entrepreneur Lin Zhuguang, gave a speech to his fellow Chamber members to announce a large gift he was making to build a primary school in his ancestral village located in the southeastern province of Fujian. Still only 21 years of age, Lin’s gift had taken the Chinese émigré community in Manila by storm. Philanthropy of this sort was supposed to be conducted by community elders; his father, Lin Xuedi, had given US$5,000 to disaster relief just before his death in 1918. For a young man like Lin Zhuguang to give a gift of such size caused quite a stir in the large, but close-knit Chinese business community of Manila.1
Part of the motivation behind Lin Zhuguang’s gift was to honor his father’s death, but other factors were also in play. “While honoring my father was certainly part of my intentions,” noted Lin, “I also want to use the gift as an opportunity to increase the influence of the overseas Chinese community back at home. We have a duty to our motherland to transform her as we have transformed Southeast Asia. What we have learned here must also be applied in our villages and schools back at home.”2 These patriotic motives continued to grow in the younger Lin. In later years, although he would continue to reside in Manila, he would contribute US$5,000 annually for the school’s upkeep and was a member of its board of directors. Why would Lin Zhuguang contribute so lavishly to a school located over 800 miles from his residence in Manila?
The answer to this question illustrates many of the ways in which living abroad affected the lives of China’s large overseas community. Life outside China not only made a great number of émigrés extremely wealthy, but also forced them to face virulent anti-Chinese racism, thereby creating within overseas Chinese communities a strong nationalism and a deep loyalty to Chinese culture. By the 1930s, these feelings had developed into a powerful desire to help rebuild and modernize their mother country. As one poet from Fujian Province who was living abroad noted:
Fujian is our ancestral village,
It feels like our blood and bones,
We are like its parents,
Protecting its shore and nurturing its growth.3
The process by which these feeling grew was both global and transnational in nature. Motivated by events both in China and abroad, many Chinese overseas like Lin Zhuguang played a critical role in communities on both sides of the ocean. Indeed, the economic and cultural contributions of Chinese abroad became so important that beginning in early twentieth century the Chinese government coined a new term, Huaqiao or “Chinese sojourner,” to emphasize the permanence of Chinese citizenship. This new identity of the Huaqiao would transform the way in which many overseas Chinese imagined the Chinese nation, extending the country’s influence far beyond the geographical confines of China proper to include all residents in Chinese communities abroad.
The experiences of China’s Huaqiao in the twentieth century force us to rethink some of our most commonly held notions about the relationship between a nation, its territory, and its people. It has become second-nature for us to assume that the borders of a nation are conterminous with the geographical confines of its territory, and that only those who were born within or live within a nation’s borders are its citizens. The familiar map of China—the rooster-shaped outline whose head is Manchuria, chest is the southeast coast, and tail is the western provinces—certainly serves as an important visual representation of the nation. However, the rapid movement of Chinese sojo
urners back and forth across the Pacific to both North America and Southeast Asia, the development of Chinese communities abroad that have identified with the Chinese mainland rather than their host countries, and the rise of Chinese nationalism within those communities all attest to the fact that national boundaries may not be as fixed as we generally assume. What does it mean to live abroad but to still consider yourself to be Chinese? Can a nation be defined solely by territorial boarders, or can it be imagined socially, ethnically, or culturally?
The idea of remaining “Chinese” while abroad was reinforced by both cultural and geopolitical considerations emanating from both sides of the sea. Overseas Chinese continued to feel the magnetic pull of the homeland. They wove together an embracement of Chinese language, dress, diet, and customs with residence outside China into an identity that stressed the connection between Chinese culture and nationalism: they saw themselves as Huaqiao. If we emphasize a cultural identity rather than a national, as many Chinese living abroad did in the first half of the twentieth century, then our map of “China” may need to be redrawn.
This chapter analyzes the key visual images and markers that connected Huaqiao with China in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Charles Musgrove’s work on the structure of the Sun Yat-sen memorial located in the hills of Nanjing, it considers the meaning infused into important cultural and religious buildings, but moves to explore places—like Singapore, Batavia (Jakarta), and Saigon—outside the Chinese nation itself. These structures housed powerful reminders of the connection between Chinese immigrants and their hometowns. Temples, native-place associations, and even homes were more than just buildings; they were concrete representations of the cultural and social forces around which émigré life was organized. Image, identity, and place were powerful forces connecting émigré Chinese and their hometowns in China, and they were steeped into the very structures that sheltered the overseas Chinese community. Eventually, these currents of culture and identity would also return to China and have a powerful impact on its own development.