Panel 18: Modern Chinese Histories: The Early 20th Century

Chair: Julia Kowalski, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

António Eduardo Hawthorne Barrento, University of Lisbon, “Newly-Wed, Newly-Toured: The Lure of Honeymoon Travel in Republican China”

Honeymoon travel became an attractive practice in China during the Republican period. It started as a fashionable ritual, with a following amongst an upper class few, as attested by the inclusion in the press of captioned pictures of well-to-do newly-weds on their honeymoon tours. If a general aura of distinction must have helped promote it, its attraction was probably only further magnified by news of the nuptial journeys of particular celebrities. By 1935, it had become more common. A writer in a magazine for young people said that it was popular throughout the whole country, and that young people, particularly those who had had a new education, yearned for it. Honeymoon experiences published in the China Traveler showed, for their part, that they were a domain available to many, without the need for extraordinary means. A newly-wed described a honeymoon journey to Tianmu as based partly on transportation by bus and simple accommodation. This being so, the honeymoon was not to become a pervasive phenomenon, to the point that it was not identified with China: a writer for the China Traveler still referred in 1936 to the ‘honeymoon existing abroad’, explaining that it was aimed to allow husband and wife to have deeper and friendlier feelings in relation to one another. It is the aim of this paper to look into the honeymoon as a new form of tourist practice in China and more broadly as the expression of a new tourist culture that was developing since the late Qing.

Li-Lin Tseng, Pittsburg State University, “From ‘Gimmick Trick Shows’ to a Modern ‘Motion Picture Industry’: Shanghai Cinema in Transition, 1896–1937”

This paper investigates the remarkable evolution of the film industry in Shanghai from 1896 to 1937. At the turn of the 20th century, European and American filmmakers initially screened their newly invented “moving pictures” at local tea houses, attracting enthusiastic spectators with a series of stunning “gimmick trick shows.” By doing so, cinema took root in China. By the 1920s Hollywood films dominated 90% of the Chinese market. Nevertheless, in the 1930s Shanghai became “the Hollywood of China,” capable of producing blockbuster films. Still, the rise of Shanghai cinema greatly benefited from a new model of collaboration between the Chinese and global film professionals. International in scope, this paper focuses on the interactive relationships between Shanghai and Hollywood and Shanghai and the world. The study contains a panorama of mutually beneficial partnerships from around the globe and features models and strategies involved in initiating, managing, and sustaining a range of transnational linkages between Shanghai and the global film community. I argue that the evolution of Shanghai film industry was enriched by an ambivalent relationship of “competition and collaboration” among those Chinese and European and American film producers, filmmakers, and film stars who journeyed back and forth across oceans, continents and cultures. These experts developed and accelerated cultural exchanges and cross-cultural dialogue and revitalized a newly dynamic Chinese civilization.

Iris Ai Wang, Winona State University, “The Environmental Transformation of the Dagu Bar and the Rise of Modern Tianjin City”

This paper examines the environmental transformation of the Dagu Bar, a mud flat and coastal sandbar at the mouth of the Hai River, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Dagu Bar was conceptualized and transformed by a variety of cultures in the imperial and modern eras. After Tianjin became a treaty port in 1860, the Dagu Bar went through a series of drastic changes that had not only physically transformed estuary environment, but also created new discourses of coastal environment. By analyzing engineering plans and changing discourses of the bar, this paper argues that the modern conceptualization of the Bar had marked a departure from its imperial past. This paper highlights two leading engineering schemes that strived for creating a permanent bar channel for navigation, designed by European engineers. The environmental transformation of the Dagu Bar played a critical role in the rise of the Tianjin city. As the condition for marine navigation improved, Tianjin gradually developed into an industrial city and a distributing center of global trade on the North China Plain in the early twentieth century.