Articles

“Our Girls Have Grown Up in the Family”: educating German and Chinese girls in the nineteenth century

Fang Qin & Emily Bruce

ABSTRACT：In this article, we examine and compare historical changes in girls’ home-based education in nineteenth-century Germany and China. In many ways, girls’ home-based education in these two historical contexts exhibited differences, including the relationship between formal schooling and home education, and the role that new genres played in shifting tradition and structuring girlhood. However, we argue that more commonalities between the German and Chinese cases emerge. By analyzing the relation between talent and virtue, the writing of exemplary lives, and family dynamics, we see that in both cases the home was the critical site for valorizing and reproducing the class-bounded ideology of domesticity and identification for girls as home-based education constituted the means by which knowledge, morality, and practical skills were produced and transmitted from generation to generation.

KEYWORDS: Girls’ home-based education, Germany, China, ideology of domesticity, class

Christian colleges amid political changes: The University of Nanking’s reorganization and registration (1927-1928)

Baolin Jiang

ABSTRACT：Jinling University, or the University of Nanking, was created in 1910 from the merger of three Christian missionary schools in Nanjing (Nanking). After a period of smooth development in the second decade of the twentieth century, the University of Nanking had to face huge challenges in the 1920s when nationalism and revolutionary movements gained momentum in China. After the Nanjing Incident in 1927, the university was forced to deal with all the serious challenges of running a new school. Within two years, the University of Nanking underwent comprehensive reform, which included the reorganization of the school administration, the establishment of a board of directors, the accession of the university’s first Chinese president, and the completion of a process of government-mandated registration. All this ultimately led the University of Nanking into a new era. The university reacted to the registration requirement and the internal administrative reshuffling in a process of gradual, interlocking responses. This process reflects the general nature of relations between church universities and the Chinese government during this important historical moment, though the unique characteristics of the University of Nanking’s own experience are also apparent.

KEYWORDS: University of Nanking, Nanjing incident, reorganization, registration, Chen Yuguang

From scholar to bureaucrat: the political choice of the historical geographer Zhang Qiyun

Fangyu He

ABSTRACT：In the mid-1920s, under the guidance of his teacher, Zhu Kezhen, Zhang Qiyun established himself as a scholar by compiling middle school geography textbooks. He reached the peak of his early academic career when he joined the National Defense Planning Commission (Guofang sheji weiyuanhui) in 1932. His subsequent setbacks offered him a different kind of experience. During his tenure at Zhejiang University (1936–1949), he strived to combine research and administrative work. His friendship with Chen Bulei, Chen Xunci, and others, provided him with the connections to move from academia into politics. More important, beginning in the 1940s, Zhang contributed his scholarship in historical geography and geopolitics to the ruling regime and attracted Chiang Kai-shek’s attention. In 1948, some of the students at Zhejiang University started a movement to oust Zhang, which truly alienated him. During the power transition in 1949, Zhang made a political choice entirely different from the one made by his longtime mentor Zhu Kezhen, epitomizing the political divergence among scholars in the last years of the 1940s.

KEYWORDS: Zhang Qiyun, Zhu Kezhen, Chiang Kai-shek, knowledge and power

The two starting points of World War II: a reexamination from a global perspective

Haipeng Zhang

ABSTRACT：Although the factual chronology of World War II is not in dispute, how to best make sense of these facts and how to objectively evaluate that history have always been limited by political circumstances and personal biases. Viewing WWII seven decades later, we need to move away from Eurocentrism and to stop seeing the war from the prism of a European war or Pacific war. The entire history of WWII, from beginning to end, including its several phases characterized by fermentation, outbreak, climax, and conclusion, is extremely complex. This paper argues that the war has two origins or starting points because it resulted from disparate prewar conditions in Europe and Asia. Viewed from this perspective, the strategic importance of the China Theater in WWII and the enormous sacrifices and contributions the Chinese people made to the victory over Fascism and for world peace ought to be given due credit.

KEYWORDS: WWII, the war of resistance against Japanese aggression in China, the European theater, the Asian theater

Interview

Studying the Chinese Communist Party in historical context: an interview with Yang Kuisong, October 17, 2015

Kuisong Yang & Wennan Liu

Special Collection

Preserving collective and individual memories: the Contemporary China Social Life Data and Research Center at Fudan University

Letian Zhang

ABSTRACT：This essay introduces the Contemporary China Social Life Data and Research Center at Fudan’s School of Social Development and Public Policy and the data the archive has collected. This archive contains data on Lianmin Village in northern Zhejiang Province that provide exceptionally detailed information on economic, political, social, and cultural changes during the period from 1949 to 2000 in China. The archive also collects information on life at the grassroots level, mostly from Zhejiang, Jiangxi, and Shanghai, including documents from local government offices and work units. Among the documents collected at the archive, the meeting minutes are especially noteworthy. The archive’s unique collection of private correspondence, personal diaries, and work logs is also enormously valuable to our understanding of contemporary Chinese society.

KEYWORDS: Data on villages, information on work units, documents concerning daily operations at work units, personal diaries and work logs, private correspondence

Forum

Exploring a new frontier in history: Shanghai in the 1950s

Introduction

Wennan Liu

Shanghai around 1949: continuity or rupture?

Jishun Zhang

Notes from the alleyway: Zhang Jishun’s A City Displaced and the promise of archival research

Gail Hershatter

The promise of PRC history

Elizabeth J. Perry

Studies of Shanghai history from the perspective of new revolutionary history

Xiaobing Tang

Book Reviews

A study of Japan’s intelligence system on China, 1868–1937, by XU Jinsheng, Shanghai, Fudan University Press, 2015, 422 pp., ISBN 978-7-309-11170-5

Zhimin Xu (徐志民)

Study of China’s Kailuan Coal Mine in the modern era, by YUN Yan, Beijing, People’s Publishing House, 2015, 208 pp., ISBN 978-7-01-014680-5

Zhengping Chen (陈争平)

The eventful years of the bank of communications, 1908–1937, by PAN Xiaoxia, Beijing, China Social Sciences Press, 2015, 350 pp., ISBN 978-7-5161-5765-7

Hong Yang (杨宏)

The history of social life in modern China, by LI Changli, MIN Jie, LUO Jianqiu, ZUO Yuhe and MA Yong, Beijing, China Social Sciences Press, 2015, 803 pp., ISBN 978-7-5161-6129-6

Junling Li (李俊领)

From lixue to ethics: the transformation of moral consciousness in late Qing and early Republican China, by Huang Jinxing, Beijing, Zhonghua Book Company, 2014, 405 pp., ISBN 978-7-101-09586-9

Yanjie Zhao (赵妍杰)

The memoirs of Yan Mingfu, by YAN Mingfu, Beijing, People’s Publishing House, 2015, 1116 pp., ISBN 978-7-01-014935-6

Qingqing Sha (沙青青)