Course Syllabus

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Urban Centers in Late Imperial (Early Modern) & Modern Chinese History

History 282a Fall 2022

[REVISED]

Time: Tuesdays: 6:00-7:50 pm

Place: 2292 Public Affairs

Instructor: R. Bin Wong

OH: M, W 11:00 am-12:00 pm & by appointment

Office: 7262 Bunche Hall

 

This course has been planned in response to a student suggestion that most all the History PhD program students have cities as one of the sites for their research interests, irrespective of the time period they are studying. While we will learn about types of primary sources that matter for understanding Chinese cities, we will spend the majority of our time considering how urban centers fit into different types of historical research on China with some brief references to the role urban centers play in the movement from early modern to modern eras in European history. Having an explicit even if limited awareness of what historians have written about urban centers in early modern European history helps us see the similar and different roles that urban centers played in Chinese and European history. Of most immediate concern to most of you will be the cultural and social history dimensions of what takes place in cities. In addition to considering these aspects, the course will also consider the urban centers as they fit into political and economic changes moving from the early modern to modern eras because they matter to you at least as the backdrop for your own research interests—and they include subjects you’ll likely have to teach in the future.

Course Format & Requirements

A few days before each session, I’ll supply a few questions for you to consider as you prepare for class. I’ll ask for short writing assignments by Wednesday evening 9:00 pm to respond to those questions, the readings, and our discussion. During our Week 10 class, each of you will offer a brief sketch of the research paper you plan for History 282b in which some direct or at least indirect ties to the material in this quarter’s readings and discussion can be presented.

 Week 1: This opening week’s readings address two dynamics of urban center formation & transformation in late imperial Chinese history—the building of towns from the bottom up by social actors and the expansion of existing cities through top-down plans of high-level political leaders. It also introduces one of the China-centered efforts to speak about broad patterns in Chinese history that highlight senses of space (both urban-rural and regional) and temporal (cyclical without much secular change). The study of these topics gives us a first orientation to spatial and temporal dimensions of activities involving urban centers in early modern Chinese history.

Week 1 readings

F.W. Mote, “The Transformation of Nanking, 1350-1400,” in G. William Skinner, ed. The City in Late Imperial China.

David Faure, “What Made Foshan a Town?: The Evolution of Rural-Urban Identities in Ming-Qing China,” Late Imperial China, 11.2 (1990): 1-31.

  1. William Skinner, “The Structure of Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 44.2 (1985): 271-292.

Week 2: In this week we consider the more formal manner in which G. William Skinner constructed urban hierarchies defined politically (administratively) and economically (commercially) in order to create his sense of ordered space across the early modern & modern (19th-century) empire. What we discuss for this session will also matter when we contrast the roles of cities in China to those featured in the formation of European states in Week 4. We secondly, through the Brook reading, look at how the Chinese state conceived administrative geography below the level of the county (the county seat being the lowest level of Skinner’s administrative urban hierarchy). We confront a different kind of hierarchy that relates the rural social order to the political authorities located in the county seat.  

Week 2 readings

  1. William Skinner, “Cities and the Hierarchy of Local Systems,” in G. William Skinner, ed. The City in Late Imperial China.

Timothy Brook, “The Spatial Structure of Ming Local Administration,” Late Imperial China 6.1 (1985): 1-55.

Week 3: Recognizing that the late imperial template for creating order in Chinese society spanned urban and rural settings, we now look at the complementary mix of top-down political and bottom-up social efforts to fashion institutions of local order. Significantly, the principled intent and practical implementation of creating local institutions in urban centers often, but not always, drew upon what was being done by both county-level officials and local elites to ensure social order across a rural landscape. Some historians stress the elite-based agency for constructing social order as Rankin piece suggests (and will be discussed again by William Rowe in a Week 6 reading).  Some of these Chinese institutions bore resemblances to and differences from local urban institutions in early modern Europe, to which we turn in Week 4.

Wai-po Huen, “Household Registration System in the Qing Dynasty: Precursor to the PRC’s Hukou System,” China Report 32.4: 395-418.

Christine Moll-Murata, “Chinese Guilds from the Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries: An Overview,” International Review of Social History 53 (2008) Supplement: 213-247.

Mary Backus Rankin, “Some Observations on a Chinese Public Sphere,” Modern China 19.2 (1993): 158-192.

  1. Bin Wong, “Benevolent and Charitable Activities in the Ming and Qing Dynasties: Perspectives on State and Society in Late Imperial and Modern Times,” Revue Bibliographique de Sinologie 18: 249-258.
  2. Bin Wong, “Constructing Domestic Order” (chapter 5 of China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, 105-126.)

Week 4: We have two subjects to consider in this week. First, we have the relationship between cities and states for which Charles Tilly’s essay on European cities and states offers us a set of contrasts with Skinner’s presentation of administrative and commercial hierarchies of urban centers. Some of the differences will matter to what we consider next week regarding the transition from empire to republic in early 20th-century China. Secondly, Tilly’s assessment of the role of cities in formation of early modern European states complements the role of cities as sites of economic change through trade and then industrialization that the Van Zanden and Prak reading link with the emergence of citizenship in Dutch urban settings. The article on urban and national citizenship by Prak explores the Dutch case of moving from urban to national citizenship. The research in that article became part of a much larger book project on early modern European urban citizenship and the varied relations this urban-centered phenomenon had with national citizenship in different European countries. The effort to extend “citizenship” to other early modern world regions is critiqued in the final article of this week’s readings. This week’s consideration of relationships between early modern urban centers and emergence of national states that established authority over them provides counterpoint to Week 5 consideration of how the Republican era Chinese state and its constituent parts filled in the void left by the fall of the Qing dynasty, mindful that urban dwellers’ relationship to the national state could be different from what occurred in Europe.

Charles Tilly, “Entanglements of European Cities and States” in Tilly and Wim P. Blockmans, eds., Cities & the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800.

Jan Luiten Van Zanden & Maarten Prak, “Towards an economic interpretation of citizenship: The Dutch Republic between medieval communes and modern nation-states,” European Review of Economic History 10 (2006): 111-145.

Maarten Prak, “Burghers into Citizens--urban & national citizenship in the Netherlands during the Revolutionary Era (c. 1800),” Theory and Society 26.4 (1997): 403-420.

Bao Weimin, “A new discussion of Song-era “urban culture,” Chinese Studies in History 55.1-2: 69-89.

  1. Bin Wong, “Citizenship in Chinese and Global History Before and After the 1890s,” International Review of Social History 65 (2020): 125-133.

Week 5: We consider three aspects of the Republican era state’s emergence out of the political fragmentation that occurred after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911: (1) national identity formation in urban China; (2) the relationship between bottom-up and top-down forms of political activity; (3) the significance of the province to the reconstitution of a territorial state that made claims to authority over much of what had been the Qing empire at its greatest territorial extent. None of these fits the range of possible relations between cities and states in European history thus raising questions about how to evaluate Chinese and European relations between cities and states within a common framework identifying similarities and differences.

Week 5 readings:

  1. Consider the arguments & evidence in the two Schoppa articles in order to offer at least one if not several ways to consider connecting the two pieces into a common framework.
  2. Next, read McCord readings and assess the different ways he and Schoppa view the province and its possible relations to the “state,” in the sense of some central authority.
  3. Then read Elvin and consider the elements of “self-government” in this case and in those Schoppa’s self-government article consider.
  4. Finally, consider the ways in which the previous four readings can and/or cannot fit into the kinds of contrasts Wong proposes for thinking about late imperial, Republican era, and early 21st-century relations between “state” and “society.”
  5. Keith Schoppa, “Local Self-Government in Zhejiang, 1909-1927,” Modern China 2.4 (1976): 503-530.
  6. Keith Schoppa, “Province and Nation: The Chekiang Provincial Autonomy Movement, 1917-1927,” Journal of Asian Studies 36.4 (1977): 661-674.

Edward A. McCord, “Reevaluating the Nanjing Decade: A Provincial Perspective” (unpublished paper).

Elvin, “The Administration of Shanghai, 1905-1914,” in Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner, eds. The Chinese City Between Two Worlds.

  1. Bin Wong, “Chinese Social Relations & Political Transformations in Historical and Comparative Perspectives: A preliminary sketch of new orientations in social science research,” in Deng Zhenglai, ed.政治之维
  2. Compare (similarities & differences, implications of each) Rowe & Ma readings and how they each do (or do not) address the concerns Gunn sketches out in his introduction to the journal issue.

Simon Gunn, “Urban agency: debating the aims and limits of urban history,” Urban History 44.1 (2017): 110.

William T. Rowe, “Urban agency in early modern and modern China,” Urban History 44.1 (2017): 123-129.

Zhao Ma, “Individual Agency and Social Networking in Modern Chinese Cities,” Journal of Urban History 36.5: 729-741.

  1. Consider William Rowe’s argument in his article just read about city’s guilds’ abilities to build “urban community” (last paragraph beginning on p 125) complemented by Schoppa’s review of his second volume on Hankow and the contrast he draws with Bryna Goodman’s article below. Can you think of alternative ways to assess and relate historiographically these two historians’ arguments about native place, urban community, and nation?
  2. Keith Schoppa, book review of William T. Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895. American History Review 96.1 (1991): 230-231.

Bryna Goodman, “The Locality as Microcosm of the Nation? Native Place Networks and Early Urban Nationalism in China,” Modern China 21.4 (1995): 387-419.

Week 6:  This week we look at the capacity of urban elites to promote social order and mediate among competing interests. We also see Chinese capacity to organize governance in a political sense in Shanghai. Together the two suggest possibilities for late Qing approaches to urban social order alert us to some of what we should look for when we move further into the 20th century. Through the Rowe and Wong readings we consider two additional ways to frame these urban-centered changes, first in comparison with Europe and secondly terms of how urban centers fit into China more generally.

Week 6 readings

an activity exploring the digital newspapers and periodicals that students can undertake before we meet and from that even have questions to ask

Week 7 readings

Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires, chs 2 & 3.

Student-chosen selections from newspapers & periodicals

Week 8 readings

We begin by following Meng Yue’s exploration of Shanghai, having proposed and supported in last week’s reading the clear presence of philology and concern for the classics in the early 20th century as well as the distinctly Chinese components of “urban festivity” that do not conform in substance or timing with what has been established for Western settings. Her chapter for this week’s reading shows us how access to Western cultural production was framed in a Chinese context to show us how Chinese agents added such possibilities to what she established in last week’s reading. Di Wang’s article on Chengdu teahouses gives us a rich, if not always sharply defined, picture of the social, cultural, and economic, and even political activities, staged in teahouses. We can parse what components of that culture have foreign roots and what elements already existed domestically however differently some of them may have been combined in the 20th century.

Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires, ch 4.

Di Wang, “The Idle and the Busy: Teahouses and Public Life in Early Twentieth-Century Chengdu,” Journal of Urban History 26.4 (2000): 411-437.

Student-chosen selections from newspapers & periodicals

Week 9 readings

Between them, the Yue and Wang readings from week 8 prepare us to scrutinize closely the focus Lee puts on the foreign components of modern culture in Shanghai and Wen-hsin Yeh’s considerations of late 20th-century Western scholarship on both urban cultural and urban commercial history, the absence of connections between them, and her closing stress upon the global influences on both cultural and commercial histories of Chinese urban centers. The goal of your evaluating these two readings is to consider them in relation to week 8 readings, with the week 5 Ma reading included as part of the historiographical mix to assess.

Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Shanghai Modern: Reflections on Urban Culture in China in the 1930s,” Public Culture 11.1 (1999): 75-107.

Wen-hsin Yeh, “Shanghai Modernity: Commerce and Culture in a Republican City,” China Quarterly 150 (1997): 375-394.

Week 10

Student-chosen selections from newspapers & periodicals

Oral report on research paper you plan for History 282b in which some direct or at least indirect ties to the material in this quarter’s readings and discussion can be presented.

Exam Week

Turn in a short statement on research paper plan for History 282b

 

Course Summary:

Date Details Due