Antonia Finnane

The Origins of Prejudice: The Malintegration of Subei in Late Imperial China

The convention for introducing biography in the Chinese textual tradition is to identify the subject not only by his name but also by his native place. The classic formula used for this purpose is set out in the preface to “The True Story of Ah Q,” in which Lu Xun remarks that “when writing biography, it is the usual practice to begin ‘so-and-so, from such-and-such place’ ” (Lu 1959 [1921]: 93). This formula was adopted in official documents, popular stories, obituaries and tomb epitaphs as well as in formal biographies or biographical notices. There were variations in its form, in which the person was identified as being “native of this place, living in that place” or “originally of this place, now of that place.” But in any event, a man was, and still is, normally identified by both his personal name and the name of his place of origin, just as a woman was usually identified by the names of her father and her husband. The problem for Lu Xun as fictional biographer was that Ah Qs name was a matter of debate and his place of origin unknown: He floated unmoored through Chinese society.

Chinese Domestic Interiors and “Consumer Constraint” in Qing China: Evidence from Yangzhou

AbstractIn works that have profoundly influenced contemporary views of China’s economic growth relative to the Europe’s in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, Jan De Vries has concluded that “the East Asian industrious revolution is very much a supply-side phenomenon”, while Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong among others have concluded that consumer restraint was a characteristic of eighteenth century society. These views are not supported by economic behaviour in Qing Yangzhou, where middle-brow writings show a marked attention to household decor and a high level of interest in material goods, including imports.

Cold War Sewing Machines: Production and Consumption in 1950s China and Japan

With the “consumption turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, a phenomenon evident in English-language scholarship from the 1980s onward, production ceased to command the attention it had once received from historians. A recent (2012) study of the sewing machine in modern Japan by Harvard historian Andrew Gordon demonstrates the effects: what could feasibly have been published under the title “Making Machinists” was instead marketed as “Fabricating Consumers.” What does it mean to talk about consumers in 1950s Japan, a time and place of hard work, thrift, and restraint? For Gordon an important premise was the role of women in the postwar economy. This provides a point of departure from which to explore the ideologies and practices of production and consumption across the Cold War dividing line between “consumerist” and “productionist” regimes in East Asia. The Cold War was a time of sharp differences between the two societies, but also a time of shared preoccupations with productivity and national growth. In their different political contexts, Japanese and Chinese women were acting out many of the same roles.

Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing

This book is about the politics of history in twentieth-century China, and specifically the relationship between party politics and the writing of the history of modern China. In it, the author ide...

Looking for the Jiang Qing Dress: Some Preliminary Findings

Antonia Finnane is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Melbourne. She is the author of Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City 1550–1850 (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2004) and co-editor with Anne McLaren of Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture (Monash Asia Institute, 1999). She is currently writing a book on fashion in twentiethcentury China. a.finnane@ unimelb.edu.au Looking for the Jiang Qing Dress: Some Preliminary Findings

The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China. By MARK C. ELLIOTT. [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xxiii+580 pp. £47.50,

Why does the term ‘ethnic’ sound so odd when inserted into histories of non-contemporary societies? This is one of the problems with which Mark Elliott struggles in his engaging study of the politics of difference in Qing China. The answer is that the term ‘ethnic’ has come into general circulation only in relatively recent times, and then in the context of national societies that have had increasingly to cope with the challenge of accommodating a variety of descent groups.

65.00. ISBN 08047-3606-5.]

James Cole, Shaohsing: Competition and Cooperation in Nineteenth Century China, Association for Asian Studies Monograph 44. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1986. xv, 315 pp. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, glossary, index, appendixes. Cloth: US

‘China–centred’ history: revolution or rebellion? a review article

21.00. Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1987. xvii, 331 pp. Tables, figures, appendixes, notes, bibliography, glossary, index. Cloth, n.p.g. Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrates Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform In Eighteenth–Century China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984. xviii, 385 pp. Tables, note on sources, glossary, bibliography, index. Cloth, n.p.g.