This indispensable guide for students of both Chinese and women's history synthesizes recent research on women in twentieth-century China. Written by a leading historian of China, it surveys more than 650 scholarly works, discussing Chinese women in the context of marriage, family, sexuality, labor, and national modernity. In the process, Hershatter offers keen analytic insights and judgments about the works themselves and the evolution of related academic fields. The result is both a practical bibliographic tool and a thoughtful reflection on how we approach the past.

This study examines how different ideological regimes in modern China have all responded to crises, whether economic, territorial, or spiritual, by extending state power and accumulation strategies into the northwestern corner of the country. Histories of modern China have typically turned to eastern centers of state and colonial power, especially Beijing and Shanghai, for an index of economic development and modernity. I show how Northwest China, a seemingly remote backwater, has figured prominently in political economy over the long twentieth century. The dissertation demonstrates how economic planning in China was born not in the People’s Republic, but during the Great Depression when the Northwest became the first of a series of focal regions created to transfer capital and population from the coast. “Opening Up the Northwest” was followed by three campaigns launched in the name of correcting regional inequality in the People’s Republic of China: the First Five Year Plan (1953-1957), the Third Front (1964-1980), and, most recently, “Open Up the West” (2000-present). My dissertation contributes a cultural and historical perspective to conversations among geographers and political scientists about the growing importance of regional economies as subnational scales of territorial organization. Through a panorama of state campaigns in the Northwest representing fascist, communist, and neoliberal ideologies, my project shows how Chinese leaders have garnered national support by constructing fantasies that speak to the cultural and environmental particularities of the region. State-builders have often inspired a nation to head to the Northwest by likening this region to “virgin land” in the American West or reminding their audiences of past glory along the ancient Silk Road. Beyond the gaze of state authorities, my work delves into complex experiences inflected by gender, class, and ethnicity in the regional center of Xi’an. A closer look at these historical moments reveals the realities of underdevelopment, the dispossession of ethnic minorities and agricultural communities, orphans forcibly recruited for settler colonialism, traditional virtues imposed on “Modern Girls,” the criminalization of refugees and migrants, and accelerated environmental degradation. My work contributes to the growing literature on everyday life in China, using the local histories of Xi’an and its environs to show how the material instantiations of modernity always fall short of the desires they engender no matter where they take place.

This dissertation traces the political significance of sport to the Chinese socialist state between 1949 and 1966 by examining state-sponsored tiyu (loosely translated into English as "sports and physical culture") and the connection between its two intertwined goals: tiyu for every citizen, and the development of elite sports programs. In these years Chinese leaders began to use international sport to carve out for China a different position in the world, while at the same time developing general tiyu and competitive training programs for ordinary citizens. China's athletic and political performance at international events was intended to showcase the emergence of a successful socialist state peopled by healthy, fit citizens and capable of international leadership.

A diverse group of tiyu experts helped usher in a new organizational and institutional structure for tiyu in the early 1950s. Inspired by the Soviet model, this included introducing the Soviet "Ready for Labor and Defense" system in China (known in Chinese as the laoweizhi) as the centerpiece of the government's efforts to use mass tiyu in order to cultivate the ideal socialist citizen. Chinese leaders also signaled their deference to Soviet leadership in the international socialist movement by participating in socialist bloc delegation visits.

By the late 1950s, work unit sports associations, spare-time sports schools, and the laoweizhi effectively blurred the lines of mass and elite sport because they included ordinary citizens while also providing ways to identify those with more athletic potential. As the Sino-Soviet relationship deteriorated in the latter half of the 1950s, Chinese officials turned away from relying on Soviet models, but continued to promote basic socialist ideals, such as collectivism, serving the motherland, and internationalism, as part of larger domestic efforts to build a superior Chinese brand of socialism. This included a massive increase in competitive sports programs during the Great Leap Forward and the mainstream emergence of socialist tiyu popular culture, which included sports films and reached an apex with the First National Games.

Beginning in 1961, however, recovery from the post-Great Leap Forward economic disaster required tightening the belt in tiyu. Mass tiyu and elite sport became separate, increasingly distinct entities, and most state funding went to the latter. By the mid-1960s, mass tiyu consisted primarily of paramilitary activities, workplace calisthenics, and inexpensive sports like ping-pong, basketball, and swimming. Elite sport meanwhile prospered and nearly all state-level funding went to training an elite cadre of internationally competitive athletes.

In the years between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, elite sport helped open up new transnational networks and establish foreign relations that reconfigured China's place in the world following the Sino-Soviet split. Sport served as a way to showcase and promote Chinese socialism and China as the exemplary socialist model for others to follow, particularly those in recently decolonized Third World nations. The height of these efforts came with the first Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), a sports mega-event that took place in Jakarta in 1963, which China and Indonesia promoted as an alternative to the Olympics. The turn in high politics during the early Cultural Revolution isolated China in most of its foreign relationships, and subsequently, put a temporary halt to all sport.

“Inventing the Socialist Child” illustrates the thinking, institution-building, and daily practices by which childhood was reformulated and shaped in the context of socialist nation-building in urban China from 1949 to 1966. This project draws on archival and published documents, mostly from the cities of Shanghai and Tianjin, to demonstrate that, despite numerous and overlapping political campaigns, unstable foreign relations, and rapid policy changes during the decades following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, one area in which the state had a remarkably consistent policy was its efforts to foster a specific kind of socialist childhood. Although the officials of the Maoist state believed children should be reared by their families, their goal of producing cooperative, revolutionary citizens required efforts to constrain non-state “bad influences.” State officials’ wariness about the values imparted by family and community members was compounded by the mobilization of women for production, which took many adult women out of the home and had the potential to leave children unsupervised for long periods. The desire to supplement or supplant inadequate supervision of children caused the state to intrude in family structure and child-rearing in new and important ways. “Inventing the Socialist Child” helps scholars understand how the shift to socialism brought major changes to every area of life, including gender roles, family life and child rearing, and the everyday experience of childhood during a time of revolutionary change. “Inventing the Socialist Child” enters broader conversations about childrearing and family-state relations in the postwar era around the world, and demonstrates that China used children in a tool of its postwar stabilization and nation-building efforts, deploying images of children in domestic and international propaganda, as well as actual children as agents of state-directed change—both ideological and practical—within families and society.

This dissertation demonstrates how industrializing policies of the Chinese socialist state and grassroots practices of industrial employees constituted a new kind of urban space in China after 1949, shaped by shifting social narratives about the differences between the rural and the urban and between the factory and the city. It considers the ways in which factory cadres promoted a gendered order of factory space, emphasizing women’s selfless contribution to production and their families and drawing women’s labor toward the developmental goals of the factory and the state. Utilizing internal factory documents, factory and local gazetteers, oral history, and ethnographic observations, this study analyzes how industrial space was regulated by state officials and formed by the needs and demands of factory employees and their families. In centering space as symbolic, concrete, and lived, this work develops a new understanding of the history of urban space in China, one that accounts for the contradictions and unevenness in how it evolved and the labor and actions of those who made it possible. My research weaves together a story about space with the making and unmaking of China’s state-owned factories and, in so doing, elucidates the intimate collective experiences of Chinese socialism and its afterlives.

This dissertation undertakes a historical examination of twentieth-century maritime Manchuria (Northeast China) to explore the role of seaborne interactions and coastal labor activities in shaping East Asian integration as well as social and environmental crises. "Maritime Manchuria" refers to the Bohai/Yellow Sea Rim, the area that runs along Manchuria, tracing the edge of east and north China and the Korean Peninsula, and extending into the corner of the Pacific. It is composed of port cities, less urbanized coastal villages, and the sea. The rim is not just a physical space, but also a space defined by social and economic relations. Questions animating this dissertation concern the kinds of human activities required to bring this rim into existence, the types of people who lived along the rim, and how they contributed to the development of the region.

The dissertation has two major goals: to highlight the transnational networks of commercial, cultural, and knowledge exchanges in the region, and to take full account of the everyday lives of local laborers, including male dock workers, women who grew seaweed and collected shellfish on shore, fishermen, students who were sent down to the coastal rural villages, and entrepreneurs. Its underlying argument is that region-making, nation-building, and environmental transformations require attention to those who made their living along the Manchurian coast. It shows the dialectic of transnationalism and modernity, which entailed the convergence of ideas, the circulation of commodities, and confrontations centered on labor displacement and marine environmental crises.

This dissertation examines the historical development of dentistry and the discourse of oral hygiene in China from the late imperial era to contemporary times. It traces the development of dentistry from a marginal part of the colonial project ofNorth American medical missionaries to its establishment as a distinct field combining US surgical technology, Soviet medicine, and traditional Chinese medical theories under the People's Republic. Focusing on the connections between dental development, the discourse of oral hygiene, and everyday life, this study reveals how teeth and mouths transformed from intimate body parts into subjects of scientific study, consumerism, and healthcare in modern China.

To excavate a history that has not been told about dentistry in a non-Western context, the study focuses on two main themes. First, examining how dentistry became institutionalized and professionalized in modern China and to what extent its development diverged from that of Western medicine, the dissertation offers a new layer of complexity to the Western-China medical encounter. It highlights the transnational nature of knowledge production and circulation in the formation of modern Chinese dentistry. Second, the study historicizes the shifting perception of teeth in relation to the body. It analyzes the impact of oral hygiene on the formation of self-identity, its importance within the state public health initiatives, and how it reconfigured the body as a revolutionary subject.

By analyzing the historical trajectory of dentistry in China, this dissertation provides insights into the transformation of dental practices, the discourse of oral hygiene, and their meanings for different groups of people within Chinese society. It contextualizes the history of dentistry in China's twentieth-century revolutions, tracing its co-evolution with nation-state building, changing social norms of hygiene and personal image, and everyday consumption patterns. It thus establishes connections between the history of dentistry and the broader social and cultural history of modern China.

In 1897, the Japanese government began its effort to make modern Japanese citizens out of Han Taiwanese schoolgirls in its first overseas colony, Taiwan (1895–1945). As a latecomer and the only non-Western empire, Japanese leaders showcased educational efforts in Taiwan to cast Japan as a benevolent colonizer. Educational efforts in Taiwan targeted the masses, including girls, in contrast to most European colonies in Africa and Asia where only elites received education. Through the public education of girls, the Japanese leadership implemented its version of modern female citizenship – “good wives, wise mothers” who were essential for producing loyal and healthy male citizens necessary for building a strong empire. The education of girls was a national and colonial project as Japanese leaders embarked on nation-building and empire-building efforts.

Using a combination of archival research and interviews, this project investigates how Japanese colonial education of girls shaped the daily lives, self-perceptions, and memories of Taiwanese girls. My research suggests three patterns. First, a discrepancy existed between the intentions of the colonists and the impact on the colonized: while the colonial government intended to train Taiwanese girls to become loyal wives and mothers of the Japanese empire, the colonized sought education as a way to increase family income or enhance their daughters’ marriageability. Second, experiences in colonial schools and the impact of public education depended on one’s nationality, gender, and socioeconomic status as Japanese colonial policy restructured and redefined communities and divisions. Finally, the colonial legacy lingers on as Taiwanese women and men used their Japanese educational experiences to construct colonial nostalgia and critique the postwar Chinese Nationalist government. Compared to Chinese and Koreans who suffered from Japanese imperialistic aggression, Taiwanese are known as the most pro-Japan people in East Asia. An examination of schoolgirls’ memories helps explain this phenomenon and furthers our understanding of the current geopolitics in East Asia.

"Marriage Laws and Practices in South China, 1930-1980" traces and compares different models of state regulation of marriage via laws and campaigns and people's responses over five decades. It focuses on twentieth-century South China, a time and place in which successive regimes in China and a colonial government in Hong Kong each tried to reform marriage customs, with differences in scopes and methods across the Hong Kong–China border. In China under the Nationalist and collaborationist regimes and under the Communist Party in the People's Republic of China, the national government and its provincial counterpart adopted an active agenda to reform marriage, in contrast to the laid-back approach by the post-war colonial government in Hong Kong. Through analyzing changes in marriage customs in the context of three marriage laws--the Nationalist Civil Code in 1930, the People's Republic of China Marriage Law in 1950, and the Marriage Reform Ordinance in Hong Kong in 1971, this dissertation crosses the chronological divides of the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. It suggests that regime changes or political campaigns had a real but limited effect on changes in habits and customs. Furthermore, the regional specificity of South China and cross-border marriages in China and Hong Kong during the Maoist era made marriage governance more challenging for the state, as the people were less receptive to the state's message of frugal weddings and transaction-free marriage. Gradually the state in China evolved into a regulatory behemoth, and its people's ability to act outside the law gradually diminished as state capabilities to regulate marriage expanded between the 1950s and the 1970s. Nonetheless, urban and rural residents frequently found ways to manipulate politics and policies while interacting with multiple levels of the Chinese state (local, provincial, national) and the colonial state in Hong Kong to retain their marriage practices and customs despite relentless campaigns from the top.

This dissertation examines the relationship between state visions of penal reform and actual conditions in women’s prisons in the coastal cities of Shanghai and Tianjin during a quarter century of political change encompassing Nationalist political control, Japanese occupation, civil war, and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. In particular, my research addresses a body of literature on the “woman problem,” a topic of heated public debate centered on the status of women and their proper role in twentieth-century China. I ask the following question: what was the place of problem women — the unruly, the indigent, and the criminal — within the woman problem? Even though women criminals were among the most disenfranchised members of Chinese society, their lives touched on important issues of national debate about women’s purported inherent weakness and its relationship to national weakness. Government reformers and planners believed that the reform of criminal women — who were often compelled to serve sentences in modern prisons — played an integral role in successful state building.