What was the decisive element for activists’ different individual choices during the Democracy Wall Movement? In other words, what were the primary factors for the Democracy Wall activists adopting either a moderate or radical position? This work employs the studies of factionalism of the Red Guard Movement to investigate the divisions among the Democracy Wall activists. Through analyzing the intentions of activists’ inner- and inter-organizational divergences, across three different phases, mobilization, divergence, and two parallel movements, this thesis argues that political access to educational and career opportunities was the decisive factor for activists’ inter-organizational divergences, which determined whether an activist adopted either a moderate or radical position on a macro-scale. Furthermore, access to higher political status within different organizations was the primary factor for their inner-organizational divergences, which determined whether an activist adopted either a moderate or radical position on a micro-scale.

My dissertation explores the role of race, class, and gender in the political and cultural

interactions between the African Diaspora and China. I examine the official and unofficial racial

discourses produced and practiced during the Republican Period and in the People’s Republic of

China, drawing attention to continuities as well as shifts in racial thinking in China across the

1949 divide and its impact on the political and cultural relationships of Black and Chinese

peoples. Most of this research focuses on the impact of Chinese racial discourse on visits and

other interactions with people of the African Diaspora, particularly African Americans in China

as well as analyzing the Chinese cultural productions of blackness. From the mid-1920s to the

late 1960s a continuous flow of African Americans traveled to and lived in pre and post-

Communist China. This study finds that long-term anti-Blackness in China has led to uneven and

negative relations despite the Sino-Black Solidarity that was expressed in the wake of World War

II and African independence movements.

What are the continuities and changes of student activism throughout twentieth-century China? How did students carry out contentious politics during political campaigns of the Maoist era? Scholarships on Chinese student activism have concentrated on two major events: the 1919 May Fourth Movement and the 1989 Tiananmen Protests. Others have also paid attention to student protests in the Republican era, as well as the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. However, studies of student activism in the 1950s have been missing, a decade which was presumably dominated by Communist political campaigns, thus leaving little space for social dissent. There has been no short of research on elite politics regarding the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1956-57, though a bottom-up approach to the topic would reveal a different picture of the events.

My dissertation fills the gap by investigating the spectrum of college student participation in the political campaigns of 1957, including activists, loyalists and those who stayed silent, from Peking University, Wuhan University and Yunnan University. My sources come from declassified archival documents, digital database, documentary films, student journals, official newspapers, memoirs and oral history interviews I conducted in 2014-15 with 65 college students from the late 1950s. I use social movement theories to treat this episode of student activism as contentious politics, and look at student repertoire, organization and mobilization, framing technique, and political opportunity and constraint.

Overall, my dissertation argues that Chinese students in 1957 carried out and passed on similar repertoire and framing technique in comparison to other episodes of student activism, but what made it distinctive was the ambiguous political opportunity and divisions among students that consumed the brief yet intense activism. My dissertation contributes to the ongoing scholarly challenge of the 1949 divide by connecting student activism in the Republic era and the Communist reign, and sheds light on grassroots contentious politics in the Maoist era. As 2017 commemorates the sixtieth anniversary of the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns, student activism of 1957 deserves a bright spot because it has been forgotten for too long.

In this dissertation, I explore the genesis of huanjing baohu (“environmental protection” or huanbao) in China, tracing it back to its roots in the late Cultural Revolution (1970-1976) and global environmentalist turn of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that the early 1970s saw the construction of a distinctly Maoist environmentalism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that emerged from growing scientific awareness of industrial pollution’s threats to public health, the environment, social harmony, and agricultural and industrial production. I show how Maoist political culture, epistemological structures prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, longstanding Maoist industrial waste reuse practices, and various health and scientific disciplines collectively shaped how environmental problems were understood and how solutions were theorized. I also elaborate how increased Chinese diplomatic and intellectual engagement with the global environmentalist movements around the year 1970 shaped Maoist environmentalism, such as through the translation and application of new concepts from environmental sciences. The elements of the Cultural Revolution that have often been criticized as chaotic and destructive—like mass mobilization, extreme ideological commitment, societal upheaval, the struggle against old customs and ways of thinking, and the idealistic vision of a radically improved society—also facilitated transformations in environmental thought. Many of the scientists, cadres, workers, intellectuals, technicians, medical workers, and peasants that people my narrative were drawn to huanbao precisely because it appeared to offer an especially revolutionary way of reconfiguring the human-nature relationship in a way that broke with the old, conservative thinking and ignorance of the past. Correspondingly, for many, protecting the environment became an integral part of the Cultural Revolution’s vision of a truly socialist, revolutionary society.

I analyze a rich array of sources, like Chinese scientific and trade journals, popular magazines, speeches, semi-archival official documents, newspapers, factory reports, memoirs, conference documents, scientific studies, and other materials. The dissertation explores Zhou Enlai’s role in raising awareness of industrial pollution as a societal issue. I also provide a history of “comprehensive utilization” as an industrial recycling practice and its evolution into a Maoist environmentalist practice. The dissertation also provides a history of two conferences that are often mentioned in passing in histories of environmentalism in China, but which have not been deeply analyzed: the June 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm and China’s first ever National Conference of Environmental Protection (NCEP) in Beijing in August 1973.

The present dissertation deals with how a specific kind of modern political discourse and practice, which was associated with an American style approach to public administration, was introduced, experienced, and then adapted during the 1930s and 1940s in China. The research focuses on local officials who graduated from the Central Politics School, an institution established by the Nationalist Party to train professional public administrators. These individuals were supposed to modernize the entire system of Chinese local governance, making it more rational by bringing it inline with the precepts of scientific knowledge and the scientific method. The actions of the school’s graduates in various counties expose the failure of orthodox public administration methods to deal effectively with Chinese political reality, due to a tendency to underestimate the importance of variable human factors. It was, ironically, only when some of the school’s best former students broke with the precepts of their training and use innovative strategies, which took local realities into account and made use of ideas derived from China’s own statecraft traditions, that they achieved success. This dissertation thus suggests that researchers need to pay more attention in future to Chinese statecraft and its assumptions regarding the importance of sensitivity to human nature and variability, as well as imported ideas concerning rationality and scientific methods, when trying to understand trends in Chinese politics and governance. Moreover, the historical meaning of the rise and deviation of public administration is by no means a story only of frustrated modernization or periodic revivals of “tradition.” Rather, it represents an important case study of how non-scientific indigenous resources are deployed in the face of drives in settings outside the West to impose a form of political modernity, which has the potential to overcome the problems insurmountable in the current political conceptual framework.

This dissertation examines how multiple imperial powers in Chinese treaty port cities interacted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It centers on China’s two largest treaty port cities: Tianjin and Shanghai, two cities that were divided into several colonial concessions alongside the Chinese districts from the 1860s to 1940s. Historically, while Shanghai was characterized by its tripartite division of governance—the British-dominated International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese municipality, Tianjin was home to up to nine foreign-controlled concessions (British, American, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Belgian, Austro-Hungarian, and Italian). This dissertation inquires into how these multiple imperialisms shaped, and were shaped by, these two cities. Situated at the intersection of modern Chinese history, empire studies, and urban history, this dissertation investigates how the multi-pronged and multifarious interactions between various imperial powers shaped the urban politics of these two cities, as well as their urban development. While much scholarship on colonial history has focused on the bilateral relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, my research reveals the multiplicity, multilateralism, and multilayered trajectories at the heart of the colonial experiences of both imperial powers and the Chinese. Drawing on a wide range of multi-lingual historical materials located in different parts of the world, this dissertation underscores the density and concentration of crisscrossing imperial trajectories within cities while situating Chinese colonial history within a global comparative framework.

This dissertation argues that children have contributed significantly to the rise and longevity of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) power. Utilizing a broad and varied source base—including cadre work reports, newspapers, and wartime primary school textbooks—it asks and answers three broad questions. First, prior to China’s War of Resistance (1937-1945), how had individuals associated with the Chinese Communist movement historically conceptualized children and childhood? In short, what was their ideal-type “communist child,” and what type of childhood should this young individual experience? Second, during the war, what institutions did adults devise in order to realize their ideal-type “communist child” in the flesh? Third, what was the lived experience of children who grew up during this critical period? How did they respond to adult prerogatives? To what extent, if at all, did they become “communist children”? Relying on close readings of government directives, cadre work reports, newspapers, pedagogical journals, wartime primary school textbooks, and many other primary source materials, this project aims to contextualize and excavate rural children’s life experiences. In doing so, it argues that children made critical contributions to multiple war efforts, as spies, sentries, and saboteurs, and to building Communist Party hegemony as agents of revolutions. It concludes that a focus on children as historical actors highlights the centrality of their labor to the CCP’s military success, state-building efforts, and ascendance to political power. Finally, by juxtaposing the bourgeoning party-state’s ideal-type “communist child” with accounts of what actual children did and said, this project moves the historiography of Chinese children from one focused solely on the intellectual history of childhood to, instead, the first generation of children to be fully raised with the Chinese socialist system.

The large-scale migration that resulted in the rapid growth of Shanghai during the early twentieth century brought wealth and international recognition to the city, but also created a number of social problems that reformers and philanthropists struggled to address. These social problems included several issues related to child welfare, and both foreign and Chinese residents of the city attempted to save children from kidnapping, abuse, poor living conditions, and poverty. Working together and in parallel, expatriate and Chinese advocates created a child welfare system that was private, fragmented, and voluntary.

After the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, child welfare work focused on addressing the needs of young refugees and homeless children; resolving these social problems stood as the primary goal of private charities and the local government throughout the civil war (1945-1949) and into the early years of the People's Republic of China. Although private charity institutions, both foreign and Chinese, continued to operate in the city after the communist government took over, by 1953, they had been consolidated under the auspices of the Shanghai Municipal Government.

This dissertation traces the history of child welfare work in Shanghai from the beginning of the twentieth century until 1953. It presents child aid efforts in the city as a site of Chinese-foreign cooperation, and examines the attitudes that foreigners and Chinese displayed toward Chinese children, their lives, and their futures. Through this research, we can gain a better understanding of the history of children and childhood in China during decades of great change, as well as see the ways that Shanghai's Chinese and foreign communities worked together to improve the welfare of the city's smallest and most vulnerable residents. The examination of popular culture materials produced for children offers insight into how social ills like child homelessness and poverty were explained to a juvenile audience, and how that message changed after the implementation of communist rule in 1949. Child welfare work in Shanghai reflected discourses about children and society's obligations toward them that circulated far beyond China in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Until the late nineteenth century camphor, extracted from the camphor tree cinnamomum camphora native to southeast China, Taiwan, and Japan, was a luxury commodity used for religious and medicinal purposes. That changed with the invention of celluloid plastic, the world’s first man-made plastic. From around 1870 forward camphor was used as an important industrial input to make celluloid, first for a variety of household goods, and then later as a backing for photographic roll film.

Current literature on camphor only mentions its modern industrial uses in passing, while literature on celluloid often omit its Asian origins. This dissertation seeks to fill that gap by relying on Qing dynasty records, British Parliamentary papers, archival materials from the Celluloid Manufacturing Co. and Eastman Kodak, as well as Republican-era Chinese periodicals. I argue that camphor was an essential commodity for the development of the twentieth century modern world, and that the supply of camphor was dependent upon the political and economic conditions of imperialism in East Asia.

In the aftermath of the tumultuous Taiping Civil War (1851-1864), Qing officials began imagining a reconstruction of Chinese post-war society through broad programs that resettled refugees, demobilized the army, and rebuilt temples, roads, and academies. This was an ambitious program and unprecedented in the annals of Chinese history, seeking to radically restore Chinese society through government intervention. At the center of their plans, was an administration, the Reconstruction Bureau, that blurred the boundaries between state and elite circles to achieve their common goals of reconstructing order in the war-torn landscape. At the center of this project are a few important questions: how did they understand what they were doing? Why was it necessary to do this? What were their priorities? And above all else, what did reconstruction mean to them?