China Research Monographs, 73. Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2016. xii, 382 pp. (Tables, B&W photos.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-55729-170-7.
This collection brings together new research by twelve historians of modern China, integrated into a thematically consistent and coherent whole. This is not just a group of papers, but a collective product showcasing a promising new area of investigation: the formation of academic and professional disciplines in Republican China.
In their introduction, the editors note a dearth of research on the establishment of modern disciplines. All contributors address this issue, and by reading the papers one learns a lot about what it meant, in Republican China, to be a geographer, an anthropologist, a lawyer, a judge, a civil engineer, an economist, a publisher, a journalist, or a scientist. Each chapter tells the story of its discipline, often through reconstructing the career trajectories of individual practitioners: Republican-era professionals whose names have not necessarily gone down into the annals of history but whose activities were crucial to the growth of their own fields. Collectively, the chapters in this book reflect the variety of career prospects available to educated individuals during this period. They add to the increasing number of studies that are reviving the rich diversity of Republican-era intellectual life and salvaging it from previous politicized oversimplifications.
A second claim the editors make in their introduction is that the essays contribute to our understanding of a “distinctive modernity” unique to modern China. Whereas intellectual life in most modern societies is characterized by increased specialization and a proliferation of relatively autonomous fields with their own standards, institutions, and dispositions, the editors feel that in Republican China these processes were more fluid, with professionals crossing over between academic and commercial institutions. In addition, they feel that the state, especially after 1927, intervened relatively more in the “arbitration of knowledge” and the establishment of professional institutions than in Western countries. I am not sure that a singular, distinctive “Chinese modernity” is what we should be pursuing in our study of this period, as it might turn out to be another oversimplification, but I do feel that the editors have been successful in sustaining this argument throughout the collection.
Several chapters take up the notion of fluidity across academic and commercial institutions. In the opening chapter, by Tze-ki Hon, the emphasis is on the establishment of historical geography as a field through commercial print publications. The chapter by Huei-min Sun, dealing with professional qualifications for lawyers, shows how newspaper advertisements for their services played a crucial role in constructing their professional identity. Elisabeth Köll, writing about the establishment of the discipline of civil engineering, with special reference to railroads, shows how commercial companies were in part responsible for professional training. Robert Culp presents a richly detailed study of the working practices of “petty intellectuals,” i.e., staff editors at publishing houses, whose habitus he describes in terms of a partial relinquishment of creative aspirations in favour of industrial-style cultural production. Similar aspects permeate the chapter by Timothy Weston, dealing with the introduction of journalism as a “hybrid field” where qualifications could be gained both through study and through on-the-job experience.
Virtually all chapters recognize the increasing significance of state intervention, especially under the Chiang Kai-shek regime. Clayton Brown shows how the discipline of archaeology became intricately linked to state-funded institutions aimed at preserving antiquities as national treasures. Glenn Tiffert’s discussion of the training of judges has fascinating information about state-sponsored bar examinations (including compulsory essays written in classical Chinese well into the 1940s!), while making the wider point that judicial independence was generally sacrificed in favour of national unity as soon as the war against Japan started. Köll’s paper shows how after the early period of commercially driven engineering, the state intervened in the early 1920s through the founding of Jiaotong University, and became itself the major employer of railroad engineers after 1927. The epilogue to Weston’s essay deals with the reformulation of journalistic independence in relation to service to the nation, especially during the war. Megan Greene’s contribution is devoted in its entirety to wartime debates about Ministry of Education policies that saw the natural sciences brought under state control for the benefit of postwar reconstruction, leading to a “confluence of interests” between scientists and the state.
The highlight of the collection is the essay by Bryna Goodman, which draws upon an impressive array of print culture material to revive public debates about the 1921 stock market “bubble” in Shanghai. Ranging from newspaper reports, to writings in professional bankers’ journals, to fictional accounts in literary journals, the wealth of material gathered by Goodman shows urban society coming to terms with “Western-modelled financial institutions and economic theory” (206). She follows the writings of Ma Yinchu as he emerges as a professional economist trying to demonstrate the significance of his discipline, while openly reflecting on the appropriateness of Western economic models for China’s development. This shows how thinking about a distinctively “Chinese” alternative to Western modernity was taking place already in the 1920s, casting further doubt on the editor’s use of “Chinese modernity” as an analytical category.
The final two essays cover different ground but are no less important to the overall idea of the collection. Timothy Cheek’s chapter on the Yan’an Rectification Movement shows how this movement can be seen as “interrupting the development of modern professionalism” (304). At the same time, his careful reconstruction of the actual implementation of the rectifications demonstrates the professionalism of the ideologues. Eddy U in his contribution looks at the differences in disposition between Long March veterans and “newcomers” in Yan’an, showing the latter to be less proletarianized in, for instance, their dress or their liberal views of romantic relationships, which indirectly led to their stigmatization as bourgeois intellectuals and to a negative redefinition of zhishifenzi that would have significant impact after 1949.
The collection ends with a discussant-style contribution by Wen-hsin Yeh, who places the Republican-era processes of professionalization in a wider context, especially in relation to the older, Confucian hierarchies that were much more based on seniority and less on field-specific qualifications. She ends with a timely warning that more work needs to be done to understand the continuities at work in state/knowledge relationships across the imperial, Republican, and Communist periods.
This is a very rich collection that will be of use to many historians of specific disciplines, while at the same time presenting a coherent overall argument that will feed into continuing discussions about China and modernity. It also has ample comparative potential for scholars working on social fields and processes of professionalization in other parts of the world.
Michel Hockx
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA