The Beijing Young Women’s Christian Association, 1927–1937

The Beijing Young Women’s Christian Association, 1927–1937
Author: Aihua Zhang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2021-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793608156

By exploring the interplay among gender, religion, and modernity, this book exposes the part Chinese Christian women played in China’s quest for a strong nation in general and in Republican Beijing’s modern transformation in particular. Focusing on the Beijing Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the author examines how the Association, guided by the Christian tenet “to serve, not to be served,” tailored its Western models and devised new programs to meet the city’s demands. Its enterprises ranged from providing women- and child-oriented facilities to promoting constructive recreational activities and from reforming home and family to improving public health. Through an analysis of these endeavors, the author argues that the Chinese YW women's contribution to the city's modernity was a creative embodiment of the then socially targeted missionary movement known as the Social Gospel. In the process, they demonstrated their distinctive new ideals of womanhood featuring practicality, social service, and broad cooperation. These qualities set them apart from both traditional women and other brands of the New Woman. While criticized as trivial, their efforts, however, pioneered modern social service in China and complemented what municipal authorities and other progressive groups undertook to modernize the city.

Dreaming the New Woman

Dreaming the New Woman
Author: Jennifer Bond
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2024-05-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0197654797

Based on seventy-five oral history interviews, Dreaming the New Woman uncovers the voices of Chinese women who attended Protestant missionary schools for girls in China in the early twentieth century. By focusing on the experience of women who attended these schools, Jennifer Bond provides fresh perspectives on the role of Christianity in the emergence of the Chinese New Woman. The book explores how girls negotiated overlapping school, patriotic, Christian, gendered, and Communist identities during China's turbulent twentieth century of wars and revolutions.

The Party Family

The Party Family
Author: Kimberley Ens Manning
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501715526

The Party Family explores the formation and consolidation of the state in revolutionary China through the crucial role that social ties—specifically family ties—played in the state's capacity to respond to crisis before and after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. Central to these ties, Kimberley Ens Manning finds, were women as both the subjects and leaders of reform. Drawing on interviews with 163 participants in the provinces of Henan and Jiangsu, as well as government documents and elite memoirs, biographies, speeches, and reports, Manning offers a new theoretical lens—attachment politics—to underscore how family and ideology intertwined to create an important building block of state capacity and governance. As The Party Family details, infant mortality in China dropped by more than half within a decade of the PRC's foundation, a policy achievement produced to a large extent through the personal and family ties of the maternalist policy coalition that led the reform movement. However, these achievements were undermined or reversed in the complex policy struggles over the family during Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958–60).

The YWCA in China

The YWCA in China
Author: Elizabeth A. Littell-Lamb
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2023-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0774869232

The YWCA arrived in China as a cultural interloper in 1899. How did activist Christian Chinese women maintain their identity and social relevance through the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century? The YWCA in China explores how the Young Women’s Christian Association responded to the needs of Chinese women and society both before and after the 1949 revolution ushered in a communist state. Western secretaries originally defined the Chinese YWCA movement, but successive generations of Chinese leadership localized its Western-defined organizational ethos. Over time, "the Y" became class conscious and progressive as Chinese women transformed it from a vehicle for moral and material uplift to an instrument for social action and an organizational citizen of China. And after 1949, national YWCA leaders supported the Maoist regime because they believed the social goals of the YWCA aligned with Mao’s revolutionary aims. The YWCA in China is a fascinating investigation of the lives, thinking, and action of women whose varied forms of Christian and Chinese identity were buffeted by historical events that moulded their social philosophies.

Criminal Justice in China

Criminal Justice in China
Author: Klaus Mu_hlhahn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2009-04-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780674054332

In a groundbreaking work, Klaus Muhlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture. In late imperial China, flogging, tattooing, torture, and servitude were routine punishments. Sentences, including executions, were generally carried out in public. After 1905, in a drive to build a strong state and curtail pressure from the West, Chinese officials initiated major legal reforms. Physical punishments were replaced by fines and imprisonment. Capital punishment, though removed from the public sphere, remained in force for the worst crimes. Trials no longer relied on confessions obtained through torture but were instead held in open court and based on evidence. Prison reform became the centerpiece of an ambitious social-improvement program. After 1949, the Chinese communists developed their own definitions of criminality and new forms of punishment. People's tribunals were convened before large crowds, which often participated in the proceedings. At the center of the socialist system was reform through labor, and thousands of camps administered prison sentences. Eventually, the communist leadership used the camps to detain anyone who offended against the new society, and the crime of counterrevolution was born. Muhlhahn reveals the broad contours of criminal justice from late imperial China to the Deng reform era and details the underlying values, successes and failures, and ultimate human costs of the system. Based on unprecedented research in Chinese archives and incorporating prisoner testimonies, witness reports, and interviews, this book is essential reading for understanding modern China.

Precious Fire

Precious Fire
Author: Karen Garner
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"Although Russell's own political vision may have narrowed over the years, Garner's reconstruction of her life broadens our understanding of U.S.-China relations during the twentieth century. Not only did Russell come to see her own country through the eyes of an ideological antagonist, she also brought to that vantage point the experiences of a modern American woman. As Garner shows, even if one did not agree with Russell's views, one could not deny the fervor of her commitment to gender equality, social justice, and internationalism."--BOOK JACKET.

Women in China

Women in China
Author: Mechthild Leutner
Publisher: Lit Verlag
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN:

The Chinese Republican period, often seen as representing a continuum between Imperial China and the People's Republic of China, was shaped by profound upheavals that also impacted strongly on gender relations. This volume presents the latest research on the situation of women during the Republican period, placing it in historical perspective. In addition to contributions dealing with theoretical and methodological approaches to China-related women's research, a broad spectrum of experiences and discourses related to women in China is also considered: women and the state/women and the nation; political women and their posthumous careers; little traditions and discourses of otherness; women in social and economic life; and women's education. Mechthild Leutner is professor of Chinese studies at the Freie Universitt in Berlin. Nicola Spakowski is a professor at the International University in Bremen.

China and the Philippines

China and the Philippines
Author: Phillip B. Guingona
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2023-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009359223

Foregrounding the entangled history of China and the Philippines, Guingona brings to life an array of understudied, but influential characters, such as Filipino jazz musicians, magnetic Chinese swimmers, expert Filipino marksmen, leading Chinese educators, Philippine-Chinese bankers, Filipina Carnival Queens, and many others. Through archival research in multiple languages, this innovative study advances a more nuanced reading of world history, reframing our understanding of the first half of the twentieth century by bringing interactions between Asian people to the fore and minimizing the role of those who historically dominated global history narratives. Through methodologically distinct case studies, Guingona presents a critique of Eurocentric approaches to world/global history, shedding light on the interconnected history of China and the Philippines in a transformative period. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.