The Body and Military Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China

The Body and Military Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China PDF Author: Nicolas Schillinger
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498531695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
In 1894–1895, after suffering defeat against Japan in a war primarily fought over the control of Korea, the Qing government initiated fundamental military reforms and established “New Armies“ modeled after the German and Japanese military. Besides reorganizing the structure of the army and improving military training, the goal was to overcome the alleged physical weakness and lack of martial spirit attributed to Chinese soldiers in particular and to Chinese men in general. Intellectuals, government officials, and military circles criticized the pacifist and civil orientation of Chinese culture, which had resulted in a negative attitude towards its armed forces and martial values throughout society and a lack of interest in martial deeds, glory on the battlefield, and military achievements among men. The book examines the cultivation of new soldiers, officers, and civilians through new techniques intended to discipline their bodies and reconfigure their identities as military men and citizens. The book shows how the establishment of German-style “New Armies” in China between 1895 and 1916 led to the re‐creation of a militarized version of masculinity that stressed physical strength, discipline, professionalism, martial spirit, and “Western” military appearance and conduct. Although the military reforms did not prevent the downfall of the Qing Dynasty or provide stable military clout to subsequent regimes, they left a lasting legacy by reconfiguring Chinese military culture and re‐creating military masculinity and the image of men in China.

The Body and Military Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China

The Body and Military Masculinity in Late Qing and Early Republican China PDF Author: Nicolas Schillinger
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498531695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

Get Book

Book Description
In 1894–1895, after suffering defeat against Japan in a war primarily fought over the control of Korea, the Qing government initiated fundamental military reforms and established “New Armies“ modeled after the German and Japanese military. Besides reorganizing the structure of the army and improving military training, the goal was to overcome the alleged physical weakness and lack of martial spirit attributed to Chinese soldiers in particular and to Chinese men in general. Intellectuals, government officials, and military circles criticized the pacifist and civil orientation of Chinese culture, which had resulted in a negative attitude towards its armed forces and martial values throughout society and a lack of interest in martial deeds, glory on the battlefield, and military achievements among men. The book examines the cultivation of new soldiers, officers, and civilians through new techniques intended to discipline their bodies and reconfigure their identities as military men and citizens. The book shows how the establishment of German-style “New Armies” in China between 1895 and 1916 led to the re‐creation of a militarized version of masculinity that stressed physical strength, discipline, professionalism, martial spirit, and “Western” military appearance and conduct. Although the military reforms did not prevent the downfall of the Qing Dynasty or provide stable military clout to subsequent regimes, they left a lasting legacy by reconfiguring Chinese military culture and re‐creating military masculinity and the image of men in China.

The Soldier Image and State-Building in Modern China, 1924-1945

The Soldier Image and State-Building in Modern China, 1924-1945 PDF Author: Yan Xu
Publisher: Asia in the New Millennium
ISBN: 9780813176741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"The Soldier Image and State-Building in Modern China, 1924-1945 is the first study in English to explore the ways in which the figure of the soldier was employed to advance the ideological and cultural agendas of a variety of citizen groups during the first half of the twentieth century in China. Government authorities, cadets at the Whampoa Military Academy (the "West Point of China"), elites, urban professionals, intellectuals, activists, writers and students resisted, collaborated with, or questioned the heroic ideal of the soldier promoted by the Nationalist government. Author Yan Xu casts a wide net, examining military training records, political propaganda, field reports, newspapers, magazines, government documents, memoirs, and novels. In novels and articles, women and teachers worked against the heroic ideal without openly challenging the military, emphasizing the soldier's suffering, emotional needs, and poor education and thereby promoting their own importance as caretakers and educators. Students and young people urged enlistment and idealized the warrior-hero, but also managed to effectively criticize the government by organizing soldier relief work to combat government corruption. Xu demonstrates how the CCP's strategy of building bonds between soldiers and peasants and humanizing heroes was ultimately a more successful political strategy than the GMD's approach of elevating soldiers as model citizens"--

Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China

Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China PDF Author: Martin W. Huang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824828968
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Why did traditional Chinese literati so often identify themselves with women in their writing? What can this tell us about how they viewed themselves as men and how they understood masculinity? How did their attitudes in turn shape the martial heroes and other masculine models they constructed? Martin Huang attempts to answer these questions in this valuable work on manhood in late imperial China. He focuses on the ambivalent and often paradoxical role played by women and the feminine in the intricate negotiating process of male gender identity in late imperial cultural discourses. Two common strategies for constructing and negotiating masculinity were adopted in many of the works examined here. The first, what Huang calls the strategy of analogy, constructs masculinity in close association with the feminine; the second, the strategy of differentiation, defines it in sharp contrast to the feminine. In both cases women bear the burden as the defining "other." In this study, "feminine" is a rather broad concept denoting a wide range of gender phenomena associated with women, from the politically and socially destabilizing to the exemplary wives and daughters celebrated in Confucian chastity discourse.

The Phony Reformer

The Phony Reformer PDF Author:
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538112418
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
This engaging translation presents an authentic period document that reflects aspects of Chinese life and society as seen through a contemporary's eyes. Portraying a "phony" reformer who rode the tide of the Qing court's post-Boxer reform initiatives to career success and personal wealth, this satire conveys the author's hope for a new, improved China, one that could stand proudly alongside Western nations and Meiji Japan in the modern world. His vivid descriptions of various situations shed light on late Qing elite behavior and Chinese foreign relations capture the clash between tradition and modernity, the old and new, as educated Chinese stood at a cultural and political crossroads.

Making China Modern

Making China Modern PDF Author: Klaus Mühlhahn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674916077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
“Chronicles reforms, revolutions, and wars through the lens of institutions, often rebutting Western impressions...[And] warns against thinking of China’s economic success as proof of a unique path without contextualizing it in historical specifics.” —New Yorker “This thoughtful, probing interpretation is a worthy successor to the famous histories of Fairbank and Spence and will be read by all students and scholars of modern China.” —William C. Kirby, coauthor of Can China Lead? It is tempting to attribute the rise of China’s to recent changes in political leadership and economic policy. But China has had a long history of creative adaptation and it would be a mistake to think that its current trajectory began with Deng Xiaoping. In the mid-eighteenth century, when the Qing Empire reached the height of its power, China dominated a third of the world’s population. Then, as the Opium Wars threatened the nation’s sovereignty and the Taiping Rebellion ripped the country apart, China found itself verging on free fall. In the twentieth century China managed a surprising recovery, rapidly undergoing profound economic and social change, buttressed by technological progress. A dynamic story of crisis and recovery, failures and triumphs, Making China Modern explores the versatility and resourcefulness that has guaranteed China’s survival in the past, and is now fueling its future.

The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century

The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Martin Crotty
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
What happened to veterans of the nations involved in the world wars? How did they fare when they returned home and needed benefits? How were they recognized—or not—by their governments and fellow citizens? Where and under what circumstances did they obtain an elevated postwar status? In this sophisticated comparative history of government policies regarding veterans, Martin Crotty, Neil J. Diamant, and Mark Edele examine veterans' struggles for entitlements and benefits in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, the Soviet Union, China, Germany, and Australia after both global conflicts. They illuminate how veterans' success or failure in winning benefits were affected by a range of factors that shaped their ability to exert political influence. Some veterans' groups fought politicians for improvements to their postwar lives; this lobbying, the authors show, could set the foundation for beneficial veteran treatment regimes or weaken the political forces proposing unfavorable policies. The authors highlight cases of veterans who secured (and in some cases failed to secure) benefits and status after wars both won and lost; within both democratic and authoritarian polities; under liberal, conservative, and even Leninist governments; after wars fought by volunteers or conscripts, at home or abroad, and for legitimate or subsequently discredited causes. Veterans who succeeded did so, for the most part, by forcing their agendas through lobbying, protesting, and mobilizing public support. The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century provides a large-scale map for a research field with a future: comparative veteran studies.

The History of Physical Culture in Ireland

The History of Physical Culture in Ireland PDF Author: Conor Heffernan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030637271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book is the first to deal with physical culture in an Irish context, covering educational, martial and recreational histories. Deemed by many to be a precursor to the modern interest in health and gym cultures, physical culture was a late nineteenth and early twentieth century interest in personal health which spanned national and transnational histories. It encompassed gymnasiums, homes, classrooms, depots and military barracks. Prior to this work, physical culture’s emergence in Ireland has not received thorough academic attention. Addressing issues of gender, childhood, nationalism, and commerce, this book is unique within an Irish context in studying an Irish manifestation of a global phenomenon. Tracing four decades of Irish history, the work also examines the influence of foreign fitness entrepreneurs in Ireland and contrasts them with their Irish counterparts.

China's Borderlands under the Qing, 1644–1912

China's Borderlands under the Qing, 1644–1912 PDF Author: Daniel McMahon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000343456
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book explores new directions in the study of China’s borderlands. In addition to assessing the influential perspectives of other historians, it engages innovative approaches in the author’s own research. These studies probe regional accommodations, the intersections of borderland management, martial fortification, and imperial culture, as well as the role of governmental discourse in defining and preserving restive boundary regions. As the issue of China’s management of its borderlands grows more pressing, the work presents key information and insights into how that nation’s contested fringes have been governed in the past.

Rebel Men

Rebel Men PDF Author: Pamela Hunt
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 988875405X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Masculinity, fast-changing and regularly declared to be in the throes of crisis, is attracting more popular and scholarly debate in China than ever before. At the same time, Chinese literature since 1989 has been characterized as brimming with countercultural ‘attitude’. This book probes the link between literary rebellion and manhood in China, showing how, as male writers critique the outcomes of decades of market reform, they also ask the same question: how best to be a man in the new postsocialist order? In this first full-length discussion of masculinity in post-1989 Chinese literature, Pamela Hunt offers a detailed analysis of four contemporary authors in particular: Zhu Wen, Feng Tang, Xu Zechen, and Han Han. In a series of insightful readings, she explores how all four writers show the same preoccupation with the figure of the man on the edges of society. Drawing on longstanding Chinese and global models of maverick, as well as marginal masculinity, and responding to a desire to retain a measure of masculine authority, their characters all engage in forms of transgression that still rely heavily on heteronormative and patriarchal values. Rebel Men argues that masculinity, so often overlooked in literary analysis of contemporary China, continues to be renegotiated, debated, and agonized over, and is ultimately reconstructed as more powerful than before. ‘An exceptionally lucid, elegant study of masculinity in mainland Chinese fiction of the 1990s and 2000s. Both historically and theoretically informed, Rebel Men: Masculinity and Attitude in Postsocialist Chinese Literature offers a major new perspective on post-1989 Chinese counterculture.’ —Julia Lovell, Birkbeck, University of London

Governing the Dead

Governing the Dead PDF Author: Linh D. Vu
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501756516
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In Governing the Dead, Linh D. Vu explains how the Chinese Nationalist regime consolidated control by honoring its millions of war dead, allowing China to emerge rapidly from the wreckage of the first half of the twentieth century to become a powerful state, supported by strong nationalistic sentiment and institutional infrastructure. The fall of the empire, internecine conflicts, foreign invasion, and war-related disasters claimed twenty to thirty million Chinese lives. Vu draws on government records, newspapers, and petition letters from mourning families to analyze how the Nationalist regime's commemoration of the dead and compensation of the bereaved actually fortified its central authority. By enshrining the victims of violence as national ancestors, the Republic of China connected citizenship to the idea of the nation, promoting loyalty to the "imagined community." The regime constructed China's first public military cemetery and hundreds of martyrs' shrines, collectively mourned millions of fallen soldiers and civilians, and disbursed millions of yuan to tens of thousands of widows and orphans. The regime thus exerted control over the living by creating the state apparatus necessary to manage the dead. Although the Communist forces prevailed in 1949, the Nationalists had already laid the foundation for the modern nation-state through their governance of dead citizens. The Nationalist policies of glorifying and compensating the loyal dead in an age of catastrophic destruction left an important legacy: violence came to be celebrated rather than lamented.