Chinese Historians

“Memory, Gender and Reconciliation: Rural and Urban Women in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-Present”

Hilton Union Square, Union Square 19&20

Chair: Dewen Zhang, Randolph-Macon College

Papers:

Memory, Trauma, and Reconciliation: A Peasant Woman’s Journeys from Mao to Now

Qiong Zhang, Wake Forest University

From Mao’s Campaigns to Deng’s Reforms: Memory, Education, and Gender

Aihua Zhang, Gardner–Webb University

Visibilities and Invisibilities of Women’s Work and Bodies in Socialist China

Qin Fang, McDaniel College

“From an Internal Immigrant to a Local Leader of Women”: An Odyssey of Chen Yingmei during China’s Dramatical Transition

Patrick Fuliang Shan, Grand Valley State University

Comment: Dewen Zhang, Randolph-Macon College

Panel Abstract

Treating the history of the People’s Republic of China before and after Mao as a collective whole, this panel traces ordinary women’s lives which span those decades of dramatic transformations in the spheres of national politics, economy, society and gender. Using both rural and urban women’s life experiences as windows to look at the unfolding of national history, this panel is concerned with the intersectionality between macrohistory and microhistory. It also raises new questions on the periodization of the People’s Republic of China by treating the Mao and post-Mao era as a continuous background in these ordinary women’s lives.

This panel also attempts to address the issue of possibilities and constraints faced by historians treating their mothers as subjects of research. These papers experiment with oral history methods and interrogate the relationship between gender and memory. Together, the panel explores questions such as gender-specific memory that informs Chinese women’s common and unique experiences in the history of the PRC. In the meantime, these papers inquire into the roles of emotion and intimacy in historian’s intellectual labor. 

Paper Abstracts

Qiong Zhang, “Memory, Trauma, and Reconciliation: A Peasant Woman’s Journey from Mao to Now”

At 77, Yingzhen lives with her husband in a newly developed neighborhood of XX town, the seat of a rural district (formerly a county) within Guilin Municipality in Guangxi Autonomous Region.  Like many of her neighbors here, she is a rural migrant; her official residence belongs to a farm village that lies in a remote corner of the district hours of bus ride away.  She left the village to join her husband in the mid-1990s, after their three children all graduated from college and settled in the cities. Until then, they had lived apart most of the time, as her husband worked for a county office as a temporary worker and was stationed in a different rural town of the county every several months, while Yingzhen carried on farm work at home and raised their children.  Yingzhen looks on her life today with a modest sense of contentment and triumph. Yet deep in her heart there is a wound that remains to be healed.

Born to a pair of diligent and enterprising parents who would soon be classified as “landlords”, this “daughter of the Republic” experienced Mao’s political campaigns as a victim.  She lost her parents and two elder brothers during those campaigns, and her “bad” family origin subjected her to constant abuse within the village and her extended family, which compromised her authority over her own children. The transition to the Reform Era meant true liberation, but the memories from the past continue to haunt her. This paper presents Yingzheng’s recollections of farm labor and village life under Mao and her continuing struggle to reconcile with that history, while also exploring the challenges and limitations of doing oral history with an illiterate subject.

Aihua Zhang, “From Mao’s Campaigns to Deng’s Reforms: Memory, Education, and Gender”

My mother was born to an urban clerk’s family. Upon graduating from a normal university in 1960, she started her teaching career and had stuck to it for more than thirty years until her retirement as school principal in 1993. She witnessed and experienced China’s momentous events in the latter half of the twentieth century. This paper records her memory of how the mass campaigns Chairman Mao launched affected her life, marriage, and work, and how Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms brought her new opportunities and challenges. As a female teacher, education and gender played a crucial role in her life. She benefited from her education backgrounds, which ironically led to her maltreatment during the Cultural Revolution and put her in a tension with those colleagues who received their degree as Work-Peasant-Solider graduates. Her gender contributed to her promotion to the school’s leadership, a position that sometimes required her to go beyond her administrative duties to intervene in teachers’ personal lives. In contrast, she was affected by the traditional gender bias. As a result, she had to juggle the responsibilities as a wife, mother, daughter-in-law, teacher, and leader. Her personal life’s ups and downs were closely linked with China’s shifts and turns, reflecting the interlocking relationships among state, career, family, and gender on a micro level.      

Qin Fang, “Visibilities and Invisibilities of Women’s Work and Body in Socialist China” 

In the 1950s, women in both rural and urban areas of China were motivated to break away from the obstacles of traditional society and help build a new China. Li Kexiang (1947- ) was one such woman who dedicated her youth to the country and the factory. Kexiang graduated from middle school in 1963 and was immediately recruited to work in a textile factory. She was proud of her working-class identity and was selected to be trained as a statistician. Later, she became the only female electrician in the factory. Kexiang’s gender views aligned with the ideals promoted by new China, as she often mentioned that “men and women were equal” and “both women and men could excel in science.” Additionally, she was proud to be a mother of two daughters. 

However, Kexiang also expressed discomfort in her factory work, including tensions with colleagues, difficulty with three or four shift schedules, and insomnia problems. She also struggled to have her daughters included in the state’s medical welfare. Kexiang’s memories were often conflicted, revealing both the possibilities and limitations of socialist China’s gender equality ideals and the complex intersection of gender, class, work, and family.  

The memories of Kexiang provide valuable insight into the experiences of ordinary women in new China and how they navigated the challenges and opportunities of this era. By examining Kexiang’s memories and narratives about her workplaces, marriage, housing, and child upbringing, this paper explores the ways in which the history of new China and the memories of Kexiang were interconnected and have shaped our interpretation of socialist China. The paper aims to investigate the extent to which Kexiang’s memories can inform us about her understanding of new China and the ways she dealt with the various challenges she faced in her life and work. Furthermore, the paper explores the ways in which the visual and invisible aspects of women’s bodies and work are embedded in their daily lives. 

Patrick Fuliang Shan, “‘From an Internal Immigrant to a Local Leader of Women’: an Odyssey of Chen Yingmei during China’s Dramatical Transition”

Chen Yingmei was born in 1937 when the Japanese invaded China. When she was young, she witnessed China’s dramatical changes, including Japan’s invasion, China’s civil war, and the communist takeover of the country. Because her family engaged in local business, she was able to gain her education from primary school. Then, the Great Leap Forward forced her family out from the original prosperous commercial town to a remote rural area, because her town along with the entire region would be removed in order to build a huge man-made lake. It was a project of the Great Leap Forward. Thus, she became an internal immigrant and had to settle down in a faraway location. Needless to say, the relocation ruined her prosperous family life. After that, fortunately, she landed a job at the local Supply and Marketing Cooperative (gongxiaoshe) where she worked for decades. In the early 1980s, she became the chairperson of the local township women’s association. She had tried hard to protect local women for decades, for which she got many awards including the one from the provincial government in Henan as a model leader for women. This paper is intended to trace her life which paralleled the history of the People’s Republic of China from the 1950s to the new century.

“Commerce, Culture, and Race: the U.S.-China Subnational Relations, 1842-2021”

Hilton Union Square, Union Square 19&20

Chair: Mao Lin, Georgia Southern University

Papers:

The China–US Tea Trade after the Opium War, 1842–1911

Dan Du, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

For God, Gold, and Glory: Iowans in China

Tao Wang, Iowa State University

Massacre, Reciprocity, and Indemnity: Sino-American Negotiations over the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre in Wyoming

Yuanchong Wang, University of Delaware

US–China Relations and Racism against Asians

Guolin Yi, Providence College

Comment: Mao Lin, Georgia Southern University

Panel Abstract

While the U.S.-China relations have become so essential, and controversial, to our own times, this panel examines the two nations’ collaborations and confrontations in transnational commerce, missionary activities, diplomatic negotiations, and media coverage from the mid-nineteenth century to present day, thus enhancing historical understanding of their rocky yet interdependent relations. After all, history rarely repeats itself, but it often rhymes.

Dan Du and Tao Wang examine the close connections between the two nations. Du illustrates their interlinking development through the lens of the China-U.S. tea trade after the Opium War. The United States was the second largest importer of Chinese tea. Americans’ peculiar taste for green and Oolong tea, China’s treaty system, and the U.S. adoption of the Gold Standard intertwined, determining the vicissitudes of China’s global tea trade. Wang illuminates the often-neglected engagement between Iowa, the rural midwestern U.S. state, and China through the experiences of an Iowan missionary, an ambassador, and an engineer, thus presenting the three foci of the early U.S. policy toward China—missionary idealism, diplomatic pragmatism, and commercial interests.

Yuanchong Wang and Guolin Yi investigate the clashes between Americans and Chinese in the United States. Highlighting the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre in another U.S. western state, Wyoming, Wang reconstructs the anti-Chinese riot to elaborate how Zheng Zaoru, Chinese Minister to the United States, and Thomas Bayard, U.S. Secretary of State, employed the international law and indemnity policies to orchestrate their diplomatic negotiations. Focusing on the anti-Asian sentiment in more recent history, Yi revisits the anti-Asian hatred by showing how American media’s coverage of the Sino-American relations affected public perceptions of Asians and contributed to their hostilities toward Asians during three key historical moments: Korean War, Vietnam War, and the Trade War under the Trump administration. 

Paper Abstracts

Dan Du, “The China-U.S. Tea Trade after the Opium War, 1842-1911”

Through the lens of the tea trade, this research reveals the interlinking but divergent paths of development between China and the United States in the nineteenth century. Previous research usually emphasizes the British dominance in the tea trade with China, whereas this paper highlights the significance of the China-U.S. tea trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. The United States had been the second largest importer of tea from China since the late eighteenth century, second only to Great Britain. After the abolition of the Canton Trade System and more “Treaty Ports” were open to foreign merchants after the Opium War, Americans’ distinctive taste for tea intertwined with the Treaty Ports System to reshape the landscape of China’s tea trade beyond Canton. While British traders controlled the black tea trade, Americans were the most important buyer of Chinese green and Oolong tea in the newly opened ports throughout the nineteenth century. The decline of the tea trade with America thus posed a heavy blow to the Chinese economy, which had suffered heavily from the weakened tea business with Britain. Moreover, the U.S. adoption of the Gold Standard during the Long Depression of 1873-1898 reduced the profitability and accelerated the decline of China’s global tea trade. American tea merchants diverted their capital away from China and invested in domestic industries, whereas Chinese merchants struggled with heavy taxes and fierce competition from Japan and British colonies.

Tao Wang, “For God, Gold, and Glory: Iowans in China”

This presentation examines the early connections between Iowa and China. It studies the experiences of three groups of Iowans who lived in China from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Eva and Fredrick Price, a missionary couple from Des Moines, worked in Shanxi from 1889 through their deaths in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Edwin Conger (and his wife Sarah Conger), also from Des Moines, was the United States minister to China from 1898 to 1905. Herbert Hoover, born in West Branch, Iowa, worked as a mine engineer and manager in Tianjin from 1899 to 1902. These individuals represented three aspects of early US policy toward China: missionary idealism, diplomatic pragmatism, and commercial interests.

Using primary sources, such as journals and letters by Eva Price and Sarah Conger, diplomatic documents from the Department of State and the Hoover Presidential Library, as well as secondary works, this study tries to accomplish a two-fold goal: it reveals the long, yet neglected, history of the engagement between the rural midwestern state with the remote, populous country on the other side of the Earth; and it demonstrates the themes of early US-China encounters in an era of Western “scramble for China” and American expansion into Asia.

Yuanchong Wang, “Massacre, Reciprocity, and Indemnity: Sino-American Negotiations over the 1885 Rock Springs Massacre in Wyoming”

On September 2, 1885, twenty-eight Chinese laborers of the Pacific Union Railway working in Rock Springs in Wyoming Territory were attacked and killed by white laborers who further burned and looted Chinatown. While the governor of Wyoming and the US Army rushed to Rock Springs to maintain the order, the Chinese minister to the US Zheng Zaoru instructed the Chinese consul at San Francisco, F. A. Bee, and the consul at New York, Huang Xiquan, to co-investigate the massacre in Rock Springs. Soon Zheng intensively negotiated the case with Secretary of State Thomas Bayard for prosecuting the white rioters and paying the victims indemnity. Bayard’s two predecessors’ no-indemnity policy toward the 1880 anti-Chinese riot in Denver forced Zheng to use the reciprocity principle of international law that was included in Sino-American treaties of 1844, 1858, 1868, and 1880 to indicate that China would not pay American victims any indemnity in similar cases if justice was not brought to the victims of Rock Springs. Zheng’s strategy and the pressure of American domestic public opinion forced Bayard to pay the indemnity in 1886, which made the Rock Springs Massacre the only case in the nineteenth century in which the Chinese victims of hate crime received indemnity from the US government. No rioters, however, were prosecuted in the era when the Chinese Exclusion Act was effective and anti-Chinese resentment was prevalent. This paper examines the diplomatic negotiations between Zheng and Bayard with the aim of revealing the multi-layered nature of the reconstruction of the massacre respectively on the Chinese and American sides.

Guolin Yi, “US-China Relations and Racism Against Asians”

This paper studies how the American media’s coverage of Sino-American relations has contributed to the anti-Asian sentiment in the United States during the key events of Sino-American relations: Korean War, Vietnam War, and the Trade War under the Trump administration. While other scholars study anti-Asian hatred from the perspectives of race and immigration, I look at it from the perspective of Sino-American relations. I look at how the US policy toward China and the media’s coverage, which can be a subjective process, have affected the public perception of Asians. Specifically, I examine four major components: US policy toward China seen through the rhetoric of American officials; Chinese policy toward the U.S.; US media’s coverage of Washington’s policy; and Rhetoric of the Chinese media. By looking at the media perception between China and the United States at different periods, this paper tries to map out the evolution of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. from the perspective of foreign relations.