Surveying the Nation

CHUS #11. Surveying the Nation: Rediscovering the “People” in China’s Republican Era, 1912–49
Monday, January 6, 2025: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
New York Hilton, East Room

Session Organizer: Xiaoyan Ren (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Chair(s):
Yue Du, Cornell University

Papers:
“Obstructed Embrace”: The ID Card Institution in Shanghai, 1945–49
Xiaoyan Ren, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Competing Colonialities: Nation-State Building and Nation-Empire Construction of Chinese and Japanese Migration Projects in Manchuria, 1914–45
Luming Xu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Problem of Chinese Population: Discourses of Chinese Population and Population Science, 1918–39
Zhelun Zhou, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Comment: Yue Du, Cornell University

Panel Description

Recent scholarship on the history of Republican China represented by works such as Di Luo’s Beyond Citizenship (2022), Tong Lam’s A Passion for Facts (2011), Peter Zarrow’s After Empire (2012), Janet Y. Chen’s Guilty of Indigence (2012), and Zwia Lipkin’s Useless to the State (2006) reflects both a continuing exploration of issues of modernity and a new interest  in state-building processes from the perspectives of knowledge-production and state efforts of social engineering and classification. This panel builds upon and extends this new scholarship on nation-state building efforts in the Republican era. Centering around the issues of population, identification card systems, and migration, this panel aims to highlight the efforts by the state and the elites to rediscover and re-define the “people” and the population in relation to state sovereignty, the collection and management of information about the “people,” and the agency of the “people” in these processes.

Using academic treatises, articles in newspapers and popular journals, and government documents from the 1920s and 1930s, Zhou examines the problematization of the population and the initiation of a population science in China; Xu investigates the state-led settler colonialism in the respective migration projects in Manchuria promoted by both China and Japan to claim sovereignty over this land; and Ren explores the contested ID card policy in Shanghai after 1945 as part of the state-building project and the multifarious obstacles that impeded its implementation.

Paper Abstracts

 “Obstructed Embrace:” the ID Card Institution in Shanghai, 1945-1949

Xiaoyan Ren, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

This paper examines the Chinese Nationalist government’s modern state building efforts through the lens of identification card policy in post-war Shanghai (1945-1949). In the aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the Nationalist government issued identification cards to render the population more “legible” to the state, albeit faced with considerable challenges and resistance. Focusing on Shanghai, one of the cities that piloted the ID card policy, this paper examines the multifarious obstacles to the policy’s implementation, in terms of technology (photos, seal stamps, standardization of names), administrative systems, and the impact of Japanese occupation. My research sheds fresh light on the state-society relations during this period, centering on the following questions: How did society appropriate and resist newly introduced technology of state surveillance? How was the class of “state brokers” transformed in Republican China and what new roles did they play? What legacy did the Second Sino-Japanese War leave for China that might linger even until today? 

The use of photos, seal stamps, and standardized names for individual identification encountered considerable resistance and appropriation in Republican China. The role of baojia chiefs (local community leaders) as administrators illustrates how they appropriated the ID card policies for personal advantage. The collective memory of “citizen’s cards” issued during Japanese rule in Shanghai led to an enduring perception of identification documents as stigmatized symbols of foreign invasion and illegitimate rule. All this challenged the implementation of the identification card policy in post-1945 Shanghai.

Competing Colonialities: Nation-State Building and Nation-Empire Construction of Chinese and Japanese Migration Projects in Manchuria, 1914-1945

Luming Xu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

This study focuses on the migration projects launched respectively by China and Japan in Manchuria from the 1910s to the 1940s to claim sovereignty over this land. It employs the term “competing colonialities” to characterize this particular piece of migration history, for both the Republican Chinese governments, intellectuals, and Japanese colonial authorities have used the phrase “colonize” (Ch. zhibian; Jp. Takushoku) to define their respective migration projects. These two parallel colonial enterprises clashed in 1931, when the Manchurian Incident broke out, as the Japanese army took over the whole of Manchuria by force, and the state of Manchukuo was established the next year. Although the Republican state lost its control over Manchuria until 1945, the ROC government transformed its coloniality into a rhetoric about “national humiliation” (guochi) by producing anti-Japanese propaganda at the national scale. At the same time, the Japanese promoted the independence of the state of Manchukuo from China, transforming Japanese coloniality into the ideology of “Harmony of the Five Races” (Gozoku Kyōwa).  This study argues that underneath the myths of nation and empire, migrants were the central pillars to the macro-level nation- and state-building, while migrants in Manchuria themselves have also taken advantage of Chinese and Japanese colonialities at the micro-level to create myths of their own, such as the myth of chuang guandong among Han Chinese migrants, and literary genre of bazoku in Japanese settlers’ communities.

 “The Problem of Chinese Population”: Discourses of Chinese Population and Population Science, 1918-1939

Zhelun Zhou, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Starting from the May Fourth era (1915 to 1922) to the 1930s, Chinese intellectuals and elites had voiced their concerns of China’s large population. Prior to and after Margaret Sanger’s visit in 1922, Chinese intellectuals, such as Chen Changheng, Sun Benwen, and Tao Menghe, not only suggested birth control to limit population growth, but also introduced approaches to measure and survey both the quantity and quality of population. In the 1930s, sociologist Chen Da proposed to formulate the discipline of population science to further manage the population and eventually to compel the KMT government to legislate laws for population control. Though the KMT state never formally legislated and practiced its eugenic-oriented population policy, this attention to population management and control remained consistent through the Republican period until 1949. The concerns with population coincided with the growing intellectual emphasis on social surveys and the social sciences during that era. Using intellectual treatises, newspaper articles, and governmental records, this paper explores how population came to be perceived as a problem in the 1920s and how the problematization of this issue served to stimulate the rising discussion of population science among Chinese intellectuals in the 1930s. Overall, the intense discussion on the Chinese population reflected intellectuals’ pursuit of modernization, as they attempted to concretize the population in measurable terms.