Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960 9780231543798

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Dwelling in the World

STUDIES OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

STUDIES OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia. Selected Titles (Complete list at: weai.columbia.edu/content/publications) Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam, by Nu-Anh Tran. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization, by Peter Hamilton. Columbia University Press, 2021. China’s Influence and the Center-Periphery Tug of War in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and IndoPacific, by Brian C.H. Fong, Wu Jieh-min, and Andrew J. Nathan. Routledge, 2020. The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea, by Hwisang Cho. University of Washington Press, 2020. On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam, by Martina Thucnhi Nguyen. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020. A Third Way: The Origins of China’s Current Economic Development Strategy, by Lawrence Chris Reardon. Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World, by Arthur M. Mitchell. Cornell University Press, 2020. Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China, by Nicholas Bartlett. University of California Press, 2020. Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form, by Christopher Laing Hill. Northwestern University Press, 2020. Arbiters of Patriotism: Right Wing Scholars in Imperial Japan, by John Person. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020. The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, by Benno Weiner. Cornell University Press, 2020. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China, by Arunabh Ghosh. Princeton University Press, 2020. Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, by Andrew B. Liu. Yale University Press, 2020. Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism, by Tatiana Linkhoeva. Cornell University Press, 2020. Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900-1940, by Eugenia Lean. Columbia University Press, 2020. Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand, by Duncan McCargo. Cornell University Press, 2020. Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border, by Sören Urbansky. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Dwelling in the World FAMILY, HOUSE, AND HOME IN TIANJIN, CHINA, 1860–1960

Elizabeth LaCouture

COLU M BIA U N IV ER SIT Y P R ESS  NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: LaCouture, Elizabeth, author. Title: Dwelling in the world : family, house, and home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960 / Elizabeth LaCouture. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2021. | Series: Studies of the weatherhead East Asian institute | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021007874 (print) | LCCN 2021007875 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231181785 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231181792 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231543798 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Families—China—Tianjin—History—19th century. | Families—China—Tianjin—History—20th century. | Households— China—Tianjin—History—19th century. | Households—China—Tianjin— History—20th century. | Social classes—China—Tianjin—History— 19th century. | Social classes—China—Tianjin—History—20th century. | Tianjin (China)—Social life and customs. Classification: LCC HQ684.T53 L33 2021 (print) | LCC HQ684.T53 (ebook) | DDC 306.850951/154—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007874 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007875

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: Courtesy of the author. Artist: Ye Qianyu ਦ⍵Ҹ, Van Jan (Wanxiang з䊑), no. 1, May 20, 1934, n.p.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

vii

1

Part I. Domestic Empires 1 Unraveling the Chinese Empire 17 2 Family in Ideology and Practice 47 3 Property, Power, and Identity in a Colonial-Capitalist City 80

Part II. At Home in the World 4 Choosing a House

123

5 Designing House and Home 6 Living at Home 189

154

vi Contents

Part III. Chinese Social Spaces 7 Engendering the Chinese City 217 8 The Chinese Bourgeois Home in the Socialist World 242 Epilogue: Historical Erasures and China’s New Middle Class 264

Notes

271

Bibliography 315 Index 337

Acknowledgments

M

any homes have shaped this project. My interest in the urban Chinese home began with printed-out pages of Ling long magazine scattered across the floor and futon of my tiny bedroom in a shared apartment on Claremont Avenue in Morningside Heights, and I finally closed the door to family, house, and home from my living room desk, looking onto Robinson Road and Victoria Harbor in a three-bedroom Hong Kong flat. Along the way I read and wrote in a spare room adjacent to an office in Kichijoji, a refurbished danwei apartment along Heyan Dao in Tianjin, a 1930s house in Waterville, and apartments in Urbana, Hamilton, and Taibei. This research taught me how to design my own home: when I began, I had never purchased a piece of furniture for myself, and now I have amassed enough antiques, art, midcentury modern, and Ikea to fill an apartment, a storage unit, and my in-laws’ basement. I am grateful to all the large houses that supported my research and writing. Academic affiliations provided access to libraries and a space to work. I am fortunate to have studied at Columbia University, the International Chinese Language Program (ICLP), and the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences and to have worked at Colby College, the University of Illinois, and the University of Hong Kong. Generous grants supported

viii Acknowledgments

study, research, and writing. Thanks to Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Julie How Dissertation Fellowship, the Institute for Social and Economic Research Policy (ISERP), the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, the Daniel and Marianne Spiegel Fund, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), the Academy of Korean Studies, and Colby College Social Science division. My research would not have been possible without all the houses that provide shelter to all the books, magazines, and documents. I am especially grateful to the staff at les Archives diplomatique, the Tianjin Municipal Library, and the Tianjin Municipal Archives. A large extended family, the size of which would put a May Fourth activist to shame, helped raise this book. The lineage of my intellectual da jiazu begins with the matriarch of Chinese feminist history Dorothy Ko. Dorothy taught me to look at Chinese gender history from the past, helped me discover my creativity, and inspired me to trust how I see. Madeleine Zelin always ensured that I had funding and supported me as I started my own family. My Columbia family has long supported my study of China. Bob Hymes first taught me about the Chinese family as an undergraduate, and Irene Bloom and Lu Xiaobo supported my intellectual journey at Barnard College. Mary Hue taught me much more than Japanese language, and Meng Yuan-yuan shared her infectious love of Zhang Ailing. Eugenia Lean, Pamela Smith, and Gwendolyn Wright provided fresh perspectives on gender, material culture, and architectural histories. Over the years, I have been graciously welcomed into other academic families. Countless surrogate parents offered feedback and conversation. I am especially grateful to Ronald Knapp, Jordan Sand, Ruby Watson, and Antoinette Burton. Linda Grove introduced me to China studies in Japan and to the possibilities of research on Tianjin. Not only was the Tianjin Academy of Social Science a research home away from home, but Liu Haiyan, Ren Yulan, and Zhang Limin invited me into their homes. Wang Li supported my research, offered friendship, and shared his family of wonderful students. I have been inspired by the intellectual feminist sisterhood of scholars at Academia Sinica, especially Lien Ling-ling, Sun Hueimin, and Jennifer Ning. At the University of Illinois, Jungwon Kim, Erica Vogel, and the late Nancy Abelmann provided a nurturing home for my research. Eileen Findlay has been a mentor and a model feminist scholar.

Acknowledgments

ix

I am grateful to the many brothers and sisters in my academic family. My xuege Fabio Lanza and xuejie Georgia Mickey have provided mentorship in graduate school and beyond. My brothers and sisters in the dissertation support group—Alyssa Park, Li Chen, Jisoo Kim, Adam Clulow, Colin Jaundrill, and Matt Augustine—were generous with their feedback while writing their own brilliant books. Courtney Fullilove, Jeremy Tai, and Alexandra Tunstall helped round out my intellectual family at Columbia, while Annelise Heinz and Lawrence Chua have been much welcomed additions to this family. My professional and personal life is sustained through the true feminist sisterhood of colleagues Sonja Thomas, Puja Kapai, and Staci Ford. My scholarly life is enriched by the welcomed distractions and muchneeded support of people in my personal life. I am grateful to both my chosen family— Cleo Abrams, Heidi Johnson, Michael Hill, Louise Brown-Oz, Udi Oz, and Ayal ben Or—and my inherited family— Susan Buckley, Angelo DeSantis, Isabella Buckley-DeSantis, Jay Lacouture, Patricia Lacouture, Dale Petrulis, Ken Petrulis, and Denise Petrulis. Housework is work, and I am grateful to the women who provided domestic labor and childcare, especially Cai Xiuying and Eliza Laamoon, that allowed me to write this book. Finally, to my own xiao jiating Jason and Clio, my greatest joy has been dwelling in this world with you.

Dwelling in the World

Introduction

O

n a hot summer afternoon in 2005, I joined a group of historians led by Tianjin scholar Liu Haiyan on a walking tour of the city. We entered Tianjin’s former British Concession, walked along its tree-lined streets, and stepped into a courtyard of semi-attached houses. Liu began to introduce the history of these and similar single-family houses, built in the 1920s and 1930s, when a friendly couple who lived in the neighborhood approached us. They invited us to look inside their home, and we followed them through the oncegrand entryway of their building. Standing on graying, multicolored, glazed tiles, we gazed upon a carved wooden staircase with chipping paint. We noted that although the house had been constructed for singlefamily use, it had since been subdivided into several apartments. Our hosts lived on the ground floor in a bright and tidy two-room flat, in what once likely served as the parlor and the dining room of the home. The front room continued to serve as a sitting room, and the couple invited us to take a seat. The sofa stood across from a double doorway that led into what was likely designed to be a dining room but now served as a bedroom. Our hosts explained that they had recently purchased the apartment for a good price, and that they had consulted with their daughter on renovations. Although they were of

2

Introduction

modest means, they told us, their daughter was well educated, and she discouraged them from destroying any of the original architectural features. Liu complimented them on their decor and commented that they had done well to heed their daughter’s advice. A fresh coat of paint brightened the two rooms, while the original crown moldings, fireplace, and wooden floors transported us back to the time when the house was built in the 1920s. The couple was proud of the house and its history. They informed us that when it was originally built, Chinese people would not have been able to live there, since only foreign nationals were allowed to live in the foreign concession. Liu politely advised them that their house’s former residents most likely would have been Chinese since the majority of residents in the British Concession were Chinese (over 90  percent in the 1920s). Indeed, the surrounding houses of this residential courtyard had been constructed during a real estate boom designed to meet the demands of Tianjin’s well-to-do Chinese population for concession housing. Our hosts were not alone in their belief that housing in Tianjin’s foreign concessions had once been off-limits to Chinese urbanites. On repeat visits to Tianjin’s former foreign concessions, older people would stop me in the streets or in a park to inform me that before 1949 only foreigners could live in Tianjin’s concessions. And this collective postcolonial memory did not value all colonized spaces equally: while Chinese residents of the former European concessions celebrated that they, as Chinese people, could now live there, residents of the former Japanese concession wanted to leave. As I surveyed architecture along those streets, multiple residents told me that I would be better off studying the “five great streets,” or Wudadao, the Chinese name for the former British Concession. One woman told me that she wished the government would demolish her home in the former Japanese Concession and compensate her so that her family could afford to move. With different parts of the city eliciting divergent emotional responses from residents, architectural fieldwork in Tianjin revealed the affective relationship between the city’s residents and the urban landscape and architecture. My initial goal for this book was to uncover the historical consequences of the relationship between people and things by asking how changes in the urban landscape and the built environment, which began in the late nineteenth century, forged new social structures and

Introduction 3

reshaped individual identities. Archival research and fieldwork in Tianjin revealed that as urban spaces were demolished and rebuilt, the city’s urban elites invented the modern house and home themselves, and through this process fashioned new classed and gendered identities. The relationship between identity, space, and architecture that exists in Tianjin today, however, is no longer shaped from below but instead is guided from above as those earlier processes were deliberately erased from popular historical memory. This erasure began shortly after the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949. Ironically, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) erased the historical memory of an earlier Chinese middle class by adopting the emerging middle class practice of linking individual housing rights to political rights. Shortly after assuming power, the CCP made housing a central feature of their political legitimacy, distributing housing through work units. Today, people purchase or rent housing through markets. But whether housing was allocated through work units or through the market economy, the ability to inhabit a home has been credited to the Communist Party. Today, housing is central to the identity of the so-called new and rising Chinese middle class, and indeed is key to the relationship between state and society. State-led urban renewal and development in Tianjin also shapes public memory of the city’s colonial past. Beginning in the late 1990s, the old Chinese city was demolished, only to be rebuilt as a Chinese-style shopping arcade. The Italian and British Concessions, by contrast, have been preserved as tourist destinations and business districts. Italian-built residences are now restaurants and serve as a popular backdrop for wedding photographs. Across the river, Beaux Arts banks have been preserved and new “old European style” architecture has been erected, even as the Japanese Concession remained largely neglected and forgotten as of the early 2000s. In postcolonial Tianjin, the preservation of European architecture has taken precedence over Chinese-style buildings. But while Tianjin’s European architectural heritage is celebrated, this pride is less about commemorating a colonial past or remembering the contributions of Chinese people who lived in the colonized city than it is about memorializing China’s place of strength in the world today. European-style buildings, especially large public buildings, symbolize economic and political power.

4

Introduction

Occupying former European-colonized spaces and designing new European buildings demonstrates that China is now on par with Europe, thanks to the Communist Party. In Dwelling in the World I move beyond these façades of power, and into Tianjin houses, to fill in the erased histories of the everyday experiences of the city’s urban elites. By writing Chinese people back into the concession houses they once inhabited and imagining how they lived at home, I explore how Chinese people forged their individual gendered and classed subjectivities. In taking this approach I reveal the power of their everyday lives, which spilled out beyond the walls of the home to shape Tianjin’s social and cultural histories yesterday and Tianjin’s urban life today. In 1860, Tianjin became a treaty-port city and eventually included nine foreign concessions, more than any other Chinese city. The number of concessions fluctuated along with geopolitical events, but many remained in the city until after World War II. Each concession functioned like a colony, with its own municipal governing body, individual contracts with public utility companies, national or religious curricula and schools, streets named in the national language, unique zoning regulations, and distinctive architectural styles. With nine foreign concessions, or miniature colonies, occupying such a small area of land, Tianjin was perhaps the most international city in the world during the first half of the twentieth century. A Tianjin resident could experience multiple languages and architectural styles simply by taking an afternoon stroll across the city. And since Tianjin was the largest port in northern China, its residents experienced the world at home through consuming goods from across the globe. A Chinese resident of Tianjin was quite literally dwelling in the world. Encountering the world at home and in the city led Tianjin urban elites to articulate new forms of social distinction. They formed a new urban cosmopolitan class whose people felt equally at home living in the Chinese city, in their natal home in the countryside, or in other cosmopolitan cities from Tokyo and Paris to New York and London. The Chinese modern home was not an isolated, private space but rather a contact zone, if you will, in which Chinese individuals encountered, tried on, experienced, and consumed the world.1

Introduction 5

By casting house and home as a global space in this book, I explore not only how Chinese people invented the modern home by consuming the global but also, more importantly, introduce how Chinese people produced their own identities and ideas about modernity on and for the global stage. Thus, while other historians of Chinese consumption during this period have argued that Chinese people either boycotted foreign goods due to a sense of rising nationalism, or embraced foreign goods because they were exotic, I argue that Chinese people did not take for granted categories such as Chinese and foreign, new and old, or male and female.2 Instead, they produced meanings for these categories based on their understandings of their world, inventing their own conceptions of the modern. So for many of Tianjin’s urban elites, their experiences of dwelling in the world, rather than national awakening, played a central role in forging their individual subjectivities. Moreover, as they explored everyday life at home, people forged new conceptions of social status. The abolition of the Chinese civil service examination system in 1905 and the fall of the Qing in 1911 brought about the end of the Confucian ideal of social hierarchies and opened up spaces for people to create new status identities. Home became a central site for identity formation. But this new concept of home was only available to a small subset of urbanites, a group we might call the middle class or the bourgeoisie. As a result, this book is not a history of how Tianjin people from all walks of life made their dwellings in the world, but rather the story of how a group of urban elites invented the modern home and developed it into a central site for class and gender identity formation. By writing the history of the modern home into the history of modern China, Dwelling in the World joins histories of the United States and Europe that have linked changing class and gender identities to the spatial transformation of the domestic sphere.3 According to these histories, new gender and middle-class identities were a development of a discrete separate domestic sphere that emerged with the Industrial Revolution. The historian Jordan Sand has argued for an opposite causality in Japan, asserting that Japan’s middle class invented the modern home and ideas about middle-class domesticity through interpreting and translating global ideas of domesticity and bourgeois culture. 4 I offer a third argument for

6

Introduction

China: that Chinese people simultaneously invented the modern home as they invented new status identities. Moreover, unlike their counterparts in Tokyo or London, they did not strongly identify with being part of a bourgeois class even as their patterns of behavior suggested otherwise. This begs a question: What did status, or more specifically “middle class,” mean in modern China? Chinese politics have long exerted a heavy influence on the Chinese history field—including Chinese history practiced outside China—by focusing attention on peasant and working classes. As a result, few historians have examined the “middle class” in modern China. Marie- Claire Bergère was one of the first historians to do so, arguing that the Republican era was a prosperous period for Chinese treaty-port cities and characterizing it as “the golden age of the Chinese bourgeoisie.”5 When looking at the Chinese middle class, historians often have drawn on EuroAmerican historical models of class. Bergère employed a French historical understanding of the bourgeoisie as an independent economic group visà-vis the state, while others have ascribed middle-class status according to new economic professions such as entrepreneurs, lawyers, and clerical workers, or according to their new political role between state and society.6 China historians who examine class have also been quick to point out that Euro-American analytical categories of class do not always map neatly onto Chinese society. Bergère argued that while an independent entrepreneurial class emerged during the 1910s and 1920s in Shanghai, in Tianjin an independent bourgeois class never developed since most of the shareholders of Tianjin’s cotton mills hailed from bureaucratic or military backgrounds and invested much more widely in real estate than in industrial production.7 Likewise, looking at Tianjin’s working class, the historian Gail Hershatter found that union activity and worker consciousness were much lower in Tianjin than in Shanghai.8 Class consciousness appears to have been low among Shanghai’s middle classes as well. Looking at “middle class office workers,” the historian Wen-hsin Yeh described the emergence of a new urban middle class culture, but the group she examined rarely described itself as middle class. Instead, Yeh argued that the new middle- class urban culture connected modernity and nation to  class, making it “virtually imperative for a patriotic Chinese to be

Introduction 7

modern.”9 During the Republican era, the Chinese government was weak, and China was multiply colonized, so patriotism and nationalism emerged as the primary ideological constructs around which people could form identities. Although middle class may have been an ideological construct in Paris or in Tokyo, in pre– Communist China the ideological concept of middle class never fully formed. Yet Chinese urbanites still engaged in certain cultural and social practices that historians typically associate with a middle class. The case of the Chinese modern home thus suggests that to understand everyday modernity comparatively, historians must decouple material practices of modernity from modern ideological constructs. Perhaps because a unified middle-class identity did not emerge in twentieth-century China, the Tianjin house and home could become a site for identity experimentation, a place where status identities intersected with new gendered practices and understandings of Chinese-ness. A wealthy male warlord, for example, could express his masculinity and elite social status through displaying his economic capital and his ability to purchase a grand house in one of the foreign concessions, while the daughter of a civil servant could show off her educational capital and access to female knowledge by demonstrating how to design everyday life in the modern home. In treaty-port Tianjin, gender roles were changing, and social status was relational. Thus, shifting focus from the ideological categories or sociological markers of class to the relational and multilayered processes of identity-making was in keeping with Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of status as a process of “distinction.”10 More than political or socioeconomic definitions of social status, “distinction” can highlight the practices of status formation, emphasizing the multiple factors that people call upon to establish their social position within a particular social group, or vis-à-vis others, through leveraging multiple forms of capital. In addition, examining class as a social process rather than as a given category can level the playing field, allowing historians to write comparative histories of places that did not follow the same historical trajectories as Europe or North America. When we take class and gender formation to be dynamic processes that are historically contingent, rather than universal stages, we can see a different history of house and home in modern China—a history that reveals

8

Introduction

the making of the Chinese middle class, yet also engenders the history of Chinese modernity. Beginning in the 1970s, feminist historians of the United States and Europe began to write the private history of the domestic sphere into mainstream historiography. They argued that as capital exited the household and moved into factories, the home became a private sphere, a site of respite and individual identity formation, and also the site of political ideological control.11 To achieve legitimacy in the eyes of mainstream history, women’s history reinforced a Euro-American historical timeline that identified the Industrial Revolution as the pivot of modernization. In other words, the history of private space was told through the timeline of Euro-American public spaces. Economic and political historians of China have challenged such universal historical markers of modernity and have called on us to rethink the “great divergence” and “the public sphere.”12 Chinese women’s history, however, is doubly marginalized by the masculinist field of Chinese history and the Euro-American-dominated field of women’s history. As a result, scholars of Chinese women’s history have needed to cite U.S. women’s histories if only to explain that China’s historiographical trajectory was different.13 Moreover, although historians of late imperial China such as Francesca Bray, Dorothy Ko, and Susan Mann have recast our understanding of Chinese and women’s history by analyzing the experiences of Chinese women on their own terms, their scholarly work rarely becomes required reference outside the field of Chinese women’s history. A historian of eighteenth-century United States is never required to explain why Confucian notions of nei and wai never developed, and likewise, historians of China’s economy are never expected to cite gender historians.14 Chinese women’s history can only be understood on its own terms, but we can still aim to make these histories legible to other historians through comparative analytical frames. Susan Glosser, for example, who explores the changing ideology of family in twentieth-century China, argues for focusing on “prescriptive ideals” before the lived experience of families because it follows historiographical practices of scholars of U.S. women’s history. But she also argues that Chinese socio-spatial ideologies were different from the Euro-American concept of separate spheres.15 Thus,

Introduction 9

although Glosser follows Euro-American historiographical methods, she also acknowledges that China had a different historical experience. With Dwelling in the World, I invite historians to go even further. By focusing on the materiality of everyday life over the politics of ideology, I aim to disrupt the historiographical methods that have established past Euro-American experiences as historical theory by proposing new comparative frames for women’s history. Consider the ideological concept of “domesticity.” The concept, which is so central to U.S. women’s history and has such a rich historiography, literally does not translate into Chinese.16 The term typically is rendered as jiating shenghuo or “home life,” a very different historical lens. In contrast to a history of domesticity, a history of home life considers common global trajectories as well as individual localized female experiences. Comparative histories of home life thus introduce modernity as a shared experience rather than a stage, a historical marker, or a timeline. By shifting the analytical lens from ideology to materiality, a history of home life can dislocate the Euro-American cultural experience from its primacy as theory and instead reveal similarities across the material experiences of global histories. A history of home life in modern China reveals that the urban house and home was the site of one of the most significant revolutions in Chinese everyday life. This revolution was articulated linguistically through the transformation of the classical Chinese term jia (household) into the modern vernacular word jiating (home). These transformations in language and social spaces emerged as the Qing Empire’s hold over its realm began to loosen in the late nineteenth century. Intellectuals, politicians, and even merchants began to rethink the relationship between state and society and, in the process, began to define the new Chinese nation. It marked the linguistic transition from the late imperial or early modern jia (household) to the jiating (modern home). This transition occurred historically as the Qing Empire’s hold over its realm began to loosen in the late nineteenth century, as intellectuals, politicians, and even merchants rethought the relationship between state and society and, in the process, began to define the new Chinese nation.17 Historians have focused on this political redefinition of the modern Chinese nation and the public sphere, but few have considered the redefinition from another direction, either by looking

10

Introduction

into the urban house and home, or by examining a debate that was every bit as intense as the one over state and society: the contest over the meaning and role of family, house, and home.18 In late imperial China, family, house, and household were interconnected conceptually and linguistically through the single- character word—jia.19 Depending on the context, jia could mean family, house, or household, thus social relations and social spaces were closely intertwined. The architectural design of a family’s house, ordered according to feng shui principles, could bring prosperity to a family or it could lead to ruin for future generations. And just as people and house were connected, the household was linked to the dynastic center, a relationship best envisioned as a set of mutually reinforcing nested spheres. In the Chinese classical text the Great Learning, Confucius is asked how to govern the state, and he answers that one first must regulate the household, and only then can order be brought to the state. Likewise, familial harmony and wealth was most easily achieved when the empire was peaceful and prosperous. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, a new world order of imperialist competition, powered by capitalism, governed by social Darwinism, and proselytized by missionaries, began to erode the philosophical principles and the material landscape of this Chinese spatial order. In 1911, the Qing dynasty finally collapsed, taking with it the imperial core that had glued this sociopolitical spatial ideology together. What happened when the world as Chinese people understood it literally crumbled beneath their feet? As I answer this question in my book, I connect life on the ground to the larger shifting political and economic landscapes that framed Chinese people’s everyday lives. I argue that this was a transitional time for Chinese people in two main ways: first, it was a period between two empires—the Qing dynasty that fell in 1911 and the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949 and set up on top of the territorial map of the Qing Empire—and second, it was a moment when China was at the center of multiple foreign empires, each fighting over economic and territorial rights in China. To design everyday life at home Chinese urbanites picked up the broken pieces of a fallen Qing and turned to the many global models of their multiply colonized city. Dwelling in the world at home and in their city, people in Tianjin forged new individual gender, class, and ethnic identities.

Introduction 11

Moreover, I argue that it was precisely because this historical moment fell between two Chinese empires—after the fall of the Qing imperial order, and before the founding of the People’s Republic of China’s new socialist political order—that Chinese people actually had enough space and opportunity to create new categories of understanding. The Republican era was a period of weak political unity, but it was a time rich with new political discourses. Cultural histories of modern China describe the Republican era as a period of “national awakening,” yet when it came to the architecture of the modern house or the design of the modern home, nationalist social reformers and government officials actually had very little to say.20 If anything, nationalists argued against the idea that the home could be a space for expression and empowerment and suggested instead that the oppressive feudal household was a space from which modern women should escape. Late imperial Confucians had advocated for the proper arrangement and design of houses as central to social order in the family and political success in the dynasty, but twentieth-century reformers focused on the social structure of the family. Emboldened by the principles of a new global social science, Chinese ideologues called upon Chinese people to abandon the traditional, extended, large family structure and form modern, small, nuclear families to save the nation.21 These new ideas about family accompanied a new vocabulary: jiating, the new two-character word to describe family, was a neologism borrowed from Japan that could mean family, house, or the new modern concept of home, depending on the context. Although nationalist ideology focused on family, as Chinese people tried to reconstruct their social world they continued to connect social relations and social spaces through the new modern term jiating. As they emphasized social reform, however, nationalist politicians and reformers disconnected the social relations of the family from the social space of the house. Still, the nationalist calls to reform family social relations and build xiao jiating, or small families, may not have resulted in the desired demographic change. Drawing on archival research on Tianjin family size and structures, I argue that ideology did not always line up with how Chinese people formed or even thought about their families. The questions then arise: If being a modern family in Tianjin was not about heeding the calls of nationalist rhetoric to live as a small nuclear

12 Introduction

family, what did Chinese people living in Tianjin understand as “modern”? Moreover, if textual sources tend to tell a story of “national awakening” that did not always materialize into social practice, what kinds of sources can illuminate how Chinese people understood everyday modernity? To answer these questions, I construct a multifaceted archive of jiating as Chinese people, not political ideologues, understood it, organized around the categories of family, house, and home. Placing municipal documents and intellectual essays alongside architecture and women’s magazines, this interdisciplinary archive illuminates how the transformation of the late imperial Chinese jia into the modern Chinese jiating was central to how Chinese urbanites experienced modernity and how they forged new individual identities. The project of constructing an archive of home is not a mere documentary exercise; rather, it is a methodological intervention in historical practices. As the historian Antoinette Burton argues for colonial India, the archive of home not only helps to write women and domesticity into history but also “rescues history itself” from the totalizing narratives of imperialist and nationalist histories. 22 Just as Burton highlights how Indian women “used domestic space as an archival source to construct their own histories,” I use the archive of the Chinese modern house, home, and family to reach into the gray areas of colonial modernity, highlighting the agency of ordinary people by illuminating how Chinese women and men designed everyday life themselves. Jiating is not only the archive from which women constructed their personal narratives, but it also serves as a platform for launching what Burton terms the “counterhistories” of colonial modernity. For urban China, the “counterhistories” that emerge from jiating explore the dynamic interactions between personal experiences, political discourses, and capitalist processes to rewrite the history of modern experience. The modern home emerged in twentiethcentury Tianjin precisely because nationalist ideologues and foreign imperialists ignored it, thereby opening a space in which Chinese people could invent house and home themselves. Thus, in Tianjin and in urban China, the modern home elucidates our understanding of Chinese and global empires precisely as a counterhistory to Chinese nationalist and foreign imperialist historical narratives.

Introduction 13

To understand how Chinese people interpreted the modern family house and home, I have divided this book into three chronologically ordered parts. Part 1 focuses on the spaces and ideologies of empire, exploring the shifting global, national, and local frames that informed everyday life at the turn of the twentieth century, and connecting changes in Tianjin’s urban landscape to ruptures in political ideology. This section argues that while late imperial social and political ideologies focused on connections between family, house, and home through the single word jia, nationalist ideology focused on the demographics of the small family, or xiao jiating. Chapter 1 explores spatial ruptures and continuities in the Tianjin landscape as it changed from a Qing administrative city to a colonized treaty-port city. Chapter  2 introduces new ideas about family that emerged to fill the gaps left by the fall of imperial ideology. When we compare these new family ideologies and scientific theories with how Chinese people actually formed their families, however, we see that discourse was not always put into practice. Chapter  3 introduces the colonial capitalist system that built twentieth-century Tianjin through a speculative real estate market and new legal ideas and legislation about property ownership. As property ownership became linked to political rights, the masculine individual replaced the jia as political participant, and legal reforms that appeared to guarantee female property rights actually bolstered the rights and identities of individual male elites. Part 2 explores what it meant to be at home in the world in pre–World War II Republican-era Tianjin. Chapter 4 argues that choosing a house in treaty-port Tianjin was to select an architectural technology, Chinese or Western, that prescribed a specific set of social practices. Chapter  5 describes how Chinese people worked with and within these architectural structures to create their own sense of modern style. Both chapters explore the idea that the Tianjin modern house and home was created through juxtaposition and combination: Tianjin’s urbanites placed old beside new, and Chinese next to foreign, to invent a Tianjin modern style that reflected how they were dwelling in the world. Chapter 6 explains how the material spaces and objects of home were articulated through an affective understanding of home, which in turn formed individual subjectivities. Women’s magazines introduced the new concept of home as both a prescriptive

14 Introduction

site of everyday life and a modernist escapist fantasy of individual subjectivity formation, instructing readers not only how to dwell in the world, but more importantly how to feel at home in the world. Moreover, whether authors and editors were male or female, the knowledge about home printed on the pages of women’s magazines was presented as femalegendered knowledge. Part 3 focuses on the second half of the twentieth century to analyze how ideologies, architecture, and material culture combined to produce numerous configurations of social space in Republican-era China, and to consider how social space ideals narrowed after 1949. Chapter 7 explores the intersections of gender and social status to understand the multiple interpretations of female-gendered spaces in Republican-era Tianjin. Family and home, for example, could be considered the enemy of female social status or the site of a woman’s individual subjectivity formation, while new urban sites of socialization, such as restaurants and cinemas, became places of female social agency. Chapter  8 looks at how, after World War II, a single prescriptive ideal for housing emerged from the multiple concepts of house and home that had been developed during the Republican era. Foreign countries returned their concessions, and the Chinese municipal government under the Guomindang gained full control over the city. In postcolonial Tianjin, Tianjin’s city government proposed public housing for Tianjin urbanites, but they never had the opportunity to construct their plans. In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party came to power, and in Tianjin took up the issue of housing almost immediately. The Communists transformed the earlier bourgeois notion that housing was central to masculine political identities into the idea that housing was a political right for all citizens, thus making housing central to their political legitimacy. In other words, the CCP reconnected family, house, and home under political ideology. Integrating the multiple facets of jiating under state political ideology and policies harkened back to the Qing dynasty, but the idea of family, house, and home had been forever changed by the middle class experimentations in dwelling in the world during the Republican era. Thus, the epilogue considers the legacy of this history as housing and property have become central issues in the fraught relationship between China’s so-called new middle class and the state today.

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eo- Confucian ideology constructed a cosmological ordering system of space that connected individual households to the state. Social relations, economic prosperity, and political stability were all maintained through the proper construction and regulation of spaces. The political and the personal or the empire and the everyday were mutually constructed through relational spaces. The historian Dorothy Ko has termed the gendered nature of this socio-spatial relationship the inner/outer continuum.1 According to Ko, nei (inner) was gendered female and usually attributed to the household, while wai (outer) was male and associated with civil service or commerce. She argues that nei and wai differed from European concepts of “private” and “public” in that they were neither discrete separate spheres nor were they mutually exclusive. Inner was embedded in the outer, but nei and wai were also relational and always shifting. The historian Susan Glosser has argued that the inner/outer continuum continued in twentieth-century China, and that the European notions of a discrete private sphere never took root.2 The Republican-era xiao jiating ideological discourse did seem to echo earlier NeoConfucian language in its call to transform the nation by reforming the family at its center, but the xiao jiating ideology also departed from earlier ideology by ignoring space. In

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Qing-era China the regulation of space was a central component of the inner/outer continuum, and indeed imperial power, whereas during the Republican era, the xiao jiating ideology focused largely on the social relations and demography of the family while ignoring the spaces of housing. The removal of space from family political ideology coincided with China’s loss of political control over its own spaces. In late imperial China, Tianjin started out as a military garrison and trading hub. Under the Qing dynasty, it became a city, the administrative center of the northern province of Zhili, which included the capital city Beijing. In 1860, Tianjin became a treaty-port city and included up to nine foreign concessions. The landscape of this multiply colonized city was deconstructed and reconstructed. Foreign powers destroyed and displaced Tianjin’s late imperial planning and architecture, attacking the spaces that had once established the state’s sociopolitical ideology in materiality. Thus, the political authority of the Qing literally crumbled beneath people’s feet. Tianjin may have been unique in having more foreign concessions than any other Chinese city, but the deconstruction and reconstruction of the city elucidates how colonial processes of spatial occupation delegitimized the Qing and established colonial power across China. Patterns of violent interactions led to the systematic destruction of the city followed by new reconfiguration of space. Qing-era symbols of political power were torn down, but no single authority took its place. Colonialism in Tianjin, as in most other places, was multiple yet partial, globally oriented but locally inflected, and always violent. The result was a city of multiple spatial ideologies where Qing-era structures, ruins, and ghosts lingered alongside new Chinese architecture and several foreign-controlled districts. This multiplicity of power structures, represented through space, created a vacuum at the level of the everyday life. Without a single authority, Chinese people in Tianjin created their own understandings of social spaces and social identities for themselves and for their families.

THE SOCIOPOLITICAL IDEOLOGY OF JIA Women and the family had long held a central place in Chinese political ideology and practice. The inner-outer continuum divided the dynastic realm into two interconnected spheres inner (nei) and outer (wai) that

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were mutually reinforcing.3 Stability in the empire relied on order in the home, making the inner sphere an integral part of political and economic life. Living in the inner chambers, women had significant political and economic roles that reached into the outer realm. Women conducted rituals at the family altar that connected the future prosperity of the household to stability in the imperial realm, and women brought political recognition to the family when they were bestowed the honor of chaste widows or virtuous women by the imperial state. 4 Women participated in the daily economy of running the household, making food, and clothing, and they contributed to family income, with poor women working in the fields alongside husbands and sons, and elite women producing embroidery for sale and poetry for publication. Indeed, the wives, daughters, and sisters of male scholar-officials were often the primary household managers and income earners when men left home to study for the imperial civil service examination or filled official posts in distant locations.5 Thus women in late imperial China were productive members of the household and political actors within the greater imperial realm. In late imperial China, inner and outer were not separate spheres; they were interconnected spaces that did not clearly map onto our contemporary understanding of “public” and “private” spaces. Moreover, the household ( jia) in late imperial China was not a separate domestic space, but rather a dynamic political, economic, and social institution—what may be called “public” in modern Euro-American contexts. For instance, as Madeleine Zelin has shown for salt merchants in Sichuan Province, the household was also a business institution with the family lineage acting on par with the Western corporate business model to make it “one of the most advanced business institutions of the late imperial period.”6 The household was also a political institution, with Neo- Confucian ideology designating it the center of political and social stability, a fulcrum point on the cosmological continuum of individual, household, and state that constituted the ideological foundation of the late imperial world. Confucius’s Great Learning, chosen by Zhu Xi as one of the four books of the Neo- Confucian canon, describes the interconnected relationship between individual, household, and state: The ancients who wished clearly to exemplify illustrious virtue throughout the world would first set up good government in their states. Wishing

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to govern well their states, they would first regulate their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they would first cultivate their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they would first seek sincerity in their thoughts. Wishing for sincerity in their thoughts, they would first extend their knowledge. The extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things . . . only when our persons are cultivated are our families regulated; only when families are regulated are states well governed; and only when states are well governed is there peace in the world.7

The late imperial Chinese household was fully integrated into the NeoConfucian political realm, and the success of the state, even world harmony, relied on a well-regulated household. A well-ordered household could bring prosperity to the realm just as a peaceful kingdom would instill harmony at home; likewise, chaos at home could result in the political collapse of the state. 8 Thus the household was both a political unit of, and model for, the state; consequently the inner chambers were not separate from politics. Not only did women and proper familial relations support the political stability of the state, but the moral rules and social relations of the family extended to state policies and political relationships. The relationship between ruler and subject, for example, paralleled the filial bond between parent and child, making the family a miniature version of the state. The household was also a social space. The classical Chinese word jia that designated household embraced a multiplicity of meanings that cannot be translated simply into English. Depending on context, jia could mean house (the physical domestic structure), household (the people who live within it), or family (the social ties that bind the inhabitants together). According to this multifaceted late imperial concept of jia, space, people, and social relations were not separate concepts but part of an organic whole. Thus in late imperial China, Chinese people not only understood the jia as linking the individual to the household and state in mutually reinforcing concentric circles, but they also considered the social relations of the family to be deeply connected to the social spaces where they lived. Designing a house according to correct cosmological practices was just as important as maintaining proper social relations within it, and the

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architecture of the house became central to both the prosperity of the family and to the stability of the empire. Although the Euro-American gender ideology of separate spheres used space as a metaphor to describe the distinct realms of domesticity for women, and economy and politics for men, the late imperial Chinese ideology of jia not only mapped the social and political practices of women and family onto the spaces of the house, but also connected individual bodies to the physical spaces of the house.

ORIENTING TIANJIN IN THE CHINESE EMPIRE The topographical and cosmological geographies of Tianjin connected the city to the capital Beijing and embedded it in the Qing Empire. Tianjin was framed by two waterways: the Grand Canal to the north and the Hai River to the east.9 Whether from our current understanding of urban development or imperial Chinese ideas of spatial planning, it made little sense to build the city on this low-lying marshy plain at the crossing of two waterways. The rivers constricted urban expansion and often flooded over. Moreover, according to the local Tianjin historian Liu Haiyan, the city’s siting violated Chinese spatial principles of feng shui, which held that cities and buildings should be south of mountains and north of rivers.10 But Tianjin owed its history and development to these two waterways, first to the Grand Canal that linked Tianjin to China’s imperial core and later to the Hai River that connected the city to the Pacific and its global markets and capital. Being strategically located a hundred miles southwest of Beijing on the Grand Canal, Tianjin developed in tandem with the imperial capital city. The Grand Canal was an artificial waterway constructed to transport food and luxury goods from the south to the north. Although the Grand Canal dates to the sixth century, Beijing did not become an imperial capital until the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century.11 The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) established Beijing as its northern capital; during the fifteenth century the Yongle emperor supposedly observed Tianjin while crossing the Hai River, declared its strategic military importance, and named it a wei or garrison. Also during the Ming, the city earned its

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contemporary name Tianjin, which means “heaven’s ford,” and the city wall was constructed. During the Qing Empire, Tianjin developed from a military garrison city into an imperial administrative city and regional economic center. When the Manchu Qing established Beijing as their sole capital, the Grand Canal became increasingly important as the main trade artery to transport tribute grain from the south. Tianjin’s trading role expanded accordingly, and in 1731 the Yongzheng emperor bestowed administrative responsibilities on the city, making it the prefectural seat.12 Tianjin’s economic and political histories were also tied to salt. Records of salt production in the area date to the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE). Under the Qing, Tianjin became a center for administering the salt tax and developed not only as a center of the salt trade but also as a trading post for most of northern China.13 Whether by Grand Canal or by sea, most southern trade bound for Beijing passed through Tianjin, and many of the handicraft and luxury goods that shaped the Qing’s bustling early modern economy made their way into Tianjin.14 Merchants from across the empire flocked to the city and established native-place associations or guilds. On the eve of the Opium Wars, more than half of Tianjin households were engaged in commerce while fewer than one-tenth were employed by the state.15 Salt merchants became particularly powerful civic actors. The historian Kwan Man Bun argues that as the Qing’s hold over its empire began to wane in the nineteenth century, it stopped supporting some local social services, and the eight large families (badajia) who dominated the salt trade stepped in to fill the gap.16 But this nascent form of civil society did not seek to upset the imperial order; Tianjin was too deeply embedded in the Qing political economy flowing up the Grand Canal. In the late 1830s, on the eve of the Opium Wars, Tianjin’s population had grown to the point that it surpassed every U.S. city except New York. But cities in late imperial China were more than population centers; they were deliberately designed.17 Tianjin became a city through state-led urban planning that marked Tianjin’s transition from military garrison under the Ming dynasty by building a rectangular wall to frame the city center. Walls were the chief architectural signifier for an imperial Chinese city; in fact, cheng (“wall”) was also the word for “city” in

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classical Chinese. During the Qing dynasty, Tianjin’s walls enclosed imperial administrative buildings such as the prefectural yamen, or government building, in the northwest, the district yamen in the northeast, the salt commissioner’s yamen, also in the northeast, and the garrison headquarters in the center of the city. But these enclosing walls also facilitated movement. Four gates in each of the four cardinal directions—north, south, east, and west— allowed traffic to flow in and out of the city center. The city also extended beyond these inner walls. Many of the city’s merchants and its chamber of commerce set up between the north side of the wall and the Grand Canal. The geographer Yinong Xu argues that walls did not contain the imperial Chinese city; rather, they physically and symbolically marked the official administrative center of the city.18 Tianjin’s urban planning and architecture was in keeping with late imperial Chinese standards. Although the placement of the city to the south of the Grand Canal deviated from fengshui ideals, the city was still designed according to urban planning orthodoxies that aligned the spaces of the built environment with the imperial realm and the greater cosmology. Tianjin was planned on a north-south axis, with the two main thoroughfares running north to south and east to west. The flows of traffic and cosmic energies along these roads were broken up by a drum tower in the city center that also served as a lookout point for the city’s security, and indeed the garrison commander’s office was located next to it. The city’s residences, administrative buildings, and temples were all built using the same kind of modular post-and-beam architecture as a house in the countryside or the emperor’s palace in Beijing.19 Like the city itself, each architectural unit or compound was ideally built on a northsouth axis (according to feng shui principles) and surrounded by a wall. Tianjin compounds followed the northern architectural style known as a siheyuan, in which four wings were built around a courtyard. A compound could comprise a single courtyard unit or multiple units aligned on a north-south axis. Modular building practices meant that an individual compound could be expanded by adding additional courtyard units, but also that the size of individual units might differ proportionally between buildings. In other words, the size of the units of the imperial palace would have been significantly larger than that of a local government office or an

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average residence, even while the proportions and principles remained consistent across structures. Late imperial Tianjin was part of an interconnected spatial world in which power was understood not through height or monumentality but in terms of placement, position, and relation to the imperial state. Tianjin’s city walls and drum tower gained power and structural significance not by surpassing the surrounding structures in height, but through their symbolic connection to the imperial administrative yamen contained within the walls and the imperial authority in Beijing. Like other cities in imperial China, Tianjin did not have a separate civic administration or a municipal hall; instead, since the state administered the city, administrative cities like Tianjin included an imperial yamen within its walls. While the empire framed Tianjin with its walls, the city was also an essential part of the imperial spatial order. According to Mark Edward Lewis, ancient Chinese philosophy mapped out a spatial world in which everything was significant, and everything connected through the concentric units of the human body, household, city, and region.20 Each individual space was responsible for ordering the chaos of the universe through proper ritual and spatial organization. Moreover, spaces were interrelated; the health of individual bodies depended on order in the cosmos, and vice versa. The concentric ordering of the universe was enabled through parallel construction of space. Spaces were fractals of one another, so that an individual household was designed to structure the patterns of the universe.21 Qing-era Tianjin was constructed systematically according to political and social principles of space. As ideas of separate domestic and public spheres were forming in Europe and North America, in China the inner space of the household and the outer circles of city and empire were interconnected and mutually reinforcing. So, while Europeans and Americans built their worlds along binaries such as urban and rural, private and public, the Chinese constructed a universe of concentric circles. This is not to say that Qing-era Tianjin was stagnant, but rather that even when Tianjin’s salt merchants took on many of the civic and philanthropic roles of the state in the late Qing, they never attempted to alter the built and spatial signifiers of Qing political authority in the urban landscape: although changing social and political structures may have challenged Qing authority, the city’s urban plan and architectural design remained uncontested

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and inscribed the Chinese Empire into the local urban landscape, thereby continuing to signal and reinforce Qing power. At the turn of the twentieth century, European, American, and Japanese urban planning deconstructed and reconstructed Tianjin, reorienting the city according to new spatial principles that not only questioned Qing power but also reached deep into individual Chinese bodies, reconfiguring how they connected to the city, the empire, and the world.

REORIENTING TRADE Tianjin’s first foreigners could not see Qing expressions of power in space. These early travelers barely passed through Tianjin and rarely left their boats. Those who did disembark ventured little farther than the shores of the Hai River, never reaching the symmetrically planned rectangular city wall or visiting the opulent interiors of merchants’ grand courtyard houses. But even if foreigners had visited these structures, the Chinese sense of planning and spatial order was invisible to their eyes. Instead, foreigners described Tianjin as they understood urban space in their home countries: they noted city streets crowded with people or the monumental height of the city’s military fortifications. Even against these foreign yardsticks, Tianjin still fared well as a bustling port city with potential for foreign trade and commerce. Some of the earliest foreign accounts of Tianjin came from European embassies to the Qing court. Although such missions often failed to achieve the type of trading or diplomatic negotiations that the European firms or states desired, accounts of the missions succeeded in feeding the European imaginary of China. In the seventeenth century, Johannes Nieuhoff joined the Dutch East India Company on an embassy bound for Beijing from the southern trading port of Canton. Nieuhoff detailed his trip in an illustrated volume that was published in multiple European languages, providing some of the first documented foreign observations of Tianjin.22 Nieuhoff’s words and images entertained with details of the exotic oriental, but also informed readers of economic opportunities that awaited in China. Illustrations from the Dutch boat captured Tianjin’s lively commercial life, with multistoried buildings packed along the riverbank and ships crowding the

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FIGURE 1.1 Johannes Nieuhoff, “An Embassy from the East-India Company,” 1669.

waters (figure 1.1). Were it not for the stylized, upturned corners of the tiled rooftops, the picture might be of any European trading city. Indeed, Nieuhoff used his European sense of urban space to describe the city’s strength and wealth to European readers. Although he seems never to have never left his boat, Nieuhoff did observe watchtowers and military fortifications along the river, and he remarked on the city’s twenty-five-foothigh “strong walls,” even as he misread another structure as a “castle” (figure 1.2).23 But most of all, Nieuhoff was impressed with the amount of commerce he observed in Tianjin, noting that it was on par with Canton as one of the top three seaports in China. Since Canton was the only Chinese post open to foreign trade at the time, Nieuhoff’s flattering descriptions of Tianjin suggest that he had his eye on the city’s economic potential. More than a hundred years later, George Staunton, secretary of Great Britain’s Macartney mission to the Qianlong emperor’s court in 1793, described Tianjin as a lively maritime city crowded with shops, warehouses, and people along the shore. Staunton also noted that many of the buildings along the quays were two stories high, compared to the more common single-story structures he had viewed in other parts of China.24

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FIGURE 1.2 Johannes Nieuhoff, “View of Tianjin,” 1669.

Staunton deduced that the demand for space along Tianjin’s busy commercial docks required building upward even though it went against the nature of Chinese people, who felt awkward “ascending stairs or looking down from heights.”25 Like the Dutch visitors before them, the members of the British embassy found Tianjin to be a lively commercial city. But also like the Dutch, they ventured little beyond the banks of the Hai River. While Staunton claimed their boat had docked “nearly in the center of the city,” its passengers seem only to have disembarked onto a riverside pavilion for an audience with the viceroy.26 From the banks of the Hai River, Staunton failed to see beyond what was visible to his European eye. Trying for a glimpse of residences, Staunton observed “private houses” built in “leaden-blue” brick, which he described as “little more than dead walls in front, the light only coming to them from interior courts.”27 Viewing Tianjin from the river and its banks may have limited the scope of Nieuhoff’s and Staunton’s observations of Tianjin, but their descriptions of what they did see point to different conceptions of space, order, and power. These differences came to a head during Macartney’s eighteenthcentury diplomatic mission to Beijing. Sent by King George III to establish

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more open trade with China, Macartney returned to Britain emptyhanded. While historians typically have characterized this diplomatic failure as a cultural misunderstanding that culminated in war and imperialism, James Hevia’s revisionist account argues that this was not a clash of cultures but an encounter “between two imperial formations, each with universalistic pretentions and complex metaphysical systems to buttress such claims.”28 Just as the British and Chinese represented two differing models of imperial statecraft, they offered two distinct concepts of space and spatial order, each claiming to explain the order of the cosmos. In Qing China, as in Europe at the time, space and power were intertwined, as the empire enhanced its authority by expanding territory and regulating the spaces of empire. While early modern commercial cities like Tianjin were in many ways universal in form, the ways in which cities architecturally and spatially represented power were culturally specific. As spatial units of the Qing Empire, Chinese cities represented the imperial order from the bottom up. Tianjin’s built environment was part of the Chinese Empire’s “metaphysical system,” from the wall that marked imperial authority to the individual walled courtyard households that regulated the everyday in accord with ritual practice. Early European visitors to Tianjin, by contrast, evaluated the city’s built environment against European values. They gauged power by the height of the built environment rather than the placement of symbolic structures, and as a result mistook military fortifications for castles. And although impressed by commercial activities, they were surprised when the private residences of wealthy merchants failed to project status through public façades. Space and power in Tianjin might have looked different than in Europe, but Tianjin nevertheless fared quite well according to European standards of urban vigor, such as commerce and population. In fact, European missions to Tianjin all described the city’s trade and commerce favorably and showed little interest in re-engineering Chinese cities; they were primarily interested in trade. The British Empire waged war with the Qing over “free trade,” and as a result of the First and Second Opium Wars (1839– 1842 and 1857–1860), China’s first treaty ports were established. Tianjin became a treaty port in 1860, after the Second Opium War.

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But free trade came to China at great cost. In addition to opening Tianjin to trade, treaties granted the British, Americans, and French parcels of land along the Hai River to the south of the Chinese city. These foreign concessions, as they came to be known, were leased parcels of land controlled by foreign governments or foreign-led municipal councils. The number of foreign concessions in Tianjin eventually grew to nine—more than any other Chinese city. Shanghai, by contrast, had two concessions. Britain, France, and the United States had the first concessions; Japan and Germany joined after the Sino-Japanese War; and the Qing granted parcels of land to Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary after the Boxer Uprising, with Belgium joining them a year later. The Chinese government not only relinquished legal control over these urban districts but over many of China’s foreign residents who, under negotiated extraterritoriality agreements, lived under the laws of their home countries and not Chinese law. Initially foreign countries were more concerned with reorienting trade than changing the urban landscape. Foreign powers in Tianjin and across China directed their new commercial routes toward global maritime trade, in contrast to earlier routes such as the Silk Road or Grand Canal that channeled trade toward China’s capital city. By the 1920s, there were nearly fifty cities in China opened to trade under foreign treaties, and thirty more established by the Chinese. Early treaty ports were set up in cities along the Pacific coast, such as Shanghai, Ningbo, Tianjin, and Yantai; eventually, they also extended to interior cities, such as Chongqing in Sichuan and Simao in Yunnan. Whether on the coast or in the interior, these new port cities directed trade flows east toward the Pacific Ocean. Foreigners in Tianjin’s concessions set up to the southeast of the Chinese city—a strategic spot along the Hai River that connected Tianjin with the seaport Dagu, thirty-five miles to the east. As the only northern coastal port opened to foreign trade at the time, Tianjin was the second-busiest port in China after Shanghai, and the largest importer of foreign goods of any treaty port in China.29 To facilitate trade further, the foreign empires worked together and with the Qing government, constructing a bund along the river and establishing the Hai River Conservancy Commission in 1897, a multinational organization that managed the bund and maintained the river in optimal condition for shipping. Even as foreign traders

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worked along the Hai River and concessions occupied territory there, the Chinese city, rather than the foreign concessions, remained the center of urban life. In 1866, the French and American settlements were still unoccupied, and most foreign consulates were located outside the concessions.30 The Prussians, Danish, Portuguese, and British were headquartered within the British Concession. The French Consulate, by contrast, was located not in the French Concession but in a former imperial building across the river from the Chinese city, with the Russian Consulate close by; the American, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian consulates were located in the “suburbs” outside the city-center walls. Indeed, while some foreigners lived in the British Concession, most lived in the city suburbs, conducting business inside the walled city. In Tianjin, Chinese cosmologies of space and power initially remained intact. An 1899 Chinese map of Tianjin depicts changes and continuities in the urban landscape (figure 1.3).31 The map depicts two walls: the center wall that frames the yamen and the administrative center, and an outer wall that encircles the suburbs. The outer wall includes openings for railroads and waterways. Railroad tracks enter and exit the upper portion of the outer walls, and two trains move along these tracks toward each other, almost as if they are bound for a collision. The cartographer seems to have more experience illustrating boats, as several small,

FIGURE 1.3 Map of Tianjin. Feng Qihuang, “Tianjin cheng xiang bao jia quan tu,” 1899. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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presumably Chinese boats with single sails inflated in the same direction move along the Grand Canal and lesser waterways. Only one small Chinese sailboat is depicted on the Hai River. To the far right of this boat, close to the edge of the map and the Bohai Sea, which is not depicted on the map, two large Western ships are docked with their sails lowered, next to what is labeled as the British concession on the map. The French Concession lies to the left. The white building in these two sections is depicted as three stories tall, while most Chinese buildings are single stories. There are multistory Chinese towers, but the tallest building depicted on the map appears to be the Wang hai lou French Catholic Church, built across the water from the Chinese city center and drawn on the map as a five-story castle with three spires. The cartographer depicted the Western architectural ideal of height, but late imperial cosmological ideals of placement and power still dominated the map. Despite Western buildings and boats, and the smoke rising from factories in the suburbs and trains passing through the city, the spatial principles depicted on this late Qing map remain consistent with earlier maps of Tianjin and other late imperial Chinese cities.

CONFRONTING FOREIGN EMPIRES Beyond the depictions on this map, Tianjin’s cosmological order was being challenged by multiple foreign empires through a deliberate and violent colonial process. Chinese people would confront foreign occupation and presence in parts of the city. Foreign countries would violently suppress these confrontations and then aggressively alter the urban landscape, destroying Chinese spatial constructions and replacing them with foreign imperial structures. Ideology was both a result of and a catalyst for these confrontations. Colonial violence and the destruction of imperial spatial authority paved the way for the introduction of new ideologies, but ideological confrontations with missionaries were often what sparked such confrontations to begin with. During the nineteenth century, foreign diplomacy not only focused on opening up new trading routes, but it also sought out new communities for religious conversion. Thus, diplomatic treaties ensured the free flow of capital and merchandise, as well as the rights of Christian and Catholic missionaries to proselytize.

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As foreign empires in China intertwined diplomacy with trade and religion, they created a platform for conflict in which foreigners established their trade and religious interests on Chinese soil, and Chinese people pushed back. Foreigners, in turn, argued that they needed to protect their interests even more strongly, pushing them to take measures that made them even more entrenched on Chinese soil. The push and pushback between foreign empires and local Chinese unfolded in Tianjin in tandem with the rest of China, with missionaries as the first targets of the Chinese backlash against foreign intrusion. Missionaries were likely targets since few Chinese came into contact with foreign diplomats or merchants, but missionaries regularly ventured into Chinese communities to convert. Thus, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the missionary presence across China catalyzed antiforeign sentiment among many Chinese people, leading to widespread protests and violence. Whereas the fervor behind the violence was evidence of a growing Chinese resistance to the inequalities of foreign diplomacy and free trade, the foreign reaction further entrenched foreign imperial power on Chinese soil. Colonial resistance was present from Tianjin’s colonial beginnings. Tianjin’s first colonial confrontation began during spring 1870. Rumors began to circulate that a group of nuns, who resided in Tianjin’s French Catholic mission and ran an orphanage, were offering financial compensation for children brought to their doors. As an outbreak of disease led to a growing number of child deaths and the rise of children’s graves in the Catholic cemetery, rumors became allegation that the nuns were cutting out the eyes of Chinese children to make medicine. In early June, the Qing arrested and executed a group of kidnappers for selling children to the nuns, and shortly thereafter an angry mob gathered outside the French Catholic mission looking for answers and revenge. The mission was located not in the French concession, but in a compound across the river from the walled Chinese city that included the mission, the Wang hai lou cathedral, and the French Consulate. As the crowds gathered to protest the actions of the nuns, the atmosphere soon turned more broadly antiforeign, with the rioters eventually killing twenty-one foreigners including ten nuns and two priests, the French Consul, French citizens staying at the consulate, and Russians from the nearby Russian concession.32

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This confrontation, which came to be known as the Tianjin Incident, had two consequences. First, it sparked the bifurcation of the city into Chinese and foreign spaces. The French moved their consulate out of the Chinese city and into the French Concession. Eventually, all foreign consulates followed suit, and foreigners also eventually chose to set up residences and businesses in the concessions. Thus the Tianjin Incident significantly altered the urban landscape by driving foreigners out of the Chinese city and encouraging the further development of the concession. Second, Chinese violent resistance to Catholic imperialism encouraged the articulation of a new colonial capitalist vision that justified rational military force to protect foreign trade and economic interests against irrational Chinese mob violence. Foreign observers of anti-missionary riots described the conflicts as part of a greater backlash against foreigners and foreign diplomatic and trading interests in China. George Thin, a British doctor living in China, warned that the Tianjin Incident demonstrated why foreigners needed to “take measures” to “enable business to be carried on in freedom and safety,” as the “slaughter of foreigners is always possible by a superstitious mob.”33 Thin argued that foreigners had been too easy on China, prompting the growing and ever-angrier Chinese mobs to become emboldened; if the foreigners were to maintain the peace, he claimed, Chinese people needed to fear that the foreigners could strike at any moment. Thin advocated peace through gunboats and argued that the Chinese people should bear the cost of such policing.34 Tianjin’s second major colonial confrontation occurred as a result of the Boxer Uprising, initiated by a group known in Chinese as the Yihetuan, or the Righteous Harmony Society. The Boxers were not local to Tianjin. They originated on the northern coast in Shandong Province, over two hundred miles to the south of Tianjin. According to the historian Joseph Esherick, the Boxers formed through multiple movements that drew from local protest traditions and popular folk cultures.35 Foreigners named them the “Boxers” because they engaged in martial arts fighting techniques; they also practiced spirit procession and believed that they were impervious to bullets. The Boxers initially targeted Western missionaries and Chinese Christians who, under the guise of diplomatic negotiations, were receiving privileged status in the region where the Boxers originated.

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As the movement grew, the target expanded to all foreigners and foreign influences in China. The Boxers came to Tianjin in June  1900, occupying the city as they moved north to Beijing. In anticipation of an attack, the foreign legations in Beijing had dispatched a group of foreign-trained Chinese soldiers to protect Tianjin’s foreign settlements. On the morning of June 10, residents of the foreign settlement awoke to the sounds of gunfire, as the Chinese troops, siding with the Boxers, fired on their European officers and abandoned their posts.36 Without troop protection, the foreigners banded together, forming a unified multinational defense, and families who resided in the center of the settlement opened their doors to friends who lived in houses in the more vulnerable outskirts. While foreigners helped one another, many Chinese servants and staff fled the foreign settlements in fear of a Boxer attack, while still other Chinese people with religious or business connections to foreigners sought protection in the concessions. As the Boxers organized and grew in numbers, Qing officials began to worry. At first, the Qing court had been divided on whether to support or put down the rebels, but once the Boxers reached Beijing, it was forced to take a stand. The empress dowager took the side of the Boxers. The United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy, and Austria-Hungary then formed a military alliance to put down the Boxers; once it defeated the Boxers in August  1900, the Eight Nation Alliance would demand financial and territorial reparations from the Qing. The Boxer Uprising intensified the line between foreigners and Chinese, but as attacks isolated the foreign settlements for over one month, an attitude of every man (or nation) for himself also surfaced. National factions often fought over the quotidian. Food shortages, for example, made milk cows prized possessions, so when an American cow and calf wandered off, the German army claimed them, refusing to return the calf to its rightful American owner.37 Everyday life in the foreign settlements under Boxer attack was filled with conflict. On the one hand, the shelling and violence made foreigners so fearful that the sound of a stray bullet could produce a hysterical mob of foreigners ready to round up and execute foreign-sympathizing or Christian Chinese people hiding in the settlement.38 On the other hand, constant fear helped to normalize the violence.

Unraveling the Chinese Empire 35

In an article in Ladies’ Home Journal, the American journalist Frederick Palmer recounted his stay with Herbert and Lou Hoover during the Boxer Uprising. The future U.S. president was then a young mining engineer, and he and his wife Lou had recently been dispatched to Tianjin.39 Sensing that the cottage was under fire, Palmer looked out the window and saw a shell burst under the feet of Japanese soldiers, “tossing them as shattered and shredded human debris.” Lou Hoover, however, had retreated to the living room, where, clouded in plaster dust, and with cards fallen to the floor, she calmly finished a game of solitaire. These everyday contradictions continued after the Boxers had been defeated and the Qing court fled to Xi’an. While the Eight Nation Alliance claimed victory and order over Chinese lawlessness, foreigners engaged in frenzied looting of Chinese property. Society ladies joined soldiers and missionaries in plundering Chinese public offices and private residences for treasured trophies, and in shopping for looted merchandise in local antique markets. 40 The colonial violence of confrontations between foreigners, Boxers, and local Chinese people erupted into chaos and confusion, which the global media attempted to rationalize and recast into a universalist discourse that justified imperialism. New media technologies catapulted the Boxer Uprising onto a global stage, bringing Chinese spaces into dwellings across the world. Indian newspapers reported on the events in China and stereoscope photographs brought Boxer rebels to life in American living rooms. Images of Boxers flooded public spheres across the globe. (See figures 1.4 and 1.5.) Japanese people followed the success of their soldiers through lithograph and woodblock prints, while Britons watched films of Boxer events. 41 In fact, the Boxer Uprising was the second conflict, after the Spanish-American War, to be caught on cinematic film. 42 From the telegraph to the photograph, new communication technologies brought the fighting home and brought people to the front with a speed and intimacy never before experienced. But global media was not always accurate. Newspapers misreported facts and reprinted stories, and one British newsreel was purportedly filmed in a London suburb far from China. 43 Such inconsistencies were less important than the new consistent discourse of global empire that emerged from the event. The British drew upon their experiences in India, referencing events and insurgencies in the British colony to understand the uprising in China,

FIGURE 1.4 A Japanese regiment attacks Tianjin during the Boxer Uprising. Lithograph by Tanaka Ryozo, published in Tokyo, 1900. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

FIGURE 1.5 Company of Boxers in Tianjin. Published by the Whiting View Company, 1901. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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and after the Boxer defeat, Americans used the uprising to explain antiforeign sentiment in China as well as colonial resistance elsewhere. A Chicago Tribune article on Ethiopians storming foreign legations in 1936, for example, evoked the memory of the Boxers. 44 Thus, in the eyes of foreign observers, imperialist actions in China were equivalent to colonialism elsewhere. The global media needed to construct a consistent set of discursive categories to describe colonialism because everyday life in colonized spaces was messy and complicated. The media struggled to tell stories with clear winners and losers. But while European and North American presses depicted the Boxers as barbarous savages, some papers in India portrayed them as patriots “aroused by the aggression of foreigners.”45 Moreover, after the uprising, newspapers that had previously recounted the heroic battles of foreign troops now exposed the surprising savagery of Russian soldiers who were alleged to have killed innocent Chinese women and bayoneted children. 46 Even if they could not always identify the heroes and the villains, they nonetheless began to sort out the morality of imperial war: subversives against nationalists, barbarians against the civilized. These were the terms of a new order of global empire. The everyday evidence of chaos and contradiction during the Boxer Uprising helped to hasten the disintegration of the Chinese Empire on Chinese soil. Missionaries who had been called to save Chinese souls also argued that foreigners needed to rule over the Chinese with an iron fist. 47 The universal laws of treaties privileged foreigners over Chinese, yet foreigners felt insecure in China. Mutual interests brought foreign empires together against the Chinese, but foreign individuals and foreign concession governments still competed over pieces of the Chinese pie. As the post-Boxer looting foreshadowed, foreign empires in the twentieth century took advantage of the inconsistencies, chaos, and confusion to treat China as a free-for-all.

UNRAVELING THE CHINESE EMPIRE The combination of chaos and order continued in post-Boxer Tianjin. At the same time that foreign empires were plundering temples and government yamens, they were claiming to bring order to the city. They often

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imposed order by restructuring urban spaces along lines that differed drastically from late imperial spatial structures. Late imperial Chinese cities like Tianjin were political projects, inscribed with distinct political symbolism in the built environment. From the north-south orientation of the urban plan and the rectangular wall that surrounded the urban center, to the systematic modular post-and-beam architecture shared by government offices and residences alike, the built environment connected city to empire. Foreign deconstruction and reconstruction of Tianjin’s built environment destroyed and displaced Qing imperial symbolism in Tianjin’s built environment, leading to an unraveling of Chinese imperial authority in the urban landscape. Not only were physical symbols of authority torn down, but the cosmological glue that connected individual people and their households to the city and the empire came unstuck. Thus, severing the city from empire through altering the urban landscape would encourage some Tianjin urbanites to reconsider the position of their city and themselves in the world. Fighting between the Boxers and the Eight Nation Alliance damaged Tianjin more than any other city in northern China. The Boxers had hidden within the walls of Tianjin’s Chinese city, and beginning in July 1900, the Eight Nation Alliance army launched an attack against them. The foreign army blew open the southern gate and proceeded to loot and destroy the Chinese city center. Unable to distinguish Boxers from civilians, foreign soldiers executed Boxers and innocent civilians alike, leaving dead bodies to rot in the streets. 48 While the fighting devastated Tianjin, the post-Boxer foreign occupation had an even greater impact on the city’s physical and symbolic landscape. Once the Boxers were defeated in August and the Qing court had retreated to exile, foreign soldiers and residents engaged in a looting frenzy, and the Eight Nation armies took it upon themselves to control the Chinese walled city. They divided the city into four equal areas held by the British, French, Japanese, and Americans. But unlike in Beijing, where foreigners worked with local Chinese authorities, in Tianjin, the Eight Nation Alliance claimed complete authority over the Chinese city. Soon after defeating the Boxers, they set up the Tianjin Provisional Government (TPG). This foreign occupation government included military and civilian members from each Alliance country. The governing body included a general chancellery, police and

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fire departments, a judicial board, a treasury, a custodian of abandoned property, and departments of sanitation and military affairs. Each department, headed by a foreigner, oversaw a different aspect of life in the Chinese city, although each foreign concession maintained its autonomy, and the foreign residents of Tianjin remained under extraterritorial protection. During this period, Tianjin was fully and multiply colonized. The TPG ruled over the Chinese city and its citizens with impunity. They confiscated Chinese property, both public and private, and they taxed, policed, and tried Chinese citizens. 49 The TPG ruled over Tianjin like this for two years, under claims that they were instituting a new system of rational and enlightened rule. Charles Denby Jr., the son of the American minister to China and the secretary of the TPG council, recalled the achievements of the TPG: There sprang to existence in a few weeks’ time a completely organized, efficient, honest, and enlightened administration, which ruled over Tianjin, restored order, administered justice, collected just taxes, carried out public works of long-felt necessity and performed all the functions of enlightened rulers. Its acts are beyond all praise. From a scene of physical and of moral chaos there sprang into existence a community, Chinese still, but enjoying a benefit of honest government.50

By “chaos,” Denby likely referred both to the Boxer violence and the factional and declining Qing leadership, but chaos was also the result of multiple foreign empires encroaching on Chinese soil. Chaos resulted as foreigners looted post-Boxer cities, and chaos emerged when Eight Nation Alliance member armies sparred with each other. But if foreign empires were often factional and chaotic, they shared an imperialist vision of rational governance that could overshadow the disorder. They could also find commonality and form a united front by drawing a line between foreign and Chinese. The TPG forged a multinational united front around the shared objectives of modern rational governing institutions and practices. With each united step toward “efficient” and “enlightened” practices, from instilling order and justice to administering taxes and public works, they displaced a Chinese world order, thus unraveling Qing imperial authority over Chinese soil and citizens.

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The TPG’s first order of business was “to restore order and administer justice” by arresting and executing Boxer rebels. Since foreign soldiers could not tell the difference between a Boxer and a Chinese civilian, the Chinese residents of the old Chinese city and its surrounding areas had to apply to the foreign army commander in charge of their district for a permit, which the police department standardized and issued for a fee. While the TPG’s original agreement with the Qing had been to bring order within the city walls, the TPG quickly expanded their zone of “protection” outside the wall, claiming that the Chinese residents had requested it.51 Permits gave Chinese residents permission to move freely in their city, and granted them “protection” under the foreign armies. Permits also regulated the Chinese population, while simultaneously serving as a source of TPG revenue. Treating Chinese residents of Tianjin as aliens in their own cities subject to foreign regulation, these permits acted as a first step in decentering Qing authority. In “collecting just taxes,” the TPG took over a role formerly held by the Qing imperial government, but they also expanded beyond Qing authority to collect additional revenues from business licenses, permits, and fines. Though these new fees, fines, and licenses helped to finance the foreign government, they were also a lever for regulatory and political control. For instance, the TPG was not averse to supporting the darker side of public entertainment as long as they could regulate and profit from it. At a time when recreational use of opium was illegal in Alliance countries such as Great Britain, the TPG initially outlawed opium dens. Later, however, they allowed opium vendors to reopen by applying to the TPG for a license.52 The TPG also established three brothels within the city, one for each army of Japan, the United States, and Great Britain, along with three outside the city for the Russian army, and insisted that each brothel be checked routinely for sanitary conditions.53 Eventually, even the most benign forms of leisure and entertainment, such as restaurants, were required to purchase a license from the TPG.54 Some TPG departments financed their own projects through permits and fines. The sanitation department, for example, was the only department allowed to reach into the foreign concessions for revenue. With permission from the TPG, the sanitation department began ticketing any Chinese person littering on any Tianjin street, except in the Italian

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Concession.55 In regulating sanitation through fines, the department funded such sanitation projects as building garbage incinerators and establishing a hospital for prisoners.56 Sanitation and hygiene emerged alongside policing and military security as the TPG’s most important governing principles. As Ruth Rogaski has argued, hygiene became central to modern urban development in Tianjin.57 Calls to implement sanitary conditions rang out the moment the TPG took over a city where dead bodies littered the streets. After the initial cleanup, sanitation and hygiene instilled order on everyday urban life, with the TPG regulating the sale of livestock and meat and overseeing public health efforts to control disease. Finally, hygiene was invoked to redesign the city for the future, even and especially if Chinese imperial urban design seemed in conflict with the ideals of a modern hygienic built environment. Public works projects, undertaken in the name of sanitation and policing, altered the urban landscape in a way that challenged the Qing ideological vision of ordering the city, the empire, and the world. TPG members most often cited hygiene and control as justification for plans that modified the urban landscape. To bring the city under control, the TPG rebuilt buildings destroyed during the fighting and constructed new bridges. To make the city hygienic, they instituted a water transport system.58 Narrow streets that were deemed unhygienic or too difficult to police were widened, often forcing Chinese residents to relocate.59 Whether deliberate or not, the ways the TPG altered or occupied Chinese spaces in the city often undermined Qing symbolic authority in the built environment. An abandoned temple, for example, was turned into a resting place for foreign soldiers, and Tianjin’s most prominent temple, Tianhou gong, was given to the English Methodist Episcopal Mission for use as a church.60 The greatest challenge to Qing authority came on November  26, 1900, when the TPG decided to tear down Tianjin’s city wall, which had shielded the Boxers from the Eight Nation Alliance. According to the meeting minutes from that day, TPG members discussed how tearing down the wall would make the Chinese city easier for foreign militaries to control.61 Other members noted that the wall was not hygienic. No one discussed the wall’s symbolic importance, how it marked Tianjin as

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an imperial administrative city and served to reinforce the sense of Qing authority. But the silences in the minutes do not necessarily mean that TPG members were oblivious to the political and symbolic meaning of the wall. Writing about the decision only a few years later, Hosea Ballou Morse, a China hand with many years of experience working for the Chinese Customs Service, suggested that while military strategy and hygienic modern planning were two considerations in tearing down the wall, the primary reason was the symbolic meaning of the wall. According to Morse, “walls are the distinguishing badge of an administrative city, and to deprive Tientsin [Tianjin] of this mark of honour would inflict on it a signal punishment for its misdeeds.”62 Morse’s comments also suggest that whereas Tianjin’s first foreign observers did not understand the political symbolism of Qing architecture, by the 1900s many did. Walls were more than simply “distinguishing badges” of the Chinese Empire; they also linked administrative cities like Tianjin to the capital city Beijing and to the world through an interconnected spatial cosmology. Walls joined the space of the city to the space of the household and the individual, creating a nested set of spheres, organized and anchored around a center. In late imperial Tianjin, that center was Beijing; Tianjin’s

FIGURE 1.6 Tianjin’s drum tower after the wall was torn down. Published by Griffith & Griffith, 1902. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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wall extended stability to the imperial realm, bringing order to the space of the city by controlling the movement of people and regulating energy flows. Thus, destroying Tianjin’s wall not only disrupted the spatial organization of the city but also attacked the order of the empire and the Chinese world. (See figure 1.6.) Qing authority did not rest in Tianjin alone, and the unraveling of empire in Tianjin’s built environment paralleled destruction to the built environment elsewhere in China. Nowhere was this more profound than in Beijing, the spatial center of China itself, which had also been devastated by Boxer violence. Yinong Xu notes that although cities were designed with many of the same spatial and cosmological features of the capital, they were not actually capital cities in miniature.63 An administrative city like Tianjin lacked any ritual spaces of its own to connect the city directly to the cosmos, so the connection to the cosmos flowed instead through Beijing. The capital city was the political and ritual center of the empire, and during the Qing dynasty, Beijing’s Temple of Heaven became the most important site of imperial sacrifice.64 Yet in post-Boxer Beijing, this most sacred site, the cosmological center of the Chinese Empire and world, became home to the 16th  Bengal Lancers, a British regiment of Sikh soldiers. While occupying the sacred site, British officers allegedly stole two golden bells from the temple as trophies, later melting one of them down to divide among themselves, while the troop’s colonel dismantled a roof of gold-plated tiles and ordered soldiers to hide them in a warehouse across town.65 From Tianjin’s wall to the Temple of Heaven, foreign empires were dismantling the symbols of Chinese imperial authority piece by piece.

DECENTERING THE CHINESE CITY On August  15, 1902, after two years of governing Tianjin’s Chinese city, the TPG returned political control of the city to China. This return came with conditions. The city could never reconstruct the torn-down wall, and the city had to establish a health and sanitation board based on the TPG’s model.66 Yuan Shikai, then vice regent of Zhili and later president of the post- Qing Republic, took control of the city. Yuan went beyond TPG

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recommendations to institute a series of dramatic structural and administrative changes. He retained several members of the TPG as advisers, including TPG head Charles Denby  Jr., kept on as chief foreign adviser, and C.  D. Tenney, a former missionary, president of Tianjin University, and Chinese secretary of the TPG, kept on as director of education.67 One of Yuan’s first steps was to retrain former Chinese soldiers as police, establishing China’s first police academy.68 He likewise established schools, which by 1907 included 121 schools for girls within the mostly male school system.69 Yuan even organized China’s first Western-style election for Tianjin’s county council in August  1907.70 Under Yuan Shikai, Tianjin seemed to be leading the way as one of China’s most “progressive” and “enlightened” cities.71 Each step that Yuan took to reform Tianjin was a step away from the spatial and political order of the imperial government. One of Yuan’s first moves after regaining control over Tianjin was to abandon the former imperial-era city. With the wall no longer designating the administrative center, Yuan relocated the political center of the city to the northeast across the Hai River, naming the new district Xin hebei qu, or “new north river district.” In his quest to turn Tianjin into a modern urban city, Yuan turned his back on Chinese imperial ideas of urban design and embraced foreign principles of urban planning as progressive and superior. Yuan’s new administrative center included buildings of both Chinese and foreign architectural styles, constructed on a grid of streets off a broad boulevard, today’s Zhongshan lu. Yuan’s government offices were built in only six months and were joined by such symbols of modernity as a train station, a public park, an exhibition hall, and several schools. The expansion and growth of foreign concessions south along the Hai River served to de-center the Chinese city even further. Eight Nation Alliance members that did not already hold territory in Tianjin gained concessions after the Boxer Uprising: in 1900 and 1901, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Russia joined France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States as concession holders in Tianjin. Belgium joined them in 1902 to make a total of nine foreign concessions. In addition to allowing new concessions, the Qing ceded extra territory to France and Britain to expand their concessions. These areas, which were developed to be largely residential, came to be known as the extramural concessions because they

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extended beyond the outer city walls that had also been demolished. Thus, in post-Boxer Tianjin, as Chinese imperial authority was decentered, the expansion of foreign concessions made the city a place of multiple centers. Beijing’s political status was ultimately displaced after the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, and the new Republic moved its capital south to Nanjing in 1927. This fall of Beijing also signaled the rise of Tianjin. Since Beijing was no longer the terminus of imperial trading routes, the flow of money into the former imperial capital city slowed while existing investment and industry moved to cities on the coast, like Tianjin, where taxes and transport made it more cost-effective to manufacture goods close to the port. Moreover, the city of Tianjin itself became a site for investment. As Madeleine Yue Dong notes in her history of Republican-era Beijing, former imperial government officials with capital to invest looked to Tianjin’s new, growing real estate market rather than the old capital city.72

CONCLUSION With nine foreign concessions and a Chinese-governed municipality, early twentieth-century Tianjin was a city with multiple centers, producing conflicts at the same time it encouraged coordination. Multiplicity brought chaos when foreign empires competed with one another for pieces of China, and as Chinese people pushed against foreign incursions. But the universal values and promises of global empire also claimed to offer resolutions for these conflicts. Thus, as foreign empires created chaos, the ideologies of global empire promised security and prosperity, and with Qing imperial authority crumbling beneath their feet, Chinese intellectuals increasingly turned toward these new global regimes of knowledge. Global empire proposed a different mode of space than the Chinese imperial world order. Looking at the long history of Chinese imperial capital cities, Nancy Steinhardt argues that the imperial authorities gained power in the present by reclaiming the past.73 New capital cities were constructed on top of sites of old capitals, claiming the site’s authority. And architectural plans connected new buildings to the past by using a common architectural vernacular: the uniform design of city walls, four-sided

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enclosures, and a north-south orientation. Like space, political time was seen as cyclical, with new governments gaining power by drawing on the past. These political building ideals had influenced China for centuries, and they also dominated the regional models for capital cities in northeast Asia. Thus, when Europeans and North Americans disrupted Chinese spatial practices by introducing new kinds of urban planning, they ruptured the spatial and temporal ordering of the region. Global empire proposed a radically different sense of space and time: European and North American cities projected power through height, not place, while urban order was instituted through new rational planning, not by maintaining the primordial order of things. In imperial China, chaos could only be resolved by a cyclical return to the ancients, while global empire resolved chaos through teleological change and progress. These cyclical and dialectical modes of time and space were incompatible, yet they coexisted, producing conflicts and disjuncture that came to define the modern experience of twentieth-century urban China. In Tianjin, custom-built Chinese courtyard houses sat next to semi-attached townhouses built on spec. Chinese civil servants kept concubines, while nationalist officials heralded new-style nuclear families, and schoolgirls with bobbed hair walked alongside old women with bound feet. Even Yuan Shikai, the Tianjin viceroy on whom foreigners had bestowed the highest praises for his embrace of modern urban planning, democracy, and educational reform, tried to reinstate the Chinese Empire with himself as emperor in 1915. But Yuan proved to be an aberration. Political leaders in twentiethcentury China increasingly spoke the language of global empire, calling upon new knowledge gleaned from science to construct new categories of society and citizen as they built a modern Chinese nation. Though not always in accordance, these political voices offered a distinct rupture from the ideologies and institutions of the Chinese Empire. By contrast, life on the ground in Tianjin was never that clear. Rather than embrace a new order without question, Tianjin urbanites fashioned their own worlds by juxtaposing and combining old and new. Dwelling in the world, they constructed social spaces and identities as the city and country they had once experienced unraveled beneath their feet.

2 Family in Ideology and Practice

I

n late imperial China, the term jia could mean family, house, or household depending on the context. This term expressed the interconnectedness of social relations and social spaces, or bodies and the built environment. Francesca Bray describes the house in late imperial China as a “gynotechnic,” a technology that produces ideas about women and gender and articulates social values into bodily practices and material formations.1 Bray argues that gynotechnics are historically and culturally constructed: gendered and social concepts, such as domesticity, femininity, or even family, held a particular meaning in late imperial China that differs from our own understandings today. Moreover, Bray contends that studying gynotechnics in late imperial China illuminates “the nature of knowledge and action in a society that rooted intellectual and moral activity in the physical body and in its material environment.”2 In other words, moral and political values were articulated through objects and spaces. What happened to this moral-material world when the built environment was destroyed and replaced by new structures? Did ideology outlast its materiality, or did new ideas accompany new kinds of spaces? Bray’s description of the relationship between text and house in late imperial China helps to answer these questions. She explains that late imperial China

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was unique in the role that written texts played in standardizing spatial and household practices. Texts and ideas were widely disseminated to the extent that even illiterate people understood shared principles and values, and even the house itself became a text.3 Thus, we can only imagine how disorienting spatial destruction and reconstruction in Tianjin must have been for the city’s residents. 4 In such a state of uncertainty, what ideas or alternative texts might Tianjin residents have turned to for new answers? The multiple colonization of Tianjin and China introduced numerous ideas and texts that addressed issues surrounding the household. Texts included Japanese treatises on female education, translations of English political theory, and social surveys conducted by scholars from the United States. These texts introduced a new vocabulary, including the new twocharacter term jiating, which replaced jia in vernacular Chinese. Jiating contained the single-character jia, and like jia meant different things depending on the context. Jiating could mean the social relations of the family, the physical space of the house, or the new concept of home. In the popular lexicon and in the minds of Chinese people, jiating meant all three things, but for intellectuals and ideologues, the political utility of the term focused on family relations. If Neo- Confucian ideology about jia sought to manifest itself in the materiality of the house, the new ideas about jiating found root in the demography and social relations of the family. In other words, political and moral values migrated from the house to the family. But even as family superseded the spatial material form of the house and the central ideological construct of the household, there was no single shared concept of family. Social scientists working in China, for example, could not even agree on who to include when measuring the family demographically. Still, what these multiple ideas of family all had in common was a connection to the world. Whether to build a stronger Chinese nationstate or to develop Chinese society, the ultimate goal was to improve China’s standing in the world. Dwelling in the world thus transformed the Chinese family into a yardstick for universal progressive change.

INTRODUCING JIATING AS HOME The term jiating first entered late Qing discourse through female education. Ironically the term for family, house, and home gained traction at a

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time when the “woman question” was displacing the household as the central site for expressing social values in political discourse. Instead of space, Chinese male intellectuals focused on female bodies as problematic, and found their habits troubling. The political reformist Kang Youwei appealed to the Guangxu emperor to ban footbinding, which he felt weakened the Chinese race and belittled China in the eyes of foreigners, making China less competitive on the global stage of nation-states.5 In an 1897 essay on women’s education, Kang’s disciple, the journalist and reformer Liang Qichao, described Chinese women in terms of economic theory, labeling them as “parasites” who lived off the labor of their fathers and husbands, and arguing that the only way to make women productive was to educate them.6 Reformers like Kang and Liang not only debated whether China should have a constitutional monarchy or whether Chinese people were ready to embrace democracy, but they also called to transform female bodies through anti-footbinding campaigns and implored women to become more productive members of society through female education. Chinese reformers searched globally for new models of female education and found answers in Japan. Female schools and schooling had a long history in Japan that dated to the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). Schools were established for girls across elite social strata, and textbooks espousing Neo- Confucian ideology were published to facilitate their education.7 In 1872, the Meiji government proposed a plan for a national school system, and the government established schools for women and girls that built on the earlier foundation of female education. At first glance, the ideological goals of the new female curriculum to transform girls into good wives and wise mothers (ryōsai kenbo in Japanese, liangqi xianmu in Chinese) also seemed to bear a striking resemblance to the Neo- Confucian gender ideology of the past, but as Koyama Shizuko argues, Japanese “good wife wise mother” ideology actually was invented in the late nineteenth century, and was inspired by European ideas about women and gender.8 The good wife wise mother ideology called upon Japanese women and girls not only to educate themselves so that they could better manage and care for the families of the nation, but as good wives and wise mothers, they were also to think of the nation as their extended family and consider the restored monarchy as the nation’s parents.9 Thus, Meiji-era education and political reforms reinvented the Neo- Confucian relationship between household and society for the modern nation-state.

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The Japanese female educator Shimoda Utako became a bridge between China and global ideals for female education. Shimoda translated foreign ideas first for Japanese students. She visited Great Britain in the 1890s, where she observed Anglo domestic practices at home and in the field of women’s education; she even commanded an audience with Queen Victoria.10 Upon returning to Japan, she established the Practical Women’s School (Jissen joshi gakuen) in Tokyo in 1899 with the belief that women, who possessed natural virtues of “strength, purity, gentleness, and grace,” were “capable of rectifying social injustices and bringing more happiness into the world” if properly educated.11 Shimoda next made this globalized female education accessible to Chinese women, opening her school to them in 1901, establishing a separate classroom for them in 1905, and creating a “Chinese department” in 1908. By 1914, there were more than two hundred Chinese women in Shimoda’s school.12 Her ideas about female education earned the respect of Chinese educational and political leaders, conservatives and liberals alike, and her curriculum became the basis for similar schools in China.13 Shimoda’s influence in promoting new kinds of female knowledge in Japan and China extended outside the classroom. She published multiple books on domestic science in Japan, and helped spread her ideas to China by establishing a publishing house in Shanghai, called the Society for Renewal (Zuoxin she), with one of her former students.14 Shimoda’s treatises on domestic science became foundational texts in Chinese female education, with their influence reaching beyond Shanghai to cities like Tianjin.15 Her ideas also circulated widely among literate Chinese men and women, published in such popular Chinese journals such as The Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi). Shimoda’s importance to female education and the female press in China has led Joan Judge to argue that Shimoda was the most influential Japanese expert on female education in early twentieth-century China, responsible for translating most of the foreign concepts of home economics into Chinese.16 Shimoda likely introduced the concept of “home” into Chinese discourse, and possibly the term jiating.17 The idea of “home” that Shimoda put forth hinged on the new Japanese term, katei ( jiating in Chinese). According to the Japan historian Jordan Sand, the neologism katei came to stand in for the English word “home” at the turn of the century in Japan,

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and it was much more readily adopted into the Japanese vernacular than earlier attempts by Protestant social reformers, who in the 1880s began to introduce the home through the transliterated word homu (home).18 As a word and concept, katei took off in the popular press. According to Sand, the first Japanese journal to use the term in its title was Katei zasshi (Home magazine) in 1892; by the turn of the century, there were five magazines with katei in the title.19 In her Japanese-published book Katei, Shimoda put forth a vision of katei as a political space and as the center of everyday life.20 Shimoda’s text was ideological yet practical, part political treatise and part how-to. She included chapters on the ideological meaning of katei, the role of women in katei, women’s social roles, and morality, hygiene, and home economics. The Japanese concept of katei put forth by Shimoda and others was much like the Neo- Confucian Chinese concept of jia, a political space filled with ideas, people, social relations, and practices, but it was also a newly globalized space, the site of new kinds of practical, modern female knowledge that referenced global discourses of science, economics, and hygiene. The Japanese discourse of katei thereby transformed the household into a new rational, modern, global-facing place that would become the cornerstone of national reform. Ultimately the Japanese political concept of katei did not take off in twentieth-century China.21 The Republic of China followed a different political trajectory from Meiji Japan. In Japan, the household registration law of 1871 reinvented the Neo- Confucian household, ie in Japanese or jia in Chinese, as a modern political unit for social control by requiring all households to register with local government and to organize under the control of a male household head.22 Chinese political reformers and intellectual elites, by contrast, focused on the male individual as a political unit and sought to eradicate old family structures.23 The family problem joined the women problem in discussions over how best to reform Chinese society, and the traditional Chinese family was increasingly blamed for China’s inability to develop into a democracy. This ideological divergence between Japanese and Chinese political understandings of the household was reflected in differences in language. In Chinese, jiating came to stand for the modern family, house, and home. In Japanese, by contrast, katei only referred to house and home. Family in Japanese was referred to as

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kazoku, a term which when read in Chinese as jiazu had negative connotations as an extended household or clan. Aside from a handful of Chinese intellectuals who had been influenced by Japanese social science scholarship, Chinese people rarely used the Chinese jiazu to refer to family.24 Although the Chinese term jiating bore some similarities to its predecessor jia and to new Japanese ideas about the home, the early twentieth-century Chinese jiating as home was no longer a socio-political institution. Shimoda Utako’s political concept of home may not have taken root in China, but the idea of home as both a site of personal comfort and as the female-managed center of rational, scientific, modern living took off during the Republican era. Discussions of jiating as home were widely disseminated in women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi, 1915–1931), and jiating was even included in the title of Chinese women’s magazines, such as Tianjin’s 1923 Kuaile jiating (happy home). Disconnected from political discourse, home as described in women’s magazines became a site of multiple possibilities. Home could be imagined as the political cornerstone of national reform, as a site of cosmopolitan self-fashioning, or as an affective place of apolitical comfort.

TRANSLATING SOCIETY As home was disconnected from political ideology and feminized, jiating as family became integrated into political ideology through the masculine knowledge of social science. Social science was viewed as a new Western knowledge system that offered universally attainable prescriptions and promised competitive success on the global stage of nationstates. Prescriptive ideologies began with the concept of society, which was new to Chinese intellectual thought, having been introduced to China in the nineteenth century through translations. The Chinese translator Yan Fu led the way in translating theoretical texts that addressed social and political issues, such as Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Yan Fu was also responsible for introducing Darwin’s theory of evolution to China.25

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Social Darwinism encouraged Chinese reformers to envision China’s place on the global stage of modern nation-states, as well as to seek prescriptions for evolutionary social change in the “universal” modern values of social science. As the Chinese intellectual historian Wang Hui notes, early Chinese social scientists such as Yan Fu saw science not as a methodology for research but as a set of universal principles that explained the “order of the world.”26 Moreover, Yan Fu did not simply render Western theory into Chinese. He also offered additional commentaries to guide new readers of social science through tangible solutions for building and reforming a new Chinese social order that broke from the Confucian sages and the foundations of imperial political ideology, promoting the strength and struggle of the group as the motivator of progress.27 In other words, the scientific “truth” of Darwin’s theory of evolution imbued Yan Fu with the authority to denounce Confucianism as a social and political ideology. Thus, even more than a new academic discourse, the social sciences became a political ideology—a way to govern and change society rather than simply a means to explain or measure it.28 Whereas Chinese political ideology had once directed officials, scholars, and emperors to the past for answers on how to govern and bring about order and stability, social science pointed intellectuals and reformers toward new global flows of modern scientific knowledge. At first, many Chinese intellectuals turned to Japan for this knowledge. Japanese translations of Western theoretical texts could be translated easily into Chinese. But perhaps more importantly, Chinese intellectuals increasingly shifted their gaze toward Japan after Japan rose as a foreign empire, and especially after China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894– 1895). Between 1896 and 1911, almost one thousand books were translated from Japanese to Chinese, with just under half on social science. 29 Japan and China’s shared use of Chinese characters facilitated Chinese scholars’ translation of foreign vocabulary from Japanese.30 When Japanese scholars translated and described foreign texts and foreign things at the turn of the twentieth century, they used Chinese characters to convey the meaning of foreign words, which could be translated readily into Chinese through a process that the literary scholar Lydia Liu has termed “translingual practice.” Liu notes that when Chinese intellectuals

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borrowed two-character words from Japanese, they did not translate them concept-for-concept, but instead constructed a new meaning as words were reinterpreted in a Chinese context.31 These two-character words described new kinds of political knowledge, such as nation or race (minzoku in Japanese, minzu in Chinese), and modern objects like telephone (denwa in Japanese, dianhua in Chinese). Not all translators and writers adopted Japanese neologisms. Yan Fu, for example, developed his own term for “social sciences”: qunxue, or study of the group. But in the end, most translations used the Japanese two-character term shakai (shehui in Chinese), to describe society or social, and the term is still used in modern Chinese today. As Chinese people translated society into shehui, they were also defining how this new term would take shape on Chinese soil. According to Michael Tsin, when the cosmological glue that held imperial China together dissolved from the modern landscape, government authority was replaced by a “constructed social body”—the people. Tsin contends that the new notion of society became the basis for unity in modern China, and intellectuals sought to define, construct, and regulate society.32 But Chinese society was not simply defined vis-à-vis the state; intellectuals and reformers also looked at Chinese society as a player on an international stage of evolutionary progress. After touring the United States in 1903, Liang Qichao called upon Chinese society to reform its social customs and take its place among civilized nation states.33 Thus, new Chinese concepts of shehui also defined China’s position on a global stage. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals were still divided over what kind of socio-political ideology would best shape a new Chinese social body. While intellectuals like Yan Fu saw an unbridgeable gap between Western and Chinese knowledge, and others turned to Japan for Western knowledge, others still advocated for maintaining China’s ideological heritage.34 Kang Youwei interpreted Darwinian progress in a Confucian cultural context, advocating to maintain China’s Confucian ideological core while adopting Western institutions and technology. Thus, the intellectual landscape was still wide open, and a Western social scientific vision of society did not preclude Confucian ideas of social order. But soon this changed, as Chinese intellectuals increasingly turned away

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from Confucianism to craft a new nationalist social ideology in line with the universalist principles of global social science.

FROM FAMILY MYTH TO SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC FACT In Republican-era China, political ideologies combined with new Western scientific principles about society, as well as with Chinese literary and intellectual ideals, to forge a political ideology and social scientific discourse of family reform. With the family pushed to the fore, the Chinese woman was no longer the sole marker of China’s backwardness. Looking at changing family ideology from the May Fourth Movement (1919) and beyond, the historian Susan Glosser describes a small family or xiao jiating ideology, which called upon Chinese people to form small nuclear families instead of large extended families. Glosser sees this ideology as building on the political heritage of late imperial China, in which household and state formed an interconnected continuum. By disconnecting social relations from social spaces, however, this new ideology significantly diverged in substance from earlier ideas.35 Moreover, after the single Chinese imperial political order was displaced by multiple imperialisms, social science, rather than Confucian ideology, became the glue that held together the new social system. This new social scientific ideological system was forged through a process of colonial coproduction, in which Chinese intellectuals, foreign missionaries, and social scientists of both foreign and Chinese backgrounds transformed the myth of the backward extended Chinese family into a social scientific fact. The process of colonial coproduction is revealed through a close analysis of a 1931 article written by the American economist Jane Newell. Returning from three years at Beijing’s Yanjing University, Newell described the Chinese family in the U.S. journal Social Forces: It is difficult for a Westerner to understand the nature of the old-time Chinese family. We have no word that exactly translates their chia [sic], just as they have no word that has much of the connotation of our word

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home. . . . If we look at the formality of family life, its elaborate etiquette and ceremony, its potential intrigue and training in diplomacy, it seems more like the household of a king’s court than the homey thing we call our family.36

Living in Beijing in the 1920s, Newell could have found numerous Chinese women’s magazines that included illustrations of smiling nuclear families and photographs of comfortably decorated homey rooms. Working at Yanjing University, she could have visited the home economics department, pioneered by the American home economist Ava Milam.37 In fact, Newell was familiar with Milam’s work and cited her study of Chinese families, arguing that Milam’s data proved that Chinese family size was decreasing. In actuality, the average family size of nine that Milam reported was on the larger side of Chinese families at the time, but in Newell’s mind, “a family of thirty persons would not be considered a really large sized family” among China’s “conservative well-to-do groups or in isolated rural districts.”38 In addition to its unwieldy size, the Chinese family, according to Newell, was also anti-individual and oppressive to women, which led her to conclude that no matter how much Chinese society and laws changed, the modern family would not evolve as long as the Chinese traditional mindset persisted.39 Newell’s description of the traditional Chinese family was not based in data or fieldwork. Her evidence seems to have come from conversations with Chinese students, secondary sources, and her own assumptions. Indeed, she was reputed at Yanjing to be more of a gossip than a researcher. 40 But Newell was not only a trained social scientist; she was also an economist who believed in the authority of science. After earning a PhD at the University of Wisconsin and assuming a position in the newly formed economics department of her alma mater Wellesley College, she stated that she planned “to teach women that economics is not a sentiment but a science, to correct their loose, vague conceptions and to give them judicial comprehension and distinctly philosophical training.”41 Armed with social theory however, Newell did not need data to present her findings on the Chinese family. The Chinese family looked a certain way because Western social theory proposed that it should. Such theories claimed that families evolved from large to small, that smaller families

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supported individual autonomy, and that northwest European and North American families had evolved into this form. Today demographers recognize that this developmental theory of family transformation was based less in actual “science” and more in a “sentiment” that placed northwest Europe at the pinnacle of evolutionary change and the height of historical progress. In his critique of developmental idealism in the history of family studies and demography, the sociologist Arland Thornton argues that the evolution of the small, individual-centered nuclear family in northwest Europe was a myth all along; demographic research beginning in the 1970s, he says, has increasingly concluded that the extended family never existed in northwest Europe to begin with. 42 Instead, small families were the “tradition” in a society that also historically favored individualism and in which institutions held more sway than families. In other words, the institutions, structures, and values that social scientists of Newell’s generation held up as indicative of modern development were actually traditional cultural and social values in northwest Europe. Thornton argues that the evolutionary model of family change was fabricated through a process he calls “reading history sideways” in which European scholars as early as the eighteenth century looked to other societies that they deemed to be less civilized or developed and assumed that their contemporary social structures must resemble northwest Europe’s past. Northwest Europe’s developmental paradigm had multiple consequences for other places: on one hand, it cast development as universally attainable and desirable and offered other places a plan to achieve it, but on the other hand, the process of reading history sideways ensured a teleology of development in which the “evolved” needed to name a “backward other” in order to exist. Once the developmental order of nationstates was established, it became nearly impossible for those “backward” places to overcome it. A second legacy is that the northwest European family form became a universal ideal, with the nuclear family becoming both a marker of and a means to modernity. Thus, according to Thornton, the developmental paradigm has made it seem that the driving force behind global family change is the nuclear family and the social values it claims to represent—such as individualism, equality, and freedom—rather than actual social conditions on the ground. 43 But just as we cannot

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assume that social change was natural, we also cannot take for granted that Chinese people found certain social forms or values desirable. While nationalists and social science researchers heralded the small family as the cornerstone of social and national reform, as we will later see in this chapter, Chinese people imagined family structures in their own ways. Likewise, Europeans did not simply read history sideways; they often read it sideways and together with local intellectuals and informants through a process of colonial coproduction. Thus, in China, developmental idealism was not simply a product of northwest Europe’s attempts to understand its present as a teleological product of an invented past. Chinese intellectuals, reformers, and social researchers all played an active role producing the myth of the traditional Chinese family, as they tried to envision China’s past and future on an uneven global stage conditioned by the material violence and theoretical authority of imperialism. Moreover, this global stage included new tools and spaces to facilitate this coproduction of knowledge. Boxer Indemnity scholarships carried Chinese students to academic institutions in the United States. New universities in China brought youth together to experience and question social life in new ways. 44 Missionaries and mission institutions transformed the job of saving Chinese souls into the mission to save Chinese society, and new American foundations funded this and other social research. 45 When Newell sought evidence for her argument, she turned not to quantitative data on family size but to qualitative descriptions of family life penned by Chinese intellectuals. Quoting from the influential journal New Youth (Xin qingnian, 1915–1926) Newell introduced a “discouraged youth” who describes Chinese parents as “despotic” in their use of “old customs and ancient traditions [to] bind slavery on the people.”46 New Youth, and the May Fourth or New Culture Movement that inspired it, were the most influential Chinese intellectual forces in shaping the myth of the traditional Chinese family. As the historian Vera Schwarcz has noted, May Fourth youths were not the first activists to criticize the Chinese family system, and indeed many of their ideas echoed those put forth ten to twenty years earlier by Social Darwinist reformers such as Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao. 47 But it was the New Culture Movement’s call to abandon traditional Confucian family values in favor of individualism and freedom that rang loudest and most clearly, reverberating across

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oceans and continents, influencing not only nationalistic and political ideology but also academic interpretations of the Chinese family system in China and abroad. The idea of family advocated in May Fourth publications such as the New Youth confirmed the northwest European developmental model, anchoring China in the traditional past. In an article titled “The Way of Confucius and Modern Life,” the New Youth editor Chen Duxiu argued that China’s imperial legacy had prevented Chinese people from becoming modern citizens, and he made the Confucian household—the former cornerstone of social and moral order—the focus of his critique. 48 Chen criticized filial piety and family relations as the core of Confucianism’s assault against individualism. As Chen described it, the feudal hierarchical family system suppressed women and young people by requiring obedience to the point of absurdity—asking them to forgo personal property or remain obedient to a father or husband even long after the patriarch’s death. Chen noted that while modern constitutional states allowed people to make individual decisions, in a Confucian society, bound as it was by filial piety and obedience, patriarchal family relations hindered individual decision-making. Chen wondered “how people could form their own political parties and make their own choices” under such a family system. 49 Thus, aligning himself with the developmental ideals of social theory in which political parties and institutions, not families, led societies and fostered individualism, Chen broke from late imperial Chinese political ideology in which the family, house, and household were the center of political and social stability. Chen and his fellow contributors to New Youth considered the journal to be a forum to save China by fostering a new sense of nationalism, but the journal also placed Chinese politics and society in a new global context. As the authority of the new “Chinese Enlightenment,” New Youth helped to produce images of traditional China, its women, and its families for the global consumption of foreign scholars like Jane Newell, but it also translated and introduced Western social theory and literature to Chinese readers. Chinese intellectuals first read Ibsen’s Dollhouse, for example, when Hu Shi translated it in New Youth in 1918, and they learned how a Norwegian play could be relevant to Chinese society when he used the theory of Yibosheng zhuyi (Ibsenism) to explain that Nora’s escape from

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her feudal family was also a path that individuals trapped in the traditional Chinese family could follow.50 Chinese intellectuals invented the small family ideology by adopting new Western yardsticks of social progress, yet they also helped to construct the yardstick when they invented the myth of the traditional Chinese family. Indeed, if Europeans invented the developmental ideal of the modern nuclear family by reading their history sideways, Chinese intellectuals themselves produced a worthy “other” for the global stage—the backward, large, anti-individual Chinese family. But while Chinese intellectuals may have played an active role in coproducing the image of the backward Chinese family, they did so on an uneven stage dominated by European social theories, Euro-American educational hierarchies, and American research monies. This stage was set at a 1930 symposium on Chinese culture, a symposium that was the brainchild of Chen Hengzhe. Chen had developed the idea for the symposium one year earlier, when she attended a conference in Kyoto funded by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) and noted that “very few data, especially with relation to Chinese culture, were available as a scientific basis of study.”51 Chen was representative of a new wave of Chinese intellectuals. She had won a Boxer Indemnity scholarship to study at Vassar College in 1915, attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, and became Beijing University’s first female professor, teaching English and history.52 Chen was also bilingual and often published under the English name Sophia Chen Zen. Convincing the IPR that the “problem” of Chinese culture was also important, Chen secured conference funding from the American research institution. Chen’s symposium on Chinese culture highlights two aspects of how the myth of the Chinese family was formed. First, it demonstrates the role of Chinese intellectuals in the production of knowledge about China and the Chinese family on the global stage, and second, it shows how Chinese intellectuals blurred the boundaries between cultural commentary and social science. As a site for Chinese and Euro-American coproduction of knowledge about Chinese society, Chen’s symposium was global in conception, and its funder, the IPR, was an American academic institution. Yet every presenter was Chinese: the participant roster, which was apparently compiled through the IPR and Chen’s personal connections, was a

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who’s who of China’s leading intellectuals. But within this geographic homogeneity was disciplinary diversity, as participants came from a variety of fields, from the hard sciences to literature. Chen’s former colleagues from Beijing University, Cai Yuanpei and Hu Shi, gave presentations on art and literature, respectively. The Tianjin-based economist Franklin Ho spoke about his IPR-funded research on Chinese industries, while the sociologist Tao Menghe wrote on social changes in China.53 Representatives from the Biological Laboratory of Science Society of China and the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology, who may have also been recipients of IPR funding, attended as well. Conference discussions may have been conducted in Chinese, English, or both, but following the Anglophone nature of academic research in China at the time, the papers were submitted in English, were published a year later at a Shanghai publishing house, and then were distributed around the globe.54 Most of the Chinese presenters had received academic training overseas. Cai Yuanpei studied in Japan and Germany. Hu Shi and Franklin Ho trained in the United States, and Tao Menghe studied sociology in Great Britain.55 When Chinese intellectuals received academic training abroad or wrote articles in English, they were doing much more than communicating in a foreign language; they were translating ideas and assumptions from that language into their research and applying them to local conditions. Writing in English, they also made their work accessible to a global audience. Together they coproduced the myth of the traditional Chinese family through a cyclical process of translating theoretical assumptions and material conditions back and forth across a global stage—albeit a stage that privileged foreign academic institutions and was funded by foreign research monies. Still, contrary to Thornton, Europeans did not simply read the Chinese family sideways. Instead, Chinese intellectuals played an active role in producing foreign knowledge about Chinese society. The coproduction of knowledge about Chinese society also happened across disciplinary boundaries. The diversity of symposium participants, from philosophers to biologists, suggests that Chinese intellectuals across the disciplines could come together to examine a certain set of social and cultural problems deemed crucial to strengthening Chinese society. It

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also meant that social issues were not always derived through social scientific empirical research but were often cultural problems proposed by humanists. Thus, in Chen’s essay “Summary of China’s Cultural Problems,” which concluded the eighteen-essay symposium volume, she described the Chinese family by calling on a series of cultural assumptions that were fast becoming social fact. Chen, much like Chen Duxiu fifteen years earlier, turned to the authoritarian nature of Chinese Confucianism in the Chinese family. She argued that the Chinese family was a “state in miniature,” and thus less like a “home in the western sense.”56 The household as state, according to Chen, was ruled by “the patriarch or matriarch with a bureaucracy of sons and daughters, as well as in-laws, grandchildren, and dependent relatives to the nth degree.” The Western family system, by contrast, was “the product of the Industrial Revolution,” based on love and free choice rather than filial piety and obligation.57 But while industrialization had liberated the Western family, Chen likened the Chinese family to a machine in which the individual is only a nail or screw in the engine, with everything existing for “the sake of a bigger whole.” Chen’s essay spoke to two audiences: Chinese intellectuals, who in a quest to save their society transformed myths about traditional Chinese culture into social scientific fact, and foreign academics who sought answers to their own cultural and social histories in a contemporary other they perceived as backward. With Chinese intellectuals like Chen taking an active role in the coproduction of knowledge, Chinese and foreign descriptions of the Chinese family bore striking similarities. Indeed, by the 1920s and 1930s, the cultural idea that the anti-individual, despotic Chinese family was impeding national democracy had become a social fact. This coproduced fact began with Western social scientific knowledge translated into Chinese language, but once Chinese intellectuals interpreted this scientific knowledge in local context, these ideas underwent a second translation back into English, with foreign academics and social scientists turning to Chinese intellectual elites for information on China. In other words, when Americans published what seemed to be uninformed, biased observations on the Chinese family, they were often actually reiterating a Chinese interpretation of western ideas. Thus, thirty years after Chen Duxiu published “The Way of Confucius and Modern Life,” and fifteen years after Chen Hengzhe’s symposium on Chinese

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culture, Ernest Osborne, a professor at Columbia University Teacher’s College, offered a critique on the Chinese family that seemed to reiterate them word for word, stating that filial piety fostered obedience and prevented individuals from learning to live in a democracy.58

THE FAMILY AS LABORATORY While the social scientific fact of the extended Chinese family was bantered about in discourse, it was also quantitatively measured and evaluated in the new field of family social science in and of China. In fact, China became a laboratory for the social sciences of the family in the early twentieth century Asia. In this laboratory, researchers were both foreign and Chinese, funding was often American, theories were universal, and methods were actually quite diverse.59 The social sciences in and of China developed on a global stage on which all researchers, regardless of nationality or methodological approach, shared a common belief in universal progress and the imperative that Chinese society must change. Family, as both a marker of a modern society and a means to get there, became a site to explore and promote social change, and the study of family became both a global and national developmental project. With the family at the center of social reform, the new social sciences may have looked at first glance like the Neo- Confucian sociopolitical project of promoting household order to bring about political stability to the realm. Social science’s foundational understanding of mechanisms of change, however, differed greatly from Confucianism. Neo- Confucianism advocated for cyclical and restorative change through a return to ideal models. The social sciences, by contrast promoted teleological and dialectical change that supported the creation of new forms out of the destruction of existing ones. According to these models, the past would never be restored, but instead had to be destroyed and overcome to progress. Social scientific teleology offered new political possibilities, and Chinese intellectuals turned to studying Chinese society in order to strengthen the Chinese nation. Historians have debated whether the move to apply scientific method to everyday political and social issues constitutes a rupture or continuity in Chinese intellectual inquiry.60 When it came to the social

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science of family, however, the theoretical foundations for understanding the social relations of family, as well as the disconnection of social spaces from social relations, broke radically from previous intellectual understandings. The laboratory was also driven by foreign, largely American desires to change Chinese society. Foreign missionaries, who had been concerned initially with saving Chinese souls, shifted their focus to saving Chinese society. The first wave of American empirical sociologists in China were affiliated with American mission colleges and institutions such as Yanjing University, the YMCA, and Princeton University.61 By the 1920s, American funders such as the Rockefeller Foundation or the IPR, also funded by Rockefeller, supported social science research alongside other projects in China.62 Rockefeller came from a Baptist background, and many of the foundation’s projects were connected to Christian institutional, social, and academic networks. The majority of foreign sociologists working in China came from the United States, and Chinese social scientists increasingly came from U.S. academic backgrounds.63 Moreover, two of the top training centers for social scientists in China were founded with American funds: Qinghua University, which trained more social scientists than any other Chinese university during the 1940s, was established under the U.S. Boxer Indemnity program in 1911 (first as a preparatory school for students studying abroad), and Yanjing University, the sixth-largest producer of social scientists in the 1940s and an early pioneer in the field, was formed out of an amalgamation of American mission colleges in 1916.64 Researchers subscribed to universalist social scientific ideals that family form was an indicator of social form, and that family change was central to social change. Researchers employed differing approaches to measure and describe the family— empirical and cultural—and the pictures they drew of the Chinese family likewise varied. Empirical researchers used family as a comparative social unit to study social behaviors across cultures, or they quantified family form to measure China’s comparative modern social development. Cultural researchers, by contrast, while acknowledging the existence of universal family types, studied the Chinese family as a unique cultural form undergoing transformation. Empirical researchers took up a new seemingly objective tool—the social survey—to measure and quantify families and society. Collecting

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and compiling data, empirical sociologists believed they could use social surveys to systematically measure and understand Chinese society—and then enact social changes based on the snapshot of society they had taken. It was an opportunity to transform social science theory into practice. But in order to systematically measure Chinese society, social surveys used new “universal” social concepts and categories that did not always fit with Chinese practices. When surveys measured Chinese families, for example, they often took the cohabiting household as the unit of analysis. This proved problematic in cities where poor people often lived among strangers in sublet quarters, while well-to-do families housed several servants. Moreover, many Chinese urbanites were sojourners who defined “family” as their extended family living in their natal home. But the social survey needed to define parameters to make it comparable across places and universally applicable. Thus social surveys in China looked at the family in two ways: as a social unit for comparative analysis, or as a quantifiable marker for measuring modernity. The first social surveys of Chinese cities looked at standard of living. The American Sidney Gamble led this wave of surveys, traveling to China in the 1910s on behalf of Princeton in Asia and the YMCA and later teaching sociology at Beijing’s Yanjing University. Beijing became a laboratory for Gamble to conduct surveys on household consumption. Gamble, and the household consumption surveyors that followed him, based their hypotheses and data collection on the nineteenth-century German economist Ernst Engel’s principle of “Engel’s Law,” which claimed that as family income increased, the percentage spent on food decreased.65 In other words, poorer families spent a greater proportion of their income on food. Looking at industrialized Europe in the 1850s, Engel had been interested in explaining class and consumption. Some of Engel’s contemporaries criticized his empirical research for focusing on the poor or working class and assuming the consumption habits of the middle class without empirics, But Engel was not alone highlighting an emerging bourgeois class, distinguished by their conspicuous consumption of superfluous things, in Europe’s post–Industrial Revolution societies.66 Years after Engel’s death, Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how people consumed nonessential luxury items to display their status. For

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Veblen, this was not only a way of distinguishing status groups within a society but also a sign of a society’s evolution and progress. Although Veblen’s work did not address Engel’s studies, both point to a growing sense of crisis in post–Industrial Revolution consumption in nineteenthcentury Europe and the United States. If the two approaches seem radically different—Engel was examining a bare-bones consumption existence among the working classes, while Veblen was describing superfluous consumption among the well-to-do—both economists shared the view that the move toward leisure consumption would be the inevitable result and sign of modern progress.67 Thus the experiences of nineteenth-century northwest Europe paved the way for new social scientific theories on class consumption, social change, and modernization for the world. Sociologists working in China took Engel’s theory and applied it to local society, concluding that indeed poorer households spent proportionately more on food than their wealthier counterparts.68 But Sidney Gamble took his studies of household consumption in Beijing a step further, using Engel’s theory to measure Chinese household consumption comparatively with other countries. Gamble felt that comparison should be used not to judge China, which he noted was “in a period of transition” and had made remarkable progress since 1911, but to “point out what we would like to see done in China” with the hope that comparison could save China from the mistakes other countries had made.69 Some of Engel’s theory did not hold up for China, but Gamble still tried to make the China data fit with the global data on Engel’s Law.70 Focusing on percent spent on food, Gamble compared data between nation-states and concluded that Engel’s Law held true between countries as well as individuals: as a country became more developed, the percentage spent on food decreased. Gamble also compared consumption patterns across nations, noting that clerks in Beijing and middle-class families in Bombay enjoyed the same standard of living as Russian city workers and American farming and working-class families, and that even the wealthiest families surveyed in Beijing spent 3.6 percentage points more on food consumption than American professionals.71 Thus, by placing China’s urban elite on a global stage of progress, Gamble believed he had demonstrated that even those members of Chinese society who were most modern in their consumption patterns were still behind their Euro-American counterparts.

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Standard of living surveys aimed to measure class and consumption, but they also evaluated Chinese families. Taking the consumer household as a unit of comparison, these surveys made assumptions about universal family structures that often differed from how Chinese people actually thought about and experienced family life. Gamble, for example, defined the economic family as “any two or more persons living together.” The economic household included members related by blood living under the same roof, as well as children away at school and family members working and living elsewhere in the city. Family members who worked outside the city, even if they contributed to the family income, however, were not considered part of the economic family; yet servants counted, since they consumed family food and other household goods.72 In their survey of working families in Shanghai, a city known for its elaborate housing system of subletting, S. K. Yang and L. K. Tao used a similar definition of the economic household, and also included boarders who lived or took meals with the family.73 Herbert Lamson, a sociology professor at Shanghai College in the 1930s, used a narrower definition of family based on direct kinship when he examined workers in Shanghai.74 For Lamson, family was a “biological unit involving one set of children and the immediate parents of these children” rather than an “economic family” that extended to include aunts, uncles, and grandparents.75 Thus, in his study of Shanghai workers, he labeled a single mother and her daughter as a family unit unto themselves, and not as part of her relatives’ family unit, which she relied on for financial support.76 But while all three surveys defined the parameters of the economic household differently, they all yielded similar results: as household income increased, the percentage spent on food decreased.77 When researchers branched outside the usual parameters of household consumption surveys, a more complex picture of family emerged. Looking at factory workers in Tangku, located just outside of Tianjin, for example, Sung-ho Lin found that many laborers left their extended family in their native place. Lin thus measured two different family groups: the “greater family” that resided in a respondent’s native place (5.96 members) and the family that resided together (3.72 members).78 When surveys looked beyond the economic household as a site for comparison and focused on family structure in its own right, the Chinese family began to stray from social science models.

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As background research to founding a home economics department at Yanjing University, Ava Milam, who had served as the dean of Oregon State University’s School of Home Economics, conducted a survey on Chinese family culture that asked respondents to self-report family size.79 Milam defined family as “a group of kinsfolk . . . consisting of parents and their children, living together in a single domestic establishment.” She noted that a multigenerational family was called a “greater” family and a nuclear family was called a “marriage” family.80 Over two-thirds of those surveyed responded that they lived in a “marriage” family. These results might suggest that the overwhelming majority of students lived in nuclear families, but even Milam conceded that actual living conditions often exceeded the parameters of her definitions. She allowed that grandparents might be included in the “marriage” family, a conclusion that was strongly suggested in another section of the survey, which asked respondents to report on the number of family members. By allowing Chinese respondents to determine the size of their family themselves, Milam came up with a much larger average family size than her colleagues who were measuring the standard of living: the average family size for Milam’s respondents was 8, while Yang and Tao reported 4.77 in Shanghai, and Gamble calculated 4.6 in Beijing.81 Asking a more open-ended question had yielded a dramatically different result. The discrepancy in family size also may have been due to a difference in income levels. Gamble, Yang, and Tao looked at working-class urbanites for the most part, while Milam distributed her questionnaires to students, mostly at Christian schools, who came from families that could afford to pay their children’s tuition and forgo their children’s economic contribution.82 Looking at family size across a wide range of incomes in Shanghai, Herbert Lamson found that low-income families had an average family size of two to four members, whereas high-income families had an average of eight.83 Indeed Lamson, Gamble, Yang, and Tao all agreed that for China, as family income increased, so did family size.84 Herbert Lamson added education to the mix. He observed that family size actually increased with mother’s education— contrary to New Culture ideas that Western education would lead to a smaller family size, and contrary to data from Western countries as well.85 Lamson attributed this peculiar

Family in Ideology and Practice 69 phenomenon to a lack of information about birth control, despite access to modern education. The problem with his hypothesis was that Margaret Sanger’s works on birth control had already been published in China and were available in urban areas, and that Sanger had delivered a widely publicized speech about birth control at Beijing University in 1922 with Hu Shi as her translator.86 While standard-of-living surveys could be used comparatively to chart China on a universal path of social progress, the diverse data on family size contradicted universal models of social progress. Family size had become a seemingly standard and comparable measurement of modernization, and Chinese sociology dictionaries and textbooks often included statistics on family size across nations.87 Moreover, the May Fourth myth of the traditional family conjectured that with increasing income, educational attainment, and overall societal modernization, families would become smaller. Data from surveys of the 1920s and 1930s that quantified family size, however, contradicted those theories by demonstrating that Chinese family size increased rather than decreased with an increase in income. Somehow, Chinese families seemed to defy the scientific predictions of Western developmental idealism and the cultural prophecies of the May Fourth Movement by failing to follow social theory’s progressive model for family change. Academics also attempted to use qualitative cultural studies of the Chinese family to explain China’s changing families on their own terms, aiming to support the idea that changes in family structure were natural developments of social progress. For Sun Benwen, one of the founders of cultural sociology, this meant examining culture as “national essence.”88 Sun, a graduate of New York University, did not advocate turning away from Western social science. In fact, he was known for having published the most widely used Chinese textbook on Western sociological theory (Shehuixue yuanli, 1935).89 Instead, Sun wanted to imbue Western social theory with a Chinese culturalist perspective, thereby creating a social science that was theoretically relevant to China. Following Sun’s cultural lead, Mai Huiting, his student from Nanjing’s Central University (Zhongyang daxue), conducted field research on the Chinese family in the 1930s, publishing the Problems of Change of the Chinese Family (Jiating gaizao

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wenti) in 1935.90 Balancing universal social scientific theory with local social observations, Mai attempted to describe the unique systems and changes in the Chinese family structure. Mai’s observations on family change in the 1920s were moral, cultural, and structural. His analysis started with the dichotomy between the large (da) and small (xiao) families. Mai described the large family as a multigenerational group—sometimes up to five generations—that lived together and shared property. According to Mai, in practice, the large family conducted ancestor worship, observed filial piety, arranged marriages, and ultimately privileged male rights over female. The small family comprised a husband and wife, along with their unmarried children, and in contrast to the large family practiced free marriage, individual control over the family economy, and male/female equality.91 Thus, to Mai, the change from large to small was not simply about size and structure but also about a way of life. Contrary to the survey data that revealed the persistence of large families among high-income groups, Mai argued Chinese families were changing over time in tandem with broader social and economic changes, and that large families were falling apart in favor of small families.92 Mai placed the Chinese family on a timeline that naturally progressed from large or old ( jiu) to small or new (xin). Mai also invented a third category, a transitional stage that he called zhezhong (literally “compromise”). The transitional family fell in between large and small both in terms of quantitative and qualitative measurements. It might have been a nuclear family with the addition of grandparents or one that sent money home to the larger family they had left behind in the countryside. Mai argued that while this transitional phase had its good points, promoting care for the elderly and encouraging children’s responsibility for their parents, it ultimately had a negative impact on social relations, individual psychological status, and even family hygiene and children’s education.93 But Mai remained faithfully optimistic in the teleology of modern social change that promised the traditional large Chinese family would eventually become a modern, Western-style nuclear family simply by letting time take its course. As an outsider to academic sociology, Olga Lang, a Ukrainian native who fled to China in the 1930s from Nazi Germany with her then-husband, the sinologist Karl Wittfogel, also sought to understand the family using

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Chinese cultural models rather than universal models of family change.94 With funding from Columbia University’s Institute of Social Research, the IPR, and the Carnegie Corporation, Lang spent from 1935 to 1937 collecting questionnaires and data from across the country. Though Lang was not a card-carrying social scientist, her 1946 study, Chinese Family and Society, became one of the most influential monographs on the Chinese family to emerge from the family laboratory of the 1920s and 1930s. Breaking from Chinese and foreign social scientists’ ideas that family size correlated with modern progress, Lang argued instead that the traditional large Chinese family was never as widespread as academics and reformers had suggested. Looking at studies of Chinese historical records and censuses that reached back as far as the Han and Tang dynasties, she estimated that the average family was around five or six people—somewhere between large and small.95 Lang also argued that in imperial China, large joint families were an ideal enjoyed only by the wealthiest of families, and that a high mortality rate among poor families limited their size.96 Looking at contemporary Chinese society, Lang did not believe that the family had progressed from large and traditional to small and modern. Instead, she argued that families in the 1930s were far more complex, with geographic, cultural, and economic factors encouraging a variety of family types.97 In terms of family size, Lang also noted that the ideal for most Chinese families was to have many children. Thus, Lang observed that “modernized” families, who could afford better healthcare and hygiene for their children, often had more children and therefore larger families— meaning that modern families were actually more likely to be bigger than “traditional” ones.98 Most importantly, Lang proposed a new English-language vocabulary, as an alternative to the large-small dichotomy, that researchers continue to use today to describe the Chinese family.99 She proposed the terms “conjugal,” “stem,” and “joint.” The “conjugal” or “biological, natural, nuclear, or small family consists of man, wife or wives, and children,” she wrote, while the “stem” family includes “parents, their unmarried children, one married son with wife and children,” and the “joint” family, also known as the “‘large family’ or the ‘greater family,’” consists of “parents, their unmarried children, their married sons (more than one) and sons’ wives and children; and sometimes a fourth or fifth generation.”100

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Rather than map social theory onto the Chinese family, Lang attempted to define social terms to explain her observations of the Chinese family, thereby revealing a diverse and fluid Chinese family whose structure was contingent on historical time and geographic place. Lang argued that while Chinese culture historically may have recognized certain ideal forms of family, the family had always adapted to different social conditions. But while Lang may not have subscribed to the teleology of family size, she still believed that changing family form was a sign of social progress. When Lang penned a biography of Ba Jin, author of the 1930s iconoclastic novel Family, in 1967, she proclaimed that during Ba Jin’s time a growing sense of “community loyalty” challenged the “family loyalty” required of “old China.”101 In other words, in a changing Chinese society, modern nationalism’s triumph over traditional familism was inevitable.

FAMILY AS PRACTICE Although social scientists attempted to make teleological family change seem natural, life on the ground in modern China was far more complex. People in twentieth-century Tianjin lived in small nuclear families, but they also lived with grandparents or in joint families with aunts and uncles. Moreover, in a rapidly growing city with large influxes of migrants from all walks of life, many of Tianjin’s nuclear families were actually sojourning in the city and still financially contributed or otherwise felt connected to their natal household. When social scientists designed surveys to test social theories, they often missed these on-the-ground complexities of family life. Surveys that were disconnected from social theory, however, sometimes captured these diverse patterns and practices of family life. In 1931 and 1946, the Tianjin city government conducted surveys of their municipal workers and their families that appear not to have been guided by comparative social theory, nor were they directed by social engineering. The results of the 1931 survey were published in a volume beautifully decorated with art deco graphs.102 The 1946 surveys may never have been compiled or published, but the individual survey sheets were filed in the Tianjin municipal government archives, where they remain today.103 Neither the

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published volume nor the archival records reveal why the Tianjin municipal government decided to compile data on their employees or how they intended to use it.104 Moreover, the surveys themselves reveal a lack in methodological training.105 But precisely because these surveys were conducted outside the orthodox methods of academic social science research, they offer a unique window onto how Tianjin civil servants thought about their families. The 1946 survey form, and perhaps the 1931 survey as well, was more open-ended than surveys conducted by academic researchers at the time. Employees were simply handed a blank form and asked to fill in their personal background, including position, education, native place, and address in Tianjin, along with their family information, including family member’s relationship, name, age, educational background, whether they were still living, whether they lived with the employee, and whether the employee supported them financially.106 While the unorthodox survey methods of the 1946 survey and the different sample sizes between the two render these surveys empirically unreliable, we can still conjure a snapshot of how Tianjin civil servants in the 1930s and 1940s thought about themselves and their families.107 Moreover, even with a difference in sample size, the data on employee background and family demography was largely the same in both surveys. According to this data, about one third of Tianjin city employees were natives of the city, while another third came from neighboring Hebei Province. The total family size in 1931 and 1946 was just over eight, and in 1946, the nuclear family within that unit was just over four, suggesting that most people lived in extended families.108 A closer look at the 1946 survey data reveals that Tianjin civil servants had a broader idea of family that extended beyond the conjugal, economic, and cohabiting units. Among the respondents in the 1946 survey, roughly 95 percent included their mother and father as family members, even though only half of them reported that they lived together; likewise, 78 percent wrote in grandparents, even though only 4.7 percent of grandfathers and 9.3 percent of grandmothers were reported as still living. The idea of family relations even extended beyond the grave: several respondents entered that they were responsible for the financial well-being of a deceased grandparent. In fact, respondents reported 8.23 family members on average, even though only 7.22 family members were living. Family also stretched laterally, with

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TABLE 2.1 Family Members Reported on Tianjin Municipal

Employees Survey, 1946

Grandfather

Reported

Living

78.09%

4.70%

Lives in same household

7.67%

Supports financially

3.34%

Grandmother

78.59%

9.28%

10.64%

7.67%

Father

94.06%

46.78%

42.33%

37.38%

Mother

95.17%

64.36%

55.94%

54.70%

Wife

77.35%

75.37%

68.44%

69.68%

Brothers

94.31%

86.76%

60.52%

37.75%

Sisters

65.72%

63.37%

38.86%

30.20%

Brothers’ wives

17.95%

17.08%

12.13%

7.55%

Source: Data collected from the Tianjin Municipal Archives, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao [Report on the registration of family conditions], j2- 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815, 5816, 5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946).

94.3  percent reporting that family included their brothers (60.5  percent reported living with their brothers), while 65.7  percent included sisters (38.9 percent reported living with their sisters).109 (See table 2.1.) The employees’ idea of family was thus quite complicated. For most of these civil servants, family meant more than living nuclear family members. Even respondents who lived away from home considered extended kin to be part of their family. A thirty-six-year-old office head from the southern province of Guangdong reported that he was financially responsible for ten family members who were not living with him: his mother, wife, three daughters, sister, brother, sister-in-law, and brother’s two children. Individual surveys suggest that respondents who were members of more financially secure families tended to think of themselves as part of a large family, whether or not all family members regularly inhabited the household. A thirty-two-year-old man named Wu hailed from an almost stereotypically modern Tianjin family that nonetheless had fifteen members.110 His grandfather was head of the tax bureau, and his father was in the department of education. All of the women in his family—his three

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sisters, his mother, and three aunts—were educated. One aunt even worked for the high court in Nanjing. According to Wu, he lived together with his modern educated aunts and uncles in what Olga Lang would characterize as a joint family. As Wu’s case suggests, if civil servants in Tianjin could afford it, they lived with or supported an extended family. But not all city employees were as fortunate. Members of the police department, for example, were less well off than their local government counterparts in 1946. Most policemen came from areas outside Tianjin and nearby Hebei Province—from impoverished areas that were even more devastated by the war than Tianjin. On average, their families were much smaller (5.9), in part because these poorer men tended not to bring their parents or grandparents to the city to live with them. But in addition, once they moved to Tianjin, they stopped thinking of themselves as connected to a larger family back home.111 Were these cohabiting extended families and geographically scattered families—which still thought of themselves as a cohesive large family—the product of short-term family survival techniques occasioned by war, or did they indicate that China’s “feudal” past had not been eradicated?112 In a way, both: the diversity of family structures among Tianjin’s urban elites at the close of the Republican era demonstrated that modernity was never a simple case of linear progress. Even among civil servants—who were some of the most educated and modern residents of Tianjin—men with second wives worked alongside men who lived in nuclear families. As late as 1946, concubinage, the practice so abhorred by May Fourth– era intellectuals, was alive and well in the Tianjin city government, as eight men reported that their father had at least one concubine, and two men, one age forty-six and the other age fifty-four, reported that they lived with two wives.113 The Tianjin municipal government’s survey of their employees reveals that even as late as 1946, at the close of the Republican era, Chinese urban families had not followed social scientific predictions or nationalist calls to form modern small families. In concluding that well-paid and welleducated men still thought of themselves as members of an extended family, the Tianjin data aligned with the results gathered by social researchers working in China’s family laboratory: as family income increased, so did family size. Thus the theoretical model that small

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families would naturally evolve in China in conjunction with urbanization, modernization, educational opportunity, and economic growth had failed to materialize. But where changing social conditions had failed to generate social change according to scientific predictions, nationalist political ideology might have succeeded in awakening and indoctrinating Chinese elites to form small families to save the nation, especially in the case of government civil servants. Although the small family ideology was certainly a prominent nationalistic discourse during the Republican era, Tianjin civil servants, at least in practice, did not heed its call. Thus while the empirical truth of survey data on families from the Republican era must be taken with a grain of salt, it does suggest that the small families advocated in nationalist ideology did not appear in practice during the early twentieth century. In other words, the ideology of the nuclear family did not enact social change. The nationalistic small family ideology may not have pervaded local government. At least in the Tianjin municipal government, which promoted family in some of its social programs, there is no archival evidence to suggest that the local government endorsed or promoted the small family model. In fact, while intellectuals at the national level offered a vision of society based on social change and reform, Tianjin’s municipal government seemed more interested in endorsing a vision of society that encouraged social stability and order. That is not to say that Tianjin’s Chinese municipal government was disconnected from new nationalist statebuilding projects. Like many other Chinese cities at the time, Tianjin set up a bureau of social affairs, known as Shehui ju, whose job it was to maintain social order in keeping with new nationalist principles. According to the bureau’s 1929 annual report, the purpose of the Shehui ju was to eradicate China’s “feudal” past and implement the modern people’s principles (sanmin zhuyi), and as such it was concerned with customs, marriage and funerary rituals, movie inspection, attending national product exhibitions, and helping people with low incomes, women, and society more generally.114 The Shehui ju established poorhouses and night schools to serve the destitute members of Tianjin’s society; they managed requests for unionization and oversaw hygiene campaigns.115 As part of their effort to regulate, they also measured society, conducting surveys on industries, workers, shops, education, healthcare, prostitution, and employment.116

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These new social service institutions became vehicles for disseminating nationalist ideology as well as vehicles for instituting social control. Women and family were seen as particularly important targets for the Tianjin Shehui ju’s reform efforts, and several institutions developed around services for women.117 By helping women, the Shehui ju hoped to address what it saw as some of the city’s most pressing social ills: divorce, poverty, and prostitution. In 1929, the Shehui ju’s Women’s Relief Organization established a home for wayward women that would educate them about career options as well as promote ideas about bodily health.118 The home included fifty women of various ages who had been referred by the courts and police. Among those women were former prostitutes, servants, divorced women, child slaves, and concubines—a growing underclass to complement Tianjin’s flourishing urban elites. Some of these women had migrated to Tianjin in search of new opportunities. A group of five women aged eighteen and nineteen, for example, claimed to have worked in factories in Shanghai and traveled to Tianjin in search of similar work. They were subsequently either sold into prostitution or took on the work by their own free will because it was difficult to find other jobs. Other women claimed to have been brought to Tianjin against their will, some even sold by relatives into prostitution or servitude.119 Since these cases were referred to the relief organization’s home by the police or courts, it is not clear whether these women would have sought the help on their own. Furthermore, their individual stories may have been altered to fit a particular narrative of destitution, either to avoid prosecution or to earn a bed in the relief home. Whether driven by compassion or out of a fear of single women in the city, controlling women became central to the work of Tianjin’s Shehui ju. The social bureau claimed to help single women in the city by providing housing and educational opportunities, and it did indeed run night schools for women working in factories.120 But ultimately, it decided that marriage in a family was the best occupation for women. While the Shehui ju promoted a modern society in theory, in practice it was interested in social control; promoting the family as the basic unit of a society proved to be an efficient way of doing this. In 1937, the Women’s Relief Organization set up a matchmaking service for its destitute and divorced women. Interested men submitted portraits and profiles, presumably for selection by the

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women or the home’s manager. Many of the applicants looking for a wife were young men who had moved to Tianjin from elsewhere and may have been too poor to find a spouse by conventional means. But the organization also may not have been averse to supporting family arrangements that might be characterized as feudal, as the profiles of hopeful spouses also included a man with a forty-four-year-old wife and eight-year-old daughter looking for a concubine who could bear him a son.121 We have no way of knowing whether the Shehui ju ever introduced a concubine to this man, as we only have a record of the application. However, it does come as somewhat of a surprise that an organization that espoused shedding the “feudal” past would even entertain such a request, let alone file it away. In the end, the Shehui ju specifically, and the Tianjin city government more broadly, seem to have been more concerned with social stability than social reform. Social stability for lower-class women did not mean forging a new role in urban society but rather finding a place in family life. The Shehui ju’s promotion of conventional marriage for wayward women suggests that the individualistic small family ideology may not have filtered down to the local level, or that if it did, local elites considered new conjugal families to be an ideal for elite women and not their lower-class counterparts.

CONCLUSION The Chinese household has a long history as a political institution; thus, when intellectuals in the twentieth century turned to the Chinese family to save Chinese society, they were in many ways following in the footsteps of Confucian scholar-officials. But the political and social ideas of family they proposed were radically different. Formed on the global stage and bolstered by new theories of social science, the new family ideology broke from Neo- Confucian political ideology, which called for a cyclical return to former family forms. Instead, drawing from universal social models, the new small family ideology proposed that families should and did change along a teleological line of progress. Family ideology, however, did not always line up with family in practice. Making the family both a marker of modernity and a means to

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getting there, the new small family ideology proposed a formula of social change to save China—with a modern economy, education, and national awakening, Chinese families would become smaller. Survey data from the first half of the twentieth century, however, suggests that ideology and practice did not always match up. Despite the requisite inputs, the small nuclear family did not magically appear in modern China. Part of the problem began with the formula itself: it relied on cultural assumptions instead of empirical evidence to argue that Chinese traditional families had been large. While Olga Lang hinted that households in the past may not have been large, sociologists today are examining data from imperial China that confirm her insight.122 The formula also underestimated the resiliency of the family to adapt to material conditions. In fact, the extended family form in early twentieth-century China may have been a response to the drastic social, political, and economic changes taking place in China at the time. Foreign imperialist incursions, the collapse of the Qing Empire, the rise of warlord power, war with Japan, industrialization, and economic uncertainty all may have encouraged Chinese people to seek social stability and economic support in their extended families. The new small family ideology, with its focus on the social structure of the family, did not offer practical advice on how families should live. In late imperial China, by contrast, constructing a house according to unified feng shui architectural principles was central to the political stability of the realm. The house formed a foundation for prosperity not only for the family who resided within it but also through shared spatial cosmologies, connecting the inner spaces of the household to the political spaces of empire. By contrast, the new small family ideology, with its focus on social structure and relations, disconnected the social relations of the family from the social space of the house. Thus, without a central political ideology to guide them in how to build or design their social spaces, Chinese people were left to navigate the ideas, examples, and practices of house and home on their own. The following chapters explore how in constructing, choosing, designing, and residing in the modern house and home, Tianjin’s urban elites formed new ideas about their individual identities, their city and the world.

3 Property, Power, and Identity in a Colonial-Capitalist City

A

s Chinese nationalist ideologues were calling to abandon Confucian values and put an end to feudal family structures, people in Tianjin were constructing a new social system of individuals in a rapidly changing urban environment. Ideas and materiality, the two strands that had been aligned in late imperial China, came unraveled with the fall of the Qing. Chinese urbanites picked up these strands, knitting them together with new threads to produce Tianjin’s social fabric.1 At first glance, their creation appeared to be a tangled and contradictory mess, but at closer glance the knots came together in distinct nodes of power. Property or housing was a site for one of these knots because it was the center of many power struggles. As the city grew, multiple colonialisms contested Chinese municipal sovereignty over the urban landscape, but affluent Chinese men pushed back against foreign neighbors and governments, leveraging their economic capital to build and acquire housing. While Chinese male elites mobilized their economic capital to overcome the racialized and national discrimination of foreign peoples and governments in their city, they also leveraged their economic power over Chinese women in property disputes that challenged the rights granted to women under the new civil code of 1930, a legal reform that was intended to

Property, Power, and Identity 81

strengthen modern China in the face of imperialism. Multiple layers of identity— Chineseness, economic status, and masculinity—twisted and tangled around property, and as these layers strengthened into a knot, property became the locus of patriarchal power. Thus, while New Culture intellectuals were calling to abolish the patriarchal system of the Confucian family system, patriarchy was being reconstituted in new spaces. Property in colonial-capitalist Tianjin illuminates how patriarchy is constructed in materiality and in practice, often irrespective of ideology. As male intellectuals targeted Confucianism and the feudal family as bulwarks of patriarchal power that needed to be dismantled, they used the political and economic position of women as a yardstick for measuring their progress. In fact, much feminist revisionist scholarship of late imperial China has focused on property in order to demonstrate that women from these earlier historical periods actually exercised individual agency.2 The legal historian Kathryn Bernhardt, for example, argues that widows fared better under the property practices of the Qing than under the laws of the Republican civil code.3 Despite the growing number of academic studies that illustrate female empowerment in late imperial China, popular (and even some academic) discourses continue to espouse the idea that Confucianism oppressed women in the past and that any signs of oppression today are due to the persistence of Confucian culture. Many of the same men who first raised this idea of Confucian patriarchy and fought to dismantle the so-called Confucian family structure, however, were the architects of new structures of masculine power and patriarchy. Ideology never oppressed women; systems of power created structural inequalities, and structural patriarchy outlasts ideas. Power was built into Tianjin’s property system through new ways of owning, legislating, and thinking about property. The urban economic system commodified housing in new ways, and the multiple colonialisms and partial sovereignty of Republican-era China structured political identities and legal rights around property. Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system created this combination of global economic markets and foreign political rule. Economic, political, and legal structures intertwined to shape the city and forge nodes of power, and elite Chinese men became experts at navigating the system that resulted. Thus, examining the development of Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system and how Chinese men leveraged their

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intersecting identities of class, race, and masculinity to claim power within the system illuminates how practices, not ideas, forged a new patriarchal property system in Republican-era China.

THE GROWTH OF THE COLONIAL- CAPITALIST CITY In 1846, when Tianjin was on the eve of becoming a treaty-port city, its population stood at less than 200,000, but it grew to 420,000 in 1906 and exceeded 1,000,000 by 1928. 4 A multitude of factors contributed to Tianjin’s growth. As the largest port city in northern China, Tianjin grew alongside rising foreign trade. Tianjin’s close proximity to and connections with the capital city Beijing facilitated this rise, but Tianjin’s growth into a major northern regional center also contributed to Beijing’s decline. Capital, resources, and people flowed from Beijing to Tianjin especially after 1927, when the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) under Chiang Kai-shek moved the capital south to Nanjing.5 Tianjin’s early twentieth-century growth was also part of a broader trend in Chinese urban development sparked by World War I. The war brought opportunity to treaty-port cities like Tianjin, as local Chinese industries rose to fill the gap left by exiting foreign companies and spawned a growing class of Chinese entrepreneurs, a phenomenon that historian Marie- Claire Bergère identified in Shanghai as the “Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie.”6 Tianjin’s new elites included warlords and ex-Qing-official investors, as well as families of more moderate means. The foreign concessions became the most desirable residential real estate in the city. Protected by foreign police and militia, the concessions were harbors of stability during what came to be called the Warlord Era (1916–1928), a period when bandits and military cliques battled for control over local territories. The interwar period became the golden age of Tianjin’s foreign concessions. With Germany and Austria-Hungary forced to relinquish their concessions to the Chinese after World War I, Tianjin had six remaining foreign concessions, and of these six, the British, French, Italian, and Japanese grew into popular residential districts for foreigners and Chinese alike. Population in the British Concession rose from 17,000 residents in

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1913 to 39,000 in 1929 and 47,000 in 1934.7 Foreign- concession municipal governments welcomed and encouraged urban growth by filling in previously uninhabitable swampland, widening roads, planting parks, and supporting the growth of a new speculative real estate industry. Although foreign businesspeople, teachers, and missionaries populated the concessions, this rapid growth was largely led by Chinese nationals, who accounted for the majority of residents. Tianjin’s rapid growth during the twentieth century was fostered by and solidified under its colonial-capitalist system. Tianjin’s colonialism was both multiple and partial. During Tianjin’s lifetime as a treaty-port city nine foreign countries claimed concessions in Tianjin alongside the Chinese municipal district. (See figure 3.1 and table 3.1.) The simultaneously fragmented and multiple nature of colonialism in Tianjin and elsewhere in China has led historians to describe Chinese colonialism as “semi” (partial) or “hypo” (multiple). 8 Indeed, in qualifying China’s colonialism, historians have suggested that Chinese colonialism was somehow different than “real” colonialism elsewhere. Yet by its very nature, colonial power everywhere could be multiple and partial. Even indisputably colonized India was occupied by multiple foreign powers, while some princely states maintained sovereignty, at least in name. Focusing on the uniqueness of colonial sovereignty in China rather than on the shared history of global colonial processes, China historians have limited the opportunities for comparison between China and other colonized places. Rather than arguing that colonialism in Tianjin was either less or more, this chapter instead aims to articulate how the colonial process of real estate shaped Tianjin’s landscape and its people, thereby opening the door to possible comparative studies of other colonial processes, such as urban planning and housing between Tianjin and other colonized cities from Pondicherry to Singapore. China historians’ understanding of Chinese colonialism as “semi” is a legacy of how contemporary Chinese political leaders described colonialism in China. Both Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong were inspired by Vladimir Lenin’s coinage of the term “semi-colony” in his 1916 essay “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”9 Lenin understood imperialism to be an economic process through which “finance capital” called upon state power to extract “raw materials” from the colonized world. But while Lenin

FIGURE 3.1 Map of Tianjin, 1912. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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TABLE 3.1 Tianjin’s Foreign Concessions Established

Relinquished

British

1860

1943

French

1861

1946

American

1861

1902

Japanese

1888

1945

German

1899

1917

Russian

1900

1924

Austro-Hungarian

1901

1917

Italian

1901

1947

Belgian

1902

1931

Source: Compiled by author from historical data.

described imperialism as an economic process, he understood colonialism to be based on “territorial division.” In a world increasingly focused on delineating the boundaries of nation-states, Lenin turned to the nineteenthcentury German geographer Otto Hübner, who used data to divide and define individual countries, condensing the world into a clear and simple chart that according to one contemporary review could “be mounted and hung upon a wall.”10 But Lenin’s idea of the economic process of imperialism proved to be more complicated than Hübner’s chart. Although Lenin argued that the world was being colonized by “six great powers,” he also added a new category for places that did not fit the orthodox definition of colonial occupation—the “semi-colonial countries” of Persia, Turkey, and China: according to Lenin, they were politically “semi-independent,” but through their dependence on “finance capital” were almost or quickly becoming colonized. Lenin defined semi-colonialism as a “transitional form,” suggesting that while he understood the economic process of finance capital to bring about colonialism, he ultimately defined colonialism along with his contemporaries as territorial occupation. If semi-colonialism was a transitional stage, what did that mean for China? Chinese political leaders asked this question as they explored

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Lenin’s idea of the semi- colony. Sun Yat-sen revised Lenin’s characterization of “semi-colonial,” declaring in 1923 that China was in fact a “hypo-colony,” enslaved by multiple masters.11 According to Sun, the hypo-colonized China was in many ways worse off than the singular colonized Annam or Korea, where the single colonizer maintained a level of responsibility for the welfare and maintenance of the colonized land. Writing in 1939, Mao described China as “semi-colonial” and “semifeudal.”12 Imperialism, according to Mao, had both spurred the demise of China’s feudal society and stunted its economic and social development; only revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party could bring about complete social transformation. If semi-feudal explained China’s social and economic conditions, semi-colonial described its political status. Looking to Japanese-controlled Manchuria in the north, Mao defined colonialism in terms of sovereignty, noting that China was both semicolonial and colonial. While Chinese leaders and the global community understood colonialism as territorial occupation, the legal practices of extra-territoriality in China allowed foreign empires to disguise colonial occupation by claiming that foreign laws attached to foreign bodies and not Chinese territory. Studying the legal and jurisdictional process that formed extraterritoriality in China and Japan, the historian Pär Kristoffer Cassel claims that China was never a colony “in the strict sense of the word.”13 Yet in examining how extraterritoriality was practiced on the ground in the courts of the Shanghai International Settlement, the legal scholar Teemu Ruskola concludes that legal practice in the settlement looked “far more like direct control than any kind of informal imperialism.”14 Under extraterritorial agreements, Chinese nationals in foreign concessions were still subjects of Chinese law, but they also were subjected to the foreign laws and regulations of the concessions. In Tianjin, such foreign regulations in the concessions ranged from limiting the number of inhabitants in a single house and maintaining an architectural façade in foreign style to prohibiting gambling parties at home. In granting foreign empires jurisdiction over parcels of Chinese land, extra-territoriality in Tianjin meant that each concession acted like a colony even in the strictest sense of legal and territorial occupation. Focusing on process rather than territory, this chapter aims to move beyond narrower understandings of colonialism that are

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anchored in the complete occupation of a single territory by a single colonizing state to examine colonialism through a series of locally embedded global processes. At the heart of the colonial process in Tianjin was the real estate market that connected territorial occupation to capitalist investment and brought together the politics and the economics of colonialism. Concessions were occupied spaces, global showplaces, and above all, economic investments. Tianjin’s multiple foreign empires dictated how the city would expand and how each concession would grow. But though concession governments proposed detailed plans for urban growth, they lacked the municipal funds to develop those plans themselves; as a result, they turned to investors, many of whom were Chinese. During the golden age of the Tianjin concessions, Chinese people could sometimes exercise agency through their economic status, but in the push and pull of colonial and economic negotiations, foreign empires always maintained the upper hand. Thus, unequal power relations dictated Tianjin’s urban growth, even as Chinese renters, buyers, and investors drove that growth. With multiple foreign empires located next to each other and embedded in a Chinese city, and with foreign residents scattered across it, Tianjin compressed the global stage into a single cosmopolitan space. Foreign empires performed colonialism on this global stage for multiple audiences that included local Chinese residents, citizens at home in the metropole, and other foreigners. At a time when nations and borders were forming and being tested across the globe, empire became a mechanism for forging the identities of a nation, and the colony offered a “clean slate” onto which empire could project new nationalist visions of a modern city.15 Thus for Italy, whose only Asian colony was Tianjin, the concession became an imperial showpiece, an urban work of art carefully planned and built by Consul General Vincenzo Fileti to include indoor plumbing and paved roads, and indeed the first concession to have asphalt roads throughout. The Italian press back home sang the praises of the modern urban colony, claiming that the Italian Concession was one of the finest in Tianjin.16 Italian-style buildings filled with imported Italian marble conjured national pride for Italians back home when juxtaposed against the French Beaux Arts and British Gothic architecture across the river.

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In a compressed and multinational city, a beautiful concession could be a source of national pride; but the city’s cosmopolitanism also posed problems for local concession governments. Take schools, for example. Foreign schools were material manifestations of empire, colonial institutions that marked the boundaries of a foreign empire on Chinese soil. Thus in the 1920s, Tianjin was home to a British school, an American school, three French schools, a Jewish school, and one Japanese school; a German school was suspended after World War I, and a planned Italian school was never built.17 In a city with a diverse population of Chinese, foreign, and stateless people, and in a city where many expatriate youth had never stepped foot in the motherland, schools became primary sites of national and religious indoctrination. But in concessions whose foreign populations were too small to sustain the schools over time, what was a nation to do? Despite a dwindling British population, for example, the otherwise fiscally conservative British Municipal Council (BMC) continued to fund a British school for fear, in the words of its constituents, that British children would be forced to seek their education at the French Jesuit or convent schools.18 The school was kept open even though British pupils were just under half of those enrolled in the school, which included Russian, American, and even Chinese children.19 Moreover, not all British children attended the British school. Brian Power, an Irish child of the British Empire, for example, transferred to the Catholic French Marist Brothers School, where his best friends were Chinese and Russian.20 While the BMC debated dwindling numbers in the British school, the concessionsupported Chinese school, meant to serve the British Concession’s ample population of Chinese residents, was rapidly expanding so that by 1932, there were 735 students enrolled in the Chinese school compared to 447 in the British school.21 Enrollment figures of Chinese and foreign concession schools suggest that Tianjin was a Chinese cosmopolitan city, boasting a diverse population of foreign nationals yet numerically dominated by Chinese residents. This cosmopolitanism fostered insecurities among foreigners in concession governments, who tried to stake clear boundaries in their colonial negotiations. Chinese residents of foreign concessions could find ways to exploit those insecurities to get what they wanted, but foreign empire always

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maintained a privileged edge. For example, the BMC continued to subsidize the British municipal school at a much higher rate than the Chinese school even when enrollment numbers did not warrant it. Tianjin’s compressed cosmopolitan space also fostered cooperation among foreign empires when they had common security or economic interests. The Boxer Uprising brought the militaries of the Eight Nation Alliance together to defend their security successfully, even when soldiers of differing nationalities were reputed to fight among one another.22 These countries continued to find a common interest in local security as they banded together to govern the Chinese city after the uprising. Collaboration was most successful, however, when foreign empires cooperated to facilitate commerce. In 1901, the foreign governments in Tianjin worked with Chinese representatives to establish the Hai River Conservancy Commission, intended to ensure that the Hai River was properly dredged and maintained for shipping. Likewise, foreign empires joined forces in the 1920s to construct a modern drawbridge across the river that provided direct access to Tianjin’s main railway station while allowing ships to pass through. Yet colonial capitalism was not always rational or even efficient. While Tianjin’s multiple empires joined forces in developing commercial transportation routes, they never came together over other municipal services such as policing or public utilities, even when it might have been in the interest of economy. Capitalism provided the impetus for colonialism in Tianjin, but colonial competition could undermine capitalist markets. It was far from obvious that national interest should trump economic interest in the concessions; foreign governments, after all, considered Tianjin’s concessions to be economic outposts rather than colonies. The home country offered little financial support to develop infrastructure, and never considered local Chinese residents of foreign concessions to be colonial subjects of empire.23 In concessions such as the British, French, and Japanese, foreign consulates represented the laws and interests of foreign states, while locally elected foreign municipal councils governed the economic interests of the local concession community. Still, foreign members of the municipal councils, most of whom were businessmen and not colonial bureaucrats, viewed concession plans and policies through the lens of imperial ideals of “civilization and

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enlightenment,” and they often sought ways to align local issues with the national concerns of the home country. Foreign council members imagined themselves to be much like colonial civil servants dispatched by the mother country; they articulated plans for urban development through the imperialist vision of the home country, and not just through the lenses of business interest. While the imperialist visions of these concession governments shared common goals of modern, hygienic urbanization, each concession articulated a distinct, national vision for implementing that goal. As a result, the quality of policing, level of plumbing, and even the electric voltage varied across the city, dependent upon the national ideals in a particular concession.24 By the time Tianjin’s real estate market began to take off in the 1910s and 1920s, this patchwork of services could be a liability or a competitive advantage, increasing or decreasing the price of housing. Thus in a compressed cosmopolitan city of multiple foreign empires, the colonial management of each concession fueled a market competition over real estate drawn along the national lines of empire.

COMMODIFIED HOUSING When foreign empires initially established concessions in Tianjin, they were largely interested in extracting natural resources such as coal from China’s northern lands, but by the 1920s, investors began to see the land itself as a resource. Their capital found its way into the booming Tianjin real estate market, a remapping of colonial space that transformed urban space into a highly sought-after commodity. Under the logic of colonialcapitalism, Chinese land had shifted from being a site of production to being the product itself. Much like in other cities during this global period of high modernity from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, real estate investment became a driving force in Tianjin urbanization. The growth of a housing market in Tianjin illustrates the similarities or simultaneity of some aspects of modern urban experience, while also suggesting how global processes unfold differently according to local historical circumstance. In her history of the Manhattan real estate market, Elizabeth Blackmar examines how housing became a profitable commodity in nineteenth-century New York, with her conclusion building on a

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historical trajectory of urban modernity that moved from rural to urban and created a division between the two.25 Chinese patterns of urban growth, however, were different. Building on William Skinner’s model of the urban-rural continuum, historians of late imperial China have argued that city and countryside were historically linked in Chinese people’s minds and social behavior and were physically connected through shared architectural styles.26 During Tianjin’s rapid rise, many new urbanites still maintained ties to their rural native place, but ideas and practices of the city also changed. Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system disrupted the city’s late imperial past, while also distinguishing it from other cities like New York. The rise of a housing market in Tianjin was not new per se, but colonial-capitalism introduced new kinds of urban planning and building practices alongside new modes of economic investment and legal concepts of property that recognized individual or corporate investors instead of families. Under Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system, concession governments established urban plans and zoning regulations based in the ideals of empire, but because they lacked the municipal funds to develop these plans themselves, they turned to private investors to build the concessions instead. The Italians, for example, tried to fund their concession’s development by auctioning off rights to portions of their concession before even breaking ground on a single public building. 27 Other municipal governments tried to select investors with whom they shared common interests, such as nationality or language, to develop their district. The British Concession, for example, awarded most of their housing development to the Anglo-American-managed Tientsin Land Investment Company. The French, on the other hand, turned to the French-speaking Belgian bank Crédit Foncier to develop private real estate in their concession.28 The colonial-capitalist real estate system also blurred lines between public government and private business, since investors often sat on municipal councils and prominent council members worked on the boards of land investment companies. In choosing the Tientsin Land Investment Company, the British Concession turned to a company with connections to the old Tianjin Provisional Government (TPG) and the current British Municipal Council. Founded in 1902, the Tientsin Land Investment Company was one of Tianjin’s oldest real estate companies; it included such

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TPG officers as C. D. Tenney and Charles Denby Jr. on its founding board. The Tientsin Land Investment Company continued to include members of the BMC among its investors well into the 1930s.29 Thus, as municipal planners and real estate developers worked closely together, the two forces became difficult to separate. Did the Tientsin Land Investment Company draft the plans to expand the British Concession or did the BMC lead private development through its zoning laws? Actually, the order of events is beside the point, as capitalism and colonialism went hand-in-hand in treaty-port China. The men who sat on the BMC were not British colonial bureaucrats armed with civilization and enlightenment, preparing to transform the Chinese populace, but instead were businessmen who had come to Tianjin to make money. Like their foreign counterparts, Chinese investors with business or political connections to certain districts began investing in real estate as individuals or as part of corporations. Yuan Shikai and his cohorts from the Beiyang Army led development of his new municipal government district, Xin hebei qu.30 In the Japanese Concession, a former comprador for a Japanese company established the Lijin gongsi (literally “benefit Tianjin”) in 1901 to develop holdings there, investing in a range of buildings from residential alleyway homes to brothels and gambling dens.31 While several Chinese investors contributed to growth in the Japanese Concession, other foreign concessions welcomed Chinese investors to varying degrees. The French Concession, for example, did not allow Chinese people to purchase real estate on the main thoroughfare, Rue de France.32 Foreign real estate companies, however, manipulated and even profited from colonial investment regulations by appointing foreign companies as trustees for Chinese owners. Crédit Foncier acted on behalf of Chinese investors buying property in the French Concession for an initial 1 percent fee and an annual fee after that, and Chinese businessmen eventually became the primary investors in the Anglo-American Tientsin Land Investment Company, making up 63.5  percent of all investors by the 1940s.33 Chinese investors also took advantage of the political vacuum created in a multiply governed city. At the turn of the twentieth century, a particularly enterprising group of investors turned to a section of the city located between the Chinese city, the Japanese Concession, and the

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French Concession called the san bu guan, or “three do not deal with it,” since none of the three bordering municipal governments were interested in developing it. Investors included the warlord-turned-developer Li Tun, who established a real estate company called the Dongxing gongsi, and former Qing minister Rong Yuan, who established the Rongye gongsi.34 Li and Rong helped transform this untouchable zone into the city’s main shopping and entertainment thoroughfare until the French Concession took its place in the 1920s, inspiring the district to be renamed nanshi (southern market) for its location to the south of the former city wall.35 Real estate investment became a major business in Tianjin, and warlords and retired Qing bureaucrats became some of the biggest investors. Marie- Claire Bergère suggests that in contrast to Shanghai, Tianjin’s warlords and bureaucrats were not true entrepreneurs because of their political connections and their tendency to invest in property and financial speculation over modern industry.36 In other words, unlike Shanghai, Tianjin never developed a true bourgeois class. Chinese real estate investors may not have followed the same pattern of social change as France’s bourgeoisie, yet they did represent a distinct break from China’s past. These men acted as individual investors or joined forces with other male investors to work as a group, but they rarely invested on behalf of the family as an economic unit; at least nominally, these investors claimed property ownership as individuals or corporations and not as families or lineages.37 The new real estate market also changed social status through new types of housing and by spatially reengineering how social status related to political and economic spaces in the city. In Qing-era Tianjin, the social elite comprised salt merchants and scholar-gentry, and their housing clustered around the political and economic centers of the city.38 The Tianjin historian Liu Haiyan argues that China historians have been wrong to assume that social status and residential districts were not related in the late imperial Chinese city. Liu notes that in Tianjin, at least, residences were sited according to social position, with the city’s two elite groups, Qing officials and salt merchants, setting up residences close to the city’s two centers, the yamen in the center and the market outside the east gate.39 According to an old Tianjin saying, “the north gate is for nobles; the east gate for the rich; the south gate is for the poor; and the west gate is for the

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lowly” (beimen gui, dongmen fu, nanmen pin, ximen jian). A nineteenthcentury population survey corroborates this evidence, noting that almost half the city’s gentry and salt merchants lived in the city center, with the east gate being the second-most popular neighborhood for these elites, while only a small number of gentry and no salt merchants lived in the poor southern district. 40 By the twentieth century, with the end of the civil service exam and the rise of foreign trade, scholars and salt merchants ceased to dominate Tianjin’s social ranks; moreover, the city’s political and economic centers multiplied and shifted. Multiple foreign political centers sprang up, dotting the banks of the Hai River; they were joined by the Chinese government, which abandoned its location within the city walls. The landscape of Tianjin’s mercantile center also changed dramatically, with banks, trading houses, and mining companies like the Kailan Mining Administration setting up offices to create a new economic center of the city, located along an avenue that ran parallel to the Hai River and transected the French, British, and German Concessions. In fact, depending on where you were standing, and at what moment in Tianjin’s history, that same avenue could be called Rue de France (along its northern section, in the French Concession), Victoria Road (in the middle, British section), and Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse or, after World War I, Woodrow Wilson Road (the southern section). The social demography of the city also changed. The area around the old north gate, once known as the place of nobles, became home to Tianjin’s working class, while some elite native Tianjin families continued to hold on to their grand Qing-era courtyard houses. 41 Tianjin’s civil servants lived dispersed throughout the city, while warlords lived in grand villas safely ensconced in the Italian and French Concessions, next door to bankers, compradors, and intellectuals. 42 Economic status displaced Neo- Confucian social hierarchies as the determinant of where people lived. Simply put, in the new Tianjin, Chinese people lived where they could afford to. Foreign-concession governments tried and often failed to control Chinese residents in the concessions. For instance, the Italian Concession attempted to engineer the social makeup of their district by mandating that only Chinese people of a “certain character” could reside there. 43 In fact, while one of modern China’s most prolific journalists, Liang Qichao, lived in the Italian Concession, so did

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several notorious warlords. 44 In a concession where resources were notably low, a potential resident’s suitability seemed to be based less on social character or profession than on ability to pay. Thus in twentieth-century Tianjin, urbanites lived where they found housing they could afford, and the façade and the location of a house likewise marked their economic status. Moreover, close proximity to political and commercial spaces no longer designated a higher status for residential spaces. As Tianjin’s residential spaces disconnected from political and business spaces, and as the social value of housing was tied to cost, Tianjin’s socio-spatial frameworks began to resemble a Euro-American ideal of public and private separate spheres. But far from a “natural” transformation following an orderly economic reorganization, Tianjin’s colonialcapitalist real estate market instead engineered this new socio-spatial scaffolding, reconfiguring the city with the aim of maximizing profit. When the British Municipal Council proclaimed that its goal was to create a garden city on Chinese soil, they were invoking the residential ideals of the British Empire, but more importantly they were calling upon a commercial urban planning model that created distinct, for-profit residential commuter suburbs. 45 While concession governments were drawing on global prototypes to remap the city, they were also reacting against local examples of urban organization in Tianjin and elsewhere in China. In late imperial China, city neighborhoods and individual courtyard houses mixed business and residential use. This practice persisted in Tianjin’s Chinese-controlled city and to some extent in the Japanese Concession. 46 Public and private also mixed in Shanghai’s overcrowded neighborhoods, where commerce intersected with home life and multiple families squeezed into partitioned houses intended for single-family use. 47 Since Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist real estate market had taken off later than Shanghai’s, Tianjin’s foreign concessions enjoyed the hindsight of looking at Shanghai as a model of how not to plan a city. Tianjin’s French Consulate received reports from their concession in Shanghai, the Tianjin British Municipal Council closely followed the housing crisis in Shanghai’s international concession, and social science journals reported on Shanghai’s “vile” slums. 48 Shanghai’s housing market embodied unbridled capitalism. In an overcrowded housing market, renters became landlords and divided up their single-family houses to rent out rooms. But

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while urbanites on the ground made money in this system, property owners and investors lost out. Working from Shanghai as a case of undesired urban development, colonial-capitalist municipal councils in Tianjin’s foreign concessions created urban plans and zoning laws to prevent overcrowding and enhance profits for investors and property owners. To encourage a particular kind of market growth that would avoid the Shanghai model and promote a friendly environment for investment, concession governments like the Italians and the British instituted zoning regulations. Colonial-capitalist governments could not afford to base zoning regulations explicitly on race or nationality because they needed Chinese people to invest in, buy, and rent the new concession housing. So instead they focused on measures to keep out the Chinese laboring classes who had crowded Shanghai. After all, in a city of multiple empires, individual concessions did not need to worry about where workers would live; it simply was not their problem. To head off subdividing and subletting, the British carefully calculated how many cubic feet should be required per occupant and included these calculations as they created zones for different grades of housing in their new Extra-Mural Area. 49 Plans included the size of individual lots, the distance between houses, what kinds of houses could be built in each zone, and whether businesses could be established. Zoning regulations thereby ensured that each neighborhood would maintain its distinct character, so that the British Municipal Council could design social distinction into its concession. In the British Concession, zones were appropriately titled first, second, and third class; the first-class zone offered the largest lots, intending them as sites for single-family villas, presumably for the largest price tag. The first-class zone also forbade businesses, while highernumbered zones allowed some mixed use.50 By locating the largest singlefamily homes furthest from public or commercial buildings and calling the neighborhood “first-class,” BMC planners engineered a socio-spatial system in which the largest, most private, and presumably most expensive houses would designate the highest-class inhabitants. Through zoning regulations and market practices, zoning in the European concessions institutionalized and commodified the Euro-American notion of separate spheres in Tianjin. The British Concession’s colonialcapitalist real estate development inscribed a new market idea that the

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farther private housing was located from the public spheres of commerce and politics, the more expensive it would become. Likewise, the Italian Concession decided to bank solely on the residential real estate market, and explicitly forbade any businesses from setting up outright.51 At first glance, the new European practice of separating domestic dwellings from businesses seemed aimed at removing the private life of housing from the dirty world of urban commerce. But ironically, this move helped to turn housing into a business itself, because the more planners drew a line between a house and its commercial urban environment, the more commercial housing became. Moreover, the further housing was removed from the halls of government, the more it became entangled in concession and Republican politics.

THE POLITICS OF PROPERTY RIGHTS While China’s long legal tradition regulated property ownership through standard contracts and practices, the colonial-capitalist system introduced new legal understandings of property rights that connected property ownership to political rights.52 Madeleine Zelin argues that understandings of property rights are culturally constructed, and that Chinese notions of property differed from those of the West.53 Chinese understood property as a tangible thing that could be owned, whereas Western cultural ideals had come to link property to a bundle of rights. Indeed, according to the historian Jonathan Ocko, property became the core metaphor in AngloAmerican political ideology.54 Property was connected to the individual and the individual’s economic and political rights. Ocko notes that China’s political metaphor, by contrast, was the family. By the early twentieth century, however, Tianjin had experienced two major political changes that caused the cultural understandings of property to shift from family to individual. The first was the arrival and installation of multiple foreign empires, which imposed their ideas about property onto Chinese soil; the second was the fall of the Qing Empire, which had held the family at the center of political discourse. These political events changed how people possessed property—property ownership moved from the family to the individual—and they changed people’s

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cultural understanding of property—property became endowed with political rights. When the foreign-led Tianjin Provisional Government instructed Yuan Shikai, viceroy of the region at the time, to move his local government out of the old Chinese city, they also required that he take on foreign advisers. Yuan carried out reforms beyond their instructions by experimenting with new forms of governing. In Qing-era China, city governments were staffed with officials who had passed the requisite level of the civil service exam. With the abolition of the civil service exam in 1905, Yuan began to set up a municipal government system in Tianjin that was to serve as a model for Chinese cities elsewhere.55 The system that went into effect in May 1907 granted suffrage to men over the age of twenty-five who were natives of Tianjin or had resided in the city for at least five years. Voters had to be literate enough to write their name, place of residence, and occupation, and they had to hold at least 2,000 taels of property. Voters in the general election selected 135 delegates from a list of candidates with professional and educational pedigrees that included college graduates, former officials, acclaimed writers, and directors of public organizations. These delegates in turn selected thirty members for the municipal council.56 According to this new system, political identity was no longer based on mastery of the Chinese classics and ability to pass the imperial examination, but on education, profession, and property-holding status.57 Foreign concessions also turned to property as the basis for determining the right to participate in municipal governance, but the level at which they allowed Chinese property owners to partake of those rights varied. Chinese residents were active on the Japanese municipal council from the start, and Chinese representatives even surpassed the number of Japanese members in 1914.58 The French Concession, by contrast, hesitated in allowing Chinese to even own property, while the British Concession initially denied property owners of other nationalities to participate in concession governance even as property formed the basis for political participation by Britons.59 According to the 1900 “Local Land Regulations and General Regulations” of the British Municipal Council, in order to qualify as a “land renter” or property holder, one had to be a British subject or a naturalized British subject. Subjects of foreign states were allowed to hold land with permission from their national authority and had to abide by the

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regulations and by-laws of the concession. The regulations also established an elected council charged with levying taxes and holding public meetings, and each land-renter was ensured one vote.60 For foreign residents of the concessions, municipal life in Tianjin was not about experimentation in democratic governance; it was about making money. This had two consequences for politics in the British Concession. First, this created a tension between British residents’ reluctance to allow Chinese political participation and their need for Chinese capital to fund the expanding concession. Second, the concession as a moneymaking, rather than civilizing, enterprise gave rise to a political system in which the weight of a person’s vote was linked to his financial stake in the concession. While Great Britain had a history of linking taxpaying or property-holding status to voter eligibility, Tianjin’s British Concession took this tradition a step further by granting property-owning individuals a certain number of votes based on how much property they held in the concession. In other words, the more property you owned, the more your vote counted. These two issues came to a head beginning in the 1910s, when the British leased more land from the local Chinese government to expand into what they called the Extra-Mural Area. In the Extra-Mural Area, rules for political participation changed, having been negotiated under different terms: notably, Chinese residents or “ratepayers” were allowed to hold land and vote on the council. Ratepayers in the Extra-Mural Area were granted a proportional vote based upon the amount of property they held, though Chinese land owners were held to a higher minimum requirement than foreigners.61 Despite these restrictions on Chinese participation, the Chinese vote became a point of contention among local British residents after the British consulate informed them that the two settlements would have to combine jurisdictions under a single council. At a 1918 meeting to discuss amalgamation, a British resident named S. G. Teakle stated his aversion to giving Chinese a voice on the council. He suggested that concessions were for foreigners “to get away from Chinese society,” and that Chinese residents could “experiment with running a Western-style municipality in other parts of China.” He also imagined that the Chinese government did not want Chinese people to hide from Chinese law in the concessions.62

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At the heart of Teakle’s fears lay an insecurity that Chinese capital would overtake foreign political power. This insecurity was grounded in the reality that the rising Chinese demand for concession housing meant that fewer foreigners could afford to buy or rent property. The British Municipal Council’s 1912 report noted the influx of wealthy Chinese into foreign concessions, stating that “Many of the more well-to-do [Chinese] refugees bought land in the western parts of the Extension and built houses.”63 By 1921, foreign residents were beginning to feel the strain on housing, and at a meeting of general electors of the British Municipal Council, a British resident named Woodhead voiced his concern that “the Chinese demand for residences in the foreign concessions and especially in the British Concession is making it extremely difficult for foreigners of moderate means to obtain suitable housing accommodation.”64 Woodhead suggested that in the spirit of urban councils in Britain that provided housing for the working class, the British Municipal Council in Tianjin should provide subsidized housing for the foreign middle class.65 Woodhead’s concern pointed to a growing sense in Europe that not only did housing represent an individual’s identity (middle-class people lived in “suitable” housing), but that urban housing was a public right. Between 1913 and 1925, the Chinese population of the British Concession had doubled, becoming nearly fifty times larger than its British population.66 While some BMC voters may have feared that Chinese residents were dominating the property rolls, and were thus a potential political threat, the Chinese voice on the council remained quiet. This changed once Chinese ratepayers were assessed heavier transfer fees on selling land than their foreign counterparts. At a 1927 meeting of the general electors, a Mr. Shen lodged a complaint. Shen was a Chinese comprador for the Belgian bank Crédit Foncier, which had been responsible for real estate development in the British, French, and Italian Concessions. He drew up a list of demands that included translating council regulations into Chinese, and he demanded the council’s serious attention for “the unique requests of Chinese landlords, merchants and residents in the area” when deciding concession policies.67 As a comprador, a go-between for foreign and local businesses, Shen owed his economic well-being to the colonial-capitalist system. Yet as a Chinese homeowner in the British Concession, he identified less with the colonial political-economic system that created his

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status than with his Chinese neighbors. In response, the council chairman brushed aside Shen’s request and suggested that “if Chinese themselves regularly attend and take an interest,” the council would “carry on in good will.”68 The chairman’s statement was greeted by a protest from another Chinese voter named Dong, who addressed the council in Chinese. Dong stated that he could not understand English and suggested that the Chinese councilors should translate. He was then joined by Mr. Shen, who this time spoke in Chinese, declaring that the council must hire an interpreter.69 The objections succeeded: shortly thereafter, all British Municipal Council documents were published in both English and Chinese. At this meeting, the Chinese ratepayers used language to exercise power. The decision to voice Chinese demands in their native language rather than English seems to have been deliberate. As a concession property owner with an interest in attending council meetings, it seems likely that Dong could have spoken English. Shen, a comprador of a Belgian company, certainly would have been comfortable conducting business in Chinese, English, and perhaps even French. Indeed, Shen voiced his initial concerns in English, the lingua franca of the council, and switched to Chinese in solidarity with Dong. Filling the site of British colonial power with Chinese language, Dong and Shen forced the council to acknowledge that they were beholden to a Chinese constituency, and by 1936 this constituency had become so active on the BMC that Chinese electors outnumbered non- Chinese.70

ENGENDERING PROPERTY With property rights increasingly associated with the individual, rather than the family, political reformers turned to female property rights as a way to bring about gender equality and to eradicate the extended-family property system. The Republican government instituted a new legal civil code in 1929 and 1930 that introduced female inheritance and property rights alongside marriage and divorce rights. The legal reforms encouraged a cascade of litigation in which women articulated new gendered identities through a legal discourse of “rights consciousness.”71 Outside the courtroom, however, property was governed by overlapping understandings

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of ownership and rights. In a city of multiple jurisdictions such as Tianjin, property was defined through concession governance and registration practices, Chinese law, family relations, and individual autonomy. Women may have been granted property rights under the law, but a female individual’s legal and political rights through property ownership were rarely realized in practice. Under the new individual rights-based political structure, a house went from being a ritual space to a tangible manifestation of an individual’s property ownership and political rights. This ideological transition rendered the political relationship between a woman and the house ambiguous. In late imperial China, a woman’s gendered and political roles were associated with spatial practices and spatial relations inside the house.72 Chinese socio-spatial cosmologies connected the spaces of the house to the larger realm of the empire; thus, when a woman prepared and placed ritual offerings at the ancestral altar, she not only defined her position in the family but also enacted her role as a subject of the state. While ritual practices in the household outlasted the Qing, the political position that a woman performed when enacting those rituals crumbled along with the empire. Under the new political ideologies of the Republican era, officials and reformers no longer viewed housing design and household ritual practice as political acts. Instead, they introduced the house as a piece of capital that could transform its owner into a citizen of the state. As property became endowed with a new politics, legal reformers put property ownership in the hands of individual men, hoping to direct loyalty away from the family and toward the state. At the same time, property rights for women became an avenue for legal gender equality. Chinese legal reformers paid attention to female property rights in the hopes of improving China’s global standing. Chinese reformers targeted several issues: colonial legal structures in foreign concessions and extraterritoriality limited Chinese sovereignty over Chinese soil; and moreover, women had long been a yardstick for measuring Chinese civilization and modernity. Reforming the legal position of women thus became a way for China to enhance its global image. China’s legal reformers believed that if they could “de- Confucianize” China’s laws and implement “universal” individual rights–based law, they could join the modern family of nation-states, reclaim their territory, and abolish foreign extra-territoriality

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on Chinese soil.73 Advocates had attempted to reform the law as early as the late Qing, but the new civil code was not instituted until 1929. The civil code granted daughters and widows the right to inherit property and included generous provisions that allowed women to file for divorce and claim property.74 Moreover, the civil code’s call to grant women equal inheritance and break patrilineal succession went further than earlier Chinese attempts at legal reform, signaling the extent to which May Fourth ideas about the small family had influenced China’s new legal and political cultures.75 Like their May Fourth predecessors, Guomindang legal reformers wanted not only to bring about gender equality but also to take down the “feudal” Chinese family. Because reformers saw patrilineal succession of property as the glue that held that feudal family together, the new civil code moved property ownership from the family to the individual, changing both when and how property was divided. In late imperial China, each male household member had been entitled to a share of the property, which was itself managed by the male household head. When the head died, the property was not typically divided among male household members; instead, it remained in the household, managed under a patrilineal heir. The property was divided only when, under extenuating circumstances, the household could no longer remain together, at which point property was divided among male household members through a process known as fen jia. But under the new property law, in which property belonged to the individual and not the household, property belonged to the individual household head, and was divided upon his death among all family members, including his widow, his daughters, and his granddaughters. Patrilineal inheritance was to give way to a division among individuals, including women.76 Yet the civil code had only mixed success in bringing about gender equality through property. While abolishing patrilineal succession granted daughters and granddaughters a right to the family property for the first time, the law could disadvantage widows. Requiring property division at the moment of death and then granting the widow only a portion of that property, put her at the mercy of her husband’s children. Under pre-reform state policies that had promoted chaste widows, the Qing court had often ruled in favor of widows. A widow could select a supportive male heir or

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she could require that her new household continue to support her.77 Under the new law, however, a widow was only entitled to a portion of her husband’s estate, and since the law no longer required that her family support her, she could find that she was unable to keep or maintain her house.78 The civil code may not have changed gender relations overnight, but it did introduce a new way of thinking about the individual, property, and gender roles. The legal historian Margaret Kuo argues that the Guomindang government “was never able to remake society according to its ideological vision,” but that the civil code provided a legal and discursive framework of “rights consciousness” through which Chinese people reshaped their ideas about marriage and the family through litigating from the ground up.79 This language of female property rights was disseminated swiftly into urban areas such as Tianjin. A few months after the code was put into place, the Tianjin municipal government issued a handwritten memo explaining how the new regulations would affect married women in Tianjin.80 The statement focused on widow inheritance, noting that all women married after the law’s enactment would have the right to inherit property. Moreover, women who had previously been denied inheritance rights by the court would have six months after the publication of the Tianjin memo to come forward and claim that property. According to Tianjin municipal tax records from the 1930s and 1940s, several women owned property in the Chinesecontrolled city under the new property law, suggesting that the civil code had helped to change the culture of property ownership. Since gender cannot always be easily discerned from a name in Chinese, some records made special note of the owner’s gender by ascribing the title nüshi. The women who owned property in Tianjin’s Chinese city either had purchased the property themselves or received it from a male relative.81 One woman owned property along the busy East Road of the Chinese city where the wall once stood, while another woman managed a rental property with more than a hundred rooms on the city outskirts.82 Property disputes offer further insight into how Chinese people negotiated the new legal culture of individual property rights in a society that still organized its ideas about property around the family.83 The new civil code was designed to promote a society in which nuclear families were the standard form of family organization, and in which the individual or

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corporation was the primary economic rights holder. Yet Chinese society did not fit that ideal type. Moreover, under the colonial-capitalist system, Chinese courts did not have complete jurisdiction over property held in foreign concessions, and foreign courts did not rule over Chinese citizens. Chinese property cases were heard by Chinese courts, but Chinese homeowners in foreign concessions were required to register their property with the foreign concession government. In a multiply colonized Tianjin, the new Republican government’s political ideology of a citizen-state relationship expressed through individual property rights was interrupted by layers of colonial laws. The multiplicity of property laws and rights created gaps, confusions, and contradictions that Chinese individuals and families could exploit. A female property owner could call upon the European legal culture of individual property rights to ask the concession to help execute the new civil code on her behalf; likewise, a family could seek the concession’s support of a male property owner’s privilege to deny his wife the right to manage the family property. Living under multiple property jurisdictions and changing legal cultures, Chinese women in Tianjin’s foreign concession negotiated multifarious layers of state, colonial, and global power to claim property rights and ownership. Extra-territoriality meant that an individual’s property rights were connected to that individual’s home country, no matter where the property was located. Chinese courts oversaw disputes by Chinese people who owned property in the Italian Concession, while an American living in the British Concession would have taken a property case to the American consular court. But while the home country determined an individual’s property rights, the concession government decided whether or not that individual had the right to buy or sell concession property. Property owners in the French Concession had to file their title deed in multiple offices, including the concession, the home consulate for foreigners, the bureau of foreign affairs, and the local Chinese government.84 The French Concession verified whether or not a title deed was valid, and they could engage their police force to investigate a title’s legitimacy before a property transfer. In some instances the concession denied the sale of a property based on the deed’s validity.85 Thus, while foreign courts could not oversee Chinese cases, concession governments maintained authority over property ownership. At the same time, this offered some Chinese

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residents of foreign concessions an alternative avenue for appeals, especially when they were waiting for their cases to be heard by the Chinese court or when they did not want to take their case to court at all.86 The two cases from Tianjin’s French Concession illuminate how Tianjin urbanites living in the foreign concessions negotiated multiple political layers of property regimes to forge their gendered, individual, and familial identities.87 Moreover, these cases suggest that new cultures of individual property rights may have supported masculine power over female rights. The first case involved a woman seeking a divorce. On March 6, 1931, a Tianjin attorney named Richard T. Evans submitted a letter to the French consulate on behalf of his client Mrs. He Zhang Suling, asking the consulate and the concession to protect Mrs. He and her property as she waited to have her case heard by the Chinese court.88 Mrs. He and her husband owned property in the heart of the French Concession off of Rue de Passe along an alleyway named Tianchang Li. The property had been purchased by the He family and registered with the concession under the name Yudetang He or the Jade Moral Hall of He. Mr. and Mrs. He received the property when the He family divided, however the acte du vente (deed of sale) had not been changed to mark this transfer, perhaps because the husband and wife were minors, nineteen and twenty respectively. According to Mrs. He’s attorney, she discovered a promissory note indicating that her husband was trying to sell the property out from under her to his eldest sister and older brother. Moreover, the husband had abandoned Mrs. He and the property and had removed furniture from the domicile. Mrs. He was seeking a divorce, most likely on the grounds of abandonment, from her husband who had fallen into a “disreputable life” in which “court officers can never find him.” Despite his absence, however, Mr. He had appointed a French man to collect rents on the property and had hired bullies to harass his wife into leaving the property. Mrs.  He had begun proceedings in the Tianjin Chinese Civil Court to annul the property sale to her husband’s siblings and to sequester rental income, but the case would take over a month. In the meantime, her attorney was requesting that the French Concession permit a title transfer, seal up the domicile property, collect and hold the rent until the court decision, and offer police protection.

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The He dispute reveals the multiple cultural and legal frameworks through which Tianjin urbanites understood property ownership and rights. As the impetus for cases like this one, the civil code illuminated interactions between Chinese and colonial property regimes, as well as the tenacity of the family economic unit in a legal culture that increasingly favored individuals. Even though the He household most likely purchased the property in the 1910s or 1920s, when property ownership was already shifting to the individual, they purchased the property as a family unit. Since the concession required that a title deed be registered under the name of an individual or of a corporation, the He household registered the property under Yudetang He. In late imperial China, much like in the colonial city, the household head’s name typically represented the family unit on contracts or titles.89 The He family may have chosen “Yudetang” as a poetic name for the property inspired by nearby Rue de Passe, which included the character de in its Chinese translated name, or “Yudetang” may have been the name of their family business.90 Regardless of why the Hes entered the deed as they did, in the eyes of the French colonial property system, Yudetang He was legally a corporate owner, which would be treated as an individual unit. That individual unit could change only through a legal property transfer and corresponding change in the title deed. The He family, however, understood the property differently from the French colonial representatives. Drawing on a longer history of family property in China, the Hes believed the house belonged to the collective household unit, and since household division had typically been mediated outside the state, they did not deem it necessary to change the name on the title deed.91 But the new civil code threatened the seamless transfer of property under household division, as granting women the right to claim property in a divorce threatened to remove property from the patriline for the first time.92 Fear of this threat may have been strong enough to prompt Mr. He to transfer the property to his siblings. Yet with the property legally registered under the corporation of Yudetang He, it is unclear how the court would have ruled on this case.93 The civil code granted women the right to own property and to claim their fair share, but it did not ensure their right to manage that property, and neither did it give them political rights that might be associated with

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property ownership. If late imperial Chinese cultural understandings had regarded property as a “thing” owned by the family unit, the new twentieth-century legal culture of property rights introduced property as a bundle of rights assigned to an individual owner. The 1929–1930 Chinese civil code placed women’s property rights between these two cultural understandings. Women could claim individual ownership over their fair share of property, but they did not automatically gain the rights and responsibility that came with property ownership under an individualbased property regime. Unlike their Chinese male counterparts, women who owned property did not gain a political voice in the foreign concessions, and married women did not gain the right to manage the property over their husbands, even when that property was in their name. Thus, while property was understood to belong to an individual, in the case of married couples that individual was usually the husband/father until his death, at which time it was divided among the entire family. Legally, property could be listed in a wife’s name, but culturally, a husband might consider himself, and not his wife, to be the manager of that property. Not all property issues brought to the French Concession’s attention ended up in court. Elite families preferred to keep family disputes private, especially those that dealt with the subtleties of property management within a family, as the second French Concession example shows. In April  1930, Henry  K. Chang, consul general for China in San Francisco, sent letters to the French Consulate and French Concession demanding that his wife Isabel Tong Chang not be allowed to sell, mortgage, or transfer his property at 9 Cours Joffre.94 The property, listed in Isabel’s name, was located along the French Concession’s showpiece—a stunning circular park in one of the most expensive neighborhoods, indeed a site where some of Tianjin’s wealthiest warlords and industrialists had built palatial mansions during the early 1920s. While her husband was stationed in San Francisco, Isabel had mortgaged the property to the Belgian bank Crédit Foncier for over 20,000 taels. When her father-in-law heard about the incident, he repaid the mortgage and asked that the title deed be transferred to his name. When Isabel later brought him the deed in Beijing, however, he discovered that it was still in her name. Isabel’s father-in-law promptly asked her to sign a document stating that she would not sell or mortgage the

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property and that to do so “would be illegal.” The father-in-law forwarded the notarized document to the French Concession, and Henry sent a telegram stating that the property could only be sold or mortgaged in his or his father’s name. In letters that followed, Henry specified that no statement from him would be valid except one sent from San Francisco or from a foreign bank under an identified signature. Henry also took further steps to remove his wife from managing the property and appointed the Banque Belge pour l’Etranger to pay taxes in his absence. Henry and his father may have feared that Isabel was attempting to remove the property from the patriline, but they were more likely concerned that she would mismanage the property in Henry’s absence. There is little evidence to suggest that Isabel was threatening divorce. Indeed, she and Henry had six daughters, stayed married to the end of their days, and Henry, who outlived Isabel by twenty years, never remarried.95 But if Henry and his father did not want Isabel to manage the property, why did they put the title deed in her name? Henry may already have been posted to San Francisco by the time the property was purchased, and they did not have another choice; or the property may have been put in Isabel’s name to hide an investment made by Henry or the extended Chang family.96 Regardless of the reason, Henry assumed that with the deed in her name, his wife would not act outside his wishes, thus echoing the contradictory political culture of the day that gave women the legal right to own property but did not necessarily endow them with the trust to manage it. Henry also seemed to act outside new legal cultural norms of individual property ownership when he suggested that his father, rather than his wife, should act on behalf of the property. Indeed, Henry and his father may have understood the property to belong to the Chang family rather than to Henry or Isabel as individuals. What effect, if any, did the new civil laws have on Henry’s understanding of property? If anyone could understand the legal background of the new system of individual property rights, it was Henry K. Chang, a member of the Chinese government and a graduate, with a law degree, from the University of Pennsylvania.97 But more than that, he claimed expertise in property law: one year after sending his letter to the French Concession asking them not to allow his wife to manage his property, Henry penned an article about the Chinese family for the American Rotary Club magazine in which he

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discussed China’s shifting legal culture and its effect on the family, the individual, and their property rights.98 While the article focused on the Chinese family in general, Henry began the article by noting that before the new legal code, “Chinese never felt the need of making wills for the reason that the property rights were so well defined by common usages,” and he ended his article with a suggestion that with the “recent completion of the first three sections of China’s civil code, family relationships, marriages and divorce, property rights of both sexes, and the right of inheritance, etc., are all minutely defined, and are intended by the authorities to supersede the common law and usages which have hitherto prevailed.”99 The article was published just under one year after Henry sent the telegram to the French Concession asking them to prevent his wife from selling or mortgaging the property in her name. How might this personal experience have led him to contemplate the role that the new civil law was playing in defining individual property rights and in reshaping Chinese family structures? In his private life Henry acted to intervene in his wife’s individual property rights and called upon his father and his extended family to manage the property, whereas in his public essay Henry praised the new legal changes, proclaiming that they were bringing China “in line in the march of progress.”100 These seemingly contradictory responses by a single person exemplified the two sides of masculinity and power in twentieth-century China that on the one hand called for a new relationship between women and property but in practice excreted male economic power. When it came to ideas and practices of family and property, Henry Chang, like many elite men in his day, lived two lives: a private and personal life in which he negotiated shifting legal cultures and social practices, and a public life in which he optimistically highlighted China’s changing family and espoused progressive ideology. Like many of his colleagues in government and politics, Henry articulated his public persona through the rhetoric of new nationalist Chinese ideology. The audience of Henry’s performance was the global stage. Even before Henry married Isabel, he began fashioning a public identity for a global audience. He studied in Europe and the United States before earning his undergraduate and law degrees from Penn; his educational achievements were even featured in the Washington Times.101

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Henry and his family were launched onto the global stage in December 1909, when his father was appointed as the last Qing ambassador to the United States. Henry, his mother and his sisters, his future bride Isabel, and Isabel’s sister joined Henry’s father in travelling together to Washington, DC, making newspaper headlines along the way. The press immediately seized on the Chang family as exemplars of a China in transition. The San Francisco Call featured photographs of family members on the front page, with the elder Chang dressed in mandarin robes and Henry in a Western-style suit. According to the article, Henry was “as aggressively United States as his distinguished father is oriental.”102 (See figure  3.2.) Isabel also came from an esteemed background and boasted connections to the United States: her father Tang Shaoyi had traveled there in 1908 on an official mission to thank the country for the Boxer Indemnity and later served as the first premier of the Republic of China, while her sister went on to marry the famed Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo. Isabel and Henry’s marriage seemed to have been tailored for Washington’s society pages. Henry and Isabel made another media splash when they married on Christmas Day at the Chinese legation, leading the American press to speculate whether the marriage was arranged or a love match.103 In an American media fascinated by the dramatization of the global stage on American soil, the ambassador’s entourage continued to make national news. The Omaha Daily Bee reported on the girls’ visit to Springfield, Massachusetts, while the New York Tribune announced Mrs. Chang’s Thursday teas for the diplomatic corps.104 The American media used the Chang family women to create a story not only of a changing China but also of the power of American customs and education to transform and civilize. The Chang and Tang sisters were depicted as English-speaking, educated, fashionable, and were always said to be wearing foreign shoes. (See figure 3.3.) But the Chang daughters were anything but passive objects of an American media frenzy. Instead, they constructed their image. When the Chinese helped to launch an American-made cruiser from a New York shipyard, Henry’s youngest sister led the affair, even though the entire family, including her father and brother were in attendance.105 Alice, who the Washington paper described as “charmingly naïve,” took the opportunity to wax profoundly to the press on political changes under China’s new

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FIGURE 3.2 The Chang family’s arrival in 1909. San Francisco Call, December 11, 1909.

government, stating that China was now “a republic and we shall have all the freedom and liberty that you American women enjoy. It will be glorious.”106 Through a process of colonial coproduction, the younger Changs, in their public celebration of American education, holidays, and footwear, had already come to represent the freedom and liberty of a future China on

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FIGURE 3.3 Isabel Chang with Henry’s sisters and mother. The Day Book, May 14, 1912.

the global stage as well as the power of American culture and values to bring about that change. Indeed, the same paper that announced their arrival also reported on their departure four years later: the Chang family, a reporter gushed, “came in picturesque costumes of their court” and departed in “chic tailor made gowns, with smart American made shoes of black leather . . . and becoming French model hats” (figure 3.4).107 When we look past these carefully cultivated images, however, the Chang family exemplifies how public ideological proclamations and personal practices did not always match up. Chinese nationalist intellectuals and political reformers who supported small families or gender equality in public did not always practice what they preached in private. While the senior Chang had willingly dispatched his youngest daughter to represent the fresh face of a progressive China at public functions in the United States, he was hesitant to allow his daughter-in-law to manage her property in China. Likewise, Henry publicly called for changes to China’s old family

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FIGURE 3.4 The Chang women before returning to China. San Francisco Call, June 23, 1913.

system while simultaneously maintaining close financial and property ties to his father. The new civil law was also fraught with these kinds of tensions. Since property was the center of Anglo-American law, Chinese lawmakers had also made it the legal centerpiece for gender equality; but while women were granted the right to claim ownership, they were never granted other political property rights associated with Anglo-American legal and political cultures. In fairness, women in England and the United States did not gain the political right to vote until 1918 and 1920 respectively; moreover, Tianjin’s foreign concessions never allowed female property owners, Chinese or foreign, to serve as electors or members of the council. Thus in many ways, property rights became central to Chinese male, rather than female, gendered identities in twentieth-century China.

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MASCULINITY AND PROPERTY Changing legal and economic practices of property ownership transformed property into a site of individual masculine identity formation in colonial-capitalist Tianjin. To begin with, the legal conception of property ownership was shifting from the household to the individual. This was first enacted in foreign concession property regulations and later codified in the 1929 civil code. Individual property ownership mobilized layers of identities beginning with economic status. Owning property depended on the economic capacity to purchase it, moreover participation in concession governance was determined by this capacity. But in a colonized city, economic status was also undercut by racialized ideas of national origin, and Chinese property owners were not always allowed to participate in governance or even be taxed at the same rate as their, usually white, counterparts of European or U.S. origin. Finally property became a central site of gendered identity formation. The Chinese civil code aimed to empower women through property rights, while the right to engage in the political affairs of the concessions as a property owner was a masculine affair. Thus, as elite Chinese men claimed their individual property rights in multiply colonized Tianjin, they were simultaneously navigating changing practices of status, race, and gender to forge their individual masculine identities. In Tianjin’s foreign concessions, the house became a symbol of masculinity because property ownership legally and financially regulated a person’s economic, racial, and gendered identities. In Tianjin, Chinese men who owned houses were not simply endowed with property rights; they had to navigate the identity norms that multiple layers of colonial power put upon them in order to claim their individual property rights. The British Municipal Council of the British Concession is an example of a site where this process took place. The council was a homosocial space— only male property owners were allowed to serve on the council and to participate as electors. These men gathered annually to discuss concession business in Gordon Hall, the Gothic municipal hall and government center of the concession. If women attended these meetings, they were not recorded in the minutes. While the municipal council began as a white British space, Chinese property owners were eventually allowed to participate, and as the Chinese population in the British Concession grew, and as the British

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Municipal Council began translating documents into Chinese, their participation at council meetings increased. In 1935, Chinese male rate-payers found themselves mobilized against the British over a single issue: water.108 In 1899, British Concession Water Works began pumping water from Tianjin’s Hai River. The water was purified before flowing through concession home pipes, but it still needed to be boiled before it was palatable. Over the years, as the city fought off one cholera epidemic after another, the council debated the sanitation of river water.109 By the 1930s, the water works had devised a thoroughly modern system that drew water from wells rather than the dirty river. This new water was tested by Chinese and foreign residents alike, and Chinese property owners in particular were concerned that the well water was too costly and tasted salty. As a remedy, they demanded to be allowed to consume water from the Tianjin Native City Water Works that supplied the rest of the city.110 Foreigners on the BMC, however, were concerned more with hygiene than with taste. Thus, Chinese residents leveraged British fears over health by questioning whether the well water’s high levels of fluorine made it palatable. According to some studies at the time, fluorine was thought to have contributed to mottled teeth. The British, in turn, conducted scientific studies of the water to confirm that the well water was indeed more sanitary. They studied the effects of water on the teeth of foreign children residing in the concession. When that did not satisfy Chinese residents, they sent the water to Britain to be tested by “a panel of scientists and experts.” The experts determined that the water was excellent, albeit with a “mineral taste” that was “more noticeable when heated.”111 Chinese residents refused to give in on the salty water. One Chinese property owner put taste into economic terms. Mr. Zao Jiuyou complained that the high cost of bad-tasting water was driving prospective Chinese residents out of the concession, depressing rental incomes: “People are not inclined to reside in this Area on account of the salty taste and high cost of the water supply.” Zao feared the problem would cascade: “If it were not for the drop of house rentals suffered by the property owners, it is to be feared that more houses would remain vacant. Furthermore, the loss of each resident will mean the loss of the Council of his portion of revenue due to rental assessment, electricity and water receipts.”112 In this colonialcapitalist fight over water, Chinese male property owners used the

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colonizer’s discourses of hygienic modernity and economic rationalism to wield their economic power as property owners and their political rights as rate-payers. While years earlier, Chinese rate-payers had spoken in Chinese to gain a voice on the council, in the debate over water, they instead used the so-called universal language of science, economic rationalism, and property rights, turning the discourse of foreign empire back onto the colonizer, to be most effective. Due to these tactics and their persistence, the BMC eventually conceded, allowing Chinese residents to receive water from the Native City Water Works delivered by water carriers, while British Municipal Council Water Works continued to pump water through the pipes.113 In the fight over drinking water, Chinese male homeowners demonstrated a new understanding of individual private property rights based in the colonial-capitalist market’s division of public and private spaces, and new cultural legal understandings of individual property rights. As the real estate market divided the city into public and private spaces, both the colonial and the new Chinese political systems appointed the male property owner to serve as the individual political representative of private property. These new understandings of private space and property rights inspired new ways of thinking about the relationship between household and state. In late imperial China, household and state were interconnected, and the household had a responsibility to maintain order through ritual practice. In treaty-port Tianjin, the district or concession was responsible for supplying public services to provide comfort at home and in its environs—from clean roads to a working sewer system and palatable water—and property rights endowed owners with the right to demand such services. When these services were not provided to Chinese property owners’ liking in the British Concession, they turned private property into a public issue, joining their individual voices on the municipal council with a unified concern. While Chinese property owners could have stood up to the BMC on a collective nationalist issue, such as British extraterritorial legal rights on Chinese soil, instead they petitioned for an issue that leveraged their individual property rights, and indeed, leveraged them on an issue that was connected closely to their individual private lives at home, palatable drinking water. As these men demonstrated, even as colonial-capitalist and Chinese political notions of space and property

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moved more toward a system of separate spheres and individual rights, the modern urban home was never simply a sequestered place of private domesticity; it was also central to notions of masculine self-identity.114 These debates on the British Municipal Council over drinking water suggest that while Chinese lawmakers may have reformed property law to bring about equal rights for Chinese women, the reforms may have gone further in shaping individual masculine identities of Chinese men. The new civil law granted Chinese women the right to claim a share of their family property through inheritance or divorce, but it did not grant women the right to act as public individuals on behalf of that property. As legal understandings of property shifted from the extended family to the individual, men became the legal representatives of the nuclear family’s property and claimed the new political property rights that went along with it.

CONCLUSION In early twentieth-century Tianjin, three forces shaped new ideas about housing, property, and its connection to individual identity: the colonialcapitalist real estate market, colonial property regulations, and the Guomindang civil law. For Tianjin’s Chinese economic elites, property became a source of masculine individual identity and political power. This rise of individualism could have bolstered Chinese nationalism. Chinese political reformers designed the civil code to favor the individual and bring an end to the traditional Chinese family, but instead, the new individualist private property regime in many ways undermined the nationalist project. One of the chief goals of legal reformers had been to bring about gender equality, but by failing to grant women explicit property rights, the new individual property ownership structure actually granted individual men stronger political property rights by default. Moreover, the very nature of individual rights promised by new ideas and practices of property ownership undermined the collective project of the nation. With market forces and legal reforms focused on the property rights of the individual rather than on society’s need for housing, Guomindang reformers and foreignconcession governments ignored a growing crisis in Chinese cities: the

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housing shortage. Indeed, it was not until after World War II, when the foreign concessions were returned and Tianjin became a wholly Chinese city, that Tianjin’s government could focus on public housing, and the Communists would make the right to housing, rather than property rights, one of the central tenets of their governance.

4 Choosing a House

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efore becoming a treaty port in 1860, the city of Tianjin already had a sizeable population, and by the 1920s that number had quadrupled to a population of two million.1 Tianjin’s native residents were joined by individuals and families who migrated to the city seeking economic opportunities or the safety of the foreign concessions, and Tianjin’s urban elites grew to include natives and migrants, permanent residents, and temporary sojourners. When choosing a house, the city’s elites faced diverse choices. While residents of Qing-era Tianjin could select to live in or build a courtyard house, elite residents of treaty-port Tianjin could choose to live in a quiet villa in the residential Italian Concession, a row house in the bustling Japanese Concession, a modernist apartment along Rue de France, a semi-attached townhouse in the British garden city, an alleyway house in the new Chinese municipality, or a Qing-era courtyard house in the old Chinese city. Tianjin urbanites faced choices but also limitations, starting with their budget. A Chinese resident of Tianjin first had to decide whether to rent or buy a house. Temporary sojourners may have been more inclined to rent, and sometimes their employer covered housing costs. Some people decided to purchase their residence as a space for living; others decided to purchase a  residence as an investment. If a Chinese person wanted to

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reside in a foreign concession, they faced high rents and hefty purchase prices and often regulations over Chinese ownership. Despite these obstacles, Chinese people still bought and rented the majority of concession homes. Even if a person had enough money, choosing a house was also determined by availability. Tianjin’s housing market was growing rapidly, yet demand outpaced the supply. At first glance, choosing a house appeared to be market-driven, but the structures and spaces of housing also were political. During the Qing dynasty a single sociopolitical ideology drove design, and after the fall of the Qing, Chinese nationalist ideology focused more on the demography of the family than the structure of the house. But houses that represented Qing-era spatial principles still stood in the old city and continued to be constructed during the Republican era. At the same time, houses in the foreign concessions were built according to each concession’s zoning regulations, which often reflected European notions of public-private and domesticity. Foreign imperial expansion in Tianjin’s built environment both deliberately and indirectly aimed to displace and replace the imperial Chinese structural order, but even after foreigners tore down the imperial city wall and so-called modern urban planning proliferated across the city, courtyard houses continued to be built. Thus, when selecting a house, Tianjin urbanites chose from two political spatial ideologies: Chinese courtyard house built by artisan-carpenters who followed late imperial architectural ideals, or Western-style houses designed by architects or builders according to European housing principles. These two technologies of space— courtyard house and Western house— coexisted in Tianjin’s urban landscape and within the lifespan of its elite inhabitants, who likely experienced both technologies during their residence in the city. To dwell in the world meant not only to have multiple choices, but to ultimately feel equally comfortable with either choice; in other words, to be at home in the world. Chinese individuals could choose where to live, but the Chinese municipal government, colonial governments, and real estate investors decided what new housing would look like. Houses contained ideologies, held ritual significance, embodied systems of belief, and framed social prescriptions. Houses were shelters, divided by posts and walls, held up with beams, and covered by a roof. They were constructed to keep out rain, let in sunlight, and circulate air. But if Tianjin houses were structured in

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practical ways, they were also structured through politically driven engineering. Tianjin’s multiple governments decided what circulated in and through and out of these houses. New Tianjin houses included plumbing to pump in municipal water, telephone lines to connect communication, and electric wires to illuminate lightbulbs. Houses connected people to the city and placed people within urban hierarchies, while the spaces within a house prescribed gender roles, shaped generational differences, and regulated social hierarchies. People could choose the type of house they wanted to live in or decide how to decorate it, but they could not tear down load-bearing walls. To choose a house was thus to select a particular set of prescriptive social spatial practices. How did Chinese people choose and adapt to different spatial technologies within their city and their lifetime, and in what ways did these dissimilar technologies of house shape everyday life? These questions cannot be answered by archives alone. Archives concerning the real estate market or property ownership in Tianjin might hold some clues, but these materials are not open to researchers. Real estate records can illuminate how much people paid for housing, and who purchased or rented it, but they cannot speak to why a person chose a particular house or how that house shaped their everyday lives. This chapter draws from unrelated archival records of the Republican era, but it focuses specifically on three case studies to construct its own archive of the house and thus to trace priorities and conditions involved in choosing a house. The case studies include physical details of a preserved courtyard house, blueprints of a house in the Italian Concession, and one woman’s memoir of the multiple houses she lived in. The newly constructed archive of the house offered in this chapter brings materiality to the two ideal types of socio-spatial technologies— carpenter-built courtyard houses and readymade builder homes—that framed the everyday lives of Tianjin urban elites during the first half of the twentieth century. In treaty-port Tianjin, people chose houses, but housing also shaped people.

A REPUBLICAN- ERA COURTYARD HOUSE Very few courtyard houses remain in Tianjin. Most of the old city was demolished to make way for a new old-style shopping district. But one

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house has been preserved and currently serves as a museum. The house stands on what would have been a busy street during the Republican era, and there was likely a neighbor to either side. The house is actually a compound that includes three courtyards seated along a north-south axis. This three-courtyard compound is surrounded by a brick wall that separates the inner space of the compound from the outer world of the street. Indeed the street outside was probably quite bustling, as early photographs of Tianjin’s old city depict the streets in front of courtyard houses as filled with peddlers, rickshaws, barbers, and people loitering or passing by. A visitor who approached the compound from the main southern entrance would not have been able to see inside over the tall gray brick wall, and passersby would have had little idea about what kind of household lived beyond the wall until they came to the door. The doorway offered a glimpse into the status of the compound’s occupants. The height, the type of wood or materials used, the quality of craft, and the ornateness or plainness of the decoration all gave clues as to what kind of household dwelled behind the high wall. The doorway also served as what Francesca Bray calls a “notice board” that announced the achievements of the inner household to the outer community.2 A fortuitous event such as a wedding or the birth of a son was recorded on red paper and pasted to the door, while a more somber occasion like a death was noted

FIGURE 4.1 Xu Pu’an house—stone screen. Photograph by the author.

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on white paper. Doorways were portals between inner and outer, nei and wai. Just like the mutual relationship between empire and household, inner and outer were porous and interconnected, and doorways facilitated the movement of people, things, good fortune, and even ghosts and energy in and out of the household. Crossing the threshold of the doorway, a visitor entered a small entry yard and faced a stone screen (figure 4.1). The screen did not actually shield the interior from view since it faced a wall; instead the screen blocked negative energy and ghosts from the outer realm from flying into the compound, and it prevented positive energy and good fortune from the inner chambers from escaping outside. There were two ways to enter the compound. A household member might have walked straight ahead through the open doorway to the left of the screen and entered the north-south corridor that spanned the length of the compound (figure  4.2). Visitors would most likely have turned to their left and walked toward the doorway that led directly into the first courtyard (figures 4.3 and 4.4). The compound consisted of three courtyards lined up in a row along a north-south axis. Each courtyard was framed by four single-story wings. The first (or southernmost) courtyard and its buildings would have been considered the most outer space of the house, while the third (or northern) courtyard would have been considered a more inner space. Guests were entertained or business took place in the first courtyard, while the back (or innermost) courtyard rarely would have received nonfamilial male guests. There are no blueprints to explain how or why this courtyard house was designed in this manner. The carpenters who built courtyard houses did not use blueprints, but they did follow a systematic set of design and building principles. These principles would have been learned on the job until they became embodied knowledge. The carpenters who built this house most likely did not learn their trade from a manual, but treatises and manuals on architectural principles and building practices produced during late imperial China can still illuminate shared spatial ideologies and practices. The Yingzao fashi or “Treatise on Architectural Methods” is the earliest example of a late imperial architectural manual.3 In 1103, the Song imperial court commanded Li Jie, the director of court construction, to compile a series of architectural guidelines for building the capital. Li, who had overseen the

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FIGURE 4.2 Xu Pu’an house— corridor. Photograph by the author.

construction of several imperial buildings, described a technological method for building that was based on standardization and modularity. For the first time, Li committed to paper the proportional system of measurement that formed the foundation of Chinese post-and-beam construction.4 This standard of late imperial architectural measurement was based on a module called a cai, composed of 15 units or fen in height by 10 units in width. The Yingzao fashi outlined eight different grades of imperial architecture, all built according to the 15-to-10 fen proportion, with the size of the fen differing according to grade.5 The imperial building techniques outlined in the Yingzao fashi were developed from the early Ming (1368–1644) when, according to the historian Klaas Ruitenbeek, “there were hardly any changes in official

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FIGURE 4.3 Xu Pu’an house— doorway into first courtyard. Photograph by the author.

architectural style.”6 The Yingzao fashi did not instruct carpenters in how to build houses, but, for the first time, it chronicled the imperial building system that would form the core of building knowledge in China. The practice of building houses was later recorded in a more popular carpenters’ manual that chronicled the techniques and practices of everyday building, from houses and stables to furniture. The Lu Ban jing or “Classic of Lu Ban,” published during the Ming dynasty, with information dating back to the Song and Yuan dynasties, is the best known of these manuals and has survived even to present-day Taiwan.7 This carpenter’s manual was named for Lu Ban, a fifth-century BCE craftsperson who

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FIGURE 4.4 Xu Pu’an house—first courtyard. Photograph by the author.

became the patron saint of carpenters. In practice, the manual was less of a guide for carpenters than a metaphysical embodiment of the spiritual and ritual practices of carpentry. In his annotated translation of the Lu Ban jing, Ruitenbeek suggests that most carpenters probably could not have read the manual, but nevertheless kept a copy on hand as a talisman to protect them throughout the building process.8 For those outside the building profession, the Lu Ban jing included information on techniques for constructing houses and furniture, as well as insight into the magic and tricks that disgruntled carpenters were known to practice against employers and clients. Houses in late imperial China employed the structural technology of a standardized system of building and engineering alongside the cultural and political technologies of cosmological energy and Neo- Confucian socio-political norms. Artisan-carpenters were masters of all three technologies: engineering, cosmology, and Confucianism. Carpenters studied these technologies first by observing a master craftsman, often as an

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apprentice, and second by imitating the master.9 Although building knowledge was embodied knowledge, it also engaged the mind through rote memorization; carpenters learned a series of mnemonic rhymes that described everything from the wooden parts of a structure to the process for laying bricks or building a roof.10 A master carpenter would have committed a standard building catalog to memory so he could design and build a house without any drawings or models.11 The Lu Ban jing suggests how two types of technologies were inseparable in building imperial houses: carpenters in late imperial China had to be fluent in structural engineering, but they also needed to build houses in accordance with popular geomantic principles of harmonious design. Indeed, one of the more distinctive features of late imperial domestic architecture was that regardless of region or the social, political, and economic status of the owner, structures were designed and built according to the same geomantic principles. Geomancy, also known as feng shui (literally “wind and water”), is a process of siting a building so that it is in alignment with the energies of nature and the cosmos. Energy or qi circulated through houses and (depending on construction) could contribute to the long-term prosperity of a family or lead to chaos and ruin. In this sense, the jia as house was a natural organism connected to the jia as household.12 Since the auspiciousness of the house was central to the prosperity of the family, each step in building a house combined structural and geomantic engineering. Ruitenbeek calls this an “imaginary architecture,” a geomantic architecture constructed on top of structural engineering that is invisible to an untrained eye. Ronald Knapp, a leading scholar of Chinese architecture and cultural tradition, has noted that geomantic architectural design not only brought good luck but also created an aesthetic balance to a structure that “at its most elegant, . . . is a sculptural expression of the cosmos.”13 In late imperial China, families often custom-built their houses. The household head was involved in each step of the process, which first required choosing an auspicious location—whether by consulting an almanac, contracting with a geomantic expert, or hiring a knowledgeable carpenter. The house would then be designed around that location, typically planned on a north-south axis, facing south, with a symmetrical balance between east and west.14 A household built and expanded its

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residence slowly over an extended period of time, which had practical as well as cosmological implications: building a house slowly ensured that each step was conducted at the most cosmologically correct and auspicious time to facilitate a flow of positive energies and block negative energies; but it also allowed families to build a house in increments, which made the best financial sense for most households. Since carpenters designed and built houses according to a modular system, this expansion could happen over time.15 Houses typically were designed with modules that included a south-facing hall or halls (called a ting or a tang), arranged on a north-south axis with jian (bays) on either side. A jian was the space between four columns; a room could include several jian, or jian could be added on at a later date as long as they remained proportional.16 Thus, the jian allowed for simplicity, modularity, and the possibility for portions of the house to be prefabricated offsite. Courtyards were transitional inner-outer spaces located within a compound’s walls that became multiseasonal living spaces in their own right.17 Typically, a courtyard was surrounded on three sides by a main hall at the north and flanking wings on either side. In northern cities like Tianjin and Beijing, a hall on the south side of the square (which thus faced north) closed off the courtyard, completing a four-sided courtyard house known as a siheyuan (literally a four-sided courtyard). The courtyard and surrounding walls became a module in itself, and a Chinese house in Tianjin might have had one or multiple courtyards, with each courtyard usually constructed in a straight line along the north-south axis. Once the location and proper time for building had been chosen and building plans determined, construction began by tamping the ground. A series of ritual practices were organized for this and every step that followed.18 Hoisting the ridge pole (shangliang), the longest beam that held up the uppermost peak of the roof, was a structurally and ritually significant event. The homeowner first would consult an almanac to ensure that a most auspicious day was chosen for the occasion, then depending on local custom he would be sure to supply his workers with an abundance of sweets, food, liquor, or cash to keep them satisfied and discourage them from slipping an evil talisman into the pole or practicing other evil magic on the house.19 Geomantic architectural technology took every line and angle into account, and carpenters were experts in calculating auspicious

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measurements, carrying a special rule named after the patron saint Lu Ban himself, which included lucky and unlucky inches.20 Carpenters measured each window and door, sometimes adjusting just an inch to ensure that the opening was cosmologically correct. Houses were metaphysical shelters that could bring prosperity or destitution to a family. Cautious household heads oversaw each ritual step in the building process because disgruntled carpenters were known to use their magical powers to bring harm to a family. Indeed, the Lu Ban jing included just as many entries on magical carpentry spells as instructions for building techniques, and household manuals intended for elite homeowners included recipes for reversing their damage.21 The ritual negotiations between homeowner and carpenter suggest that despite a carpenter’s low social status, his skills and knowledge were highly valued, and thus could be leveraged into better working conditions.22 When owners and carpenters designed houses with auspicious symmetry, or when owners tried to remedy a carpenter’s cosmological trick, they were not simply engaging in personal negotiations over a private family house. They were also participating in a political project that linked the household to the empire through a standardized building technology. The standardization of building technology coincided with the rise of a new socio-political interpretation of Confucianism, known among Western scholars today as Neo- Confucianism. Confucius’s Great Learning (Da xue), one of the four canonical Neo- Confucian books, linked stability in the household to that of the state. For household architecture in imperial China, this meant first that houses were responsible for spatially regulating social relations between gender and status hierarchies in the household, and second it meant that all architecture from the imperial palace to the simplest residence was beholden to universal socio-spatial ideologies.23 Thus, as Bray notes, in late imperial China all houses followed the same set of design principles, just to a different degree.24 These design principles prescribed a specific set of social relations. The ancestral altar was the ritual center as well as the orientation for social relations within a house. In this Tianjin courtyard house, the altar was likely located in the first southern-facing hall of the first courtyard, as this was typically the most auspicious location. Gender and status relations revolved around this location. The household head, for example, would

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have lived in the most auspicious south-facing hall closest to the ancestral altar. The chambers for sons were laid out accordingly, with the eldest son inhabiting the most favorable rooms. Servants’ storage rooms and kitchens were placed in less favorable locations, facing east or west. The kitchen would have been in the back of the house (usually the north) and servants’ quarters would have been located far away from the ancestral hall in the front (usually the south) or back. This house includes a set of structures built along the corridors and away from the main courtyards toward the front of the east corridor and the back of the west corridor for this purpose. Gender relations were prescribed according to inner and outer, with the front being more outer, or masculine, and the more feminine inner chambers located in the back. What happened to late imperial design prescriptives after the fall of the Qing dynasty, when the small family political ideology replaced the NeoConfucian preference for the extended family? Demographic evidence suggests that ancestral and familial ties also continued to be important to the Republican-era Chinese family, and thus even in the face of abrupt political change, the ancestral altar was still the ritual center of many twentieth-century Chinese houses. Knapp has noted that as late as the 1980s, houses in rural Zhejiang continued to set aside a space as the decorative or entertainment center of the home, and although few households displayed ancestral tablets, many hung photographs of deceased family members.25 Moreover, with the fall of the Qing, Chinese households may no longer have perceived the regulation of energy in a house to have political implications, but the regulation of auspicious cosmic energies throughout a home through feng shui practices was still central to an individual family’s prosperity. This lone remaining Tianjin courtyard house and its former owner might offer some insights into how late imperial spatial practices continued into the Republican era. This courtyard house was constructed in the twentieth century and likely after the fall of the Qing. Its owner Xu Pu’an was a native son of Tianjin who worked as a comprador for the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China (Jiali yinghang). Compradors, the Chinese businessmen who assisted foreign enterprises in China, were among the first professionals to come into regular contact with Western traders; they were known to embrace foreign material culture, and

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expected to reside in the foreign concessions, which most of Xu’s colleagues did. A house in the French or British Concession would have been closer to the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China, a 1924 Beaux Arts–style building located on Victoria Road in the British Concession, at the heart of Tianjin’s financial district. Tianjin elites also tended to socialize in the concessions, and Xu was likely a member of such social circles, as his name was listed among wedding guests in the Tianjin New Pictorial (Xin Tianjin huabao) in 1940.26 Xu chose to live in, or at least own, “a Chinese style” courtyard house in Tianjin’s old city. We may posit that Xu, a native Tianjiner, wanted to remain close to his roots, even though at this time many well-to-do native Tianjiners were leaving their natal homes in the old city for life in the concessions. Or perhaps Xu felt that life in a courtyard house better suited his family (although we do not know how many family members lived in the Xu household). Xu may even have kept a separate apartment closer to his work in the concessions, while his family lived in the courtyard house. Any number of personal factors may have driven Xu’s decision to maintain his family house in the old Chinese city, but the decision itself had two political consequences. First, even though Xu participated in and benefited economically from Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist structure, in selecting a courtyard house as his family’s primary residence, he exerted individual autonomy from the system at a social and cultural level. Second, even after the Qing Empire had fallen and Tianjin became a colonized space, the courtyard house, which had been designed in accordance with very distinct late imperial political technologies of space, continued to shape the social relations and practices of Chinese urbanites like the Xu family. Thus, while we may know little about Xu or his family life, we do know that he owned a house that prescribed a specific understanding of social relations through space. Xu Pu’an’s courtyard house in Tianjin’s old Chinese city reveals that early social-spatial relations did not disappear from Tianjin’s landscape and from Chinese people’s lived experiences after the city was multiply colonized and geographically and architecturally altered. How did Xu Pu’an navigate the multiple special technologies of his city, from his courtyard house in the old Chinese city, to the place where he worked in the concessions? Did Xu separate work life in the concession from household

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life in the Chinese city, or did he live in one of the foreign concessions, only to return to the courtyard house when ritual prescribed? If there is a record of Xu owning property in the foreign concessions, it is not accessible from archives. Although Xu’s house raises many more questions than it can answer, it still fills in the silences of those archives. The remains of Tianjin’s houses reveal that transitions in social life may not have been as seamless as social scientific models assume.

A LIFE FRAMED BY MULTIPLE HOUSES In 1917, Shen Yiyun (1894–1971) and her husband moved into a four-room, two-story house that they rented for $70 per month in Tianjin’s Italian Concession.27 (See figure  4.5.) The Western-style house featured a yard with grass in the front, a separate kitchen built in the back, and running water with a “modern bath.” Writing her memoirs more than forty years later, Shen suggested that their decision to live in the Italian Concession had been determined by availability rather than choice. According to Shen, the Italian Concession had more vacant housing than other parts of the city because of its remote location away from the city business center, not to mention a micromanaging concession government that drove many Chinese residents away.28 Indeed, keenly aware of the politics of colonial space, Shen recalled that she did not particularly like “the idea of living in a foreign concession,” but “had to yield to circumstances.”29 Even if Shen had wanted to rent a courtyard house in the old Chinese city, she was an outsider, not a native of the city, and she would have found it nearly impossible; native Tianjin families still occupied the finest courtyard houses, or at least maintained them as the family home. Though Shen may have chosen reluctantly to live in the Italian Concession, she recounted little hardship in adjusting to life inside a foreign-style house in Tianjin, despite it being the “first time [she] had lived in a western-style house in China”30 Even for someone as flexible as Shen Yiyun, housing—its position on the city street, its structure, its organization of social space, and the materials in which it was fabricated—mattered. For Shen Yiyun, a seemingly simple decision such as where to live formed individual subjectivity and shaped everyday life.

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FIGURE 4.5 House in the Italian Concession. Photograph by the author.

Shen was part of a new group of cosmopolitan Chinese urbanites who forged their identities through dwelling in the world. In China, Shen was equally at home in a Beijing siheyuan courtyard compound as in an Italianstyle villa. Moreover, she followed her husband’s career across the world, living in multiple dwellings. Shen seemed to understand her everyday life more through the houses she dwelled in than through the places in which she lived. She framed and narrated her memoirs through houses, beginning her account with her natal family’s stately merchant compound in Zhejiang and ending with her daughter’s suburban house outside of New York City. She interacted with the world around her through house and home, forging her identity through where she lived.

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Shen’s life story began in the Zhejiang compound that her grandfather built after the Taiping Rebellion. Three rows of two-story buildings, with three yards, all enclosed by a brick wall, housed the multigenerational Shen household at the turn of the century.31 Each building had six suites, three on each floor: ground-floor rooms were reserved for guests and common family use, while the second-floor rooms contained the family’s private quarters, with each of the family’s four sons occupying an individual suite with his wife and children. After marrying the prominent politician Huang Fu (1883–1936), Shen lived in a series of houses and apartments from Shanghai and Tokyo to Berkeley and Singapore before returning to Beijing in 1916. Shen described her Beijing dwelling in detail as a “typical Chinese house,” facing south, with a private bedroom and sitting room in the back and more public rooms to receive guests in the front.32 She recalled the paved courtyards as sunny and filled with potted flowers like chrysanthemums in the fall, and indeed seemed reluctant to leave the Beijing courtyard house for the Tianjin Italian villa. Narrating her life through different houses, Shen conveyed a cosmopolitan adaptability, feeling equally comfortable in a nineteenth-century Chinese country house, an American apartment, an urban courtyard dwelling, and a concession villa. Her ability to move from place to place was facilitated by her membership in a particular social class. She hailed from a family of Zhejiang silk merchants, and her father, also a scholar and teacher, was later an editor at Shanghai’s Commercial Press. The Shens educated their daughters, and Shen Yiyun won a scholarship at a young age to the Beiyang Normal School for Girls in Tianjin. The Shen family’s combined economic, educational, and cultural capital formed the basis for their established yet progressive social network, which included such prominent national political activists as Qiu Jin (1875–1907).33 In keeping with practices of the time, the family confirmed and enhanced their social standing through marriage, with the Shen daughters marrying men who were successful in fields befitting their social group.34 Her sister married the sociologist and Beijing University professor Tao Menghe (1887–1960), while Shen’s militarist and politician husband Huang Fu, who divorced his first wife to marry Shen, was a sworn blood brother of Chiang Kai-shek.35 Huang served in several political posts, and at the end of his life was the mayor of Shanghai.

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As outlined in Shen’s memoirs, housing was equally important to social networks in signaling individual and group identity. Shen described her family house in Zhejiang as “typical of a middle-class family home. . . . It was practical and comfortable without being luxurious.”36 What should we make of her description of the Zhejiang home as “middle class”? After all, it is highly unlikely that the merchant Shens would have described themselves as middle class at the turn of the century, especially since the concept of “middle class” did not yet exist in the Chinese social imaginary. Indeed, Shen’s description of an extended family with numerous sons and generations inhabiting a multistructure compound hardly fits with twentieth-century Chinese social scientific conceptions of the modern middle-class Chinese family. If anything, her home in Tianjin’s Italian Concession seemed to be more typical of how we might imagine middleclass housing today than a sprawling compound in southern China. But for Shen, writing from her daughter’s “typical” 1960s American “middleclass” house, she imagined the modern home to be less about prescriptive walls and family structures than about how a family inhabited a space— their family life, their education, their comfort, and their close family ties. Thus, while Shen recalled the many walls that had framed her life, how she inhabited each space drove her narrative. Moreover, as she adapted from one house to the next, Shen never described Chinese houses as less modern or less comfortable than their Western counterparts, but actually suggested the opposite. Through a combination of different dwellings in the world—in China and abroad, and in Chinese and Western styles— Shen came to understand herself as a cosmopolitan, or what she called “middleclass,” Chinese woman. Despite being integral to individual and social identities, dwellings are all too often absent from historical biography. Compare Shen’s memoirs to an entry on her husband in the 1925 edition of Who’s Who in China.37 The Who’s Who biography of Huang focuses on the details of a political career, a life encapsulated by educational achievements, diplomatic junkets, learned writings, and honorary titles. In Shen’s memoirs, these sorts of professional details are missing. Though the events of her husband’s political career inform the background, carrying the couple from place to place, Shen’s homes are more central to her biography than the kind of achievements usually outlined in a Who’s Who–style biography. Shen narrates

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everyday experiences that the encyclopedic format of Who’s Who excludes. For example, Who’s Who explains how Huang Fu’s clash with Yuan Shikai in 1913 drove the couple into exile in Japan and America. Shen, by contrast, focuses more on the daily details of life in exile, describing their Berkeley apartment where, lacking domestic help, she had to shop for groceries and do the cooking herself for the first time. Who’s Who notes that after Yuan’s death in 1916, Huang returned to Beijing, where he assumed a post as the representative of the Zhejiang military governor. Shen never relates her husband’s exact political role or title, but instead recalls how his new position impacted life at home, requiring her to hire more than her original staff of four servants to take care of their Beijing courtyard house and manage frequent visitors. In 1917, Huang escaped the political turmoil in Beijing and moved to Tianjin to concentrate on writing. Who’s Who in China lists multiple publications and lectures that Huang completed during his sojourn in Tianjin. Shen, however, simply recalls that she only needed to hire two servants, a husband and wife, to maintain their small Western-style house because they received far fewer guests. Indeed, to pass the time during her husband’s retreat from public service, Shen turned to sewing slippers and clothing, a skill she had learned in her natal household, where the women practiced embroidery and made all the clothes for family members.38 Huang Fu died in 1936, and Shen eventually moved to New York to live with her daughter. In these final years, Shen recorded the details of her private life for the public record. Encouraged by her friend Hu Shi, Shen began working on her memoirs, which would eventually be housed in Columbia University’s collection of Chinese oral histories.39 In exile during the final years of her life, Shen felt an acute conflict—not between Chinese and American lifestyles but in how new demands on her private life took away from her professional work. In the United States she observed that “people of the middle and lower classes [could] not afford servants.”40 Shen, who was more at ease managing a staff of servants than cooking dinner herself, took care of the household for her working daughter. As she tried to manage the house and write her memoirs, Shen “often found [her] papers blown away while the pots burned.”41 Shen’s focus on the quotidian rather than the political forces that shaped her narrative highlights how houses and everyday life are central

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to the human historical experience. Shen was not simply a housewife. By her own account, she was never comfortable with the kind of housework that life at home in the United States required; moreover, she described herself as her husband’s intellectual equal, a partner in discussing scholarship and politics. Shen’s cosmopolitan world reached beyond the household, taking her miles away from her native place to school in Tianjin as a young girl, and even farther during her husband’s years in exile to Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Yet in compiling her unpublished memoirs, Shen used home and place to mark the stages of her life. For Shen, courtyards, flowers, housework, and servants were as important as social and political ties and events in shaping her individual and social identity. 42 When we note how important dwelling was in Shen’s account of her life, we can also begin to reevaluate the role of house and home in history. Although public politics, social movements, and the rise of nations traditionally have framed the narratives of what has been considered to be “history,” rooms and furniture, and likewise the dust and food within, have framed the histories of individual experience. Shen may have come to understand herself through memories of home, but each house was also an actor in its own right, helping to shape her life. As Shen noted, different architectural technologies and social environments required different ways of living. Beijing courtyard houses required more servants for upkeep than concession villas, while American apartments and houses required household members to take care of cooking and cleaning themselves. Thus, this chapter also argues that changing architectural technologies of urban houses forged everyday life in modern China: people chose their houses, but those houses also shaped people’s lives.

A “SUITABLE” HOUSE In 1923, Sung Sik, the acting deputy commissioner of the Tianjin branch of the Chinese post office, moved to Tianjin with his family and chose to rent a Western-style townhouse on Via Conte Gallina in Tianjin’s Italian Concession. (See figure 4.6.) The house was convenient to his work and comfortable for his small family. A problem arose when the Belgian real estate developer Crédit Foncier, which owned the house, had decided to raise the

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FIGURE 4.6 Attached houses in the Italian Concession. Photograph by the author.

rent by ten Chinese dollars to ninety-five dollars per month. 43 A debate with his employer over his housing benefits ensued, leaving traces in the archives that reveal how a high-ranking civil servant justified choosing to live in a particular house, how the people working with him conceived of living in concession houses, and what the interior design plan of a concession house looked like. Sung’s rent, first at $85 and later at $95, was quite high. To justify this rental allowance, which was included in his employment package, Sung and his superiors had to send a series of memos to supervisors at the central post office when he first moved into the house in 1923 and a year later when the rent increased. Sung’s rent was one of the more expensive items listed in the post office accounts in 1924. For example, the post office paid $118.80 (about $24 more than Sung’s monthly rent) for a Chesterfield sofa, and $35 for a top-of-the-line icebox. The post office also recorded regularly hiring a “coolie” or manual laborer, whom they paid a monthly salary between $9 and $15. Sung’s high rent was more than six times the salary of a laborer— exposing the gap between urbanites of the white-collar and manual-laboring classes in treaty-port Tianjin. The post office did not freely distribute funds, and indeed scrutinized the disbursement of every

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last copper coin. 44 So how did Sung justify a rent that was expensive even for a high-ranking bureaucrat in a Sino-foreign government institution? While the correspondence does not mention it, the first consideration was probably availability. Judging by the Cantonese spelling of his name, Mr. Sung was not local to Tianjin, and likely from the southern province Guangdong. New migrants to Tianjin rarely settled in the old Chinese city, choosing to reside in the foreign concessions instead. 45 As Shen Yiyun noted, the Italian Concession was often the first stop for new arrivals since it usually had vacancies due to high turnover. Moreover, hailing from the south, Sung and his family may have found life in a northern courtyard house to be just as foreign as living in a Western single-family house. The Italian Concession was also convenient for Sung’s postal work. Located on the opposite side of the Hai River from the banking and commercial centers of the city, and without any businesses of its own, the Italian Concession was inconvenient for most Tianjin residents. But for Sung, a postal commissioner, proximity to Tianjin’s train station made the Italian Concession a desirable location. The rails had recently been plagued by bandits and rioters, who slowed the trains and sometimes even hijacked the mail. 46 Sung’s supervisor noted this situation in his request to increase Sung’s rental allowance, suggesting that living on Via Conte Gallina allowed Sung easy access to the train station (under fifteen minutes by rickshaw) to troubleshoot at all hours of day or night. 47 Either of the two practical justifications for choosing a house in the Italian Concession—availability or location—probably would have sufficed for Sung’s employers. Yet in the end, Sung offered a personal and seemingly frivolous reason for selecting the house and requesting an increased rental allowance. Echoing a commissioner’s statement made when Sung first moved into the home in 1923—that the house was “considered quite suitable for Mr. Sung who has a grown-up family and lives in foreign style”— Sung simply stated that “this house has proved suitable for myself and my family.”48 In his request to increase Sung’s rental allowance once again, the commissioner reiterated his sentiments from the year before, noting that “owing to the present unsettled condition in Tientsin [Tianjin], a suitable house at the present rate is not obtainable.”49 The central post office must have found Sung’s request for “suitable” housing compelling, as they approved the rental allowance increase shortly

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after receiving Sung’s memorandum. On the other hand, his request for a rickshaw allowance was denied.50 Certainly, for a man in Sung’s position, who was expected to report to different parts of the city at a moment’s notice, rickshaw transport would have been more pertinent to his job than comfortable housing. But for many colonial and joint-venture enterprises like the post office, “suitable” housing was considered to be a necessity and not a luxury. The Hai River Conservancy Commission, which was in charge of Tianjin’s bund and port, for example, saw to the domestic comforts of its top employees, providing housing, purchasing furniture, and maintaining a list of household necessities from iceboxes to egg cups.51 For foreigners, a house was a shelter from the “unsettled” city of treaty-port Tianjin. Coming from the south to Tianjin, Sung was also an outsider; in taking on the language of his supervisors and typing his request in English, Sung adopted a colonial concept of “suitable” housing to convince his superiors to approve his high housing allowance. Sung may have employed a colonial language of suitable housing to gain leverage with his superiors and get a higher rent allowance, but his spatial experiences and knowledge would have been much different than those of his foreign colleagues. Having been born before Chinese families could inhabit foreign-concession houses, Sung would have lived at least part of his life in a Chinese house, most likely in his native Guangdong Province, and while the southern house of Sung’s youth would have looked very different than Xu Pu’an’s northern courtyard house, both houses would have been structured using similar structural and cosmological technologies of space. Thus, comparing Sung’s house in the Italian Concession to Xu’s courtyard dwelling in the Chinese city not only illustrates the different spatial technologies that coexisted in treaty-port Tianjin, but also highlights the dramatically different socio-spatial prescriptions that a Chinese urbanite might have within a single lifetime. Rather than adhering to Chinese imperial notions of inner and outer, the Italians designed their concession according to spatial principles of public and private. Zoning laws prohibited businesses from setting up in this residential district, and houses were designed to be private domestic spaces. Thus, unlike Xu’s house, which was designed so that the outermost courtyard could be used for conducting business or other public affairs, the Sung home was zoned for private use. But without the high walls of a

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courtyard house protecting it from sight, Sung’s privately zoned space in many ways seemed more public. Facing the street with a prominent and large glass picture window, Sung’s house proclaimed his family’s social status to all who passed by. (See figure 4.7.) The grand façade announced social status both in terms of economic capital (the financial ability to purchase and maintain such a house) and cultural capital (the knowledge and taste needed to choose a suitable house). The large glass windows invited passersby to peer in even further at household furnishings and family life inside. Indeed, window curtains became new necessities for regulating private everyday life in Western-style houses. The process by which Sung’s house in the Italian Concession was constructed was also different from that of Xu’s compound. Whereas the Xu

FIGURE 4.7 A house much like the one Sung Sik rented. Photograph by the author.

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family compound would have been privately commissioned by its initial occupants and built by a carpenter, the Sung family house was built by real estate developer Crédit Foncier as an investment.52 Tianjin’s housing boom and the growth of its speculative colonial-capitalist real estate market coincided with the introduction of a new scientific knowledge about building according to architectural principles and structural engineering. Professional architects emerged out of the elite social group that in the past had commissioned artisan-carpenters to build their family houses.53 One of the best-known architectural historians, Liang Sicheng (1901–1972), came from a preeminent Chinese intellectual family. His father Liang Qichao (1873–1929) resided in Tianjin’s Italian Concession in a house not far from Sung’s. (See figure  4.8.) Liang Sicheng parlayed his social and intellectual capital into places at the elite Chinese-foreign university Qinghua and the University of Pennsylvania. Indeed, most of Liang’s colleagues claimed credentials from foreign universities, many having studied abroad with Boxer Indemnity Scholarships.54 As students abroad, Chinese architects forged a cosmopolitan social network that they carried into China when they formed professional associations with other architects such as the Society for Chinese Architects, landed jobs in prominent Western firms, or in some cases founded their own successful firms. They also published professional journals like Zhongguo jianzhu (The Chinese Architect, Shanghai, 1933). Many of these new professional architects considered structural engineering to be compatible with social and political engineering. They debated the importance of a national architecture on the pages of Zhongguo jianzhu; others, like Lu Yanzhi, built new national monuments in modern Chinese style; still others, like Liang Sicheng, pioneered the academic study of architectural history in China’s modern universities. But none of these men concerned themselves with housing. In his meticulous study of imperial Chinese architecture, for example, Liang Sicheng focused on political and religious architecture, but not domestic, despite its central role in the socio-political technologies of space. Professional architects did design some residential housing in Tianjin. The Austrian-born Rolf Geyling (1884–1952), for example, designed several impressive villas and a few modernist apartment buildings. But when a local real estate developer wanted to design a modest row of

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FIGURE 4.8 Liang Qichao house. Photograph by the author.

semi-attached town houses, they turned to a builder. The number of Tianjin builders grew in parallel with Tianjin’s foreign-concession housing boom of the 1920s and 1930s. At the start of the 1930s, there were only eight Chinese contractors in Tianjin; by 1937, there were more than thirty.55 Although both foreign and Chinese architects worked in China, builders were always Chinese. Builders required knowledge on multiple planes. They needed foreign-language skills if they wanted to work in the concessions. They needed a solid understanding of the market, not just how much housing should cost, but also the going rate for all building materials. They needed to be well versed in Western architectural principles and understand structural engineering, and finally they needed to be able to communicate that knowledge to and manage Chinese manual laborers. While artisan-carpenters underwent an apprenticeship and Chinese architects trained at universities in China and abroad, builders did not have a single educational path.56 They did have trade journals, like Jianzhu yuekan (The Builder).57 This Shanghai-based monthly magazine, published

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between 1932 and 1937, included advertisements for building suppliers, a regular column that introduced English architectural and construction terms, articles on technical aspects of building such as how to lay bricks, blueprints and illustrations of foreign suburban houses, and monthly reports on the cost of building supplies and labor. In sum, with journals like Jianzhu yuekan as their guide, builders translated the architect’s pencil into the carpenter’s nail, deploying the developer’s capital with the utmost efficiency. The builders who constructed Sung Sik’s house in the Italian Concession did not design a home for a “typical Chinese family”; instead, they built a living space based on efficiency and engineering. Moreover, while courtyard houses were typically designed with a particular family in mind, builders designed new speculative houses for the market. Sung’s house was built as part of a row of attached townhouses each with identical, prescriptive floor plans. Building housing in this manner was more efficient than constructing individual houses, but it also meant that each house replicated the same prescriptive vision of family and social relations. Housing constructed for the Tianjin real estate market thus flipped the architectural mantra “form follows function” so that form dictated function. The blueprints to Sung’s house reveal that before construction even began, the builder had assigned a specific function to each room. (See figure 4.9.) Moreover, this blueprint prescribed a specific idea of the modern family based on love, individualism, privacy, and close family bonds. The new technology of social space was apparent as soon as you walked through the front door into the drawing room. Although the drawing room did not exist in courtyard houses, it functioned in Sung’s house similarly to a first courtyard, as it was closest to the main entrance and the most “public” room of the house. One moved through the drawing room to enter the dining room, a new type of space for family and public meals. In courtyard houses, for example, banquets would have been served in the courtyard. Walking up the stairs to the first and second floors, one reached the family members’ bedrooms, or the more “private” quarters of the house. Unlike courtyard houses, where each stem family occupied a single room, this Western villa included three individual bedrooms. This prescriptive design of social space assumed a Euro-American idea of the

FIGURE 4.9 Floorplan of Sung Sik’s house based on blueprint. TMA w2-295, 1924. Illustration by Clio Petrulis.

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small nuclear family in which the loving husband and wife would share a room while two children each occupied their own space. Family members would then come together in the communal spaces of the house, such as the drawing room and dining room. Whereas in Sung’s Western-style house, walls framed a single room with a single prescriptive function, function and space in courtyard houses could be more flexible. An ancestral altar could not be moved, but the hall that housed it, like other wings of a courtyard, could be altered. Inhabitants could create different living spaces by putting up a screen or curtain. Moreover, moving around furniture could change the function of a space throughout a single day. Sung’s house reserved a room for dining, but in a courtyard house, tables were stored in a stem family’s quarters and moved out for meals. Similarly, in place of a permanent bathroom, courtyard houses had a moveable washstand or chamber pot placed within a room.58 The Western-style house and the courtyard house both regulated social relations but did so in radically different ways. Tianjin courtyard houses arranged social relations horizontally on a north-south axis and in relation to the family altar. The household head was situated closest to the ancestral altar while servant quarters were farthest away, relegated to the far front or back of a compound. In Sung’s house, status was guided by staircases. The Sung family members slept upstairs in their individual private spaces, and the servants lived in the downstairs basement, near the kitchen and next to the coal storage, thereby establishing a hierarchy of status that literally placed master above servant. In both styles of housing, kitchens were peripheral spaces that designated social, or servant status, not female gender status. This was in stark contrast to the idea of the modern kitchen as a female space, the housewife’s laboratory, which was taking hold in Europe, America, and Japan at this time. While such ideas were introduced in home economics education in China, in treaty-port Tianjin they never materialized in the spatial designs of urban housing.59 The kitchen in Xu Pu’an’s courtyard house was located far from the ritual center. The kitchen in Shen Yiyun’s Italian Concession home was located in a detached building behind the house, and Sung’s kitchen was located in the basement. With all their smoke and oil, kitchens were considered to be among the dirtiest and most unsightly rooms in the house. According to a Chinese home economics textbook published in 1940, for example, the two dirtiest rooms in Chinese houses were the kitchen and the bathroom.60 But while the modern

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bathroom enjoyed a facelift with ceramic and porcelain tiles, the modern kitchen never followed suit. In a country where domestic labor was plentiful and inexpensive, servants could do the cooking, and while the modern housewife might plan her family’s meals or advise her cook, the kitchen never became her social space.61 Choosing to live in the Italian Concession, Sung chose to live in a new configuration of public and private. Unlike the old Chinese city, where the streets that surrounded Xu Pu’an’s courtyard house were filled with vendors and commerce, the Italian Concession was purely residential, and businesses were not allowed to set up. In the Chinese city and inside courtyard houses, inner and outer were relational and fluid. In the Italian Concession and in Sung’s house, domains of public and private were clearly delineated. Yet Sung’s public profession paid for his private residence, and his private residence allowed him easy access to the public space of the train station so he could perform that job. Sung chose to live in a completely residential district but still desired to live in convenient proximity to conduct business. Through Sung Sik’s request for a higher rent, archives reveal not only how one man articulated his reasons for choosing to live in a foreignconcession house, but also what the new spatial and social arrangements of that choice looked like. Ultimately it was his and his superior’s claim that the Western-style house was “suitable” that convinced the postal service to pay the housing allowance. This “suitable” house presented a new set of prescriptive spatial practices that Sung would not have experienced at the beginning of his life—but Sung, like Shen, never described Western-style houses and new spatial practices as alien or foreign. This signifies what it meant to feel at home in the world. Feeling comfortable in a Western-style concession house also signaled a particular social status. Sung does not say so himself, but the archives reveal the cavernous socioeconomic difference between Sung and the coolie laborers hired by the post office, whose yearly wages were equal to just two months of Sung’s rent.

CONCLUSION As two different socio-spatial practices existed simultaneously in Tianjin’s urban landscape, different family forms inhabited different prescriptive

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spaces that did not always align with their demography. Extended families lived in concession houses designed for nuclear families, while nuclear families and couples could find themselves living in a courtyard house designed to hold much larger families.62 The case of Shen Yiyun, for instance, shows that while living in a Beijing courtyard house with only her husband, she hired four servants to help her manage the house. Space was prescriptive, but Chinese people also adapted spaces. To use an example from another resident of the Italian Concession, the playwright Cao Yu’s family owned two adjacent European-style villas that they inhabited much like courtyards of the same compound: Cao Yu’s father lived in the front house with his own public sitting room and personal dining room, while the rest of the family stayed in the back house until the family fell on hard times and had to rent the front residence. Not all Tianjin families could afford to choose the ideal prescriptive space for the way they lived. In a crowded city with high housing costs, urban families negotiated everyday life in the spaces they could find and afford. People may not have been able to live in a perfectly “suitable” house like Sung, but all literate urbanites could still learn about architectural technologies and new prescriptions for social space in inexpensive popular manuals and encyclopedias with titles like The ABC’s of Architecture.63 These books introduced readers to the ins and outs of structural engineering, but more importantly they instructed readers in new social spaces, including floor plans of perfectly arranged rooms, each with a specific title and function. Popular architectural manuals also offered solutions to the problems that arose when an urbanite’s rooms did not match the necessary prescriptive functions. In the case of a missing dining room, one manual recommended using a section of the living room (qijujian) and not the kitchen, which was too dirty and smelled of smoke and oil.64 If a house did not have a formal drawing room, or keting, the book suggested using a corner of a living room to receive guests, and if a guest needed to spend the night, a study could be transformed into a guest bedroom. But while Chinese readers were learning how to pour concrete foundations and frame high rises with steel, they could still purchase a geomantic almanac to calculate the most auspicious days to construct or renovate a house. In other words, late imperial building practices did not disappear with the introduction of Western architectural knowledge.

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Life in a Chinese urban house was often about coordinating and compromising between different spatial technologies. Xu Pu’an, Shen Yiyun, and Sung Sik may have chosen to live in Chinese or Western houses for different reasons, but they all experienced both of these architectural technologies in their lifetime. Xu Pu’an owned a Chinese courtyard house while working in a foreign building. Shen Yiyun adapted to life in multiple styles of residences in several different countries, and Sung Sik most likely grew up in a southern Chinese house before he claimed as an adult that the only suitable house for his family in Tianjin was one in the foreign concessions. Whether they were passing through, like Shen Yiyun and Sung Sik, or whether they could trace deep local roots like Xu Pu’an, the residents of Tianjin inhabited a world in which Chinese and foreign ideas, technologies, and styles coexisted. For these individuals, modernity was not defined through Western progress and science, but rather through a cosmopolitan combination of Western and Chinese temporalities and cultures. To be modern meant to be comfortable dwelling in both of these worlds.

5 Designing House and Home

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hen residents of Tianjin chose a house, whether intentionally or not, they also selected a set of spatial politics. Choosing to live in a particular district or concession meant living according to a distinct political vision of spatial order and architectural design, from the grid of the old Chinese city to the tree-lined streets of the British Concession’s garden city and the civic buildings of the new Chinese municipal district, Xin hebei qu. Moreover, floorplans of individual houses prescribed a social vision for everyday life, whether in the separate private bedrooms of an Italian villa or in the cosmologically designed wing of a Chinese courtyard house. These politics of design were cemented in brick, wood, and concrete. Chinese individuals could not reroute roads or tear down load-bearing walls and beams, but they could refashion façades, decorate interior spaces, and design furnishings that represented a particular prescriptive politics of style. Thus, while the Republican-era Chinese government did not regulate architectural spaces of the house, designing house and home continued to be a political project. China has a long history of linking visual and material culture to politics. In imperial China, design, style, and aesthetics were linked to each dynasty and each emperor’s reign. The court employed imperial artists and artisans. The imperial

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kiln, for example, was located in Jingdezhen and produced ceramics marked on the underside with the name of the dynasty and reigning emperor. Wares produced in Jingdezhen during the Qing took on a different design aesthetic than those under the Ming and Song; likewise objects produced under the Qianlong emperor’s reign differed from those made under Kangxi. Imperial styles influenced nonimperial objects produced in the same area. Even today scholars define art and artifacts, from imperial goods and high art to more common objects of everyday life, according to the dynasties in which they were produced. Thus, material culture in late imperial China functioned much like how Leora Auslander describes furniture style in old-regime France: style was associated with a particular reign, and furniture was a representation of political power.1 Auslander argues that whereas style is political, taste is an aesthetic value formed in “a complex interaction of desires for emulation, distinction, and solidarity.”2 In other words, taste is the story of how and why people come to desire particular objects. Tracing the history of style and taste in France, Auslander argues that following the French Revolution, furniture consumption eventually became democratized as “social power” through the consolidation of bourgeois political identity, ending in mass consumerism in the latter half of the twentieth century. China followed an alternative historical trajectory after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Taste was democratized in the sense that Chinese people faced multiple choices, but their choices were conditioned by the styles of the multiple colonial powers and a new Chinese nationalist power. While French citizens navigated a politics of style from the Ancien Régime to the Republic, Chinese residents of multiply colonized Tianjin dwelt within the multiple politics of the world. Walking along the city’s major commercial street, today’s Liberation Road (Jiefang lu), a Republican-era Tianjin resident would have navigated a street whose name changed three different times in three different languages, from Rue de France in the French Concession to Victoria Road in the British Concession and Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse in the German Concession— which itself changed when it was renamed Woodrow Wilson Road after World War I. Continuing to stroll throughout the city, that resident would have witnessed the high, gray brick walls of Qing-era courtyard buildings in the old Chinese city, a Shinto shrine in the Japanese Concession, a

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Beaux Arts bank in the French Concession, a neo-Gothic municipal hall in the British Concession, the art deco club of the Italian Concession, and onion domes in the Russian Concession. Inside each of these buildings, depending on which country controlled the district, the walker would have noticed different electric currents running through the wires, while different-tasting water pumped through the pipes. Urban planning, architectural styles, and municipal utilities made the abstract politics of Tianjin’s multiple foreign empires concrete to the city’s residents. These multiple politics of style dictated Chinese tastes, yet they also created gaps in which Chinese people could design a unique Tianjin modern style, which reflected the fractured and mixed styles of the city. Through this process of creating a Tianjin modern style, they also formed their own self-understandings on and for the global stage. As Chinese people chose a house to live in and decided on how to decorate their home, they navigated multiple politics to develop their individual taste. This taste in turn helped shape new individual identities of gender, Chineseness, and social status. The desire, knowledge, and ability to occupy a house, was determined by economic capital but also educational background, cultural knowledge, and social network. Likewise, through designing the modern home, taste functioned as a form of distinction, a means to signal that a house’s residents belonged to a particular social class.3 In treaty-port Tianjin, however, these understandings of social class were still unclear. The Japan historian Jordan Sand argues that in modern Japan, a growing bourgeois class enabled the rise of the modern home. 4 In China, a fully self-conscious bourgeois social class had yet to emerge; instead people produced status through taste formation. The colonial-capitalist system in Chinese cities like Tianjin sparked a rupture in Chinese social relations, not only by ushering in the end of the late imperial status hierarchies that had centered around the imperial civil service exam, but also by offering up new sites like the modern home where new gendered and status identities could be articulated. During this period of economic and political transition, there were no clear delineations of middle class. Instead, the modern house and home became sites where Chinese people could experiment with social distinctions, leveraging different forms of economic, educational, social, and cultural capital to create a common set of tastes that signaled belonging to a particular

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social group. In other words, Chinese people designed the social space of the bourgeois home before that social class had developed; and designing that social space led to new forms of social distinction. Tianjin’s urban elites purchased and rented houses, but as they designed the modern home, they articulated new social status through their aesthetic choices. Measuring class simply according to a household’s relation to production, or to the male household head’s profession, reveals the different kinds of status groups that composed Tianjin’s urban elites, including militarist warlords, former Qing officials, compradors and bankers, civil servants, and office workers. Examining social status through the lens of taste, however, defines urban elite more broadly, but also reveals the processes through which shifting and relational social strata were constructed. For example, a warlord had the economic capital to purchase a large villa in one of Tianjin’s foreign concessions, but the educated daughter of a civil servant possessed the knowledge and cultural capital to understand how to decorate and manage the modern home. During a period when social classes were shifting significantly, the ability to perform social practices could be just as important as income in signaling an individual’s membership in a particular social group.5

THE POLITICS OF STYLE The multiple politics of architectural style that dotted Tianjin’s landscape, as well as a new nationalist Chinese style of architecture that was emerging at the time, influenced the home design of Tianjin urban elites in the Republican era. Unlike the consumers that Auslander describes who democratized taste in modern France, Chinese consumers did not simply forge taste through a singular national style. Instead, they had to navigate multiple colonial styles within their city. Gwendolyn Wright shows how architecture illuminates a connection between culture and politics in her analysis of French colonial architecture. According to Wright, every ornamental detail on a colonial building and each municipal zoning regulation pointed to a larger political agenda.6 The French colonial political agenda for instance, was split between two approaches: assimilation and association. Assimilation argued for the superiority of French and European

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culture, while association respected cultural difference.7 An assimilationist approach toward architecture in Hanoi meant that government offices, the opera house, hotels, and residences were all built in grand European style. On the other hand, an associationalist approach in Morocco meant that colonial builders took the local architectural heritage into consideration, constructing buildings with pointed arches, tilework, and whitewashed walls.8 Colonial politics in Tianjin were neither assimilationist nor associationalist. First, colonialism was multiple, but second, foreign powers never clearly articulated a policy to rule over the Chinese population. Concession architecture often appeared to be assimilationist, but not because it was part of a larger colonial political agenda to train the local Chinese in the style and practices of the home country. Foreign empires in Tianjin did not consider their concessions to be colonial settlements but rather were commercial extensions of empire. Imperial powers France and Japan, for example, never attempted to transform Tianjin’s local Chinese population into imperial subjects; instead, formal and informal agents of the French and Japanese Empires in Tianjin focused on making money. This was reflected in Tianjin’s public architecture, which included more banks than civic projects like opera houses and museums. But even if foreign governments did not pursue an associationalist colonial agenda, the consulates, municipal halls, and banks built in the home country’s style still depicted colonial power in a similar way. In a city of multiple foreign empires, the local Chinese population was not the only audience for concession architecture. Enmeshed in a competition that mirrored the rivalry among nation-states on the global stage, concession governments designed their districts with other concessions in mind. As the Italians planned out their concession, for example, they projected authority over a Chinese landscape, but they also broadcast Italian power and modernity through design to the French and British Concessions across the river. Several concession governments commissioned municipal halls to be built in national style, from the Beaux Arts building in the French Concession to castle-like Gordon Hall in the British; as latecomers to European-style imperialism, the Japanese designed all but two of their municipal buildings—a Shinto shrine and an exhibition hall—in European style.

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The nature of colonial real estate development in Tianjin further enhanced this sense of political competition. Unlike in some French colonial cities, where the colonial government established an urban planning department or even a housing bureau to oversee the design and construction of houses, in Tianjin, concession governments turned to real estate developers to build housing.9 Developers and concession governments competed to make their districts desirable to wealthy Chinese investors or renters, whose taxes would help fund the concessions. Foreign municipal governments may not have designed their concessions to indoctrinate the local Chinese population as subjects of empire, but they did plan their districts to attract investors’ capital. Thus the British Municipal Council declared itself to be a British garden city on Chinese soil, while the Italians set zoning laws to ensure that their residential community would be built only in European style. The leading developers of what might be understood as associationaliststyle buildings were U.S. religious and educational institutions. This new Chinese-style architecture was led by the U.S. architect Henry Murphy. In 1914, the Yale-in- China Program commissioned Murphy to design their Changsha campus. Murphy later drafted plans for other universities and mission colleges and the YMCA.10 Murphy’s designs complemented the missionizing project of his clients by grafting Chinese designs onto a Western architectural infrastructure. His buildings can be essentially characterized by imagining a Chinese roof atop a Western Beaux-Arts base. Murphy did not refer to his designs as associationalist; instead, he called them adaptive.11 His goal was to apply Chinese tradition to modern architectural design. Murphy’s adaptive designs inspired a new Chinese nationalist architecture. His style influenced the first generation of Chinese professional architects, many of whom trained in the United States and went on to integrate Murphy’s design ethos into their own work. Lu Yanzhi, who was born in Tianjin, graduated from Cornell University with a degree in architecture in 1918 and began his career in the “Oriental Department” of Murphy’s U.S.-based firm, Murphy and Dana. Lu later returned to China to head the firm’s Shanghai office, and eventually started his own firm. Though Lu continued to work for foreign clients, he also began to convert this foreign, Chinese-style institutional architecture into a national

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design; his best-known design, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing, was completed shortly after Lu died in 1929. The focal point of the mausoleum is its blue-tiled roof. Indeed, following Murphy’s designs, the roof became the focus of Chinese nationalist architecture. Murphy had singled out the roof as the essence of Chinese architectural design when actually the core principles of Chinese architectural design emphasized post-and-beam construction, modularity, and feng shui planning. Rooflines, by contrast, were regional, and Murphy had based his “Chinese” designs on a northern Chinese roofline with simple, extended eaves. Debates over rooflines would dominate discussions on Chinese architectural aesthetics among Chinese architects into the 1950s.12 The new Chinese nationalist architecture also diverged from late imperial building practices through incorporating Western notions of public and private. The newly professionalized class of Chinese architects, who were often educated in the West or at least in Western architectural practices, were still very much interested in Chinese architectural history. In 1925, the Song dynasty imperial architectural manual, the Yingzao fazhi, was published and made widely available. The architect and teacher Liang Sicheng led the movement to study the Yingzao fazhi in order to understand China’s architectural past, conducting fieldwork at the imperial architecture sites that still existed.13 To transform Chinese late imperial architecture into a modern academic subject, Liang translated what he called “the grammar of Chinese architecture” into the “universal” language and drawings of modern architectural knowledge.14 In other words, Liang, who had studied under Paul Cret at the University of Pennsylvania, applied the Beaux Arts universal architectural language to Chinese architectural designs, in order to establish Chinese architecture as a technical system on par with the West.15 This translation imposed a Beaux Arts understanding of public and private onto Chinese architectural history. Although according to architectural principles in late imperial China, all buildings, from temples to domiciles, were constructed according to a core set of design and structural values, Liang’s studies privileged temples and government buildings over the private spaces of courtyard houses. In doing so, however, Liang not only mapped a Western architectural understanding of public and

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private onto Chinese buildings, but he also ensured that housing would not be codified into the modern study of Chinese architecture. As they articulated design practices, China’s first generation of modern architects, Chinese and foreign alike, largely ignored housing. Henry Murphy never designed housing in China, although in 1926 he did design a housing development called the “Chinese village” in Coral Gables, Florida. In 1935, the editor of The Builder, a Shanghai-based trade journal, criticized Chinese professional architects for debating the merits of Chinese architecture while ignoring housing. According to the editor, architects had only “superficial knowledge of palaces and temples” and did not understand what society needed in terms of housing. He argued that if Chinese society were to progress, housing needed to be improved to protect against the elements and disease and to promote modern hygiene.16 In other words, housing could be a form of social engineering. The Builder may have called for housing reform, but very few of its readers (professional builders) took up the call, and while architects designed new Chinese-style public buildings, they never proposed Chinese-style housing. Faculty at Tianjin’s Nankai University held classes in an architectdesigned, modern Chinese-style building, but they lived in Western-style bungalows.17 Moreover, while a few developers experimented with middleclass housing in Shanghai’s suburbs, in Tianjin, government planners did not propose middle-class housing until after World War II, when the city became wholly Chinese once more.18 A few foreign architects designed houses or apartment buildings in Tianjin, but for the most part, when it came to housing design, builders, developers, and Chinese people were left to their own devices. Living in a city with a patchwork of architectural styles, Tianjin urbanites negotiated multiple politics of design, with influences ranging from foreign concession governments and civilizing universities to Nationalist architects and real estate investors—not to mention the Qing dynasty’s politics of style, which lingered in the old Chinese district of the city. But unlike in many other colonial cities, these multiple, competing politics of style, and the municipal neglect of housing that accompanied them, opened up a space for Tianjin’s residents to design modern style at home. The French may have established a Bureau of Economic Housing in Madagascar in 1929 to regulate even what kinds of building materials should be used in building

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new houses, but in Tianjin the French Concession contracted most of the development to the Belgian bank Crédit Foncier.19 Although Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist urban planning presented multiple politics of style, it also exposed gaps that allowed personal taste to squeeze in between the politics.

TASTE AND PERSONAL IDENTITY To understand how Tianjin’s residents navigated the multiple politics of style to design their houses, imagine visiting the British Concession in 1924. You are strolling along the sidewalk, under the trees, on Glasgow Road. Once you reach the corner at Singapore Road, you cannot help but notice a unique, newly built house. (See figures  5.1 and 5.2.) The threestory modernist box shape, with its curved balconies and alternating stripes of white plaster and brick, is strikingly handsome, similar to modernist, almost Bauhaus-style houses that were constructed in the British Concession around the same time. What makes this particular house so noticeable is an unusual structure on top of the roof: a Chinese pavilion with a yellow glazed tile roof. If you are fortunate enough to be invited to that rooftop to take a closer look, you will discover that boxy, white modernist columns support the tiled roof and decorative metalwork surrounds the base. This unique design, which juxtaposes imperial-era yellow tile with modernist white plaster, certainly would have caught people’s eyes in 1920s Tianjin. They may even have wondered how this house could have been built in a foreign concession with some of the strictest zoning laws in the city, laws that explicitly forbade the construction of Chinese architectural style. In fact, this was the only house in the British Concession with Chinese architectural details visible to the street. How might a Tianjin urbanite passing by this house in 1924 have understood the architectural style? And why did the owner who commissioned it choose this design? If there were more houses like this, we might view the design as a British associationalist attempt to control the local Chinese population through adopting Chinese style in housing, but since it was so unusual to incorporate Chinese design into the façade like this, the house may have been linked to the owner’s individual taste. If that owner had

FIGURE 5.1 Chen Guangyuan house, British Concession. Photograph by the author.

FIGURE 5.2 Detail of the Chen house. Photograph by the author.

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been a British colonial, the house may have represented an Orientalist consumption of empire. But the house actually belonged to a Chinese man named Chen Guangyuan, a militarist warlord turned real estate investor. Chen commissioned this house, built in 1924, around the time that Tianjin’s concession real estate market was taking off. And when he chose the design for his house, Chen may have been inspired by a similar home in the Italian Concession, an Italianate villa adorned by two rooftop pavilions, one Romanesque in style and the other Chinese (figure 5.3). The house in the Italian Concession belonged to a warlord named Bao Guiqing, who eventually headed a northern railroad company, and most likely chose to live in the Italian Concession because of its proximity to the railroad station. Bao bought the house in the early 1920s and renovated it to his taste; based on the difference in the architectural details of the pavilions and the main house, the pavilions likely were part of his later renovation.

FIGURE 5.3 Bao Guiqing house pavilions in Italian Concession. Photograph by the author.

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There are no records of whether Chen or the builder based their design on Bao’s design, nor are there any similar examples of public architecture in Tianjin today that might have inspired these men. While a Chinesetiled pavilion atop a roof might seem reminiscent of Murphy’s or Lu’s adaptive or nationalist designs, these rooflines did not reference the architectural history of China’s palaces or temples. Instead, pavilions were garden structures, sites for personal contemplation or rest amid nature. Indeed, in deciding to construct a garden on their rooftops, both men were summoning a centuries-old practice in which scholar gardens were sites of literati taste and masculine identity.20 But while literati-scholars of late imperial China often obtained elite status through their mastery of imperial sanctioned texts, neither Chen nor Bao was a learned scholar. Instead, their economic capital enabled them to express their elite status through individual taste, specifically by purchasing a large house in one of Tianjin’s foreign concessions and erecting a garden pavilion on its roof. Rooftops were not the only place where garden pavilions could be found in Tianjin’s concessions. Down the road from Chen’s house, the British Concession’s Victoria Park included a Chinese-style pavilion that provided shelter for Chinese nannies looking after foreign children. The British Concession may have forbidden building in Chinese style, and they may have constructed municipal and consular buildings to project a British national style, but they permitted a Chinese-style pavilion in the public park. Moreover, while classical Chinese private gardens had been gendered male, the foreign concession public parks were sites for the feminized leisured labor of child-rearing. Indeed, many postcards and photographs of Tianjin’s concession parks featured foreign children at play. Public buildings in the concessions that represented the masculinity of political and economic power were almost universally built in Western style; the female and childhood spaces of the public parks, by contrast, could incorporate a Chinese pavilion as a public leisure space. Then how should we interpret Chinese elements incorporated into the façade of a house in the context of the concession built environment? Looking at the American home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historian Kristin Hoganson describes U.S. consumption of the objects and styles of imperialism and their incorporation into interior design “cosmopolitan domesticity.”21 Like other historians of North

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America and Europe who look at the consumption of empire at home during this period, Hoganson argues that everyday practices, such as interior decorating, consuming cosmetics and soap, and reading travel novels are as integral to understanding empire as diplomatic treaties and trade agreements, and that by consuming the world at home, American women celebrated empire through everyday practices that reinforced the racial, national, and gendered imperatives of empire.22 If the cosmopolitan domesticity of North American and European women, who lived at the edges of empire, reinforced the power of foreign empires, what did cosmopolitan domesticity mean for Chinese men like Chen and Bao who lived at the very heart of the foreign imperial order? When American women decorated their parlors with an Oriental rug from Tianjin or Chinese porcelain from Jingdezhen, their Orientalist consumption reinforced a global power structure that feminized the East. When Chen and Bao placed Chinese style on the architectural façade of their houses, they turned the Orientalist paradigm on its head. By taking the East out of the feminized interior and installing it on the masculine façade, they made Chinese style masculine, and the Chinese pavilions atop their foreign-style houses projected the power and wealth that some Chinese men could wield over the colonial landscape. The architectural designs of houses like Chen’s and Bao’s illuminate the complexities of power relations under the colonial-capitalist system, in which foreign municipal councils may have controlled building regulations, but nevertheless relied on the capital of warlords-turned-businessmen like Chen and Bao to develop the concession’s infrastructure and its businesses, thereby empowering these two men to transform their economic capital and political connections into an expression of personal taste that defied the strictest zoning laws in the city. Chen and Bao may have chosen to juxtapose Chinese and Western architectural elements in their façades, but they did not invent this style. In fact, in districts with more lenient or nonexistent zoning regulations, styles were mixed across a variety of housing stock. For example, the Xu Pu’an house in Tianjin’s old Chinese city assembled elements of Chinese and Western architecture into a Chinese-Western courtyard house that included a two-story domed Western-style villa as one wing of the courtyard flanked by Chinesestyle halls.23 (See figures  5.4, 5.5, and 5.6.) The house mixed Chinese and

FIGURE 5.4 Xu Pu’an house in Tianjin’s old Chinese city. Photograph by the author.

FIGURE 5.5 Inside the walls of the Xu house. Photograph by the author.

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FIGURE 5.6 European- Chinese courtyard in the Xu house. Photograph by the author.

foreign building materials, with foreign poured concrete embellishing gray Chinese brick. The poured concrete dates construction to the 1920s, when the material became more widely used in Tianjin. The gray Chinese brick, already widely used throughout China, was produced through a different oxidation process than foreign red brick. Moreover, the bricks were laid according to Chinese bricklaying techniques that emphasized a uniform, seamless wall rather than European techniques that displayed exposed mortar.24 The house also combined Chinese and Western architectural plans. On one hand the compound was enclosed by a high gray brick wall in keeping with surrounding courtyard houses, but on the other hand the dome atop the Western villa rose above the wall to reveal a Western façade to passersby on the street. The main entrance to the compound was located to the east instead of the south, and rather than a post-and-lintel doorway, typical of the surrounding courtyard homes, the main entryway was octagonal, a modest opening that was more in keeping with an entrance into a

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Chinese garden than an entry-gate into a high-status house. While the inhabitants of neighboring courtyard houses most likely projected their status to the outside through the materials, carvings, and postings on their doorway, this building projected the owner’s status much in the same way that Chen’s and Bao’s villas in the foreign concessions did—through its towering architectural façade. But unlike villas in the foreign concessions, which could at most add a Chinese pavilion, this compound included a sprawling complex of mixed Chinese and European features. In addition to the Western-style courtyard at the main entryway, the compound included a second courtyard to the south that was constructed in Chinese style. The Chinese courtyard, framed by the villa to the north and a Chinese post-and-beam building to the south, was surrounded by a veranda covered in a tile roof, and adorned with wooden latticework. An octagonal door on the Western side of the Chinese-style veranda, which recalled the octagonal entrance to the compound, opened onto a European-style arcade of arches and pillars, decorated with ornate capitals, made mostly from concrete and plaster. These arcades led to a glass-domed conservatory in the back garden, which was topped by a spire identical to the one found atop the dome on the main house. Viewed in the context of the entire complex, this building was not simply a Western-style villa built in the old Chinese city. Rather, the villa was a single structure in an architectural garden of Chinese- and European-style structures. In the Japanese Concession, the mixing of styles was more subtle, with Chinese design elements adorning Western-style homes. One villa, for example, included red-painted wooden doors carved in Chinese floral motifs and red wooden latticework on the gateway to the street. Tianjin’s new Chinese district included a cozy single-family bungalow hidden behind a high wall reminiscent of the courtyard houses across the river, while down the road, a series of identical alleyway houses, built by a real estate investor, used poured concrete to attach Western-style columns and ornate windowsills onto Chinese gray brick. (See figures 5.7, 5.8, and 5.9.) Thus, the juxtaposition of Chinese and Western styles in architectural design and façades was not the exclusive taste of a select few warlords but rather part of a Chinese-initiated Tianjin modern style that spanned the elite classes of the city.

FIGURE 5.7 Row house in Xin hebei qu. Photograph by the author.

FIGURE 5.8 Poured concrete columns on Xin hebei qu row houses. Photograph by the author.

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FIGURE 5.9 Western-style window on gray brick row house in Xin hebei qu. Photograph by the author.

Combining foreign and Chinese styles to make something new seems in many ways to be similar to the critical theorist Homi Bhabha’s idea of hybridity—a colonial-cultural crossover in which colonized writers expressed themselves in the language and style of the colonizer, yet in doing so created something new, thus displacing colonial authority.25 But unlike a typical colonial hybrid, in which the two parts fused to form a single entity, these architectural examples were more properly a chimera: a collection of unique parts, all grafted together while maintaining the integrity of each individual portion. The words hybrid and chimera refer to the science of cell fusion and grafting. A hybrid results from the fusion of dissimilar genetic materials, while in a chimera, the two types of genetic material remain distinct. The chimera is also a mythic beast of multiple parts from ancient Greek mythology: the body of a lion, the head of a goat, and the tail of a snake. This image of a chimera could apply to this architectural style as well—a combination of Chinese and Western styles and tastes, each maintaining its own

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distinctiveness. In this juxtaposition of Chinese and Western styles, Tianjin’s Chinese urbanites produced a new modern Tianjin style that challenged the claims of foreign empires to aesthetic authority over modern design.

SELLING AND CONSUMING FURNITURE As urban real estate expanded in Chinese treaty-port cities, so did the need and desire for new furniture. As one 1907 British guidebook stated, “in no branch of commercial and industrial activity in Shanghai is there greater competition than in the manufacture and sale of furniture.”26 Starting in the nineteenth century, Chinese and foreign businessmen set up furniture shops along Shanghai’s Nanjing Road, offering imported sundries and locally constructed furniture.27 Years later, when businesses and families in Tianjin wanted to decorate their homes with Westernstyle furnishings, they ordered from older Shanghai stores like the Chinese-owned and -managed Tai Chong and Company, established in the 1870s, or Shanghai department stores that had branch offices in Tianjin, like Hall & Holtz. Tianjin consumers also shopped at local furniture dealers like the Chinese-managed Sun Chong and Company, located in the French Concession, or the foreign- operated Sims and Company, in the British Concession, not to mention any number of workshops and stores in the Chinese section of the city.28 The market in Western-style cabinetry, dining tables, and sofas may have been sparked by the demand from foreigners setting up offices and residences, but foreign consumption alone could not have sustained these businesses in a city like Tianjin. Foreign offices such as consulates, the post office, and the customs house purchased furniture for their offices and employees, but accounts suggest that they often pinched pennies.29 Chinese urbanites not only made up the vast majority of residents of Western-style houses, but Chinese consumers also were more affluent than their foreign neighbors. Indeed, foreign furniture companies seemed to target Chinese consumers, often adopting a Chinese name with local marketing appeal. Tianjin-based Sims and Company, for example, chose a Chinese name that transliterated their English name while highlighting the nature of the business. The Chinese name Senmu si not only sounded

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like the English “Sims,” but it comprised the Chinese characters that meant “forest” and “wood”—appropriate for a furniture company. Situated in Tianjin’s British Concession, Sims and Company claimed to operate the preeminent furniture factory in north China. The factory was located on Racecourse Road at the outskirts of the concession, and the office-showroom was on Victoria Road in the concession’s commercial heart.30 Visiting the Sims showroom, consumers encountered a shopping experience designed to cultivate the consumer as much as to sell products. Tianjin was no stranger to China’s new consumer culture of massproduced and readymade products that were advertised in newspapers or magazines and sold in department stores. The Sims and Company sales experience, however, also suggested that modern consumption could also be a conversation of taste-making between producer and consumer. Salespeople at the Sims and Company showroom began a more personal conversation with consumers, showing them sample pieces of furniture on display or offering catalogs for browsing. Sims and Company was not only a furniture designer, manufacturer, and retailer, but also a social visionary with a particular prescription of what furnishings in the modern home should look like. The Sims furniture catalog presented Tianjin consumers with a diverse and global set of styles. The catalog suggested that each room was to be decorated in a singular style with multiple offerings to choose from. Some styles were listed simply by a number, such as B104 or A44; others took the title of European furniture styles, such as the British “Sheratonstyle” or the French “Louis XVI, which elicited a foreign political regime.”31 Regardless of where a person lived in the city, they could select to decorate their home in a different foreign style. Yet designing the modern home was about function as well as style. Furnishings had to work in the rooms of the new house. Starting with the entryway, Sims offered hat and umbrella stands. They manufactured sofas and armchairs for the living room, dining sets for the dining room, and desks, bookcases, and lounge chairs for the study. To outfit a kitchen and pantry, they sold iceboxes, China cupboards, scales, and stoves; for bedrooms they offered bed frames, springs, and mattresses of varying quality along with furniture such as wardrobes and dressing tables.32 Decorating a house with all of the above necessities and in a consistent style came with a hefty price tag. In 1928, Sims and

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Company estimated the cost of completely furnishing the newly remodeled home of the foreign secretary of Tianjin’s Hai River Conservancy Commission at over $2,500.33 The Sims estimate for decorating a bedroom was between $657 and $838, while the drawing room would have cost between $345 and $419. Even the most financially secure Chinese families would have found such a bill to be quite daunting, thus most families probably decorated their homes over time, purchasing furnishings piece by piece. One new furniture item that a Tianjin family would only have been able to purchase from a furniture store like Sims was a sofa. The average cost of a sofa was around one month’s rent in the foreign concessions. To purchase a sofa, a family needed sufficient space in which to place it and sufficient disposable income to purchase it. The sofa served as a primary signifier, transforming a Chinese keting from its literal meaning of guest hall into a modern sitting room. This single piece of furniture not only defined the function of the room, but it also revolutionized the design of the space. Sofas were not flexible pieces of furniture. At around seven feet in length, they took up a considerable amount of space in a sitting room; and being made from wood, horsehair, and thick, sturdy textiles they were also quite heavy. Although people in late imperial China could quickly transform the function of some rooms simply by rearranging comparatively light wooden furniture, the sofa, given its weight and size, made it more difficult to change the function of a sitting room. Also, use and the aesthetics of a sofa required new furnishings to complement it. Sofas were lower to the ground than the high wooden chairs of the vernacular guest hall. They dropped bodies down to a new level, and thus required side tables closer to the ground. Sofas inspired a new design aesthetic; they earmarked a significant amount of space, and they were an expensive purchase. These factors combined to enhance the sofa as a status item. Still, less affluent families, or those who lived in small spaces without multiple rooms, could purchase a piece of modern seating such as an upholstered armchair, or at the very least a rattan chair.34

FEMALE TASTE The story of producing and consuming furniture suggests that designing the modern home was far from arbitrary. The high expense of furniture meant that Chinese people had to make deliberate decisions about

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furnishing their homes, and as they made these decisions, they navigated multiple politics of style including Chinese and foreign, and traditional and modern. Taste was displayed through decisions in how to design the home, and Chinese people forged their tastes through leveraging different kinds of capital: economic, cultural, social, and educational. These processes molded new social identities. A wealthy family may have been able to afford the entire line of Sheraton-style furniture from Sims, but a civil servant’s family could have decorated their home for less expense using the knowledge an educated daughter could glean from reading women’s magazines. Indeed, when viewed as aesthetic treatises, women’s magazines suggest that designing the modern home was not an accident of consumption but rather a deliberate production that generated new social identities and relations. If the walls built the modern house, then furnishings, interior decoration, and everyday objects transformed the interior into a home. Women were responsible for mastering the new knowledge of home. As they designed the interior, women needed to master a new set of codes and symbols, familiarizing themselves both with new styles that signified modernity and with new tastes that distinguished the family’s social identity. At the same time, women needed to navigate the new material objects that transformed the cultural and social practices of everyday life: light bulbs that extended daylight, bathtubs that enhanced washing with new commercial soaps and perfumes, and dining tables that brought families together for meals. In the early twentieth century, knowledge associated with the interior design of the Chinese urban home became feminized. This was a change from late imperial China, when taste was central to a literati man’s individual identity, and men published manuals on aesthetic design and encyclopedias on household management.35 In the twentieth century, a rising commercial popular press re-gendered this knowledge female, and women’s and family magazines became the new manuals of household taste and management. Historians cannot always identify the authors and editors of these ephemeral magazines, and many were in fact men, or in some cases men writing under female pen names. But whatever the writer’s gender, the magazine’s contents, unless otherwise noted, were assumed to be woman’s knowledge, gendering expertise over the modern household as female.

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The female-managed interior of the home signified social status differently than the exterior of the house. While men leveraged economic or political capital to project individual or family status through the façade of a house, women summoned cultural and educational capital to design the modern home. It was not enough to be able to consume goods for the modern home; women had to know how to consume. In other words, when it came to interior design, or household management, the daughter of a warlord like Chen or Bao was not necessarily better equipped than the daughter of a civil servant who had been educated in one of Tianjin’s several new schools for girls. In fact, women and girls with a lower economic status could have leveraged knowledge about the home’s interior by studying new school subjects like domestic science and reading print material like women’s magazines and domestic manuals to imagine themselves to be, or even to participate as, members of the same social strata as the wives and daughters of wealthy men like Chen or Bao.36 Thus, shifting the lens from the property of the house to the design of the home, and from the economic and professional status of the male household head to the educational and cultural capital of women and girls, reveals an even more complex picture of social relations in colonial-capitalist Tianjin. Engendering the analytic of social status through the lens of female taste complicates previously held assumptions about social class in modern China, yet it does not broaden the scope that defined elite social status in cities like Tianjin. Women cultivated cultural capital through the new curriculum of coeducational and girls’ schools as well as through women’s magazines. While female education and popular periodical literature may have had the potential to equalize social strata in theory, in practice they delineated class boundaries. Schools opened social spaces and introduced new kinds of academic knowledge to young women and girls, but they did not necessarily revolutionize female literacy. For one thing, women had been reading and writing in the inner chambers in imperial China.37 Moreover, the girls who attended Tianjin’s new schools belonged to China’s elite, like their grandmothers before them. Women of the laboring classes in Tianjin had different educational opportunities. The Social Bureau, which was part of the Chinese municipal government, organized night school classes for working women. Not only did the curriculum differ, but it is unclear whether this effort led to widespread literacy.38

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Even if lower status women could read the magazines, they likely lacked the economic and social capital to obtain a copy, as well as the cultural capital to decode it. Unlike in Japan, where factory girls reportedly read women’s magazines, in Tianjin women’s periodical literature was not targeted to a working-class readership.39 Tianjin women’s magazines were very much a product of their environment. Although the history of women’s magazines in China dates to the late nineteenth century, the first women’s magazine produced in Tianjin was published in 1923, around the same time that Tianjin’s housing market was taking off. Titled Kuaile jiating (Happy home), this magazine was published twice a month for one year, and cost 25 cents per issue, about half the daily wage of the carpenters who built the modern house. 40 Kuaile jiating was targeted to the women who lived in, or knew people who lived in, Tianjin’s new houses. (See figure  5.10.) A material reference point could help a reader understand the magazine, but she first needed to access it, leveraging either her economic capital to purchase it or social capital to borrow an issue from a friend. Kuaile jiating thus defined its readers as members of a distinct social group and suggested that even when women may not have had the necessary economic capital to consume all the trappings of the modern home, having the necessary social and educational capital to read about home in a women’s magazine marked them as members of this elite social group. Magazines like Kuaile jiating were connected to the material world in which they were produced but they also instructed women on how to dwell in the world beyond their city. Pages opened up a world of knowledge including content on cleaning, menu planning, and child rearing. Many of these articles were similar to those found in American magazines from the time such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens, and in fact, Kuaile jiating and magazines like it often included translated articles from American magazines, along with features on the latest lifestyle trends in Europe, and photographs from Japan. You might say that a women’s magazine put forth a new global vision of home. This vision also connected to the global city where the magazine was published, and Tianjin’s chimeric modern design was also featured on the pages of Kuaile jiating in the juxtaposition of new foreign furnishings, like upholstered chairs, with Chinese accessories, like ink-painted hanging scrolls.

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FIGURE 5.10 Kuaile jiating [Happy home] magazine, issue 9 (Tianjin, 1923).

From the moment it was launched, Kuaile jiating instructed Tianjin women in this chimeric modern design. The first issue included an article on interior design with photographs of two different rooms. 41 (See figures  5.11 and 5.12.) The first room, described as “the arrangement of a Western style library,” could have depicted an English country estate, a Tokyo suburban home, or a Tianjin villa. 42 Being devoid of people, the photograph of the library allowed the reader to enter the room and imagine herself inside this global fantasy of the modern home. The second room, described as “a hall in the style of Chinese furnishings,” was by contrast self-referentially local. The accompanying text guided the reader as she explored each of the rooms in the photographs. The Western-style library had a “natural ceiling” with exposed beams from which a “Greek-style chandelier” hung. While the chandelier may

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FIGURE 5.11 “Arrangement of a Western style library.” Kuaile jiating, issue 1 (Tianjin, 1923).

have lit the room at night, a large glass window provided natural sunlight to read by during the day, and three fireplaces, as noted in the accompanying text, provided warmth on a cold northern winter afternoon. An upholstered armchair and a chair with a high wooden back were placed facing one another by the fireplace whether for warmth or for a chat. Indeed, this “library” may actually have been a room for socializing or relaxing rather than reading; as the accompanying text suggests, the small seats in front

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FIGURE 5.12 “Hall in the style of Chinese furnishings.” Kuaile jiating, issue 1 (Tianjin, 1923).

of the square table at the center of the room could easily be moved, allowing two or three people to gather around the fire for conversation. While the text claims that books were present, the photograph suggests otherwise. There are no books in the photo, let alone a bookshelf; instead, the photo shows large, framed paintings hung high on the wall and decorative

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plates on the fireplace mantel. A vase of flowers sits on a table in the center of the room, and a large carpet covers the floor. No oil paintings decorated the walls in the photo of the Chinese hall; instead, that room featured an ink-painted hanging scroll hung above a table displaying a potted plant. A large armchair was placed next to the table, and on the wall behind it hung a Chinese calligraphy couplet. 43 Two lamps surrounded the chair— one hanging, one standing, and both “fastened in silk thread.” A table and chair made of “famous Fujian lacquer” with a “luster beyond compare” and other objects in the “ancient Chinese style” decorated the room. The text noted that the room was “especially lively and elegant, while being solemn at the same time,” claiming as well that the furnishing and decorations were all of “ancient Chinese style.” The arrangement, however, was distinctly modern. The crowding and cluttering of furniture, lamps, artwork, and antiques offered a strong contrast with late imperial Chinese design aesthetics, which emphasized geomantic symmetry and order. In a typical late imperial Chinese dwelling, furniture and objects occupied particular places in the hall, leaving space around them that accentuated the size and height of the room. Side tables flanked wooden chairs that were placed against the side walls. The back wall (reserved for display or an altar) usually featured a high, long table, adorned by a plant, a ceramic vase, or another object, with a scroll hanging above. A table surrounded by chairs would often be in the center of the room. While the writer commenting on the photograph in Kuaile jiating noted that “everything appears in perfect order,” to a late imperial eye, the room would have seemed to be complete pandemonium. With couplets hung side by side off in the corner instead of symmetrically displayed, and with multiple styles of seating and too many lamps for such a small corner of a room, this Chinese hall was chaotic and cluttered, a thoroughly modern space. Even if the Chinese hall did not display classical Chinese tastes, the article’s author suggested that Chinese style was “different but in no way inferior to Western style,” so much so that “there is no reason for all people to claim with gusto that [Western style] is more fashionable.” At first glance, these words might seem to be a nationalist celebration of Chinese style, but seen in the context of the article and its photographs they were

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actually part of an aesthetic treatise on the chimeric modern, claiming that Chinese style was just as good but not necessarily better than Western style. Indeed, to understand the concept of chimeric modern design put forth by Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating, the photographs of the Western library and the Chinese hall must be viewed together. The modern is not found in either room by itself, but in the juxtaposition of Western and Chinese rooms—with lacquer next to glass, and a Chinese lantern beside a Greek chandelier. In the modern interior, objects, which tend to be mistakenly classified into binaries of new and old and Chinese and Western, are actually part of an organic aesthetic whole. Moreover, this modernity needed the lingering elements of a not-so-distant past in order to define itself. The chandelier was considered to be a new kind of lighting when juxtaposed against a lantern; and yet the lantern gained its “Chineseness” only in comparison to a foreign chandelier. They derived their meaning reciprocally, as part of a modern whole. Together these layers of newness and Chineseness, glass and lacquer, formed the Tianjin modern aesthetic of the urban interior. Indeed, the way Kuaile jiating discussed modern home design was more in keeping with the chimeric design of Tianjin’s architecture than with depictions of interior design in similar women’s magazines published in Shanghai. Shanghai magazines labeled visual depictions of interior design as modern (modeng) and contemporary (xiandai) but never foreign. 44 As the modern metropole of China (and possibly even Asia), Shanghai kept pace in the global contest to represent universal modern style. With the tallest building in Asia, Shanghai’s skyline rivaled Tokyo, and with a thriving nightlife, its jazz scene compared with New York’s. 45 But the global stage of modern culture and style was fraught with politics and power. Thus, the literary scholar Shih Shu-mei examines this so-called universal Shanghai modern in its semicolonial context, arguing that the identity of modernist Shanghai writers was “bifurcated” between their belief that they were participating actively in a universal literary globalism and the reality of being constrained within the power structures of the colonial-capitalist global system. 46 Tianjin urbanites never made such bold claims to represent the universal modern, and instead were always conscious of being on the periphery of Shanghai and foreign modernities. Moreover, living at the center of

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multiple foreign empires made Tianjin urbanites acutely aware of the systems of power that divided up the global modern stage. Unlike residents of Shanghai who understood their city as a series of streets and alleyways, Tianjin residents saw their city as a patchwork of colonial districts. Even after World War II, when the concessions had been abolished, many Tianjin urbanites still gave addresses starting with the concession name, only then followed by street names and numbers. 47 Thus the chimeric was not simply a style but a way of understanding the space of the city as distinct foreign and Chinese parts grafted together. Tianjin never claimed membership in the universal modern but instead invented its own chimeric modern—a local modern style in which a juxtaposition of foreign and Chinese styles was mobilized to challenge the aesthetic authority of foreign empires. Western tastemakers exercised not only state hegemony but hegemony of taste: so that when they consumed the spoils of empire in the “cosmopolitan domestic” interiors of the home country, they celebrated their juxtapositions of Western and colonial as aesthetically pleasing. Yet when Chinese people combined Western and Chinese styles, Western tastemakers often condemned the new style as bricolage or pastiche. In 1928, the American journalist Nathaniel Peffer described the “typical” Chinese interior as “lost in a tradition completely alien.”48 Peffer had traveled to China, armed with a Guggenheim Foundation grant, to study China as a civilization in conflict. Interior design was one of the areas in which he located “conflict” between native/traditional and Western/modern ways. Peffer condemned Chinese-built houses that attempted to use foreign styles, decorating “with wooden floors and electric lights and bathrooms,” furnished in “mongreloid furniture that is of no hemisphere but blends the hideous in both,” and he attacked interior design that mixed both national styles (an “Italian chromo” with an American “Grand Rapids mission chair”) and periods (nineteenth-century Victorian doilies with twentiethcentury Arts and Crafts furnishings). 49 Peffer’s criticism underscores the threat of chimeric design to Western tastes. Thus, the power of the chimeric modern lay not only in its defiance of colonial zoning laws but also in its ability to challenge the aesthetic authority of foreigners by being offensive. Peffer’s description of chimeric interior design in a home outside of Tianjin also suggests that chimeric style may have been celebrated in

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other parts of China as well. Indeed, in his study of modern material culture in China, the historian Frank Dikötter argues that it was precisely this mixing, what he calls “creative bricolage,” that drove Chinese mass consumption, and that Chinese consumers created cultural and stylistic meaning by mixing (qipaos with overcoats), recycling (Western oil barrels transformed into cook stoves), and inventing (Chinese/Western dishes like eggs and tomatoes).50 Thus, while Peffer suggests that Chinese consumers were passive, unschooled recipients of Western material culture, Dikötter argues that Chinese people actively and eclectically engaged multiple styles. Yet both Peffer and Dikötter overlook the methodical knowledge required to consume modern material culture, a knowledge prescribed in women’s magazines and by manufacturers themselves. Indeed, the process of selling and consuming furniture illuminates the multiple forms of economic, social, educational, and cultural capital that Chinese urbanites leveraged to design the modern home.

PRODUCING CHIMERA FOR THE WORLD Furnishings in treaty-port China were more than status signifiers for the city’s Chinese residents. As products of a colonial-capitalist city, they had a larger story to tell about China’s place in the world. As they designed everyday life amid multiple empires, Tianjin urbanites produced the chimeric style by combining the new material culture of foreign empires with lingering elements of an imperial Chinese past, thus creating a new Chinese modern style that challenged Western aesthetic authority. The world was in Tianjin, but women elsewhere were dwelling in the world. From Tianjin to Tokyo, and from Boston to London, the new, urban modern home was not only a global phenomenon, but more importantly, a site for experiencing the world. Women who lived on the edges of empire, in places like Philadelphia and Paris, consumed an imperial bricolage that celebrated and confirmed the racial and nationalist imperatives of empire. Thus, even if the mixture of objects and styles in a Tianjin sitting room resembled those of a Philadelphia parlor, each arrangement in its relationship to global power communicated a different message.

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When people consumed the world at home, it was more than an act of signification, articulating the connection between home and empire; their domestic consumption drove global capitalism. American and European manufacturers knew this, and they tried to crack a market of “400 million Chinese customers,” while from the other side of the Pacific, the exotic demands of American housewives fueled global trade networks.51 In some instances, cosmopolitan domestic consumption even sparked new handicraft industries. The Tianjin carpet, for example, a Chinese product invented by American and European Orientalist tastes, illuminates the complicated networks of production, trade, and consumption that forged global capitalism.52 Tianjin carpets initially were manufactured in Tianjin for export to Europe and America, reinterpreting Tianjin’s chimeric tastes for foreign consumers. (See figures 5.13 and 5.14.) The story of the Tianjin carpet thus connects multiple sites of global empire, as rugs moved from the dusty floors of Tianjin workshops to export companies’ halls of capitalism to the private interiors of European and American homes. Yet the Tianjin carpet also reveals a more complicated story: though they were first manufactured for export, Tianjin carpets later rode capitalist circuits back to China: Chinese residents of Tianjin eventually adopted the export carpets as modern furnishings and thus incorporated European and North American Orientalism into the Chinese home. The primary consumers of Tianjin carpets lived overseas, but as these “foreignized” Chinese commodities found their way into local interiors, such rugs were regularly depicted in photographs of the modern home in Chinese women’s magazines, suggesting that, at the very least, they had become an integral part of the idealized domestic environment.53 Before Tianjin produced rugs, few local Chinese people decorated with them, and in parts of China where people did have rugs, they typically were not used as floor coverings. In imperial Beijing palaces, carpets were hung from walls or draped on furniture. In northern China, rugs were placed on kang or heated platforms. The photographs of both the Western library and the Chinese hall from Kuaile jiating suggest that by the early 1920s, people in Tianjin had imported the decorative ideal of carpets as floor coverings from Europeans and Americans, for whom oriental carpets were foreign and exotic to begin with. When Chinese people began to buy locally

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FIGURE 5.13 Tianjin carpet template. Author’s collection.

produced carpets and covered their floors with them, they were incorporating global bourgeois tastes into their own ideal interior designs— even when those tastes included a locally produced Chinese style that had been invented for a global market. Moreover, when a women’s magazine like Kuaile jiating could place the Tianjin carpet in both a Chinese- and a Western-style room, it suggested that chimeric objects were flexible enough to signify either Chinese or foreign style, depending on the context.

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FIGURE 5.14 Tianjin carpet template. Author’s collection.

CONCLUSION Global markets and commodity flows allowed Tianjin urbanites to partake in a global vision of middle-class domesticity, and the world also resided within Tianjin where the global was local. The city’s urban landscape reproduced the global stage where foreign empires competed to represent the universal modern. As a result, style in Tianjin was assertively political, with French Beaux Arts banks, Italian villas, Japanese modernist school buildings, and the British garden city all claiming to stand for the pinnacle of modern style. Yet this global competition of national styles also exposed gaps that allowed a new Tianjin modern style to emerge. Juxtaposing Western styles from the foreign concessions with Chinese elements from the lingering Qing imperial city, the Tianjin chimeric modern challenged the aesthetic authority of foreign empires. Moreover, when Chinese people in Tianjin displayed this chimeric modern on the façades of their houses, in the interiors of their homes, and through export commodities

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like Tianjin carpets, they coproduced an image of China and Chinese style for the global stage. Thus, while a Boston housewife may have understood the Tianjin carpet on display in her parlor to be an authentic representation of an unchanging traditional East, its style actually was invented through the intersection of national styles and global tastes, tastes facilitated through the interconnectedness of the modern global market. Thus, designing house and home was truly a cosmopolitan experience. Living at the center of multiple foreign empires, Tianjin urbanites were dwelling in the world. In fact, while historians have long credited the rise of the modern home elsewhere to industrialization or the development of a middle class, in Tianjin, the modern home formed when Chinese urban elites worked to navigate new global visions of the modern middle-class home, creating a modern home before either industrialization or the formation of a self-conscious bourgeois class in China. Instead, leveraging different forms of economic, cultural, and social capital to encounter the world at home, Chinese urbanites formed new social distinctions. This use of taste and consumption as a means of distinguishing social status was not entirely new to China. During the early modern period, for example, a growing merchant class had tried to leverage economic capital to enhance its social position vis-à-vis literati scholars, whose cultural and educational capital assured them a place among China’s social elites, but the shifting and uncertain economic and political landscape of treaty-port Tianjin had destabilized social status. Warlords with large amounts of economic capital could purchase their social position in the city, but knowledge, or knowing how to live in a changing colonial capitalist and global city, also became a valuable form of capital. In Republican-era China, women’s magazines helped gender this knowledge female. Women were not only responsible for designing the modern home, but they also became proprietors of knowledge about all kinds of worldly goods that entered the modern home. If life at the intersection of multiple empires forced Chinese people to encounter the world at home, then Chinese women became guides to that encounter, and women’s magazines were their guidebooks.

6 Living at Home

T

he new Chinese word jiating could mean family, house, or home, depending on the context. Meanings of family and house could be mapped onto earlier understandings expressed through the classical Chinese term jia, but home was a new concept. If family expressed social relations and the house was the physical space, home encompassed material culture and affect. This concept of home was global, and the vision of home that was articulated among Tianjin elites resembled that of middling classes in other parts of the world. In English the ideological and material practice of inhabiting the bourgeois home is called “domesticity,” but this word does not translate easily into Chinese.1 Most dictionaries would translate it as jiating shenghuo (“home life”), but this translation does not incorporate the ideological sense of the English term “domesticity” that connects the home to the state. Indeed, the Chinese urban home at this time was not the focus of nationalist ideology, which was more concerned with the demography and relations of the family than with everyday life in house and home. Thus, while domesticity may not be a useful comparative term, jiating shenghuo or “home life” can be a useful concept for thinking about everyday life at home across places.

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Home life was a happy life— or at least it was constructed and cultivated to be, as affective happiness needed to be attached to home, just as consumers had been guided to attach happiness to household objects. Sarah Ahmed argues that “certain objects become imbued with positive affect as good objects. After all, objects not only embody good feeling, but are perceived as necessary for a good life.”2 She notes that people are drawn to certain objects as good and cites the “happy family” as one such an entity, arguing that “we share an orientation toward the family as being good, as being what promises happiness in return for loyalty.”3 The problem with this understanding of the “happy family” for twentieth-century China is that Chinese people were not oriented toward family as a site of happiness; if anything, May Fourth ideologues had cultivated a negative image of family. Likewise, the family as depicted in Chinese literature often was the site of the individual’s angst and turmoil. To manage the fact that these two sets of contradictory emotions attached to the same Chinese term ( jiating), the affect associated with the happy home needed to be simultaneously constructed and cultivated in terms of its objects of affect, and this task fell to women’s periodical literature. The first magazine published for the home in Tianjin in 1923 was titled Kuaile jiating, and although the editors did not provide an English translation for the title, more than ten years later a Shanghai magazine of the same title, published from 1936 to 1949, called itself in English Happy Home. The invention of home as a site for happiness was central to the creation of middle-class identities. The emotion of individual subjectivity and the transformation of public and private spheres have been referred to as markers of bourgeois identity. Lauren Berlant identifies the “problem of living in capitalist modernity” as described by Habermas as the bourgeois male who, as a “subject of emotion,” must navigate the separate spheres of public and private as a split between the “man of the house” and the “man of the market.”4 Scholars of China have also examined connections between emotions, subjectivities, and a rising public sphere. The literary scholar Haiyan Lee argues for the role of emotion and individual subjectivity in Qing literature, while the historian Eugenia Lean has demonstrated that female-gendered sentiment shaped the public sphere in

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modern China.5 Both scholars argue for a distinct understanding of emotion in the Chinese context centered on the concept of qing. Looking at the affect of home life, I argue that there were more similarities than differences between how Chinese urban elites and their global counterparts shaped emotive visions of home life, and also that the Chinese home was not a mere copy of Western practices and beliefs. Moreover, while histories of Europe and the United States assume that the private sphere and the bourgeois class that inhabited it were transformed through industrial modernity, the history of home in China suggests that home and the middle class had to be deliberately constructed, and that this coproduction enabled the emergence of both. The relationship between home and the world was a radical departure from the late imperial Chinese notion of nei and wai (inner and outer). The nei-wai relationship made the late imperial jia political. A properly ordered, female-gendered inner brought stability to the masculine outer realm of the empire. The post-imperial jiating disconnected this relationship between inner and outer, where politics, family, and home were intertwined. Instead, jiating as family could be a political site, called upon to strengthen the nation, while jiating as home could be an apolitical and private personal space. The shift from jia to jiating changed home in other ways, too. The post-imperial home was a discrete space lived within the interior of the house, whereas late-imperial ideas of inner and outer were relational and could describe spaces and relations across or within the walls of the house. For example, a room in the front of a courtyard house, when used to conduct business, would be considered outer in relation to the female inner chambers behind it. In contrast, home was a bounded space with no clear relational counterpart, yet also was a site whose boundaries were often porous, making home life potentially volatile. While the relational inner and outer maintained stability within the household and within the empire, the porous borders of the home created chaos by allowing the outside to come in regardless of consequence. The home emerged as a site of boundary making and boundary breaking, and home life was in a constant state of destruction and repair. The role of affect, then, was to regulate these fluctuations in home life by turning home into an object of desire in order to mask its volatility. Emotion made home life stable.

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FEMINIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE If property laws and real estate development had made the house and its architectural façade male, urban China’s burgeoning female periodical press helped to invent the concept of home and “home life,” and designated knowledge about everyday life within those walls as female. Chinese women’s magazines first began publication in the late nineteenth century, and they expanded with changes in print technology in the twentieth century. Home emerged as a subject in women’s magazines and a featured topic in newspaper advice columns. From magazines to newspapers, this knowledge was presented as female, irrespective of the actual gendered identities of the reader or author. The gender of all readers cannot be confirmed, but both men and women edited and wrote for this new female periodical literature, with male writers sometimes even assuming female pen names. Regardless of who read and wrote about home life, knowledge about home was gendered female, signaling an epistemological shift from late imperial China, when such knowledge was gendered male. In particular, encyclopedias known as riyong leishu had offered prescriptive advice on how to decorate, conduct ritual, and live within the household. While women may have read leishu, the intended audience was male. By charging women with the knowledge of how to live at home, the new female periodical press endowed women with the prescriptive burden of managing the household. But it also empowered women by entrusting them with the responsibility of a new social space that came to signify cosmopolitanism, modernity, and social status. New houses, with their new styles and spaces, required new knowledge about how to live in them, and magazines served as guidebooks to everyday life within city homes, which were increasingly designated as the modern ideal. While individual men claimed the property rights of the house, women could claim the knowledge of how to live within it. Endowed with the responsibility for home life, women as tastemakers could enhance their family’s social status. Reading about the multifaceted home in women’s magazines helped female readers to accumulate the cultural capital that distinguished them and their families. The U.S. historian Jennifer Scanlon describes how social distinction was central to the Ladies’

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Home Journal in the 1910s and 1920s, which depicted he ideal home as signifying inhabitants who were white, middle class, and native born.6 She also notes how the popularity of the magazine was facilitated by the advent of markers of middle-class modernity, including rising literacy rates, increasing leisure and income, and the ever-broader reach of electricity and postal service.7 Several of these markers were taking hold in urban China, but just as the modern home was not a “natural” historical development, new understandings of social status had to be invented. Tianjin urbanites simultaneously invented both the signifiers and signified of house and home as markers of social status. Women’s magazines not only facilitated this process but also opened up a space for literate women to gain cultural capital. Certainly, a wealthy businessman could display his economic capital by building an imposing villa in one of Tianjin’s concessions, but through accumulating cultural capital by reading a women’s magazine, the educated daughter of an office clerk might better understand how to conduct modern everyday life inside such a home. Through navigating multifaceted depictions of home life in periodical literature, women developed their own subjectivities and formed the affect of home. Knowledge about home could be prescriptive or descriptive, including instructions on how to live at home as well as the fantasy of home. One page of a magazine might portray home as the site of new rituals of everyday life, telling women how to cook for the modern family and clean the modern home, while the next page might include photographs of impeccably arranged rooms, luxurious furnishings, and opulent objects that depict the home as a fantasy escape from the reader’s real-life home. Women read about the ordered practical tasks of household management and viewed images of perfectly curated home life that differed from the messiness of their own lives. This discrepancy could have provoked anxiety, but the magazines’ presentation of home life was familiar and happy.

MAGAZINES AS MATERIAL CULTURE As products of a tangible, material world, magazines about home and women reflected everyday life in the Chinese city. The city gave birth to the magazines; the richness and diversity of urban life enabled the

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technological and cultural expertise that made publishing women’s magazines possible, yet also provided a growing, literate female readership. Magazines also transformed the very social environment that created them, offering prescriptive advice on everything from fashion to hygiene and childcare. Even the fantasy world of images and articles revealed an aspirational modern home that readers could reproduce on a smaller scale in their own living spaces. The magazines were also objects of the city themselves—pieces of modern ephemera that circulated across the city, into the home, and into the new woman’s hands. The materiality of the magazines, the format and size, offer clues as to how they moved, how they were read, and who might have read them. Magazines came in different sizes. The most common size for a women’s periodical during this time was about 7 inches wide by 10 inches tall, running about 25 pages of content. Women’s magazines also came in pocket sizes that could easily travel with women as they moved in and out of their houses and around the city; the 1930s Shanghai magazine Ling long, for instance, was about 5 inches tall and 4 inches wide. In an essay titled “Talking About Women,” popular female Shanghai writer Zhang Ailing noted that “every female student had an issue of Ling long magazine in hand during the 1930s.”8 Zhang emphasized that Shanghai schoolgirls carried, not read, Ling long. Thus, the object itself became as much a marker of female identity as the knowledge contained within it. Innovations in photographic print technology offered a vivid way to bring the world into the home. Photography arrived in China in the nineteenth century, with portrait studios gaining instant popularity in treatyport cities such as Shanghai and Tianjin.9 These early photographs, however, could not be mass-produced for the commercial press. Instead, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lithograph print technology allowed for the mass consumption of illustrated images in pictorials such as Shanghai’s Dianshizhai huabao (1884–1898).10 It was during the 1920s that photographs finally replaced illustrations as the primary mode of mass-consumed print visual culture in Chinese cities. In 1925, ten years before the U.S. publisher Henry Luce launched Life magazine, Shanghai publishers began production of China’s most widely read pictorial, Liang you, or The Companion Pictorial (in print from 1926 to 1945). Tianjin publishers soon followed suit with their own local pictorial, Beiyang huabao

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(from 1926 to 1937). Pictorial magazines were about twice the size of typical magazines, and too cumbersome to tote around the city or read on a streetcar. Instead, large pictorials could be displayed on a coffee table or a desk as a material signifier of the modern interior, bringing the city, the nation, and the world into the home through photographs. Titles displayed across the cover of women’s and home magazines further connected the home to the world. Magazines often included bilingual titles: Tianjin’s Jiating zhoukan (literally “home weekly”), for example, also called itself The Chinese Home, while Shanghai’s Kuaile jiating used the English title Happy Home. Notably, both titles used the English word “home” rather than “family” when translating the word jiating, echoing the titles of such North American and European magazines as Ladies’ Home Journal. Chinese women’s magazines even included articles translated from foreign magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal. Bilingual titles and translated articles signaled that Chinese publishers were aligning themselves with a global female knowledge of home life. If Chinese women’s magazines took inspiration from their foreign counterparts, they were also products of their local context. The Chinese popular press was largely centered in treaty-port cities, especially Shanghai. Although it was an important port city, Tianjin did not shape cultural production to the same extent that its southern counterpart Shanghai did. From the modern ink painters of the nineteenth century, to the avantgarde writers of the 1930s and 1940s, to the cinema of the early twentieth century, Shanghai represented the cultural center of late Qing- and Republican-era China.11 Indeed, most women’s magazines were born out of this atmosphere of cultural and technological innovation. Tianjin played less of a role in China’s print history. Of all of the women’s magazines collected by local Tianjin libraries during the first half of the twentieth century, and which survived to be housed in the Tianjin Municipal Library today, only four were published in Tianjin. Moreover, a list from Shanghai’s Ling long magazine of the Chinese women’s periodicals published in 1933 included only one Tianjin magazine—Jiating zhoukan (Home weekly).12 Indeed, Jiating zhoukan’s editor lamented the lack of northern periodicals in the 1931 inaugural issue, stating that northern publications were scarce, especially in Tianjin, because the northern printing industry had just begun to develop over the previous ten years.13

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The small-scale history of the Tianjin’s women’s press began on January 1, 1923, when the Guanghua Publishing Company (Guanghua yinshua gongsi), located on Dagu Road in Tianjin’s Special First District (the former German Concession), published the first issue of the bimonthly Kuaile jiating. Publication of Kuaile jiating seems to have ceased after one year. Short runs of women’s magazines in Tianjin (and elsewhere) were not uncommon.14 The Tianjin pictorial Xin funü (New Women Weekly), for example, was also published for a single year, 1935. The short lives of these women’s magazines were not due to lack of interest. The editors of Tianjin’s leading newspaper, the Dagong bao, felt women and family to be worthy of a full-page column from 1927 to 1929. The Tianjin-published Jiating zhoukan (The Chinese Home, a “home and family weekly”) enjoyed a total run of eight years, first from 1931 to 1937 and then from 1946 to 1948, while Funü xin duhui (Woman World) was published for about five years, starting in 1939, and only ceased publication when its editor Yin Meibo proposed to change it into a weekly publication called Tianjin funü ribao (Tianjin women weekly).15 Tianjin presses may not have produced a wealth of women’s magazines, but the long runs of Jiating zhoukan and Woman World and the column in Dagong bao suggest that people in Tianjin wanted to read about women and home. When Tianjin women tired of local publications, there were always magazines from Shanghai. The women’s press in Shanghai was far more established than Tianjin’s, with the Commercial Press’s Funü zazhi enjoying a fifteen-plus year run between 1915 and 1931. Technological advances made nationwide distribution possible: printing allowed magazines to be mass-produced, while the domestic postal system allowed Shanghai magazines to be distributed to cities as close as Tianjin and as far away as Lanzhou.16 Indeed, women’s magazines circulated across individual cities, throughout China and even to Chinese readers overseas. According to the ten-year memorial issue of Shanghai’s Happy Home, the magazine aimed to reach a mass audience, exemplified in the English-language slogan “A Chinese Ladies Home Journal, Plus Direct Mail Idea, With a Guaranteed Circulation of 50,000 Better Homes.”17 Shanghai magazines actively marketed themselves to a broad audience of Chinese women, but the same was true for Tianjin magazines such as Kuaile jiating and Jiating zhoukan. Shanghai’s 1930s Ling long magazine may have had the widest circulation

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of any Chinese women’s magazine; it included information on domestic and even overseas subscription rates, and today copies that were collected at the time of publication are still housed not only in municipal libraries in Shanghai and Tianjin, but also the Columbia University Library in New York City.18 But Ling long is the rare women’s magazine to have been saved by a university library. Women’s magazines were never published for posterity; they were pieces of modern ephemera produced for the moment— printed on inexpensive paper that has yellowed and crumbled after years of damp and dusty storage. As pieces of ephemera, women’s magazines reveal the lives of people silenced by the archive. When we hold a copy of Ling long magazine in the palm of our hand we are closer to the woman who paged through that issue after it was freshly published and the paper was still white, but we still do not know her name or where she lived. Some magazines tried to include readers on their pages, or even the cover, especially after the 1930s when the technology of photographic printing became more readily available. Pictorial magazines like Shanghai’s Ling long and Tianjin’s Woman World included photographs of local women, often students. These photographs suggest what the magazines imagined their readers to look like: young, modern, educated, and members of the new urban middle class. While scholars of Japan and Korea have argued that factory women read women’s magazines, in all likelihood, Tianjin factory girls did not, some Tianjin magazines explicitly stated that they were not meant for the laboring classes.19 Unlike most readers, editors and writers leave their names in published pages of the magazine, but historical records on them are limited or absent. Editors and writers were both men and women, and since gender is not always discernible from Chinese first names, female authors and editors often added the title “lady” or nüshi to their name for clarity.20 Even so, we cannot be certain that these nüshi were actually women, as sometimes men wrote under a female pseudonym. The fact that men would write under women’s names, however, suggests that magazines wanted to present knowledge as female even when it was produced by a man. A magazine’s title also suggested the gendering of knowledge. Titles often used the term “woman,” while some magazines took a more subtle gendered approach. The title of Ling long, for example, used a Ming

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dynasty aesthetic term that meant “elegant and fine,” an onomatopoeia that referred to the sound of pieces of jade clinking together, and was part of the aesthetic idea of qiao or female handiwork.21 Whereas Ling long might have described a trinket of lesser value to a member of the male Ming literati, the editors of this 1930s weekly used it to signal the clinking of different opinions and ideas that created a unique harmony of female modern knowledge. Articles published inside the magazine often assumed a female reader. But Shanghai’s Happy Home (Kuaile jiating, 1936–1949, no relation to the earlier Tianjin magazine of the same name), expanded their target readership to include the entire family. The contents recommended articles for each member of the family: psychology and education for the husband, domestic science and technical arts for the housewife, social relations and marriage for daughters, and biographical essays and articles on self-cultivation for sons. Husbands or sons may have never actually read Happy Home, but the editor clearly delineated the gendering of household knowledge female, charging women with home life or managing everyday life at home. Magazines were both a product of and a producer of the local. The locals of Shanghai and Tianjin were globally connected and entrenched, but the globally infused local world created in women’s magazines did not represent everyone. Instead, women’s magazines were produced by and for a cosmopolitan female middle class. And though Tianjin was not the leading publisher of women’s and home magazines, it certainly was a center of well-educated and well-connected literate elites. Tianjin developed both as the gateway to Beijing, China’s capital until 1928, and as an entry port to the bountiful natural resources of northern China— especially coal. As a result, Tianjin attracted businessmen, politicians, warlords, and exiles. Liang Qichao, one of the most prolific journalists in modern China, erected a villa and studio in the Italian Concession. The deposed Qing emperor Puyi lived in the Japanese Concession during the 1920s, while the young warlord Zhang Xueliang lived in the French Concession. The city’s celebrity elites were joined by middle-class families who flooded into Tianjin’s concessions during the 1920s and 1930s, and the daughters of these Chinese families likely attended one of the increasing number of single-sex and coeducational schools throughout the city.22 Women’s magazines became guidebooks for the women of the city’s growing urban elite

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class to navigate life in the city and at home. Women’s periodical literature thus represented the dual nature of home as the site of lived everyday experiences and as an escapist fantasy of interior desire.

COMMON SENSE FOR EVERYDAY LIFE The home was in the world and the world was in the home. Commodities from across China and around the globe poured into the Chinese home, bringing the messiness and chaos of modern life along with them. As these objects broke through the boundaries of home life, advice columns helped to bring order to the disarray and construct new boundaries. Through this process of boundary breaking and making, readers learned how to conduct home life and also developed positive associations with the orderliness of home life. Advice columns created order, but they also revealed a dirty side of modern life lurking beneath the perfectly polished furniture. Hints about the material world that a magazine’s readers inhabited were not to be found in the choreographed photographs of fantasy modern urban life or in the didactic editorials that idealized home and family in service to the nation, but they surfaced in these guides to the quotidian. Although advice columns often helped to constitute the fantasy world of social manners, clean homes, and perfect hygiene, they also revealed cracks in the veneer, fissures in the fantasy of modern life that illuminate the everyday material world. Advice about how to live at home was part of a broader discussion about urban everyday life in the Republican-era popular press. Published advice on everyday matters was not new to Chinese print culture, dating back to Ming-era encyclopedias, but the new knowledge of everyday life was made more accessible to a broader audience through the popular press at the same time that it was gendered female. Knowledge about everyday life also had a new name: changshi, or common knowledge. A variety of magazines published advice columns for women and home under the title changshi, including Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating in 1923, the Dagong bao from 1927 to 1929, and Ling long magazine in the 1930s. Changshi designated not only female knowledge but a broader constellation of knowledge about everyday life in the modern city. Starting in the 1910s, Shanghai

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publishing houses put out books on changshi topics that ranged from furniture and family to airplanes and electricity.23 In the 1920s, Shanghai’s “mosquito” press dedicated entire journals to the topic of changshi.24 While the word changshi is usually translated as “general knowledge” or “common sense,” the editors of the 1928 journal Shanghai changshi chose an English translation for their title that may be more apt: Shanghai Common Knowledge. “Common knowledge” is a literal translation—the character chang means common and shi means knowledge—but it also captures the essential meaning of the kinds of knowledge about modern life that appeared in magazines: changshi was common or shared information about daily life that modern city dwellers already knew or were supposed to know if they wanted to consider themselves urbane. The range of everyday experience that was presented as changshi ran from mundane lived experiences like housecleaning and riding streetcars to fantastical examples of “everyday” modernity that included both high-society dinner parties and new scientific machines such as robots and recording devices. The latter inspired in the reader both aspiration for and anxiety over a modern life she may not have had. The former was common in both senses of the word—its ordinary qualities and its shared relevance. In both cases the common was to elicit an affective feeling of the familiar, even in cases of the unfamiliar. Ordinary and shared types of common knowledge often centered on home and family. Topics included protecting furniture, removing stains, raising pets, cooking, and flower care. Different magazines published at different times sometimes even offered the same advice, which suggests that some household tips may have indeed been shared common knowledge. Five years after Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating recommended that readers lay their handkerchiefs out to dry on a glass or marble surface to prevent wrinkles, the Tianjin newspaper Dagong bao published the same advice in an article titled jiating xiao changshi (minor common knowledge about home and family) in its women and family section.25 Starting with its fourth issue, Kuaile jiating published a regular advice column titled Jiating xin changshi or “new common knowledge for the home.” The column drew attention to “new” knowledge in two ways. First, the column explored ways of caring for and dealing with new objects that had just entered the home. Several columns discussed how to clean and

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care for new types of footwear—leather shoes, canvas shoes, satin shoes. The authors discussed how to clean new types of home decorations such as glass mirrors and curtains. Advice also focused on how to make old things new—how to freshen up an old rattan chair, how to stop flowers from wilting, how to moisten a dry lemon, how to replace a record needle, how to polish silverware, and how to get ring marks, white marks, and burn marks out of wooden utensils. Advice columns also illuminated what happened when global commodities entered Tianjin houses, offering real solutions to the problems that attended foreign things. When cheese was about to go bad, it should be wrapped in cloth. When Western ink seeped through Chinese paper, one was to mop it up with sugar or table salt, and when “chocolate” or “CoCo” (the magazine used English rather than Chinese) stained a dress, borax and cold water could get the stain out.26 The Kuaile jiating column on common knowledge for the home offers an indirect insight into the everyday life of its female readers in Tianjin. Descriptions of how to clean and care for objects suggested a practical lived experience of home, but the objects themselves in their newness and foreignness were actually the fantasy of a modern life. In the descriptions of stains, age, and dirt that surrounded the chocolate, western ink, rattan chairs, shoes, and wooden utensils a picture of everyday life began to emerge. Separating stain and dirt from commodities revealed traces of motion, space, and time—the “social life” of the objects.27 Age faded objects, use caused stains, and the circulation of people, things, and even insects tracked in dirt, all challenging the clean and sanitary vision of modern life. Indeed, the material life of the modern everyday took place in the tension between modernity and its opposite: degradation. Reading the advice columns for what the author attempted to conceal—by cleaning up or brushing away—actually reveals the texture of urban life. In a column on how to get rid of bugs, for example, the author noted that bugs became a nuisance on a summer evening when the windows were open and an electric light was on.28 While the electric light and the glass window evoke a sense of universal modernity, the bugs, the very thing the author tries to eliminate, reveal the localness of place. Why open a window if bugs will fly in? Because the summer nights in 1920s Tianjin were hot and humid; and bugs, while unwelcome in a modern home, were a fact of life in a city

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constructed along a river and on filled-in swampland in the British Concession’s Extra-Mural Area.

FEELING HOME LIFE Advice columns cleaned up the messes and covered the anxieties of everyday life at home. They introduced the order that made the home an object of desire and a site of affect. The material culture of home life as depicted in magazines were the positive objects that directed the reader toward a happy home. Since many of these objects were new and costly, readers had to be taught first how to identify and second how to feel about these objects. Readers could buy or borrow a copy of the magazine, but they could not necessarily afford all the objects included on its pages. Common knowledge made the home and its objects familiar, but they were also aspirational. Sofas were aspirational objects of modern home life. A sofa was a new kind of seating that identified a modern sitting room, but it was also large and expensive. A reader of Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating may not have owned a sofa or even possibly experienced sitting on one, but nevertheless, the magazine introduced this object to readers. Even the name for this newly introduced object was not settled. Kuaile jiating, called sofas changyi, long chair, pointing to the physical description of the furniture, or tangyi, chair to recline in, describing one of its uses. Later women’s magazines used the transliterated English term shafa, which has come to denote sofa today.29 Although sofas were a new form of seating, Chinese people had long been sitting in chairs, moving from mat to chair in the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127).30 Chairs in late imperial China were made from wood with an almost architectural design of simple lines and geometric forms, but also with a curved back that fully supported the body.31 As the art historian Sarah Handler argues, the move to chairs in late imperial China inspired a host of changes in the Chinese interior, affecting everything from furnishings and decorations, to new kinds of tableware and social practices.32 Likewise, sitting in sofas in twentieth-century China required new social practices, new understandings of the social space of home, and of course, new decorations.

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Upholstered sofas introduced contradictions into the modern home’s interior. On one hand, as the centerpiece of the parlor, the most public room of the modern home, sofas were sites for socializing among family members and with guests. But sofas also made these public social interactions more intimate, bringing guest and host together in a shared seat, unlike the separate wooden chairs of the late imperial interior. A sofa could even transform a public guest room into a private parlor, a respite for interiority and contemplation. Describing a sofa in a photograph of an “elegant western room” as a tangyi, or reclining chair, the accompanying text in Kuaile jiating suggested that the sofa was “very comfortable” and that laying upon it elicited a feeling of “joyful bliss.”33 “Comfort” was itself a concept in flux: while wooden chairs had sometimes been draped in textiles in the past, upholstered sofas with horsehair cushions provided a new sensory experience for reclining bodies that came to be described as “comfort.” Likewise, new interior designs added to the visual, and sometimes olfactory, experiences of enjoying a comfortable sofa, as in the same example from Kuaile jiating in which a vase full of flowers was placed on a table in front of the sofa to inspire “delight.” The magazine instructed readers how to decorate with the sofa, how to socialize on a sofa, how to relax upon a sofa, and most importantly how to feel a sofa. As an object of desire, the sofa promised positive emotions, such as bliss, comfort, and delight. Beyond happiness, these emotions ensured entrance into the leisure class. Whether or not readers could experience the respite and pleasure of reclining on a sofa with a novel, they could imagine what it might feel like. A reader’s family may not have been able to afford the objects of desire, but by instructing readers in how to feel the objects, the magazine endowed readers with the knowledge of middle-class affect.

VISUALIZING THE INTERIOR Nearly all women’s magazines published in early twentieth-century China included photographs. Most images in Kuaile jiating depicted interior spaces, while other magazines, such as Ling long and Woman World, mostly featured images of women out in the city and few images of the interior.

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Print technology allowed for the mass reproduction of images on the magazine pages, and new camera technologies made small portable cameras affordable to magazine readers, so that the photographs of women in parks or on school grounds could have been taken by readers themselves. Photographs of the interior required more sophisticated equipment and lighting, and they appear to have been taken by professional photographers. While photographs of women in the exterior delivered spontaneity, interior images felt carefully curated and planned. As a new form of visual reproduction, photographs claimed to represent reality with a new visual accuracy, but whereas readers may have witnessed some outdoor images of their city, photographs of the interior represented a fantasy of home that many readers would have never experienced. These interior spaces set the stage for an imagined interior world, where readers could escape from the dusty everyday life of home in the city simply by turning a page. Though some readers lived in new, spacious houses with multiple rooms to use and decorate in the styles of the magazine, many more lived in crowded quarters that could not possibly have contained the multiple rooms depicted in magazine photographs. Readers had to learn how to view these images of the interior. Writing about Europe in 1936, Walter Benjamin noted that film and photography had changed how people saw things.34 The magazine also instructed readers not only in how to see the interior but also in how to feel it. This lesson began with a caption that would alert the reader as to the kind of room they were looking at. Accompanying articles would deepen her knowledge: an article on interior decoration that included a photograph in Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating, for example, suggested that in addition to considering hygiene (weisheng), economics ( jingji), and finance (licai), one should take feelings (xinli) into consideration when decorating.35 The “feeling” of a room could be experienced by touch or by sight. The texts that accompanied photographs of rooms instructed women how to reproduce that feeling through viewing. Kuaile jiating explained the physical experience of sitting in a chair or at a table, and since photographs in the magazine were black and white, the text also detailed the aesthetic emotional experience that particular color choices could elicit.36 The text encouraged viewers to enter the photograph of the room and feel the furniture with her body and fill her eyes with emotion. In short, the text encouraged a personal

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subjective relationship between the room and the individual viewer that was mediated by the photograph. Articles in Kuaile jiating also encouraged readers to relate their subjective relationships with the magazine photographs to their experiences in their own lived interior spaces, meaning that photography could also be prescriptive. Articles that accompanied photographs often warned that the aesthetic experience of the visual interior was far from spontaneous; indeed, the aesthetics were carefully orchestrated, with room decorations coordinated to match the type of room. According to an article in Kuaile jiating, each type of room was to elicit a specific kind of emotion: sitting rooms were formal and upright, a living room or bedroom quiet and comfortable, a meeting room orderly, and a library elegant.37 The article went on to note how the proper atmosphere of a room could be ruined by a misplaced object—an armchair in an otherwise solemn ancestral temple, or a Chinese scroll next to a western oil painting in a sitting room. According to the author, such decorating mistakes created a mood of ridicule, and were the sign of an ignorant decorator.38 Thus the photographs of interior spaces in women’s magazines served a dual purpose: encouraging the reader to enter a world of rooms and experience them subjectively, but also generating the anxiety of modern life and its resolution—the idea that although the modern individual was always on display and being judged, she could navigate these judgments, and the new world around her, by using the women’s magazine as her guidebook. By the 1930s, women’s magazines were encouraging readers not only to view the photographs on their pages, but to get in front of and behind the camera themselves. Readers would find local women as well as film actresses on the cover of Ling long magazine, and the magazine’s pages were filled with photographs of ordinary women from Shanghai and elsewhere, most likely readers themselves, posing in a park, standing next to an automobile, competing at a sporting event, or attending a charity luncheon. The magazine also included advertisements for photography studios, portable cameras, and Kodak film, encouraging women to have their photograph taken or to take photographs themselves. Since the new portable cameras did not have a flash, readers’ snapshots would have been taken outdoors— like the majority of photographs of women depicted in Ling long. By contrast, photographs of interior rooms would have been taken by professional

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photographers; and some photographs of interior spaces may not have been taken in a house at all but instead staged in a photographer’s studio. Lighting provides the first clue that the photo of a room was staged. Although architects designed houses to light up naturally through windows, commercial photographers used artificial lighting to simulate sunlight on their sets, and they often lit their subjects from strange, even unnatural angles. In a photograph of a sitting room that appeared in Ling long under the caption “modern home decorations” (xiandai jiating zhuangshi), the room first appears to be lit by the large full-length window at the corner of the room.39 (See figure 6.1.) Yet the shadows cast by objects and furniture in the room reveal that the window was a fake and that an external artificial light source brightened the set. Like the window, an electric lamp, placed on a side table next to the sofa, was also decorative. The lamp cast a large shadow on the wall next to the window, suggesting that the light source was a spotlight from the left rather than the window on the right or the lamp itself.

FIGURE 6.1 “Modern home decorations.” Ling long magazine, issue 256 (Shanghai, 1936).

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Indeed, two large spotlights shone down on this corner of a sitting room, one from stage right and the other from stage left. The light that was set up next to the armchair illuminated the arms and cushions of the chair; the shadow it cast was actually opposite to the shadow that the sun would have cast through the window. The second light was placed next to the sofa, shining on the forearm of the sofa and on the lamp and side table at the far end. Unlike rooms in real houses, staged scenes did not necessarily have a ceiling and four walls. In a second photograph exemplifying “modern home decorations,” for instance, notice first how each piece of furniture enters the photograph’s frame. (See figure 6.2.) The dark, curved upholstery of the sofa in the center contrasts with the light colors of the surrounding furniture—two side tables, an armchair, a bureau, a dressing table, and two rugs—which draws the viewer’s eye into the room. This composition is framed by three walls. An armchair, tilted toward the sofa and with its back to the viewer, encloses the space almost as if it were a fourth wall. But instead of a wall, there is a large empty space between furniture and camera. The absence of a wall means that the photographer could step back from the arrangement and photograph the room and all its furniture in their entirety, a scene that would be nearly impossible to

FIGURE 6.2 “A modern sitting room.” Ling long magazine, issue 256 (Shanghai, 1936).

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capture in an actual room with four walls. With only three walls and no ceiling, this room was just like the fantasy of a movie set, allowing the photographer and the viewer to transcend the limitations of material space in both the production and consumption of the image. Now compare a photograph from the same series of modern home decorations to a photograph of a small bedroom that appeared in Ling long four years earlier. 40 (See figure 6.3.) The photograph of a “small bedroom and dressing table” looks onto a corner of a room, including two walls and the ceiling, and does indeed appear to depict a small room. The room seems only wide enough to have included a bed, a side table, and dressing table. The photographer, confined by the four walls of this small space, had to choose whether to include the entire bed or the dressing table. The photographer chose the latter, leaving most of the bed out of the frame. With many of its photographs of interior rooms staged in a photographer’s studio, the Ling long home could have been anywhere, and indeed it

FIGURE 6.3 “Bathroom” and “Small bedroom with dressing table.” Ling long magazine, issue 55 (Shanghai, 1932).

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might have been. Copy books with photographs of interior spaces traveled from Europe to Japan and China, allowing magazine editors to create a world of ideal modern interior spaces simply by selecting a stock photo. 41 The global circulation of photographic images brought the world into the women’s magazine’s imaginary home, and female readers into that world. Photographs and images of home in Chinese women’s magazines had two characteristics that disconnected images of home from the specificity of place: unlike contemporary architecture or builder magazines, women’s magazines rarely depicted the exterior architecture of a house or any other image that could put the home in a specific place. 42 Additionally, photographs of the interior spaces of the home almost never included people. The empty sets of tidy, hygienic, modern rooms allowed for the global circulation of images of home, but they also allowed the reader to place herself in a fantasy world of the interior. Although the home was the most intimate space of everyday life, the absence of people in interior-design photographs made these images seem universal, constructing the modern home as a shared global space. The photograph’s claim to a shared global modern style was especially true in Ling long magazine. While the Tianjin modern depicted the chimeric juxtaposition of Western and Chinese styles, Shanghai modern, as depicted in Ling long, was a universal global style that was never labeled foreign. The magazine might introduce new foreign material objects such as a French sofa or German stainless steel utensils, but editors never referred to the spaces as German or French. Instead, they used a new lexicon of modernity, calling the rooms xiandai (contemporary), xinshi (new style), or modeng (modern). The difference between how Kuaile jiating and Ling long explained images of the modern depended on time as well as place. Though only seven years separated the publication of Kuaile jiating and Ling long, the magazines were positioned on either side of a major rupture in interior design: the 1925 Parisian Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, which popularized art deco interior design. In his history of home, Witold Rybczynski argues that art deco, with its break from the past and focus on utility and minimalism, signaled the death of comfort in domestic interior design. 43 For Chinese taste-makers, it offered a design vocabulary through which they could communicate a universal

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modernity for China. While Kuaile jiating had depicted modern style by showcasing Western libraries and Chinese sitting rooms cluttered with knickknacks, Ling long included pictures of stark rooms with clean lines, sharp contrasting colors, and geometric furniture that were intended not to be part of any particular national or regional style, but rather were to be understood as universally modern. The art deco interior design depicted in magazines like Ling long complemented Shanghai’s art deco urban architecture, modernist writing, and popular culture, all of which claimed membership in a global universal modernity. 44 Tianjin also had its fair share of art deco architecture, such as the French and Italian Clubs (1930s), the Leopold Building (1936– 1938), and the Great China Theatre (1934), but Tianjin never claimed membership in the global modern. Instead, throughout the 1920s and 1930s Tianjin remained (and remains even today) acutely aware of being on the periphery of Shanghai’s modern and of the global modernity on display in Tianjin’s foreign concessions. While Tianjin magazines reminded readers of their city’s peripheral locality, Ling long beckoned readers into a cosmopolitan modern world. Whether it was a photograph of bobbed hair, an article about wireless radios, or an advertisement for greyhound racing, articles in Ling long were always self-referentially “modern” or “contemporary” and never “foreign.” Calling the images foreign would have distanced readers from them; by calling them “modern” instead, editors invited readers to enter the universal modern through imaginary personal interior spaces. Photographs of interior spaces in Ling long were welcoming and escapist, inviting readers into a fantasy modern world of never-ending, sparely furnished, contemporary rooms—a fantasy that contrasted starkly with the cramped quarters in which many Shanghai women lived, since Shanghai’s housing crisis was even worse than Tianjin’s. 45 Even if Tianjin readers may have enjoyed more living space than their Shanghai counterparts, their houses could not possibly have contained the countless rooms with innumerable functions depicted in Ling long photographs. Whereas a single wing in a late imperial courtyard house could serve as a bedroom, washroom, dining room, or nursery, depending on the time of day and the ever-moving arrangement of furniture, rooms in the modern fantasy home each had a specific and unchanging function

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denoted by the titles of the room and its corresponding furnishings. Captions to photographs introduced readers to these new single-purpose rooms, including sitting or guest rooms (ketang, keshi, keting, huiketing), living rooms (xiuxishi, qizuoshi, qijushi), bedrooms (woshi, qinshi), dining rooms (canshi), bathrooms ( yushi), libraries (shushi, shufang, shuwu, shuzhai). 46 While such rooms might also be featured on architectural blueprints of actual houses, Ling long’s fantasy homes overflowed with superfluous spaces, including make-up rooms (huazhuangshi), children’s rooms (ertong jushi), breakfast rooms (zaocanshi), and even chatting rooms (tanhuashi). One room was notably absent from the photographs of the interior: the kitchen. The modern kitchen was never integrated into the fantasy vision of the Chinese modern home depicted in women’s magazines. Cooking was usually relegated to servants, not housewives, and kitchens were not always fully integrated into a house’s floorplan. Women’s magazines thus reflected the lived reality of classed household labor and the materiality of Chinese urban houses by excluding kitchens from their fantasy interior. Kuaile jiating did not include photographs or images of the kitchen, although Tianjin’s Woman World included a photograph of a Japanese housewife in her kitchen, and Ling long magazine printed a cartoon of a so-called new woman in her kitchen. 47 The cartoon from Ling long suggests that the very idea of the modern woman cooking was comical. (See figure 6.4.) Standing in the right foreground of the image, this ideal modern woman seems ready for business—she has pulled back her permed hair and put on an apron to cover her patterned qipao. And yet she teeters on high heels over a table, with a bowl and chopsticks in her hands and a wok on a low coal stove placed at her feet, as she consults a book (one of three on the table) on how to prepare this meal. Beads of sweat spring from her husband’s face as he anxiously looks on from the doorway. His mother stands beside him, her rounded mouth displaying surprise at her daughterin-law’s clumsiness in the kitchen. The older woman’s shock comes in part from the fact that the younger woman seems not to be able to cook without a manual. For the older woman, cooking might have been embodied, something learned by doing. New women, on the other hand, needed to read about it in books and magazines. The humor in this cartoon comes from a double mocking: first of the new woman, for whom cooking does

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FIGURE 6.4 Cartoon of the “new woman” in the kitchen. Ling long magazine, issue 73 (Shanghai, 1932).

not come naturally, and second of the reader, who herself must consult one of the magazine’s many articles on cooking and nutrition as a guide to something that should come naturally. The kitchen may have been excluded from the visual fantasy of the modern home, but people still had to eat. Thus, magazines offered prescriptive advice on how to conduct themselves in this everyday space. Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating included detailed seasonal menus and a regular column on cooking, which included advice on how a woman should instruct her servants to cook for her family. An article on how to make small dishes noted that while many wives went into the kitchen and

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“watched” and “spoke” to what was going on, many others simply left the business of their family’s food to the cook. 48 The latter were all too willing to eat delicious food, but when the food was unpalatable, they would lose their tempers. According to the author, if readers wanted to enjoy food that tasted good, they had to understand how to make it. The article continued by suggesting that this knowledge of cooking could come either from the wife practicing it by her own hand or by directing the cook in how to prepare dishes. Thus the kitchen was not an escapist imaginary space but rather the site of everyday ritual. As the text suggested, however, the ritual of cooking was not part of an elite urban woman’s daily practice; instead, the kitchen was the site of her daily social ritual of observing and managing household staff.

CONCLUSION In the end, what does this fantasy world tell us about the material world in which Chinese urban women lived? Did the black and white photographs of perfectly arranged rooms mirror actual living conditions at the time? Most likely not. In fact, compared to floorplans for the ideal modern house that were hinted on the pages of architectural and building journals, the never-ending series of rooms depicted on the pages of women’s magazines could not possibly have fit inside a single house. But while urban Chinese women in the 1930s may not have had a breakfast room, the fact that a room with such a specific function had entered the visual imaginary of the modern interior was revolutionary, something that these women’s grandmothers would have never imagined. Moreover, while twentieth century nationalist ideologues claimed that women needed to break free from the prison of the feudal household, women’s magazines presented an alternate vision of jiating as home, the site of middle-class affect and individual subjectivity. This pristine and affective vision of home and its objects as the happy life was not without cracks in the veneer. The lists of objects in circulation, followed by dirt, stains, and bugs, exposed the porous nature of the home and the insecurities of modern life and urban capitalism. Rather than disrupt or overthrow this system, however, women’s magazines masked its

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volatility through the advice of changshi, which offered familiarity and security in an unfamiliar changing world, and through the photographic fantasies of modern interior spaces, which allowed an escape from crowded interiors. Transforming the anxieties of modern life into the stability of home life, women’s magazines ultimately stabilized the privileged class position of their readers— China’s new urban elites. Female periodical literature thus placed home at the center of a constellation of urban social spaces that shaped the social identities of elite urban women in twentieth century China. The new woman did not need to flee her household to realize her individual subjectivity; she fashioned her gendered and classed identities through jiating before entering other social spaces of the city.

7 Engendering the Chinese City

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he transformation of the late imperial jia into the modern jiating lay at the center of changing conceptions and practices of social spaces in Tianjin that coincided with shifting gender and class relations. Tianjin’s urban spaces were produced through what Henri Lefebvre describes as the relationship between “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” spaces.1 Part 1 of this book introduced the planners, politicians, social scientists, and real estate developers of Tianjin’s domestic empires who conceived of social relations and spatial design, while part 2 explored the lived spaces of Tianjin’s cosmopolitan cultures at home. This chapter examines how people perceived social spaces in their city. Chinese spatial cosmologies, like Chinese politics, were in transition during the Republican era. Historians have employed multiple models to capture these transitional forms, especially inner/outer, state/ society, and public/private. Indeed, each of these models was evident in Tianjin’s architecture and urban planning: late imperial courtyard houses in Tianjin’s former walled Chinese city sat across the river from the new Chinese municipal district Xin hebei qu, while Italian villas were near French Beaux Arts banks. But while historians today have developed a vocabulary to talk about these different spatial cosmologies, people living in Tianjin at the time developed their own rich

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vernacular to describe the transitional spaces of their city. The complexity with which Tianjin urbanites thought about the spaces of their city was born out of the triangular relationship of the conceived social and political spaces of planners and politicians, the lived spaces of the new city, and the perceived spaces of the local commentators who wrote about urban space. Beginning in the late Qing dynasty, Tianjin was torn apart, decentered, and rearranged by multiple foreign empires. Because of its proximity to the capital city Beijing, Tianjin had been designated as an imperial city, a strategic military garrison and trading post. But after foreign empires tore down the city’s imperial wall and moved the city’s administrative center, these imperial connections to the capital began to deteriorate. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek declared the former southern capital city Nanjing to be the new capital of the Republic of China. Historians of modern China have come to understand Chiang’s symbolic movement of the capital city from Beijing to Nanjing as marking the end of the Warlord Era (1916–1928) and the beginning of the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937). Moving the capital had implications for the socio-spatial histories of China and Tianjin as well. By moving the capital away from Beijing, the Guomindang further distanced themselves from the cosmological center of Qing imperial power; yet in establishing the new capital at the site of the former Ming capital, the Guomindang still called upon the power of late imperial space for their authority. With the new capital on the site of the former imperial capital, the Guomindang embarked on plans to build a new, modern capital city based on scientific methods of urban planning.2 As the Guomindang began plans for their new capital in Nanjing, remnants of the Qing dynasty, the Warlord Era, and former Republican political life exited the former capital Beijing and emptied onto Tianjin. As the historian Madeleine Yue Dong has argued, when the capital shifted to Nanjing, wealthy Beijingers increasingly invested in neighboring Tianjin over Beijing.3 Indeed, by the start of the Nanjing Decade, Tianjin was home to former Qing officials and Beiyang government ministers. As the repository of the displaced political life of old Beijing, 1920s and 1930s Tianjin has earned a reputation among many Chinese people and scholars today as conservative and conventional, especially when compared to its cultured southern counterpart Shanghai. This reputation stems in part from how local writers at the time portrayed the cities. Shanghai writers

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embraced their city’s place in the universal modern, even at the risk of ignoring colonial inequities, while Tianjin writers were very much aware that their city was on the periphery of modern cities like Shanghai. 4 Living in a peripherally modern city that blurred time, space, culture, and politics actually allowed Tianjin residents to imagine a broader variety of urban social spaces. Tianjin was close to the former Qing capital city but far from the new Guomindang political center, and the city’s residents spanned the political temporalities of Chinese history, ranging from members of the Manchu imperial family to early Republic officials and warlords. Moreover, with urban spaces multiply fractured by colonialisms, Tianjin residents had no choice but to reimagine and re-engender social spaces in their city. Nationalist ideology may have been more concerned with the social relations of jiating than the social spaces of house and home, but writers of periodical literature and Chinese people themselves sought to understand the relationship between home, the individual, and the city. Although fragments of the past still marked the Tianjin landscape, new perceived configurations of social spaces departed radically from earlier gendered ideas of nei and wai. Scholars, popular writers, and Chinese people themselves employed a new lexicon to talk about space centered around new conceptual terms of home and society, or jiating and shehui. These terms were not fixed, and people proposed different ways of thinking about jiating, its relationship to society, and even imagined new female-gendered spaces onto the city. These discussions not only revealed changing perceptions of urban space, but also the intersectional relationship between gender and social class in mapping the city.

COSMOLOGIES OF SOCIOPOLITICAL SPACE In Tianjin, a Chinese city with multiple foreign empires, the gendered spatial relations of imperial China lingered alongside the public/private divisions of the colonial concessions. Tianjin urban planning and architecture included two socio-spatial ideologies—late imperial Chinese and European— each with a distinct vision for the spatial-political relationship between the family or individual and the state. Spatial politics of late

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imperial China proposed gendered orderings according to nei and wai, inner and outer, female and male.5 Inner and outer referred to spaces inside and outside the house but also the gendering of spaces within the household. Tianjin’s foreign concessions introduced socio-spatial understandings of gender through urban planning that divided spaces into commercial (or public) and residential (or private). As European spatial relations separated office from domicile, both in location and design, Chinese men who lived or worked in the European concessions experienced a distinction between the public spaces of their workplace and the private spaces of the home. Tianjin included multiple forms of urban planning, including late imperial spaces, European colonial spaces, and new Chinese political spaces with the construction of the new municipal governing district Xin hebei qu. Examining the Guomindang in Canton on the eve of the Nanjing Decade, the historian Michael Tsin links urban planning and political reform, arguing that as urban planners shifted from a dynastic- to a European-inspired model, political practices also changed.6 According to Tsin, the dynastic urban planning model maintained state power through space. Officials located government structures strategically, placing them on specific sites, in alignment with a political ideology to guarantee “a stable and proper order.”7 Guomindang urban planners in Guangzhou rebuilt the city at the same time that they restructured the relationship between the government and its people. According to their new political ideology, political legitimation was no longer to be found through strategic cosmologies of space, but instead in constructing and mobilizing society as a legitimizing source of political power. Tsin argues that the Guomindang constructed a new sociopolitical relationship based on the dichotomy of state and society rather than the inner/outer continuum that placed the household and its individuals at the center of the imperial world. More than material spatial arrangements, people also began to perceive individual subjectivities, social relations, and gender through the lenses of public and private. The May Fourth (or New Culture) Movement epitomized this distinction, as May Fourth reformers believed that a society of autonomous individuals would become the social conscience of the state, as well as the means for social reform. While several May Fourth

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activists called for marriage and family reform as a means to changing society, others viewed family as an oppositional and lesser sphere when compared to society. Indeed, as a legacy of the May Fourth Movement, histories of women and gender, and of modern China more generally, often have elevated the public political lives of Chinese women and marginalized the lives of women in the home. When the historian Wang Zheng interviewed women who had participated in the New Culture Movement, for example, she noted that they were quick to distinguish themselves from taitai (or wives) of scholars, businessmen, and bureaucrats who had chosen a life of luxury and comfort by marrying elite men. According to Wang, women of the May Fourth generation could have chosen the path of taitai, but instead wanted to define themselves “by their career achievements in the public sphere rather than by their private lives.”8 Only participation in the public realm would allow them to achieve duli renge or independent personhood.9 Thus Wang suggests that May Fourth women understood the private as a female-gendered space of lesser value, and public as a more highly valued and possibly male-dominated space. Yet in their oral histories, the women themselves do not seem to have articulated this public/private divide so clearly. They rarely refer to “private,” yet they do use the term “public” to refer to the public arenas of work, activism, and politics, or to the public opinion of media. This use of “public” is less a spatial sphere that complements a private sphere than an articulation of a new vision of a public-oriented society. The focus on public over private is reflected in the historical scholarship on China. While historians of Europe and America have devoted countless monographs to the history of private life or the rise of separate spheres, China historians have been more focused on debates over the public sphere.10 Since the 1990s, China historians have debated if, how, and when a public sphere developed in China.11 Their lack of consensus points to the difficulties of applying Euro-American social structures to Chinese history. Still, most historians agree on the rise of some form of a Chinese public. The historian Eugenia Lean has attempted to introduce gender into discussions of the public by examining how sentiment—which she notes historians typically have relegated to the private sphere—was mobilized to transform a mass public during the Nanjing Decade.12 Lean’s work has been critical in reorienting our understanding of the public/private divide

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in modern China, and more important still in highlighting the complexities of public and private in China and elsewhere. But while public and private may be useful structural categories for understanding Chinese history comparatively, when Chinese people in Tianjin talked about social space, they rarely used terms such as public and private, or even inner and outer. Instead, they expressed similar concepts through a socio-spatial vocabulary that included terms such as shehui (society), jiating (family/house/home), and jiaoji (the socializing sphere). Social commentators understood shehui to be what we now call the public sphere of commerce and politics. While they did not explicitly gender shehui as male, they described a woman’s entry into the sphere of shehui as a proud achievement that resulted in her gaining equal social status or shehui diwei. Jiating, by contrast, was an unequivocally femalegendered space, and social commentators described it as either the center of shehui or as an oppositional space detrimental to women. Jiaoji was a social sphere named for a social action. The term jiaoji can be translated as communication or social intercourse. The term seems to have first been used in reference to international relations. In the Tianjin newspaper the Dagong bao, for example, the term first appeared in a headline in 1905 in an article on the difference between communication and negotiation.13 This understanding of the term was echoed in the title of a 1918 article on Japanese/British communications.14 By the mid-1920s, the paper introduced a new understanding of the term. A 1926 article reported that the May Fourth intellectual Zhang Shizhao had been invited to Tianjin to give a lecture on the male-female jiaoji question (nannü jiaoji wenti).15 In April 1929 the National Hotel was reported to host a social dance ( jiaoji wu).16 Yet another understanding of jiaoji entered the discourse of the Dagong bao in the 1930s. This was the jiaoji mingxing (social star or celebrity) and the jiaoji hua (social flower).17 The social star or social flower usually referred to a young woman who was depicted as a kind of social butterfly. As the meanings of jiaoji expanded, so did its usage in discourse. In the Daogong bao as in other Republican- era periodicals, usage peaked in the 1930s, with jiaoji appearing in headlines only three times in the 1900s, and fifty times during the 1930s.18 The actions of the new jiaoji woman defined the new jiaoji sphere. In 1927, the Tianjin periodical The Lady (Funü) published the article

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“Twelve Things that the Social Star is Busy With,” which included the following list: 1. Busy seeing guests 2. Busy dancing 3. Busy inviting guests 4. Busy watching plays and movies 5. Busy strolling through public parks 6. Busy going on friendly dates 7. Busy buying perfume, pearls, and jewelry 8. Busy taking photographs 9. Busy driving cars 10. Busy having fabric cut 11. Busy having hair cut 12. Busy playing ball19

The socializing sphere of jiaoji was defined by movement, transactions, and exchanges, and these activities were tied neither to the home nor to the workplaces of the elite women who participated in the socializing sphere. The spaces of the sphere could mean two things at once: a department store could be the site of public work for a female shop worker and a place of leisured jiaoji for the women who shopped there. A person’s actions defined the meaning of the space for them, and for jiaoji activities were youthful, female, and elite. While married women could inhabit the social network of jiaoji, the activities of jiaoji implied a social life before marriage and children with an emphasis on dating. The article in The Lady implied such romantic inclinations through the author’s name Yuan Hu, likely a pen name meaning “mandarin ducks lake.” Mandarin ducks were a symbol of love, always pictured in pairs, and they referred to a genre of romantic literature known as mandarin duck and butterfly literature. If socializing was about dating and finding a match, women in the jiaoji sphere appeared to be designing what that should look like. During the first half of the twentieth century, the term jiaoji had shifted from largely referring to international relations to including new understandings of a female gendered sphere of social and romantic relations. This widening of discourse suggests two things about everyday life in

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treaty-port cities like Tianjin. First, whether the adaptation of a term used for international relations to social relations was conscious or not, people were engaging with global political discourses in their everyday lives as they were dwelling in the world. Second, new understandings of gendered social relations were being configured according to new understandings of international relations. The Chinese term for international guoji includes two characters—state and boundary. The character boundary or ji is also found in jiaoji. Just as the understanding of international is formed at the boundaries of states, the social intercourse of romantic jiaoji is formed at the gendered boundaries of male and female. When a woman purchased perfume or went on a date, she invented a gendered role for herself that established and clarified these gendered boundaries of male and female. But what happened when she drove a car or played basketball? She may have been challenging the gendered boundaries of jiaoji, but she was certainly establishing the classed boundaries of jiaoji as social space for an elite group that enjoyed the privilege to be busy with leisure. With the fall of the Qing dynasty and its Confucian socio-spatial prescriptions of inner and outer, and without clear direction from the new Republican state, Chinese people were left to define and engender social spaces for themselves. Debates over the relationship between jiating and shehui often took on nationalist political tones, drawing on both the Chinese inner/outer continuum and European public/private. Jiaoji, by contrast, appeared at first glance to be anything but political, a frivolous space of female leisure, but even the language of this new terminology was borrowed from the political intercourse of international relations. Whether consciously or not, as Chinese people in Tianjin managed their everyday lives, they were navigating global and national politics in discourses in the media and spaces in the city to forge a new sociopolitical spatial model of gender and class relations.

THE SOCIAL SPHERE On September 7, 1927, Isabel Chang appeared on the front page of the Beiyang huabao—three years before her husband Henry would write a letter to the French Consulate demanding that she not be allowed to mortgage

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their property in Tianjin’s French Concession.20 With her eyes cast down, a dark shadow enveloped Isabel’s white face like a modern bob. Her bare shoulder tipped toward the camera, framed by a soft, dark fabric covering her arm and a string of pearls glistening across her neck. The bilingual caption identified her as “Mrs. Henry Chang, the second daughter of Expremier Tang Shao-Yi,” and named the photographer’s studio as B.  M. Joseph & Co. The Beiyang huabao began publication in Tianjin’s French Concession in 1926, a year before Isabel appeared on the cover. The pictorial magazine was published for eleven more years, first weekly and eventually every other day.21 The magazine ceased publication with the start of the SinoJapanese War in 1937. The Beiyang huabao was Tianjin’s first pictorial magazine, although Tianjin readers already would have been familiar with pictorial magazines from Shanghai such as Liang you (The Good Companion), which began publication in 1925. Tianjin resident Feng Wuyue founded the Beiyang huabao to educate local Tianjin readers in knowledge and the arts, but he was very much aware that his audience comprised members of his own elite social group. 22 The magazine encouraged audience participation, soliciting photographs of “rarely seen national scenery,” “national customs,” “current events,” and “young ladies of prominent families.”23 Each issue of the Beiyang huabao featured a photograph of a woman on the cover. Sometimes these women were Chinese movie stars or socialites from other cities, but more often they were young ladies from prominent Tianjin families. These “cover girls” brought Tianjin’s elite social sphere into focus. Captions described the family networks that connected women to the elite sphere of socialization. Advertisements illuminated the urban spaces where socializing took place, and photographic portraits connected the cover girls to each other, to the magazine’s readers, and to the spaces of the city where the magazines traveled. The captions located below and alongside the photographs captured the intersection of temporalities, Chinese culture, and cosmopolitanism in treaty-port Tianjin. Until the last years of publication, even though the magazine’s articles were all in Chinese, photograph captions were usually bilingual, in English and Chinese. Both English and Chinese conveyed similar meanings, but they were not direct translations. English captions,

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for example, often referred to a woman as a “society lady,” but the Chinese caption never actually used the Chinese neologism for society (shehui). These women instead were representatives of the socializing sphere, jiaoji. English captions used gendered terms, such as “lady,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss” to refer to a woman. The Chinese captions employed multiple gendered titles from a lexicon that spanned Chinese linguistic history, from the classical Chinese term guixiu, meaning “cultivated woman” or “gentlewoman,” to the modern term xiaojie, “little sister” or “miss.”24 Rarely did Chinese and English captions refer to married women by their birth names. When personal names were used, they usually referred to a single daughter of a well-known man, a career woman, or a female celebrity. In such cases, the woman’s name was usually accompanied by the title nüshi, literally “female scholar.” The socializing sphere depicted in the cover photos of the Beiyang huabao was gendered female. Occasionally, a cover might feature a general or a man posing next to his bride in a Western-style wedding photo, but most photographs featured women only. Photography and visual imagery were already playing a role in shaping female celebrity, fashion, and beauty in China as elsewhere in the world, and the magazine included photographs of international Chinese celebrities like Chinese-American Anna May Wong, as well as famous beauties from Harbin and Shanghai. Still, if the photography enabled the mass circulation of celebrity images, it was also increasingly accessible to the readers of the Beiyang huabao, and indeed, most covers included photographs of local women instead of national and international celebrities, making these local Tianjin women visible to a mass audience. The journey into this visible social sphere of photographic reproduction began in the photographer’s studio, where a woman would sit for her portrait. She might even select a photographer based on his work in other Beiyang huabao cover photos, since the photographer was always credited in the caption. Once the photograph had been developed, it traveled to the magazine’s editorial office, where it would be laid out on the cover page, sent to the printer, printed hundreds of times, and finally dispersed to houses, offices, hotels, and restaurants across the city. As a woman’s image circulated across the city through the newly visible socialization sphere, she joined a diverse company of women, ranging from the daughters and

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wives of prominent Tianjin men to students recently returned from study abroad, not to mention a variety of career women including medical doctors, the first female diplomat, and the first Chinese head of a college for girls. Thus, the taitai and the May Fourth new woman shared the same social space on the pages of the Beiyang huabao. The socialization sphere depicted on the pages of the Beiyang huabao was far from an “imagined community” in which readers would never know one another. Rather, the women featured on the cover of the Beiyang huabao and its readers inhabited the same physical social spaces, often connected through kinship and marriage.25 Isabel Chang’s younger halfsister Edith, for example, appeared on the cover of the magazine a year before Isabel did, and the magazine regularly featured photographs of their former brother-in-law Wellington Koo and his new bride.26 Other daughters of well-known men appeared across issues of the pictorial, with captions noting both their father’s name, and, if the woman was married, the husband’s name. Identifying a woman with reference to both her husband and her father, the captions suggest that marriage and kinship played a role in creating social networks in Republican-era China.27 According to social norms in late imperial China, once a woman married, she became part of her husband’s family and was no longer considered a part of her natal family. But in the socializing sphere on the pages of the Beiyang huabao, both Isabel and her sister Edith were identified through their husbands and their father. Through the technology of photographic reproduction, women like Isabel and Edith became the public faces of both their natal and marriage families in the socializing sphere. While a woman’s beauty, artistic talent, or smarts could land her on the cover of the Beiyang huabao, her father or husband’s title marked her classed position in Tianjin’s social sphere. Captions often included a husband’s or father’s profession as well as his name. By listing the male family member’s profession, the captions were trying to set stakes that would define the class boundaries of a shifting social landscape. In late imperial China, neo- Confucian social ideals prescribed a very clear social order with scholars at the top, but with the abolition of the civil service examination in 1905, the professional basis for the social order was no longer as strong, and by the time of the Nanjing Decade, urban elites in Tianjin called upon multiple forms of economic, social, and cultural capital for

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social distinction.28 The urban socialization sphere thus became one space where the city’s elite could articulate new understandings of social status. The men associated with women in the Beiyang huabao socialization sphere hailed from a variety of professions, including generals, warlords, former ministers, a railway director, a telegraph director, the owner of a department store, a magician, the deposed emperor Puyi, a newspaper editor, a stamp collector, and famous scholars. The diversity of male professions may have signaled that definitions of the male urban elite were expanding, or perhaps, the linking of male profession to a female photograph suggests that feminine charm and beauty helped expand the definition of elite social status in the jiaoji. As photographs introduced the actors of Tianjin’s socializing sphere, advertisements illuminated the spaces where social activities were taking place off the page. The cover of the Beiyang huabao included ads for places to shop, such as the Pathé Department Store in the French Concession and the Chung Yuen Department Store in the Japanese Concession, as well as places to dine and imbibe, such as the Fululin Restaurant, the Riche Café, and the Yeho Yuen Restaurant, all in the French Concession. Isabel Chang could have walked easily to these locations from her house in the French Concession, or she could have driven in one of the Renault cars depicted in advertisements for the automobile dealer Garage Central, which also appeared on the front page. While department stores and cafes may have been modeled on similar social spaces in Western cities, the businessmen and restaurateurs conceived of these new spaces of jiaoji with Tianjin’s Chinese urban elites, and not foreign expatriates, in mind. The Fululin Restaurant, for example, advertised Chinese tea to be served with its Western dishes.29 From Chinese names to the mixture of Chinese and foreign wares, these social spaces served up chimeric entertainment to a Chinese clientele. How did women navigate these spaces, and how did the classed nature of the socializing sphere shape their gendered identities? Although photographs in the Beiyang huabao displayed social activities, such as a society ladies’ picnic on the banks of the Hai River or a wedding at the British Concession’s Gordon Hall, they offer little insight into how women negotiated the sphere in practice.30 How did a woman enter the socializing sphere? How did she succeed in becoming a “leading society lady”? How

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did she navigate between jiaoji and other urban spaces like shehui and jiating? These are questions women’s periodical literature can help us answer.

SOCIETY, HOME, AND THE SOCIAL SPHERE Almost two years after Beiyang huabao ceased publication, on June  21, 1939, a new women’s pictorial magazine was launched from Tianjin’s French Concession. The Chinese title of the magazine was Funü xin duhui, or “women’s new metropolis”; the English title was Woman World. Both titles connected women to space, and connected the metropolis to the world, thus highlighting the multiple layers that Tianjin women experienced when they navigated everyday life at the intersection of local and global spaces. Woman World inherited the readers and the socializing sphere of the Beiyang huabao, but the editors and writers of this women’s magazine had an additional mission: to explore the political roles women could play through the spaces of home and society. From its outset, Woman World aimed to describe and define female spaces in the city. In the fourth issue of Woman World, the female editor Yin Meibo opened a discussion on women, home, and society in a two-part editorial on female social status: In whatever city there are two sexes of animals. We give these animals a name—humans. In so many places, the number of women is greater than men from one third to over four times, but on the city streets, in the shops, dance halls, schools, and public places, we often feel that there are fewer women than men. In government meeting rooms or company boards of trustees, one very rarely hears a woman’s voice. We can only glimpse the shadow of a woman in a girls’ school that doesn’t admit boys or a women’s factory that doesn’t let men past the door. Where do all the women go? Isn’t this curious?31

Starting with this early issue, editor Yin proposed to reconfigure urban space along gender lines, allowing women to play a more prominent role in society (shehui) and the sphere of social status (shehui diwei). Yin

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envisioned a city with women filling every corner of social space—from dance halls to government halls. While Yin lamented the lack of visible women in the city, the pages of her biweekly pictorial suggest that Tianjin was already a new city of women. The cover of each issue of Woman World, much like Beiyang huabao, featured a picture of a local female student or society lady who had been carefully posed in a photographer’s studio, alongside snapshots of women out in the city: visiting Beijing parks, vacationing at nearby summer beach resort Beihai, or attending a benefit gala at the Beijing Hotel. Advertisements for pharmacies, dance halls, restaurants, and photography studios, as well as jewelry, clothing, bicycle, and automobile shops, encouraged female readers to venture out and sample their wares or services. The magazine also devoted one of its six pages to the latest news in film and theater, including listings and advertisements for local Tianjin theaters. In fact, the articles, photographs, and advertisements in Woman World suggest that Tianjin was a city of well-educated women who roamed the streets by day, frequenting parks and local businesses, and filled their evenings with dancing, dining, and theater. Yin probably overstated her case to make a point; still, how could her analysis of urban life be in such discord with the images printed on the pages of her magazine? The discord arose from the fact that the social role of the urban new women was not clearly defined at the time. Was she to achieve equal social status as a career woman? Benefit state and society as an exemplary housewife and mother? Or was she to be a social butterfly? Likewise, these multiple possible roles did not always align with the binary spatial arrangement of society (shehui) and home ( jiating). To understand women’s new social roles, the writers of Woman World also needed to remap urban social space. As one writer noted, “everything throughout the world changes according to thought and environment.”32 Woman World’s writers thus attempted to unify the conceived spaces of social theory, as they understood it, with the material world of the city in which they lived, all in order to portray their vision of an ideal social order with women at its center. If they could describe and define the building blocks of a successful urban life for the modern woman, then perhaps they could help her to advance her social status, benefit society, or at the very least buy their magazine.

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Woman World’s editorial staff most likely forged their perceptions of social space through the field of female education. Yin Meibo, the editor and publisher of Woman World, was only thirty when she founded Woman World in Tianjin’s French Concession in 1939. She also served as the headmistress of the Beijing Girl’s High School (Beijing yu qingnüzi gaoji xuexiao). In 1943, when she applied to the local government for permission to change the magazine into a weekly called Tianjin funü ribao (Tianjin woman weekly), she listed two other members of the editorial staff, both women in their mid-twenties, as employees of the same school.33 Other members of the staff included men and women drawn from local publishing.34 With a staff hailing from the education field, the goal of the magazine was to educate Tianjin women, who were seen to be peripheral to modern women in both Euro-American cities and Shanghai. The first issue of Woman World stated that its goal was “to introduce the moral beauty of our countrywomen’s lives and of women all over the world to point the way for how to live our lives.”35 Women from Shanghai or foreign cities who had climbed career or social ladders were held up as examples for Tianjin women to emulate.36 The implication was always that Tianjin women could learn from them and advance their own positions in society, but what this position should look like was the subject of multiple debates. Coming from the field of female education, the young editorial staff members of this Tianjin magazine were most likely aware of social scientific definitions of the new Chinese term shehui (society) as well as new forms of female education such as home economics. In Keeping the Nation’s House, the historian Helen Schneider argues that home economics educators in China saw home as the center of society; through learning to keep house, women could save the nation.37 Woman World editor Yin Meibo, however, perceived a different relationship between home and society, arguing that home was the enemy of female social status, and that women needed to find a way to enter society. Still, Yin opened up her pages to the complex and often contradictory debate on the meaning of home and society, as well as women’s roles in both. Claiming that it was difficult to find women out and about in the city, publisher Yin began by trying to uncover female space in Tianjin, and then to categorize spatial and gender relations in the city accordingly. Women, she said, could be found at home, where they “wait for their husbands and

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take care of their children. They don’t have the time to go out to socialize, or the time to go out and do things. That goes as far as not even having the time to read a newspaper. Their world is the household ( jia) and not society (shehui). Their service is limited to washing clothes and cooking and not public affairs (gongshi). In this way, you see only a few women in society.”38 In this description, Yin saw the household not as a part of society but as a separate and lesser sphere. Using geographic language, she referred to the home as the woman’s “world” ( jiating jiushi tade shijie), and without going so far as to call the home a private space, Yin contrasted the work of this space (cleaning and cooking) with the work of society (public affairs, or gongshi). But if the household was not a part of society, then what was society, the sphere lacking in visible women? Yin described society in spatial terms. It included the streets, shops, dance halls, and schools, as well as places of work, such as chemistry labs, offices, and even the halls of government. According to this conception of society, it was not state and society but rather household and society that were at odds, and high social status (shehui diwei) could only be achieved by becoming a member of society. Though Yin’s editorial voice resonated strong and clear, not all writers for the magazine agreed. Some writers echoed Yin, arguing that women could only achieve fulfillment by joining society and gaining social status (shehui diwei). They were joined by writers who suggested that home and society were indeed separate spheres, and that home was a woman’s place, and others still who argued that home was the cornerstone of the nation, and that to manage the home was to save the country.39 While the nation was sometimes cited throughout these debates as a beneficiary (or victim) of new female social roles, female identity and autonomy, not national salvation, drove the discourse. In other words, Woman World attempted to map out a new understanding of society that placed women at the center, not the nation. The debate over home and society in Woman World suggests that even during the Sino-Japanese War, nationalistic calls for women to reform home and family to save the nation did not resonate with all Tianjin urbanites, and, moreover, that the boundaries and meanings of home and society were still being defined. Furthermore, the multiplicity of voices that sounded throughout the debate, even to contradict the magazine’s editorial stance, suggests that women’s magazines like Woman World were open, diverse, and intellectually creative forums.

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Regardless of their stance in the home-versus-society debate, all writers viewed society to be a male-dominated space, the space of political action but also the space of work. According to an article on career women, women who worked “benefited society” and “benefited country.”40 The article noted that while Tianjin was starting to follow the European way of being more open to “male-female equality, freedom, liberation” and even “dating,” in terms of female careers, “a lot of people study it, but very few people practice it.” The article encouraged the “women of our country” to “stand up and take their place . . . to be able to achieve an independent livelihood.”41 Articles such as this encouraged women to seek a career in general terms, but the magazine was often at a loss when it came to giving specific advice to Tianjin women on how to enter the workplace. One problem was that the social order mapped out on the pages of Woman World was more complicated than “home” versus “society.” To start with, the working world was also divided along class lines. While the multiple definitions of female gender roles proposed in Woman World may have been fluid, class boundaries were much more rigid. The magazine clearly defined its audience as elite educated women. An article on skills for career women, for example, suggested while both an educated woman and a factory woman were “career women,” there was a difference between the two, and that this article, like others in the pages of Woman World, addressed “educated women” (zhishi funü) to the exclusion of factory workers. 42 While factory women worked for necessity or livelihood, educated women were encouraged to work to establish individual autonomy and gain social standing. A local educated career woman whose article was published in one magazine described how she transgressed this class divide by working out of necessity. Although the title of the article, “The Freedom of a Typist,” suggested that the author had sought a career as a form of emancipation, she began her narrative by noting that “in order to take care of my mother, I took a job as a Chinese typist in a bank. This was after leaving school, and with diploma in hand, I stepped into society, and began to make money and return home. I was very excited and at the same time proud.”43 While the author talks about “stepping into society,” she also notes that the impetus for taking the job in the first place was to take care of her mother. The author soon discovered the “hardships of seeking a livelihood.”

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Unlike the women on the covers of Beiyang huabao, who entered the public sphere of socialization attached to the names and professions of their husbands and fathers, the career woman in this story entered the public sphere of work without the class status of a male family member’s profession. The ambiguity of her class status made her vulnerable to sexual harassment, and the pride of the author’s first day was soon diminished when she realized that her education had not prepared her for the workplace. She noted that “when I first stepped into society, I was unfortunately lacking in the ability to handle work.”44 Luckily a colleague named Mr.  Wang offered to show her the ropes. Unfortunately, Mr.  Wang’s kindness turned into office gossip and the casual sexual harassment of male colleagues who “placed their hand on [her] shoulder” and offered “impolite” words. And yet the author persevered, all the time thinking of her responsibility to her widowed mother and not “daring to do anything.”45 There is no way to verify whether the article is true, but archival evidence does suggest that Tianjin women rarely worked in middle-class jobs—and when they did, the motivation often seemed to be to support their families financially. According to a 1931 survey of Tianjin municipal workers, only twenty-nine women worked in city government. 46 And according to a 1946 sample of eighteen women workers, most were employed as typists or secretaries. 47 All but one of the women in that group were single. These women seemed to provide the primary income for their families: fourteen of the eighteen women lived with at least one parent, and in most cases took care of those parents; in some cases, their salaries also supported their siblings. Likewise, six women who responded took care of widowed mothers. Thus, whether the article depicted a genuine personal account or a fiction, it nevertheless reflected the social reality in Tianjin that elite women rarely worked, and those who did often worked out of financial necessity. Moreover, the article issued a warning that elite women who defied class boundaries and entered society through the workplace would be sexualized. This alarm bell echoed throughout Woman World, as in an earlier article that warned career women against being mistaken as a “flower pot” or plaything in the workplace. 48 Discouraged from society sphere’s workplace by discrimination or because they were already financially secure, Tianjin’s elite women found

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more success in the socialization sphere. According to editor Yin, the socialization sphere was not the “society” of career and government, but rather the “stage of social interactions” (shejiao chang). In an article on what it meant to be a modern woman (xiandai funü), Yin once again raised the society/home distinction. She wrote that there were two kinds of women: those who entered society (dao shehui qu) and those who returned home (hui jiatingli). Although she gave advice to both home and society women, she specified that the women of society could be confident when entering the socializing sphere. 49 In contrast to society, the place of work and government, the socializing sphere was fun, filled with dancing, skating, and dating.50 As one author proclaimed, dating was not about carnal desire but was instead an integral part of “social activities.”51 In contrast to Woman World’s ambiguous advice on how to enter society, the magazine gave detailed explanations on how to prepare physically for the socializing sphere, offering tips on appropriate makeup and fashion for social activities such as a date.52 Women may have enjoyed more success in the socializing sphere than in society, but on the pages of the magazine, it was not always clear whether these accomplishments warranted praise or criticism. In one article, an old man lamented his son’s choice of a wife, complaining that there were two types of women: those who are lots of fun and those who know how to run a household. And young men of the day only wanted to marry the former.53 Indeed, as articles in Woman World continued to describe and debate these different social spheres and types of women, married women who crossed over into the social sphere came in for increasing criticism. One cover story noted, “Unfortunately, many women go into society and forget about the goals of their family. Whenever you see middleclass (zhongchan) women, they don’t know how to manage a home. . . . They are nothing more than a man’s plaything, and therefore today’s housewives must have home management skills.”54 The subtitle of the article, “in today’s society the household is still the root of the country,” signaled a way of talking about home and society in Woman World that differed from Yin Meibo’s earlier editorial comments. Instead, it echoed discussions about the home’s role in state-building among reformers and politicians.55 In this configuration, the home became a part of society, with the state as architect.

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As these different and often conflicting ideas about home and family in modern Chinese society suggest, theoretical ideas about social structure did not clearly map onto the social reality of Republican-era China. Indeed, home was a chameleon that could take on whatever shade of meaning a social critic wanted to assign. Home could be described as a part of society, the cornerstone of the nation, but also separate from society, a place that women ran either toward or away from to seek refuge or liberation. In reality, home was the center of a complex web of relationships and spaces that constituted everyday life in Chinese cities. This web was constantly changing and shifting, and thus could not be captured by rigid social descriptions. At first glance, Yin Meibo’s break from the orthodoxy that saw home as the core of national strength seemed not to be in keeping with the times. In 1937, Japanese forces invaded Tianjin, an event that could have renewed the nationalist discourse often said to categorize this period in China’s history. In fact, according to the literary scholar Nicole Huang, in Shanghai the opposite was true: there, the war encouraged female literati to turn away from the politics of national salvation.56 Female writers in Shanghai during the 1940s increasingly focused on everyday life, turning inward toward an alternate “domestic” reality as a strategy for coping with the realities of war. Yin Meibo and several of her Woman World writers took a different tack: they turned outward, imagining a new role for women in society. Still, in both instances, women turned away from standard nationalist discourse to carve out spaces of their own. The chaos of wartime China may have opened up a space for women to create new narratives, but such women were also products of a longer history of female education, everyday urban life, and dwelling in the world, modern women who had the background and resources to see the city and the world outside of a nationalist framework. Although Shanghai’s female wartime writers such as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) and Su Qing approached the question of female space differently than the Tianjin publisher Yin Meibo, they were all educated young women who had come of age during the Republican era. For them, the idea that a feeble, oppressed Chinese woman with bound feet could be the enemy of national salvation was a fiction of a constructed feudal past. These urban, middle-class women saw education as a form of self-cultivation rather than national

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improvement. In their minds, individual subjectivity and identity were as worthy of attention as national salvation. Thus, Yin Meibo could craft an identity through her role in society and her career, while Shanghai writers like Zhang and Su could find subjectivity in the practices of everyday life. Through this diversity of approaches, Chinese women engendered the city from the inside out and from outside in, rejecting the orthodox definitions of the modern woman and jiating as captive to the nation.

JIATING AS THE CENTER OF FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY As the editors and writers of the Beiyang huabao and Woman World focused on engendering the public spaces of society and the socialization sphere, they largely ignored the private realm. Neither magazine described jiating as a private sphere and center of individual subjectivity. The Beiyang huabao described jiating as a kinship network that connected women through social class to the socialization sphere, while in Woman World, jiating was either the enemy of society and individual autonomy or it was the public and female political center of national reform. In both cases, jiating might have served as an individual’s private refuge from the public spheres of socialization and society, but neither magazine depicted it as such. But these mass media depictions were at odds with the personal and individual narratives of jiating that were written by women out of the public eye. In contrast to the magazine depictions, individual women’s narratives portrayed jiating as both a public space of social reform and as a private sphere of intimate experience and affect. In 1948, after World War II had ended, and on the eve of Communist “liberation” of Tianjin, a group of young women prepared to enter the Home Economics department at Tianjin’s Hebei Women’s Normal Institute (Hebeishengli nüshixueyuan). As part of their entrance, they were asked to write an essay about their family.57 Their essays navigated the sociopolitical ideologies of both the inner/outer continuum and the public/private divide and yet also revealed their personal perceptions of family and home. Entering home economics, an educational field that placed home at the cornerstone of national reform, the students were familiar

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with the political rhetoric asserting that family reform could save the nation. But as young women on the precipice between childhood and adulthood, they could not help but feel a personal connection to and nostalgia for members of their families and the spaces of their houses. Thus for these young women jiating was complicated, simultaneously an inner sphere of political reform, a bridge between state and society, and a private space for individual sentiment. A young woman named Zhang Mei began her essay by describing her early life in the countryside of Liaoning Province, where she was born into a “large feudal family.”58 This was a signal to her professors that she, like many of her classmates, understood the discourse of family size and modernity. Like Zhang, most students noted in their essays that they hailed from a “large feudal family” ( fengjianshide da jiating) or a “lovely small family” (ke’ai xiao jiating). In fact, Zhang experienced the transition from large to small family in her lifetime: as she described in her personal narrative, her household eventually disbanded, and Zhang’s grandfather and father headed south to try their luck in the booming coastal city of Tianjin, where they eventually moved their smaller family into one of the city’s new single-family houses. Zhang demonstrated that she understood the discourse of family modernization, but she also did not condemn her family of the past. Zhang actually seemed to like her large, feudal family, and described her early years with nostalgia and warmth. As one of the youngest additions to a household that included over one hundred members, she explained how she was frequently doted on by elders as she played in beautiful gardens enclosed in a sprawling compound. Like her classmates, Zhang knew to frame her family essay in nationalist rhetoric, but her descriptions of family relations and household spaces were intimate and personal. Indeed, few of the students who came from large feudal families like Zhang told stories that aligned with the nationalist myth of the traditional Chinese family system, in which the large family begat individual oppression and deep-rooted misogyny. Instead, they joyfully recalled playing with their many cousins or fondly remembered the love and attention that family members had showered on them. If anything, some young women found the transition from the sprawling courtyards of the large extended family to the confines of the single family urban house to be lonely and isolating. Twenty-two-year-old Liu

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Haidi told the story of her family’s transformation from da to xiao.59 Born into a “large feudal family,” Liu moved out with her parents and two sisters to form their own small family. While Liu’s language showed that she knew how to write about the evils of the large family system, she longed for the days when she played with her little friends and sisters. Life in a xiao jiating, according to Liu, was simply boring. Liu’s sisters were older, married, and far away; her father was busy all day with work. So for the past ten years, all Liu had done was go to school and stay home with her mother. In the absence of cousins to play with, Liu found other things to fill the emptiness of her single family urban home, describing how she managed her time alone, enjoying listening to phonograph recordings of operas or playing with her cats. While students overwhelmingly agreed with the public rhetoric that nuclear families were ideal, their private lives revealed that the transition from da to xiao was not seamless. Family living patterns were often based less on ideal type and more on solutions to individual needs. One eighteenyear-old student noted, for example, that after her father died, her brother took over as head of household and cared for her and her widowed mother.60 In other cases, large extended families seemed to best exemplify the values of the modern middle-class nuclear family. Twenty-yearold Sun Xiuying, for example, lived in an eleven-person household with her parents, grandparents, four brothers, and two sisters.61 Featured in her school portrait with chin-length permed hair, a round face, and almond eyes, and wearing a dark qipao, Chen was well educated, having completed both elementary and secondary education. Her parents had also been educated in Western-style schools (Mr. Sun at Columbia University), and her father was a modern business professional. By all sociological predictions, the Sun family should have seen itself as a five-person nuclear unit. Yet according to Sun Xiuying, their family consisted of eleven people; and despite her family’s size, she believed that the Sun household was thoroughly modern, rooted in modern bourgeois ideals of love and respect. Drawing on inclinations that were partly bourgeois and partly Confucian, she described her parents with affection, noting that “she grew up quickly under their nurturing.” Indeed, she displayed deep filial respect for her mother when she described her admiration for her mother’s gentle sensitivity, a characteristic she aspired to duplicate.

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The personal essays written by Zhang Mei and her classmates at the close of China’s Republican era suggest that while women in urban China negotiated multiple ideological concepts of social space, they also created spaces of their own. If read quickly, the essays might seem to confirm the nationalist interpretation of jiating. Drawing on a nationalist rhetoric that placed reform at the center of national salvation, they suggest the success with which ideological prescriptions about social spaces and social relations had been disseminated through education. But when read carefully, these essays also revealed the diversity of the world women were making in Republican Tianjin. They described a wide variety of demographic backgrounds among middle-class urban families, the very social group that ideologues and social scientists argued would embrace the small family ideal. Indeed, the essays suggest that by the end of the Republican era, ideological prescriptions for social change had not necessarily translated into social practices. But more importantly, the nostalgia with which female students described the feudal family they had left behind, and the affection with which they portrayed relationships in an extended urban family, suggests that for these woman jiating was neither an oppressive force to escape nor a social space they needed to reform. Jiating was rather a space of personal relations and intimate affections, a site where these young women could forge their individual subjectivities and sense of self.

CONCLUSION By the close of the Republican era, Tianjin urbanites had formed new complex perceptions of gendered space. New gendered and classed concepts of social and political spaces broke from the late imperial inner/ outer continuum, but they cannot be easily explained by historians’ retrospective models, such as state/society or public/private. Tianjin urbanites engendered their city to reflect their lived experiences in a Chinese local city at the center of the world. They drew on national and global political discourses as they navigated cosmopolitan local spaces to forge new concepts of social space. Women from elite families redefined class distinctions in new spaces of social interaction, from restaurants and hotels to department stores and photography studios, and they returned home to

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domestic spaces which in many cases, in keeping with new concession zoning laws, were disconnected from commercial spaces. According to social discourse, this female-gendered home space could either build a nation or destroy female social mobility. In practice, however, the disconnection of jiating from shehui allowed home to become a personal retreat, a space of individual sentiment and nostalgia during a tumultuous period of political chaos and war. The nationalist focus on jiating as the demography of family rather than the spaces of home allowed for a new engendering not only of home but of the Chinese city itself. Chinese people invented and reinvented the social spaces of shehui, jiating, and jiaoji through public discourse and social practice. Discussions about these spaces and their interactions often focused on the role of women within them, but more than engendering spaces, they were establishing the classed boundaries of social space. Whereas the social space of the household was theoretically available to all strata in the inner/outer continuum of late imperial China, the female realm of the home in Republican-era China was a distinctly bourgeois space. Likewise, while female sales assistants and waitresses labored in department stores and restaurants, these spaces were only available to elite woman as the socializing sphere of jiaoji when they transformed them through their leisure activities. Thus, by the end of the Republican era, although the gendered construction of social spaces within the Chinese city was still in flux, the classed nature of spaces was increasingly coming into view.

8 The Chinese Bourgeois Home in the Socialist World

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he nationalist ideology of xiao jiating assured social mobility through demographic change. The small nuclear family promised a prosperous middle-class life and was central to a theoretical vision that an ideal demographic formulation could be both the result of and a condition for social change, modernization, and nation building. Jiating as house and home, by contrast, was constructed to prescribe the behaviors and define the boundaries of the social status of a new urban elite. Anyone could become a small family, but only the social elite could enjoy the privileges of house and home. Moreover, while historians of the bourgeois home in other places have argued that the middle class gave rise to ideas and practices of home, in China the formation of class identity and the construction of home were simultaneous and mutually constitutive processes. Middle-class men cultivated their masculinity, individuality, and political identities through owning the house as private property. Women found new gender roles at home, where they were charged with managing the affect and knowledge of domestic space, and in the socializing spaces of the city, where they represented the household through social leisure. Through defining these social spheres as bourgeois, Tianjin’s urban elite became bourgeois.

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As the urban elite transformed house, home, and the socializing sphere into spheres of privilege, these sites became places of power. They were empowered in part by the fact that Tianjin’s working classes were denied access not only to the spaces but also to the debates over the relationship between shehui, jiating, and jiaoji. Elite women could discuss choosing to work in order to gain social status in the public sphere, but women from the laboring classes worked for economic survival. Mothers and daughters slipped in and out of public places of work depending on their household’s economic needs, and in many households, women and men labored within their houses.1 Elite men could purchase or rent a house to project their economic capital, while working-class men faced fewer options to rent housing. A male migrant worker usually moved to Tianjin by himself, but if his family joined him, he would not have been able to afford to purchase or even rent a single-family house. If he was more fortunate, he could have rented a single room in a brick courtyard house with a tiled roof. 2 Much like the courtyard houses of the elites, the conditions of the interior would not have been visible from the street, but once inside a visitor would have found multiple families living around a single courtyard. A less fortunate family would have lived in a house fashioned out of unbaked clay with a roof of sorghum stalks. Landlords were unlikely to keep residences in good repair, and leaking roofs and crumbling walls were common. Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist real estate market deliberately neglected public housing for the laboring classes. The working classes rarely lived in the foreign concessions. One family, for example, labored in a walnut factory in the British Concession but lived across the river in Hedong qu, or “east river district.”3 Foreign concessions promoted a real estate market that built high-end, high-return houses and ignored public housing. Likewise, the Chinese municipal government did little to address the housing needs of the city’s working and lower classes. It was not until Tianjin became a wholly Chinese city after World War II that Tianjin’s local Guomindang (GMD) government proposed public housing, and not until after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takeover in 1949 that public housing became a reality. The story of the Chinese bourgeois home in the socialist world thus begins in 1947, not in 1949, and begins as a story of de-colonization and

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continuity. Tianjin’s multiple colonialisms created the postwar housing crisis, but they also launched the laboratory that invented the house and home, which planners, even under the CCP, looked to when they proposed housing. During a period of liberation and revolution, however, continuity was neither inevitable nor desirable. The CCP turned to the bourgeois house and home model because they recognized the potential of its power. During the global 1950s, individual states were articulating new visions as they built or rebuilt their relationship with society. To consolidate power, the Chinese state, under the CCP, reconnected family, house, and home in state ideology. But they could not simply adopt and reformulate the Qingera inner/outer continuum since the old feudal family was the foundational strawman of leftist critiques of Chinese society. Instead, they adopted the new model of jiating, the nuclear family and its house and home. Moreover, in taking up this model, they took on the power of class privilege that elites had mapped onto house and home during the Republican era, translating it into patriarchal privilege and power for male citizen workers and the Communist-led state.

PUBLIC HOUSING IN MULTIPLY COLONIZED CHINA As Tianjin grew in the 1920s and 1930s, the real estate market could not keep up with the influx of families migrating to the city. Chinese and foreign residents alike complained about high rents and the shortage of suitable housing. 4 At the time, Tianjin lacked a single municipal government that could field their complaints and effectively launch projects for affordable public housing. While the British, French, Italians, and Japanese were interested in promoting real estate development to increase their tax base, they were less concerned with housing the city’s people. If anything, concession governments such as the British and the Italians wrote laws to regulate what kinds of Chinese people would be allowed to reside in the concession. In practice, Chinese residents were permitted as long as they had the money to buy or rent concession property. This practice excluded the people who swept concession streets and cleaned concession houses. As far as the concessions were concerned, they could live elsewhere in the

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city. In a city with multiple jurisdictions, housing for lower-status Chinese people was thus largely neglected. Tianjin’s real estate market did not fill the large and growing demand for middle- and lower-end housing. Real estate developers in the concessions seem to have been motivated by a belief that high-end housing would produce the highest return. While new technologies could have been used to address the housing crisis, developers built luxury residences instead. New steel and concrete engineering technologies that had reached Tianjin by the 1930s presented builders and investors with the opportunity to construct high-density, reasonably priced housing. But the multistory, multiunit apartment buildings that were designed for Tianjin’s concessions included high-end fixtures and amenities, making the apartments more appropriate for a luxurious modern life than for economical family living. Typical Tianjin apartment buildings built in the 1930s included hardwood or polished-stone flooring, copper door handles, and basement-level car parks, all suggesting that these apartments were designed for a discriminating elite consumer.5 Tianjin’s concession governments and real estate developers may have ignored mid-range and lower-end housing, but in Shanghai, where the housing crisis was especially acute, philanthropic organizations and even some developers sought solutions to the housing crisis. Missionary groups like the YMCA addressed the Shanghai housing crisis by reaching out to urbanites who could not afford to buy a house. Central to this project was the new global bourgeois belief that housing was an individual’s social right. Missionary groups tried to support poorer Chinese families by organizing home expositions and promoting domestic education, encouraging families to transform their houses into modern, healthy, hygienic, and eventually Christian places.6 The YMCA took these lessons a step further by building a “model village” in Shanghai’s Pudong district. Established in 1926, the Pudong Model Village included “sanitary” housing for twentyfour families as well as a community center, schools, and a playground. Built as private, single-family homes with Christian ideals of domesticity, each house included a sitting room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom.7 The village attracted attention both from prominent Chinese people and foreigners. Even the Republic’s president Chiang Kai-shek was reported to have made a financial donation to the village.

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New ideas that home ownership was essential to middle-class identity fueled the New China Bank’s (Xinhua yinhang) plan to develop more affordable housing in Shanghai.8 In 1934, the bank proposed capitalizing on crowded urban living conditions, rising rents, and the lack of housing for sale with a plan to encourage middle-class home ownership.9 According to an article in a Chinese architectural journal, the bank planned to build houses in a development named New China Village (Xinhua yicun), located in the Guomindang government’s new Shanghai development. To help urbanites purchase these houses, the bank introduced a home-buyers’ savings account. But while the bank’s plan aimed to cultivate home ownership among a Chinese citizenry in a new Chinese district of the city, the homes were to be built in “Dutch, English and international styles,” and indeed as multistory, single-family homes that conformed to a new global ideal of bourgeois home ownership.10 While there is no evidence of municipal, philanthropic, or market projects to build mid-range housing in Tianjin before World War II, the local Chinese government did present a proposal to build housing for the city’s poor. In 1930, the Chinese municipal government’s Social Bureau’s (Shehui ju) Benevolent Association offered a plan for poor people’s housing.11 The housing project consisted of a series of rows of single-story, singleroom residences, with each room measuring 3 by 3.2 meters square (9.9 by 10.5 feet) and 2.7 meters high (8.9 feet). Floor plans did not indicate separate cooking facilities. Shared male and female toilets were placed in the common gardens between the rows of rooms. These simple, single-room dwellings were more in keeping with extant worker housing in Tianjin than the multiroom, single-family houses proposed by Shanghai philanthropists and bankers.12 In other words, the proposed project emphasized housing relief, rather than social engineering through sustained social planning. The proposed project also indicates that Tianjin’s Chinese municipal government was aware of the city’s housing crises even if it was unable to fully address it.

PUBLIC HOUSING IN POSTCOLONIAL TIANJIN Tianjin’s experiments in urban housing would have to wait until after World War II, when the city and all its concessions had been returned to

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China and Tianjin was unified under a single Chinese municipal government for the first time in more than eighty years. The British returned their concession to China during the war in 1943. After the war, the Japanese government was forced to surrender their holdings in Tianjin. The French relinquished their concession in 1946, followed by the Italians in 1947. With foreign powers no longer governing parcels of the city, Tianjin’s Guomindang government finally addressed the longstanding housing crisis that the war had exacerbated, and in 1947, Tianjin’s Guomindang government proposed a new municipal housing project.13 The plan to build more than 150 attached single-family houses may have seemed simple when compared to some of the townhouses in the former foreign concessions, but the proposed housing was far more elaborate than the Shehui ju’s single-room housing project from 1930. The new plan included six housing blocks with five rows of houses in each block. Each house was to be built out of brick, a material readily available in Tianjin, and would be fully equipped with electricity and running water. The blueprints depicted a peaked roof with a small window for ventilation atop each unit, with at least two multipaned windows in the front. The floor plan epitomized the middle-class housing ideal of single-family living, boasting a large sitting room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Some units even included a small garden; bushes and perennials were to be planted along each row of houses.14 The proposal did not specify who would qualify to live in this housing. While the municipal government planned to finance the sixty-millionyuan project through the Agricultural Bank of China, they did not suggest how much consumers would be expected to pay, whether they would rent or buy, or what social group they would come from. The future inhabitants were simply called shimin (city people.)15 The term shimin suggests that the proposal was not seeking to provide housing for the city’s underclasses but for the new urban citizenry, a group for whom single-family housing had become a political and social right but for whom the colonial capitalist market and Japanese wartime experience had made this ideal unattainable. In building housing for shimin rather than the city’s poor, the Guomindang municipal government indicated a shift in political and social policies from addressing the immediate needs of the housing crisis to using housing to shape a political and social relationship with the urban citizenry. Moreover, when the Guomindang municipal

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government designed their plan to promote the shimin individual’s right to housing, they designed it as a two-story, single-family house, in keeping with the global model of the bourgeois home. Urban planning in Tianjin under the Guomindang was short-lived, and there is no archival or architectural evidence to suggest that the Guomindang ever built the shimin housing village. On January 15, 1949, the People’s Liberation Army entered Tianjin, making it the first former treaty-port city to be “liberated” by the Communists. Like the GMD before them, the Communists quickly set about addressing a housing crisis that had been produced by the colonial- capitalist housing market and worsened by World War II and the Chinese Civil War.16 Initially, official state housing policy was to confiscate and redistribute enemy property, which in Tianjin was largely Japanese; and to work toward stabilizing private rents. Tianjin’s municipal government, however, worked beyond state policy and introduced plans for new housing. In 1951, the Tianjin Building Company proposed a new kind of “economical housing” for families.17 Each townhome would be two stories high, with a kitchen, dining room, and living room on the ground floor and two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor, a front garden and a back garden, all clearly labeled on the plans. Blueprints for these new economical houses resembled GMD plans for shimin housing, and they seemed more based on the bourgeois single-family house ideal than on models of socialist living. Indeed, the architects and planners of GMD shimin houses may have continued to work under the CCP designing the economical housing. The political scientist Kenneth Lieberthal argues that after the Communists took over Tianjin in 1949, the CCP lacked cadres with experience in managing cities, and thus relied on local civil servants, many of whom did not have allegiance to the GMD government officials who had arrived only after the war.18 In terms of the people who planned and constructed Tianjin housing, the early postwar period most likely saw more continuity than change in the transition from GMD to CCP governance.19 The single-family house ideal originated in early twentieth-century China and crossed the 1949 divide, but it was also a concurrent ideal of the global 1950s that spanned the political and geographic divides of the early Cold War. Governments worked to address the housing crisis brought on by economic depressions and World War II, and housing became central

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to the relationship between the state and its citizens. The United States, for example, introduced the GI Bill, which provided housing loans to many returning soldiers, a measure that in turn stimulated the market in singlefamily suburban homes. In the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev issued a decree for single family housing in 1957 that led to central planning for building new residences.20 Since the future of housing was only then unfolding across the globe, Tianjin’s municipal government had no readymade models to turn to and instead had to plot their own strategies. Responding to the particular context of their postcolonial and newly Communist city, Tianjin planners first rejected the private housing market of the city’s past. While the market had constructed housing that yielded the highest profit, planners in the early 1950s discussed “economical” houses or dormitories that could be built quickly, and at little expense.21 Municipal records from the first half of the 1950s discussed the nuts and bolts of building housing, from planning to financing, but the Tianjin municipal government rarely built the housing itself. Instead they offered loans for companies to build housing for their workers and even allowed “private” enterprises to apply.22 This concept of company-provided housing predated the establishment of the work unit or danwei system, but it was not without precedent in modern China. Before World War II, employers from civil offices to industrialized factories provided dormitories for their single workers, while laborers in smaller workshops often slept in their workspaces. Likewise, Nankai University campus included faculty housing, while some companies or government offices provided housing budgets for managers with families. In the 1920s, Tianjin’s Bank of China even constructed an enclosed compound for its bank manager and employees that included free-standing houses, apartments, athletic facilities, and schools.23 Thus, the decision to grant government-sponsored private loans for housing expanded on an earlier practice of employee housing, but it also introduced a new role for the state in the distribution of housing. With housing in the hands of employers, housing type became even more aligned to profession than it had been during the Republican era. Instead of investors developing housing for a broad housing market, private and public employers designed housing and selected a size and style that they deemed appropriate for a particular profession. The Tianjin

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municipal government required that all companies submit blueprints along with loan applications, and applicants were required to describe the intended occupants. Thus, while the GMD municipal government’s public housing project had been unclear about who the shimin were, the loandriven housing proposed under the CCP clearly delineated the occupants’ professional status, and blueprints were aligned to that status. Moreover, housing for professions formerly associated with the middle class was much larger than that proposed for workers. While the CCP may have been raising the position of the urban working class in rhetoric, in practice, their housing was simpler than that of other professional groups. In 1953, Tianjin University submitted blueprints for new facilities to the municipal government, including housing for workers and faculty. The proposed housing for workers was an improvement over a typical Tianjin worker’s house before 1949, but it was significantly smaller than a professor’s house. Workers’ housing consisted of a series of attached single-story units.24 Each unit had two rooms and a kitchen. The plans did not specify whether the rooms would be assigned as a set or individually. Bathrooms and toilets were not included in the plans. Faculty, by contrast, were to be housed in more spacious apartments in two-story buildings.25 While the façade of the workers’ housing was plain and just included windows, the professors’ building included a streamlined modern light fixture above the door, and balconies with metalwork that resembled apartments in the foreign concessions. Each apartment included three rooms with an exclusive-use bathroom and kitchen. Rooms were not labeled, but one could imagine two of the three rooms in the professor’s apartment used as private bedrooms, or a bedroom and study with the third room functioning as a common room for dining and living. The blueprints sketched a bourgeois space, the perfect private space for a nuclear family. The lower-status university workers, by contrast, were to live in one or two rooms without a private toilet. Even within a single housing complex, the layout and size of apartments could vary. Housing plans suggested hierarchies within the workplace, with some positions warranting more space or amenities. A 1954 proposal for a set of apartment buildings for government cadres, built on the edge of Tianjin’s former British Concession, included multiple apartment layouts within a single building.26 Like Tianjin University’s faculty

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housing, the cadre apartments included ornamentation on the façade, but instead of using European styling, the cadre apartments employed a modern Chinese nationalist decorative style that had rarely been used on housing during the Republican era. (See figure 8.1.) The three-story brick buildings included Chinese roof lines and poured concrete ornamentation, such as octagonal windows, along with an entrance that was framed in pillars. Each floor of each three-story building included multiple apartment arrangements: some apartments had only one room and shared the floor’s toilets and kitchen, while other apartments had two connected rooms, with or without a balcony, and each floor included at least one apartment with two rooms and a private kitchen and bath. Presumably families of higher-ranked cadres would have been allotted the larger apartments and those with private facilities. Although “bourgeois” terms like “sitting room” were absent from these plans, the middle-class ideal of single-family housing seemed to gain a new life under Chinese socialism, as housing was connected to status even more concretely than before. As China unleashed the First Five-Year Plan in 1953, the Tianjin municipal government was acutely aware that they needed to use housing as a platform for launching the city’s productive forces. As government

FIGURE 8.1 Cadre housing in Tianjin. Photograph by the author.

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documents noted, “this city is an industrial city,” and workers’ housing was a “major problem.”27 Thus, while ideologically, workers were to form the base of CCP legitimacy in the cities, in more practical terms they were needed to implement the new planned economy. Workers’ housing needed to be built quickly and economically. Early government plans for “economical” workers’ housing featured dormitories with shared bathrooms and a dining hall.28 Such plans best suited single workers. In 1954, the Tianjin municipal government proposed a more family-oriented workers’ village in the south of the city, near the new industrial district.29 Unlike the single-person dormitories that many factories were constructing, the workers’ village was planned to offer public services for families as well as a cultural life (wenhua shenghuo). The “quiet” and “hygienic” workers’ village was enclosed by a wall with a single entrance so that no major roads or traffic passed through, allowing children to safely walk around the area.30 Each of the seven apartment complexes in the village was built around a garden, and the complex included a public park and sports field that added to the “beauty” and “health” of the development. Plans also included a nursery, a kindergarten, and an elementary school for the children who lived in the complex. Tianjin’s utopian workers’ village actually preceded the expansion of single-family apartments in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev.31 Like Soviet housing from the late 1950s, the Tianjin complex was designed to address the postwar housing shortage, and it was also designed with the private nuclear family home in mind. Thus, while the complex featured facilities to nurture resident children, it did not include other communal facilities, such as a dining hall, to relieve mothers of their domestic duties, as later Chinese plans for worker housing would.

VISIONS OF A HAPPY LIFE While municipal governments were attempting to address the immediate postwar, postcolonial housing crisis, propaganda artists were envisioning the ideal and happy home life. Their visions were both a continuity with the past and a vision for the future. The Shanghai-based artist Xin Liliang depicted the happy home life in a poster published in March 1954 that featured a father and his three plump, rosy-cheeked children seated around a

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table while a qipao-wearing, apron-clad mother served up a bountiful dinner of stir-fried vegetables, meat, fish, and egg and tomato soup.32 (See figure 8.2.) The home includes a rocking horse and ball for the children to play with, a radio for family entertainment, and a clock so the father would know when to head to work. The room was also adorned with luxuries—from a blue-and-white porcelain vase filled with fragrant flowers to a framed blackand-white photograph of a family portrait. The red characters printed at the top of the poster read: “Chairman Mao gives us our happy life.” This vision of a happy life mediated through consumable objects looked very much like the affective picture of bourgeois home. Indeed, if it were

FIGURE 8.2 “Chairman Mao Gives Us Our Happy Life,” 1954. Courtesy of the International Institute of Social History.

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not for the father’s blue worker’s cap and his unbuttoned shirt, this image might have depicted a white-collar Shanghai family during the Republican era. Like most Chinese propaganda poster artists in the 1950s, Xin Liliang began his career illustrating commercial advertisements in Shanghai in the 1930s.33 During this period, artists like Xin painted images for advertisements, calendars, and New Year posters.34 After the Chinese Communist Party took over Chinese cities in 1949, the party called on commercial artists to redirect their art to further socialism. Xin and many of his colleagues, who had once sold goods ranging from tobacco to mosquito repellent, began to sell a socialist future. The visual tools employed to sell the Chinese socialist home were in many ways a continuation of commercial advertising techniques from the Republican-era home, but they were deployed in response to a new global postwar urgency to create a vision for future prosperity that transcended socialist and capitalist divides.35 As states tried to rebuild their relationship with citizens, the home and its commodities became central to their promises of prosperity in part because people were facing a shortage of consumer goods and housing after the war. Whether in China, the Soviet Union, Japan, or even the United States, governments faced crises in housing and shortages in food. They also shared a vision of what postwar prosperity should look like—a happy family and a comfortable home, but they proposed divergent means to achieving it.36 The capitalist vision of prosperity included both the promise and the means to get there: a capitalist future would be filled with new commodities; and consuming those commodities would drive the economic development of capitalist states like the United States and Japan. Advertisements suggested that consumption could bring happiness. In the United States, for example, a 1949 Magnavox advertisement promised not only a comfortable home life but also improved family relations through sitting around the television.37 At a transitional moment when many people could not afford the joy of conspicuous consumption, advertisements promised that one day they could. As a 1950s Sanyo advertisement assured Japanese citizens: “Sanyo electronics for a bright future.”38 In China, by contrast, production rather than consumption drove the economic plan for the future, thus the message in the poster of the happy life was not to shop to jumpstart the economy, but

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instead to trust that Mao and the CCP would deliver a prosperous life to the Chinese people who engaged in productive work outside the home. In the 1950s, consumption could also be socialist. As Susan Reid has argued for Khrushchev-era Soviet Union: “Mass consumption and images of how and what to consume were not the monopoly of capitalist modernity. They were also central to modern socialism.”39 In China, this new socialist consumption built on the infrastructure and practices of colonial capitalist cities. 40 Department stores continued to operate after 1949. A poster of the Shanghai Number One Department Store from 1955, for example, depicted socialist mass consumption with brightly clothed consumers crowding the store’s ground floor and a CCP banner prominently hanging above the escalator. 41 The store is crowded with people: visitors line up around the escalator for a ride, factory girls in overalls stroll, girls in minority dress join the crowd, and sailors and soldiers enjoy a leisurely outing. Indeed, the spectacle of this department store is found not in the commodities on display but in the pageantry of people who fill the scene. Aside from a few bolts of cloth, the exact goods for sale are not immediately clear to the viewer’s eye; instead, a short poem underneath the image explains how to view this scene of consumption: “The department store is filled with all kinds of merchandise; Goods to your heart’s content; Whatever you want, you can buy; Life is getting better year by year.”42 Here, the department store represents the new Chinese Communist state, with the multiethnic consumers as its nation. The 1955 department store, much like the Chinese state, may not have actually stocked everything consumers could possibly want to buy, but as the poster suggests, the state promised to improve its citizens’ lives year by year. The poster of the department store depicted a new relationship for the Chinese state and its citizen, with the state positioned at the center of the people’s livelihood and prosperity. This relationship was also articulated in the title of the poster of the family seated around the table: “Chairman Mao gives us our happy life.” Depicting the “happy life” through images of the home and its objects in many ways echoed the affective happy home of the Republican era. In explaining the affect of happiness, Sarah Ahmed argues that “happiness functions as a promise that directs us toward certain objects which then circulate as social goods.” In the happy home or

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kuaile jiating the objects promised happiness, but in the socialist home Chairman Mao promised to deliver the objects and thus the affect was directed toward him. These different conceptions of happiness can be understood by examining changing terminology. Happiness in the socialist happy life was indicated by the Chinese term xingfu, whereas the middle-class capitalist happy home used the term kuaile. Both terms are translated into English as “happy,” but kuaile refers to the affective feelings of joy, while xingfu denotes good fortune. In the xingfu shenghuo the good feelings were thus oriented toward Mao, who was responsible for the prosperity of the home. Indeed, a poster from 1953 titled “moving into a new house” features a family hanging a portrait of Mao on the wall even before they unpack their belongings. 43 (See figure 8.3.) Propaganda posters from the 1950s presented a new ideological vision of state-led patriarchy that united the three facets of jiating—the nuclear family, public housing, and the prosperous home—under the party with Mao as its father. Furthermore, this patriarchy established a lineage between Mao, the male worker head of household, and his sons. This relationship is portrayed in the poster of the “happy life.” Father and son wear the same male worker’s clothing, and father points to the portrait of Mao. This new socialist patriarchy needed to distinguish itself both from the

FIGURE 8.3 Moving into a new house, 1953. Courtesy of the International Institute of Social History.

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feudal extended family that the May Fourth Movement had derided as the enemy of individual agency, and from the middle-class happy home of capitalist modernity. The past could be erased by methodically designing the future, and the CCP began to take a much more active role in delineating and defining the domestic sphere of the household than the GMD had. At the same time, however, they emptied the domestic sphere of any political or productive agency and expunged its historic role in the economy, governance, and individual identity formation. Citizenship and class identities were no longer to be forged in the private spaces of house and home but instead in the public spaces of work. The new roles outlined for women further cemented the state-led patriarchy. Women could claim citizenship as a rural or urban worker, but they could also be categorized as a dependent or jiashu of a working man. 44 According to Song Shaopeng, dependents were not considered to be full citizens, and indeed often were called “parasites.”45 In theory, women were supposed to be liberated by becoming productive members of society and working in the public sphere. In 1955, Mao wrote: “In order to build a great socialist society it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity.”46 In reality, the majority of urban women did not work in state-owned enterprises. 47 Moreover, when CCP ideological discourse and propaganda attempted to work out the gendering of the spaces of work and domestic life as well as the role of women in both, it perpetuated images of the home as a female space. Analyzing discourse from the People’s Daily Newspaper, Song argues that in the early 1950s, women were encouraged to join the workforce, but that between 1956 and 1958 they were mobilized to leave public work for housework, and that beginning in 1958 political discussions focused on collectivization of household labor. 48 While these campaigns may have been clearly delineated in the party’s major newspaper, they were expressed unevenly in propaganda posters. Posters in the early 1950s portray women both as model workers and as household laborers. A 1954 poster featured a beautiful woman with rouged lips and cheeks dressed in a unisex, blue worker’s suit. 49 The smiling woman is surrounded by her three children; her son holds the certificate announcing her achievement, while her baby and daughter reach for the red and gold medal displayed proudly on her chest. The caption notes that

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she is a “glorious model producer.” A series of children’s prints from 1954 titled “With labor comes happiness” featured a school worker making soymilk, workers building a house, and a mother making clothes at home.50 A poster from 1954 titled “Help mom do work” depicted a mother washing clothes by hand in a basin while one boy fetches a pail of water and two siblings watch the baby.51 A 1956 poster, which may have been part of the campaign to mobilize women workers to go home, included multiple panels portraying a woman caring for her family and supporting her worker husband while featuring the slogan “Do housework well and raise children well.”52 Only the text accompanying the model worker mother describes her work as productive. The Chinese words used to describe the household labor of the women at home—zuo yifu, zuoshi, jiawu— do not actually use the term for work. Thus, while the images of women working at home may have depicted female productivity in the domestic realm, the captions suggested otherwise—that housework was not productive work. Housework was gendered female in order to diminish household space in relation to public work space precisely because women had been described as parasites or appendages of productive men. Under this new ideology, the household was no longer to be an economic competitor to the state-led public sphere of work; instead, the happy life at home was framed as being dependent on productive work of the public workplace. In reality, however, women continued to engage in productive labor in the household. The historian Jacob Eyferth, for example, has argued that rural women made homespun clothing well after the socialist revolution in spite of the state’s disdain for it.53 Because the public workplace was the state-sanctioned productive sphere, male workers became citizens through their relationship to this production. In contrast, a woman’s relationship to public productive work, and thus her political status, was always tenuous. As quickly as a woman was mobilized into the productive forces, she could be asked to leave to make room for male employees. The gendered representations of work and home that began in the 1950s laid the foundation for the dichotomy of going out to work and returning home that continues to haunt Chinese women today. In other words, the so-called traditional role of housewife that women were summoned back to, especially after market economic reforms in the 1980s, is itself an invention of the 1950s.

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COLLECTIVIZING HOUSE AND HOME In 1955 the CCP strengthened the link between housing and the state by mandating that state or collective-run urban work units, danwei, must be responsible for building, distributing, and regulating housing. Moreover, the CCP actively began to seek ways to make all urban housing public. According to the 1956 CCP “Report on Urban Housing Property and Suggestions for Socialist Transformation,” over half of the housing in China’s major cities, including Tianjin, still belonged to the private sector.54 Abolishing private property by making housing public would bring about a socialist transformation, connecting people to the state in their everyday lives, and it would ideally improve housing conditions for workers. The 1956 CCP report on housing identified overcrowding and poor living conditions as major problems for workers; and indeed, some scholars have estimated that per-capita housing availability in Chinese cities actually decreased during the 1950s.55 At the same time that the CCP issued the report on the state of urban housing, they called upon individual work units to investigate workers’ housing.56 The party’s attitude toward housing can be seen in their changing requirements for housing loan applications during the 1950s. While in the early 1950s, applicants for housing loans from the city were asked to present viable building plans and an appropriate budget, after 1956 work unit loan applications also needed to demonstrate attentiveness to workers’ living conditions. A textile work unit’s application, for example, happened to include a national government memo that asked each danwei to investigate workers’ housing conditions by recording how many people lived in each house and by measuring the size of the house.57 The memo outlined four issues that demanded close attention from the work units: (1) housing standards that did not meet health requirements or were dangerous; (2) families of multiple generations living under one roof; (3) married couples unable to live together in their allotted space; and (4) housing far from work. The memo reveals how socialist policy continued to deploy bourgeois ideals, as the socialist individual was endowed with the right to live in a safe and well-located house, residing with his wife and nuclear family. Thus, while the socialist transformation in housing had eliminated private property, it retained many of the ideals of the bourgeois home that had developed alongside

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new ideas of private property in the colonial-capitalist city. Indeed, two of the four highlighted issues for housing promoted the bourgeois individual ideal that husband and wife should live together in a nuclear family without their parents. In a society that increasingly valued socialist collectivity, plans for new danwei housing still clearly distinguished individual private space from shared spaces. A textile and clothing danwei’s application to build workers’ housing from 1956, for example, noted that to encourage a socialist transformation of everyday life, they would need to pay close attention to public amenities and services like transportation and a children’s school.58 Moreover, the work unit would be responsible for the maintenance of public facilities and spaces in the housing buildings. Individual workers, however, were charged with maintaining and paying taxes on their personal residences. A worker’s living space may have been his personal responsibility, but it was not his private property. The work unit’s plans clearly stated that workers could not rent or lend their housing to relatives or friends. As the Chinese state rebuilt its connections to housing, and as the CCP shifted from the practical, economy-driven Soviet-style planning of the early 1950s to the ideology-driven Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, planners began to propose a new ideological understanding of jiating that reconnected social relations to social spaces and linked everyday life at home to the state. While Republican-era nationalist ideologues had focused on transforming the demographic and social relations of the xiao jiating in order to transform the nation, new socialist ideas about housing suggested that new spatial designs could revolutionize social relations and bring about a socialist transformation. In a 1958 issue of the Journal of Architecture, the Tianjin Building and Engineering Bureau presented their plans to build a shehui zhuyi da jiating in Tianjin.59 In his book on the origins and spatial organization of the danwei system, David Bray translates this as the “Great Socialist House,” but the description of the project in the article could just as easily suggest “great socialist family.”60 Indeed, as the article suggests, late 1950s China saw the reemergence of a political understanding of jiating that blurred the lines between social spaces and social relations. Family and house were again integrated in the socialist vision of jiating, a vision that represented a transformation of both the imperial jia and the Republican jiating.

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Rather than begin by describing architectural plans, the author of the “great socialist family” first introduced the people who would make up the “great socialist family.” The complex was slated to house 42 households with 176 people. The residents would include workers, cadres, students, and 27 housewives.61 The author noted that liberation had yet to change some old mindsets, with many women still laboring within their houses. To liberate these women and release their productive labor, the planners called for a new communal spatial arrangement to transform social relations. The great socialist house was centered on a large dining hall, which would relieve women from cooking meals in individual kitchens, and also included a nursery and cleaning department so women would no longer be burdened by childcare and housework. In the great socialist family, elderly women, who were presumably past their prime of productive labor in the factory, would take over the domestic tasks of younger women—three women were to be assigned to the canteen, three to the nursery, and two to cleaning. This plan began to address some of the inequities in female participation in public labor, and also proposed a new concept of family in which household tasks could be outsourced to people outside the immediate family. Connecting social relations to social space, the great socialist jiating proposed a radical vision of jiating that departed from the individualistic ideas of the Republican era xiao jiating and drew on some aspects of the late imperial da jiating. Like late imperial households, the complex was designed as a four-walled compound around a central courtyard, and it seems to have been planned on a north-south axis. But while the central room of the imperial household would have featured the ancestral altar, the central room in the great socialist house was the large dining room located in the center of the east wing. With socialism replacing kinship as the force that brought people together, the dining room, like other everyday services, was to be staffed by members of the new extended socialist family. The new socialist household also proposed a radically new vision of social space that departed from the late imperial inner/outer continuum and the Republican-era public/private divide. Inhabitants of the great socialist house would share communal household facilities like toilet, bath, and laundry, but the complex would also introduce amenities

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previously relegated to the outer world of commerce or public services, such as a bank, an infirmary, a recreation hall, and a small shop.

CONCLUSION Whereas early postwar planners had focused on building “economical” housing, by the end of the 1950s planners were looking to improve “everyday life” through housing. The great socialist jiating proposed an ideological vision in which the collective was greater than the individual and in which communal living improved everyday life.62 But while the socialist da jiating aimed at a radical reform of the Republican-era xiao jiating, many of the ideals of the bourgeois home proved resilient. For example, the ideals presented in architectural plans were not always realized. According to David Bray, when the Tianjin socialist housing complex was completed in 1962, it lacked many of the promised amenities, and people were forced to cook on their own, in the hallways.63 Moreover, the economic failures of the Great Leap Forward and the ideological turmoil of the Cultural Revolution slowed construction of new urban housing during the 1960s. Thus, the socialist spaces that potentially could have transformed social relations never fully materialized. Still, while the CCP failed to bring about a socialist revolution through housing, they nevertheless reconnected the social space of the household to the political authority of the state by abolishing private property. The danwei system of distributing housing built on and reinforced many of the ideals of the bourgeois home. First, it asserted that an individual had a right to housing, married couples should live together, and nuclear rather than extended families should inhabit a single space. Perhaps as an unintended consequence, the danwei system strengthened the link between housing and social status. While property denoted status in Republicanera Tianjin, status was still fluid, and could be defined by multiple forms of capital. By the end of the 1950s, a danwei’s political and economic status and a person’s position within it determined a housing assignment, making housing a visible and material marker of social position. While Tianjin University professors inhabited apartments, workers lived in dormitories; while senior cadres occupied multiple rooms with private facilities, their

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single or lower-ranked neighbors lived in single rooms, sharing a kitchen. In the end, while Chinese planners, intellectuals, and residents of the socialist world, much like their counterparts in the Soviet Union, had multiple global examples of experimental living to choose from, the single model for housing to emerge in the early Cold War socialist world was much like the ideal touted by their capitalist counterparts—the nuclear family home.

Epilogue Historical Erasures and China’s New Middle Class

B

efore midnight on August  12, 2015, a series of chemical explosions went off in a warehouse storage facility in Tianjin’s Binhai district, located along the Hai River between Tianjin’s urban center and the port. During Tianjin’s life as a treaty-port city, this area was little more than a salty marshland, but in the 1980s, when the central government began to promote market economic reforms, it was designated the Tianjin Economic Technological Development Area (TEDA). TEDA did not take off until the early 2000s with the establishment of businesses, hospitals, and satellite campuses of Tianjin universities, and the Binhai district became an enclave for Tianjin’s new middle class. The rapid growth of the Binhai district meant that housing and commercial buildings were constructed quickly alongside one another. The chemicals that exploded that August evening were thus housed in a commercial warehouse built dangerously close to a new residential complex of gated communities that included new flats surrounded by green spaces and parks. The explosions devastated the surrounding residential area.1 More than 170 people were killed, and hundreds more were injured. Property was severely damaged, and the air and ground were polluted. Surviving property owners took to the streets in protest demanding that the government compensate

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them for their losses. They wanted to know why the government had allowed hazardous chemicals to be stored so close to a residential area, and they sought fair compensation for their damaged property. This tragedy and its aftermath seemed ready-made for the English-language media’s liberal belief that China’s middle class would leverage property rights for political rights. The Wall Street Journal, for example, proclaimed that “the deadly blasts . . . put a deep dent in the compact between China’s government and its middle class.”2 Would the Tianjin explosion be the tipping point between state and society? Less than one month after the explosion, an anonymous post appeared on the Chinese social media platform Weibo that at first glance appeared to answer this question affirmatively. The author, allegedly a young woman about to enter Swarthmore College in the United States, claimed to have been living near the epicenter of the explosion and to have sustained severe injuries. The post received more than eight thousand shares before it was removed, but it was reposted on Chinese-language websites outside the People’s Republic of China and translated into English by the Journal of Foreign Policy.3 The author had personal grievances—her injuries and a delayed start at an elite liberal arts college in the United States— but instead she spoke on behalf of her family and their property loss. As translated in the Journal of Foreign Policy, she wrote: “I’m a Tianjin native. . . . When the incident occurred, I was living in Vanke Harbor City—the closest area to the explosion. I’m from a middle-class home. We own one apartment—we sold the other one so I could study abroad.” This statement was not, as the translation might suggest, a grievance against the state on behalf of the author’s social identity as middle class, however. In the original Chinese text, the author did not use the Chinese term for middle class, zhongchan jieji. Instead, she used the term xiaokang shuiping, which literally means well off or comfortable. The term xiaokang shuiping is a political term rather than a social category. Deng Xiaoping first used it in the early 1980s when he proposed economic development plans to bring about a well-off or comfortable society in which people had adequate food and clothing. The author used the political language of the state to make her appeal, and later in the text, she referred to her family as members of the xiaolaobaixing, the common people or the masses, a term that the Chinese Communist Party coined in its early years to refer to the masses as

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opposed to the bourgeois capitalists or the feudal landholders. Using the terms xiaokang shuiping and xiaolaobaixing the author did not distinguish herself as a member of the middle class in opposition to the state, but rather appealed to the CCP and its promises. This appeal on social media reinforced rather than challenged state power, and indeed the civil unrest after the Binhai incident has died down with little political change. The Binhai incident reveals the conclusion of the multilayered history of property, the individual, and the state in modern China. This history began in Republican-era China with the introduction of legal concepts and legislation that tied private property rights to the individual, making property central to middle-class, masculine identities. Whereas Tianjin’s housing market in the Republican era grew in the political vacuum created by multiple foreign empires and a weak Chinese municipal government, housing in the People’s Republic of China ultimately was consolidated under state control through the danwei system. After 1949, the CCP built upon bourgeois concepts— of housing and legal rights, and of individual identity and home—to make the distribution of housing and the promise of an abundant home life central to the state’s relationship with citizens. Moreover, under this system housing continued to denote social status since it was connected to one’s place of work and one’s position within that work unit. Eventually the danwei system of housing distribution gave way to a second marketization of housing, but this too reinforced rather than undermined CCP authority. In 2007, the National People’s Congress passed legislation on property. The first law revised the urban property laws on eminent domain, granting the state authority to demolish danwei and private property for the public interest. The second law granted private owners the right to use property on state- owned land for seventy years. Foreign media outlets extolled the legal protections over private property as strengthening a growing middle class and suggested a corollary: that with property rights established, the democratic political rights of the middle class would be right around the corner. The New York Times, for example, proclaimed in a headline: “China Backs Property Law, Buoying Middle Class.”4 But as time has passed, the expansion of property rights seems to have bolstered an economic elite who believe that a powerful state is necessary to protect their investments. The historian Wang Hui has identified private property

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as part of a bundle of neoliberal and ostensibly extra-governmental principles that actually have become incorporated by state policy.5 He traces the moment of entanglement of the neo-authoritarian state with neoliberal ideas to 1989, when a crisis in state legitimacy was answered through pro-market radicalism. As a result, Wang suggests that today’s state is not only responsible for expanding the market but also for protecting and mediating the market in the face of globalization. The state may no longer distribute housing, but the ability to own and invest in private housing is central to the relationship between the Chinese state and its citizens. A history of private property in China reveals that laws regarding property have long benefited men over women. During the Republican era, laws intended to bring about female property rights instead privileged the rights of male individuals and forged the political ideal that the singlefamily house was central to urban male citizenship. The CCP built on this foundation when they introduced housing policies after 1949 to establish their political legitimacy by constructing a system of socialist patriarchy between the state and its male citizens. The heightened anxieties over today’s property markets have only made visible these long-standing gender and status inequalities of housing distribution and ownership. In her book on China’s so-called leftover women, Leta Hong Fincher contends that “many Chinese women have been shut out of arguably the biggest accumulation of residential real estate wealth in history, worth more than US$30 trillion in 2013.”6 Even though women are contributing to the purchase of marital property, the vast majority of deeds are registered under the male spouse’s name, and according to the 2011 marriage law, when couples divorce, the property is bestowed upon the deed holder.7 Hong Fincher argues that this situation represents a resurgence of gender inequality. In many ways, however, the current housing market has simply exacerbated and exposed long-persisting gender inequalities in property rights and distribution. Thus, a history of family, house, and home in twentieth-century China not only shatters the myth that capitalist prosperity is endowed by the state, but it also exposes the inequalities and unevenness in how the state has delivered this prosperity and distributed resources over time. State legitimacy and the re-marketization of housing in Tianjin depends on genealogies of prosperity that emphasize the role of the CCP in lifting

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China out of poverty. These historical narratives transform the concession houses once inhabited by Chinese people into the homes of foreign colonials, and thus erase Tianjin’s Chinese middle class, who were the majority of residents in Tianjin’s foreign concessions. To restore middle-class Chinese residents to the histories of their former houses would be to undermine the commonly held belief that the ability to purchase an apartment in Tianjin today is a direct result of CCP economic policies. The idea that the CCP is the economic savior of the Chinese people has deep roots in Chinese Marxist historiography, and it has found new life in China under market economic reforms. In 2007, I presented my research on the Republican-era Tianjin home to a packed lecture hall at Tianjin’s Nankai University. As students at one of China’s top universities, the attendees were members (or future members) of China’s elite. When I had finished speaking, a handful of these students suggested that I find an alternate topic. Although I noted that the history of Republican-era Tianjin had been under-represented in Western scholarship, one student questioned why I had chosen to write on Tianjin and not an even more peripheral, and therefore representative Chinese city, such as Lanzhou, while another suggested that I should instead write the history of “real” Chinese people, such as peasants, and not the urban elites of a treaty-port city. These students failed to recognize that, rather than being marginal, the history of Tianjin’s urban elite actually was central to the founding and prestige of their own university. Not far from the lecture hall stood a towering statue of Nankai’s most famous alumnus, Zhou Enlai. Zhou attended Nankai in its early years when it was a private institution founded to educate Tianjin’s growing urban middle class in new global pedagogies. Indeed, Zhou, and his wife Deng Yingchao hailed from the very same educated, elite Tianjin circles that my talk had introduced. While the students undoubtedly knew the biography of their university’s most famous student, the social historical context of his early life had been erased from their popular historical memories. My goal in this book has been to reinscribe these erasures: to write the history of the modern home into the history of modern China, and to write the history of Republican-era Tianjin and its elites into the history of the Chinese city. This recovered history reveals both the deep structures of inequality in urban life as well as the possibilities of alternatives. In

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Republican-era Tianjin, gender was constructed through status, but both of these social categories were in flux. A wealthy warlord could purchase one of the finest mansions in the city, while the educated daughter of a civil servant might have been better equipped with the knowledge of how to live in it. As these young women grew to become wives and divorcées, however, they would have confronted a legal structure that did not always deliver on the property rights that the Chinese state or the foreign concession had promised women. And still, women could imagine an alternative city with female-gendered social spheres. As the pages of Tianjin’s Woman’s World suggest, the spaces of urban life in Republican-era Tianjin were open to various gendered possibilities. It is tempting to see a reemergence of the past, as China once again embraces global markets, but dwelling in the world has changed significantly for Chinese people. While the Republican-era state was weak, the Chinese state today governs from a position of strength and sets its own terms of engagement with the world. The nature of global commodities has also changed as revealed through women’s magazines. Republicanera Ling long magazine may have included advertisements for foreign cosmetics brands like Cutex, but it also included recipes for readers to concoct their own makeup. Moreover, advertisements were only a small proportion of the magazine; just as important were the diversity of articles and editorials that offered conflicting viewpoints worthy of the magazine’s onomatopoetic name, the sound of clinking jade. By contrast, today’s Chinese Cosmopolitan magazine, which is printed on glossy pages much like its American parent magazine, includes more advertisements than articles, most of which feature foreign luxury brands. Whereas Republicanera readers were invited to produce their world—participating in debates, expanding common sense, fashioning their spaces and their selves— today’s Chinese urbanites are left to consume theirs, facing a world of packaged global commodities that leaves little room for personal design or agency. Revealing the erased history of jiating reclaims a moment of human agency, when in the face of multiple foreign empires, and without a mediating state, Chinese people designed modern everyday life for themselves. But it is also worth remembering that this agency was unequal, particularly at the margins: Tianjin’s Republican-era urban elites could only

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design their own everyday lives at home because carpenters built them and maids cleaned them. Here, again, today’s stories echo an earlier history of power and privilege, as the history of Republican-era urban housing illuminates how private housing markets by their very nature often exacerbate social inequality. Indeed, to understand what these social inequalities might have looked like in Republican-era Tianjin, one need only visit Tianjin today. When I began researching this project in Tianjin, I rented an apartment in former danwei housing located in the shadow of a construction project for a new upscale housing complex called “Class Dream.” When I returned years later, I found that Class Dream had been completed, but many of its apartments stood empty, owned by real estate speculators with no plans to inhabit them. Staying in a serviced apartment down the road, I once again lived in the shadow of a luxury skyscraper construction project, this time being built as a high-end hotel, intended to house the capitalists who would visit Tianjin now that the state had designated the city a priority for national investment. Down at the foot of the skyscraper, in the deepest shadows, the project’s migrant construction workers took their evening meals on the sidewalk, delaying the moment when they would return to bunkbeds in their makeshift dormitory for a short night of rest. For them, and indeed for us, the long history of family, home, and housing has not been erased but just hidden—a force that continues to shape who we are and how we live in the world.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Frank Dikötter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1976); Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 9–39; and John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle- Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). For a revisionist and global look at domesticity, see articles in “AHR Roundtable: Unsettling Domesticities: New Histories of Home in Global Contexts,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1246–1336. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Marie- Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Bergère, The Golden Age; Xu Xiaoqun, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor:

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

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Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Bergère, The Golden Age, 178– 86. Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986). Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 101. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Sklar, Catharine Beecher; Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class; and Kerber, “Separate Spheres.” Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and “Symposium: ‘Public Sphere’/‘Civil Society’ in China? Paradigmatic Issues in Chinese Studies III,” ed. Philip C. C. Huang, Modern China, 19, no. 2 (April 1993). Elizabeth LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity in Chinese History and Historiography,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1278– 89. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in SeventeenthCentury China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); and LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity.” Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 15. LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity.” William T. Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–1895 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Michael Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900–1927 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Rebecca E. Karl, and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Helen  M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011); and Glosser, Chinese Visions. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mann, Precious Records; and Bray, Technology and Gender. John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

1. Unraveling the Chinese Empire

21. 22.

273

Glosser, Chinese Visions. Antoinette M. Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 251.

1. UNRAVELING THE CHINESE EMPIRE 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in SeventeenthCentury China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 13. Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4. Man Xu, Crossing the Gate: Everyday Lives of Women in Song Fujian (960–1279) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016); Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers; and Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Janet Theiss, Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth- Century China, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). and Bray, Technology and Gender. Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Madeleine Zelin, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 84. Da xue, The Great Learning, in Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed., ed. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 330–31. Bray, Technology and Gender; Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers; and Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Tianjin tongzhi: Jiuzhi dian jiaojuan [Overall annals of Tianjin’s old gazetteers] (Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 1999), 3: 434. Liu Haiyan, Kongjian yu shehui: Jindai Tianjin chengshi de yanbian [Space and society: Contemporary Tianjin City’s changes] (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2003), 36. For an overview of Tianjin’s imperial history, see section 1, “The Development of Tianjin Before the Modern Period, Yuan—1840,” in Jindai Tianjin chengshi shi [Tianjin’s modern urban history], ed. Luo Shuwei (Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1993), 21–113. Also see Guo Fengqi, Tianjin de chengshi fazhan [The urban development of Tianjin] (Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe, 2004). Man Bun Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin: State-Making and Civil Society in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 12.

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin, 16. Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin, 21. Kwan notes that during the Qing, wealthy Tianjin salt merchants purchased fine wines, silks, and porcelains from the south. See also the new Qing historians who describe China’s “long eighteenth century” as an economically prosperous and culturally rich period. Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); William Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Mann, Precious Records; and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin, 26. Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin. For comparison of 1842 official Qing census to U.S. census data for 1850, see Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 54. Yinong Xu, The Chinese City in Space and Time: The Development of Urban Form in Suzhou (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). Lewis, Construction of Space, 118. John Nieuhoff, An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Province to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperour of China (London: John Macock, 1669), 112. Nieuhoff, An Embassy, 12. George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China: Including Cursory Observations Made, and Information Obtained in Travelling Through That Ancient Empire, and a Small Part of Chinese Tartary (London: G. Nicol, 1797). Staunton, An Authentic Account, 203. Staunton, An Authentic Account, 185. Staunton, An Authentic Account, 184, 201. James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 25. Diplomatic and Consular Reports, China. Notes on the Foreign Trade of Tientsin during the Years 1900– 03 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1904). N. B. Denys, Notes for Tourists in the North of China (Hong Kong: A. Shortrede, 1866). Feng Qihuang, Tianjin cheng xiang bao jia quan tu [Complete map of the community self-defense system of the walled city of Tianjin and its environs] (1899), http:// hdl.loc.gov/ loc.gmd/g7824t.ct002306, accessed June 15, 2020.

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

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John Fairbank, “Patterns Behind the Tientsin Massacre,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20, no. 3/4 (1957): 480– 511. George Thin, The Tientsin Massacre: The Causes of the Late Disturbances in China and How to Secure Permanent Peace (London: William Blackwood, 1870), 3. George Thin, The Tientsin Massacre, 67, 68. Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874–1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 48. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs, 57– 58. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs, 51. Frederick Palmer, “Mrs. Hoover Knows,” Ladies’ Home Journal 46 (March 1929): 6. James Hevia, “Looting and Its Discontents: Moral Discourse and the Plunder of Beijing, 1900–1901,” in The Boxers, China, and the World, ed. Robert Bickers and R. G. Tiedemann (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 93–113; and “Topics of the Time: Tianjin,” The Advance (October 4, 1900), 423. Robert Bickers, “Introduction,” in The Boxers, ed. Bickers and Tiedemann, xi–xxviii. Bickers, “Introduction.” Bickers, “Introduction,” xiv. “Ethiopian Siege Recalls Boxer Uprising in China: Foreign Legations Stormed,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 5, 1936. C. A. Bayly, “The Boxer Uprising and India: Globalizing Myths,” in The Boxers, ed. Bickers and Tiedeman, 147– 55. See, for example, “Powers at Odds at Tientsin: Russia Holds the Railway in Spite Of England,” Boston Daily Globe, July 25, 1900, 1; and “Tientsin Horrors: Chinese Atrocious, but the Russians Were Worse. Shocking Tales Told,” Boston Daily Globe, August 7, 1900, 4. Hevia, “Looting and Its Discontents,” 104. See Esherick, Origins of the Boxer Uprising; and Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity. For the history of TPG governance, see Lewis Bernstein, “After the Fall: Tianjin Under Foreign Occupation, 1900–1902,” in The Boxers, ed. Bickers and Tiedemann, 133–46; and Lewis Bernstein, A History of Tientsin in the Early Modern Times, 1800–1910 (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1988), especially chapter 5. Charles Denby, China and Her People: Being and Observations, Reminiscences and Conclusions of an American Diplomat (L. C. Page, 1906), 204– 05. Minutes of the 23rd  meeting of the Tianjin Provisional Government (TPG), August 30, 1900, Procés-verbaux des séances du Gouvernement Provisoire de Tientsin, translated into Chinese as Baguo lianjun lingshilu (The China Times, 1902; repr., Tianjin: Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, 2004), 24.

276

52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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Minutes of the 8th  meeting of the TPG, August  10, 1900, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 12. Minutes of the 20th  meeting of the TPG, August  27, 1900, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 21. Minutes of the 61st meeting of the TPG, October 29, 1900, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 67. Minutes of the 214th  meeting of the TPG, October  25, 1901, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 463. It is unclear why the TPG decied that the sanitation department could not issue tickets in the Italian Concession. It is possible that the Italians were already instituting their own system of fines. Minutes of the 46th  meeting of the TPG, September  28, 1900; 231st  meeting, December 6, 1901; 41st meeting, September 21, 1900; and 65th meeting, November 7, 1900, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 46, 509, 43, 74. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity. See Bernstein, “After the Fall” and A History of Tientsin. When the Public Development Department decided to build a new road along the river, it decided that residents along the proposed route would be forced to move within a month. The TPG debated whether to compensate residents with money or new land. Minutes of the 72nd meeting of the TPG, November 22, 1900; the TPG decided to level roads in the minutes of the 181st meeting, August 7, 1901, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 373; Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 92. See also Bernstein, “After the Fall” and A History of Tientsin. Minutes of the 3rd meeting of the TPG, August 4, 1900; and 50th meeting, October 6, 1900, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 6–7, 52. Minutes of the 74th meeting of the TPG, November 26, 1900, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 97. Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 296. For biographical information on Morse, see C. A. V. Bowra, “Hosea Ballou Morse,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 2 (April 1934): 425–30. Yinong Xu, The Chinese City in Space and Time. Nancy Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 14. Hevia, “Looting and its Discontents,” 100; Hoover, The Memoirs, 60. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity; O.  D. Rasmussen, Tientsin: An Illustrated Outline History (Tianjin: Tientsin Press, 1925). Tenney was dismissed in 1906 due to antiforeign sentiment. New York Times, February 4, 1906. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity; Stephen R. MacKinnon, Power and Politics in Late Imperial China: Yuan Shikai in Beijing and Tianjin, 1901–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 152.

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69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

MacKinnon, Power and Politics, 147. Roger  R. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform, 1898–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 37. Stephen  R. MacKinnon notes that Tianjin became a site of Qing government experimentation. Mackinnon, Power and Politics. On elections, see Thompson, China’s Local Councils, 38. Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, 1911–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City, 4.

2. FAMILY IN IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICE 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 4. Bray, Technology and Gender, 380. Bray, Technology and Gender, 57. Patterns of deconstruction and reconstruction that began in the nineteenth century were not always brought on by colonialism. Meng Yue looks at the impact of internal migrations and reconfigurations of Shanghai due to the Taiping Rebellion on the intellectual and cultural life of the city in Shanghai and the Edges of Empires (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 38, 243n1. Joan Judge, “Citizens or Mothers of Citizens? Gender and the Meaning of Modern Chinese Citizenship,” in Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, ed. Merle Goldman and Elizabeth  J. Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23–43. On Tokugawa-era schools, see Martha Tocca, “Norms and Texts for Women’s Education in Tokugawa Japan,” in Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, ed. Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 193–218. On women’s education in twentieth-century Japan, see for example Yoshiko Furiki, The White Plum: A Biography of Ume Tsuda, Pioneer in the Higher Education of Japanese Women (New York: Weatherhill, 1991); and Barbara Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Higher Education in Japan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Koyama Shizuko, Ryosai Kenbo: Constructing the Educational Ideal of Good Wife and Wise Mother (Leiden: Brill Academic Publisher, 2012). Ueno Chizuko, “Formation of the Japanese Model of the Modern Family,” in The Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall (Melbourne, Australia: Trans Pacific Press, 2009), 63– 88.

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12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

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Noboru Koyama, “Cultural Exchange at the Time of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance,” in The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902–1922, ed. Phillips Payson O’Brien (New York: Routledge, 2009), 199–207. Shimoda’s ideals still frame the mission of the school today. Jissen Women’s University website, https://www.jissen.ac.jp/en/ideals/ideology/ideology.html, accessed July 10, 2020. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 55. According to Joan Judge, conservative officials Rong-qing (1854–1912), Zhang Baixi (1847–1907), and Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) cited Shimoda’s textbook on domestic science as the only foreign work “compatible with the Chinese way of womanhood.” Shimoda advised Wu Huaijiu, the founder of one of the first private schools for girls in Shanghai in 1901. Her professional network extended to the Empress Dowager Cixi—who had expressed interest in meeting with Shimoda to establish a women’s school—and to nationalist Sun Yat-sen, for whom she composed a poem. Joan Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 765– 803. See also Ko Shimoda kōchō sensei denki hensanjo (under the guidance of Fujimura Zenkichi), ed., Shimoda Utako sensei den [Biography of Professor Shimoda Utako] (Tokyo: 1943), and Ono, Chinese Women (1989). The Society for Renewal published a journal along with translations of Japanese books on domestic science and women’s education, including Shimoda’s Domestic Science (Kasei gaku in Japanese, Jiazheng xue in Chinese). Judge, “Talent, Virtue and the Nation.” Two of Shimoda’s Chinese translations, a 1910 edition of Jiazheng xue and a 1939 edition of New Contributions to Domestic Science [Xinzhuan jiazheng xue], can be found in the Tianjin Municipal Library: Shimoda Utako, Jiazheng xue [Studies in domestic science] (Shanghai: Guangzhi shuju, 1910); and Xinzhuan jiazheng xue [New contributions to domestic science] (Shanghai: Guangzhi shuju, 1939). Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation.” Whether or not Shimoda Utako was responsible for introducing the term katei to China, jiating as a new category of feminine knowledge did not appear in China until around the time her books were being published. The earliest entry in the National Libraries of China database for a title with the term jiating, for example, is a 1907 book called Jiating tanhua [Discussions on home] (Xuebu bianyi tushuju, 1907). Jordan Sand notes that debates over the native family system (ie sei) and the modern idea of home (homu) occurred at the same time the Meiji Civil Code was being drafted, suggesting that family reform was central to social reform in modern Japan. The linguistic introduction of katei to replace homu extended the political

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

debate to a mass audience, which was more apt to digest Japanese neologisms than foreign transliterated words. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 22–26. Sand, House and Home, 25. Shimoda Utako. Katei [Home] (Tokyo: Yumani Shobo, 2000) [reprint]. Elizabeth LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity in Chinese History and Historiography,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1278– 89. See, for example, David Chapman, “Geographies of Self and Other: Mapping Japan Through the Koseki,” Asia-Pacific Journal 9, issue 29, no. 2, (July 18, 2011); and Ueno, The Modern Family in Japan. LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity.” For example, Chen Shousun, a little-known scholar with no formal academic affiliation, published Dictionary of Social Problems [Shehui wenti cidian] in 1929 in which he referred to family as jiazu. Chen drew from Japanese and English scholarship, attributing many of his entries to a Japanese volume of the same title— Motoyuki Takabatake’s Shakai mondai jiten (1925)—and A. S. Rappoport’s Dictionary of Socialism (1924), which was published in Britain. He also claimed to have spent half of the 2.5 years he took to compile his Dictionary of Social Problems in Japan. Chen’s affinity toward Japanese scholarship carried over into his other work, which included a 1935 study titled War-time Economic Control [Zhanshi tongzhi jingjilun or Senji to sei keizairon], coauthored with Japanese colleague Mori Takeo. Chen Shousun, Shehui wenti cidian [Dictionary of social problems] (Shanghai: Intelligence Press, 1929). James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Wang Hui, “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China: The Concept of Science and its Application in Modern Chinese Thought,” positions 3, no. 1 (1995): 27. Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 53– 57. Pusey outlines how reformers from the Confucian Kang Youwei to May Fourth activists Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi used the ideas of social Darwinism to express their political agenda. Pusey, China and Charles Darwin. Chung-hsing Sun, “The Development of the Social Sciences in China Before 1949” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1987), 42. Before developing its own writing system, Japan had adopted Chinese characters, and educated male elites continued to read and write in classical Chinese through the Tokugawa period. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). Michael Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China, Canton, 1900–1927 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

280

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34.

35. 36. 37.

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43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

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Liang Qichao, “Xin dalu youji jielu” [Selected memoir of travels in the new world], in Yinbing shi he ji [Collected writings from an ice-drinker’s studio] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1926), zhuanji 22. In an essay titled “Learning from the West,” Yan Fu argues: “The difference between Chinese and Western knowledge is as great as that between the complexions and the eyes of the two races. We cannot force the two cultures to be the same or similar. Therefore, Chinese knowledge has its foundation and function. . . . If the two were combined, both would perish.” Translated in Ssu-yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 150– 51. Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 10. Jane I. Newell, “The Chinese Family: An Arena of Conflicting Cultures,” Social Forces 9, no. 4 (June 1931): 564. Helen  M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011); and Ava  B. Milam, A Study of the Student Homes of China (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1930). Newell, “The Chinese Family,” 564. Newell, “The Chinese Family,” 564–71. If Newell did conduct original research during her years at Yanjing, she left no record of it; according to contemporaries, she was better known as a department factionalist than a researcher. Yung-chen Chiang cites Grace Boynton, an English teacher at Yanjing, in a letter to her family as claiming that Yanjing was “a perfect hornets’ nest” with Newell at the center. Yung-chen Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 237. Wellesley Alumnae Quarterly (October 1920), 65. Arland Thornton, Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Thornton, Reading History Sideways. Fabio Lanza, Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Chiang, Social Engineering. The New Youth 5 (1918): 637, quoted in Newell, “The Chinese Family,” 570. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 107. See also Pusey, China and Charles Darwin. Chen Duxiu, “Kongzi zhi dao yu xiandai shenghuo” [The way of Confucius and modern life], Xin qingnian [New youth] 2, no. 4 (December 1916): 3– 5. Chen, “The Way of Confucius,” 4.

2. Family in Ideology and Practice 281

50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59.

60.

Hu included a translation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in the special issue. Hu Shi and Luo Jialun, “Nala” [A Doll’s House], Xin qingnian [New youth] 4, no. 6 (June 1918). Chen Hengzhe (Sophia H. Chen Zen), ed., Symposium on Chinese Culture (Shanghai: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1931). Katrina Gulliver, “Sophia Chen Zen and Westernized Chinese Feminism,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 4, no. 2 (2008): 258–74. In addition to his work as a sociologist and as a cultural commentator in the New Youth, Tao served as a professor at Beijing University, director of the Institute of Social Sciences at Academia Sinica, and research secretary at the Institute of Pacific Relations. Chen, Symposium. A title search on the library database Worldcat lists 219 entries for the book in an international list of libraries that includes Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Israel, Great Britain, and the United States. The historian Chen Hengzhe was comfortable writing in English and Chinese, publishing Chinese short stories and essays in the New Youth as well as publishing books and articles in English under the name Sophia H. Chen Zen. H.  D. Fong, Reminiscences of a Chinese Economist at 70 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1975). Fong, the second head of the Nankai Economics Institute, did not join Franklin Ho at the 1931 IPR conference, but as Fong noted in his memoirs, he attended the eighth IPR conference in Canada in 1942. Chen, Symposium, 305. The article was also printed in the journal Pacific Affairs. See Sophia  H. Chen Zen, “China’s Changing Culture,” Pacific Affairs 4, no.  12 (December 1931): 1070– 81. Chen, “China’s Changing Culture.” Ernest G. Osborne, “Problems of the Chinese Family,” Marriage and Family Living 10, no. 1 (Winter/February 1948): 8. According to the historian Tong Lam, Republican-era China became a social laboratory of modernity with Chinese and foreign social scientists experimenting in a variety of practices to understand Chinese society. Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation State, 1900–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 143. D. W. Y. Kwok argues that Chinese intellectuals were concerned less with scientific research than they were with using science to discredit traditional values and support their social, moral, and political agenda, and that adherents to “scientism” used “the respectability of science in areas having little bearing on science itself.” Revisiting the “scientism” argument, the historian Wang Hui outlines a longer history of “scientific” intellectual inquiry in China, arguing that nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers did not mistakenly impose the scientific method on non-scientific matters; rather, they translated and debated Western scientific ideas in the context of a Chinese intellectual tradition that identified an “organic connection among the universe, the world, society, and life,” with science defining people’s political and moral behaviors. D. W. Y Kwok,

282

61.

62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70.

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Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 3; and Wang Hui, “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science,’” 68. Christian universities like Yanjing were pioneers in survey research in China, with faculty such as Sidney Gamble producing multiple volumes of research on Beijing society. Other American pioneers who worked in the field in China were C. G. Dittmer at Qinghua College and John Stewart Burgess at Yanjing University. See Chiang, Social Engineering. According to Yung-chen Chiang, the development of the social sciences in China in the twentieth century was driven by foreign funding agencies like the Rockefeller Foundation, which often drove research by only funding certain research. In Chiang, Social Engineering. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education in 1945, of the 311 foreign PhDs, more than 40 had received their PhDs in the United States. The same report, which recorded the highest degree obtained abroad including doctorate, master’s, and bachelor’s degrees, recorded that a total of 108 Chinese social scientists had studied in the United States, 42 in France, 38 in Japan (BA and other only), 27 in Great Britain, and 14 in Germany. Sun, “The Development of the Social Sciences,” 349– 50. Sun, “The Development of the Social Sciences,” 348. Erik Grimmer-Solem, “Engel’s Law,” in Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, ed. Dale Southerton (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2011), 528–29. For a criticism of Engel’s exclusive focus on the working class, see A. G. Warner, “Engel’s Family Budgets,” Publications of the American Statistical Association 5, no. 33 (March 1896): 58– 61. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1975) [reprint]. See for example, Sidney Gamble, How Chinese Families Live in Peiping: A Study of the Income and Expenditure of 283 Chinese Families Receiving from $8 to $550 Silver per Month (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1933); Gamble, Peking, a Social Survey Conducted under the Auspices of the Princeton University Center in China and the Peking Young Men’s Christian Association (New York: George H. Doran, 1921); Tao Menghe, Livelihood in Peking: An Analysis of the Budgets of Sixty Families (Beijing: Social Research Department, China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, 1928); Tao Menghe (L. K. Tao) and Yang Ximeng (Simon Yang), A Study of the Standard of Living of Working Families in Shanghai (Peiping: Institute of Social Research, 1931); H. D. Lamson, “Standard of Living of Factory Workers,” Chinese Economic Journal 7 (1930): 1240– 56; Ava B. Milam, A Study of the Student Homes; and Lin Sung-ho, Factory Workers in Tangku (Beiping: Social Research Dept., China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, 1928). Gamble, Peking: A Social Survey, xv. Engel’s theory that clothing expenditures remained stable as income increased did not hold for Gamble’s Beijing data, in which the percentage spent on clothes

2. Family in Ideology and Practice 283

71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

increased with a rise in income. Moreover, on other expenses such as funerals or weddings, Gamble noted that “the amount spent for the different items varies, of course, with the tastes and social position of the family.” Gamble, How Chinese Families Live, 203. Gamble, How Chinese Families Live, 57– 58. Gamble, How Chinese Families Live, 12; see also Sidney D. Gamble, The Household Accounts of Two Chinese Families (New York: China Institute in America, 1931). Tao and Yang, Working Families in Shanghai, 21. For the history of housing in treaty-port Shanghai, see Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Lamson, “Standard of Living of Factory Workers.” H. D. Lamson, “Population Studies: Size of the Chinese Family in Relation to Occupation, Age and Education,” Chinese Economic Journal 11 (1932). Lamson, “Standard of Living of Factory Workers.” Lamson even reported almost the exact same percentage spent on food by Shanghai workers as Tao and Yang (56 percent for Lamson and 56.6 percent for Tao and Yang), in Lamson “Standard of Living of Factory Workers.” Tao and Yang, Working Families in Shanghai. Lin, Factory Workers in Tangku, 55 and 71. The “greater” native place family and the local resident family in Lin’s study are not the same sample group, although there may be overlaps between the samples. Milam, A Study of Student Homes. Even this self-report survey constrained respondents’ choices: respondents could decide whom to include in their family, but they were still confined to several multiple-choice responses outlined in the questionnaire. Milam, A Study of Student Homes. Milam, A Study of Student Homes; Tao and Yang, Working Families in Shanghai, 23; and Gamble, How Chinese Families Live, 20. Milam’s respondents tended to be middle and higher class. Under “type of family,” Milam also asked about class through occupational group—“student, official, shopkeeper, farmer, or boatclass, etc.” Milam concluded that the majority of students came from the “merchant class” (336), with the second- and third-largest groups coming from the “student and teacher” (126) and “official class” (127). Milam, A Study of Student Homes. Lamson, “Population Studies.” Lamson, “Population Studies”; Gamble, How Chinese Families Live; and Tao and Yang, Working Families in Shanghai. Lamson, “Population Studies.” Margaret Sanger’s talk at Beijing University was covered widely in popular journals such as Dongfang zazhi (Eastern miscellany) and Funü zazhi (The ladies’ journal). Hiroko Sakamoto, “The Cult of ‘Love and Eugenics’ in May Fourth Movement Discourse,” trans. Rebecca Jennison, positions 12, no. 2 (2004).

284 2. Family in Ideology and Practice

87.

88.

89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94.

95.

96.

97.

According to these comparisons, the “modern” countries of northwest Europe and the United States were usually described as having families of between four and five people. See, for example, Chen, Dictionary of Social Problems. See Bettina Gransow, “The Social Sciences in China,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7, The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 507; and Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 180. Sun Benwen, Shehuixue yuanli [Principles of sociology] (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan, 1971) [Reprint of 1935 text]. Mai Huiting, Jiating gaizao wenti (Problems of family change) (Shanghai: Shanghai Commercial Press, 1935), reprinted in Zhongguo minzu xuehui minzu congshu (Folklore and Folk Literature Series of National Peking University and Chinese Association for Folklore) (Taibei: Dongfang wenhua shuju, 1973), vols. 82 and 83. Mai, Problems of Family Change. Mai, Problems of Family Change, 53– 67. Mai, Problems of Family Change, 78. Even after settling in the United States after the war, Lang never joined the ranks of social scientists, instead studying Chinese literature and eventually teaching Russian language at Swarthmore College. Olga Lang, Chinese Family and Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946), 16. Francis Hsu supported Lang’s assertions, claiming that recent field studies had found the average family size to be about five. In Francis Lang-Kwang Hsu, “The Myth of Chinese Family Size,” American Journal of Sociology 48, no. 5 (March 1943): 555– 62. Conducting fieldwork in the 1960s, Myron Cohen discovered, by contrast, that at least for the southern Taiwanese village of Yen-liao, large extended families were common regardless of socioeconomic status. Myron Cohen, House United, House Divided: The Chinese Family in Taiwan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). First, Lang noted that families in industrialized cities like Hong Kong and the treaty ports were more likely to be conjugal (81 percent, according to her count) than families in non-industrial provincial capitals (51  percent) or in villages (24  percent). According to Lang, in the cities, conjugal families were popular on both ends of the economic spectrum— with poor workers who could not afford to bring their parents to the city and with upper- class professionals, officials, and educators who had come into contact with Western-style learning and ideals favoring conjugal families. Lang noted that in Beiping, economic security led to joint family living for middle- class professionals in “traditionbound” careers, such as businessmen, landlords, and shop managers. Lang, Chinese Family, 142.

2. Family in Ideology and Practice 285

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104.

105.

106. 107.

108.

109. 110. 111.

112.

Lang, Chinese Family, especially chapter 12, “The Type and Size of the Family.” Myron Cohen notes that Lang introduced the terms “conjugal,” “stem,” and “joint” to Chinese family studies in Cohen, House United, House Divided, 61. Lang, Chinese Family, 14. Olga Lang and Ba Jin, Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth between the Two Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Studies, 1967), 2. Tianjin City Government, Tianjin-shi zhengfu zhiyuan zhuangkuang tongji [Statistics on the condition of Tianjin city government workers] (1931). Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao [Report on the registration of family conditions], j2– 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815, 5816, 5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946). Sources from the Tianjin Municipal Archives are hereafter referred to as TMA; they include the title and file number when available. I visited the Tianjin Municipal Archives on several trips between June 2005 and August 2011. I have listed the document information according to how it was listed when I consulted it. The surveys were most likely conducted in the spirit of what the historian Tong Lam has termed “a passion for facts,” in which the social fact became an instrument of government. Lam, A Passion for Facts. When hiring survey takers from the Shehui ju, H. D. Fong of Nankai University’s Economic Research Institute complained that he had to first train them in social scientific techniques. Chiang, Social Engineering; and H. D. Fong, Reminiscences of a Chinese Economist at 70 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1975). TMA, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao. The sample sizes were 1,707 for 1931 and 808 for 1946. The 1946 results were tabulated based on surviving copies of surveys in the Tianjin Municipal Archives. The sample size for 1946 may have been greater than what is available in surviving surveys. Tianjin City Government, Tianjin-shi zhengfu zhiyuan zhuangkuang tongji . and TMA, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao. Comparatively, in 1940, the average size of the American nuclear family was 3.15, and only about one-fourth of all families included adult relatives. United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States; 1940, (Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1944). U.S. Census, Sixteenth Census (1940). All names of private individuals appearing in the Tianjin Municipal Archives have been changed. TMA, Report on the registration of family conditions. The discrepancy between police numbers and the rest of government employees could also be due to how the surveys were administered. We will never know if different departments were given different verbal instructions in how to fill out the forms. Writing after World War II and in the midst of China’s civil war, the Chinese American anthropologist Rose Hum Lee noted that due to the weak Chinese

286 2. Family in Ideology and Practice

113. 114. 115.

116.

117.

118.

119.

120.

state, Chinese people relied on the family rather than the state to provide services such as local governance, business management, and relief provisions. Rose Hum Lee, “Research on the Chinese Family,” American Journal of Sociology 54, no. 6, (May 1949): 497– 504. Lee, “Research on the Chinese Family.” Tianjin tebie shi shehuiju (hereafter Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs), Annual Report (1929). Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs, Annual Report (1929). On night schools for workers (male and female), see also TMA, Minjiaoguan funü yinranban (The printing office of the people’s education), j113–107 (1939). The Shehui ju conducted surveys especially of workers as a “social problem.” They surveyed local industries and working conditions and wrote that “in a capitalist system” one could “profit the individual and raise capital while at the same time not ignoring the worker.” These surveys may not have been as “academic” as those conducted by professional researchers like H. D. Fong. For discussion of surveys in Tianjin, see Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs, Annual Report (1929), 268. The Shanghai Shehui ju also conducted social surveys on workers. A survey on worker families’ cost of living published in 1932, for example, was conducted in response to the high amount of labor unrest in the city in 1927 and 1928. Shanghai Bureau of Social Affairs, Shanghaishi gongren shenghuo fei zhishu minguo shiwunian zhi ershinian [The cost of living index numbers of laborers: Greater Shanghai, January 1926–December 1931] (Shanghai: City Government Bureau of Social Affairs, 1932). Most night schools were targeted to women. See TMA, Funü shizi ban, funü buxi ban [Female literacy, female cram school], j113–273 (1939); TMA, Guanyu funü bianzhi ban [Regarding female weaving/knitting classes], j113–329 (1939); TMA, Guanyu gezhong xuanchuan zhou [Regarding various propaganda], j113–389 (1941), 3–4; TMA, Minjiaoguan funü zhiye ban [People’s education, women’s job school], j113– 93 (1939–40). TMA, Funü jiujiyuan zaosong shijiu niandu linshi yusuan shu Tianjinshi shehuiju [Women’s relief organization report on 19-year budget, Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs], j25–2987 (1931). TMA, Funü jiuji yuan jisuanshu tianjinshi funü jiujiyuan [Women’s Tianjin City relief organization account book, Tianjin women’s relief organization], j54–3313 (1929). For an overview of Shehui ju activities, see Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs, Annual Report. On housing for working women, see TMA, Benyuan funü buji gongchang tiangai fangwu, Tianjinshi jiuji yuan [The women’s division of this bureau building factory housing, Tianjin relief organization], j131– 815 (1939). For night schools that taught classes to women ranging from basic literacy to mathematics and the technical arts, see TMA, j113–273, (1939); TMA, j113–329 (1939); TMA, j113–389 (1941), 3–4; TMA, j113– 93 (1939–40).

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121. 122.

287

TMA, Tianjin jiujiyuan guanyu benyuan funü suoyuan sheng zeye [Tianjin City relief organization—regarding women selecting careers], j131–1-742 (1937). See, for example, Tim Futing Liao, “Were Past Chinese Families Complex? Household Structures during the Tang Dynasty, 618– 907 AD,” Continuity and Change 16, no. 3 (December 2001): 331– 55.

3. PROPERTY, POWER, AND IDENTITY IN A COLONIAL- CAPITALIST CITY 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Bettine Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960– 1368), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Family and Property in Sung China: Yuan Ts’ai’s Precepts for Social Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Man Xu, Crossing the Gate: Everyday Lives of Women in Song, Fujian (960–1279) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). Kathryn Bernhardt, Women and Property in China: 960–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 123. Liu Haiyan, Kongjian yu shehui: Jindai Tianjin chengshi de yanbian [Space and society: contemporary Tianjin City’s changes] (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2003), 111. Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, 1911–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 107–13. Marie- Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). British Municipal Council (hereafter BMC) Minutes, 1935. Tani Barlow, “Colonialism’s Career in Postwar China Studies,” positions 1, no. 1 (1993): 224– 67; Gail Hershatter, “The Subaltern Talks Back: Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese History,” positions 1, no. 1 (1993): 103–30; Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939, first published 1916). S.  W.  A., “Review of Otto Hubner’s Geographisch-Statistische Tabellen Aller Lander der Erde. 42. Ausgabe fur das Jahr 1893,” Publications of the American Statistical Association 4, no. 25/26 (1894): 46–48.

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11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

Sun Yat-sen, “Lecture 2,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 2, ed. William Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 15–16. Mao Zedong, The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1954, first published 1939). Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth- Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15. Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 188. On architectural design and urban planning in the French colonies, see Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Maurizio Marinelli, “Making Concessions in Tianjin: Heterotopia and Italian Colonialism in Mainland China,” Urban History 36, no. 3 (December 2009): 399– 425; and Marinelli, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Colonial Italy Reflects on Tianjin (1901–1947),” in “Global Cities, Transtext(e)s-Transcultures,” special issue, Journal of Global Cultural Studies 3 (2007): 119– 50. The Japanese school was the largest with 400 students in 1923, followed by the British at half the size. Otto D. Rasmussen, Tientsin: An Illustrated Outline History (Tianjin: Tientsin Press, 1925). BMC Minutes, 1932. BMC Minutes, 1932. In his memoirs of his Tianjin childhood, Brian Power, who was born to an Irish father and Irish-French mother, recalls a local Jesuit brother instructing his mother that her sons should have a Catholic rather than British education, thereby resulting in his transfer from the British School to the French Jesuit-run Marist Brothers School (where instruction was in French and English). Power, The Ford of Heaven (New York: M. Kesend, 1984), 63. BMC Minutes, 1931. Even in the face of the most urgent threats, such as restoring order after the Boxer Uprising, there were stories of international fighting between soldiers. See various reports of soldiers fighting in TPG meeting minutes, Procés-verbaux des séances du Gouvernement Provisoire de Tientsin (Baguo lianjun lingshilu) The China Times, 1902 [reprint, Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, 2004]. The contrast between Japan’s educational policy in its Tianjin concession and in its Taiwanese and Korean colonies offers insight into the diversity of concession colonialism. In Tianjin, the Japanese, like the British, set up a Japanese school to educate Japanese children as subjects of the Japanese empire. In Taiwan and Korea, by contrast, they instituted a school system for local children as part of an increasingly authoritarian system to transform members of the colony into imperial subjects. See Patricia E. Tsurumi, “Colonial Education in Korea and Taiwan,”

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24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

289

in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 275–311; and Leo Ching, “Between Assimilation and Imperialization: From Colonial Projects to Imperial Subjects,” chap. 3 in Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 89–132. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity; and Rasmussen, Tientsin. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). William G. Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), especially F. W. Mote, “The Transformation of Nanking, 1350–1400,” 101–54. Italian Concession Municipal Government, “Notice for Land Auction” (1908); Rasmussen, Tientsin; and Marinelli, “Making Concessions in Tianjin.” Tianjinshi fangdichan guanliju (Tianjin Gazetteer Office), Tianjin fangdichan zhi [Tianjin housing and real estate Gazetteer] (Tianjin: Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1999). Herbert Hoover, a resident of Tianjin in the early 1900s, was also a member of the founding board. See Liu Haiyan, Tianjin zujie shehui yanjiu [A study of Tianjin’s concession society] (Tianjin: People’s Press, 1994), 50; and Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 70. Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 93. Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 735, 752. Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 739. Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 739. Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 735. A prominent Manchu, Rong Yuan was the minister of domestic affairs under the Qing and father to Gobulo Wan Rong, wife of Emperor Puyi. Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 733. Bergère, Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, esp. 178, 182, 185. Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Jonathan Ocko, “The Missing Metaphor: Applying Western Legal Scholarship to the Study of Contract and Property in Early Modern China,” in Contract and Property in Early Modern China, ed. Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan  K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004): 178–205. According to Neo- Confucian ideals of social order, scholars topped the social hierarchy, followed by farmers, artisans, and merchants. In practice, however, as Man Bun Kwan argues, by the late Qing, salt merchants in Tianjin had begun to carve out an alternative social space for themselves, providing public resources and services that the Qing government was increasingly unable to provide. Man Bun Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin: State-Making and Civil Society in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). Liu Haiyan, Kongjian yu shehui.

290

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

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Liu Haiyan, Kongjian yu shehui, 276. By the 1920s, Chinese guidebooks were calling the former market district in the northeast unsanitary (bu weisheng). Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, 204. In a survey of Tianjin civil servants taken in 1946, respondents were required to report their address. They listed addresses throughout the city. Some even listed an address in the “former xxx concession.” In Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao [Report on the registration of family conditions], j2– 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815, 5816, 5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946). While most compradors lived in the foreign concessions, Xu Pu’an, a native of Tianjin, chose to live in a courtyard house in the old Chinese city. For more on Xu Pu’an’s house, see chapter 4. Italian Concession Municipal Government, Local Land Regulations. In addition to Liang Qichao, Italian concession residents included warlords Chen Guangyuan and Tang Yulin; government officials Cao Kun, Zhang Tinge, Cheng Ke, Zhou Longguang, Qi Yaoshan, and Bao Guiqin; playwright Cao Yu; and calligrapher Hua Shiku. Marinelli, “Making Concessions in Tianjin,” 413–14. BMC Report, 1920. The Japanese concession included distinct areas for commercial and public service building, and neighborhoods tended to be inhabited by residents with a shared background in national origin and income level. This urban development, however, does not seem to have been deliberately zoned. Moreover, the concession was much more densely populated than its European counterparts and included such unsavory elements as industrial factories, gambling parlors, opium dens, and brothels. Wan Lujian, Jindai Tianjin Riben qiaomin yanjiu [A study of Japanese nationals in modern Tianjin] (Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Press, 2010), 109, 115–17. On the mixing of residences and businesses in Shanghai alleyway or lilong neighborhoods, see Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Gustav Schwenning, “An Attack on Shanghai Slums,” Social Forces 6, no. 1 (1927): 125–31. BMC Report, 1921. BMC Building and Sanitary By-laws, 1936. Italian Concession Municipal Government, Local Land Regulations and General Rules, 1908. Madeleine Zelin, “A Critique of Property in Prewar China,” in Zelin, Ocko, and Gardella, Contract and Property, 17–36. Zelin, “A Critique of Property in Prewar China.” Ocko, “The Missing Metaphor.” O. F. Wisner, “The Experiment in Constitutional Government in China,” North American Review 189, no. 642 (1909): 731–39; Chester Lloyd Jones, “Republican

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56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

291

Government in China,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 39 (January 1912): 26–38. Wisner, “The Experiment in Constitutional Government.” Most likely due to the scarcity of archival materials from the Tianjin local government during the early years of the Republic, there has been very little research done on how the local government structure changed from Yuan Shikai’s late Qing government to the early Republic system under Yuan, and then to the Nanjing Decade system in the late 1920s and 1930s. Reports on national constitutional reform suggest that there were changes in voter rolls in Tianjin during the election of the National People’s Congress. According to an American observer at the time, Tianjin had a turnout of 60,000 voters, including members of labor unions and people who were not literate, as well as two-thirds who were classified as “merchants and shop-keepers.” A “special order” limited this pool to directors and heads of firms, which reduced the electorate to 30,000; only 17,267 votes were cast in the end. John  A. Fairlie, “Constitutional Developments in China,” American Political Science Review 25, no. 4 (November 1931): 1016–22. Wan Lujian, Jindai Tianjin Riben qiaomin yanjiu. The French concession did not begin to discuss allowing Chinese property owners to vote until 1928, at which time they looked to the British Municipal Council as an example. Memo, Box 6 (1928), Archives diplomatiques du France (hereafter ADF), Nantes, France. BMC, Local Land Regulations and General Regulations, Tianjin, 1900. Meeting of Landrenters and Ratepayers of the British Concession Tientsin, February 29, 1916. BMC Report, Tianjin, 1918. BMC Report, 1912. BMC Report, 1922, 191. BMC Report, 1922, 191. BMC Report, 1935. BMC Minutes from the Extraordinary General Meeting of Electors, 1927. BMC Minutes, 1927. BMC Minutes, 1927. BMC Minutes of the Eighteenth Annual General Meeting, 1936. Margaret Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law, and Society in Early TwentiethCentury China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). Bray, Technology and Gender. Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty, 15–16. Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty; and Kathryn Bernhardt, “Women and the Law: Divorce in the Republican Period” in Civil Law in Qing and Republican China, ed. Kathryn Bernhardt, Philip C. Huang, and Mark A. Allee (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994): 187–214.

292

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

96.

97.

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Bernhardt, Women and Property, 102– 03. Bernhardt, Women and Property. Bernhardt, Women and Property. Bernhardt, Women and Property. Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty, 5. TMA, Tianjin Municipal Government, Memo, August 1929. TMA, tax records for: Ms. Wang C, 56– 6-4531 (1935); TMA, Tax records for Ms. Zhang, 56– 9-11506 (1941); and TMA, tax records for Ms. Li, 56–1624822 (1931). TMA, Ms. Wang; and TMA, tax records for Ms. Zhu, 56– 6-4531 (1935). Bernhardt, Women and Property; and Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty. ADF, Order Bureau of Foreign Affairs for the Province of Chihli, November  25, 1927. ADF, Letter from Tientsin Trust Company on behalf of Client, November  4, 1938. ADF. Letter from Tientsin Land Investment Company, August 26, 1937. The French diplomatic archives provide insights onto disputes over property located in the Concession. Archival materials related to private property in Tianjin before 1949 are currently not available to researchers at the Tianjin Municipal Archives. ADF, letter from Richard  T. Evans Attorney at Law, March  1930. All Chinese names of non-public figures listed in ADF files have been changed. Myron Cohen, “Writs of Passage in Late Imperial China: The Documentation of Practical Understandings in Minong, Taiwan,” in Zelin, Ocko, and Gardella, Contract and Property, 37– 93. Elite families in late imperial China often named their houses. The Peabody Essex Museum’s Ming-era house Yinyutang is one example. The family also may have been trying to avoid paying transfer taxes. Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty. Unfortunately, we do not know if and how the local Chinese court ruled on this case since the Tianjin Municipal Archives has not opened any legal records concerning property. ADF, Henry K. Chang letter, May 1930. “Obituary: Mrs. Henry Chang, Wife of Ex-Diplomat,” New York Times, April 20, 1957; and Werner Bamberger, “Henry  K. Chang, 92: Chinese Nationalist Held Envoy Posts,” New York Times, February 23, 1977. Contemporaneous observers of real estate in Tianjin noted that property, and especially property belonging to Chinese government officials and warlords, was often registered in the name of a dummy corporation or an individual other than the owner. See for example, Charles Dailey, “The Crime of the Tianjin Concessions,” Chinese Students’ Monthly (March 1924): 49– 56 [reprint]. Who’s Who in China: Biographies of Chinese Leaders (Ministry of Interior, National Government of China: 1932).

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98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

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Henry K. Chang, “China: A New Family Portrait,” The Rotarian (April 1931): 9–11, 44. Chang, “China: A New Family Portrait,” 9, 44. Chang, “China: A New Family Portrait.” Who’s Who in China; and “Young Chang Formerly of Washington Enters U. of P. Law Department,” Washington Times, October 23, 1906. “Chang Yin Tang, Chinese Minister, Here to Replace the Smiling Wu,” San Francisco Call, December 11, 1909. “Chang to Replace Wu”; and Edward B. Clark, “Washington’s Americanized Foreign Colony,” Perrysburg Journal, October  13, 1911. Clark’s article was widely syndicated. Reports from the Daily Bee, October  2, 1910; and from Tribune, November  18, 1910. “Charming Young Chinese Girl to Christen Cruiser: Alice Chang, Daughter of Diplomat Will Act Sponsor for ‘Feihung,’ ” Washington Times, May 4, 1912. “Charming Young Chinese Girl to Christen Cruiser.” “Diplomatic Family Going Home: Radical Sartorial Change in Changs,” San Francisco Call, June 23, 1913. See Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, on how water became the cornerstone of the BMC’s hygienic modernity. See BMC Reports. BMC Report, 1932. BMC Report, 1935. According to Mr. Tsao, it cost $3 more per 10,000 gallons. Tsao also complained about the salty taste. BMC Minutes, 1936. BMC Minutes, 1937. John Tosh argues that the home was a central site of masculine identity in Victorian England. Not only was the home the most visible badge of a man’s social position (moving house meant moving up or down the social ladder, almost literally so), but the home was viewed as refuge from the negativity of the work world that made men whole again. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the MiddleClass Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

4. CHOOSING A HOUSE 1. 2. 3. 4.

For a summary of Tianjin’s demographics and growth, see chapter 3. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 92– 93. Li Jie, Yingzao fashi (Beijing: Zhongguo shu dian, 1989, originally published 1103). Klaas Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China: A Study of the Fifteenth- Century Carpenter’s Manual Lu Ban jing (Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993),

294

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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27; Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Feng Jiren, Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012). For example, when building a grade-one building, such as a large hall, one fen equaled .6 Song dynasty inches (1.97 cm), while a fen in a grade-one structure like a garden pavilion was half the size at 0.3 Song inches (0.99 cm). Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 135. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 28. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 145. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 62, 74. Ronald  G. Knapp, China’s Vernacular Architecture: House, Form and Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989), 35. Late imperial China witnessed a popularization of geomantic technology in common dwellings. The earliest geomantic building practices were solely concerned with choosing a proper site for a structure. In the Song dynasty, a new school of geomancy emerged that was concerned with determining and correcting favorable and unfavorable locations. For urban houses especially, this meant that if households could not choose the most auspicious location on which to construct their dwelling, they could build or adjust their houses accordingly. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 55. Ruitenbeek also defines geomancy as an aesthetic in Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 55. See also Ronald G. Knapp, China’s Traditional Rural Architecture: A Cultural Geography of the Common House (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986), 1. Facing south was geomantically auspicious, but also practical, since southern exposure offered the most heat and light. Lothar Ledderose describes how Chinese practices of “modularity” apply not only to architecture but also to calligraphy, bronze casting, manufacturing, art, and even cooking, in Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things. Most dwellings include an odd number of jian— one, three, or five—arranged crosswise. Knapp, China’s Vernacular Architecture, 34. The size of courtyards varied regionally. Courtyards in northern cities like Tianjin or Beijing tended to be larger than their southern counterparts to allow for maximum natural light during cold winters. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 51. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 86.

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23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

295

Before the Song, sumptuary laws institutionalized distinctions in building; only elite homes were built on a north-south axis with the ancestor tablets at the center of the home. After the Song, all homes were to be built according to these shared sociopolitical architectural principles. Late imperial sumptuary laws, from the Song onward, reinforced this basic unity of form by regulating only the extent to which households could expand or adorn their houses and not whether they could be built consistent with auspicious practices. Scholars have also noted that a change in sumptuary laws facilitated the unification in building practices and social uses of domestic space. Fourteenth-century Ming sumptuary laws, for example, stated that “common people” could not build structures larger than three bays ( jian). Bray notes that a shift in sumptuary laws beginning in the Song allowed for a standardization of the “basic social and cultural structure of the Chinese house . . . at all levels of society,” in Bray, Technology and Gender, 90. Ronald  G. Knapp has also noted that Ming and Qing sumptuary laws, though “formulated to preserve Confucian status distinctions, also contributed to the standardization, modularization, and stylization of Chinese houses,” in Knapp, China’s Old Dwellings (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 23. According to Bray, someone living in a one-room house would have ritual and social spaces similar to the palace. Without separate rooms, they would simply mark these spaces with furniture or a curtain. Bray, Technology and Gender, 74. Knapp, China’s Vernacular Architecture, 51– 53. Xin Tianjin huabao 2, no. 22 (1940): 1. Shen Yiyun (Mme. Huang Fu), Reminiscences of Huang Shen I- yun (Chinese Oral History Project Collection of Reminiscences, Columbia University, 1962). The financials cited in this chapter should be understood within the context of the individual source. Currency in Republican-era China was very unstable and complicated. I include amounts quoted in my various sources even if equivancies and currency types (taels to dollars, for instance) are not clearly specified to document that people were discussing what they paid for goods and services. National currency was not unified until 1935. See Brent Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times: Money, Banks, and State- Society Relations in Republican Tianjin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). According to Shen, the Italian Concession forbade gambling in private homes and would often levy fines on private mahjong parties. In Shen, Reminiscences. Ironically, the Italian Concession had also constructed a multistory entertainment club in art deco style that hosted a casino and a jai alai court. The proceeds of these “public” gambling revenues are believed to have funded Italian colonial ventures in Ethiopia. Shen, Reminiscences. Shen, Reminiscences. Shen, Reminiscences. Shen, Reminiscences.

296

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34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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Shen recalls Qiu Jin visiting the family compound. Qiu Jin was a feminist educator, activist, and anti- Qing revolutionary who was publicly executed after a failed assassination attempt on a Qing official. Shen, Reminiscences. Marie- Claire Bergère asserts that prominent families of the new entrepreneurial class that rose after World War I reinforced their social standing and social ties through arranged marriages between families in Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The Song sisters, being daughters of a prominent banker and businessman, provide a good example of forging family social ties through marriage. The eldest married a wealthy banker, the second married Sun Yat-sen, and the youngest married Chiang Kai-shek. See chapter 2 for more on Tao Menghe. Shen, Reminiscences. John Benjamin Powell, Who’s Who in China; Containing the Pictures and Biographies of China’s Best Known Political, Financial, Business and Professional Men (Shanghai: China Weekly Review, 1925), 379– 81. Shen, Reminiscences; and Powell, Who’s Who in China, 379– 81. Hu Shi’s oral history is also housed in the same oral history collection at Columbia, and it also was published. Shen’s memoirs were never published. Shen, Reminiscences. Shen, Reminiscences. While Shen may not have dwelled on the details of her social and political status, her membership in an elite political and social group was certainly important, enabling her memoirs to be collected and stored at Columbia University. Tianjin Municipal Archives (TMA), Hebei Postal Administration Office, Guanyu caiwu hui bokuan xiang piao kuan yishi jiaju gongju shebei de laiwang hanjian [Correspondence regarding finances, remittances, furniture, and equipment], w2–295 (1924). See note 27 above regarding complexities in document Republican-era currencies per Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times. While the post office agreed to reimburse a foreign clerk who had transferred to Tianjin for first-class passage for himself and family, for example, it would only reimburse his Chinese maid’s first- class transport at the rate of third class. TMA, w2–295 (1924). The Mandarin transliteration of his name is Song Shuo. TMA, w2–295 (1924). TMA, w2–295 (1924). TMA, w2–295 (1924). TMA, w2–295 (1924). TMA, w2–295 (1924). TMA, Haiho Conservancy, Youguan dichan gouzhi jiaju gouzhi, yiji hedao wenti de shiwu lianxi de laiwang wenjian [Documents related to property and furniture purchasing as well as miscellaneous problems related to the riverway], w3– 66 (1926).

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52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

297

Lu Hanchao argues that in the nineteenth century, Shanghai produced the first modern real estate market in China with mass-produced alleyway homes (lilong fangzi). According to Lu, cities in imperial China had a small rental market for temporary sojourners, but most housing was built for personal use and not for profit. Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 140. The rise of professional architects in urban China signaled a shift in social groups involved in building. In late imperial China, artisan- carpenters built houses for literati and merchants. Although not as socially powerful as their employers, carpenters possessed building knowledge that could be leveraged into improving their position. In twentieth-century urban China, architects rarely hailed from the carpentry or artisan social groups but instead came from the same elite groups that had commissioned carpenter-built housing in imperial China. Some artisan-carpenters did rise to a position of social prominence equal to that of the new professional architects. Yao Chengzu (1866–1939), for example, hailed from a family of Suzhou artisan-carpenters and later headed Suzhou’s Lu Ban guild. Yao also taught at a technical college and wrote a technical textbook on building in the 1920s. While successful in his own right, Yao would not have been a member of the same kind of professional architect associations organized by foreign-trained architectural professional elites. See Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 29. Lu Yanzhi, born in Tianjin, studied at Cornell University in the 1910s; Liang Sicheng and Chen Zhi (also known as Benjamin Chen) both studied with Paul Cret at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920s. Tianjinshi fangdichan guanliju [Tianjin Gazetteer Office], Tianjin fangdichan zhi [Tianjin housing and real estate Gazetteer] (Tianjin: Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1999), 753. In Tianjin, it remains unclear whether some of these builders had been trained as artisan- carpenters, whether they were enterprising men who parlayed money and/or language skills into a new profession, or both. While the Tianjin Real Estate Gazetteer notes the number of builders, there is no mention of carpenters. It is unclear, for example, whether Tianjin carpenters had a guild. In imperial China, urban carpenters were far more likely to organize into guilds than their rural counterparts. Even as late as the Republican era, carpenters continued to organize into a Lu Ban guild in Suzhou. In the twentieth century, however, Tianjin notoriously lacked guilds and unions. In her exhaustive study of workers in Tianjin, Gail Hershatter notes that guild formation in Tianjin was at best spotty. Though she examines some of the more prominent guilds in the city, she makes no mention of a carpenters’ guild. Since building was such big business in the city at the time of her study, if there had been a guild it likely would have been prominent enough to catch her attention. Additionally, the Tianjin Real Estate Gazetteer, in its more than 1,000-page history of building in Tianjin, does not

298

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58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63.

64.

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mention a carpenters’ guild. Further research is warranted to determine if there were carpenters’ guilds in imperial and Republican- era Tianjin. See Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 29; Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); and Tianjin fangdichan zhi. The journal also suggests that builders were literate, which would have set them apart from earlier carpenters, who probably were not literate. Ruitenbeek suggests that many carpenters could not read the Lu Ban Jing but carried it around as a talisman. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China. Knapp, China’s Vernacular Architecture, 36. On home economics education, see Helen  M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011). Jiaoyubu Shehui jiaoyusi [Department of education, social education], Jiating jiaocai [Home teaching materials] (Chongqing: National Sichuan Professional School, 1940). See Kuaile jiating (Tianjin, 1923) on menu planning and advice on directing domestic labor in the kitchen. See chapter 2 for examples of Tianjin civil servants who lived in foreign concessions with their extended families. Yang Juanshi, Jianzhuxue ABC [The ABC’s of architecture] (Shanghai: ABC Congshu, 1930). Other pre-1949 books on architecture and engineering in the Tianjin Library include: Ding, Fangnei diandeng zhuangzhi gaiyao [An outline of electric and interior design for the home] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936); Fangwu gongcheng [The engineering of housing] (Beiping: Huatongzhai, 1919); Shen Zhijian, Shijie zhuming da gongcheng [World famous engineering] (Shanghai: Yanxingshe, 1941); Tumu gongyi [Industrial arts of civil engineering] (Beijing: Kexue huabao, Zhongguo kexue tushu yiqi gongsi, 1949); and Wang Huzhen and Gu Shiji, eds., Mai yong tushu gongxue [Practical civil engineering] (Shanghai: Zhongguo tushu yiqi gongsi,1949). Fangwu gongcheng. In his memoirs, Nick Cherniavsky recalled how his Russian émigré family arranged its four-room, British-architect- designed, company house for the Shanghai Waterworks Company to fit its functional needs. Since the ground floor only had two rooms, one of which was occupied by the kitchen, his family used the second ground-floor room as a combined dining/living room, while other families chose to dine in the kitchen. Coming from Russia, the Cherniavskys would have been familiar with European domestic spaces and would have known how to rearrange their space accordingly. A Chinese family may or may not have arranged its house differently. Nick Cherniavsky, Reminiscences of Nick Cherniavsky (oral history, 1973; accessed at Columbia University).

5. Designing House and Home 299

5. DESIGNING HOUSE AND HOME 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Auslander, Taste and Power, 2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). For an understanding of how shifting class relations led to class anxieties during this period, see the period novel by Chang Hen-Shui, Shanghai Express: A Thirties Novel, trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997). Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7– 8. Raymond F. Betts argues that assimilation, or the idea that people in the colonies could become “French” through the civilizing process, governed nineteenthcentury French colonial policy, whereas France in the twentieth century increasingly turned toward a colonial policy of association, or the idea that colonial subjects were partners with, rather than citizens of, the metropole. Conversely, Gwendolyn Wright argues that the policies and practices of the two schools were much more closely intertwined. Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Wright, The Politics of Design, 74. Wright, The Politics of Design. Wright, The Politics of Design. Jeffrey  W. Cody, Building in China: Henry  K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture,” 1914–1935 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001); Jeffrey W. Cody, Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Cody, Building in China. Rowe and Seng, Architectural Encounters. Klaas Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China: A Study of the Fifteenth- Century Carpenter’s Manual Lu Ban jing (Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993), 144. Liang Sicheng, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture: A Study of the Development of Its Structural System and the Evolution of Its Types, ed. Wilma Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984), xvi. Many of Liang’s studies of traditional Chinese architecture were published posthumously, including a Chinese-language study of the Yingzao fazhi and an English-language

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

illustrated history of Chinese architecture. Liang Sicheng, Yingzao fashi zhushi (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, Xinhua shudian, 1983). Li Shiqiao, “Writing a Modern Chinese Architectural History: Liang Sicheng and Liang Qichao,” Journal of Architectural Education 56, no. 1 (2002): 35–45. Jianzhu yuekan 2, no. 6 (June 1934). Nankai faculty housing is described in Eleanor McCallie Cooper and William Liu, Grace: An American Woman in China, 1934–1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2003). In 1934, Shanghai’s New China Bank (Xinhua yinhang) proposed a housing development named “New China Village (Xinhua yicun),” located in the Guomindang government’s new Shanghai development. Zhongguo jianzhu [Chinese architect] (February 1934), 10. According to Gwendolyn Wright, the French launched their plan to redesign Madagascar’s capital city in 1918 with every street and district laid out carefully. The plan even proposed the type of housing that should be built— single family rather than apartments. In 1927, the colonial administration established the Bureau of Architecture and Urbanism, and two years later they added the Bureau of Economic Housing. See Wright, The Politics of Design, 273– 88. Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Kristin  L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). See for example Allison Blunt, “Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, no. 4 (1999): 421–40; and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995). When I last visited, the home was a restaurant where staff claimed that the building is “over one hundred years old.” However, building materials, such as decorative concrete that was not used in Tianjin until the 1920s, suggest that the house could not possibly have been built that early. While there is no official record of who owned the house, the restaurant claims that it was at one time home to the fourth concubine of warlord who became Beiyang president Cao Kun. According to the historian Liu Haiyan of the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, the home was most likely built by a merchant or businessman. It is unlikely that a warlord would have let a concubine live in the Chinese section of the city during the 1920s, a period of violent unrest and feuding between warlords. In fact, during this time, many warlords purchased or built homes for their families and concubines in the concessions, where foreign governments offered security. Cao Kun himself lived in the Italian concession. See also Elizabeth LaCouture, “Tianjin’s Western- Style Chinese Villa,” China Heritage Quarterly, no. 21 (March 2010). Most urban courtyard houses in Beijing and Tianjin tended to be built from gray bricks, whereas even as late as the 1930s, less than a quarter of rural dwellings had brick walls. Ronald G. Knapp, China’s Traditional Rural Architecture: A Cultural

5. Designing House and Home 301

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

Geography of the Common House (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986), 69. Makers of Chinese gray bricks reduced oxidation in the final stages of brickmaking by adding water. The finest bricklaying technique first ground the individual bricks to fit a joint and then applied mortar from the inside, making the seams almost invisible from the outside of the wall. Ivan Chi- ching Ho, The Study of the Chinese (Grey) Brickwork in the Vernacular Buildings in Hong Kong (MA thesis, University of Hong Kong, 2002). Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Seaports of the Far East, Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures, & Resources (London: Macmillan, 1907), 156. One foreign-owned factory, for example, employed 120 workers. Seaports of the Far East, 156. Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), Muqi jiaju paimaihang gonghuigongyuan dengjibiao [Registry of wooden utensils and furniture auction houses], j128–1399 (1917); TMA, Muqi jiaju ye tongyegonghui shanghao diaocha biao [Registry of wooden utensil and furniture companies], j129–364 (1942). In 1940, for example, the Tianjin Customs House sent a memo to the central office requesting permission to reupholster a couch purchased in 1915. Tianjin haiguan (Tianjin Customs House), TMA (1940). Sims claimed to own the only wood- drying kilns in the area to ensure that carefully selected timbers would shrink up to 12 percent before being built into furniture, and since Tianjin and many of China’s coastal cities could be quite humid, Sims coated their furniture in a special moisture-resistant varnish that they believed to be “an exclusive feature” of their products. For upholstery, Sims claimed to use English webbing, coils, and horsehair as well as coir fibers from coconuts and down feathers from chickens. TMA, Sims and Co. memo to Hai River Conservancy Commission, dated July 1928 in Haiho Conservancy, Youguan dichan gouzhi jiaju gouzhi, yiji hedao wenti de shiwu lianxi de laiwang wenjian [Documents related to property and furniture purchasing as well as miscellaneous problems related to the riverway], w3– 66 (1926–1928). TMA, Haiho Conservancy, W3– 66 (1928). TMA, Haiho Conservancy, W3– 66 (1928); TMA, Tianjin haiguan [Tianjin Customs House], Gongyong jiaju [Common-use furniture], W0001– 003581 (1923) and (1940); TMA, Hebei Postal Administration Office, Guanyu caiwu hui bokuan xiang piao kuan yishi jiaju gongju shebei de laiwang hanjian [Correspondence regarding finances, remittances, furniture, and equipment], w2–295 (1924); and Guanyu jiaju shebei gongju de laiwang hanjian [Concerning correspondence dealing with furnishings and equipment], w2–358 (1926). TMA, Sims and Co. memo to Hai River Conservancy Commission, July 2, 1928, W3– 66 (1928). Frank Dikötter argues that by the 1920s, increased production of rattan furniture by prison labor made these objects highly affordable, thereby “democratizing the

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35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

easy chair.” Dikötter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 170. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). Helen  M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011). See for example, Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth- Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); and Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). On Tianjin night schools for workers (male and female), see Tianjin tebie shi shehuiju [Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs], Annual Report (1929); and TMA, Minjiaoguan funü yinranban [The printing office of the people’s education], j113–107 (1939). While the Tianjin Social Bureau ran several schools, as late as the 1940s, many workers signed their company savings passbooks with a thumbprint, suggesting they were illiterate. Savings passbooks for British Tobacco, collection of author. Scholars of Japanese women’s magazines have noted that factory girls in Japan read women’s magazines, sharing issues with each other. See for example, Sarah Frederick, Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). In 1927 a skilled carpenter in Beijing earned 75 cents per day, an unskilled carpenter 45 cents. Sidney D. Gamble, “Peiping Family Budgets,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 152 (November 1930): 81–88. Kuaile jiating [Happy home; Tianjin], issue 1 (January 1, 1923). In his history of the home, Witold Rybczynski notes that English houses continued to be built and decorated in the Georgian style of the eighteenth century well into the twentieth century, as it epitomized the height of comfort in English design. In fact, the arrangement of the library pictured in Kuaile jiating sounds nearly identical to Rybczynski’s description of a typical Georgian-style library, with “easy chairs . . . set in front of the fireplace to create a cozy corner” and “cut flowers and potted plants” as part of the decor. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 1987), 104, 118. Couplets or duilian are two complementary poetic or auspicious phrases written vertically in Chinese characters on two long and narrow sheets of paper. They are always displayed together. They can be for temporary display, like the couplets written on red paper and displayed on either side of a household’s door at Chinese New Year, or they may be more permanent, written on high quality paper or silk and mounted on hanging scrolls like the couplet in the picture. See, for example Ling long magazine, published in Shanghai (1931–1937). By the 1930s, Shanghai boasted the tallest building in Asia, the 275-foot, 22-story Park Hotel, whose art deco façade alluded to skyscrapers in New York. By

6. Living at Home 303

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

comparison, the Empire State Building, which was constructed around the same time, was 1,050 feet tall (102 stories), and remained the tallest building in the world until 1972. The Park Hotel was financed by Chinese banks and designed by Ladislav Hudec (1893–1958), a stateless Hungarian expatriate residing in Shanghai. On Shanghai nightlife and music, see Andrew Field, Shanghai’s Dancing Worlds: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919–1954 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010); and Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). According to Tianjin local historian Liu Haiyan, Tianjin residents, unlike their counterparts in Shanghai, gave addresses beginning with the concession name first. Conversation with Liu Haiyan, October 2006. On the Tianjin civil-servant family background surveys, some Tianjin civil servants listed their address as the “old British” or “old Italian” concessions. TMA, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao [Report on the registration of family conditions], j2– 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815, 5816, 5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946). Nathaniel Peffer, China: The Collapse of a Civilization (New York: John Day, 1930), 123. Peffer, China: The Collapse of a Civilization, 123. Dikötter, Exotic Commodities, 54, 200, 219. Carl Crow, 400 Million Customers (Soul Care Publishing, 2008 [1937]). Elizabeth LaCouture, “Inventing the ‘Foreignized’ Chinese Carpet in TreatyPort Tianjin, China,” Journal of Design History 30, no. 3 (2017): 300–314. According to a report on Tianjin rug workshops in the Chinese Economic Journal, the limited number of rugs that were purchased locally found their way into “government offices, large business establishments and wealthy families.” While the market was mostly foreign, Tianjin’s foreign manufacturer Elbrook did advertise to a Chinese consumer in the Shanghai-based housing trade journal The Builder. “Tientsin Rug Workshops,” Chinese Economic Journal 4 (1929): 404–10.

6. LIVING AT HOME 1. 2. 3. 4.

Elizabeth LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity in Chinese History and Historiography,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (October 2019): 1278– 89. Sarah Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 38. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 102–3. Berlant refers to Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation

304

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

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of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989 [1969]). Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 35. Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings. Zhang Ailing, Tan nüren [Talking about women] (first published in 1944). Régine Thiriez, “Photography and Portraiture in Nineteenth- Century China,” East Asian History 17/18 (1999): 77–102; and Régine Thiriez, Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor’s European Palaces (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998). For a detailed description of technical innovations in the Chinese printing industry, see Christopher Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). On painting, see Jonathan Hay, “Painting and the Built Environment in LateNineteenth- Century Shanghai,” in Chinese Art Modern Expressions, ed. Maxwell  K. Hearn and Judith  G. Smith (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001); and Jonathan Hay, “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth- Century Shanghai,” in Art at the Close of China’s Empire, ed. Ju-hsi Chou (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1998), 134– 88. On literature, see Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On cinema, see Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). The list also included 13 Shanghai magazines, 4 Beiping, 2 Hong Kong, and one each for Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Zhengzhou. Ling long, issue 100 (1933), 964. Jiating zhoukan, issue 1 (1931). The Tianjin Municipal Library has only eighteen issues of Kuaile jiating. I have not been able to locate additional libraries with this periodical in their collection. Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), Funü xin duhui baoshe cheng wei gaifa yuekan [Woman World magazine application to change to monthly], j1–747 (1941). On the history of the growth of print technology in Shanghai, see Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai. On the impact of distribution, see David Strand, “ ‘A High Place Is No Better than a Low Place’: The City in the Making of Modern China,” in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-Hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Strand describes a 1924 incident in which girls in

6. Living at Home 305

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

Baoding city in Hebei Province rebelled against their male headmaster after reading in the feminist Tianjin journal Funü ribao [Women’s daily] about debates over whether male headmasters should lead girls’ schools. The magazine, in turn, covered the protests in Baoding, which led female students in Tianjin to protest in sympathy. Jiating shinian jinian kan [A commemorative issue for the 10th  anniversary of publication of Happy Home] (Shanghai, 1946), 1. For an outline of Shanghai’s Happy Home, see Maeyama Kanako, “Chûgoku no josei muke teiki kankôbutsu ni tsuite— sono naiyô to tokuchô” [Chinese periodicals for women from 1898 to 1949: Their contents and characteristics], reprinted in Surugadai University Studies, no. 10 (1995): 115–45. Columbia University subscribed to Ling long magazine and now maintains the most complete digitized collection of the magazine. See Ling long magazine, written content by Elizabeth LaCouture (Columbia University Libraries), https:// exhibitions .library.columbia .edu/exhibits/show/ linglong, accessed June  19, 2020. Women’s magazines in Japanese cities and in colonial Korea, by contrast, included factory girls in their audience. For Japan, see Sarah Frederick, Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006); for Korea, see Theodore Jun Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). See chapter 7 for more on class and readership. Men edited Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating and Shanghai’s Happy Home. The editor-inchief of Ling long was also a man. Writers included both men and women. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 85. In addition to local Chinese schools for girls such as the Beiyang Girls’ School, foreign churches offered both single-sex and coeducational options (the St.  Joseph’s Convent, for example), and in 1927, the British Municipal Council opened a coeducational school for Chinese children to complement the councilrun school for foreigners. The Chinese school remains one of the most competitive high schools in Tianjin today, second to Nankai Middle School, known for famous graduates such as Zhou Enlai. Examples from the Tianjin Municipal Library include Jiating changshi huibian [A compilation of household common knowledge], vols. 1– 8 (Shanghai: Wenming shuju, 1918); Jiating changshi huida [Common knowledge questions and answers to life at home] (Shanghai: Changchun shudian, 1930); Hangkong changshi [Airplane common knowledge] (Shanghai: Beixin shudian, 1934); and Diande changshi [Electricity common knowledge] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936). “Mosquito press” was the English term used to refer to periodicals known in Chinese as xiaobao, literally “small papers.” These were low-brow, less expensive, sometimes tabloid papers. Examples of two “mosquito” journals that dealt with

306

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30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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changshi are Da changshi [Important common knowledge] and Shanghai changshi [Shanghai common knowledge], both published in 1928. Kuaile jiating, issue 1.7 (1923); “Jiating xiao changshi” [Minor common knowledge about home and family], Dagong bao, L’impartial (August 23, 1928). Kuaile jiating, issues 1.4, 1.5, and 1.7 (1923). Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Kuaile jiating, issue 1.12 (1923). The 1930s Shanghai women’s magazine Ling long used the term shafa. A tangyi, according to a magazine photograph, was an outdoor lounge chair. Ling long, issue 70 (1932): 938. Sarah Handler, Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). The Lu Ban jing carpenters’ manual included instructions on building furniture in addition to houses. Klaas Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China: A Study of the Fifteenth- Century Carpenter’s Manual Lu Ban jing, ed. E. Zurcher (Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993). Sarah Handler argues that high, square tables joined chairs, leading to people taking meals together and eating from a common bowl with chopsticks, rather than from individual trays. The move from mat to chair also changed architectural space and interior decoration. Chairs raised the level of vision, bringing windows and ceilings up along with it. Decorations followed, with high, long tables placed against walls to display ancestor offerings, plants, a clock, or other luxury items, and on the walls behind these tables, a hanging scroll or Chinese character couplet was often hung at or above the eye level of someone seated on a chair. Handler, Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture. For a comparative look at how changes in furniture transformed social relations in France, see Mimi Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in EighteenthCentury France,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 415–45. Also see Jordan Sand, “Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia.” positions 21, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 95–132. Kuaile jiating, issue 1.3 (1923): 33. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. James Amery Underwood (London: Penguin Books, 2008 [1936]). Kuaile jiating, issue 1.3 (1923): 34. Kuaile jiating, issue 1.3 (1923): 33. Kuaile jiating, issue 1.1 (1923). Kuaile jiating, issue 1.1 (1923). “Xiandai jiating zhuangshi” [Modern home furnishings], Ling long, issue 256 (1936): 3039. Ling long, issue 256 (1936): 3042; and Ling long, issue 55 (1932): 215.

7. Engendering the Chinese City

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

307

Thank you to Sarah Teasley for sharing a European copy book from Japan that included a photograph of an interior space also used in Ling long. Ling long included only a handful of images of the home’s exterior, while Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating and Jiating zhoukan did not include any. This is in stark contrast to the images of exteriors and floor plans in magazines for building professionals like The Builder and Chinese Architect. See chapter 4. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986), 179– 83. Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), esp. 14. See B. L., “Shanghai Tackles Slum Problem,” Far Eastern Survey 6, no. 11 (1937); and Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). This list of Chinese names for various rooms was drawn from women’s magazines. The imagined modern interior included many new kinds of rooms with new functions, thus new Chinese names had to be created. Names for these new kinds of rooms were still not standardized in the 1920s and 1930s. The photograph in Woman World appeared twice, first as a stock photo without a caption and second with a caption suggesting the photo was of a Japanese housewife. Visual clues, such as the style of the woman’s apron, may or may not have alerted readers that the subject was Japanese. Ling long, issue 73 (1932): 1066a. “Zuo xiaocai de fazi” [How to make small dishes], Kuaile jiating, issue 1.1 (1923).

7. ENGENDERING THE CHINESE CITY 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 39. Charles  D. Musgrove, China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013). Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, 1911–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in SeventeenthCentury China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

7. Engendering the Chinese City

Michael Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900–1927 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Michael Tsin, “Canton Remapped,” in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950, ed. Joseph  W. Esherick (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 19. Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 30. Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, 20. For an exception to the focus on the public sphere, see Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson, ed., Chinese Concepts of Privacy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002). Two events in 1989 influenced the public sphere debate in Chinese history: the English translation of Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and the Chinese government’s crackdown on student demonstrations in Beijing. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989 [1969]); and Modern China 19, no. 2 (April 1993). Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). “Lun jiaoji yu jiaobu zhe jieyan” [Discussing communication and negotiation], Dagong bao (June 4, 1905). “Ying Ri jiaoji” [British and Japanese communications], Dagong bao (May  14, 1918). “Lu Zhong qing Zhang Shizhao jiangxue” [Lu Zhong invites Zhang Shizhao to give a lecture], Dagong bao (November 5, 1926). Dagong bao (April, 2, 1929). A social dance was also reported in Dagong bao (January 13, 1930). See for example, Dagong bao (June 29, 1935), (March 13, 1933), (March 16, 1935), (March 29, 1935), (July 12, 1935), (July 13, 1935), and (March 4, 1936). According to the Shanghai periodical database, jiaoji appears in Dagong bao as follows: 1905–1909: 3; 1910–1919: 9; 1920–1929: 28; 1930–1939: 50; 1940–1948: 6, and in all periodicals 1905–1909: 37; 1910–1919: 123; 1920–1929: 696; 1930–1939: 5; 1940–1948. www.cnbksy.com, accessed May 20, 2020. Yuan Hu, “Nü jiaoji mingxing shier mang” [Twelve things that the social star is busy with], Funü 1, no. 1 (1927): 14. Beiyang huabao (September 7, 1927): 1. Sun Liying, “An Exotic Self? Tracing Cultural Flows of Western Nudes in Pei- yang Pictorial News (1926–1933),” in Transcultural Turbulences Towards a Multi-Sited Reading of Image Flows, ed. Christiane Brosius, and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 273–74. The ten-year anniversary issue of Beiyang huabao proclaimed that they were very much aware that their audience was elite all along. Sun, “An Exotic Self?,” 274. Beiyang Huabao (January 5, 1927): 2.

7. Engendering the Chinese City

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

309

On guixiu and nineteenth-century Chinese male intellectuals’ backlash against them, see Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6. Beiyang huabao (December 2, 1926). Isabel’s sister May, Koo’s second wife, died in 1918. The best-known example of a family that expanded its social network through marriage was the Song family. The eldest sister married a businessman and minister of finance, the second married Sun Yat-sen, and the third married Chiang Kai-shek. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Beiyang huabao (July 3, 1937). Beiyang huabao (August 4, 1926); and Beiyang huabao (November 5, 1928). Yin Meibo, “Nüren zai shehuishang de diwei: weishenme jiao nanzidi xia?” [Women’s social status: why is it lower than men’s?], Funü xin duhui / Woman World, issue 4 (July 1, 1939): 1. “Shidai he huanjing gei funü de yingxiang” [Era and environment influence women], Woman World, issue 6 (July 8, 1939). Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), Funü xin duhui baoshe cheng wei gaifa yuekan [Woman World magazine application to change to monthly], j1–747 (1941). The fact that the editor-in-chief, Yin Meibo, was a woman may have been rare at the time. The editor of Happy Home, for example, was male, as was the chief editor of Ling long. Yin Meibo, “Diyitian de hua” [Introduction to the first issue], Woman World, issue 1, (June 21, 1939). “Shanghai de funü zouxiang shiyeceng qu” [Shanghai women walk toward career status], Woman World, issue 39 (November 25, 1939); and Ah Mei, “Deguo funüde meide: Neng chiku naifan wujia xiuxi, hunqian hunhou chengliang ge ren” [The moral beauty of German women: They can eat bitter and are patient, before and after marriage two different people], Woman World, issue 27 (October 14, 1939). Similarly, other Tianjin-published women’s magazines suggested that the Tianjin modern woman was peripheral to foreign and Shanghai modernity. See, for example, “News from the Women’s World,” Jiating zhou kan [Home weekly], no. 1 (1931); and “Shanghai funü de muqian xin zhanrong” [The future battle of Shanghai women],” Xin funü [New woman weekly], no. 5 (1935). Helen  M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press, 2011). Yin Meibo, “Nüren zai shehuishang de diwei.” See also Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating (1923).

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40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

7. Engendering the Chinese City

Zhou Mengjie, “Funü zhiye de jiantao” [A criticism of career women], Woman World, issue 41 (December 2, 1939). Zhou, “Funü zhiye de jiantao.” Meizi, “Zhiye funü ying juyou de jian zuo” [The skills that career women must have], Woman World, issue 46 (December 20, 1939). Man Qi, “Nüzi daziyuan de ziyou” [The freedom of a female typist], Woman World, issue 37 (November 18, 1939). Man, “Nüzi daziyuan de ziyou.” Man, “Nüzi daziyuan de ziyou.” Tianjin City Government, Tianjin-shi zhengfu zhiyuan zhuangkuang tongji [Statistics on the condition of Tianjin city government workers] (1931). See also chapter 1. TMA, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao [Report on the registration of family conditions], j2– 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815, 5816, 5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946). See also chapter 1. Zhang Fei, “Nü zhiyuan: weishenme shi huaping?” [Office women: Why are they flower vases?], Woman World, issue 20 (September 16, 1939). Yin Meibo, “Ru hezuo ge xiandai funü” [How to be a contemporary woman], Woman World, issue 24 (September 4, 1939). Zhang Fei, “Xiaojie you liangzhong zuofeng: Yizhong shi jiating shi de, yizhong shi xuesheng shi de” [There are two styles of women: One is family and one is student], Woman World, issue 32 (November 1, 1939); Liu Ling, “Shehui gongkai yu lian’ai wenti” [The opening of society and issues of dating], Woman World, issue 44 (December 13, 1939). Liu, “Shehui gongkai.” Zhai Junsheng, “Xie gei shejiaochang shang de xiaojiemen” [Written for the young ladies in the social sphere], Woman World, issue 25 (September  7, 1939); “Dang ni he nan pengyou chichi deshihou yinggai chuan shenme yifune” [What should you wear when you go out for tea with your boyfriend?], Woman World, issue 4 (July 1, 1939). Woman World, issue 32 (November 1, 1939). “Shi zhufu dang ying zenyang chuli jiating: Zai xiandai de shehui li haishi cong jiating wei guojia de benwei” [How should today’s housewives manage the home?: in contemporary society the home is still the root of the state], Woman World, issue 48 (December 27, 1939). Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Kuaile jiating (1923). Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005). TMA, “Hebeishengli nüshinüshixueyuan, xuesheng shenghuo diaocha” [Hebei Women’s Normal Institute, student life survey], j164–169 (1948). Names of students have been changed.

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59. 60. 61.

TMA, “Student life survey.” TMA, “Student life survey.” TMA, “Student life survey.”

8. THE CHINESE BOURGEOIS HOME IN THE SOCIALIST WORLD 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 66. For description of working-class residences see Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 69. Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 66. See for example, Woodhead’s complaints to the British Municipal Council in “British Municipal Council, Annual Report (1922).” For Chinese complaints on the rising cost of housing in the foreign concessions, see Yishibao (September 23, 1924). Tianjinshi fangdichan guanliju (Tianjin Gazetteer Office), Tianjin fangdichan zhi [Tianjin housing and real estate Gazetteer] (Tianjin: Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1999), 324. Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011). Chün Hsing, Baptized in the Fire of Revolution: The American Social Gospel and the YMCA in China, 1919–1937 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1996), 116; and Gustav Schwenning, “An Attack on Shanghai Slums,” Social Forces 6, no.  1 (September 1927): 125–31. Zhongguo jianzhu [Chinese architect], (February 1934): 10. Zhongguo jianzhu (February 1934): 10. Zhongguo jianzhu (February 1934): 10. Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), j131–472 (July 1930). This area of each residence was similar to what Gail Hershatter records for working class houses. Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 69. TMA, j56 1198 (August 1947). TMA, j56 1198 (August 1947). TMA, j56 1198 (August 1947). Kang Chao, “Industrialization and Urban Housing in Communist China,” Journal of Asian Studies 25, no.  3 (May  1966): 381– 96; and Christopher Howe, “The Supply and Administration of Urban Housing in Mainland China: The Case of Shanghai,” China Quarterly no. 33 (January–March 1968): 73– 97. TMA, “Jingji zhuzhai, Tianjin Jianzhu gongsi” [Economical housing, Tianjin architecture company], X0053-D- 001008 (1951).

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

8. The Chinese Bourgeois Home

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37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

in the United States, see Jason Petrulis, America the Brand: Advertising the American Way, (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010). See for example, Reid, “Communist Comfort.” Magnavox Television advertisement, 1949, http:// library.duke.edu/digitalcoll ections/adaccess_TV0639/, accessed October 2, 2015. Partner, Assembled in Japan, 153. Susan  E. Reid, “Khrushchev Modern: Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 47, no. 1/2 (January–June 2006), 227– 68. On the history of consumption in pre-1949 China see Frank Dikötter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Chen Fei, “Shanghai No.  1 Department Store” (Shanghai huapian chubanshe, July  1955), private collection, http://chineseposters.net/posters/pc-1955– 001.php, accessed June 17, 2017. Chen, “Shanghai No. 1 Department Store.” Xie Zhiguang, Shao Jingyun, and Xie Mulian, “Banjin xin jia” [Moving into a new house] (Shanghai: Huadong renmin meishu chubanshe, November 1953), https:// chineseposters.net/gallery/d29– 682.php, accessed June 21, 2020. Song Shaopeng, “The State Discourse on Housewives and Housework in the 1950s in China,” Rethinking China in the 1950s, ed. Mechthild Leutner (Berlin: Lit: 2007), 49– 63. Song, “The State Discourse on Housewives and Housework.” Mao Zedong, “Women Have Gone to the Labor Front” (1955). Song, “The State Discourse on Housewives and Housework,” 49. Song, “The State Discourse on Housewives and Housework.” Jin Zhaofang, “A Glorious Model Producer” (July  1954), IISH, https://chinese posters.net/gallery/e16– 627.php, accessed June 21, 2020. Yan Gefan, “With Labor Comes Happiness” [Ertong duwu chubanshe], November  1954, http:// hdl.handle.net/10622/30051002821715?locatt=view:level2.; and http:// hdl.handle.net/10622/30051002821681?locatt=view:level2, accessed June 21, 2020. IIISH, https://chineseposters.net/posters/e16–26.php, accessed June 21, 2020. Wei Yingzhou, “Do Housework Well and Raise Children Well” [Shanghai huapian chubanshe], October  1956, http:// hdl.handle.net/10622/30051003048722 ?locatt=view:level2, accessed June 21, 2020. Jacob Eyferth, “Women’s Work and the Politics of Homespun in Socialist China, 1949–1980,” International Review of Social History 57, no. 3 (2012): 365– 91. Xing Quan Zhang, “Chinese Housing Policy, 1949–1978: The Development of a Welfare System,” Planning Perspectives 12, no. 4 (1997): 437, 438. Zhang, “Chinese Housing Policy,” 438; Kang Chao, “Industrialization and Urban Housing in Communist China,” Journal of Asian Studies 25, no.  3 (May  1966):

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EPILOGUE: HISTORICAL ERASURES AND CHINA’S NEW MIDDLE CLASS 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

Li Jing, “Has China Failed to Learn the Lessons of Deadly Tianjin Explosions?,” South China Morning Post, August 12, 2016, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/poli tics/article/2002987/ has- china-failed-learn-lessons- deadly-tianjin- explosio ns. Te-Ping Chen, “Chinese Officials Ramp up Investigations into Tianjin Explosions,” Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2015. Anonymous, “Censored: A Young Survivor Decries Handling of Tianjin Explosion,” trans. David Wertime, Foreign Policy (September 10, 2015). The Weibo post originally appeared on September 7, 2015. Joseph Kahn, “China Backs Property Law, Buoying Middle Class,” New York Times, March 16, 2007. Wang Hui, “The Year 1989 and the Historical Roots of Neoliberalism in China,” in The End of Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London: Verso, 2011), 19– 66. Leta Hong Fincher, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (London: Zed Books, 2014), 45. Hong Fincher, Leftover Women, 47.

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Index

ABC’s of Architecture, The, 152 advertisements, 230, 254, 269, 312n36 aesthetics. See architecture and building practices; home design affect. See emotions Ahmed, Sarah, 190, 255 altars, ancestral, 19, 102, 133–34, 150 apartments: in Tianjin, 1, 123, 135, 146, 161, 245, 249, 250– 52, 262, 268, 270; in the U.S., 138, 140, 141 architecture and building practices, 12; architectural manuals and journals, 127–31, 133, 146, 152, 160– 61; architectural styles of foreign concessions, 87, 156, 158, 187 (see also specific concessions); art deco style, 156, 210, 302n45; assimilation vs. association agendas in architectural styles, 157– 59; auspicious locations and dates for building, 131–32, 152, 294n12; Bao Guiqing house, 164(fig.), 164– 66; Beaux Arts style, 3, 87, 135, 156, 159, 160, 187, 217; building practices, 127–32, 147– 50, 152, 294nn 12–17, 295n23; Chen Guangyuan house, 162, 163(fig.), 164; and choice of housing, 13, 123– 53; courtyard houses

(see courtyard houses); feng shui and cosmological principles, 10, 17, 20, 42–43, 79, 131–34, 160; garden city model, 95, 123, 154, 159, 187; Gothic style, 87, 115, 156; imperial-era architecture of Tianjin, 23–24, 123; mixed Chinese-Western styles, 162– 69, 170–71(figs.), 183– 84; modular home building, 23, 38, 128, 132, 160, 294n15, 295n23; Murphy’s adaptive designs, 159– 60; nationalist architecture, 159– 60; and negative energy, 127; Peffer’s criticisms of mixed styles, 183–84; politics of architectural style, 157– 62; post-and-beam construction, 23, 38, 128, 160; postcolonial preservation of European architecture in Tianjin, 3–4; and public and private domains, 160– 61 (see also public and private domains); and real estate market, 91, 146, 148; rooflines, 159, 160, 162, 165; rooftop pavilions, 162, 163(fig.), 164(fig.), 164– 65; and sociopolitical spaces of Tianjin, 219–20; sumptuary laws, 295n23; Sung Sik house, 141–46, 148– 51, 149(fig.),

338

architecture and building practices (cont.) 153; and Tianjin modern style, 13, 156, 169–72, 187– 88 (see also Tianjin modern style); and Tianjin’s colonialcapitalist system, 91; Tianjin’s public architecture, 3, 156, 158, 161, 165; Western building principles, 145– 51; Western-style houses, 124, 136, 137(fig.), 139, 142(fig.), 145– 51, 246; Xu Pu’an house, 125–27, 126(fig.), 128–30(figs.), 134–36, 150, 153, 166– 69, 167– 68(figs.), 200n23. See also carpenters and builders; zoning laws and building regulations art deco, 156, 209–10, 302n45 assimilation vs. association agendas in architectural styles, 157– 59 Auslander, Leora, 155 Austria-Hungary, 29, 34, 44, 82 Ba Jin, 72 Bank of China, 249 Bao Guiqing, 164(fig.), 164– 66, 290n44 Bao Guiqing house, 164(fig.), 164– 66 bathrooms, 149(fig.), 150– 51, 208(fig.), 211 bays (ian), in courtyard houses, 132, 294n16 Beaux Arts style, 3, 87, 135, 156, 159, 160, 187, 217 bedrooms, 148, 149(fig.), 173–74, 208(fig.) Beijing: and Boxer Uprising, 43; displaced as capital, 45, 218; family size in, 68; first British envoy to, 27–28; as imperial capital, 21–22, 43; Shen Yiyun’s house in, 138; social surveys in, 65, 66 Beijing Girl’s High School, 231 Beiyang Girls’ School, 305n22 Beiyang huabao (pictorial magazine), 194– 95, 224–26, 228, 229, 237, 308n22 Belgian Concession (Tianjin), 29, 44 Benevolent Association, 246 Benjamin, Walter, 204 Bergère, Marie- Claire, 6, 82, 93, 296n34

Index

Berlant, Lauren, 190 Bernhardt, Kathryn, 81 Better Homes and Gardens, 177 Betts, Raymond, 299n7 Bhabha, Homi, 171 birth control, 69 Blackmar, Elizabeth, 90– 91 BMC. See British Municipal Council Bourdieu, Pierre, 7 bourgeoisie. See middle class, Chinese; urban elites Boxer Indemnity scholarships, 58, 64, 146 Boxer Uprising, 29, 33–34, 36(fig.), 89, 288n22; aftermath, 37–43 Boynton, Grace, 280n40 Bray, David, 260, 262 Bray, Francesca, 8, 47–48, 126, 133, 295n23, 295n24 breakfast rooms, 211, 213 British Concession (Tianjin), 29, 30; architectural style, 95, 156, 158, 159, 162, 163(fig.), 164, 187; British school in, 88– 89; Chinese architectural elements in, 162, 163(fig.), 164; Chinese residents in, 2, 100, 244; Chinese school in, 88– 89, 305n22; and decolonization, 247; as desirable residential district, 82– 83; furniture stores, 173; garden city model for residences, 95, 123, 154, 159, 187; governance of (see British Municipal Council); and property disputes, 105; public parks, 165; and real estate market, 91– 92, 96; as tourist destination, 3; water issue, 116–18; zoning laws and building regulations, 96 British Concession Water Works, 116–17 British Municipal Council (BMC): and architectural style of British Concession, 159; bilingual documents facilitating Chinese participation, 100–101, 116; British school funded by,

Index 339

88– 89; participation of Chinese (male) residents, 100–101, 115–16; and political rights of Chinese residents, 98– 99; and real estate development, 95; zoning laws and building regulations, 96 brothels, 40, 92 bugs, getting rid of, 201–2, 213 Builder, The (journal), 161 building practices. See architecture and building practices; carpenters and builders Bureau of Social Affairs (Shehui ju), 76–78, 246, 247, 285n105, 286n116, 302n38 Burgess, John Stewart, 282n61 Burton, Antoinette, 12 cai, 128 Cai Yuanpei, 61 Canton, urban planning in, 220 Cao Kun, 200n23, 290n44 Cao Yu, 152, 290n44 capitalism, 10, 12, 13, 267, 286n116; and post–WWII visions of prosperity, 254; Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system, 81– 91, 95– 97, 100, 105, 115–18, 135, 146, 156, 162, 166, 184, 243. See also real estate market career women, 221, 230–34. See also employment Carnegie Corporation, 71 carpenters and builders, 297n53, 297n56, 298n57; architectural manuals and journals for, 127–31, 133, 146, 152, 160– 61; and courtyard houses, 124, 127–33; professional associations, 146, 297n56; training, 130–31, 147–48, 297n56; tricks and magic practiced against employers, 130, 132, 133; wages, 302n40. See also architecture and building practices carpets, 185– 86, 186(fig.), 188, 303n53

Cassel, Pär Kristoffer, 86 ceramics, 155 chairs, 173, 179, 202, 306n32 Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing), 194, 236–37 Chang, Henry K., 108–14 Chang, Isabel, 108–14, 113(fig.), 224–25, 227 changshi, 199–202, 214. See also women’s magazines: advice columns changyi, 202. See also sofas Chen Duxiu, 59, 62, 279n28 Cheng Ke, 290n44 Chen Guangyuan, 162, 164, 290n44 Chen Guangyuan house, 162, 163(fig.), 164 Chen Hengzhe (Sophia Chen Zen), 60– 62, 281n54 Chen Shousun, 279n24 Chen Zhi (Benjamin Chen), 297n54 Cherniavsky, Nick, 298n64 Chiang Kai-shek, 82, 138, 218, 245, 309n27 Chiang Yung-chen, 280n40, 282n62 chimeral aspects of architecture. See Tianjin modern style China, imperial (late Qing dynasty), 13; abolition of civil service examination, 5, 98; Boxer Uprising and its aftermath, 29, 33–45, 36(fig.), 89, 288n22; and colonialism (see colonialism); confrontations with foreign intruders, 31–38; design, style, and aesthetics of dynasties, 154– 55; European imaginary of China, 25; fall of imperial ideology, 13, 53– 55, 58– 59, 78; fall of the Qing, 5, 10, 37–43, 79, 80, 97– 98; foreign accounts of, 25–28; furniture, 202; and history of Tianjin, 18, 21–25, 218; house-building practices, 79, 131, 133, 294n12; knowledge about the home as male-gendered knowledge, 192; and layout of houses, 133–34; patrilineal succession of property, 103; regulation of space and the inner/outer (nei and wai) continuum, 18 (see also inner/

340

China, imperial (late Qing dynasty) (cont.) outer continuum); relationship between house and political stability, 19–21, 59, 79, 131, 133; relationship between individual, household, and state in Neo- Confucian ideology, 19–20, 117, 133–34; relationship between text and house, 47–48; social relations, 10, 17, 20–21, 47, 133–34; sociopolitical ideology of jia, 18–21, 59, 133–34, 191; sumptuary laws, 295n23; and transformation from jia to jiating, 9, 12, 48, 191; and urban planning, 44, 46, 91, 136, 162, 217, 220–21; weakening of Qing Empire and reduction of local services, 22, 24; “woman question,” 49; women’s gendered and political roles, 102. See also Confucianism; Neo- Confucianism China, People’s Republic, 242– 63, 265–70; collectivization of household labor, 257, 259– 62; Cultural Revolution, 262; current housing market, 267; and “economical housing,” 248–49; establishment of, 10; Great Leap Forward, 260, 262; housing through work units (danwei system), 3, 249– 50, 259– 63, 266; new middle class in, 3, 6, 14, 264–70; patriarchal privilege and power, 244, 256– 57, 267; production rather than consumption as economic driver, 254– 55; propaganda about happy home life, 252– 56; and property rights, 266– 67; and public housing, 243–44, 246– 52, 259– 63; remarketization of Tianjin housing, 266– 68; and socialist mass consumption, 255; social relations, 260– 62; women’s gendered and political roles, 257– 58; worker’s housing needed for First Five Year Plan, 251– 52. See also Chinese Communist Party

Index

China, Republican era, 13; capital moved to Nanjing, 45, 82, 218; and choice of housing, 13, 123– 53 (see also housing; real estate market); civil code of 1929 and 1930, 80– 81, 101– 5, 107– 8, 114, 115, 118; concern for China’s global standing, 102–3; female-gendered spaces, 14, 17 (see also social spaces); gender and social status (see gender roles; social status); as “hypo-colony,” 86; identity formation, 7, 10–11 (see also identity); ideological concept of middle class not fully formed, 6, 7; and invention of home by urban elites, 5, 6, 242 (see also home life); Nanjing Decade (1927–1937), 218, 221, 227; nationalist architecture, 159– 60; nationalist family reforms not fully realized, 72–78, 239–40; nationalist ideology focused on reforming the family, 11, 17–18, 46, 51, 55, 75, 76, 78–79, 238–42; neglect of public housing, 243; new vocabulary of, 11 (see also jiating); and property ownership, 80–119 (see also property ownership); prosperity of Chinese bourgeoisie, 6; as social laboratory of modernity, 281n59; social relations, 11, 18, 55, 64, 70, 79, 135, 148, 176, 220–21, 237–40; social spaces in Tianjin, 217–41; Tianjin concessions returned to Chinese municipal governance, 14, 246–47; and Tianjin modern style (see Tianjin modern style); and urban planning, 218, 220, 247–48; Warlord Era (1916–1928), 82, 218 Chinese Civil War, 248 Chinese Communist Party (CCP): abolition of private property, 260– 62; collectivization of household labor, 257, 259– 62; and “economical housing,” 248–49; and erasure of

Index 341

historical memory, 3, 264–70; and historical narrative about prosperity, 267– 68; housework gendered female and devalued, 257– 58; housing as a political right for all citizens, 14, 247–48, 262; and new understanding of jiating, 259– 63; and patriarchal privilege and power, 244, 256– 57, 267; and postcolonial preservation of European architecture in Tianjin, 3–4; propaganda about happy home life, 252– 56; and public housing, 243–44, 251– 52; takeover of Tianjin, 248; women’s roles in the workforce and the home, 257– 58; and xiaolaobaixing (common people), 265– 66. See also China, People’s Republic Chinese Family and Society (Lang), 71 cholera, 116 Chung Yuen Department Store, 228 civil code of 1929 and 1930, 80– 81, 101– 5, 107– 8, 114, 115, 118 civil servants, 17, 19, 72–76, 93, 234, 290n42 civil service examination, 5, 98, 156 Cixi, Empress Dowager, 278n13 Class Dream housing complex, 270 Cohen, Myron, 284n96 collectivization of household labor, 257, 259– 62 colonialism: assimilation vs. association agendas in architectural styles, 157– 59; China’s confrontations with foreign intruders, 31–38; colonial coproduction of knowledge about the traditional Chinese family, 55– 63; colonialism as both multiple and partial in Tianjin, 18, 81, 83, 85– 86, 158; consumption of objects and styles of imperialism in the U.S., 165– 66; cooperation and competition among colonial empires, 89, 158– 59; decolonization, 246–47; and deconstruction and reconstruction

of Tianjin, 18, 25, 31, 38–43; and delegitimization of the Qing, 18, 37–43; French colonial policy of association vs. assimilation, 299n7; hybridity (Bhabha’s concept), 171; and politics of design, 155– 56; property as center of power struggles between colonial powers and Chinese urban elites, 80– 82; semi-colonial countries, 83, 85– 86; Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system, 81– 91, 95– 97, 100, 105, 115–18, 135, 146, 156, 162, 166, 184, 243, 248. See also foreign concessions; specific concessions Columbia University, 71 comfort, 203 common knowledge, 199–202. See also women’s magazines: advice columns communal living, 259– 62 concubines, 46, 75, 77, 78, 300n23 Confucianism, 133; critiques of the Confucian household, 59, 62; and Darwinian progress, 54; denunciation of, 53– 55, 58, 102; and house-building practices, 130–31; and oppression of women, 81; and patriarchy, 81; and sumptuary laws, 295n23. See also Neo- Confucianism Confucius, 10, 19–20 “conjugal” family, 71, 284n97, 285n99. See also nuclear family consumption, 282n70; and advertising, 254; conspicuous consumption, 65– 66; consumption of global commodities, 5, 165– 66, 173, 178, 185– 88, 201, 209; consumption of objects and styles of imperialism in the U.S., 165– 66; and “creative bricolage” (Dikötter’s concept), 184; Engel’s Law (law on income and food consumption), 65– 66; and furniture, 172–74; and post–WWII visions of prosperity, 254;

342

consumption (cont.) socialist consumption, 255; social surveys on household consumption, 65, 67, 283n77. See also home design cooking, 211–13, 212(fig.) cosmological spatial ordering, 17, 42–43, 131. See also feng shui principles cosmopolitanism, 4, 52, 87– 90, 137–39, 141, 146, 153, 192, 210, 225; cosmopolitan domesticity, 165– 66, 183, 185, 188 Cosmopolitan (magazine), 269 couplets (wall hangings), 181, 302n43, 306n32 courtyard houses, 24, 28, 94, 124–36, 138, 217; ancestral altars, 19, 102, 133–34, 150; bays ( jian), 132, 294n16; building materials, 200n24; building practices, 127–32, 294n16, 294n17; compared to Western-style houses, 148; elements of, 126–28, 132–34; flexible living spaces in, 150, 210; and gender and status relations, 133–34, 150; and great socialist jiating, 261; and inner/outer (nei and wai) continuum, 132, 191; mixed Chinese-Western styles, 166– 69, 167– 68(figs.); and servants, 134, 140, 141, 150, 152; Xu Pu’an house, 125–27, 126(fig.), 128–30(figs.), 134–36, 150, 153, 166– 69, 167– 68(figs.), 200n23 courtyards, 126, 127, 132, 138, 141, 152, 238, 294n17 Crédit Foncier (bank), 91, 92, 100, 108, 141–42, 146, 162 Cret, Paul, 160, 297n54 cultural capital, 7, 145, 157, 175, 176, 192– 93, 227–28, 269 Cultural Revolution, 262 Dagong bao (newspaper), 196, 199, 200 da jiating, 261, 262 danwei system of housing, 3, 249– 50, 259– 63, 266

Index

Darwin, Charles, 52– 53 dating, 223–24, 235 daughters: cultural and educational capital of daughters of civil servants, 7, 157, 175, 176, 193, 269; daughters of scholar-officials as household managers and income earners, 19; education of daughters of urban elites, 198; and household as a state, 62; and inheritance rights, 103; and marriage, 138; social status marked by taste/style, 1–2, 157; and women’s magazines, 198, 226–27 democracy, 46, 49, 51, 62, 63 Denby, Charles, Jr., 39, 44, 92 Deng Xiaoping, 265 Deng Yingchao, 268 department stores, 172–74, 223, 228, 241, 255, 301n30 Dianshizhai huabao (pictorial publication), 194 Dictionary of Socialism (Rappoport), 279n24 Dictionary of Social Problems (Chen Shousun), 279n24 Dikötter, Frank, 184, 301n34 dining room, 148, 149(fig.), 150, 152, 173, 211, 261 dining tables, 172, 175, 306n32 disease, 32, 41, 116 Dittmer, C. G., 282n61 divorce, 77, 101, 103, 106– 8, 267 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 59– 60, 281n50 domesticity, 47, 189; cosmopolitan domesticity, 165– 66, 183, 185, 188; difficulty of translating into Chinese, 9; and the Japanese middle class, 5; translated as jiating shenghuo (“home life”), 9. See also home life Dong, Madeleine Yue, 45 Dongxing gongsi, 93 doorways, 126(fig.), 126–27

Index 343

dormitories, 249, 252, 262 drawing room, 148, 149(fig.), 150, 152, 174 duilian, 302n43. See also couplets (wall hangings) Eastern Miscellany, The (Dongfang zazhi; journal), 50 economics: cosmological principles in house design required for economic prosperity, 21, 131, 134; “economic family” defined, 67; Engel’s Law (law on income and food purchases), 65– 66; and modular home building, 132; and motivation of female workers, 234; and Neo- Confucian ideology, 17; relationship between income and family size, 68– 69, 75; and women in the late imperial era, 19; and women viewed as parasites, 49. See also capitalism; real estate market education: Boxer Indemnity scholarships, 58, 64, 146; Chinese intellectuals educated abroad, 58, 61; concession schools, 88– 89, 288n23; and domestic science, 176; educational capital of women, 7, 176 (see also cultural capital); education viewed as way to make women productive, 49; and family size, 68– 69; as form of self-cultivation rather than national improvement, 236–37; home economics education, 50, 51, 56, 68, 150, 231, 237; Japan as source of models of female education, 49– 50; night schools, 77, 176, 286n117, 302n38; and origins of jiating as home, 48– 52; Shimoda Utako and, 50– 52; and social class, 176; texts on domestic science, 50, 176; Tianjin schools, 44, 77, 88– 89, 288n23, 305n22; training of social scientists, 64; and women’s magazines, 231. See also schools

Eight Nation Alliance, 34–35, 38, 39, 89 elites. See urban elites emotions, 190– 91; affective understanding of home, 13, 213; Chinese terms for happiness, 256; consideration of “feeling” in decorating, 204– 5; different conceptions of happiness, 256; happy home life framed as dependent on productive work in the public workplace, 258; and home life, 190– 91, 202–4, 252–56; and photography and fantasies of home, 204 (see also fantasies of home); propaganda about happy home life under the CCP, 252– 56 employment: distinction between elite career women and working-class women, 233–34, 243; happy home life framed as dependent on productive work in the public workplace, 258; identity formation in the public spaces of work under the CCP, 257; most common types of work for women, 234; motivation of female workers, 234; and sexual harassment, 234; and socializing sphere, 241; women as career women vs. wives and mothers in the Republican era, 221, 230–34; women in the workforce under the CCP, 257– 58; and women’s tenuous political status under the CCP, 258; women’s work and incomes, 19, 234; work unit–based housing (danwei system), 3, 249– 50, 259– 63, 266 encyclopedias of knowledge about the home, 192 energy, negative and positive, 127, 132 Engel, Ernst, 65– 66, 282n70 Engel’s Law, 65– 66 epistemology: colonial coproduction of knowledge about the traditional Chinese family, 55– 63; common knowledge, 199–202; knowledge about

344 Index

epistemology (cont.) the home acquired from women’s magazines (see women’s magazines); knowledge about the home as female-gendered knowledge in the Republican era, 14, 175–77, 184, 192– 93, 242; knowledge about the home as male-gendered knowledge in imperial China, 192; Yan Fu on the difference between Chinese and Western knowledge, 280n34 Escherick, Joseph, 33 Europe: and coproduction of knowledge about Chinese society, 60– 61; developmental theory of family transformation, 57, 59; European housing principles, 124; family size, 57, 284n87; ideas about origins of small families, 57; ideas about public and private spaces, 8, 17, 220; ideas about women, 49; modern kitchens in, 150. See also colonialism; foreign concessions Evans, Richard T., 106 Evolution and Ethics (Huxley), 52 extended/“joint” family, 71, 75, 238–39, 284n97; financial responsibility for, 73–75; myths transformed into social science fact, 55– 63; negative views of, 51, 56, 58, 59, 62, 190, 221, 238–39; positive views of, 238–40; property rights, 101, 107; as a response to drastic changes in China, 79 Extra-Mural Area, 99 Eyferth, Jacob, 258 family: CCP and, 259– 60; colonial coproduction of knowledge about the traditional Chinese family, 55– 63; and common knowledge, 200; complications of defining families and households, 67– 68, 72–75; Confucian

family values, 58, 59; “conjugal,” “stem,” and “joint” families, 71, 284n97, 285n99; critiques of the Confucian household, 59, 62; developmental theory of family transformation, 57, 59, 76; “economic family” defined, 67; extended/“joint” family (see extended/“joint” family); families in Tianjin in the Republican era, 72–76; family size, in China, 68– 69, 73–74, 79, 284n95; family size, in Taiwan, 284n96; family size, and income, 68– 69, 75; family size, in Europe and the U.S., 57, 284n87; family size, in Hong Kong and other industrialized cities, 284n97; family structure not accurately captured by social science models, 67–72; family structure not always matched by housing choice, 152; and filial piety, 59, 62, 63, 70; Japanese term for, 51– 52; jiazu as, 52, 279n24; as laboratory for the social sciences, 63–72; and layout of houses in the late Qing and Republican era, 134; and May Fourth Movement, 58– 59; and moral and political values, 48; myth of backward extended Chinese family transformed into social science fact, 55– 63; and narratives of jiating, 238–40; nationalist ideology focused on reforming the family, 11, 17–18, 46, 51, 55, 64, 75, 76, 78–79, 238–42 (see also nuclear family; xiao jiating ideology); and new understanding of jiating under the CCP, 259– 63; nuclear family as ideal (xiao jiating ideology), 11, 17–18, 46, 55, 57, 58, 60, 78–79, 239, 242, 260; patriarchal family relations, 59, 62, 81; and perceived obstacles to democracy, 51, 62– 63; and “reading history sideways,” 57, 58, 60; services

Index 345

provided by the family rather than the state, 285n112; shift in cultural understanding of property ownership from family to individual, 97– 98, 101, 103, 104, 108; and social progress, 69, 72; social relations (see social relations); social surveys on, 64– 66, 68–70, 72–76; and sociopolitical ideology of jia in the late imperial era, 18–21; transitions from large to small, 238–39; types of families, 70–72, 75, 284n97, 285n99; and Western-style houses, 148. See also jia; jiating fantasies of home, 14, 193, 199, 201, 203–14; kitchens excluded from, 211–13 fashion, 111, 194, 226, 235 fen, 128 feng shui principles, 10, 79, 131–34, 160; and Tianjin city site, 21, 23 Feng Wuyue, 225 Fileti, Vincenzo, 87 filial piety, 59, 62, 63, 70 floorplans, 127, 134, 138, 148, 149(fig.), 150, 152, 154, 211, 213, 250– 51 Fong, H. D., 281n55, 285n105 food consumption, 65– 67 footbinding, 49, 236 foreign concessions (Tianjin), 86– 87; address conventions, 303n47; architectural styles, 156, 158, 187 (see also specific concessions); Chinese nationals’ power in, 88, 98, 100–101, 115–16, 291n59; Chinese residents in, 2, 8, 83, 94– 95, 100, 136– 51, 244; and colonial competition, 89, 158– 59; as commercial extensions of empire rather than colonial settlements, 158; concession holders, 29, 44; and cooperation among foreign empires, 89; current status, 3; dates established and relinquished, 85(fig.); establishment of, 18, 29; expansion and growth of,

44–45, 83; extramural concessions, 44–45, 99; foreigners priced out of housing, 100; governance of, 89– 90, 98, 100–101, 114–16 (see also British Municipal Council); lack of public housing, 243; legal practices in, 86 (see also zoning laws and building regulations under this heading); as miniature colonies, 4, 86– 87; misinformation about, 2; as most desirable real estate in Tianjin, 82; and property disputes, 105–11; public parks, 165; public utilities and services in, 89, 90, 116–18; and real estate market, 91– 97, 159, 243; return to Chinese control, 14, 82, 246–47; schools in, 88– 89, 288n23; shops and restaurants in, 228; and sociopolitical spaces, 220; zoning laws and building regulations, 96– 97, 124, 159, 162. See also British Concession; German Concession; Italian Concession; Japanese Concession; Russian Concession France: assimilation vs. association agendas in architectural styles, 157– 58; and Boxer Uprising, 34; French colonial policy of association vs. assimilation, 299n7; style and taste in, 155; and urban planning in Madagascar, 300n19 French Concession (Tianjin), 29, 30, 31, 33, 44; architectural style, 156, 158; and decolonization, 247; as desirable residential district, 82; housing development contracted to Crédit Foncier, 162; housing for warlords, 94; and political rights of Chinese residents, 98, 291n59; and property disputes, 105–11; real estate market, 92; shops and restaurants in, 228; and Woman World, 229 Fululin Restaurant, 228

346

Funü xin duhui. See Woman World Funü zazhi (magazine), 196 furniture, 172–75, 181, 202–3, 301n30, 301n34; carpets, 185– 86, 186(fig.), 188, 303n53; chairs, 173, 179, 202, 306n32; and changing social practices, 202–3, 306n32; Chinese words for, 202–3, 306n29; and common knowledge, 200–201; and consuming the world at home, 185– 86; and emotional and aspirational aspects of home life, 202–3; furniture stores, 172–74, 301n30; sofas, 172–74, 202–3; tables, 150, 172, 175, 306n32 Gamble, Sidney, 65, 66, 67, 68, 282n61, 282n70 gambling dens, 92, 295n28 garden city residential model, 95, 123, 154, 159, 187 gender roles, 7; civil code of 1929 and 1930 as legal centerpiece for gender equality, 101–3, 114, 118 (see also civil code of 1929 and 1930); housework gendered female and devalued under the CCP, 257– 58; and housing, 125, 133–34; jiaoji women, 222–24, 226, 228, 241; knowledge about the home as female-gendered knowledge, 14, 175–77, 184, 192– 93, 242; and May Fourth Movement, 221; nei (inner) as female and wai (outer) as male, 17; and political rights (see political rights); and property ownership (see property ownership); and public and private domains, 221; public parks as sites of child-rearing, 165; sewing, 140; and the social sphere, 224–29; and sociopolitical spaces of Tianjin, 219–24 (see also social spaces); and state-led patriarchy of the CCP, 257; women and society, home, and the social sphere,

Index

229–37; women as household laborers under the CCP, 257– 58. See also men; patriarchy; women geomancy, 131, 132–33, 152, 294n12, 294n13. See also feng shui principles George III, king of England, 27 German Concession (Tianjin), 29, 44, 82 Germany, 29, 34 Geyling, Rolf, 146 ghosts, 127 Glosser, Susan, 8– 9, 17, 55 “good wife wise mother” ideology, 49 Gothic style, 87, 115, 156 governance of Tianjin: and blurred lines between public government and private business in real estate market, 91– 92; Bureau of Social Affairs (Shehui ju), 76–78, 246, 247, 285n105, 286n116, 302n38; Chinese participation in foreign concession governance, 100–101, 115–16, 291n59; concessions returned to Chinese control, 14, 82, 246–47; and development of housing, 124–25; focus on social stability and order, 76; foreign members of concession municipal councils, 89– 90; governance of foreign concessions, 89– 90, 98, 100–101, 114–16, 291n59 (see also British Municipal Council); multiplicity of property laws, 105– 6; relocation of political center, 44 (see also Tianjin: new municipal district); return to Chinese control following Boxer Uprising, 43; suffrage, 98; Tianjin Provisional Government (TPG), 38–45; transition from Guomindang to CCP governance, 248 Grand Canal, 21, 22, 23 Great Britain, 34–35, 50, 114, 293n114. See also British Concession Great Leap Forward, 260, 262 Great Learning (Confucius), 10, 19–20, 133

Index 347

Guangxu emperor, 49 guilds, 22, 297n56 guixiu, 226 Guomindang: and capital moved to Nanjing, 82, 218; and civil law, 104, 118 (see also civil code of 1929 and 1930); and control of Tianjin municipal government, 14; and public housing, 243, 247; and reforming the family, 103 (see also family; ideology); and urban planning, 218, 220, 247–48. See also China, Republican era gynotechnic, 47 Habermas, Jürgen, 190 Hai River, 21, 29, 44, 116 Hai River Conservancy Commission, 29, 89, 144 halls: in courtyard houses, 132, 181; in Western-style houses, 180(fig.), 181, 182, 185 Handler, Sarah, 202, 306n32 happiness in the home. See emotions; home life Happy Home (Shanghai magazine), 195, 196, 198, 305n20 Happy Home (Tianjin magazine). See Kuaile jiating Hershatter, Gail, 6, 297n56 Hevia, James, 28 He Zhang Suling, Mrs., 106– 8 historiography, 58, 60, 268 Ho, Franklin, 61, 281n55 Hoganson, Kristin, 165– 66 home: affective understanding of, 13, 213 (see also emotions); as the center of society, 231–32, 237; collectivization of household labor, 257, 259– 62; debates over home and society in Woman World, 230–37; as the enemy of female social status, 231–32, 237; as femalemanaged center of modern living, 52;

formation of class identity and the construction of home as mutually constitutive processes, 242; and gender roles (see gender roles); interiors and exteriors (see architecture and building practices; home design); invention by urban elites in the Republican era, 5, 6, 242; jiating as, 48– 52, 191, 213, 241; katei as, 50– 51, 278n17, 278n18; and patriarchal privilege and power under the CCP, 244, 256– 57; as refuge from work world for men in Victorian England, 293n114; Shimoda Utako and, 50– 51; as site of identity formation in Republican era, 5, 7, 242; as site of personal comfort, 52; in socialist China, 243, 244, 256– 58; subjectivity and narratives of jiating, 237–40; and women’s magazines, 52, 175, 177– 81, 229–37 (see also women’s magazines); women’s mastery of knowledge about the home, 175–77, 184, 242. See also home design; home life; house; jiating home design, 13, 154– 88; architectural styles of foreign concessions, 156, 158, 187 (see also architecture and building practices; specific concessions); art deco design, 209–10, 302n45; consideration of “feeling” in decorating, 204– 5; and consumption of global commodities, 5, 165– 66, 173, 178, 185– 88, 201, 209; cosmopolitan domesticity, 165– 66, 183, 185, 188; decorating mistakes, 205; European and American Orientalism in the Chinese home, 185– 86; and female taste and knowledge about the home, 174–77, 184, 192– 93; and feminization of knowledge, 14, 175, 188, 192– 93, 197–202; furnishings, 154, 172–74, 202–3, 306n32 (see also furniture); global modern style, 209;

348

home design (cont.) late imperial Chinese aesthetics, 181; mixed Chinese-Western styles, 162– 69, 177–78, 180(fig.), 182– 88; photos of interior spaces and fantasies of home, 203–14; photos of staged interiors, 205– 8, 206– 8(figs.); politics of architectural style, 157– 62; politics of design/style, 154, 155– 56, 175; and social status, 192– 93; Tianjin modern style, 13, 156, 169–72, 177–78, 182– 88, 209–10; wall hangings, 177, 181, 205, 302n43, 306n32; and women’s magazines, 175, 177– 81, 202–13. See also architecture and building practices; specific rooms home economics education, 50, 51, 56, 68, 150, 231, 237 home life ( jiating shenghuo), 9, 189–214; advice on, 192– 94, 199–202, 212–13; and affect, 190– 91, 202–3 (see also emotions); and common knowledge, 199–202; fantasies of home, 14, 193, 199, 201, 203–14; and feminization of knowledge, 14, 175, 188, 192– 93, 197–202; home as apolitical space, 191; the home as a site for happiness, 190, 252– 54, 253(fig.); and middle-class identity, 190– 91; potential volatility of, 191; and propaganda under the CCP, 252– 54, 253(fig.); and women’s magazines, 190, 192–202 Hong Fincher, Leta, 267 Hoover, Herbert and Lou, 35 house: Bao Guiqing house, 164(fig.), 164– 66; Chen Guangyuan house, 162, 163(fig.), 164; design and personal taste (see home design); floorplans, 127, 134, 138, 148, 149(fig.), 150, 152, 154, 211, 213, 250– 51; “Great Socialist House,” 260– 62; as gynotechnic, 47; importance of cosmological principles

Index

in design of, 20, 79, 124 (see also feng shui principles); jia as, 131; as manifestation of an individual’s property ownership and political rights, 102 (see also political rights; property ownership); owned by individuals rather than the extended family, 101, 103, 104, 108 (see also property ownership); relationship between house and political stability in late imperial China, 19–21, 59, 79, 131, 133; relationship between text and house in late imperial China, 47–48; ritual and social spaces in analogous positions in all types of houses, 133, 134, 295n24; Shen Yiyun’s houses, 136–41, 153; as site for identity formation and signaling, 5, 7, 14, 137, 139, 214; as site of women’s gendered and political roles associated with spatial practices, 102; Sung Sik house, 141–46, 148– 51, 149(fig.), 153; superfluous rooms, 211; as symbol of masculine identity, 115–18; Xu Pu’an house, 125–27, 126(fig.), 128–30(figs.), 134–36, 150, 153, 166– 69, 167– 68(figs.), 200n23. See also apartments; architecture and building practices; courtyard houses; furniture; housing; jia; property ownership; property rights; real estate market; single-family houses; townhouses; Western-style houses; specific rooms household, 9; as business institution in the late imperial era, 19; and changes in property rights, 101, 103, 104, 108; defining the “economic family,” 67; divergence between Japanese and Chinese political understandings of the household, 51– 52; and gender roles (see gender roles); and inner/outer (nei and wai) continuum, 17; as political participant, 19; relationship between

Index 349

household and state in the imperial era, 19–20, 117; relationship between household and state in the Republican era, 117; as social space, 20; and sociopolitical ideology of jia in the late imperial era, 19–21; surveys on household consumption, 65– 67. See also jia housewives, 211, 230, 235, 261; housework gendered female and devalued under the CCP, 257– 58; taitai (wives of elites), 221; women as career women vs. wives and mothers in the Republican era, 221, 230–34. See also gender roles housing: building practices, 127–32, 147– 52, 294nn12–17, 295n23 (see also architecture and building practices; carpenters and builders); for cadres, 250– 51, 251(fig.), 262– 63; choice of, 13, 123– 53; commodification of, 81, 90– 97, 266– 68 (see also real estate market); communal housing not fully realized, 262; economical housing proposed in the early postwar years, 248–49, 262; floorplans, 127, 138, 148, 149(fig.), 150, 152, 154, 211, 213, 250– 51; form dictating function, 148; and gender roles, 19, 125 (see also gender roles); hierarchies within housing complexes, 250– 51; housing assignments under the CCP, 250– 51, 262– 63; housing central to masculine identities, 14, 115–18, 242, 293n114; housing central to middle class identity, 3, 246, 264, 266– 67; housing as a right, 14, 119, 247, 248, 262; housing shortages, 119, 210, 244–48; investors, 87, 92– 93, 146, 159, 245, 267, 270; loan applications, 249– 50, 259; middle-class housing in the post-WWII era, 161; new development determined by Chinese municipal

government, colonial governments, and investors, 124–25; political consequences of choice, 135; and politics of architectural style, 157– 62; public housing (see public housing); renters and rental property, 87, 95– 96, 116, 123, 136, 142–43, 243, 244, 297n52; for shimin (city people), 247–48; single-family house ideal, 248–49, 251, 262, 263; and social class/social status, 7, 82, 94– 95, 125, 138, 150 (see also middle class, Chinese; urban elites; working class, Chinese; specific classes under this heading); and social practices, 13, 125; and sociopolitical ideology of jia in the late imperial era, 133–34; subletting, 65, 67, 95, 96; “suitable” housing, 143–45; types of, 123 (see also apartments; courtyard houses; dormitories; public housing; single-family houses; townhouses; Western-style houses); for university faculty, 250; for urban elites, 93– 95, 123– 53, 245; for warlords (see warlords); and water issues, 116–18; for workers, 3, 94, 243–45, 249– 52, 259– 63, 266; work unit–based housing (danwei system), 3, 249– 50, 259– 63, 266; zoning laws and building regulations, 96– 97, 124, 144, 159, 162. See also apartments; architecture and building practices; courtyard houses; dormitories; property ownership; property rights; public housing; single-family houses; townhouses; Western-style houses Hsu, Francis, 284n95 Huang, Nicole, 236 Huang Fu, 138, 139–40 Hua Shiku, 290n44 Hübner, Otto, 85 Hudec, Ladislav, 303n45 Hu Shi, 59, 61, 140, 279n28

350

Huxley, Thomas, 52 hygiene, 40–41, 76, 116–17 Ibsen, Henrik, 59– 60 identity, 293n114; in the current era, 265– 66; and dwelling in the world, 13–14, 137; and economic status, 115; formation of class identity and the construction of home as mutually constitutive processes, 242; and home design, 156, 175; house and home as a site for identity experimentation and signaling, 5, 7, 14, 137, 139, 214; housing central to identity of Chinese middle class, 3, 246, 264, 266– 67; identity formation in the public spaces of work under the CCP, 257; middle-class identity and the home as a site for happiness, 190– 91, 214; multiple layers of, 81– 82, 115, 156; and multiple social roles of urban women, 230–37; and personal taste, 162–74; and possession of women’s magazines, 194; property ownership and masculine identity, 14, 115–18, 242, 293n114; in the Republican era, 5, 7, 10–11, 115–18, 137; scholar gardens as sites of masculine identity, 165 ideology: CCP propaganda about happy home life, 252– 56, 253(fig.); and Chinese intellectuals educated abroad, 61; and colonial coproduction of knowledge about the traditional Chinese family, 55– 63; “community loyalty” vs. “family loyalty,” 72; debates over sociopolitical ideology, among Chinese intellectuals, 54– 55; denunciation of Confucianism and Confucian family values, 53– 55, 58, 59; differing models of change, 63, 78–79; disjunction between ideology and practice, 72–78, 113–14, 239–40; and

Index

house design, 20, 79, 124; late imperial Chinese political ideology, 13, 18–21, 59, 133–34, 191 (see also Confucianism; Neo- Confucianism); nationalist ideology focused on reforming the family, 11, 17–18, 46, 51, 55, 75, 76, 78–79, 238–42; and patriarchal privilege and power under the CCP, 244, 256– 57, 267; and public and private domains, 220–21; reconnection of family, house, and home under the CCP, 244, 260– 62; small family (xiao jiating) ideology, 11, 17–18, 46, 55, 57, 58, 60, 78–79, 239, 242, 260, 262; social science as political ideology, 53, 55 (see also social science); sociopolitical ideology of jia, 18–21, 59, 133–34, 191; and women’s roles in the workforce and the home under the CCP, 257– 58. See also Confucianism; May Fourth Movement; Neo- Confucianism India, 37, 66, 83 individualism, 57, 58, 59 Industrial Revolution, 8, 62 inner/outer continuum (nei and wai), 17, 240; and concentric ordering of space, 24; and courtyard houses, 132, 191; distinguished from public/private distinction, 17, 19; and doorways, 127; and sociopolitical ideology of jia in the late imperial era, 18–21, 191; and sociopolitical spaces of Tianjin, 220 Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), 60– 61, 64, 71 interior decoration. See home design international relations, 224 investors, 87, 92– 93, 146, 159, 245, 267, 270 IPR. See Institute of Pacific Relations Italian Concession (Tianjin): architectural style, 156, 158; Chinese architectural elements in, 164, 164(fig.); Chinese residents in, 94– 95, 136– 51,

Index 351

244, 290n44; as desirable residential district, 82; entertainment club in, 295n28; establishment of, 44; housing for warlords, 94, 95; and property disputes, 105; and real estate market, 91, 97, 136, 143; as showpiece, 87; as tourist destination, 3; Western-style houses in, 136– 51, 137(fig.), 142(fig.); zoning laws and building regulations, 97, 144, 159 Italy, and Boxer Uprising, 34 Japan: adoption of Chinese characters, 279n30; advertisements and consumption, 254; and Boxer Uprising, 34–35, 36(fig.); and capitalism, 254; divergence between Japanese and Chinese political understandings of the household, 51– 52; education of women in, 49– 50; family reform, 278n18; “good wife wise mother” ideology, 49; invasion of Tianjin, 236; Japanese middle class and the invention of the modern home, 5, 156; katei as home, 50–51, 278n17, 278n18; kazoku as family, 52; modern kitchens in, 150; post–WWII shortages of goods and housing, 254; and translations of social science texts, 53; women’s magazines, 302n39, 305n19 Japanese Concession (Tianjin), 2, 3, 29; architectural style, 158; Chinese property owners as members of municipal council, 98; and decolonization, 247; as desirable residential district, 82; mixed Chinese-Western styles, 169; mixed-use real estate development, 95, 290n46; Puyi as resident, 198; real estate market, 92; schools, 288n23; shops and restaurants, 228 jia: different meanings of (family, house, household), 10, 20, 47; as house, 131;

and katei, 51; meaning in late imperial era, 19, 191; as political participant, 13; sociopolitical ideology of, in the late imperial era, 18–21, 59, 133–34, 191; transformation into jiating, 9, 12, 48, 191 jian, 132, 294n16 Jianzhu yuekan (The Builder; journal), 147–48 jiaoji, 222–23, 228–29, 241, 243, 308n18. See also social spaces: women and the socializing sphere jiating: affect and, 190 (see also emotions); different meanings of (family, house, home), 11, 48, 51, 222; early use of term, 278n17; as the enemy of society or political center of national reform, 231–32, 237; as family, 191 (see also family); as female-gendered space, 222; as home, 48– 52, 191, 213, 241 (see also home); and multiple social roles of urban women, 230–37; new model of jiating under the CCP, 244, 260– 63; and patriarchal privilege and power under the CCP, 244, 256– 57; relationship between jiating and shehui, 224, 241; as space of personal relations and affections, 240–41; subjectivity and narratives of jiating, 237–40; transformation from jia, 9, 12, 48, 191; as understood by Chinese people rather than political ideologues, 12; and urban elites, 242; and women’s magazines, 52, 195, 213, 237 (see also women’s magazines); word origin, 11, 48– 52. See also home; home life jiating shenghuo, 9, 189. See also home life Jiating zhoukan (The Chinese Home; magazine), 195– 97 jiawu, 258 jiazu, 279n24 “joint” family. See extended/“joint” family

352

Journal of Architecture, 260– 61 Journal of Foreign Policy, 265 Judge, Joan, 50, 278n13 Kailan Mining Administration, 94 Kang Youwei, 49, 54, 58 katei (Japanese word for “home”), 50– 51, 278n17, 278n18 Katei (Shimoda), 51 Keeping the Nation’s House (Schneider), 231 keting, 152, 174. See also drawing room Khrushchev, Nikita, 249, 255 kitchen, 152; appliances and furniture, 173; and courtyard houses, 134, 150; excluded from photographs, 211; and gender and status relations, 150– 51; modern women cooking considered comical, 211–12, 212(fig.); and servants, 150– 51, 211; and Western-style houses, 149(fig.), 150 Knapp, Ronald, 131, 134, 295n23 Ko, Dorothy, 8 Koo, Wellington, 111, 227 Korea, 288n23, 305n19 Koyama Shizuko, 49 kuaile, 256. See also emotions Kuaile jiating (Happy Home; Shanghai magazine). See Happy Home Kuaile jiating (Happy Home; Tianjin magazine), 52, 190, 196; advice columns, 199, 200–201; and affective understanding of home, 204– 5; contrast to Ling long, 209–10; cooking column, 212; and emotional and aspirational aspects of home life, 202–3; and fantasies of home, 203– 5; and global vision of home, 177– 82, 178(fig.), 179(fig.), 180(fig.), 185– 86; kitchens not depicted in, 211; male editors, 305n20; readership of, 177; words for furniture used in, 202 Kuo, Margaret, 104

Index

Kwan Man Bun, 22, 274n14, 289n38 Kwok, D. W. Y., 281n60 Ladies’ Home Journal, 35, 177, 192– 93, 195 Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi), 52 Lady, The (Funü; periodical), 222–23 Lamson, Herbert, 67– 69, 283n77 Lang, Olga, 70–72, 79, 284n94 Lean, Eugenia, 190, 221–22 Ledderose, Lothar, 294n15 Lee, Haiyan, 190 Lee, Rose Hum, 285n112 Lefebvre, Henri, 217 legal practices: civil code of 1929 and 1930, 80– 81, 101– 5, 107– 8, 114, 115, 118; legal practices in foreign concessions, 86, 96– 97 (see also British Municipal Council); legal reforms intended to enhance China’s global standing, 102–3; marriage law of 2011, 267; multiplicity of property laws in Tianjin, 105– 6; property laws under the CCP, 266– 67; property rights of extended families, 101, 107; property rights of men, 97–101; property rights of women, 101–14; sumptuary laws, 295n23; zoning laws and building regulations, 96– 97, 124, 144, 159, 162 Lenin, Vladimir, 83, 85– 86 Lewis, Mark Edward, 24 Liang Qichao, 49, 54, 58, 146, 147(fig.), 198 Liang Sicheng, 146, 160– 61, 297n54, 299n14 Liang you (pictorial magazine), 194, 225 library, 178– 82, 179(fig.), 185, 211, 302n42 Lieberthal, Kenneth, 248 Li Jie, 127–28 Lijin gongsi, 92 Ling long (women’s magazine), 195; advertisements, 269; advice columns, 199; contrast to Kuaile jiating, 209–10;

Index 353

and fantasies of home, 210, 211; images of women in public spaces, 203, 205; meaning of title, 197– 98; modern women cooking considered comical, 211–12, 212(fig.); possession of, as mark of identity, 194; and Shanghai modern style, 209–10; staged interior shots, 206– 8(figs.), 206– 8; wide circulation and preservation of copies, 196– 97; words for furniture used in, 306n29 Lin Sung-ho, 67 literacy, 48, 98, 176, 193, 194, 302n38 Li Tun, 93 Liu, Lydia, 53– 54 Liu Haidi, 238–39 Liu Haiyan, 1–2, 21, 93, 200n23, 305n47 living room, 152, 173, 211 Lu Ban, 129–30, 133 Lu Ban jing (architecture manual), 129–30, 131, 133 Luce, Henry, 194 Lu Hanchao, 297n52 Lu Yanzhi, 146, 159– 60, 297n54 Macartney, George, 27–28 magazines. See women’s magazines magic, practiced by carpenters against employers, 130, 132, 133 Mai Huiting, 69–70 make-up rooms, 211 Mann, Susan, 8 Mao Zedong, 83, 86, 253(fig.), 255, 256, 256(fig.), 257 maps, 30(fig.), 30–31, 84(fig.) marriage, 70; arranged marriages, 296n34; and civil code of 1929 and 1930, 101; concubines and second wives, 46, 75, 77, 78, 300n23; dating, 223–24, 235; marriage law of 2011, 267; matchmaking services, 77–78; and May Fourth Movement, 221; men’s choice of a wife, 235; and social

networks, 227, 309n27; and social status, 138. See also divorce masculinity, 81, 82; and architectural styles, 166; and property ownership, 14, 115–18, 242, 293n114; and scholar gardens, 165 materiality of everyday life, 9; and advertising, 269, 312n36; cosmopolitan domesticity, 165– 66, 183, 185, 188; design, style, and aesthetics of dynasties, 154– 55; positive affect of “good objects,” 190; tension between modernity and degradation, 201–2; and women’s knowledge about the home, 175–77, 184, 199–202; and women’s magazines, 193–202. See also consumption; furniture; home design May Fourth Movement: and concubinage, 75; and ideas about traditional Chinese families, 58, 59, 69, 190, 221; and legal reforms, 103; and public and private domains, 220–21; and small family (xiao jiating) ideology, 55; and women, 221 Matsushita Electronics, 312n36 memoirs, 136–41 men: as editors of women’s magazines, 305n20; knowledge about the home as male-gendered knowledge in imperial China, 192; in large vs. small families, 70; male individual as political unit, 51; “man of the house” vs. “man of the market” (Habermas’s concepts), 190; multiple layers of male identity, 81– 82; and patriarchal power in the Republican era, 81; patriarchal privilege and power under the CCP, 244, 256– 57, 267; and patrilineal succession, 103; political rights tied to property, 13, 97– 99, 115–16, 118; and property disputes, 80– 81; property ownership and masculine identity, 14, 115–18, 242,

354 Index

men (cont.) 293n114; and property rights, 118, 267; and public and private domains, 220; right to manage women’s property, 108; social status marked by housing choice, 7, 94– 95, 145, 157, 293n114; and society as a male-dominated space, 233; and suffrage, 98; as writers for women’s magazines, 197. See also civil servants; gender roles; sons; warlords middle class, Chinese, 14; Chinese words for, 265; and conspicuous consumption, 65– 66; and erasure of historical memory, 3, 264–70; Euro-American class categories not easily mapped onto Chinese society, 6; formation of class identity and the construction of home as mutually constitutive processes, 242; global visions of the modern middle-class home predating self-conscious bourgeois class in China, 188; and home life, 190– 91, 203, 213 (see also home life; women’s magazines); home ownership central to middle-class identity, 3, 246, 264, 266– 67; and housing in Zhejiang, 138, 139; and joint family structure, 239, 284n97; low class consciousness, 6, 7, 156, 188; middle class housing in the post-WWII era, 161; and modern China, 3, 6, 14, 264–70; and singlefamily housing project of 1947, 247; Tianjin’s lack of true bourgeois class, 93, 156; and women’s magazines, 193, 198 (see also women’s magazines). See also urban elites middle class, Japanese, 5, 156 middle class, U.S., 140 Milam, Ava, 56, 68, 283n82 Mill, John Stuart, 52 Ming dynasty, 21–22, 128, 155, 295n23 missionaries, 10, 31–32, 37, 58, 64, 245

modernity, 5, 281n59; “counterhistories” of (Burton’s concept), 12; and diversity of family structures, 75; and feminization of knowledge about the home, 192; global modern style, 209–10; and middle-class urban culture, 6–7; and mixed Western and Chinese temporalities and cultures, 153; and reconstruction of Tianjin’s political center, 44; Shanghai universal modern style, 182; and small family (xiao jiating) ideology, 57, 58, 78–79; and social surveys, 65; tension between modernity and degradation, 201–2; Tianjin modern style, 13, 156, 169–72, 177–78, 182– 88, 209–10; and transformation from jia to jiating, 12 modular home building, 23, 38, 128, 132, 160, 294n15, 295n23 Morse, Hosea Ballou, 42 “mosquito press,” 200, 305– 6n24 Murphy, Henry, 159– 60, 161 Nanjing: capital moved to, 45, 82, 218; Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, 160 Nanjing Decade (1927–1937), 218, 221, 227 Nankai Middle School, 305n22 Nankai University, 161, 249, 268 Nationalist Party. See China, Republican era; Guomindang nei and wai, 17–19, 127. See also inner/outer continuum Neo- Confucianism: denunciation of, 53– 55; and house-building practices, 130–31, 133; interconnected relationship between individual, household, and state, 19–20; ordering of space and inner/outer continuum, 17, 19; reform through cyclical and restorative change, 63; and social hierarchy, 289n38; and sociopolitical ideology of

Index 355

jia in the late imperial era, 19–20, 48, 133. See also Confucianism New China Village (Shanghai), 246 New Culture Movement, 58, 220–21. See also May Fourth Movement Newell, Jane, 55– 56, 58, 280n40 New Youth (Xin qingnian; journal), 58– 59 Niehoff, Johan, 25–27, 26(fig.), 27(fig.) nuclear family: as “conjugal” family, 71; connection to natal household, 72; and developmental theory of family transformation, 57, 70; in Europe, 57; and housing for university faculty vs. workers, 250; as ideal family structure in nationalist ideology, 46, 55, 75, 239–40, 242 (see also xiao jiating ideology); as ideal family structure under the CCP, 259– 60, 263; and Mai Benwen’s ideas about types of families, 70; as marker of and means to modernity, 57; as “marriage” family, 68; and narratives of jiating, 238–39; nationalist calls for modern small families not heeded, 75–76, 239–40; and patriarchal privilege and power under the CCP, 256– 57; and property disputes, 104– 5; size of, 73, 285n108; in the U.S., 285n108; and Westernstyle houses, 148, 150; worker’s village for, 252 nüshi, 226 Ocko, Jonathan, 97 On Liberty (Mill), 52 opium, 40 Opium Wars, 22, 28 Osborne, Ernest, 63 Palmer, Frederick, 35 Park Hotel (Shanghai), 302–3n45 parks, 83, 165, 204, 223, 230, 264 Partner, Simon, 312n36

Pathé Department Store, 228 patriarchy: Confucian patriarchy, 81; patriarchal family relations, 59, 62, 81; patriarchal privilege and power under the CCP, 244, 256– 57, 267; property ownership and patriarchal power in the Republican era, 81 Peffer, Nathaniel, 183–84 People’s Daily Newspaper, 257 People’s Liberation Army, 248 photography, 194– 95; cover girls, 225–27, 230; and fantasies of home, 203–14; and female celebrity, fashion, and beauty, 226; and global modern style, 209–10; images of women in public spaces, 203, 205, 230; kitchens not depicted in women’s magazines, 211; pictorial magazines, 224–27, 229–37 (see also Woman World); as prescriptive, 205; sitting for portraits, 226–27; staged interior shots, 205– 8, 206– 8(figs.); stock photos, 209 police, 44, 75, 89, 90 political rights: and Chinese participation in foreign concession governance, 100–101, 115–16, 291n59; housing as a political right for all citizens, 14, 247–48, 262; and property ownership, 13, 97– 99, 102, 114, 266– 67; of women, 107– 8, 114, 118, 258; and women’s employment, 258 political stability, 17, 19–21, 59, 79 politics of design/style, 154, 157– 62, 175 poor, the, 77; family size, 68, 71; high mortality rate, 71; living arrangements, 65; poor women in Tianjin, 77–78; and public housing, 246, 247 (see also public housing); relationship between income and food purchases, 65, 66. See also working class, Chinese Power, Brian, 288n20 Practical Women’s School (Tokyo), 50

356 Index

Princeton University, 64, 65 private/public space. See public and private domains Problems of Change of the Chinese Family (Jiating gaizao wenti; Mai Huiting), 69–70 propaganda, 252– 58, 253(fig.), 256(fig.), 257– 58 property ownership, 80–119; and dummy corporations, 292n96; and masculine identity, 14, 115–18, 242, 293n114; and middle-class identity, 246; and political rights, 13, 97– 99, 102, 114, 266– 67; property as center of power struggles between colonial powers and Chinese urban elites, 80– 82; shift in cultural understanding of property ownership from family to individual, 101, 103, 104, 108. See also housing; real estate market property rights, 97–114; abolition of private property under the CCP, 260– 62; differing notions of property in China and the West, 97; of extended family, 101, 107; inheritance rights, 103–4; legal protections of private property under the CCP, 266– 67; of men, 97–101, 114, 118, 267; patrilineal succession in the imperial era, 103; property disputes, 104–11; and public utilities, 116–18; shift of rights from family to individual, 97– 98, 103, 115, 118; of women, 13, 80– 81, 101–14, 118, 267; women not guaranteed the right to manage their property, 107– 9 prostitution, 77 public and private domains, 8; development of the public sphere in China, 221–22; distinguished from inner/outer continuum, 17, 19; and gender, subjectivity, and social relations, 220–21; and housing in the Italian

Concession, 144, 151; and nationalist architecture, 160– 61; and real estate development, 95, 97; and shehui, 222; and socialist collectivity, 260; and sociopolitical spaces, 220, 221 public housing: CCP and, 243–44, 251– 52, 256– 57, 266; and collectivization, 259– 62; and Guomindang government of Tianjin, 247–48; neglected in the Republican era, 119, 243–46; and patriarchal privilege and power under the CCP, 256– 57; in postcolonial/CCP era, 246– 52, 259– 63; Tianjin municipal government’s early plans for, 246 Pudong Model Village, 245 Pusey, James Reeve, 279n28 Puyi, deposed Qing emperor, 198, 228 qi, 131 Qianlong emperor, 155 qijujian. See living room qing, 191 Qing dynasty. See China, imperial (late Qing dynasty) Qinghua University, 64 Qiu Jin, 296n33 Qi Yaoshan, 290n44 Rappoport, A. S., 279n24 real estate market, 90– 97, 123–25, 136, 146, 148; and architectural styles, 159; foreign concessions as most desirable location, 82– 83; foreigners priced out of concession housing, 100; and gender inequality, 267, 269; housing shortages, 119, 210, 244–48; and investors, 87, 92– 93, 146, 159, 245, 267, 270; lack of middle- and lower-end housing, 245; public housing neglected in the Republican era, 243; remarketization of housing in Tianjin under the CCP, 266– 68; renters and

Index 357

rental property, 87, 95– 96, 116, 123, 136, 142–43, 243, 244, 297n52; in Shanghai, 95– 96, 210, 245–46, 297n52; subletting, 65, 67, 95, 96. See also housing; property ownership Reid, Susan, 255 renters and rental property, 87, 95– 96, 116, 123, 136, 142–43, 243, 244, 297n52 restaurants, 3, 14, 40, 228, 240, 241, 300n23 Riche Café, 228 rituals, 24, 102, 117, 130, 132, 133, 134, 213 riyong leishu (encyclopedias), 192 Rockefeller Foundation, 64, 282n62 Rogaski, Ruth, 41 romance, 223–24 Rong-qing, 278n13 Rongye gongsi, 93 Rong Yuan, 93 rooflines, 159, 160 Ruitenbeek, Klaas, 128–30, 131, 298n57 Ruskola, Teemu, 86 Russia, and Boxer Uprising, 34. See also Soviet Union Russian Concession (Tianjin), 29, 32, 44, 156 Rybczynski, Witold, 209, 302n42 salt merchants, 19, 24, 93, 94, 274n14, 289n38 salt trade, 22 Sand, Jordan, 5, 50– 51, 156, 278n18 Sanger, Margaret, 69, 283n86 sanitation, 40–41, 116–17 Scanlon, Jennifer, 192– 93 Schneider, Helen, 231 schools, 44, 77, 176, 260, 305n22; and education of women in Japan, 49– 50; in foreign concessions, 88– 89, 288n23; night schools, 77, 176, 286n117, 302n38 Schwarcz, Vera, 58 scientism, 281n60

semi-colony, Tianjin as, 83, 85– 86 servants, 141; and courtyard houses, 134, 140, 141, 150, 152; and the “economic family,” 67; and kitchens/cooking, 150– 51, 211–12; living arrangements, 65; and Western-style houses, 140, 150 sexual harassment, 234 shafa, 202, 306n29. See also sofas Shakai mondai jiten (Takabatake), 279n24 Shanghai: class consciousness in, 6; department stores, 255; and the “economic family,” 67; family size in, 68; foreign concessions, 29; furniture stores, 172; housing crisis, 210, 245–46; “model village” in Pudong district, 245; popular press in, 195–200; real estate market, 95– 96, 210, 245–46, 297n52; subletting in, 67; tallest building, 302n45; and universal modern style, 182; urban development in, 95– 96; women’s magazines, 182, 194, 195– 98 (see also Ling long) Shanghai changshi (Common Knowledge; journal), 200 shangliang (ridge pole), 132 shehui, 54, 219, 222, 224, 229–31, 241, 243. See also society shehui diwei, 229, 232. See also social status Shehui ju (Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs), 76–78, 246, 247, 285n105, 286n116, 302n38 Shehuixue yuanli (Sun Benwen), 69 shejiao chang, 235. See also social spaces: women and the socializing sphere Shen Yiyun, 136–41, 143, 150, 152, 153, 295n28, 296n33, 296n42 Shih Shu-mei, 182 shimin (city people), 247–48 Shimoda Utako, 50– 52, 278n13, 278n17 siheyuan, 24, 132. See also courtyard houses Sims and Company, 172–74, 301n30

358 Index

single-family houses, 1, 95, 96, 143, 169, 238, 243, 245– 52, 267. See also Westernstyle houses Sino-Japanese War, 29, 53, 232 sitting rooms, 207(fig.), 211 Skinner, William, 91 small family ideology. See xiao jiating ideology Smith, Adam, 52 Social Bureau. See Bureau of Social Affairs social capital. See cultural capital social class: and ability to change residences throughout life, 138; delineated by education, 176; and employment of women, 233; formation of class identity and the construction of home as mutually constitutive processes, 242; and property ownership, 82; as a social process rather than a category, 7; and social spaces, 227, 228, 241 (see also social spaces); and social surveys, 283n82 (see also social science: social surveys); and taste/ style, 156– 57 (see also home design); and women’s magazines, 177. See also middle class, Chinese; social status; urban elites; working class, Chinese social Darwinism, 10, 53, 58, 279n28 socialism. See China, People’s Republic; Chinese Communist Party social practices: female social agency, 14, 230–37 (see also social spaces); and furniture, 202–3, 306n32; and housing, 13, 125 social progress, 66, 69, 72. See also ideology; modernity; social science social relations: and colonial-capitalist system, 156; disconnected from social spaces, 55, 64, 79; and international relations, 224; and Japanese concept of katei, 51; in the late imperial era, 10, 17, 20–21, 47, 133–34; and meanings of

jiating, 48; and narratives of jiating, 237–40; and public and private domains, 220; reconnected to social spaces under the CCP, 260; in the Republican era, 11, 18, 55, 64, 70, 79, 135, 148, 176, 220–21, 237–40; in socialist China, 260– 62; spatial regulation of, within the house, 133–35, 148, 150; and transitional families, 70; and women’s magazines, 198. See also patriarchy social science: developmental theory of family transformation, 57, 59, 76; the family as laboratory for, 63–72; foreign funding for, 61, 64, 282n62; global social science and Chinese intellectuals, 52– 55, 64; myth of backward extended Chinese family transformed into social science fact, 55– 63; as political ideology, 53; science used to discredit traditional values, 53, 281n60; social surveys, 48, 64– 66, 68–70, 72–76, 234, 283n77, 283n82, 285n104, 285n105, 285n107, 286n116, 290n42; training of Chinese social scientists, 64, 282n63 social spaces, 14, 217–41; cosmologies of sociopolitical space, 219–24; identity formation in the public spaces of work under the CCP, 257; jiaoji women, 222–24, 226, 228, 241; jiating, shehui, and jiaoji, 222–23, 229, 241, 243; and multiple social roles of urban women, 230–37; new understanding of jiating under the CCP, 244, 260– 63; and public and private domains, 220–22 (see also public and private domains); and salt merchants, 289n38; and social class, 227, 241, 243; women and the socializing sphere, 14, 224–29, 235, 240–41, 242; women and the social sphere, society, and home, 14, 229–37, 240–41; women and the workplace, 233–34, 241, 243

Index 359

social status, 5; Chinese term for, 229, 232; and Confucianism, 295n23; and conspicuous consumption, 65– 66; and courtyard houses, 150; and danwei system, 266; discussions in Woman World, 229–37; and educational and cultural capital of women, 176 (see also cultural capital); and exterior house design, 7, 157; and family and home, 14; and feminization of knowledge about the home, 192; and furniture, 174; hierarchies within housing complexes, 250– 51; and housing, 7, 94– 95, 125, 145, 157, 293n114; and housing assignment under the CCP, 250– 51, 262– 63, 266; and interior home design, 7, 176, 192– 93; and marriage, 138; in Neo- Confucian social order, 289n38; and possession of women’s magazines, 194; and process of “distinction” (Bourdieu’s idea), 7; and social sphere, 228; status within houses, 133–34, 150; and sumptuary laws, 295n23; and taste/style, 156– 57, 174– 84; and Western-style houses, 150. See also identity; social class society: Chinese term for, 54, 222 (see also shehui); debates over home and society in Woman World, 229–37; as maledominated space, 233; and multiple social roles of urban women, 230–37; as new concept in Chinese intellectual thought, 52, 219; women and society, home, and the social sphere, 14, 229–37, 240–41 Society for Chinese Architects, 146 Society for Renewal (Zuoxin she; publishing house), 50, 278n14 sofas, 172–74, 202–3 Song dynasty, 127, 155, 294n12, 295n23 Song Shaopeng, 257 Song sisters, 296n34, 309n27

sons: and CCP propaganda posters, 256; chambers for, in courtyard compounds, 134, 138; and Happy Home magazine, 198; and household as a state, 62; and inheritance rights, 103; and marriage, 235; and “stem” family, 71 Soviet Union, 249, 252, 254, 255 space: ancient Chinese concentric ordering of the universe, 24; Chinese projection of power through place, 46; cyclical modes of, 46; and deconstruction and reconstruction of Tianjin, 41–45; Euro-American projection of power through height, 46; Euro-American public/private distinction, 8, 17 (see also public and private domains); flexible living spaces in courtyard houses, 150, 210; ignored in xiao jiating discourse, 17; NeoConfucian cosmological ordering system, 17, 42–43; social spaces of Tianjin, 217–41 (see also social spaces); traditional building ideals, 42–43, 45–46, 124. See also feng shui principles; inner/outer continuum staircases, 149(fig.), 150 standard of living, surveys on, 65– 67, 283n77 Staunton, George, 26–27 Steinhardt, Nancy, 45 “stem” family, 71, 150, 285n99 stone screen, 126(fig.), 127 subjectivity, 14, 190; and escapist fantasies of home, 14, 213–14; and material spaces and objects of home, 13; and narratives of jiating, 237–40; and public and private domains, 220–21 subletting, 65, 67, 95, 96 sumptuary laws, 295n23 Sun Benwen, 69 Sung Sik, 141– 51, 153

360

Sung Sik house, 141–46, 148– 51, 149(fig.) Sun Xiuying, 239 Sun Yat-sen, 83, 86, 278n13, 309n27 Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, 160 Su Qing, 236–37 surveys. See social science: social surveys tables, 150, 172, 175, 306n32 Tai Chong and Company, 172 taitai, 221, 227 Taiwan, 129, 288n23 Takabatake, Motoyuki, 279n24 tang. See halls Tang Shaoyi, 111 tangyi, 202–3, 306n29. See also sofas Tang Yulin, 290n44 Tao, L. K. (Tao Menghe), 67, 68, 138, 281n53 taste, personal: female taste, 174– 84, 192; and furniture, 173; and identity, 162–74; rooftop pavilions, 162, 163(fig.), 164, 164(fig.), 164– 66; shift from taste as aspect of male identity to taste as domain of female knowledge, 175; and social status, 156– 57, 192. See also home design Teakle, S. G., 99–100 TEDA. See Tianjin Economic Technological Development Area Temple of Heaven (Beijing), 43 Tenney, C. D., 44, 92 theaters, 230 Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen), 65– 66 Thin, George, 33 Thornton, Arland, 57, 61 Tianjin, 27(fig.), 30(fig.); address conventions, 303n47; architecture of (see architecture and building practices); and Boxer Uprising, 32–35, 36(fig.), 37–43; chemical explosions of 2015, 264– 66; as city of multiple

Index

centers, 45; city’s residents’ perception of their city, 183; colonial-capitalist system, 81– 91, 95– 97, 100, 105, 115–18, 135, 146, 156, 162, 166, 184, 243, 248; colonialism as both multiple and partial in, 18, 81, 83, 85– 86, 158; Communist takeover (1949), 248; and concentric ordering of space, 24; confrontations with foreign intruders, 31–38; as cosmopolitan city, 88 (see also cosmopolitanism); and decolonization, 246–47; deconstruction and reconstruction under colonial powers, 18, 25, 31, 41–45, 48, 218; drum tower, 23, 24, 42(fig.); elite residents (see urban elites); establishment of foreign concessions, 29; and fen shui principles, 21, 23; foreign accounts of, 25–28; foreign concessions (see British Concession; foreign concessions; German Concession; Italian Concession; Japanese Concession; Russian Concession); geography of, 21, 30–31, 93– 94; governance of (see governance of Tianjin); history of, 21–25, 218; housing crisis, 244–48; hygiene and sanitation in, 41, 116–18; imperial yamen (administrative building), 23, 24, 30; Japanese invasion, 236; lack of guilds and unions, 297n56; and legal practices of extra-territoriality, 86– 87; maps, 30(fig.), 30–31, 84(fig.); middleclass housing in the post–WWII era, 161; as military garrison and trading hub, 18, 22, 218; new economic center of, 94; new municipal district, 44, 94, 154, 170–71(figs.), 217–18, 220; partial sovereignty of, 81; pictorial magazines, 224–25; and politics of design, 155– 56; population statistics, 82, 123; and post–Boxer Uprising foreign occupation, 37–43; postcolonial

Index 361

preservation of European architecture, 3–4; public housing, neglected in the Republican era, 243–46; public’s memory of colonial past, 3, 264–70; real estate market, 90– 97, 146, 267– 68 (see also real estate market); reputation as conservative and conventional, 218–19; schools, 44, 77, 88– 89, 176, 288n23, 305n22; as site for investment, 45 (see also investors); social spaces in, 217–41 (see also social spaces); surveys on municipal workers and families, 72–76; transition from Guomindang to CCP governance, 248; as treaty-port city, 4, 18, 28–31, 82– 83; and unraveling of Qing authority, 39–43; urban planning (see urban planning); violent confrontations with colonial powers, 32–35; walls, 22–23, 24, 30; walls removed by colonial powers, 41–43; water, 41, 116–18; women’s magazines, 195– 96 (see also Kuaile jiating); working class, 94; Xin Hebei qu (municipal complex), 154, 170–71(figs.), 217, 220 Tianjin Economic Technological Development Area (TEDA), 264 Tianjin funü ribao (Tianjin Woman Weekly; magazine), 196 Tianjin Incident (1870), 32–33 Tianjin modern style, 13, 156, 169–72, 177–78, 182– 88, 209–10 Tianjin Native City Water Works, 116–17 Tianjin Provisional Government (TPG), 38–45, 91, 98, 276n55, 276n59 Tianjin Social Bureau. See Bureau of Social Affairs Tianjin University, 250, 262 Tientsin Land Investment Company, 91– 92 ting. See halls Tong, Edith, 227 Tong Chang, Isabel, 108–14, 113(fig.), 224–25, 227

Tong Lam, 281n59 Tosh, John, 293n114 townhouses, 46, 123, 141, 145(fig.), 148 TPG. See Tianjin Provisional Government Tsin, Michael, 54, 220 United States: advertisements and consumption, 254; and architectural styles in China, 159; and Boxer Uprising, 34; and capitalism, 254; Chinese students in, 58, 282n63; concessions in China, 29, 44; consumption of objects and styles of imperialism, 165– 66; modern kitchens in, 150; post–WWII shortages of goods and housing, 254; promotion of changes in Chinese society, 64; and single-family house ideal, 249; size of nuclear families, 285n108; and women’s rights, 114 urban elites, 4; celebrity elites, 198, 226, 227, 228; choice of housing, 123– 53; and combining old and new, 46 (see also Tianjin modern style); and conspicuous consumption, 65– 66; as cosmopolitan class, 4, 138, 139; and cultural capital, 7, 145, 157, 176, 192– 93, 227–28, 269; and development of Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system, 82– 91 (see also capitalism); diversity of family structures, 75; and dwelling in the world, 13–14, 137; education as form of self-cultivation rather than national improvement, 236–37; employment of elite women, 233–34, 243; family size, 68– 69, 71; formation of class identity and the construction of home as mutually constitutive processes, 242; houses named by, 292n90; housing prioritized for, 245; income gap between urban elites and working class in Tianjin, 142; jiaoji women, 222–24, 226, 228, 241; and marriage

362

urban elites (cont.) (see divorce; marriage); multiple forms of economic, social, and cultural capital, 227–28; multiple social roles of urban women, 230–37; and personal taste, 162–74; photographs of, 113(fig.), 197, 225–27, 230; and political rights (see political rights); and privileges of jiating as house and home, 242; and property ownership (see property ownership); and property rights (see property rights); and real estate investment, 87, 92– 93, 146, 159, 245, 267, 270; and social spaces, 217–41 (see also social spaces); and social status (see social status); and standard of living, 66; types of elites, 198, 218; and women’s magazines (see women’s magazines) urban planning, 300n19; foreign urban planning in Tianjin, 44; imperial era (late Qing dynasty), 44, 46, 91, 136, 162, 217, 220–21; Republican era, 218, 220, 247–48. See also architecture and building practices; public housing Veblen, Thorstein, 65– 66 violence, 31–37 wai. See nei and wai walls: and courtyard compounds, 24, 28; as signifiers for imperial cities, 22–23, 28, 41–43; Tianjin’s walls, 22–24, 30; Tianjin’s walls removed by colonial powers, 41–43; wall hangings, 177, 181, 205, 302n43, 306n32 Wang Hui, 53, 266– 67, 281n60 Wang Zheng, 221 Warlord Era (1916–1928), 82, 218 warlords, 82, 166, 188; location of housing, 94, 95, 200n23; and personal taste, 164; and property ownership, 269; and

Index

real estate investment, 93; social status marked by housing choice, 7, 157 water, 41; water issue in British Concession, 116–18 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 52 Wen-hsi Yeh, 6 Western-style houses, 136– 51, 137(fig.), 142(fig.), 149(fig.); compared to courtyard houses, 148, 210; elements of, 148– 50; and gender and status relations, 150; and modern family ideal, 148, 150; photographs of interiors (see photography); single-purpose rooms in, 210–11; and women’s magazines, 178– 80. See also single-family houses; specific rooms Who’s Who in China, 139–40 widows, 81, 103–4 window curtains, 145, 201 windows, 145, 201 Woman World (Funü xin duhui; magazine): cover girls, 230; dates of publication, 196; debates over home and society, 229–37; and female education, 231; founding of, 231; goal of, 231; and jiating as the enemy of society or political center of national reform, 231–32, 237; and multiple social roles of urban women, 230–37, 269; photographs of local women, 197, 203; photographs of women in the kitchen, 211; readership of, 233 women: as career women vs. wives and mothers, 221, 230–34; celebrity, fashion, and beauty, 226, 235; Chinese terms for, 226; Chinese women in Japanese schools, 50; and civil code of 1929 and 1930, 80– 81, 101– 5, 107– 8, 114, 115, 118; cover girls, 225–27, 230; cultural and educational capital of, 7, 145, 157, 176, 192– 93, 227–28, 269; current status, 258, 267, 269; dating,

Index 363

223–24, 235; economic roles, 19, 234; education of, 48– 52, 176, 231, 236–37, 286n117; elite women identified through husbands and fathers, 227; employment of (see employment); and family size, 68–70; and feminization of knowledge, 14, 175, 188, 192– 93, 197–202; and filial piety, 59; footbinding, 49, 236; as fun to be around vs. as competent household managers, 235; gender roles (see gender roles); “good wife wise mother” ideology in Japan, 49; identity (see identity); and inner/ outer (nei and wai) continuum, 17, 19–21; and Japanese invasion, 236; jiaoji women, 222–24, 226, 228, 241; knowledge about the home as female-gendered knowledge, 14, 175–77, 184, 192– 93, 199–202, 242; knowledge acquired through women’s magazines (see women’s magazines); in late imperial era, 18–21; marginalization of Chinese women’s history, 8; mastery of knowledge about the home, 175–77, 184, 188, 242; matchmaking services, 77–78; and May Fourth Movement, 221; municipal government services for, 77; and negative views of traditional Chinese family, 56, 59 (see also under family); oppression of, 11, 56, 81, 236, 238, 240; as “parasites,” 257, 258; political rights, 107– 8, 114, 118; political roles, 19, 102; and poverty, 77; and property disputes, 80– 81, 106–11; and property rights, 13, 80– 81, 101–14, 118, 267; and ritual practices in the house, 19, 102; sexual harassment, 234; social agency, 14, 230–37 (see also social spaces); and social status, 7, 14 (see also social status); and sociopolitical ideology of jia in the late imperial era, 18–21; and

state-led patriarchy of the CCP, 257; status of women as yardstick for civilization and modernity, 102; subjectivity of, 14, 237–40 (see also subjectivity); and taste/style, 174– 84, 188; “woman question” of the late imperial era, 49; as writers for women’s magazines, 197. See also daughters; divorce; gender roles; housewives; marriage; widows women’s magazines, 12–14, 192–202, 224–29, 269; advertisements, 230, 269; advice columns, 192, 194, 199–202; and fantasies of home, 14, 193, 199, 201, 203–13; and feminization of knowledge, 14, 175, 188, 192– 93, 197–202; and home design and social identities and relations, 175, 176; home design styles promoted in, 177– 82, 179– 80(figs.); and the home as a site for happiness, 190; images of women in public spaces, 203, 205; in Japan, 302n39; and jiating as home, 52; kitchens not depicted in, 211; list of, 194– 96; male and female writers, 197; male editors, 305n20; and marriage, 235; as material culture, 193–202; and photography, 194– 95, 197, 205– 8, 206– 8(figs.), 230; possession of, as mark of identity, 194; readership in China, 177, 197, 198; readership in Japan, 302n39, 305n19; Shanghai magazines, 182, 195 (see also Ling long); and society, home, and the social sphere, 229–37; staged interior shots, 205– 8, 206– 8(figs.); Tianjin magazines, 195– 96, 229–37 (see also Kuaile jiating; Woman World) Wong, Anna May, 226 working class, Chinese: class boundaries and female workers, 233–34, 241; class consciousness, 6; and the “economic

364

working class, Chinese (cont.) family,” 67; education/night schools for working-class women, 77, 176, 286n117, 302n38; excluded from foreign concession housing, 96, 244–45; family size and structure, 67, 68, 284n97; and housing crisis, 244–45; housing for, under the CCP, 249– 52; housing for, neglected in the Republican era, 243–45; income gap between urban elites and working class in Tianjin, 142; location and type of housing for working-class people, 94, 243, 249, 252; relationship between income and food purchases, 65; and social surveys, 72–76, 286n116; women’s magazines not read by, 177, 197. See also public housing working class, Japanese, 302n39, 305n19 working class, U.S., 140 work units, and housing. See danwei system of housing World War I, 82 World War II, 246–47, 254 Wright, Gwendolyn, 157, 200n19, 299n7 Wu Huaijiu, 278n13 xiao jiating ideology (small family ideology), 11, 17–18, 46, 55, 57, 58, 60, 78–79, 239, 242, 260, 262. See also family; nuclear family xiaojie, 226 xiaokang shuiping, 265– 66 xiaolaobaixing, 265– 66 Xin funü (magazine), 196 xingfu, 256. See also emotions Xin hebei qu, 154, 170–71(figs.), 217, 220 Xin Liliang, 252– 54 Xu Pu’an, 134–36, 153, 290n42

Index

Xu Pu’an house, 125–27, 126(fig.), 128–30(figs.), 134–36, 150, 153, 166– 69, 167– 68(figs.), 200n23 Yale-in- China Program, 159 yamen, 23, 24, 30, 93 Yan Fu, 52– 53, 54, 58, 280n34 Yang, S. K., 67, 68 Yanjing University, 64, 65, 68, 282n61 Yao Changzu, 297n53 Yeho Yuen Restaurant, 228 Yiboshen Zhuyi (Ibsenism), 59– 60 Yingzao fashi (architectural manual), 127–28, 160 Yin Meibo, 196, 229–31, 235, 309n34 Yinong Xu, 23, 43 YMCA, 64, 65, 159, 245 Yongle emperor, 21 Yongzheng emperor, 22 Yuan Hu, 224 Yuan Shikai, 43–44, 46, 92, 98, 140 Zao Jiuyou, 116 Zelin, Madeleine, 19, 97 Zhang Ailing, 194, 236–37 Zhang Baixi, 278n13 Zhang Mei, 238, 240 Zhang Tinge, 290n44 Zhang Zhidong, 278n13 Zhejiang, 138, 139 zhezhong (transitional) family, 70 Zhongguo jianzhu (The Chinese Architect; journal), 146 Zhou Enlai, 268, 305n22 Zhou Longguang, 290n44 Zhu Xi, 19 zoning laws and building regulations, 96– 97, 124, 144, 159, 162 zuoshi, 258 zuo yifu, 258