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"Poon, Shuk-wah"
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Embodying Maoism: The swimming craze, the Mao cult, and body politics in Communist China, 1950s–1970s
Mao Zedong's historic swim in the Yangtze River on 16 July 1966, which heralded a new phase of the Cultural Revolution, was a carefully staged political performance and a notable example of body politics in Communist China. Beginning in the late 1950s, Mao began to broadcast the idea that he was a keen swimmer and to convince the masses to take up swimming. The swim was the climax of those efforts and an integral part of the Mao cult. Swimming in Mao's China offers a useful lens for understanding the close relationship between sports, the body, and politics. Swimming was a means for Mao to mobilize mass support for his political authority and a venue for the masses to practise and perform Maoism. This article examines the constructive process and meanings of Mao's swimming body, and the extent to which the bodies of the populace were regulated through the mass-swimming craze. Drawing on untapped archival materials related to mass swimming in Mao's China, this article argues that swimming both solidified and destabilized the Mao cult and became a venue through which political values were shaped, indoctrinated, contested, and repudiated.
Journal Article
Thriving Under an Anti-Superstition Regime: The Dragon Mother Cult In Yuecheng, Guangdong, During The 1930s
China's quest for modernity since the early twentieth century has put popular religion in a vulnerable situation. A large number of temples were demolished or converted for other purposes in the Republican period as a result of the campaigns against \"superstition.\" Interestingly, during the 1930s, the popularity of the \"ancestral temple\" of the Dragon Mother (Longmu 龍母) located on the northern bank of the West River in Guangdong did not merely continue but flourished. This article explains the various factors that helped promote the expansion of the Dragon Mother cult, including the inconsistencies in government policies towards popular religion, the importance of the annual pilgrimage to the Dragon Mother for the regional economy and government revenue, and the development of the modern means of transportation. The concluding part examines the importance of this case study in rethinking the issue of rural-urban divide in Republican China.
Journal Article
Cholera, Public Health, and the Politics of Water in Republican Guangzhou
Along with the establishment of the Department of Public Health in 1912, the implementation of public health policies became an integral part of city management in Republican Guangzhou. Yet the cholera outbreak of 1932 fully exposed the weaknesses of the medical and sanitary infrastructure of the city. Due to the Guangzhou government's inaction, the Fangbian Hospital, a local charitable hall founded in response to the bubonic plague of the 1890s, involuntarily took over the major responsibility for providing medical services for cholera patients in the early stage of the epidemic. Only after the death of hundreds of patients and Guangzhou being described as a ‘world of horror’ in the local press did the government-run hospital start to take a more active role. Epidemics have always served as catalysts for change in public health perceptions and practices. This paper attempts to explain how the cholera epidemic of 1932 changed the role of public health in the urban administration of the city. Emphasis is placed on analysing how the people of Guangzhou began to fight for a supply of clean drinking water once they came to realize the link between water and the spread of the fatal cholera epidemic in 1932. Clean water, which used to be seen as a commodity enjoyed by the privileged few, was now increasingly regarded as a citizen's right.
Journal Article
Refashioning Festivals in Republican Guangzhou
Influenced by the concept of evolution, the Republican regime branded popular religious beliefs and practices as \"superstition,\" believing that the eradication of \"superstition\" was crucial to the making of modern citizens. Government policies not only affected the development of popular religion but also reshaped the relationship between the state and the common people. Tracing the changes of the Double Seven Festival and the Ghost Festival in Republican Guangzhou, this article aims to show the complexities of the contestations between the state and the common people in actual religious settings, particularly the interaction between official culture and traditional festivals. It argues that although new national symbols successfully found their way into common people's religious lives, helping to give a nationalistic outlook to traditional festivals, underneath the expansion of an official culture, a rich variety of local traditions persisted. By appropriating official symbols, the common people refashioned and preserved their religious traditions.
Journal Article
Religion, Modernity, and Urban Space: The City God Temple in Republican Guangzhou
This article examines the impact of the Nationalist regime's modernizing project on the religious landscape and people's public behavior in Republican Guangzhou. In the transformation of the Guangzhou City God Temple, urban space became a place of contest between the government's modernizing project and urban people's religious traditions. In 1931, the municipal government converted the City God Temple into the Native Goods Exhibition Hall, a political space that attempted to foster patriotic consumption among the populace. Yet, beneath the surface, the people of Guangzhou continued to treat the \"exhibition hall\" as a religious space for expressing their faith in their patron god. While the government was doubtless an importance force in modernizing the urban landscape, the city's people managed to inscribe their values onto the urban public space.
Journal Article
Religion, Modernity, and Urban Space
This article examines the impact of the Nationalist regime's modernizing project on the religious landscape and people's public behavior in Republican Guangzhou. In the transformation of the Guangzhou City God Temple, urban space became a place of contest between the government's modernizing project and urban people's religious traditions. In 1931, the municipal government converted the City God Temple into the Native Goods Exhibition Hall, a political space that attempted to foster patriotic consumption among the populace. Yet, beneath the surface, the people of Guangzhou continued to treat the 'exhibition hall' as a religious space for expressing their faith in their patron god. While the government was doubtless an important force in modernizing the urban landscape, the city's people managed to inscribe their values onto the urban public space. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2008.]
Journal Article
Faiths on Display: Religion, Tourism, and the Chinese State
The endeavour to examine religion and tourism in China together, in the editors' words, provides a useful lens for understanding \"the state's struggles, dilemmas, and negotiations to maintain authority during a time of profound social transformation\" (13). With nine articles plus an introduction by the editors and an afterword by Rubie Watson, the book is an outcome of combined efforts of anthropologists, historians, a political scientist and a human geographer.
Journal Article
Refashioning popular religion: Common people and the state in republican Guangzhou, 1911–1937
In its search for a modern China after the 1911 Revolution, the Nationalist regime not only mobilized public resources to strengthen the regime's administrative, financial, and military control over society, but also strove to nurture a new official culture in order to foster citizens' allegiance to the nation. Scholarship on the relationship between state and local society tends to emphasize how modern nation-states' dissemination of political ideology and urban values breaks down local cultural beliefs and leads to the homogenization of people's behavior and thoughts. By unfolding the process of state expansion into the domain of popular religion in Republican Guangzhou from the experiences of the grassroots people, this dissertation argues that official values and symbols did not dominate popular religion. Facing the expansion of state culture that stressed the modern ideas of “evolution,” “science,” and “anti-superstition,” common people resisted by refashioning popular religion into state-approved forms of existence. Thus, the infiltration of national symbols into society did not necessarily mean the replacement of local traditions by national culture. Instead of being integrated into the national culture advocated by the political authority, common people in fact preserved their local traditions underneath the surface of cultural integration. By refashioning their own religion into state-approved forms, the common people at the same time refashioned the meanings and representations of national culture in local society.
Dissertation