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Building New China, Colonizing Kokonor: Resettlement to Amdo and Qinghai in the 1950s examines rural resettlement to the Sino-Tibetan cultural borderlands in the 1950s.More than 100,000 eastern Han and Hui Chinese were sent to Qinghai province--known in Mongolian as Kokonor and Amdo to Tibetans--to plow up new fields in areas that were being.

From less than three dozen in 1949, the number of small hydropower stations in the People’s Republic of China grew to nearly ninety thousand by 1979. By the early 1980s, these stations were distributed across nearly 1,600 of China’s 2,300 counties. In 770 counties, small hydropower was the primary source of rural electricity generation. This article offers a history and assessment of these developments, unsettling our traditional emphasis on large-scale hydroelectricity. The article begins by reconstructing the PRC’s enormous investments in small hydropower from the 1950s to the early 1980s. This reconstruction, the first of its kind in the English language, not only helps reassess key periods and events in the history of the PRC but also establishes the position of small hydropower in the hydraulic history of the twentieth century. The article then turns to a discussion of the claimed impacts of small hydropower. As electricity became available for the first time in many parts of the Chinese countryside, it affected patterns of economic and social activity for hundreds of millions of people. Finally, the paper explores what the case of small hydropower can offer to conceptual and theoretical problems surrounding development, innovation, and the environment. Returning to the long-standing debate over scale and development, China’s experience with small hydropower reminds us of the important role played by smaller-scale, appropriate, and self-reliant technologies in global energy history.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a frequent claim among speakers of local Chinese languages (called fangyan in Chinese) is that their native languages preserve the language of antiquity better than the Beijing-based national language, Mandarin. This paper explores the origin of these claims and probes their significance in the making of the Han ethnoracial collective identity. I argue that claims of linguistic proximity to the imagined ancient origins of Chinese civilization represent a form of “hegemonic Han-ness”—an idealized form of the Han collective identity that was both internally hegemonic, in that it was meant to supersede other expressions of Han-ness, and externally hegemonic, in that it was meant to uphold the superiority of the Han people over other ethnoracial groups. From Zhang Taiyan, whose work provided a model for drawing linguistic connections between contemporary local languages and the language spoken at the dawn of Chinese civilization, to local gazetteer authors, who used linguistic data to prove their mother tongues directly had preserved the language of antiquity without being adulterated by the languages of non-Han peoples, this paper explores how various groups drew upon the cultural power of an idealized Han-centered past to challenge the authority afforded to the national language by the state.

This paper explores the intricate interactions between heritage and religion in modern China, as well as the broader social and political implications of these interactions in relation to national heritage policies and local developmental practices. By conducting a longitudinal analysis of the social history of Baosheng Temple, this research traces its transformations over the past hundred years from a historically religious site to a local built heritage dedicated to preserving and displaying religious relics. This transformation highlights a shift in the role of religious relics from carriers of practice and thought to focal points for heritage preservation, aimed at supporting nation-building and, more recently, promoting local development through the tourism industry. These changes reflect continuous local responses to broader social transformations towards a modern nation-state as well as the influence of Western ideas and practices. The findings of this research illuminate the evolving values associated with religious heritage and the corresponding implications for Chinese modernity within a secular state context.

This essay analyzes recent discourse on two emerging representations of women in China, \"tender\" women (nennu) and \"ripe\" women (shunu), in order to examine the relationships among gender, body politics, and consumerism. The discourse of nennu and shunu suggests that older, ripe women become younger and more tender by consuming fashions, cosmetic surgery technologies, and beauty and health care products and services because tender women represent the ideal active consumership that celebrates beauty, sexuality, and individuality. This discourse serves to enhance consumers' desire for beauty and health and to ensure the continued growth of China's beauty economy and consumer capitalism. Highlighting the role of the female body, feminine beauty, and feminine youth in developing consumerism, this discourse downplays the contributions of millions of beauty and health care providers (predominantly laid-off female workers and rural migrant women) and new forms of gender exploitation. Such an overemphasis on gender masks intensified class division. This essay suggests that women and their bodies become new terrains from which post-Mao China can draw its power and enact consumerism. Gender constitutes both an economic multiplier to boost China's consumer capitalism and a biopolitical strategy to regulate and remold women and their bodies into subjects that are identified with the state's political and economic objectives. Since consumerism has been incorporated into China's nation-building project, gender thus becomes a vital resource for both consumer capitalist development and nation building. This essay shows that both gender and the body are useful analytic categories for the study of postsocialism.

In this path-breaking book, Tong Lam examines the emergence of the \"culture of fact\" in modern China, showing how elites and intellectuals sought to transform the dynastic empire into a nation-state, thereby ensuring its survival. Lam argues that an epistemological break away from traditional modes of understanding the observable world began around the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the Neo-Confucian school of evidentiary research and the modern departure from it, Lam shows how, through the rise of the social survey, \"the fact\" became a basic conceptual medium and source of truth. In focusing on China's social survey movement, A Passion for Facts analyzes how information generated by a range of research practices—census, sociological investigation, and ethnography—was mobilized by competing political factions to imagine, manage, and remake the nation.

This essay studies how the government of the Republic of China attempted to reterritorialize Taiwan as a part of modern China, following Japanese colonization, by examining the first editions of postwar gazetteers for Taiwan's major cities. This genre historically played an important role in the assertion of control by China's dynasties and in efforts by local elites to shape official knowledge and policies, and these editions on Taiwan's cities were some of the first dedicated city gazetteers produced in the twentieth century. The essay argues that these texts were among several important tools that the state used to project its Chinese nation-state onto Taiwan, by linking urban Taiwan to China's history and envisioning future cities that would be the basis of the nation. Versions of these future cities gradually took shape, but they did so more within the context of Taiwanization than of Sinification.

The origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia are most often located in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in the late 1940s. Historians sometimes trace its origins to Japan's expansionist phase in the 1930s, which accelerated the decline of the European and American colonial order in this part of Asia. However, the necessity of the fight against communism appeared very clearly in the minds of the leaders of the major colonial powers well before the 1930s. Focused on the case of Siam, this article aims to show that the origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia dated back to as early as the 1920s with the emergence of international cooperation in the fight against communism and the Thai elite's manipulation of imperialist powers to further their own political agenda and support their dominance in the domestic political arena. The Cold War in Southeast Asia was not only about the postwar fight against the spread of communism, but also closely intertwined with the decolonisation and nation-building efforts of every country in the region — including of the so-called un-colonised Thailand.

This article examines the development of the Chinese discourse on consumption and standards of living from the early twentieth century to the implementation of the New Life Movement in the mid-1930s. During this period, the idea that China's economy was characterized by scarcity rather than growth—and thus was experiencing a different level of development from the industrialized West—caused Chinese intellectuals and officials to question the wisdom of adopting Western-style consumerist habits and “extravagant” standard of living. In this context, they struggled to find a balance between a supposedly universal model of economic modernization and China's particular nation-building and developmental needs. This early twentieth-century debate illustrates how nationalist and developmental perspectives hindered the adoption of liberal models of consumerist economy, marking the beginning of China's uneasy relationship with a free-market economy as well as a growing tension between urban consumerist trends and central planning. It also helped bring about new forms of frugal modernity that were to culminate in the New Life Movement.

This article examines the changes in behavioral norms in modern China and argues that the promotion of good manners and civilities constituted an important part of China's nation-building project. By focusing on the reform of movie theater etiquette in the first half of the twentieth century and situating it in the context of China's struggle to combat colonialist and racist discourse about the country, the article sheds new light on the New Life Movement and other state-sponsored national campaigns that were aimed at disciplining the Chinese people to conduct themselves in ways compatible with Western norms.