City of Working Women: Life, Space, and Social Control in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing by Weikun Cheng (review)

Weikun Cheng, professor of Chinese history at California State University, tragically passed away in 2007 as a result of an automobile accident. As someone who focused much of his research on women and sociocultural change in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China, the book under review brings together many of the themes explored in his previously published articles and book chapters. (Colleagues and friends were able to ensure publication of the manuscript; Cheng was still completing the final revisions at the time of his death.) In particular, Cheng explores the lives of lower-class urban women (maidservants, beggars, actresses, prostitutes) in Beijing during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and how they became an increasing public presence at a time of modernizing change. Utilizing a wide variety of sources (government archives, newspapers and periodicals, memoirs), Cheng argues that such women (driven by the need to seek an economic livelihood) successfully colonized public space in their everyday lives and used such space to enhance their opportunities and influence. In so doing, Cheng provides an insight into the changing nature of Beijing itself during the republican transition that complements previous studies of everyday life and practices in the city (e.g., D. Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989]; M. Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003]).

An opening chapter discusses economic and social change in Beijing that brought in its wake the introduction of streetlights, telephone boxes, running water, new or widened roads (and the corresponding destruction of old city walls), the opening of public parks, and the proliferation of bureaucracy (including a new police force). Unlike Shanghai or Tianjin, however, modern industry was not as developed during this period, with most workers employed in handicrafts or the service sector. Cheng notes that while the educated daughters of the “upper and middle classes” sought benefit from urban reforms (without elaborating further on this), for ordinary laboring-class women the “impact of reforms was only peripheral” and that “urban reconstruction touched their lives only superficially” (p. 27)—a rather puzzling and contradictory observation given the fact that the whole point of his study is to highlight lower-class women’s increasing (and unprecedented) public presence both in terms of leisure activities and employment. Subsequent chapters detail the various strategies pursued by ordinary women to secure an economic livelihood (as maidservants, peddlers, beggars, recyclers of junk, barbers, handicraft workers, and even rickshaw pullers), although no information is provided on new opportunities for female employment in retail and department stores that were beginning to emerge during this period (chap. 2); street and neighborhood community life among working class women, who did not, unlike elite women, observe clear distinctions between domestic and public spaces (chap. 3); new forms of leisure and entertainment (amusement parks, theatre, market fairs) that gave ordinary women more recreational choice (chap. 4); the reappearance of female stage performers (and female theatre audiences) in the early 1900s after they had been banned during the early Qing dynasty in the seventeenth century (chap. 5); the flourishing of prostitution during the first two decades of the twentieth century, which Cheng views as a viable employment option given the lack of economic development in Beijing and the fact that (unlike Shanghai for example) brothels enjoyed legal sanction (brothels were also taxed to finance urban reform, although Cheng seems unaware of the fact that this phenomenon occurred in other cities such as Nanjing and Guangzhou in the 1920s) (chap. 6); and, finally, how women’s public presence was policed in practice, part of the state’s agenda (in both the late Qing and early Republic) to uphold traditional virtues and construct a national identity (chap. 7).

Overall, however...