Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (review)

A fellow historian and I disagree over whether conference volumes are worth buying. He argues that these volumes provide the gist of a broad range of works in progress. In other words, they provide many books for the price of one. In contrast, I often find that these volumes rarely contain essays worth reading once, much less owning and rereading. I prefer to wait for the chapter to become a full-fledged book. In the case of Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, however, he is absolutely correct. This book, the product of a conference organized in 1995 by the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, includes the latest research by many of the leading scholars of modern China, and provides a tantalizing look at larger studies in progress or recently completed.

Wen-hsin Yeh's masterful introduction revives a dormant tradition of the "state-of-the-field" essay. Once, these essays provided timely and invaluable guides for graduate students and professionals searching for a broad overview of a subfield (e.g., Frederic Wakeman's classic essay on popular movements in modern China in the Journal of Asian Studies 36, no. 2:201-237). Now they appear less often. Perhaps the dramatic growth and concurrent fragmentation in studies on modern China make any such surveys impossible. Or, perhaps a subfield needs to reach a level of maturity before it can be outlined successfully. Whatever the case, Yeh successfully synthesizes the essays that follow, and in the process identifies the major trends in the study of China during the period 1900-1950. This is no simple task given that these essays cover everything from urban culture to political economics, from Catholic communities in North China to merchant networks in South China, from notions of traitor (hanjian) to conceptualizations of femininity, and much more. Yeh's essay alone is worth the price of the book.

These essays demonstrate why there is now so much interest in China's experience with modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. Clearly, access to new sources has much to do with it. Mainland Chinese libraries and archives are now open for business. And, as the recent book Chinese Archives by Wa Ye and Joseph Esherick makes abundantly clear, there is no shortage of places to go. The new emphasis on social theories of contingency and agency provides added impetus for examining neglected or overlooked subjects. Indeed, liberated from having to discuss China in the context of the Cold War, scholars are now turning to questions beyond those explicitly linked to the success of the Communist Revolution. Chinese modernity, in the hands of contributors to this volume, is about much more than a political revolution.

The research agendas of scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee embody this very broadening of subject matter. Who better than a scholar whose early career centered on intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement to overturn its place in the development of Chinese modernity? In his contribution to this volume, "The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai," Lee argues that Shanghai rather than Beijing is the home of modern China. In doing so, as Yeh's introduction concludes (p. 7), Lee turns conventional assumptions concerning modern China on their head. In his analysis, it is style and social imaginaries that replace ideas and "isms." Similarly, leisure and private enterprise replace politics and collective action. Modernity reveals itself in the everyday activities of the many consumers rather than the highbrow ruminations of a few intellectuals. Lee's chapter confirms the importance of Shanghai in studies of modern China.

Indeed, the growing interest in consumerism as a key area of concern for historians of modernity across the globe suggests that what the study of modern China needs is more research on Shanghai, not less. For instance, the study of advertising in...