Nationalist Nanjing: The Inheritance of Historical Legacy

On the New Year day of 1912, Sun Yatsen took the train off Shanghai. On the way to Nanjing, the train passed through the stations at Suzhou, Wuxi, and Changzhou, where hundreds of people crowded on the platform; they tried to catch a glimpse of the newly elected president, while cheering “Long lives the Republic of China!” When the train finally arrived Nanjing in the afternoon, Sun was welcomed warmly by salute cannonfire and military parade, not to mention a sea of peoples, including the representatives from every province in China, foreign consulates and thousands of Nanjing locals. That night, Sun was inaugurated as the first president of the Republic of China. Following the establishment of the central government at Nanjing, the city had become the administrative center of the new republic.

Ironically, only until fifteen years later, Nanjing was designated as the capital of the Republic of China by the Nationalist party headed by Jiang Jieshi. The hundreds of people who had attended Sun’ inauguration ceremony, will be surprised to see Sun giving up his presidency few weeks later to Yuan Shikai, a deal to prevent the country from being divided by warlordism. Based in Beijing, Yuan had shifted the center of politics back to north China, leaving the city of Nanjing at the fringe of power. Nevertheless, the success of the Northern Expedition had ended the sovereignty of Yuan and the north warlords. Nanjing had regained its prestige when Jiang Jieshi’s army entered Nanjing on 24 March 1927, and declared in less than a month later that the city would served as the capital of China. To many Chinese at that time, Jiang’s announcement was a gesture to inherit Sun’s legacy.

Once again, the Nanjing locals took part in a grand national ceremony - on 18 April 1927, the whole city celebrated Nanjing as the capital of the Republic of China. In his concluding speech of the ceremony, Jiang Jieshi mentioned the reasons for selecting Nanjing as the capital: to continue Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary enterprise, to overthrow imperialism and to secure independence and freedom for the people.[1]

Among the three reasons, the fact that Sun Yatsen had selected Nanjing as the capital of the Republic was the reason most frequently stressed by the authority, as well as the most accepted one by the public deal to their respects and supports to the first president. Sun pointed out that Nanjing possess an ideal location: with high hills, deep water and plain, the city was situated on the lower reaches of the Yangtze and was the key city of fertile areas on both banks of the river.[2] Most importantly, Sun stressed that only by breaking completely from everything that stood for the Manchu regime could reform be carried through.[3] Because of this, he preferred Nanjing over Beijing as the capital of the new republic, for the former has been the capital of Han Chinese in history, while the latter represented the sovereignty of the foreigner Manchu, despite the fact that Beijing was far more developed than Nanjing at that time. Hence, once Sun assumed the presidency, he took all the officials to pay their respects at the tomb of the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, the Xiaoling Mausoleum at Nanjing, and made a speech there to call for national unification.

Additionally, Nanjing was often associated with anti-foreign struggles in history – the Southern Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty and the short-lived Taiping regime had all founded its capital at Nanjing as a base to fight against foreign invasions, notably from the north. Jiang Jieshi proclaims that, “This is the third time that a revolutionary government sets its capital at Nanjing. The first time, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the second time, the Provisional Government of the first year of the Republic, unfortunately failed. The building of the capital this third time is our last revolutionary struggle. We will live or die with it.”[4]

Jiang’s speech reveals his historiography on China’s revolutionary history and reminds the Chinese that these revolutionary efforts in history should be linked in continuum. In doing so, Jiang reinforced the party-state’s role as a legitimate inheritor of the revolutionary business, and implicitly placed himself to a position preceding the historical leaders, Hong Xiuquan and Sun Yatsen, who failed to regain China from the hands of foreigners. Only until Jiang’s leadership, Nanjing was able to reinstate its position as the capital of Han Chinese. Like Sun Yatsen who paid homage to the Ming ancestor, Jiang reinforce the party-state’s (or his own) legitimacy to rule by the linkage to history.

[1] Zhu, Hanguo ed., Nanjing Guomin Zhengfu Shi Zhi (Anhui: Anhui Ren Min Chu Ban She, 1993), pp.3.
Quoted in Lipkin, Zwia, Keeping Up Appearances: The Nanjing Municipal Government and The City’s Elements Declasses, 1927-1937, pp.13.
[2] Nanking, The Capital of China: Outline of its Activities, Nanking Municpal Government, February 1930, pp.1.
[3] Thomas F. Millard, “Will Nanking Replace Peking?” in The China Weekly Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 13, May 26, 1928, pp. 393.
[4] Zhu, Hanguo ed., Nanjing Guomin Zhengfu Shi Zhi, pp.3.
Quoted in Lipkin, Zwia, Keeping Up Appearances: The Nanjing Municipal Government and The City’s Elements Declasses, 1927-1937, pp.13.

The Creative Destruction of China: Urban Transformations of the Yangtze Regions Since 1920s

How do the state and its politics shaped the urban experience of 20th century China? When the state leaders place the development of the Yangtze regions as one of their top agendas today, what they bring in, paradoxically, is not only new innovations but also vast destructions: the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, for instance, will destroy 2 cities, 11 counties, 140 towns, and 1,351 villages. For many years, the urbanization of the Yangtze regions, like many parts in China, is not defined by simple expansion and growth but rather by a vibrant state-lead process of destruction and rebuilding. The state recurrently destroy old cities to give ways for new developments; yet, in its efforts to free from the past, the state is in fact deeply enmeshed in the insistent demand of memories to the past in rebuilding the Yangtze regions. By knowing how the state and its politics shaped the urban environments in modern China, we can unfold the nature of this paradoxical modern experience and hence, grasp a better understanding to the future developments of the state’s top priority, the Yangtze regions – China’s inner regions which are still underrated by many scholars who heavily biased their efforts to coastal China.

Influenced by Karl Marx, the economist Joseph Schumpeter coined in 1942 the never-ending cycle of destroying and inventing new methods of production – a crucial fact about capitalism – with the term “creative destruction.” In the arena of urban studies, similar concept has been developed by the sociologist Marshall Berman, who studies the the creative destruction of modern cities as a result of capitalist urbanization. Although Berman et al. highlight creative destruction as an essential process of capitalism, they neglect the fact that the creative destruction of socialist states like China are perhaps more extensive than many of its capitalist counterparts. If not a result of capitalist urbanization that many scholars have suggested, how does creative destruction happen in China since 1920s, when it transit from capitalism to socialism, and to the current polity which many scholars labeled as capitalist-socialism?

Additionally, previous studies often focus on the socio-economic factors of the creative destruction process, leaving little room for the influences of politics (the intervening of the state) and cultures (the attachment to history and memory) on the transformation of place. Elaborating Marx’s words, if the modern society is a place where “all that is solid melts into air”, what remains in China is the memory of the place one has experienced.

Objectives
This research aims to explore the relationship between the state, its politics and the urban experience in modern China. Through investigating the urban transformations of the Yangtze Regions since 1920s, this research aims to unfold the two paradoxical, yet intertwined natures of modern experience in China:

1. The creative destruction of the urban environment as a result of state interventions;
2. The attempts of the state to break with tradition and the tenuous link of history and memory to the development of the new urban environment

Methodology
This research will employ the method of multiple-case studies. It will study three creative destruction cycles of the Yangtze regions that cover the most part of the 20th century:

1. Nationalist regime, 1920s-1940s
This is a short-lived period after the Nationalist Party overthrown the imperial monarchy and turned China into a modern capitalist state. The case study will be focused on the transformation of three cities along the Yangtze River, namely Nanjing (lower Yangtze), Wuhan (middle Yangtze) and Chongqing (upper Yangtze), under the state-lead capital building and beautification projects. It will analyze how the state link history and memory in planning the cities to confer its legitimacy to rule.

2. Early People’s Republic period, 1950s – 1970s
This is the early period after the Communist Party took over China and turned it into a socialist state. The case study will highlight the anti-urban bias of the state that relegates the cities to a subordinate role and dramatically decentralized and industrialized the Yangtze regions. It will evaluate the state’s attempts to separate its people from traditions, and its efforts to implant the people with new collective experiences.

3. China after reform, 1980s onwards
This is the period after the state implemented the economic reform and open door policy. The case study will discuss the transformation of the Yangtze regions by the construction of Three Gorges Dam, with focuses on the vast population displacement and the loss of historical relics. It will analyze how the project signals the state’s ambitions to place China on the global stage, and its attempts to compensate the loss of memories anchored on the relics through the construction of new memorials.

The case studies will entail both archival researches and field works. Through visiting archives inside and outside China, such as the State Historical Archives in Nanjing and the East Asia Archive in Hoover Institute of Stanford University, the research will review materials including official records, gazetteers, periodicals, newspapers, memoirs, biographies, blueprints, movies and etc., to reconstruct the process of creative destruction in the Yangtze regions. The information obtained will be verified on site and through the interviews with local people to investigate their experiences and memories about the regions’ urban transformations.

Impacts
The delivery of the research will primary be a doctoral dissertation and a number of academic papers to be presented in academic conferences such as the annual meeting of Association of Asian Study and the annual meeting of the Urban History Association. It will contribute to the understandings of the following areas:

1. Chinese modernity: the paradoxical nature of modern experience in urban China.
2. Non-capitalist urbanization: the pattern of urban developments in China which is characterized by the heavy involvement of the state.
3. Political and cultural influences on the transformation of place: the role of history and memory in shaping the state’s decisions in transforming the urban environments.
4. Evolution of the Yangtze regions: the urban landscape, morphology and history of the Yangtze regions that occupy a significant position in China’s geo-politics.

Taking Grievances Seriously

My memory flies back to the beginning of this semester, when I knew nothing about contentious politics and collective actions. Yet, I have an intuitive and naïve thinking that “grievances” should be what all contentions about – a group of people are grieved for particular issues, and they want their targets to address their grievances seriously and seek ways to settle/relieve them. Nonetheless, after a semester of study, I have a feeling that many social movement theories and literatures have raised high the political opportunity structure far more than grievances. Are we really taking grievances seriously?

Disappointingly, this week’s readings do not tell us what exactly grievance is. Although the first three articles highlight three areas of grievances that prone to collective actions, they do not grant us a complete picture on the nature of grievances and its implications on social movements. Snow et al. argues that grievances are grounded in everyday experience and that the disruption of quotidian heightens prospect of collective actions; in other words, the loss (or threats of loss) of some aspects of everyday lives that the people already have. However, Snow et al. neglect those aspects of life that people expect to have. For instance, Hong Kong female villagers fight for the inheritance of land ownership, which is given solely to male villagers as a result of long time gender bias in the traditional villages. For many years, the female villagers do not have the right to inherit the land – this is not a quotidian – but as they become more educated, they are no longer silent about their grievances and fight for the right they expect to have. This example shows the limitations of the quotidian argument to explain the nature of grievances.

Chen, on the other hand, identifies subsistence crisis and managerial corruption as two critical factors that shaped worker’s sense of injustice and drove them to protest (Chen: 42). The threat to one’s survival, without doubts, is a great cause of his/her grievances; but beside subsistence, there are other elements in life that contribute to one’s identities and emotional attachments, and the crisis in identities will definitely generate one’s grievances, such as the failure in search of democracy, free speech and religious freedom, the harms to nationalism, clanship, one’s dignity and etc. Yet, Chen analyze that the laid-off workers are prepared to bend to the policies that took away much of their entitlement because of the political constraints to any open resistance and because of their faith in the ultimate outcomes of the reforms (Chen: 45), until the point that their minimal well-being was threatened, then they will take it to the street (Chen:49). It would be equally illuminating if similar researches are made on the aforementioned identity crisis – to what degree that one’s grievances accumulate, that he/she will act up and resist?

Can political opportunity structure answer this question? Chen discovers that labour protests by Chinese state workers are essentially spontaneous, leaderless and characterized by narrow and enterprise-specific claims (Chen: 62). In an interview about wage arrear that Lee conducted, the worker also mention that they just stopped work “spontaneously, no need to organize (chuanlian), without any call from anyone, without any leader” (Lee: 207) – the suspension of work happens, not because of any expansion in political opportunity, but because of the accumulation of grievances collectively.

Collective grievance is crucial to the emergence of social movement – the grievance of one single person generate sympathy, while the grievance shared by a community prone to collective actions. The sharing of grievances is reinforced by the collective memories of the community. Hurst and O’brien highlight the retirees’ inclination to make nostalgic references to better time past (Hurst & O’brien: 355). Likewise, Lee suggests that the workers’ historical experiences of state socialism form the basis for interpreting the present-day institutional changes brought about by market reform (Lee: 204). He points out that “the politics of collective memories have less to do with accurate reconstruction of reality than with the shared vision of history that memories invoke, or the challenge memories pose against history” (Lee: 214).

Hurst and O’brien highlight in their article that pension gripes are perceived by the Chinese to be more legitimate and felt more intensely than many other grievances (Hurst & O’brien: 353). It will be interesting if further investigations can be made on what sorts of grievances are more likely to provoke social movements, arouse media coverage, or to ally with elites. For example, the comparisons on movement emergence, mobilization and development, between collective actions related to subsistence crisis and identity crisis respectively. It will shed light on the relationship between grievances and outcomes.

For grievances to turn into collective actions, there must be clear targets of resistances, whether it is the SOEs, the village cadres, the provincial government officials, the state and etc. If there is no clear target - for example, in the case of nature disasters – people’s grievances, though intense, may not lead to any collective actions; unless there are mis-handlings in the process of relieving their grievances that they are expecting. In Lee’s study, for instance, the laid-off workers are not protesting again the reform or the lay-off per se, but the failure of the SOEs to implement the compensation policies.

Among all the articles assigned in this week, Li is the only one who addresses the issues of relieving grievances. He points out that villagers are more likely to turn to elected cadres to redress their grievances. Nevertheless, not many studies have been made to show how the resisters’ grievances being relieved. For example, besides the compensations, how does the state redress the grievances of the stunningly large amount of laid-off workers? Obviously, the social movement literatures have a strong bias on what the workers (the resister) have done over what the state (the opponent) has done.