Strenuous Decades: Global Challenges and Transformation of Chinese Societies in Modern Asia

Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2022

Strenuous Decades

Global Challenges and Transformation of Chinese Societies in Modern Asia

Edited by: Chi-cheung Choi , Tomoko Shiroyama and Venus Viana

Volume 2 in the series Social and Cultural Changes in China [SCCC]

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110757422

Overview
Contents

About this book

The movement of goods and passengers between port cities not only stimulates growth in coastal trading networks and centers but also inevitably changes the social and economic lives of people in these port cities and, subsequently, of their fellow compatriots farther inland. Studies of port cities have focused on the interactive political and economic relationship between trading centers. The center of attention in this book is socioeconomic life and cultural identity, which are shaped by the movement of goods, people, knowledge, and information, particularly when the community faces a crisis.

Transnational studies focus on cross-border connections between people, institutions, commodities, and ideas, with an emphasis on their global presence. This book looks at the responses of different localities to the same global crisis. It gathers a selection of the fifty papers presented at the conference on "Coping with Transnational Crisis: Chinese Economic and Social Lives in East Asian Port Cities, 1850-1950," held in Hong Kong on June 7-11, 2016. The period from the 1850s to the outbreak of war in the Pacific in the late 1930s encompasses two major transnational crises with significant impacts on the Chinese population in Southeast Asian port cities in terms of their way of living and the construction of their identity: the emergence of bubonic plague in the 1880s and 1920s and the global economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The authors discuss the social and economic lives in various South East Asian port cities where many residents had to cope with these transnational crises. They do so through examining institutional measurements, rituals and festivals, communication, knowledge and information exchange as well as identity (re)construction. In addition, they explore how local communities responded to knowledge and information between the port cities and cities as well as inland locations.

The chapters in this book offer solid grounds for future comparisons, not only based on a specific time or event but also on how society reacted over time, space, and various types of crises.

Author / Editor information

CHOI Chi-cheung, Xiamen Univ., China, Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong; Tomoko Shiroyama, Univ. of Tokyo, Japan; Venus Viana, Univ. of Macau.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Foreword Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	IX
Contributors Publicly Available Download PDF	XIII
Introduction Tomoko Shiroyama Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I: Traders and workers abroad: Coping with colonial powers and socioeconomic adversaries
Coping with colonial governments
Chapter 1 Hong Kong rice merchants and Saigon’s rice exports, 1870s–1920s Li Tana Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Chapter 2 The general, the Chino, and the Señorita: Stories from The Manila Times in early US Colonial Manila Richard T. Chu Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
Chapter 3 Vulnerability, divided loyalties, and secret societies in Siam, 1850–1950 Jeffery Sng and Pimpraphai Bisalputra Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
Modern hygiene and medicine
Chapter 4 A different model of hygienic modernity: Encountering plague in Macau in 1895 Di Mao Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
Chapter 5 Health crisis in Chinese worlds: Medicine, religion, and epidemics in South China and Southeast Asia, 1880s–1910s Kaori Abe Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
Collective survival of workers
Chapter 6 A Cantonese Carpenters’ strike in Rangoon, 1922 Yi Li Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
Chapter 7 Coolies and crisis in Singapore: The great depression in the 1930s and the Chinese working class Kah Seng Loh Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Part II: Banks and businesses during the great depression
Silver and the Chinese economy
Chapter 8 Silver and East Asian cities before China’s Depression: Shanghai, Tientsin, and Dairen, 1925–1931 Kai Yiu Chan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
Chapter 9 Distant thunder? Reconsidering the impacts of the great depression on China Tomoko Shiroyama Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
Credit system without a central bank
Chapter 10 Chinese currency circulation and credit order in the interwar period Hiroaki Morota Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
Chapter 11 Monetary war between Nanjing and Guangzhou during the great depression: Financial unification and national versus local politics in China in the 1930s Jin-A Kang Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
Qiaoxiang (Overseas Chinese hometown) in crisis
Chapter 12 Currency reform and the 1934 financial crisis in Shantou Chi-cheung Choi Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279
Chapter 13 Bank runs and runaway bankers in Zhongshan, 1930s Venus Viana Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291
The paradox of the consumer market
Chapter 14 The Chinese cigarette market amid an economic crisis, 1931–1936 Huangfu Qiushi Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309
Glossary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	329
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Audience: Readers who are interested in Southeast Asia History, Colonial History, Economic History of China
Pages
- Front matter: 15
- Main content: 338
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 37
- Tables: 26
Keywords: Crisis; Colonial Powers; Great Depression; Social Lives

eBook

Published: March 7, 2022
ISBN: 9783110757422

Hardcover

Published: March 21, 2022
ISBN: 9783110673449