This research examines the formation and development of Shanghai film star culture from 1905 to 1936, and discusses film stars’ social status in the transitional Republican Chinese society. I argue that the film star culture in Shanghai was shaped by two forces: the popular social ideology and Shanghai’s commercial entertainment culture. Also, because stars took part in the promotion of the popular social ideology through their performance in entertainment, they stepped away from marginalised society and their social recognition increased. This research not only examines stars as images, a conventional method in the approach of star studies within the discipline of film studies, but also takes a historical approach to analyse the original social and cultural context’s influence to the creation and promotion of stars images. Therefore, this thesis relies on analysis of primary materials including newspapers, fan journals, popular magazines, film texts, and stars’ autobiographies. The first chapter introduces a brief history of the development of Chinese film star culture from 1905 to 1936. It especially locates the development of film star culture in the context of the global expansion of Hollywood and Shanghai entertainment industry that developed from the late Qing onwards. The remaining chapters discuss how the popular ideologies and entertainment culture created and promoted three aspects of stars’ images: their screen images, personal images, and social images that were shaped in public events. To illustrate the main argument of this thesis, a case study on Hu Die, arguably the most influential star from the mid- 1920s to mid-1930s, is carried out in the final chapter to demonstrate the relationship between her star image and the social and cultural context. I conclude that although stars were always confronting doubts from the public in regard to their motivations to promote social ideologies through entertainment, the embodiment of these ideologies in stars’ images enabled them to be involved in intellectual discourses, which helped to raise their social status. Such changing status of film stars also reflects a more flexible social mobility that appeared in the transitional Republican Chinese society.

My dissertation examines the unacknowledged role of negative female models from traditional literature in constructing the modern woman in China. It draws upon literary and historical sources to examine how modern cultural figures resuscitated and even redeemed qualities associated with traditional shrews in their perceptions and constructions of the new woman across the first half of the twentieth century. By linking the literary trope of the shrew, associated with imperial China, with the twentieth-century figure of the new woman, my work bridges the transition from the late-imperial to the modern era and foregrounds the late-imperial roots of Chinese modernization. The scope of my dissertation includes depictions of shrews/new women in literary texts, the press, theater, and public discourses from the Republican to the Socialist period. Although there exists a rich body of work on both traditional shrew literature and the new woman narrative, no one has addressed the confluence of the two in Chinese modernity. Scholars of late imperial Chinese literature have claimed that shrew literature disappeared when China entered the modern age. Studies on the new woman focus on specific social and cultural contexts during the different periods of modernizing China; few scholars have traced the effects that previous female types had on the new woman. My research reveals the importance of the traditional shrew in contributing to the construction and reception of the new woman, despite the radically changing ideologies of the twentieth century. As I argue, the feisty, rebellious modern women in her many guises as suffragette, sexual independent, and gender radical are female types grafted onto the violent, sexualized, and transgressive typologies of the traditional shrew. My research contributes to the studies of Chinese modernity and the representations of Chinese women. First, it bridges the artificial divide between modern and traditional studies of China and expands the debates about the nature of Chinese modernity. Second, it brings to light the underexamined constructions of the new woman as an empowered social actor through her genealogical connections to the traditional shrew. Third, it provides a methodology for rethinking the contested depiction of women in Chinese modernity.

New woman, a new word and concept put forth during the New Culture Movement beginning from 1919, when China was in the process of political, economic and cultural transformation which strongly influenced almost every aspect of society, was loaded with nationalistic connotations from the beginning and soon became a public venue to venture various discourses. Much research has been done on this topic, from the historical perspective of women’s emancipation, by studying it in the context of China’s modernization, from the angle of gender norms and sexuality, and so on. What sets my research apart is that I use New Woman--a 1934 film made in Shanghai which is especially dedicated to the image of new woman-- as my primary text and single out major themes in the film, such as “new woman” and nationalism, new woman’s struggles. In my research, I combine fictionalized narratives about new woman in literary works and films with historical discourses on new woman, and real life experiences of new woman such as Qiu Jin and Ruan Lingyu. My particular interest is to grasp the major sentiments expressed in the film and to investigate of the social and cultural context that had given rise to these sentiments. With no intention to be complete or exhaustive, this paper would consider its goal fulfilled by being able to grasp the main sentiments surrounding new woman and her place in Chinese society in the 1920s and 30s.

Today’s Chinese ethno-nationalism exploits nativist ancestral claims back to antiquity to legitimize its geo-political occupation of the entire territory of modern China, which includes areas where many non-Han people live. It also insists on the inseparability of the non-Han nationalities as an integrated part of Zhonghua minzu. This dissertation traces the origin of this nationalism to the two major waves of scientific investigation in the fields of paleoanthropology and anthropology in the Chinese frontier during the first half of the twentieth century. Prevailing theories and discoveries in the two scientific disciplines inspired the ways in which the Chinese intellectuals constructed their national identity. The first wave concerns the international quest for human ancestors in North China and the northwestern frontier in the 1920s and 1930s. Foreign scientists, such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Amadeus Grabau, Roy Chapman Andrews, and Davidson Black, came to China to search for the first human fossils. With the discovery of Peking Man, they made Beijing one of the most prestigious places for the study of human paleontology and popularized the evolutionary Asiacentric theory that designated Chinese Central Asia and Mongolia as the cradle of humans. Inspired by the theory and the study of the Peking Man fossils, Chinese intellectuals turned Peking Man into the first Chinese and a common ancestor of all humans. In the second wave, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, Chinese anthropologists like Rui Yifu, Cen Jiawu, Fei Xiaotong, and Li Anzhai made enormous efforts to inscribe the non-Han people of the southwestern frontier into the genealogy of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu). Their interpretations of the relationship between the Han and the non-Han and between the frontier and the center were influenced by various Western anthropological theories. However, their intensive studies of the southwestern non-Han societies advocated the ethnic integration and nationalization of China’s southwestern frontier. By linking the two waves of scientific endeavor, this dissertation asserts that the Chinese intellectual construction of modern Chinese ethnogenesis and nationalism was not a parochial and reactionary nationalist “invention” but a series of indigenizing attempts to appropriate and interpret scientific theories and discoveries. / History

This thesis examines four translations and retranslations of novels by British female writers. They are Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The translations and retranslations, eight target texts in total, are mapped onto the sociopolitical and sociocultural milieu of China from the late 1920s to 1930s. During the span of time when the eight translations were published, China was undergoing a special period of political turbulence intertwined with literary vibrancy. With the literary field of China segmented into various literary societies or political organizations subscribing to their respective doctrines and principles, Chinese intellectuals including translators from various backgrounds produced literature and translation within the agenda of their respective literary or political societies. The heart of this thesis’s theoretical framework is the role of agents of translation involved the practice of translation production. The interaction amongst the human and nonhuman agents: translators, patrons, intellectuals, literary institutions, publishers and more, are examined in order to identify the translation motivations of the translators. The seven translators covered in the present study are categorized into three distinctive groups: the leftists, the humanists and the commercial translators. A collective analysis of the translators’ behaviour should shed light on the general understanding of the intended social functions of these translated novels written by British female writers published during Republican China.

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This PhD dissertation surveys the development of the concept and the academic discipline of mathematical logic in the transitional period between late Republican and early socialist China. Providing a contrastive analysis of the main developmental aspects of its conceptual variegations, its institutional life and research-related development, this dissertation focusses on the main continuities and discontinuities between these two important periods of its existence in the period of China's modernisation. The main analytical apparatus of this treatise is divided into two main parts. The first part outlines the main developmental milestones in research and teaching of mathematical logic in Chinese academic community in the late Republican period (1930-1949). Its main focus lies on the establishment of mathematical logic as a philosophical discipline in framework of the "Qinghua School of Logic" at National Qinghua University, on the one side, and the beginnings of Chinese mathematicians' research in mathematical logic in the early 1930s, on the other. The second part, on the other hand, closely examines the main three aspects of change which the idea and discipline of mathematical logic underwent in the first decade after the founding of the People's Republic (PRC): from its unique role in Chinese...

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