This thesis is a study of neutrality and collaboration during the Second World War in East Asia. It analyses the relations between China and Portugal during the conflict and the immediate post-war period, with a particular focus on the enclave of Macau, the only foreign-administered territory in China not to be occupied by Japan. It argues that the practice of Portuguese neutrality in East Asia was marked by great ambivalence and used by different actors for their own, often conflicting, ends. In social history terms, Macau was part of the war, with comparable experiences to other cities in China, including a massive refugee influx, as well as everyday experiences of hunger, popular mobilisation for relief, and urban crime. Wartime Macau was marked by multiple layers of collaboration involving Chinese, Portuguese, British, Japanese, and others. This thesis also argues that wartime issues left unsolved had an impact on Sino-Portuguese relations after the war. Its dealings with a small European imperial power reveal China's attempts and difficulties to exercise its regained sovereignty and new international status.

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Chiu Yuen Ming Vivian. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-87). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1 - --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Overview --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Significance --- p.7 / Chapter Chapter 2 - --- Literature review --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1 --- Definition of nation --- p.8 / Chapter 2.2 --- History of Chinese nationalism --- p.8 / Chapter 2.3 --- From state nationalism to popular nationalism --- p.16 / Chapter 2.4 --- Three levels of Chinese nationalism --- p.17 / Chapter 2.5 --- Media and nationalism --- p.17 / Chapter 2.5.1 --- Media in China- newspapers --- p.20 / Chapter Chapter 3 - --- Framing --- p.22 / Chapter 3.1 --- Overview --- p.22 / Chapter 3.2 --- Four different frames --- p.24 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- National self respect --- p.27 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- National self strengthening --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Co-operation with Japan --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- National humiliation --- p.31 / Chapter 3.3 --- Framing Sino-Japanese relationship --- p.33 / Chapter Chapter 4 - --- Methodology --- p.35 / Chapter 4.1 --- Theoretical concern --- p.35 / Chapter 4.2 --- Case study --- p.35 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- First case study: the Mukden incident --- p.36 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Second case study: Junichiro Koizumi's visit to Yasukuni Shrine --- p.37 / Chapter 4.3 --- Media text --- p.39 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- People's Daily --- p.40 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Global Times --- p.42 / Chapter 4.3.4 --- Southern Metropolis News --- p.45 / Chapter 4.4 --- Data and sampling --- p.47 / Chapter 4.5 --- Content analysis --- p.49 / Chapter 4.6 --- Hypothesis --- p.50 / Chapter 4.7 --- Coding categories and schemes --- p.54 / Chapter 4.8 --- Coding training --- p.55 / Chapter Chapter 5 - --- Results --- p.57 / Chapter 5.1 --- Overview --- p.57 / Chapter 5.2 --- Quantitative results --- p.59 / Chapter Chapter 6 - --- Discussion --- p.67 / Chapter 6.1 --- Analysis --- p.67 / Chapter 6.1.1 --- National self respect --- p.68 / Chapter 6.1.2 --- National self strengthening --- p.70 / Chapter 6.1.3 --- Co-operation with Japan --- p.72 / Chapter 6.1.4 --- National humiliation --- p.74 / Chapter 6.2 --- Implications --- p.76 / Chapter 6.3 --- Limitations and further study --- p.78 / Chapter 6.4 --- Conclusion --- p.80 / Bibliography --- p.82

published_or_final_version / abstract / History / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / History / Master / Master of Philosophy

This dissertation investigates roles of cultural practice in China’s revolution. It begins with cultural experiments in the War of Resistance to Japan (1937-1945) and culminates with the agrarian cooperativization of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. I interrogate how China’s “cultural workers” –– meaning the writers, performers, artists, and filmmakers engaged in the revolutionary project –– participated in mass mobilization. In doing so, I develop elements for a new approach to analyzing cultural works in their relations to political movements. This approach aims to address my study’s driving question: how did the practice of cultural workers advance, challenge, and transform China’s revolutionary process? My formal approach is drawn from an issue at the heart of revolution; namely, that of time. I argue that revolutionaries repeatedly wrestled with remaking time–– whether to and how to break with the past in constructing the future. My study investigates this problematic as it was developed in two temporal fields: campaign time and narrative time. Activists developed campaign time, or standardizing temporal structures, to reform society through sequences of mass mobilization. Distinct from campaign time, cultural workers articulated narrative time through acts of narrative creation in literary prose, theater, art, and cinema. I argue that by analyzing the collisions, collusions, and contradictions between campaign time and narrative time, we can define cultural workers’ interventions in the revolutionary process. The first four chapters focus on the historical emergence of campaign time through mass movements of the Communist base areas during the War of Resistance to Japan. I seek to demonstrate: first, that a coherent series of strategies for mass movements was developed, bearing consistent, repeatable patterns for social reorganization; and second, that cultural workers contributed to, contradicted, and at key moments innovated mass movements through expressions of narrative time. Each of these four chapters proceeds chronologically through major mass movements: the reform of “vagrants” in chapter one; family reforms and women’s labor in chapter two; the hygiene movement in chapter three; and chapter four takes up the anti-spirit medium movement. Chapter five argues that the narrative time of novels stretched the political imagination of campaign time in the scope of the agrarian cooperative movement (approx. 1953-1957). The sixth and final chapter focuses on the case of Liu Qing’s unfinished epic The Builders. I interrogate fraught relations between narrative and campaign times in the novel’s historical trajectory to foreground a problem I call campaign-narrative equivalence. When cultural narratives were conflated with historical movements, such equivalences were produced. The campaign-narrative equivalence is not only a problem for historical interpretation but also for the political imagination. By disentangling these equivalences, which have been grafted upon histories of cultural creation and political transformation, I seek to grasp the distinctive contributions and transformative valence of the cultural worker in China’s revolution –– for then and now.

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Previous historiography on late Qing naval technology has been geared toward locating the root causes of the Qing’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Pushing back against this teleological view of late Qing naval development, this dissertation underscores the global, multidirectional, and highly contingent processes undergirding the Qing’s naval rebuilding project in the late nineteenth century. Starting from the 1860s, the Qing empire strove to reassert itself as a competitive naval power by establishing new dockyards and arsenals; procuring arms, warships, and machineries from abroad; as well as dispatching educational missions to European naval schools, technical institutes, factories, and shipyards. The Chinese diplomats and students that the Qing sent overseas served as transnational agents who cultivated close-knit networks with Western diplomats, merchants, shipbuilders, military officers, and arms manufacturers. These networks formed the basis upon which the Qing navigated a global marketplace of warships and armaments spanning Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Tracing the personal, material, and institutional networks connecting late Qing China to the world’s naval technology reveals how the Qing engaged actively in a global regime of arms production and arms trading. This regime, driven by the transnational sourcing of raw materials and the export-oriented tendencies of Western arms manufacturers, gave rise to a shared, decentralized, and surprisingly open terrain of material circulation and technological transmission. It produced highly fluid circuits of military industrial products and knowledge that blurred the boundaries between the arms race and the arms trade, secrecy and openness, competition and collaboration. This dissertation shows how the Qing tapped into these tensions through intertwining networks of trade and diplomacy. It also shows how the material and logistical processes underlying the importation of warships, machineries, and shipbuilding components constituted crucial channels for the transfer of naval engineering knowledge from the West to China.

This dissertation interrogates and explores the formation of literary modernity in Japan in the 1880s–1910s, a process fundamentally underpinned by translation and often attributed to the novelist and Russian–Japanese translator Futabatei Shimei (c. 1862/1864–1909), who has been acclaimed as one of the progenitors of modern Japanese literary language, modern Japanese literature, and modern literary translation in Japan. Drawing extensively on Russian texts, I revise the view of the literary modernization process by situating Futabatei’s translation practice in its historical context and reconstructing the reception and reading of his translations, showing what was at stake in both Russian and Japanese. I select two converging approaches to this end. First, I analyze the process of forming through translation and its evaluation the foundational concepts that define the contours of modern Japanese literature: the question of what is considered artistic, creative, Western, Japanese, foreign, local, real, and modern. Second, I examine how language reform, in particular the standardization of the Japanese language, led to the formation of a new literary language that continues to frame the way we interface with language in the present. While these two aspects—the evaluative concepts of modern Japanese literature and the language norms that underlie the modern Japanese language today—tend to be perceived linearly and teleologically and are often reduced to the development of the nationalization of Japan and its language, my analysis reveals that these two processes, fundamentally forged through translation practice, entailed extensive experimentations with language varieties in the midst of the changing linguistic sensibilities and evolving discursive imaginaries of the West, Russia, and Japan. The work of Futabatei, who engaged with the formative process of not only modern Japanese literature but of modern Russian literature, serves as a unique prism through which to view the formative process of modern literature, modern literary language, and modern literary translation—all of which emerged out of linguistic competition, experimentation, and hybridity. Chapter 1 examines the emergence of the concepts of artistic-literary creation and production in Japanese translations from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s. Drawing on the formation of modern Russian literature, I analyze Futabatei’s translation of texts written by Russian critics in the 1820s–1840s, the time of the formation of the concept of modern literature in Russian discourse. In doing so, I show how Futabatei’s translation practice transforms concepts of artistic production through translation. The chapter also introduces the issues of translatability and the linguistic specificity of aesthetic concepts. The transformations introduced into Russian texts by Futabatei posed fundamental questions about the concept of artistic creation and production itself, which foreshadowed long-lasting debates on artistic production in subsequent years. Chapter 2 focuses on the translations of Ivan Turgenev’s works, written around the 1850s, and examines how conceptualizations of Westernness and Western literature evolved in the period following the Sino–Japanese War (1894–1895). Impassioned calls for the standardization of literary language and the translation of Western literature into Japanese to create a “national literature” (kokumin bungaku) as well as the revision of the unequal treaties between Japan and major powers—including Russia, which was generally perceived as Western—led to the reconsideration and reimagining of what constitutes Westernness in literary translation. I show that the generalized sense of Westernness in literature at this time was intertwined with the competition among various writing styles and increased interest in the Edo or Tōkyō language, which was itself undergoing reconceptualization. I also argue that dialogue in novels represents a unique and important locus within which ideas about Westernized socialization and language standardization encountered each other generatively. Chapter 3 considers Futabatei’s translations at the turn of the twentieth century—some with source texts that I have newly uncovered—which have hitherto been largely understudied. My analysis focuses on translations of texts originally written by lesser-known writers in the 1890s, such as “Parent’s Heart” (originally written by Fritz Marti) and “Commune of Four” (originally written by Ignaty Potapenko). The differentiation between the concepts of “standard language” (hyōjungo) and “dialects” (hōgen), alongside the burgeoning attention paid to the representation of local languages in literature, led to a number of literary experiments that incorporated local elements and in the process constructed a new literary language as Futabatei did with countryside and regionally associated language. By analyzing the shifting evaluations of his translations in this period, I illustrate how the standardization process and the introduction of the local intervened in the shifting perspective of how foreignness should be conveyed in translation, with particular emphasis on how the awareness of the construction of literary language varieties is foregrounded, problematized, and obscured at different times with the emergence and development of the concept of dialect. Chapter 4 turns to texts from the post-Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905) period, specifically those pieces of literature related to war and madness—two major themes through which the relationship between “Western” literature, its translation, and the real came into question. By analyzing Futabatei’s translations of such stories, I argue that the establishment of views of language varieties in this period led to different ideas about the representation of Japanization in translation. I then illustrate the changing positionality of Russia and Japan in this period and the way that the representation of madness in literary texts complicated the sense of reality therein. I also explore how the emergence and prevalence of the concept of the “modern” was linked with the use of language varieties in translations. The integration of the overarching concept of the modern into literature and the existence of language varieties associated with specific social strata and localities tend to be considered unrelated or even mutually exclusive phenomena. However, I demonstrate that the concept of the modern was instead integrated into Japanese literary discourse by means of such language varieties. Ultimately, by reconstructing Futabatei’s translation practice and its reception and placing them back into their fluid historical contexts, my analysis reveals the fluctuations in collective linguistic sensibilities and the engravement into Japanese literary discourse of foundational conceptions, such as the artistic and the creative, the Western, the foreign and the modern, thus providing a new history of the formation of modern Japanese literature.

This thesis contributes to the existing literature by exploring the intersection between collective memory theory and ontological security theory within East Asia’s autonomous entities. It explores how varying degrees of political autonomy shape the construction of collective memory in history textbooks, navigating the dynamics in the pursuit of ontological security. Drawing from ontological security, collective memory, and autonomy literature, this thesis posits that the level of political autonomy within an entity influences the divergence or alignment of its collective memory from that of the central state in its process of ontological security seeking. The theoretical assumption for this thesis is that entities with greater political autonomy tend to construct a more distinct and independent collective memory, while those with lesser autonomy align their narratives closely with the central state. The findings suggest that Taiwan with the highest autonomy, forms the most distinct narratives from the central state, presenting Japan in a relatively positive light and depicting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a negative role. This distinct narrative reflects Taiwan’s assertion of its ontological security. Conversely, Macau with the lowest political autonomy, closely parallels the Mainland Chinese narrative, focusing predominantly on Chinese victimhood and celebrating the CCP’s heroism. Macau’s limited autonomy results in aligning its narrative closely with the central state to affirm ontological security through securing a positive relationship with the central state. Hong Kong, enjoying a comparatively higher autonomy than Macau, adopts a more nuanced approach, acknowledging Japan as a perpetrator while incorporating positive postwar Japanese imagery. Additionally, it portrays the CCP negatively in the context of war, differentiating its narrative from Mainland China. Thus, this thesis sheds light on how varying degrees of political autonomy shape ontological security pursuits, influencing the construction of collective memory.