Strenuous decades : global challenges and transformation of Chinese societies in modern Asia / edited by Chi-cheung Choi, Tomoko Shiroyama, Venus Viana.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Viana, Venus, editor.

Shiroyama, Tomoko, 1965- editor.

Cai, Zhixiang, editor.

Series:

Social and cultural changes in China ; Volume 2.

Social and cultural changes in China ; Volume 2

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Port cities.

Harbors--China.

Harbors.

China.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (354 pages)

Place of Publication:

Berlin, Germany : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, [2022]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Foreword

Contents

Contributors

Introduction

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

Chapter 2 The general, the Chino, and the Señorita: Stories from The Manila Times in early US Colonial Manila

Chapter 3 Vulnerability, divided loyalties, and secret societies in Siam, 1850–1950

Modern hygiene and medicine

Chapter 4 A different model of hygienic modernity: Encountering plague in Macau in 1895

Chapter 5 Health crisis in Chinese worlds: Medicine, religion, and epidemics in South China and Southeast Asia, 1880s–1910s

Collective survival of workers

Chapter 6 A Cantonese Carpenters’ strike in Rangoon, 1922

Chapter 7 Coolies and crisis in Singapore: The great depression in the 1930s and the Chinese working class

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

Chapter 9 Distant thunder? Reconsidering the impacts of the great depression on China

Credit system without a central bank

Chapter 10 Chinese currency circulation and credit order in the interwar period

Chapter 11 Monetary war between Nanjing and Guangzhou during the great depression: Financial unification and national versus local politics in China in the 1930s

Qiaoxiang (Overseas Chinese hometown) in crisis

Chapter 12 Currency reform and the 1934 financial crisis in Shantou

Chapter 13 Bank runs and runaway bankers in Zhongshan, 1930s

The paradox of the consumer market

Chapter 14 The Chinese cigarette market amid an economic crisis, 1931–1936

Glossary

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes index.

ISBN:

3-11-075742-7