This book is the memoir of Chinese economist's Yang Xiaokai. It tells the stories of more than two dozen characters he met while imprisoned in Changsha during the Cultural Revolution. Published in 1994, it was reprinted in 1997 and 2016. The English version is titled *Captive Spirits: Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution*, published by Stanford University Press in 1997.
This book is about Gu Zhun, a Chinese economist, historian and philosopher. Gu Zhun was the first person to put forward the theory of China's socialist market economy, which became a key concept in the Reform era, helping to justify the use of markets in a socialist system. He also devoted himself to the study of politics, history and philosophy, translating several foreign classic works on economics and democracy and writing a large number of articles. Due to his independent thinking and dissent, he suffered repeated political persecution, including during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution (for more information on Gu Zhun, see his biographical entry). As he personally experienced the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution, his diary is also considered a valuable source of information on these historical events. By documenting and analyzing his life, thoughts, and the eras in which he lived, Wang's book shows how Gu Zhun persisted in his "pursuit and search for the freedom and equal rights that are inherent to all human beings " (author's preface) in an era when independent thinking was suppressed. This book was published in 2015 by the Great Mountain Culture Publishing House in Hong Kong.
When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Yang Xiaokai was a senior high school student at No. 1 Middle School in Changsha. On January 12, 1968, he published an article entitled "Where is China Going?" which systematically put forward the ideas of the "ultra-leftist" Red Guards, criticized the privileged bureaucratic class in China, and advocated for the establishment of a Chinese People's Commune based on the principles of the Paris Commune. Yang Xiaokai recalled that his parents were beaten because they sympathized with Liu Shaoqi's and Peng Dehuai's views, and that he was discriminated against at school and could not join the Red Guards. As a result, he joined the rebel faction to oppose the theory of descent. Yang Xiaokai was later sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for this article. Yang Xiaokai died in 2004. This article is a retrospective of his life.
This book concerns two Chinese economists, Xue Mingjian and Sun Yefang. Xue Mingjian (1895-1980, former name Xue Epei, he changed his name after joining the volunteer student armies during the 1911 revolution - Mingjian (明剑) meant “to eliminate the Qing government with sword and revenge on behalf of the Ming Dynasty (剑除满清,为朱明报复)” ) was "the founder of modern Chinese national enterprise economics, the pioneer of modern national industry, a civil society activist, educator and scholar" (author's preface). He served as a delegate to the National People's Congress of the Republic of China, Senate member of the Kuomintang, and a popularly elected legislator. Sun Yefang (1908-1983, former name Xue Eguo, he changed his name out of security concern after the incident that he got arrested by KMT when he was a underground CCP member), by contrast, a member of the Communist Party of China, was an important economist in post-1949 China, who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and regained attention and respect after the reform and opening-up period. The author tells the story of the two brothers' very different life trajectories, while pointing out that even though they were in different political camps, their concern for and practice of humanitarianism were in fact the same.
The book was first published by China SDX Joint Publishing in 2009, and was to be reprinted by Economic Press China in 2014, but it was censored. The version in our archive is published by Boden House in 2023.
The Ladies Journal was founded in January 1915 by the Commercial Press Shanghai. It was a monthly magazine primarily targeting upper-class women. It ceased publication in 1932 when the Commercial Press was destroyed by Japanese bombing. The magazine was distributed in major cities in China and overseas, such as Singapore. The magazine was considered an influential forum for the dissemination of feminist discourse in modern China, given its long operation and large readership.
The magazine spanned important historical periods such as the May Fourth Movement and the National Revolutionary period, and readers can see how the political environment and social trends influenced the political stance and style of the publication.
Although it was a women's magazine, the chief editors and the authors of most of the articles were men. According to Wang Zheng, Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies and History at the University of Michigan, the early articles of The Ladies Journal were more conservative. Although it advocated for women’s education, the goal was to train women to be good wives and mothers. Later, under the influence of New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Student Movement, the magazine was forced to reform itself and began to publish debates on women's emancipation as well as to call for more women's contributions, spread liberal feminist ideas, and support women's movements across the country.
1923 saw the beginning of the National Revolutionary period, and the Chinese Communist Party’s nationalist-Marxist discourse on women’s emancipation started to challenge liberal feminism, and the magazine's influence waned. In September 1925, the magazine ceased to be a cutting edge feminist publication after it changed its chief editor again and shifted its focus to ideas more easily accepted by conservative-minded readers,such as women's artistic tastes.
Although the <i>The Ladies Journal</i> was run by men, and some articles displayed contempt for and discrimination against women, it pointed out and discussed many issues that hindered women's social progress, such as lack of education, employment, economic independence, marriage freedom, sexual freedom, family reform, emancipation of slave girls, abolition of the child bride system, abolition of prostitution, and contraceptive birth control. It was also open to many different ideas and views, all of which were published. It is a valuable historical source for the study of women's studies and modern Chinese history.
Yujiro Murata, a professor at the University of Tokyo, founded the The Ladies Journal Research Society in 2000, along with a number of other colleagues interested in women's history from Japan, Taiwan, China, and Korea. The two main goals of the Society are to produce a general catalog of all seventeen volumes of the Magazine and to bring together scholars from all over the world to conduct studies based on the magazine. With the assistance of the Institute of Modern History of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the magazine was made into an online repository, which is stored on the Institute’s “Modern History Databases” website, and can be accessed by the public.
Link to the database: https://mhdb.mh.sinica.edu.tw/fnzz/index.php. Thanks to the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, for authorizing the CUA to repost.
The Modern Women’s Biographies Database is part of the Modern History Digital Database of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. The goal of the database is to create biographical information on women in modern China, in order to counter the dominance of biographies of male figures in modern China history. The database includes biographies of 1,848 women in modern China, a few of whom were not Chinese but were included because they taught at universities in China or Taiwan.
In addition to browsing and searching for biographies, the database provides two additional functions: 1. “Biography Connections”: users can select multiple biographies to generate a map displaying social connections among selected figures; 2. “Place of Origin Map”: a map presenting the places of origin and eras of the figures, and users can click the markers on the map to read the biographies of the figures. By visualizing the biographical information, users can have an overview of the organizational networks of modern women's groups, as well as the development of women's discourse.
Link to the database: https://mhdb.mh.sinica.edu.tw/women_bio/index.php. Thanks to the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, for authorizing the CUA to repost.
This database is part of the “Modern History Databases,” operated by the Institute of Modern History of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The "Women and Gender History Research Group" of the Institute endeavors to collect, digitize and categorize related books and journals from libraries worldwide, and established the Modern Women Journals Database, which consists of 214 journals and 110,000 individual items. The database has been made available for public use since 2015.
In 1919 and the years that followed, women’s movement in China was on the rise, and as a result, many women's magazines appeared, a lot of which were run by women. Most of the journals collected in this repository were published between 1907-1949, with some published after 1949; there are comprehensive publications, as well as those focusing particularly on women's movements, family, health, employment, etc.; nearly a quarter of the publications were published in Shanghai, followed by Beijing, Guangzhou, and Nanjing. As can be seen from the Database, most of these journals have a relatively short duration, ranging from one to five years. Through this database, readers can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the history of women and women’s movements in modern China.
In addition to browsing journals and searching the database, users can also conduct author research and journal analysis. Under the author research section, users can read author biographies, as well as see the number of articles written by a particular author, and a map displaying their family and social relations. Under the journal research section, users can generate maps by keywords, eras, and article categories, which can provide more multi-dimensional information about a specific era or topic.
Link to the database:https://mhdb.mh.sinica.edu.tw/magazine/web/acwp_index.php. Thanks to the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, for authorizing the CUA to repost.