Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890-1930

by Qin Shao

This is a multidimensional study of a simulation of modernity that transformed Nantong, a provincial town, from a rural backwater to a model of progress in early twentieth-century China. The author analyzes this transformation by depicting the new institutional and cultural phenomena used by the elite to exhibit the a museum, theater, cinema, sports arenas, parks, photographs, name cards, paper money, clocks, architecture, investigative tourism, and public speaking. In focusing on this exhibitory modernity and its role in reconstructing this local community and in promoting “the Nantong model” nationwide, the book sheds intriguing new light on the connections between local and national politics and rural and urban experience.

376 pages, Hardcover

First published November 11, 2003

About the author

A native of Shanghai, Qin Shao (邵勤) was among many whose formal education was interrupted by the onset of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. After grammar school, Shao was sent to the countryside for six years as a peasant (including a brief stint as a “barefoot doctor” and village teacher). Largely self-taught through books surreptitiously supplied to her in the countryside by an elder sister, she went on to attend college and then graduate school. In 1983, Shao joined the faculty at the East China Normal University in Shanghai. Teaching herself English in her spare time, she entered the Ph.D program in East Asian History at Michigan State University in 1990 and received her doctorate in 1994. Shao has been a professor of history at The College of New Jersey since.

Shao has published extensively on ancient Chinese statecraft, China’s early urbanization effort, and the post-Mao reform in leading international journals. Her research has been awarded many fellowships, including those from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University; the International Research Center on Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History (re:work), Humboldt University, Berlin; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C; the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation; the American Council of Learned Societies; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In spring 2013, Qin Shao is a research fellow at re:work at Humboldt University, where she studies “Social Displacement and Change of Work and Life Course in Post-Mao China.”