Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890-1930 - Hardcover

Shao, Qin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804746893 ISBN 13: 9780804746892

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2003

Synopsis

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 modern: 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.

About this title

About the Author

Qin Shao is Associate Professor of History at the College of New Jersey.

From the Back Cover

“[Shao’s] book is the most complete and best history of Zhang Jian and Nantong available.”—The China Review
"Shao's book is based on a wealth of archival and interview sources, and provides a thoughtful reassessment of how 'modernity' was experienced in China outside the big cities."—Pacific Affairs

From the Inside Flap

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 modern: 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804746893
• ISBN 13: 9780804746892
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 376