[港]何杰尧：理解广州：重构共和时期的大众文化（牛津+2005） (pdf document) free file download at fliiby.com

"Understanding Canton Studies on Contemporary China The Contemporary China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) has, since its establishment in 1968, been an international centre for research and publications on China. Studies on Contemporary China, which is edited at the Institute, seeks to maintain and extend that tradition by making available the best work of scholars and China specialists throughout the world. It embraces a wide variety of subjects relating to Nationalist and Communist China, including social, political, and economic change, intellectual and cultural developments, foreign relations, and national security. Series Editor Dr Frank Dikotter, Director of the Contemporary China Institute ¨ Editorial Advisory Board Dr Robert F. Ash Professor Hugh D. R. Baker Professor Elisabeth J. Croll Dr Richard Louis Edmonds Mr Brain G. Hook Professor Christopher B. Howe Professor Bonnie S. McDougall Professor David Shambaugh Dr Julia C. Strauss Dr Jonathan Unger Professor Lynn T. White III Understanding Canton Rethinking Popular Culture in the Republican Period VIRGIL K.Y. HO Division of Humanities Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Virgil K. Y. Ho, 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn ISBN 0–19–928271–4 978–0–19–928271–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 1 Acknowledgements I COULD never have completed this study without the truly kind support, generous assistance, and much-needed encouragement of my mentor Professor Mark Elvin. His thought-provoking comments on the earlier versions of this manuscript helped to improve its conceptual clarity, historical accuracy, and analytical depth. Professor Goran Aijmer of Gothenburg University in Sweden is another ¨ mine of intellectual stimulation that I have greatly benefited from. His useful comments on earlier drafts of some of the chapters of this monograph, and his insightful, often witty, remarks about Chinese society and culture, helped broaden my views and knowledge on the subject, as much as remind me of the complexity of social events and human action. During my archival researches in Hong Kong and Canton between 1985 and 1993, I was more than fortunate to be offered the invaluable help of Dr Ming K. Chan at the History Department of Hong Kong University, and Professor T’an Ti-hua at Chung-shan University. Only through their recommendations could my work at the different libraries and archives in their city be smoothly accomplished. Their assistance and support was indispensable. During the final stage of writing of this monograph, Professor Frank Dikotter ¨ kindly provided me with not only perceptive comments on some of the chapters, but also much-appreciated encouragement and technical assistance. Special ´ thanks also go to Professor Geremie Barme who has kindly given his permission to reproduce some of the materials that had appeared in East Asian History. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the John Swire & Sons/Cathay Pacific Scholarship, which granted me the opportunity of pursuing my post-graduate study at St Antony’s College in Oxford. Colleagues and staff at the Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Jennifer Wilkinson, Jenni Craig, Carol Bestley, Sylvia Jaffrey, Mick Belson, Arthur Attwell of Oxford University Press, have been very helpful during the final stage of preparing the manuscript. I am also indebted to many friends for their intellectual stimulation as well as their much-needed emotional support and encouragement during the long, and at times frustrating, process of research and writing. They are the Elvins (Dian, John, Charles), Ivana Kawikova, Mok King-fai, Yong Juquan, Virginia Unkefer, Motono Eiichi, Lo Ju-jung, Yap Kai-chung, Christian Henriot, Sebastian Tse, Kenneth Law, Jane Chan, Irene Chiu, Vivien and Peter So, and Steven Kwong. I would like to dedicate this book to the sweet memories of my parents, Bing-chung and Sau-wan, my two aunts, Lee Ho and Lee Pien, and uncle Chow Chi-wong. It was their views of life, sense of humour, thoughts and sentiments that aroused my initial curiosity to learn more about the social and mental history vi Acknowledgements of modern Cantonese. I wish they all had lived to see today. Special thanks must be given to all my siblings, in particular my eldest sister, Mary, whose moral, and at times financial, support helped to raise my spirits again when I was low. The final stage of revising the manuscript of this book was marked by two tragic events that have shattered my life and made a deep impact on my view towards human existence. The loss of my most beloved young nephew Derek to the senseless SARS virus, and the death of my eldest brother, Wai-ming, remind me of the fragility of life and the irreplaceable value of love. Last but not least, I could hardly have finished revising this book on time without the patience and support of my wife Monica and our cheerful daughter Athena. To them I must also dedicate this book. Contents List of Plates Introduction 1. City versus Countryside: The Growth of an Urban Identity and its Meanings in Canton 2. The Limits of Hatred: Popular Attitudes Towards the West in Republican Canton 3. The ‘Problem’ of Opium Smoking in Canton 4. Gambling in Canton: Myth and Reality of a Calamity 5. The Worlds of Prostitution in the Early Republic 6. Cantonese Opera as a Mirror of Society Conclusion Endnotes Abbreviations Selected Western and Japanese Language References Selected Chinese Language References Glossary Index viii 1 9 49 95 156 226 301 354 364 431 433 447 470 475 List of Plates (between pages 264–265) 1. The Waterfront of Canton in the 1930s. 2. Modern buildings in the commercial heart of the 1930s Canton. 3. Respect the clothes, not their owner. 4. The Quaker Oats: Superiority of Western Culture in the Popular Minds. 5. A different Person Before and After. 6. The Only One Who is Insightful. 7. The Dream of Mr Ho: Favourable Attitude Towards Prostitution. 8. Spiritual Training for the Inmates of Canton Addiction Termination Hospital. 9. A Gambling Den in Canton. 10. A Gambling-House in Macao. 11. A Row of ‘Flower Boats’ on the Pearl River in Canton. 12. A ‘Flower Boat’ in Canton. 13. Hua Tsai, a High-class Prostitute in the 1920s. 14. ‘Yellow Rose’, a Popular ‘Dance Girl’ in the Early 1930s. 15. An Anti-Prostitution Processsion in Canton. 16. The Influential Cantonese Opera Singer and Actress Li Hsueh-fang. ¨ ˆ 17. The Legendary Ma Shih-ts’eng. 18. The Legendary Hsueh Chueh-hsien. ¨ ¨ Introduction With an administrative area of about 57,100 acres and a population of over one million, Canton was the largest city solely administered by the Chinese, and undoubtedly the most important metropolis in South China in the 1920s and 1930s.1 To most foreign travellers to the city, Canton was both exciting and bustling. As one American traveller vividly recorded of the busy waterfront of Canton in the mid-1920s, ‘all the rank and file and chaos of Chinese life stretching as far as the eye can see and farther than the ears can hear or the nose protest down the wide street between the more or less foreign face of the city and the river with its even more crowded streets of boats’ (Franck 1925: 223). Being the heart of South China’s commerce and economy, Canton, like Shanghai, was a city packed with intense human activities. In a somewhat contradictory way, Cantonese of this period took pride in the city’s past as well as its present. In both official literature and unofficial guides to the city, Canton was popularly introduced as the ‘City of the Rams’, or the ‘City of the Immortals’, or ‘Grain City’. All these ‘courtesy names’ have their origin in one ‘beautiful legend’ dated back to the remote days of the Chou Dynasty which ‘is indeed most cherished by the people of the city’, as one unofficial guide book wrote in 1936 (Ng 1936: 1). In the eyes of its people, therefore, the glorious past of the city rendered its modern-day prosperity and development even more respectable and reputable. As early as 1922, Canton had already been praised for its commitment to municipal reform and its many accomplishments (Li 1922). By the mid-1930s, Canton was no longer just the highly regarded capital city of the ‘New Kwangtung’, wherein the transformation of southern China was said to have first been launched, but a modern metropolis that had accomplished many commendable changes that were believed to have brought about modernization not only to the cityscape, but also to many aspects of urban life and culture (Lee 1936). Meanwhile, however, some old customs and traditions persisted and thrived in harmony along with the new and Western ideas in Canton. Adjacent to skyscrapers were humble traditional houses with tiled roofs, automobiles operated side by side with rickshaws, and narrow tortuous lanes were interwoven with wide asphalt roads (Ng 1936; Murayama 1941: 8–12, 31–2, 40–69). Canton was a city of contrasts; contrast in terms not only of architecture or the means of transport, but also more importantly of human experiences, emotions, feelings, attitudes, and perceptions. 2 Introduction This book aims at presenting a ‘thicker’ glimpse of perceptions of realities— and the realities themselves—that prevailed in the dynamic city of Canton during the 1920s and 1930s. It is not a sociological inquiry into the notion of social perception,2 nor a historical account of urban or municipal development of this city, which have been well studied by many scholars,3 nor an overall survey and analysis of Cantonese popular culture, nor a comprehensive social history of Republican Canton—topics that deserve much more space and research. It also does not intend to seek any paradigmatic access that might enable us to read the Cantonese mind and character, or to define their patterns and systems of thought—both are highly problematic subjects hard to accomplish without biased generalizations. What it does modestly attempt is the study of certain specific aspects of life in Republican Canton, and especially the popular attitudes towards them, as a way to tell the story of the city and the life of its people from a different point of view—an approach that resembles, on a much humbler scale, that of Theodore Zeldin (1979) in his monumental works on modern France.4 These attitudes, being the cognitive product of the Cantonese themselves, embodied personal views and reflected social and cultural values relative to the specific phenomena discussed in this book. They are rich sources of information about the citizens’ life and representations of their thought. They also provide a sociocultural historian with materials to study the processes by which meanings were constructed into social phenomena and historical events. I hope, moreover, by underlining the coexistence of contradictory views of one and the same social phenomenon, and by an awareness of alternatives to a given belief system, to demonstrate the inherently complex and unmonolithic nature of life in a Republican Chinese city. Perceptions of realities, like realities themselves, are full of incongruities, ambiguities, and even contradictions.5 These imperfect perceptions of realities, however, must not be simply dismissed as totally wrong or erroneous because they still represent different possible ways that sociocultural events are perceived and understood. They are not necessarily wrong; but they are also by no means the only way that people’s perceptions of and attitudes towards socio-cultural phenomena are structured and defined. To paraphrase Roger Chartier (1988: 13–14), ‘history is turning to [study] practices that give meaning to the world in plural and even contradictory ways’. Alternatives were, and are, there. They coexist and sometimes compete with each other. In both ways, these bundles of alternatives become a dynamic force in history and society. One does not need much specialized historical knowledge to be aware that life and reality in the past, as it is in the present, could well be complex. It is, however, quite a different matter to substantiate this awareness with appropriate and convincing examples drawn from history. One of the major purposes of this work is to provide substantial examples that help unveil the complexity of history and to offer alternative ways to construe the past events and human experiences in the context of this southern Chinese city. This book contains six chapters that are structurally and thematically independent of each other. Instead of locking the focus onto one single aspect of social reality or onto the entire Introduction 3 society, each chapter deals with one specific social phenomenon in Canton in this period: changing social perceptions of the city and the countryside; popular views of the West; gambling and its social, cultural, and political meanings; the extent of the ‘problem’ of opium smoking, and the habit’s social and political functions; contradictory social perceptions of prostitution, and the diversity of experiences of prostitutes; the popularity of Cantonese opera and its social implications. This multi-focal approach is preferred over the alternatives because it is able to show the richness of peoples’ lives in former times and their cultures from more than one aspect of social reality, by which the inherent complexity of this city and its human components can be adequately outlined and better appreciated. Cantonese perceptions of the city and the countryside are studied in Chapter 1. One of the reasons for including this aspect of urban experience in the present study is the commonness of the discourse as seen from contemporary sources. The living conditions in metropolitan Canton, as compared with those of the countryside, were a much-discussed issue in local intellectual circles. Writing of different kinds, such as short stories, travelogues, prose pieces, novels, poems, and so on, which examined the situation and the fate of urbanity and rurality in this part of China, are abundant in local highbrow magazines and student journals. Such concern was also shared by many residents, other than those men of letters, whose opinions might not be adequately represented in intellectual writings, but reflected, sometimes only indirectly, from popular materials. Popularity to such an extent was a sign of the seriousness of this phenomenon, and a study of this common concern about the city and the countryside throws light on our understanding of the mentality and self-realization of this group of urbanites. These perceptions also help us to understand the growth of city identity among the inhabitants of Canton, and the cultural relationship between city and countryside. In spite of the fact that the countryside and its intrinsically idyllic values and way of life were by and large idealized in traditional Chinese orthodox thinking and ideology, the socio-cultural relations between city and countryside remained ambiguous, rather than one-sidedly anti-urban.6 There was indeed an alternative set of values that recognized the city’s social and cultural importance. By the 1930s, with the continuous growth of Canton into a modern metropolis, this cultural ambiguity, though it persisted, had apparently turned to the advantage of the city. More and more Cantonese openly pronounced their culturally superior identity as urbanites. The city’s socio-cultural functions were imbued with new symbolic meanings. And urban values were increasingly idealized at the expense of the countryside. The rise of the city became an irreversible cultural process in the modern history of China; its socio-cultural consequences are still being vividly felt today. Due to its alleged contribution to the success of the modern Chinese revolution at its various stages, Canton was, and still is, generally hailed as ‘the cradle of the Chinese Revolution’. Cantonese were, and still are, unduly praised for their patriotic stance and acts of bravery in withstanding the encroachment of the 4 Introduction foreign powers. Anti-imperialism, and to some extent anti-foreignism, was upheld as official foreign policy by the Republican government in Canton. Antiforeign messages permeated most official publications and much unofficial literature as well. Occasionally, the general public did respond enthusiastically to the emotional appeal for patriotism. The aim of Chapter 2 is to penetrate the facade of anti-foreign rhetoric in order to obtain a better glimpse of how ‘anti¸ foreign’ anti-foreignism was. This chapter also intends to draw attention to a much neglected issue in the history of Sino-Western cultural relations in the Republican period: the existence of an explicitly pro-Western mentality among the inhabitants of Canton and, apparently, of other treaty-port cities as well. This pro-Western mode of thinking found its expression in numerous political, social, and cultural facets of life in Republican Canton—the cityscape, fashion, notions of beauty, the lifestyle, public entertainment, political campaigns, and so on. A group of iconoclastic young intellectuals even put forward their high regard for Western values and culture and preached for the total Westernization of, initially, Cantonese society, and then of the whole of China. This second chapter, for all that, is not intended to discredit or repudiate the ‘revolutionary’ reputation or the contribution of Canton and its people; many remained sincerely patriotic and devoted to the cause of the National Revolution. Instead, it tries only to unveil the simple historical fact that Cantonese in this period were capable of unduly admiring their Western ‘enemies’, as much as of hating them. The common people in this city were not all anti-foreign revolutionary heroes; there was no short supply of citizens who were unpretentiously practical and openly unequivocal in their attitudes toward the West, which was admired and followed as a model of modernity and an antidote to China’s problems. By outlining this pro-Western mentality, the over-boosted image of the revolutionary Cantonese, as long propagated in Chi..."

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