Browsing by Subject "Tianjin"
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Item Beauty and a Broken City: women and their publicity in Tianjin, 1898-1911.(2011-04) Qin, FangMy dissertation is an attempt to explore the ways in which the global-local network impacted diverse women's lives and experiences at the turn of the twentieth century Tianjin, a coastal city in north China. I will especially emphasize two aspects of their experiences in cities: the ways in which women emerged as a public presence in the urban landscape, and the ways in which women's issues became a social phenomenon under the public observation and discussion. To be specific, I focus on three most-debated issues in Tianjin: women's physical body (footbinding), women's education, and women's performance. The three themes had for a long time been rooted in Chinese society and culture and symbolized the normative womanhood or its opposite side. When it came to the modern era, the themes of publicizing women's deformed feet, the transition from private inner chambers to public women's schools, and the extreme publicity of actresses on and off the stage became social issues in Tianjin, with which the city had never dealt before, or at least not to this extent. All the discussions, debates, arguments, and reforms of these issues affected groups of women such as missionary women, educated women, and actresses and dramatically changed their life styles and their identities in the city. New definitions of social and gender norms were forming to discipline women's behaviors and spheres. It is the negotiation between women and the forming norms that a space was created between layers for these women to actually lived with flexibility and agency. Meanwhile, it was also through the discussion, translation, and adaptation of these issues in Tianjin that people were able to articulate and consolidate their own identity as Tianjin natives.Item on the Road To A Modern City: New Transportation Technology and Urban Transformation of Tianjin, 1860-1937(2020-06) Li, KanAfter the northern Chinese city of Tianjin was opened as a treaty port in 1860, the steamship, railroad, and electric tramway were introduced into the city in rapid succession. The adoption of modern transportation technologies enabled Tianjin to occupy a crucial position in the emerging national and global transport and trade networks, Tianjin thus became one of a few cities that made the transition from a traditional commercial city on the Grand Canal to a modern seaport and railroad hub. Instead of taking a city’s modernity for granted, this dissertation examines how the physical forms of modernity came into being in Tianjin by connecting these processes to the adoption of new technologies and the building of national and international networks of transportation. Studying Tianjin from this angle, this dissertation sheds light on why, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a select few cities thrived even as China as a whole was struggling economically and politically. While fundamentally transforming Tianjin’s status, these new transport technologies also led to unintended consequences, which revealed the contingencies in modernization and the complexity of the Chinese modernity. In order to make the port of Tianjin a high-capacity, reliable harbor for large steamships, the river connecting Tianjin with the sea was drastically reshaped during the first two decades of the twentieth century. These efforts, however, created environmental problems that eventually harmed the sustainability of the port. In the construction of the railroads connecting Tianjin with critical resources, the Qing officials demonstrated their ability in employing western capital and professionals while curtailing western intervention in the railroad planning. Officials and local elites dominated the urban planning of Tianjin, trying to divert the benefit of the railroads toward the Chinese administered parts of the city. At the turn of the twentieth century, a system of electric tramways was forced upon Tianjin mainly to display the superiority of western civilization and technology. Bearing the mark of imperialism and being far ahead of the actual demand for mass transportation, the tramway system met with enormous resistance. The protests to the tramway often utilized the modern media and the discourses of nationalism and sovereignty. Modernity means that even actions of anti-modernization had to speak the language of the modern.