Urbanism vs. Communism? Conflicts over Movies and Plays in Early PRC Shanghai

Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies presents Jin Jiang.

Speaker:
Jin Jiang

Shanghai during the early years of the People's Republic of China underwent a socialist transformation at the directive of the Chinese Communist Party. The most cosmopolitan city at that time, Shanghai was faced with a rural-based revolutionary force that subscribed to a communist ideology and vowed to purge the city’s popular culture of all its bourgeois elements. The subsequent clash between urbanism and communism in Shanghai was full of drama. Professor Jiang will reveal some of the implications of this clash by tracing a series of conflicts surrounding the production and consumption of the best-selling movies and plays of the period.

Jin Jiang is professor of modern Chinese history at East China Normal University. Her research covers social and cultural histories of twentieth-century China, with special interests in urban, gender, and cultural studies focused on Shanghai. She has published articles and books in both English and Chinese including Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (2009), and Performing Women: Women in Republican Shanghai (2010, in Chinese). Professor Jiang is currently a research fellow-in-residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute.