No. 4 - September 2012 - Communications and Development ...

Foreigners’experienceof RepublicanChina unearthedin new bookThe untold stories offoreigners living inRepublican China(1912–1949) are revealedin a new book co–editedby a University ofCanterbury academic.Associate Professor Anne–Marie Brady(Social and Political Sciences) co–editedForeigners and Foreign Institutions inRepublican China with Douglas Brown fromJohn Abbott College in Quebec, Canada.“There were very diverse groups in Chinabefore 1949 and they had a big effect onforming modern Chinese identities. Therewas everything from White Russiansescaping the Bolsheviks, then Bolshevikscowering from Stalinism, Koreans escapingJapan, Vietnamese escaping Frenchcolonialism, and Western homosexualsescaping persecution back home,” ProfessorBrady said.“In China today, historians don’t reallydelve into the complexities of pre–1949China in that way,” she said.“It’s generally depicted as a bad era withforeigners exploiting China, but what thebook shows is the diversity and how theseforeigners often helped provide free–zonesor enclaves of ‘other Chinas’ where newideas could develop. It also shows that itwas a two–way experience and foreignerswere equally impacted by China during theirtime in the country.”Foreigners and Foreign Institutions inRepublican China features 12 papersincluding one on the little–known TianjinItalian settlement; one on New Zealandwriter Robyn Hyde’s experiences in China byUC Foundations Studies lecturer Dr MeganClayton; one on the experiences of SovietAssociate Professor Anne-Marie Brady with her latest book.Comintern agents in China; another onKorean members of the ChineseCommunist Party who were later sent toKorea to fight in the Korean War; theexperiences of women activists for theYWCA in China; the writings of TakedaTaijuin, who was a Japanese officer based inChina during the war years and laterbecame one of Japan’s most celebratedauthors; an analysis of how poets WHAuden and Christopher Isherwood’s journeyto observe the war in China led to some ofthe key ideas of the early gay liberationmovement; as well as Professor Brady’s ownresearch on Rewi Alley and the experiencesof other foreign homosexuals living inRepublican China.“The idea for this project came to me in1998 when I was still doing my PhD. Overthe years I kept thinking about it andtalking to other scholars about it. The bookincludes a range of scholars from aroundthe world who reveal the diversity andrange of these ‘other Chinas’, the pluralistic,heterotopic China of the Republican erathat hadn’t been fully revealed in otherstudies.“It has been wonderful collaboratingwith the different authors over the past fiveyears since Doug Brown and I began to editthe book. It’s the kind of book you can’twrite yourself. There is no way you couldknow so much about such diverse groupsof people and I have learnt so much frommy authors’ research.“We have drawn on the expertise of awide range of scholars including ananthropologist, literary specialists,historians, and a political scientist as wellas a former senior Korean politician. Whenyou bring all that diverse experience ofsocial sciences and humanities disciplinestogether from scholars who come from awide range of backgrounds, it helps toexpose the complexities of all thesedifferent foreign interactions.”6