Antonia Finnane

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Formerly full professor; since retirement honorary professorial fellow at University of Melbourne

This is a public interest article published on the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice (27 July 1953). It draws on research undertaken for How to Make a Mao Suit (Cambridge, 2023) to explain the clothing supplied to Australian (and British and American) prisoners of war during the war, if they were lucky.

This is a public interest article drawing on current research on gender issues in cross-strait relations. The hit Taiwanese series Wave Makers, which has prompted a #Metoo storm in Taiwan, is banned in the People's Republic of China but both the ban and the series itself have provoked some commentary.

When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, new clothing protocols for state employees resulted in far-reaching changes in what people wore. In a pioneering history of dress in the Mao years (1949-1976), Antonia Finnane traces the transformation, using industry archives and personal stories to reveal a clothing regime pivoted on the so...

The Mao years were also the time of the pattern book, a characteristic genre of publishing in the Mao years. Pattern books were core to the dissemination of skills needed for the making of the clothing worn in the New China ushered into being by the Communist Party. Privately published, crudely illustrated publications produced largely for sewing s...

When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, new clothing protocols for state employees resulted in far-reaching changes in what people wore. In a pioneering history of dress in the Mao years (1949–1976), Antonia Finnane traces the transformation, using industry archives and personal stories to reveal a clothing regime pivoted on the so...

Chapter 3 surveys the range of zhifu (‘uniforms’) made and worn in the Mao years, showing that they quickly replaced the long gown as dress for men in urban contexts.Countering claims that there were no official laws or regulations governing dress in China, this chapter argues that protocols governing work dress constituted a regulatory system. The...

Some clothing styles are commonly associated with women. The Lenin jacket (Lieningzhuang), the dual-purpose jacket (liangyongshan) and the Chinese-style jacket (Zhongzhuang or bianfu) are examples. As Chapter 9 shows, attributing gender to particular styles is nearly always complicated. The names of all of these styles were also attached to garment...

Although zhifu is a term more closely associated with men’s wear than with women’s, women’s work in the Mao years did include making zhifu. Chapter Four documents the proliferation of sewing schools for women in the 1950s, showing that they were a route by which women entered the paid workforce. Women in various contexts – in factories, sewing co-o...

Styling Shanghai is the first book dedicated to exploring the city’s fashion cultures, examining its growing status as one of the world’s foremost fashion cities. From its origins as an international treaty port in the 19th century, Shanghai has emerged as a global leader in the production, mediation and consumption of fashion. This book reveals ho...

This article explores a lesser known source of graphic images of male and female figures produced during the early decades of the People’s Republic of China. Propaganda posters, stage performances, and cinema suggest a high level of visibility for women in Mao’s China. In contrast, how-to-sew manuals and pattern books, which in Japan, Western count...

Paris, Capital of Fashion accompanies a major exhibition at The Museum at FIT, New York's only museum dedicated solely to the art of fashion. This lavishly-illustrated book is edited by MFIT's director and chief curator, Valerie Steele, also the author of the acclaimed Paris Fashion: A Cultural History. This new book opens with an important essay o...

available for this title.

div class="title">City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions. By Chuck Wooldridge . Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2015. xiii + 242 pp. $50 (cloth). - Antonia Finnane

With the “consumption turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, a phenomenon evident in English-language scholarship from the 1980s onward, production ceased to command the attention it had once received from historians. A recent (2012) study of the sewing machine in modern Japan by Harvard historian Andrew Gordon demonstrates the effects: w...

As art objects, Chinese bronze mirrors can be dated back to the Warring States era, which is when high quality mirrors were first produced in quantity. In the second millennium long-handled fans became a less common element in paintings, while small fans became an established feature. In the period of glass mirrors, which were rare and costly, bron...

Since 1750, the world has become ever more connected, with processes of production and destruction no longer limited by land- or water-based modes of transport and communication. Volume 7 of The Cambridge World History, divided into two books, offers a variety of angles of vision on the increasingly interconnected history of humankind. The second b...

The chapter is a translation with introduction of an essay by a contemporary Yangzhou scholar, Wei Minghua, who has written extensively on the the local culture of his home town. The historical phenomenon he deals with in this essay would be described now as human trafficking: young girls being bought by a professional matchmaker and trained in fem...

Zhu Ziqing (1898-1948) was a highly esteemed essayist of the Republican era whose body of work included a number of essays on his home town, Yangzhou. Among them was "Speaking of Yangzhou" , written in the midst of a loud public controversy over the place and its good name. That essay is translated here, with extensive annotations and a substantial...

In works that have profoundly influenced contemporary views of China’s economic growth relative to the Europe’s in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, Jan De Vries has concluded that “the East Asian industrious revolution is very much a supply-side phenomenon”, while Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong among others have concluded that consumer rest...

Statesmen and gentlemen: the elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi in Northern and Southern Sung. By HymesRobert P.. (Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions.) pp. xv, 379, 19 maps. Cambridge etc., Cambridge University Press, 1986. £30.00. - Volume 120 Issue 2 - Antonia Finnane

How new was the New China? This article explores the experience of Beijing tailors in the early years of the PRC in light of this question. After 1949, many long-established tailors simply continued to ply their trade in their old business premises, giving a strong impression of continuity in the social fabric of the city. They were increasingly ch...

This collection of essays covers little-know aspects of the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, 1955, one of the key events in international post-colonial history. In it, historians of Japan, China, Indonesia, Burma, the Middle East, Australia and the Cold War provide micro-histories that show how the very process of developing post-colonial solid...

East Asia covers an area that is home to a quarter of the world’s population. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the region, followed by separate sections on China, Korea, and Japan. The section on China covers the Han people, China’s ethnic majority, as well as most of China’s fifty-five minority groups. Festive dress, China’s reputa...

This book problematizes the idea of "fashion" in a longitudinal history of Chinese dress between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, Ming to Mao. It probes the nexus between national politics, gender, and dress practices, showing in words and pictures how sensitive dress was to the political environment. First published by Christopher Hurst in L...

in the post-mao era china competed successfully for a place in the international trade in textiles and apparel, but its economic success has not been matched by recognition of chinese fashion design on the world stage. one reason for this lies in the obstacles posed by the existing hierarchy of fashion capitals, which has proved notoriously difficu...

In wake of the publication of Valerie Steel and John Major's book China Chic in 1999, China specialist Roxane Witke, author of a biography of Jiang Qing, questioned in print the veracity of their claim that in the early 1970s Jiang Qing had designed a dress intended to be the new standard form of clothing for Chinese women. The controversy is laid...

In this engaging study of weddings in contemporary Taiwan, anthropologist Bonnie Adrian documents a rite of passage recognizable across the world from its major visual representation: the wedding photograph. Photographs prompted her early questions and provided her with the point of departure for her research. Why do couples have so many wedding ph...

This useful volume brings together a number of articles showing recent shifts in the English-language historiography of 20th-century China. Historians tend to talk in terms of centuries, and a book about historical approaches to the century just finished is timely. Wasserstrom's introduction establishes the grounds for thinking about China's 20th c...

Yangzhou was once treated by historians of China as the place par excellence where something like the "sprouts of capitalism" were evident, with concomitant effects in the social sphere affecting the status of merchants. This book explores this among other historical "myths" about Yangzhou, exposing relations between local and immigrant communities...

positions: east asia cultures critique 11.2 (2003) 395-425 What does it mean to talk about “fashion” in a Chinese context? Presented with Chinese fashion magazines and fashion shows, we can be confident that the term is meaningful, but these are phenomena of the twentieth century. For earlier times, the temptation may be to agree with Quentin Bell...

Why does the term ‘ethnic’ sound so odd when inserted into histories of non-contemporary societies? This is one of the problems with which Mark Elliott struggles in his engaging study of the politics of difference in Qing China. The answer is that the term ‘ethnic’ has come into general circulation only in relatively recent times, and then in the c...

Art historians have produced some of the most interesting historical works on China, bringing to the study of the past an immediacy of insight that can elude the historian who works only with texts. Ginger Hs has provided such an insight into eighteenth-century Yangchow Yangzhou , a city renowned at the time for its wealth, beauty, and cultural pro...

Wartime Shanghai was home to diverse communities of Jewish refugees, expatriates and sojourners, many of whom settled in Australia at the war's end. This book examines their different fates during and after the war, which were in large part determined by whether or not they had passports and what the passports said.

Women's dress, women's writing, women's bodies, women's work, women as portrayed by themselves and others in literature and the arts: these are among the topics addressed in this wide-ranging collection of essays written by scholars working in a number of different areas of Chinese studies. Included is a reprint of this author's pioneering article,...

Drawing on local gazetteers, literature, and folk songs, the chapter presents a view of the historical landscape of Subei (the eastern Jiang-Huai region) through a prism of gender relations.

ANTONIA FINNANE examines Chinese nationalism during the 1930s through a discussion of Idle Talk on Yangzhou (Xianhua Yangzhou), published in 1934 by the nationalist literary critic Yi Junzuo, and the subsequent storm of controversy that led his publisher to pull the book from circulation. Finnane shows how Yi Junzuo's writing borrows certain Wester...

The convention for introducing biography in the Chinese textual tradition is to identify the subject not only by his name but also by his native place. The classic formula used for this purpose is set out in the preface to “The True Story of Ah Q,” in which Lu Xun remarks that “when writing biography, it is the usual practice to begin ‘so-and-so, f...

James Cole, Shaohsing: Competition and Cooperation in Nineteenth Century China, Association for Asian Studies Monograph 44. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1986. xv, 315 pp. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, glossary, index, appendixes. Cloth: US$21.00.Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850, Cambridge, Harva...

This thesis is concerned with identifying the physical, social and economic characteristics of a particular Chinese city, Yangzhou, and with examining the nature of the relationship between this city and its hinterland. These questions are considered within the time frame provided by the growth and decline of Yangzhou in the Qing dynasty. Chapter 1...