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‘Invisible Deaths, Silent Deaths’: ‘Bodies Without Masters’ in Republican Shanghai
Abstract and Figures
This paper is a study of death in Republican Shanghai with a focus on the issue of exposed corpses and abandoned coffins. Throughout the republican period and into the early years of the PRC, exposed corpses were collected daily in the streets of the city. A huge proportion of them were children. Shanghai was like a gigantic funnel that swallowed up lives by the hundreds or thousands every year, even in times of peace. The first part of the paper attempts to assess the extent of this phenomenon and to examine its main causes, as well as the discourses it generated. There was a huge gap between the scale of this tragedy and its social “invisibility.” Taking care of the poor and destitute became a major feature of the work of the benevolent societies. In Shanghai, some associations eventually concentrated on collecting unclaimed bodies and establishing cemeteries where they could be buried after a proper ceremony. Finally, the outbreak of hostilities in 1937 in Shanghai magnified the problems to such an extent that the local authorities were compelled for the first time to get involved in the management of death and regulate the treatment and movement of the dead bodies.
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... Between 1915 and 1951, around one million exposed corpses and abandoned coffins were recovered by charitable organisations from the city's streets. 49 In contrast, 'New Shanghai' was celebrated in three registers in the CCP's socialist realist propaganda: as a departure from the exploitative past; as an already existing model of good governance, in which citizens could lead productive and healthy lives; and as a promised utopia. 50 In practical terms, a small number of iconic Shanghai sites were repurposed with great fanfare, including the site of the former Shanghai Racecourse which became to People's Square in 1952. ...
Between 1949 and 1966, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led municipal government of Shanghai renamed more than one in seven of the city’s roads. Renaming was an important marker of revolutionary change in China’s largest and most foreign-influenced city. Road renaming in socialist China has been commonly understood to have been extensive. This article argues, however, that the nature and extent of renaming in socialist Shanghai was less dramatic than has been assumed. It demonstrates that renaming was not simply an iconoclastic process, but rather involved the pragmatic weighing of symbolic change against potential disruption. Further, it contends that renaming was driven by a desire to order the city, in line with the CCP’s modernist worldview.
... High infant mortality told a story of deprivation and unsanitary conditions. 66 As the SMC came to realize at its own expense, the hutments were also organized into well-organized communities. Many came from the same region, especially Jiangbei. ...
Hutments-a term used to designate beggars' villages strawhouse illages or more bluntly slums-became a standard feature of hanghai's urban landscape in the early 1920s. Located in peripheral areas, they became a central object of concern by the authorities that governed the foreign settlements in the city. Over time, due to economic crisis and above all war, "hutments" slowly colonized the whole urban space and became a massive housing issue and a problematic historical legacy after 1949. This paper argues that hutments arose mostly from the turmoil of the Civil War period. Their nature changed little from the time of their appearance in the 1920s to the early 1950s. Yet, perceptions and policies over three major periods under study here varied significantly. They were strongly influenced by the discursive constructions and distorting lenses the local administrations formulated around issues of nuisance, public health, and city beautification. Each era carried over the concerns and prejudices of the previous period. Yet, each municipal institution also brought in new cultural and political postures that changed the overall discourse and treatment of hutment dwellers..
... Natacha Aveline-Dubach traffic and posing a threat to public health (Henriot, 2009). These bodies were collected by benevolent societies founded by local dignitaries, which, just like the English mutual-aid societies and the French brotherhoods of charity, 2 ensured the material and spiritual accompaniment of the dead into the hereafter. ...
Shanghai was formerly the heart of a highly dynamic funeral industry. Following a fifty-year interlude under the Maoist regime, the city is now seeking to revive this pioneering tradition. Although death is no more visible here than in China’s other major cities, for the past twenty or so years Shanghai has endeavoured to compromise with market forces in order to create a new funeral culture reflecting the ambitions of a new Chinese modernity and destined to serve as a model for the country. More than any other, the funeral industry that has emerged in Shanghai bears the traces of China’s turbulent evolution over the past two centuries. This chapter traces the main stages of the industry’s history by placing it within the context of the major political, economic and social challenges of each period.
... Map : Bombed and destroyed areas in August-October . of thousands actually died, mostly infants and children, from malnutrition, disease and sheer poverty. In alone, charity organisations picked up more than , exposed bodies and abandoned coffins in the streets of Shanghai.76 On the military side, three months of bitter fighting left , casualties out of , engaged for the Chinese army and , casualties out of the , Japanese engaged.77 ...
War was a major aspect of Shanghai history in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, because of the particular political and territorial divisions that segmented the city, war struck only in Chinese-administered areas. In this paper, I examine the fate of the Zhabei district, a booming industrious area that came under fire on three successive occasions. Whereas Zhabei could be construed as a success story—a rag-to-riches, swamp-to-urbanity trajectory—the three instances of military conflict had an increasingly devastating impact, from shaking, to stifling, to finally erase Zhabei from the urban landscape. This area of Shanghai experienced the first large-scale modern warfare in an urban setting. The 1927 skirmish established the pattern in which the civilian population came to be exposed to extreme forms of violence, was turned overnight into a refugee population, and lost all its goods and properties to bombing and fires.
This Master's thesis on the Chinese printmaker Zhao Yannian is aiming to understand the link of the illustrations of Lu Xun's works by the artist with his personnal experience of the Cultural Revolution.
The burial of war dead was a key element of displacement and community formation during wartime and postwar China and Taiwan, 1937–1955. Reckoning with the physical burial and spiritual pacification of civilian as well as military dead posed practical and epistemological problems for the tens of millions forced to migrate amid shifting political and military boundaries. Various populations of living and dead refugees became increasingly politicized on the national and international levels, affecting local rituals and family burials. The accumulation of unidentified or lost bodies raised the stakes for the incorporation of the known dead into local, translocal, or national communities. The moral imperative of families and lineages to reconstitute themselves in the aftermath of war was made concrete via the extensive networks of locally-identified charitable organizations who worked to transport coffins back “home” from China's interior. The Nationalist government, meanwhile, prioritized symbolic control over military heroes in ways that ignored or eschewed burial and family ritual. The KMT and those who fled with them to Taiwan in 1949 were then cut off from their national as well as family graves, and struggled to find ritual and practical methods of overcoming or temporarily ameliorating political boundaries, geographic distance, and the passage of time.
Available statistical categories can provide a lot of insight into contemporary concepts of death disease and illness but my purpose in this article is rather to discuss in the form of a case study an empirical historical problem occupying many scholars: What happened during the initial phase of the epidemiologic transition in the Western world?...This investigation illustrates and tests the possibilities of using Swedish data on causes of death among infants and young children before and during the first phase of the epidemiological transition that is from 1750 to 1850. (EXCERPT)
Angela Ki Che Leung is a Research Fellow at the Sun Yat-sen Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
Sex, Death, and Hierarchy in. Chinese City: Anthropological Account. WILLIAM R. JANKOWIAK. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. xvi. 345 pp., index, references, notes, photographs, tables, illustrations.