EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Modern History 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 138 (1925–1926) with a special attention to its background and consequences. The CER became joint venture of Soviet Union and China in 1924. From the beginning of the unified management the conflicts between Soviets and Chinese sprouted culminating with the prohibition to transport military cargoes and troops issued by the general manager Ivanov, and his arrest by the warlord Zhang Zuolin. Му presentation argues that this conflict was provoked by both parties: on the one hand by Soviet ambassador Lev M. Karakhan’s tough posture and his premature, rash decision-making, and on the other hand — irresponsible policy of Zhang Zuolin towards Soviet specialists who worked on the CER. Zhang’s victory in the clash of 1926 convinced the Chinese that they had the power to take repressive measures against the supposedly all-powerful Soviet Union’s citizens and institutions, leading in turn to the Sino– Soviet military conflict of 1929, and exacerbating Japanese alarm over Soviet strengthening in the region, a factor in the takeover of Manchuria in 1931 by Japan’s Kwantung Army. Wang Xiaoxuan (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity) Keeping Up with theWorld: The Growth of Protestant Christianity under High Maoism in Southeastern China, 1958–1978 Key words: Christianity, Maoism, Cultural Revolution, religion, local society It is widely believed that in China during the 1960s and 1970s, especially during the Cultural Revo- lution (1966–1978), Christian activities, like any other religious traditions, were reduced to a minimum if not completely disrupted. My study challenges this view. Drawing on a variety of local government archival sources, historical records of local churches, and interviews with witnesses, this article focuses the transformation and diffusion of Protestant Christianity in the Wenzhou region of southeastern China's Zhejiang Province in the 1958–1978 period while drawing examples from other regions in both south and north China. It will demonstrate that, rather than declining, Protestant churches in Wenzhou had considerable growth in membership and organization in this period. Partly as a diversification strategy to circumvent political coercion, Protestant activities widely extended into more villages in the region. Though all church buildings were seized or closed, by the late 1970s, far more extensive networks of home gathering spots had been established all over the region. Throughout the paper, I will argue that the socialist rule in the 1960s and early 1970s in fact stimulated the growth of Protestant Christianity by forcing Protestant churches to further integrate itself into local society and unexpectedly causing the expansion and proliferation of Protestant organizations, which is critical to the explosive development of Protestant Christianity in China today. Werner Jake (University of Chicago) Culture and Living Conditions at the Grassroots in 1950s Shanghai Key words: culture, work, revolution, early PRC, Shanghai At the level of Shanghai’s public culture, the establishment of the Communist state in 1949 marked a sharp break. Long identified with the Jazz Age consumer elite and “Westernized” ways of living, Shanghai was quickly recast in the state-controlled media, the movies, and the increasingly common political assemblies as a bastion of the patriotic, self-abnegating proletariat. Yet at the level of everyday life, change took shape at a much slower pace. For many years after the advent of the “workers’ state,” living and working conditions remained rudimentary and most Shanghai residents endured poverty and arduous manual labor. This paper examines how the tensions between official culture and the lived experience of the “masses” were negotiated at the grassroots. Drawing on archival sources from Shanghai’s factories and neighborhood committees, I examine how new patterns of recreation, consumption, and work restructured the meaning of privation and sacrifice among “the people.” The emergence of a distinctive revolutionary culture served to crystallize an opposition between those who found a place in the newly homogenized culture and those who continued to be excluded.