All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
An advert for the great China Motors that had several branches around town before the war – mostly US cars, but also Fiat flatbed trucks (which were the preferred flat bed of Shanghai)….
I’ve posted about Thomson’s China photography quite a few times on this blog. Now he’s getting a heritage plaque in Edinburgh – well done Jamie Carstairs of the Visualising China project at Bristol University for nominating him….more on Thomson and the plaque here
Miss M. Moohina was a young Russian emigre woman who lived on Rue Maresca (Wuyuan Lu) in the French Concession. By day she worked as a clerk in an office in Shanghai. Some time around the Christmas holiday in 1940 four robbers burst in, tied her up, stole her diamond ring and her gold watch. They then wanted to open the office safe. But Miss Moohina was too canny for them – she fell into a supposed feint and lay still. Thinking there was no way they cold now get the combinatioin in any quick time the robbers took off. Miss Moohina saved her boss a few thousand dollars – hope the ring and watch were insured!
An ideal book for someone who writes popular Chinese history, but used to run a market research company in Shanghai!! Making it Count by Arunabh Ghosh…out this March….
In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People’s Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world’s largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data about their own country. Making It Count is the history of efforts to resolve this “crisis in counting.†Drawing on a wealth of sources culled from China, India, and the United States, Arunabh Ghosh explores the choices made by political leaders, statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures in attempts to know the nation through numbers.
Ghosh shows that early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise. By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, Ghosh not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider developments in the history of statistics and data.
Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, Making It Count offers fresh perspectives on China’s transition to socialism.
In my article for CNNi on the history Wuhan I suggested that the earliest use of the term ‘China’s Chicago’ for was a 1900 piece on the city in Collier’s magazine. But, my thanks to blog reader “Mark S” who found this earlier mention in chapter 3 of vol. 2 of The Story of the China Inland Mission, by Mary Geraldine Guinness (and with an introduction by the missionary J Hudson Taylor, also Guinness’s father-in-law), dated 1893. One chapter is entitled “The Chicago of China” and Mark also notes, it is Wuchang rather than Hankow is given prominence whereas later references invariably refer largely to Hankow, where most of the city’s fopreign prescence was clustered.
I wrote a history of Wuhan looking at the city’s two centuries of interaction witb Europe, Japan and America for CNN International – click here
Thinking of Wuhan lately obviously and remembering that in the first half of the twentieth century it was invariably referred to in the American newspapers as the ‘Chicago of China’ – apt really being an inland entrepot, industry city with iron steel, stockyards, canning etc, population of around a million, a city of largely business rather than politics or culture.
I believe the first use of the term was by Collier’s magazine in 1900 in an article on China’s ‘boom town’ (then the three cities of Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang that became known as Wuhan) that likened Wuhan to both Chicago and St Louis. Certainly by the late 1920s it was being regularly used as the articles below show….
A piece by Kate Whitehead in the South China Morning Post noting the predictions of Dean Koontz and other virus-related issues in Wuhan, including me, briefly, on Japanese biological warfare remnants in the city from WW2….click here
