The latest in my occasional series of old Shanghai signage (use the search box if you want to see other examples). This sign was captured in a photograph of the general area up around Jessfield Park (Zhongshan Park) in the 1930s. It’s a dirt lot car park (and note the rickshaw puller having a little rest behind the sign) with an “IN” sign but also stipulates for “OWNER DRIVEN CARS ONLY”. I assume this was to stop chauffeurs loitering and taking up spaces?
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-called ‘Mao suit’. The time of the Mao suit was the time of sewing schools and sewing machines, pattern books and homemade clothes. It was also a time of close economic planning, when rationing meant a limited range of clothes made, usually by women, from limited amounts of cloth. In an area of scholarship dominated by attention to consumption, Finnane presents a revisionist account focused instead on production. How to Make a Mao Suit provides a richly illustrated account of clothing that links the material culture of the Mao years to broader cultural and technological changes of the twentieth century.
In this vivid and highly original reading of recent Chinese history, Xuelei Huang documents the eclectic array of smells that permeated Chinese life from the High Qing through to the Mao period. Utilising interdisciplinary methodology and critically engaging with scholarship in the expanding fields of sensory and smell studies, she shows how this period of tumultuous change in China was experienced through the body and the senses. Drawing on unexplored archival materials, readers are introduced to the ‘smellscapes’ of China from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century via perfumes, food, body odours, public health projects, consumerism and cosmetics, travel literature, fiction and political language. This pioneering and evocative study takes the reader on a sensory journey through modern Chinese history, examining the ways in which the experience of scent and modernity have intertwined.
For those who don’t get a proper copy of theSouth China Morning Post weekend magazine in their hands & rely on the online version you may not appreciate how good the covers consistently are (& my John Le Carre tale was featured front & centre last issue)…. Many thanks to designer Mario Rivera (@mariogramme on instagram) – the article is here by the way…
Re my longread (here) in the South China Morning Post weekend mag on John Le Carre, his visits to HK in the 70s & the resultant novel The Honourable Schoolboy. There are of course a number of memorable scenes set in the old FCC including the gents urinals. A view to the harbour immortalised here…
I realise many of you (for reasons of being not in Hong Kong, or women) may not be familiar with the gents toilets at the FCC on Lower Albert Road & so will not have seen the long installed photo of the view from the old Sutherland House FCC (long demolished) on Chater Road.
My latest long read for the South China Morning Postweekend magazine deals with the two visits John Le Carre made to Hong Kong in the early 1970s and how those trips lead to the cast of characters and plotlines of The Honourable Schoolboy (1975)… click here
Drawing on a rich set of original oral histories conducted with retired factory workers from industrial centers across the country, this book provides a bottom-up examination of working class participation in factory life during socialist and reform-era China. Huaiyin Li offers a series of new interpretations that challenge, revise, and enrich the existing scholarship on factory politics and worker performance during the Maoist years, including the nature of the Maoist state as seen in the operation of power relations on the shop floor, as well as the origins and dynamics of industrial enterprise reforms in the post-Mao era.
In sharp contrast with the ideologically driven goal of promoting grassroots democracy or manifesting workers’ status as the masters of the workplace, Li argues that Maoist era state-owned enterprises operated effectively to turn factory workers into a well-disciplined labor force through a complex set of formal and informal institutions that functioned to generate an equilibrium in power relations and work norms. The enterprise reforms of the 1980s and 1990s undermined this preexisting equilibrium, catalyzing the transformation of the industrial workforce from predominantly privileged workers in state-owned enterprises to precarious migrant workers of rural origins hired by private firms. Ultimately, this comprehensive and textured history provides an analytically astute new picture of everyday factory life in the world’s largest manufacturing powerhouse.
About the author
Huaiyin Li is Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008 (Stanford, 2009).
