UBC Press Blog

Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937

Christopher A. Reed, 2004, Chapter 1, p. 12-16.

Although his progeny, in the form of typography, printing presses, and printing machines, appeared in Shanghai in the nineteenth century, Johann Gutenberg (1400?-68) himself did not figure as a recognizable name or noteworthy personality in the Shanghai consciousness before the mid-1920s. His appearance then reflected growing public awareness of the importance of technology in national development as well as the widespread dissemination of the industrially manufactured book and journal. Gutenberg was absent from China’s first modern dictionary, Xin zidian (New Dictionary)issued by the Commercial Press in 1912.Likewise,he did not appear in the Commercial Press’s 1915 phrase dictionary, Ciyuan, or in Zhonghua da zidian (Zhonghua Big Dictionary), issued the same year by Zhonghua Books. Nonetheless, all three modern dictionaries, the most important to appear in Chinese since Kangxi zidian (Kangxi Dictionary) of 1716, were printed using technology that could be traced to Gutenberg.

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The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941- 67

Patricia E. Roy, 2007, Introduction, p. 4, Conclusion p. 303-305, 309.

In 1968 Premier W.A.C. Bennett of British Columbia took Mayor Peter Wing of Kamloops, the president of the Union of British Columbia Municipalities, to a federal-provincial constitutional conference. While in Ottawa, Wing may have met another Kamloops native and fellow graduate of its high school, Thomas Shoyama, a senior economic adviser to the government. A quarter-century earlier their presence in any governmental role would have been unlikely. In 1941 Wing, born in 1914, was an active member of the Kamloops Board of Trade; Shoyama, born in 1916, had graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in economics and commerce, but until fellow Japanese Canadians appointed him editor of their newspaper in Vancouver he had worked as a labourer in a pulp mill.

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Chinese Canadian and Chinese American Political Mobilization

Shanti Fernando, 2006, Chapter 6, p. 127-130.

Author’s Comment:
Conversations about Equality and Hope

My book Race and the City is a story found in a framework created by history and scholarly studies and theories about racialization in Canada and the US. The story inside this framework is born of many conversations with leading members of the Chinese American and Chinese Canadian communities who wanted to share their community and personal stories. These were not stories of despair but stories of hope for a better, more equal future. They were generous in sharing with me the pride in gains and accomplishments as well as the frustration with barriers they continue to face. The goal of many of these groups was to “get into the conversation” of politics and make others aware of the common interests they have with all other groups. The commonality of interests is something that I hope that we can celebrate while still acknowledging histories and differences. I think that my book calls on all of us to be vigilant in remembering that common ground and protecting equality gains within that common ground. I always ask my students to do what I believe to be the most important thing in life which is to put themselves in someone else’s position. This is the only way to gain understanding. Political mobilization is not a narrow concept.  It can be protest, interest group or community group involvement or just the ability to contribute to a conversation in a way that affirms the equality of racialized minorities and asks for others to respect and support that equality. It is about self awareness. Awareness of how issues of race affect us all.

Excerpt, 2006, Chapter 6, p. 127-130.

I have attempted to define the place of racialized minorities in both a Canadian and an American context and have tried to articulate how racialization has denied them full access to political participation and substantive citizenship. I chose urban multicultural settings, where “governance units can best encourage and enable the active participation of citizens in raising issues, shaping the political agenda, making decisions, and implementing them,” because these sites had the greatest concentration of racialized minorities and theoretically had the most easily accessible political system. Continue reading…

Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation

Norman Smith, 2007, Introduction, p. xii-xiv

Canadian Women’s Studies Association /L’association canadienne des études sur les femmes
has awarded Resisting Manchukuo their 2008 Book Prize.

In early November 1944, Mei Niang (b.1920), the pre-eminent woman writer in north China, travelled from her home in Beijing to Nanjing, the capital of Japan’s conquests in south China and the site of notorious wartime atrocities, to attend the third and final Greater East Asia Writers’ Congress (Dadongya wenxuezhe dahui/Daitōa bungakusha taikai ). At the congress, one of Japan’s most prominent colonial institutions, Mei Niang’s novella Xie (Crabs) was acclaimed novel of the year, and she was feted for her achievements as a writer, editor, and translator. Her work attracted audiences across East Asia: just the previous year, in the fall of 1943, her fame was celebrated as bookstores in Beijing and Shanghai, both occupied by the Japanese, conducted polls to determine the most beloved contemporary Chinese woman writer. The results linked her name with that of Shanghai’s Zhang Ailing (1920 -95) in the catch- phrase, “nan Ling, bei Mei” ((the south has Zhang Ailing, the north has Mei Niang).The two women were widely acclaimed for career accomplishments in territories under Japanese domination, contexts radically different from the post-occupation period, which subsequently spawned highly politicized evaluations of their legacies.

Mei Niang solidified her position as a critic of patriarchy in China’s literary world of the late 1930s, in the Japanese colonial state of Manchukuo (1932 -45 ). Continue reading…