Strenuous Decades : : Global Challenges and Transformation of Chinese Societies in Modern Asia / / ed. by Chi-cheung Choi, Tomoko Shiroyama, Venus Viana.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2022 Part 1
• MitwirkendeR: Abe, Kaori,; Bisalputra, Pimpraphai,; Choi, Chi-cheung,; Chu, Richard T.,; Kang, Jin-A,; Li, Yi,; Mao, Di,; Morota, Hiroaki,; Qiushi, Huangfu,; Seng Loh, Kah,; Shiroyama, Tomoko,; Sng, Jeffery,; Tana, Li,; Viana, Venus,; Yiu Chan, Kai,
• HerausgeberIn: Choi, Chi-cheung,; Shiroyama, Tomoko,; Viana, Venus,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Social and Cultural Changes in China [SCCC] , 2
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XV, 338 p.)

The movement of goods and passengers between port cities not only stimulates growth in coastal trading networks and centers but also inevitably changes the social and economic lives of people in these port cities and, subsequently, of their fellow compatriots farther inland. Studies of port cities have focused on the interactive political and economic relationship between trading centers. The center of attention in this book is socioeconomic life and cultural identity, which are shaped by the movement of goods, people, knowledge, and information, particularly when the community faces a crisis. Transnational studies focus on cross-border connections between people, institutions, commodities, and ideas, with an emphasis on their global presence. This book looks at the responses of different localities to the same global crisis. It gathers a selection of the fifty papers presented at the conference on "Coping with Transnational Crisis: Chinese Economic and Social Lives in East Asian Port Cities, 1850-1950," held in Hong Kong on June 7-11, 2016. The period from the 1850s to the outbreak of war in the Pacific in the late 1930s encompasses two major transnational crises with significant impacts on the Chinese population in Southeast Asian port cities in terms of their way of living and the construction of their identity: the emergence of bubonic plague in the 1880s and 1920s and the global economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The authors discuss the social and economic lives in various South East Asian port cities where many residents had to cope with these transnational crises. They do so through examining institutional measurements, rituals and festivals, communication, knowledge and information exchange as well as identity (re)construction. In addition, they explore how local communities responded to knowledge and information between the port cities and cities as well as inland locations. The chapters in this book offer solid grounds for future comparisons, not only based on a specific time or event but also on how society reacted over time, space, and various types of crises.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Foreword -- Contents -- Contributors -- Introduction -- Part I: Traders and workers abroad: Coping with colonial powers and socioeconomic adversaries -- Coping with colonial governments -- Chapter 1 Hong Kong rice merchants and Saigon’s rice exports, 1870s–1920s -- Chapter 2 The general, the Chino, and the Señorita: Stories from The Manila Times in early US Colonial Manila -- Chapter 3 Vulnerability, divided loyalties, and secret societies in Siam, 1850–1950 -- Modern hygiene and medicine -- Chapter 4 A different model of hygienic modernity: Encountering plague in Macau in 1895 -- Chapter 5 Health crisis in Chinese worlds: Medicine, religion, and epidemics in South China and Southeast Asia, 1880s–1910s -- Collective survival of workers -- Chapter 6 A Cantonese Carpenters’ strike in Rangoon, 1922 -- Chapter 7 Coolies and crisis in Singapore: The great depression in the 1930s and the Chinese working class -- Part II: Banks and businesses during the great depression -- Silver and the Chinese economy -- Chapter 8 Silver and East Asian cities before China’s Depression: Shanghai, Tientsin, and Dairen, 1925–1931 -- Chapter 9 Distant thunder? Reconsidering the impacts of the great depression on China -- Credit system without a central bank -- Chapter 10 Chinese currency circulation and credit order in the interwar period -- Chapter 11 Monetary war between Nanjing and Guangzhou during the great depression: Financial unification and national versus local politics in China in the 1930s -- Qiaoxiang (Overseas Chinese hometown) in crisis -- Chapter 12 Currency reform and the 1934 financial crisis in Shantou -- Chapter 13 Bank runs and runaway bankers in Zhongshan, 1930s -- The paradox of the consumer market -- Chapter 14 The Chinese cigarette market amid an economic crisis, 1931–1936 -- Glossary -- Index