Revealing information that has been suppressed in the Chinese Communist Party's official history, Wen-hsin Yeh presents an insightful new view of the Party's origins. She moves away from an emphasis on Mao and traces Chinese Communism's roots to the country's culturally conservative agrarian heartland. And for the first time, her book shows the transformation of May Fourth radical youth into pioneering Communist intellectuals from a social and cultural history perspective. Yeh's study provides a unique description of the spatial dimensions of China's transition into modernity and vividly evokes the changing landscapes, historical circumstances, and personalities involved. The human dimension of this transformation is captured through the biography of Shi Cuntong (1899-1970), a student from the Neo-Confucian county of Jinhua who became a founding member of the Party. Yeh's in-depth analysis of the dynamics of change is combined with a compelling narrative of the moral dilemmas in the lives of Shi Cuntong and other early leaders. Using sources previously closed to scholars, including recently discovered documents in the archives of the First United Front, Yeh shows the urban Communist movement as an intellectual revolution in social consciousness. The Maoist legacy has often been associated with the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Yeh's historical reconstruction of a pre-Mao, non-organizational dimension of Chinese socialism is thus of vital interest to those seeking to redefine the place of the Communist Party in a post-Mao political order.

Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism

Business & Money

Yeh, Wen-hsin

Economics

University of California Press

This volume evaluates the dual roles of war and modernity in the transformation of twentieth-century Chinese identity. The contributors, all leading researchers, argue that war, no less than revolution, deserves attention as a major force in the making of twentieth-century Chinese history. Further, they show that modernity in material culture and changes in intellectual consciousness should serve as twin foci of a new wave of scholarly analysis. Examining in particular the rise of modern Chinese cities and the making of the Chinese nation-state, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume of cultural history provide new ways of thinking about China's modern transformation up to the 1950s. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that the combined effect of a modernizing state and an industrializing economy weakened the Chinese bourgeoisie and undercut the individual's quest for autonomy.
 Drawing upon new archival sources, these theoretically informed, thoroughly revisionist essays focus on topics such as Western-inspired modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, consumer culture, gender relationships, interchanges between city and countryside, and the growing impact of the state on the lives of individuals. The volume makes an important contribution toward a postsocialist understanding of twentieth-century China.

Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Studies on China) (Volume 23)

History

Asia

Rich with details of everyday life, this multifaceted social and cultural history of China's leading metropolis in the twentieth century offers a kaleidoscopic view of Shanghai as the major site of Chinese modernization. Engaging the entire span of Shanghai's modern history from the Opium War to the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949, Wen-hsin Yeh traces the evolution of a dazzling urban culture that became alternately isolated from and intertwined with China's tumultuous history. Looking in particular at Shanghai's leading banks, publishing enterprises, and department stores, she sketches the rise of a new maritime and capitalist economic culture among the city's middle class. Making extensive use of urban tales and visual representations, the book captures urbanite voices as it uncovers the sociocultural dynamics that shaped the people and their politics.

Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843-1949

Rich with details of everyday life, this multifaceted social and cultural history of China's leading metropolis in the twentieth century offers a kaleidoscopic view of Shanghai as the major site of Chinese modernization. Engaging the entire span of Shanghai's modern history from the Opium War to the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949, Wen-hsin Yeh traces the evolution of a dazzling urban culture that became alternately isolated from and intertwined with China's tumultuous history. Looking in particular at Shanghai's leading banks, publishing enterprises, and department stores, she sketches the rise of a new maritime and capitalist economic culture among the city's middle class. Making extensive use of urban tales and visual representations, the book captures urbanite voices as it uncovers the sociocultural dynamics that shaped the people and their politics.

Shanghai Splendor: A Cultural History, 1843-1949

With over 80 beautiful paintings and calligraphy scrolls, Elegant Gathering features one of the finest collections of Chinese art—unnacessible to the public until now. The Yeh Family collection—thought to have been begun by Ye Yanlan in the nineteenth century—has lasted a long time. Over the course of China's tumultuous modern history some works were lost or removed from the collection, while new ones were added. But the idea that these paintings and calligraphies constituted a family collection has remained. Now the current caretakers of the collection, Max Yeh and Yeh Tung, have donated more than one hundred thirty works from the collection to the Asian Art Museum, of which the eighty in this catalogue were shown in an exhibition at the museum. These eighty superb examples of Chinese painting and calligraphy date as far back as the seventh century. Included are a number of important paintings by leading artists of the early and mid-twentieth century. These are rare and significant works, but perhaps the collection's deepest meaning lies in its embodiment of values that have endured in China through generations of cultural and political change.

The Elegant Gathering: The Yeh Family Collection

Arts & Photography

Shen, Kuiyi

Yeh, Max

History & Criticism

Asian Art Museum

Wartime Shanghai

Taylor&Francis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Yeh, Wen-hsin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Yeh, Wen-hsin