Shaping the Social Imagination: Publications on Social Issues in Republican China

• In Event: Thinking beyond the Nation: The Transnational Networks of Chinese Intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

In Republican China, Shanghai publishers introduced a series of books on social issues for study by students and young intellectuals interested in contributing to society. These books, including Social Issues by Tao Menghe, and A Summary of Social Issues by Shi Fuliang, analyzed a plethora of China’s modern social problems, including issues related to nation, gender, and class, as well as poverty, peasant and farming issues, and labour relations. These books turned to intellectual resources and conceptual tools that were employed in Japan and the West in order to propose modern methods to alleviate these growing social issues. This finally culminated in the dominance of Marxist historical materialism and class revolution as the guiding factors for value systems in China, leading the leftist intellectual youth of the 1920s and 1930s to devote themselves to the revolutionary activities of the Chinese Communist Party.

Author

• Xiaobing Tang, East China Normal University