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The Suicide of Miss Xi - Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic (Hardcover)
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The Suicide of Miss Xi - Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic (Hardcover)
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A suicide scandal in Shanghai reveals the social fault lines of
democratic visions in China's troubled Republic in the early 1920s.
On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in
the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked. Although her death
occurred outside of Chinese jurisdiction, her US-educated employer,
Tang Jiezhi, was kidnapped by Chinese authorities and put on trial.
In the unfolding scandal, novelists, filmmakers, suffragists,
reformers, and even a founding member of the Chinese Communist
Party seized upon the case as emblematic of deep social problems.
Xi's family claimed that Tang had pressured her to be his
concubine; his conviction instead for financial fraud only stirred
further controversy. The creation of a republic ten years earlier
had inspired a vision of popular sovereignty and citizenship
premised upon gender equality and legal reform. After the quick
suppression of the first Chinese parliament, commercial circles
took up the banner of democracy in their pursuit of wealth. But,
Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated "new woman" exposed
the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative
finance gripped the city. In the shadow of economic crisis, Tang's
trial also exposed the frailty of legal mechanisms in a political
landscape fragmented by warlords and enclaves of foreign colonial
rule. The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese
in the early twentieth century navigated China's early passage
through democratic populism, in an ill-fated moment of possibility
between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol
of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken
promises of citizen's rights, gender equality, and financial
prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.
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