How Did Courtesan Society Affect Shanghai Society?

While under the rule of the Emperor Qianlong, China’s foreign policy and trade was beginning to unfold and open up to Europe. Qianlong, however, still maintained a strict and regulated administration of all foreign trade and foreign ability to exist within China. “ It is true that Europeans, in the service of the dynasty, have been permitted to live at Peking, but they are compelled to adopt Chinese dress, they are strictly confined to their own precincts and are never permitted to return home.” All outside interactions with China could only be permitted if ‘in the

Beginning in the late 19th century and continuing to the early 20th century, many Chinese families struggled to gain social, economic, and educational stature in both China and the United States. In the book, A Transnational History of a Chinese Family, by Haiming Liu, we learn about the Chang family rooted in Kaiping County, China, who unlike many typical Chinese families’ exemplified hard-work and strong cultural values allowing them to pursue an exceptional Chinese-American lifestyle. Even with immigration laws preventing Chinese laborers and citizens to enter unless maintaining merchant status, Yitang and Sam Chang managed to sponsor approximately 40 relatives to the states with their businesses in herbalist

British trade with China during the Qing dynasty from 1750 - 1900 was economically harmful for the Chinese, and the Chinese Imperial government responses were political. A document showing a Chinese citizen’s view on the events and how they played out would have helped me to better understand how it affected the people of China’s

In the text, “Letter to Queen Victoria”, written by Lin Zexu in 1839, he implores the Queen of Great Britain, Queen Victoria, to stop her subjects from selling opium to the Chinese public. Zexu does so by exemplifying the past relationship of China and Britain, by moral persuasion, and by warnings and threats. However, Lin Zexu’s assumption of calling British subjects as Barbarian and compliant to Chinese rule ineffectively persuades.

All throughout the world, populous cities such as New York City and Shanghai, inhabit crowded streets that are overflowing with people; these multifarious cities are examples of sites of encounters. In the middle ages, a valid example is the city Quanzhou, China. Quanzhou, being a site of encounter enjoyed a plentiful of trade, though they were forced to issue more laws and protection to ensure safety within. Trading with foreign countries created cultural diffusion within this city along with a diverse society. By being a site of encouter, the city of Quanzhou’s political and cultural worlds were the most impacted.

In the early eighteen hundreds, Britain and other European countries demanded more and more Chinese commodities, especially tea and silk. However, only the port in Canton was opened to foreign countries, and Chinese would not take any other form of payments besides silver. The desire to make China into a free market that foreigners have more access to and the increasing, though illegal, European opium import to China eventually created tension between the European countries, especially Britain, and the Chinese government (Allingham Par. 1-2). The two battles fought and won by European powers were known as the Opium Wars. China’s politics, economy, and intellects were both positively and negatively

As China faced new international pressures and the change to a communist society, gender relations transformed women from servants of men to full independent workers, who finally became soldiers of the communist state. In Jung Chang’s novel, Wild Swans, the three women – grandmother Yu-Fang, mother Bao-Qin and daughter Jung Chang – exemplify the expected gender roles of each generation. I will argue that Confucian society presented few economic opportunities for women to support

The liang min usually are peasants, commercial and artisan classes; and according to the article, in the hierarchy of ling min, there are a stratum of jian min or so called the “mean people” below them. The jian min are often having stigmatized occupations and presumably immoral conduct determined their databased legal status. They usually work as actors, prostitution, domestic salves.” People are expected to have a different treatment for liang min and jian min. There will be no doubt that jian min will receive a higher penalty then the liang min in the case of committing the same crime. The jian min will receive a lot higher penalty when they commit a crime towards the liang min, while compare the same tier crime within liang min. It is quite ironic that when the liang min committed crime towards the jin min, they can be decrease their penalty as they are superior than those jin min. This shows the serious hierarchy in the ancient china Qing Dynasty, yet this phenomena of hierarchy regarding the peasants status are actually not limited happening in the Qing dynasty in China, they exist everywhere all through the world. I have come across several readings concerning the violence and gender in the France and United States. In my previous classes, referring to June Jordan poem “Poem about My Rights”. She said that in France, if a guy penetrates but does not ejaculate, that he consented he did not, because the woman is classified as wrong, and the women is black, she is the target of sexual abuse. The classification of the black women in the society are similar with the classification of the jian min in the Qing dynasty of ancient China, that jian min can be referred or classified as prostitute, whereas the black peoples are being classified as the person that can be sexual

The courtesan thrived within a complex atmosphere of social connection and exchanges that involved not only with the high ranked members of China’s literary, military and the literati or Confucian gentlemen, scholar-officials, military commanders, but also the wealthy merchants as well as the ruling class “gentlewomen” and other courtesans within the same field. For the occupation of courtesan, this characteristic takes the form of “dirty work”. What is a courtesan’s dirty work and how does the role of a courtesan have impact in the Ming dynasty china? That is to say, what part of a courtesan’s lifestyle was integral to their success in the occupation that has given them a higher class titles from the lower class prostitutes. This paper argues that courtesan’s “dirty work” was a way of leisure, along with a set of services was part of the occupation to provided the upper-class and wealthy clientele the need of accompany and entertainment.

In 1997, Dorothy Ko published an article in the Journal of Women’s History called “The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeen-Century China”. The article is organized with a brief introduction as to what footbinding is, the negative outlook on this practice due to problematic archives, and then she discusses the examples she gives to support her thesis. Ko’s thesis was “Chinese elite males in the seventeenth century regarded footbinding in three ways: as an expression of Chinese wen civility, as a marker of ethnic boundaries separating Han from Manchu, and as an ornament or embellishment of the body.” Since Ko is a celebrated and established author on women in early East Asia, the article “The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeen Century China” is an accurate and useful source if one is trying to study that area.

In her novel Factory Girls, Leslie Chang offers an insider’s perspective of the Chinese export business that ultimately exposes the true colors of factory life in China to the people of the western society. Throughout the novel, she cites historical reasoning as to why a sudden growth in factory workers has occurred and how it has turned into the monstrous industry that it is now. Mainly, she credits the large migration of people from the rural areas to the cities because this caused major political reform. The PRC were then able to move into the global economy with a new strategy, given by Deng Xiao Ping, which consequently caused trade to open up and certain cities to be designated as placeholders for economic development with the potential for newer business.

Shanghai is not anymore where nightclubs never closed and prostitution was rampant that was depicted in Sin Cities. The power does not belong to the gangster or Western people but Chinese people now. However, Shanghai is still similar to the way the city was depicted in Sin Cities somehow. It is still a city full of life, unalloyed passion for making money and its open-door policy continued to attract an extraordinary collection dreamer, a clear example that every Chinese would like to come to Shanghai for looking for a job. Shanghai is a unique city with their own policy and their own architecture. Shanghai has been, is and will always develop and innovate.

Many issues are addressed in Shanghai Girls. The main one is the social and political conditions of Chinese people at the time (1930-50’s) living in the United States, and how difficult it was for them, especially for women, to find their place. Another important issue is the importance of the family, more precisely the role each member plays and how they must obey the patriarch.

China is becoming more westernised, particularly the ‘cosmopolitan’ city of Shanghai, where demand for Western products is increasing rapidly as disposable income rises in line with China’s strong economic growth. Michel’s wanted to establish a foothold in the market at an early stage to demonstrate a long-term commitment, which has been identified as essential to compete successfully in the Shanghai market (per Tim Harcourt, Austrade Chief Economist).

In the film “China Blue”, a seventeen year old girl, Jasmine Li, works in a Chinese jeans factory. From this documentary we learn about the pay Jasmine was receiving for her hard work, half a Yuan an hour which is equal to about six US cents. We also learn about the condition of the factory and dorms, the rules that the workers have to abide to, and how important these factories are. From just these sweat shops we learn about the economic, social, and political problems that has arisen in China. It also shows us inequality and inequity of the society in China.