Talking about JiongchengIn the traditional narrative of literary history, the writers and their works of the "Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School" are often like residues stuck in a strainer, which cannot pass the test of pure art. Although they were once popular, they now only exist as a backdrop to those classic background noises. In the final analysis, the writing of the "Mandarin Duck Butterfly Pie" is a cultural industry that is profit-oriented. Therefore, if we approach them from the perspective of cultural history, we can find that at the time of social changes in the Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, a new image of modern intellectuals was invented, which is different from its classical models: such as the famous scholars and Qingliu of the previous dynasties, these modern intellectuals are more subordinate to the economic order than to the political order. They are professional writers who pursue commercial interests, and the modern economic system that is gradually taking shape is manifested in them, and through the prism of their lives, we may get a glimpse of the spectrum of this economic system.
American historian Lin Yuqin's "Beauty Empire Butterfly Card: A History of China's Folk Industry" (hereinafter referred to as "Beauty Empire Butterfly Card") is based on the life of Chen Diexian, a writer of the "Mandarin Duck Butterfly School", and through his writing and folk industrial practice, it depicts the rise and fall of China's grassroots local "small crafts" during the ** period. The term "small craft" is at the heart of the book "Beauty Empire Butterfly Cards", and Chen Diexian wrote columns for various newspapers and magazines about light industrial products such as dyes and cosmetics, and critics at the time referred to many of these texts as "small crafts". Later, Chen Diexian, who founded the cottage industry club, successfully turned his workshop products derived from "small crafts" into an international brand. By 1934, Cottage Industries was the second largest manufacturer of cosmetics and daily necessities in China, after Fang Lixian's China Chemical Industry Corporation.
Beauty Empire Butterfly Cards: A History of Modern Chinese Folk Industry".
Written by Lin Yuqin.
Translated by Tao Lei.
Guangqi Bookstore |Shanghai People's Publishing House.
June 2023.
In the common Western-centric historical narrative, the transmission path of industry is a one-way street from west to east, and it is industry that carries the torch of civilization that shines through the entire obscurantly and dim continent. Therefore, the opening of treaty ports is often identified by this narrative as a key node in the beginning of industry. Although we must acknowledge the importance of treaty ports in the introduction of new technologies, the industries of the first country did not become the internal landscape of colonialism because of the existence of the ports, they were not notes locked in a music box, and were only used by a very small number of people. If we retell the industrial history of ** in a decentralized way and examine the bottom-up micro construction, the "small craft" advocated by Chen Diexian is quite worthy of attention. It originated from a family workshop and has more craftsmanship than the industrial production methods mentioned above, and the "small craft" has more craftsmanship components. Through the many discourses that are entwined with "small crafts", and the knowledge production of countless Chen Diexian around women's magazines, we can get a glimpse of the changes in China's social, economic and gender relations in the early years.
"Cosmetics Manufacturing Library".
The starting point of Chen Diexian's career was in Shanghai in 1914. In December of that year, Chen Diexian, who is a professional **, founded the "Women's World" magazine in Shanghai with the alias of "Heaven and Void My Life". As one of the many women's magazines in the early years, "Women's World" did not last long, and it ceased publication after a year. However, Lin Yuqin reminds us that in addition to editing the magazine, Chen Diexian's self-written column "Cosmetics Manufacturing Library" (hereinafter referred to as "Manufacturing Library") can be regarded as a kind of "domestic manufacturing for gender and specific classes". The column is aimed at middle-class women in emerging cities. The purpose of the "manufacturing library" is to introduce these women to the knowledge of making cosmetics in the boudoir.
Why did Chen Diexian, who founded the cottage industry cooperative, which later became a pharmaceutical giant, advocate homemade cosmetics instead of buying manufactured products in the market at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China?In fact, the act of homemade cosmetics is at the intersection of tradition and modernity. In a ceremonial society, cosmetics such as rouge are often symbolic: it pulls women into the outside world full of unknowns. But cottage industry, as implied by the traditional family division of labor in which "men plough and weave women", is a kind of home economics that belongs exclusively to women. We can see that in the early modern period, the act of making cosmetics was always full of contradictions, which not only showed the virtue of women's housekeeping, but also prompted women to enter the field of scientific knowledge. Thus, the "woman" was invented, not just as the other, but as part of the discourse of reform. Reforming traditional women and reforming traditional China are two sides of the same coin. The reform discourse is particularly concerned with the body, which sees physical traits such as foot binding and hair growth as symptoms of state weakness. Homemade cosmetics were also included in the reform discourse. This act, in addition to frugality, is also an attempt to shape the body of modernity.
However, we should still see that since the late Ming Dynasty, upper-class women have begun to engage in household manufacturing, for example, in "Dream of Red Mansions", there is a description of homemade rouge, rouge is also an important image in this **, suggesting the heroines' feminine and amorous temperament. Reform discourse naturally takes advantage of the shell of traditional discourse and cuts it into a suitable vessel. As Tocqueville argued in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, a tragic revolution still requires an alliance with the Ancien Régime to survive. The inertia of institutions and culture is, to a certain extent, independent of external shocks. To view China's modernization as a knee-jerk-like shock and response is undoubtedly too mechanical and ignores the details of history.
In particular, we should pay attention to the stylistic qualities of the "manufacturing library". In 1897, a man named Qiu Tingliang wrote in the article "On the Vernacular as the Foundation of the Restoration": "There are words for the wise country, and there are no words for the foolish country;Literacy is a wise people, and illiterate people are fools. All the nations of the earth are the same. Duwu China has a written language but cannot be a wise country, and the people are literate but not a wise peopleQiu Tingliang said: "This article is harmful. The linguistic consciousness of modern literature is not merely for the sake of "pure tribal dialects," as Mallarmé put it, but also because of its ability to reform the national character. The style of "manufacturing library" is not vernacular, but the shallow and modern literary language that was popular before the 1920s: a literary language with reduced allusions and a large number of vernacular elements. Therefore, we can also imagine the criticism that the "manufacturing library" genre will face in the future. Language reformers who supported vernacular writing dismissed the creations of the likes of Chen Diexian, believing that they misused archaic romantic symbols and eroded the ability of writing to intervene in social reality. But paradoxically, vernacular literature has long been transformed into an elite literary language, and what is more suitable for the market is still the shallow literary language of the "manufacturing library".
It's about local consumption
The transformation from writer to industrialist, for Chen Diexian, meant that he had to be more actively involved in the calculation of profits. Money is also the theme of his autobiographical early ** "Zheng". Sinologists Zhou Chengyin wrote in the article "Writers as Celebrities" that writers in the late Qing Dynasty liked to parody the classics, especially "Dream of Red Mansions". This "benefited from the development of new mechanical reproduction techniques, including cheaper mass printing techniques, such as lithography and the use of movable metal type." All this led to the emergence of a huge market for new editions of "Dream of the Red Chamber" in the 19th century, as well as an industry that was keen on private operation and continued to write "Dream of the Red Chamber". "Zheng" also benefits from "Dream of Red Mansions". Chen Diexian once wrote a poem for this ** single line of poems, poems: "Half of it is false and half of it is true, and it was always sad five years ago." Others are like a dream of red mansions, and I am a person in a dream of red mansions. * The protagonist, Shan, is torn between romantic fantasy and reality, and has to grapple with a world that is collapsing day by day, just like Jia Fu in "Dream of Red Mansions", slipping into the collapse of fate.
From the hazy world of words, driven by the "domestic product movement" after the May Fourth Movement, Chen Diexian quickly learned to use nationalist discourse to attract local consumers, and the invincible brand tooth powder of the cottage industry began to compete with Japanese products for the market and eventually rose in China. Of course, China's local consumers are not pushed into a consumer society by external forces, and the emergence of a consumer society is the inevitable result of the rise of the citizen class since the Ming and Qing dynasties. As the Japanese esthetician Jiro Abe examines in his book The Aesthetics of the Machito: Art and Society in the Tokugawa Period, Japan from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, it is similar to Confucian China in that the society that originally practiced the "Shinongshosho" four-people's system collapsed due to the rise of the machijin (i.e., merchants). Although the Tokugawa shogunate's 1649 "Appeal to the Townspeople" still had a series of cumbersome regulations regarding the daily use of the townspeople, including that the townspeople were not allowed to wear silk clothesIt is not possible to have gold-painted furniture in the home;It is not allowed to use gold and silver foil to carve beams and paint ...... buildingsAccording to Abe, "the machito class was the victor of the Tokugawa period," and the ambiguous and contradictory civilian culture they created eventually merged into the capitalist consumer culture of the Meiji Taisho period.
Machito Aesthetics: Art and Society in the Tokugawa Period
Written by Jiro Abe.
Translated by Wang Xiangyuan.
Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
February 2023.
In China, the prohibition of luxury in the Ming and Qing dynasties was not uncommon, such as the Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang's "Great Message" that stipulates that "the two Jingtang above the post of four grades or less and the five government administrators, and in Beijing outside the town guard, garrison, etc., duke, marquis, Bodu governor and other officials, regardless of the old and young, are not allowed to take a sedan chair, violators are asked." The Qing Dynasty also had the "Great Qing Dynasty Tongli" promulgated in the world, but this document has never been seriously implemented, the Qing Dynasty Ge Shijun compiled the "Imperial Dynasty Jingshiwen Continuation" wrote, "The Great Qing Dynasty Tongli" is not outside the line of supervision, supervision of the line of government, the way of the government of the prefecture and county, there is only a notice, hung on the door of the office, follow a piece of paper, report to the boss, the state and county are done, the original is not a household name."
Just like his *** and "small craft" columns, when Chen Diexian ran his cosmetics industry, he also used the so-called scissors and paste method. When translating and introducing the technical knowledge of homemade cosmetics in his columns, he is often confronted with multiple linguistic barriers: Latin, German, and English are trapped in his Chinese, like meat scraps embedded in dentures after some chewing, they are a figure of speech that indicates authority, but often misspelled, and it is clear that the author of these texts did not Xi so many Western languages, he was an amateur industrialist. However, Chen Diexian was not constrained by his amateurism, and he in turn took advantage of this amateurism and shaped it into a cottage industrial society, which is one of the core characteristics of "domestic products" itself. Even after World War II, the "living room as factory" model of homework was the basis for the economic take-off of Hong Kong, Taiwan and other regions. In this regard, Lin Yuqin believes that "ordinary people are mobilized to participate in nativist industry", which is a manifestation of a post-colonial trend. Chan's cottage industry may be seen as a rehearsal of such a path in the early 20th century.
Ruminate on the past and contemplate the present
The main material used in "Beauty Empire Butterfly Card" is the memoirs of Chen Dingshan, the son of Chen Diexian. However, after combing through the details, Lin Yuqin carefully shaved off the part of Chen Dingshan's memoirs that was the secret of the Venerable, trying to restore a real and complex Chen Diexian, and using his life as a guide to connect the history of modern Chinese folk industry. Through the reverse reading of a small number of documents, a society that has disappeared is reconstructed.
The exemplars of this kind of microhistoriography are known for depicting a relatively static, everyday historical subject, and the present they depict seems to be condensed in a piece of amber. Such narratives echo the "bottom-up history" movement that emerged in historiography in the sixties and seventies, and the extension of its theory, based on Gramsci's view of "negative revolution", is the so-called "Subalternstudies" (SS). In his essay Postcolonial Theory and History, the Indian historian Benjamin Kazalia argues that "the term untouchables, broadly meaning 'non-elites', are therefore generally regarded as the other or as a person who is different from what historians call themselves". In the SS's field of study, historians are those who pick up forgotten echoes. In the course of its evolution, the untouchables have gradually been abstracted into a universal cultural symbol. Therefore, in a sense, we can also regard Chen Diexian as atypical pariahs, whose early technological attempts are often regarded as unpopular and a kind of "copycat". If we turn our attention to the contemporary form of private industry, and see the imitation market in Shenzhen, which stretches like a snail's shell after the rain, we can smell the implicit untouchable temperament in it.
Lin Yuqin deliberately searched for the connection between the private industry of the first period and the "shanzhai" culture of contemporary China. In her view, the depiction of "copycats" often slips into two extremes, one denounces it as the culprit of undermining originality, and the other is similar to the view of the pirate party, which imagines "copycats" as one decentralized revolution after another, through which makers leverage the solid structure of capitalist ownership. The value of Beauty Empire Butterfly as a work of microhistory lies in the fact that it provides a bottom-up perspective that allows us to re-examine the common sense of ownership, innovation, and the nature of industrial civilization in today's society from a critical standpoint, so that readers are no longer limited by secular stereotypes and radical romantic imaginations, but can more clearly reflect on the past and think about the present.