Li Gongming | Secretary of the Week: Under the sickle... A study of the social history of the city

The Sickle and the City: A Study of the Social History of Death in shanghai, [Fa] An Keqiang, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, December 2021 edition, 402 pp., 88.00 yuan

It seems that I have not listened to the theme song of "Shanghai Beach" for a long time, and recently it has sounded from time to time in the circle of friends, and there is really a sense of hot rushing. "The waves run and the waves/ The waves of the rivers never end/ Exhaust the affairs of the world/ Mixed up a gushing trend /...... Love you hate you ask the king know or not / Like the river does not receive / turn a thousand turns and turn a thousand beaches / also did not calm this fight /...... Even if I can't tell the difference between laughter and sorrow / I still want to turn over a hundred thousand waves / In my heart up and down enough... "It was "Shanghai Beach", which was sung from Hong Kong Island to the mainland in 1980, composed by Gu Jiahui, lyrics by Wong Chun and sung by Ye Liyi, which was the Shanghai Beach of Hui Wenqiang (Chow Yun Fat) and Feng Chengcheng (Zhao Yazhi). Fast forward to several decades, and in the struggle, it is impossible to distinguish between laughter and sorrow.

When it comes to the Tao Tao River on Shanghai Beach, it is natural to think of the study of "Shanghai Studies" (Shanghai History). French scholar Christian Henriot, an internationally renowned scholar of Shanghai history and modern and contemporary Chinese history, said in an interview many years ago that the study of Shanghai history basically began from outside China and is an international science. At present, the study of Shanghai history in France, the United States, Austria, the United Kingdom and other countries is more active, and the study of Shanghai history abroad is better than that of China in the digitization and networking of historical materials. I don't know if that's still the case today. He pointed out that compared with the "history of Paris" and "history of London", "Shanghai history" is a clear concept and research field, shanghai's historical changes are more complex, materials are more voluminous and more complex; to some extent, overseas shanghai history research provides some new research angles. He also called for open materials, resource sharing, and opposition to low-level competition that monopolizes academic materials. (See Ren Siyun, "An Keqiang: Geographic Information Systems are a Technique Related to imagination- Interview with An Keqiang, Special Professor of the University of Lyon II, France" http://www.workercn.cn2013-07-01) An Keqiang's research works on Shanghai history are various, and the Chinese translations include "Shanghai Prostitutes: Prostitution and Sex in China in the 19th and 20th Centuries" (translated by Yuan Xieming, Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2003), "Shanghai 1927-1937: Municipal Government, Locality and Modernization (translated by Zhang Peide, "Shanghai History Research Series", Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2004), and the recently published Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai, 2016; translated by Liu Zhe, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, January 2022)

The first sentence of "The Scythe and the City: A Study of the Social History of Death in the Case of Shanghai" Chinese and the first sentence of the book", which is also the first sentence of the book, I, a person who studies history, feel a little shocked: "Why is the study of death important to historians?" Because death abounds in historical research. ...... In the end, historians have always dealt with death. From time to time, there are many deaths in the works of history—wars, rebellions, murders, assassinations, executions, self-imposed sentences, diseases, plagues, famines, and many other events, leaving a place for the field of history. But these are all figurative expressions of death, real individual or collective deaths. It's not about death itself, it's about how a society has historically constructed its perception and representation of death, about how to dispose of those who die. To put it very vividly and profoundly, the study of "corpses in one place" in the field of history is indeed important but easy to ignore by historians.

The title "The Sickle and the City" may seem a bit strange to Chinese readers, but the author says that he originally wanted to name the book "Death in Shanghai", which he felt was simple and straightforward, and that he resonated deeply with the death that occurred in Shanghai through literature and images. He also spoke of Lukino Visconti's masterpiece Venice and Camus's Plague, "both novels and films convey the inability of individuals to change their destiny in the face of disease and plague. This is also the cruel fate faced by a large number of individuals in Shanghai, which reached inhuman levels in times of crisis, especially in times of war." (Chinese probular) Finally, "the death of a large number of victims quietly and insignificantly, finally convincing me to return to the classic image of death in European culture, the sickle, is both a farming tool used to harvest grain and the strongest symbol of the coming of death." The sickle doesn't resonate like this in Chinese culture, but I reckon readers can understand the metaphor of Sex and the City, which inspired me to finally decide on the title." In this way, the scythe, a classic image in European culture, harvests death in Shanghai. Although both the author and the editor seem to be less satisfied with the "sickle" of this Chinese, it now seems to be quite different in different contexts. It is also worth mentioning that there are two kinds of footnotes to the book, translator's notes and editor's notes. There are eight editor's notes in Chapter IX stating "Deletions are here," which should be the most basic professional norm for translation, which is also a long-unresolved issue of publishing norms.

From the perspective of the study of modern and contemporary Chinese history, the study of historical events such as wars, disasters, diseases, and violent crimes that lead to population deaths has certainly attracted much attention and achieved countless results, but the treatment of corpses as direct products of death has not been paid attention to by researchers, and although the death of ordinary individuals in normal life involves demographic changes and statistical research, it is difficult to enter the field of modern and contemporary history research. The conventional vision of funerary history research is still to pay attention to funerals and funerary objects in culture and local customs, and there is still a long way to go from the research perspectives of public management of cemeteries in modern society, commercial production of funerary objects, parking and transportation of coffins. Just one example. Lu Hanchao's "Outside the Neon Lights: Shanghai in Daily Life in the Early 20th Century" (translated by Duan Lian, Wu Min, and Zi Yu, Shanxi People's Publishing House, September 2018) is a masterpiece of modern Shanghai history from the perspective of the daily life of ordinary citizens in Shanghai, and the study and exposition of the daily life of Shanghainese can be said to be in great detail, and even the wooden toilet of Shanghainese and the prelude to daily life are the pouring of toilets. As Zhou Xirui (J. W. Esherick) said, "I am in awe of the density of details and the completeness of the documentation of this huge study. However, the major events of birth, old age, illness, and death in life do not talk about "death." The only place where death is mentioned is in the "Palanquins and Wheelbarrows" section, "Palanquins for weddings and funerals and special decorations are also loaned, usually not in palanquins, but in shops specializing in 'red' (wedding) and 'white' (funeral) matters". Figure 35 explains: "Western-style weddings sometimes arouse the expectations of Shanghainese, while funerals in the city are almost entirely Chinese. The funeral procession of the wealthy man is distinctive: a dragon is used as an ornament, the mourners wear traditional linen clothes, and the funeral procession passes through the concession road lined with Western-style restaurants and Christian churches – a mix of Chinese and Western lifestyles in Shanghai. (pp. 288-289) This picture also appears in An Keqiang's book, which describes "the coffin platform of the Chinese elite carried by 32 coffin bearers." (220 pages, Figure 7.6)

Thus, as An Keqiang put it, "Modern Chinese urban society has a special sensitivity to death. Even to this day, it is still far away. As I wrote this preface to the Chinese edition and searched for Chinese references on the subject of death, I came to realize that Chinese historians had not yet ventured into the field, so much so that I had no choice. But I hope that the publication of Chinese edition of the book will spark academic interest in the topic. The history of death in China should have its "Philippe Aries." (Chinese prob. 2) This Aleas was the French historian Philippe Alias, whose research not only had a great influence on the field, but also shaped it. To say that Chinese historians have not yet dabbled in the history of death should refer to the history of death in modern Chinese cities, which is of course a blank that should not appear. An Keqiang's research self-description is: "In the process of studying the history of death in Shanghai, my interests are mainly in the form and expression of death in the metropolitan context, how the behavior and beliefs of the public related to death have evolved over time, and the mode of managing death between the late Qing Dynasty and the 10 years after the founding of the People's Republic of China." While beliefs and customs can change slowly, different factors and events can lead to gradual adaptation and eventual acceptance of new funeral customs. (Foreword, p. 5) In these aspects, An Keqiang's research can be said to fill in the gaps in the study of Shanghai history, and at the same time provide an example for the study of modern Chinese urban history.

Specifically, on the one hand, based on empirical and quantifiable data, in-depth study of the original data, and the selection and application of visual image data, he jointly formed a solid study of microscopic details; on the other hand, in the macro-historical context of China's modern and contemporary urban history, he focused on the statistics of urban population, death records, the identity of the dead, the management of corpses, the funeral process and the management of cemeteries, which is actually a social history, population history, urban management history, and political and business relations centered on the death of urban population. Interdisciplinary research in areas such as the history of folk culture and the history of the concept of death in relation to the body and soul. From the perspective of time spanning the late Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China and the 1950s of the People's Republic of China, this is also a history of political change with the treatment of death as the research perspective and narrative line.

In the book, the author collects and uses a large number of demographic data from various archives and compilations, as well as various charts and schematic maps, showing extremely solid microscopic research results, but also finds that "the figures disclosed in the annual reports and similar publications are very different from the figures found in the archives". (p. 16) Objectively, Shanghai's population flows enormously, as the author says, concentrating people from all over China and the world. According to 1935 records, people from more than fifty-two countries came to live in Shanghai. Thus "throughout history, Shanghai has been a hotbed of all chaos, which can be found in all other cities, especially in port cities that receive tens of thousands of people from all over the world every year." (23 pages)

From the perspective of research methods, An Keqiang's research on the social history of death in Shanghai is mainly based on two basic levels.

One is from an individual perspective, focusing on the social identity, geographical affiliation, age level, cause of death, and demographic status of the deceased, which is mainly discussed in the first chapter, "Death and Shanghai: Assessing Death". Notably, "who died in Shanghai" is a conundrum, as "all the numbers associated with deaths reflect a fundamental problem: many deaths are not recorded." Only data on foreigners are recorded on time, and most Chinese residents do not report deaths, and the largest number of unrecorded deaths are those discarded in the back alleys and open spaces of the city." (p. 13) The author can only make extensive use of the role of civil organizations such as guild halls and public offices in managing death affairs in Shanghai to find relevant information and data, such as excavating information about the place of origin and date of birth and death of the deceased based on the information of the Huzhou Guild Hall, and roughly deducing the relevant basic data.

The other is the level of social management, revealing the different roles, roles and changes of official management and civil institutions in the handling of corpses in cities, which involves the diversified social management and customs in immigrant cities, the emergence and development of commercial funeral services, the requirements of public health and urban land for death management and the response of all sectors of society, and the ideological changes in the handling of death affairs that run through the historical main line of war and revolution.

The title of the first chapter of the book is a bit frightening: "Death and Shanghai: Assessing Death." This is, of course, the most fundamental work in the study of the history of death: "Who died in Shanghai?" How has the death situation changed in Shanghai? This chapter attempts to assess death, examining how it affects people of different ages and classes, and what causes it to die. At the same time, the author admits: "It must be directly stated that we will never know how many people live and die in Shanghai." (p. 7) This is because "the demographics of Shanghai remain a mystery, and the puzzle is missing many fragments." Data provide the best reflection of a situation at a given time, but they usually don't show dynamic changes..." (pp. 33-34) There are also many difficulties in recording deaths compared to the difficulties of demographics. After 1949, Shanghai's population mortality rate was in a state of decline, but the number of deaths still rose with the expansion of the population, a large number of deaths were not recorded, and many bodies were still dumped on the street. There is a statistic: from July 1950 to June 1951, the total number of deaths recorded reached 64,834, but the total number of bodies dumped on the street reached 44,661. (16 pages)

In December 1953, Shanghai for the first time made a rule for the disposal of all dead bodies, which all institutions — hospitals, funeral homes, charities and courts — must comply with, and all dead must be compulsorily registered before burial. The government's acceptance of the private funeral industry is mainly achieved through price control and taxation, while also firmly controlling the internal operations, revenues and expenditures of private companies. Initially, most companies had two different ledgers, one for official reports, which would conceal income and property, and the other for recording the company's internal operations. (p. 283) Further on, the funeral industry also underwent the Three Antis Five Antis Movement, during which the government collected a total fine of $13.87 million from the funeral companies. After discussions on socialization in 1955 by the Health Bureau, six hundred and eighteen companies were merged into a single unit of coffin transport stations on July 1, 1955. "With the sharp decline in the number of funerary companies, the increasing number of closed cemeteries in cities and neighboring areas, and the disappearance of fellow organizations, death gradually disappeared from the public eye, which was what the municipal government wanted to do after 1945, at least for the most sensitive urban areas, such as the problem of coffins or the transportation of exposed bodies." In addition to funerals, the city government wants the most visible, visually visible displays of death to disappear from the city. After 1949, authorities explicitly wanted to evict all funeral companies from the city center and banned any display of deaths in urban spaces. Death was driven out of the city with his scythe. (p. 290) During the Cultural Revolution, cemeteries and ceremonies of worship by family members in the cemetery became the object of the Red Guards' destruction of the "Four Olds," and about 400,000 graves were destroyed and completely destroyed in Shanghai. The cemetery was finally taken over by the parties concerned, and by then nine cemeteries had been converted into various work units (factories, hospitals, warehouses) and the remaining twenty-four had been taken over. (297 pages)

In his research, Ankeqiang extensively collected and used visual materials, including maps and historical photographs, and these images were not used only as illustrations in the book, but had the research nature of pictorial evidence. In fact, among modern historians, the author's attention and research on visual images is quite prominent. He edited Visualising China: Images in Historical Narratives (Visualising China, 1845-196. Moving and still images in historical narratives , 2012，ed. by Christian Henriot & Yeh Wen-hsin) and Images in History: Pictures and Public Space in Modern China (2012, ed. by Christian Henriot & Yeh Wen-hsin) shows his strong interest and achievements in the study of graph history. His paper, Street Culture and Visual Fragments and Everyday Life: A Tale of Shanghai's Modern Street Culture, Visual Fragments, and Everyday Life. Narrating Peddlers in Shanghai Modern ，from Visualising China, 1845-1965. Moving and still images in historical narratives, 2012) explores the reflection of Chinese urban culture and the daily life of ordinary people from the lives of street vendors with a research method that combines images and literature, which is a typical study of the cross-verification of graphic history in the history of urban life. This, of course, also reflects his interest in the study of the history of the underclass, as he said in a recent interview: "I am of civilian origin, and therefore I have always been interested in ordinary people." By the time I finished the book "Shanghai 1927-1937", I had already decided that I would continue to study Shanghai, and I also decided to study the people at the bottom, such as beggars, drug dealers, prostitutes, and so on. ...... I don't study the masses at the bottom out of any political stance, or because I'm a Marxist, I study the masses at the bottom just because I'm interested in them. (Interview with | An Keqiang: How Historians Talk About "Death", interview with Liu Zhe and Hou Yueran, Surging Private History 2022-04-06)

Regarding the different visual cultures of death in Chinese and Western cultures, he has a more concentrated discussion: "From medieval Europe, the rich visual images showed believers not only the death of Christ, but also the series of presentations of death: 'Visual culture shows people the death in their daily lives. But this is not the case in China, where death is seen as having a pervasive negative effect and should be invisible. The only visual representation of death is a portrait of the deceased, which was later replaced by photographs. Chinese painters do not paint anything similar to the representation of death or the representation of the existence of death, which is common in European painting. Even in the 20th century, photographs did not capture the remains or the coffins of the dead. But overall, cameras document aspects of funeral customs and funeral spaces, which can sometimes help fill gaps in the written archives. Importantly, attempting to discern death from text involving death, with references to the death of a character, cannot provide any conclusive evidence. Chinese culture has walled death against a thick wall of silence. (Preface, p. 6)

It should be said that ancient China was of course not without artistic expressions related to death, but it was mainly manifested as "fine art under the Yellow Spring", portraits, patterns, and space decorations in tombs. In daily life, it is not always taboo to see the existence of death, and when I went to the countryside decades ago to join the team, I was impressed by two visual experiences related to death when I first arrived in the countryside. One is the wooden empty coffin on the beam of the peasant's room, which is prepared for the elderly for a hundred years, and even carries a certain symbol of wealth; the second is that on the façade of the hillside or field beside the village, there are often urns placed in small earth niches, commonly known as "golden pagodas", which contain the bones of dead people. Villagers pass by every day, and sometimes they tell us whose grandfather it is, not that they are blind. At first, we knew that the youth felt strange and scary, and then we got used to it, but we didn't forget to say a mantra when it was convenient in the wilderness.

The authors place great emphasis on obtaining valuable information in images, such as photographs of funeral processions marching on the streets of Shanghai, "although large funerals were rare in Shanghai, such things often caused severe traffic congestion, even in the early days when only horse-drawn carriages and rickshaws were the main means of transportation." For example, a photograph of Nanjing Road from around 1900-1910 taken along the street by Denniston and Sull's photo studio, and another photograph from the same period showing parts of an extraordinarily long funeral procession along Nanjing Road, were taken in almost the same location. (p. 216) There is another photograph (Fig. 7.4) "It is likely that this was the funeral procession of an official in a high position, probably the matter that led to a dispute between the Shanghai Ministry of Works bureau and the consul (the highest official of the consulate) in 1903." He also found an 1889 painting in Dianshizhai Pictorial showing a Western-style band in a Chinese procession dedicated to Mazu, with a text next to it saying that the band would also play at funerals, thus speaking of Western-style bands in Shanghai, along with Chinese musicians, appearing at private and official funerals; in a photo from the 1920s, a Western-style band of Chinese musicians in Western-style uniforms walked in front of the hearse and appeared to be at the forefront of the funeral procession. (pp. 218-219) He even complains that his photographic material is limited: "Although I have some photos of coffins redeemed on the streets of Shanghai, none of them really match the coffins depicted by Gao Yan or the highest-ranking coffins in beijing' photographs." (p. 220) He also lamented that China's first documentary, Sheng Xuanhuai's Great Funeral, shot at Sheng Xuanhuai's funeral in 1917, was likely to have been burned in the fire that burned down the bookstore building at the Battle of Songhu in 1932.

When it comes to the use of visual materials, it is a bit regrettable that the author does not seem to have noticed that in Shanghai at the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were photographs of corpses to help confirm the cause of death and verify the identity of the deceased, which is an important matter in the disposal of corpses. Ge Tao and Shi Dongxu talked about one thing in "Figurative History: Photography and Social Life in Shanghai in the Late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty" ("Shanghai Urban Social Life History Series", Shanghai Dictionary Publishing House, August 2011): In December 1890, Swire's Shanghai ship caught fire on the Yangtze River, killing more than 300 people, and Shi Shaoqing, a philanthropist at Renji Shantang in Shanghai, hired a lifeboat to salvage more than 200 corpses, and after burial, they took pictures of the bodies and recorded them. Later, shi Shaoqing summed up his experience in the process of dealing with the aftermath of the body, and proposed to set up a shadow office, whose duty was to specially photograph and record the nameless floating corpses recovered from the river, so that his relatives would come to claim them in the future. On November 7, 1893, there was an article entitled "On the Goodness of Photographic Recognition of Children", starting from the theory of using photography to recognize lost children, describing the various new roles played by photography in the field of social life, which also mentioned the procedures for taking pictures of the remains of this shipwreck accident, and said that Shi Shaoqing's proposal was highly praised by public opinion, "The relevant departments have implemented it accordingly." Since then, when relatives of the deceased came to claim the body, due to the availability of photographs, there was no misidentification." ("Declaration", Tuesday of the seventh day of november 1893 in the Western calendar, see Ge Tao and Shi Dongxu in "Figurative History: Photography and social life in Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty", pp. 134-135) Then, in addition to the shipwreck incident, whether there are procedures or habits for taking pictures of the remains of unnatural deaths in other accidents in Shanghai, it seems that there is no relevant discussion in An Keqiang's book. In chapter IV, "The Last Resting Place: From the Cemetery to the Modern Cemetery," it is mentioned that the identity of the deceased who died in accidents and suspicious cases is illegible, and that "after the advent of the newspaper, the authorities publish a brief account, including the victim's belongings, approximate age, and the request for the presence of any relatives or acquaintances." (p. 129) In the second chapter, "The Management of Death by Guilds, Good Associations, and Fellow Communities," the author also talks about the discovery of photographs of the coffin buildings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (p. 52), but does not mention the question of photographs of the remains. In addition, among the photographs in the Shanghai Municipal Archives, there are also historical photographs of minors who were transported by vehicles by the concession authorities during the occupation of Shanghai by the Japanese invading forces (see Shanghai during the Japanese Occupation period of the Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai People's Publishing House, May 2010, pp. 52 and 53), which can be supplemented by the graphic history materials in the book.

"Shanghai was once a deadly city of killing. This statement sounds cruel... The high mortality rate reflects the city's daily life and death situation. Immigrants are the city's subsistence nutrients, and they flock into the city like a tidal wave, perhaps with dreams of getting rich, but the scythe of death harvests their lives and hopes in advance. (p. 291) The author concludes, "After the reform and opening up, the greater freedom enjoyed by the Chinese people and the great economic development have challenged the situation left over from the past." (p. 294) In any case, "the waves run and the waves / The waves of the river never stop / ... Love you hate you ask the king know whether / Like the river does not receive /".