Implicated In "the Great Transformation"

Through an analysis of the gentry strata and local government of Nanchang in the late Qing and early Republican period, this thesis narrates the historical process through which local Jiangxi society was drawn into "the great transformation", discussing the inner workings of the social transformations of modern Chinese society. The entire dissertation consists of six chapters, totaling 180,000 words.At the end of the Qing and in the early Republican period, Chinese traditional society faced an unprecedented transformation. At that time, not only were the national political system and ideology going through severe changes, but also the system of power of local society and the gentry strata were undergoing a process of reorganization. Most previous studies have underestimated the interactive relationship between state and society, tradition and modernity, and thus have had difficulty illuminating the inner workings of the transformations of Chinese modem society. For this reason, a deeper inquiry into the processes of interaction between state and society, and between tradition and modernity has an important scholarly value and theoretical significance.In the new political system of the late Qing, due to the abolition of the imperial examination system, the gentry stata lost their traditional political advantages, and in a moments time fell into divisions and dissolution. But at the same time, the progressive enterprises advocated by the Qing government, as well as reform measures such as the new forms of education and forms of local government, provided new historic opportunities for the gentry strata. In this period, in order to promote the new political system, the Jiangxi local government established a set of new administrative bureaus, and local society in response also set up chambers of commerce, associations for local governance, consultative bodies, and other new kinds of social groups and autonomous organizations, and broadly participated in a wide range of local affairs. Through the process of struggling for local power local society underwent a re-organization. The appearance of these new kinds of social groups and local autonomous organizations led to a sharing of the administrative powers of the local government and facilitated the process of the development of local social autonomy. The popular associations of the Xinhai Revolutionary period combined military and political power together, and firmly established theII!Abstractsubjective agency of the gentry within the system of local autonomy.During the period from the end of the Qing through the early Republican period, the gentry of Nanchang actively established new style schools, which gradually became the principal force in the local educational administration. Because the gentry strata vied in the pursuit of new academic degrees and involved themselves in the new style education, this created a large group of new style gentry who based themselves in the new schools, inducing a change in form in the gentry, in particular the formation of the special intellectual group of "overseas returned students". Nevertheless, regardless of whether they were members of the new style school intellectual group, or whether they held traditional examination degrees, their status and function within local society was not fundamentally differentiated. In the early Republican period, the Nanchang gentry held both traditional cultural resources, and also obtained new forms of cultural resources through the new schools. Thus they controlled all kinds of local affairs, and entered into every level of local administration, thus completely controlling the local political situation.The parliamentary assemblies of the early Republican period provided the gentry strata with a new political stage to perform upon. Because the parliamentary assemblies grew out of the consultative bodies of the late Qing, they attracted the participation of new gentry such as the overseas returned students, as well as including older gentry such as former Qing bureaucrats, which inev...