Material modernities: China's participation in world's fairs and expositions, 1876--1955

This dissertation examines the ways in which a non-Western society has made use of material goods and traditions, both “Eastern” and “Western,” to invent and promote a unified national community. Its focus lies on China's participation in a series of world's fairs and expositions, national and international, from the last decades of Qing dynasty rule to the first decade of the socialist era. As an exploration of the ways in which the Chinese nation has been represented in the material spectacle of these fairs, particular attention is devoted to the ways in which objects themselves are assembled by a variety of actors to construct and advertise a national identity amidst a competing field of nations. This nation-on-display is seen as a creation of both domestic and international participants, including the diasporic community of “overseas Chinese,” and as a site for the integration of diverse constituencies including those of class, gender, and ethnicity.; China's early participation in nineteenth century European and American world's fairs reflects a growing crisis of constitution for the Qing empire, a crisis of constitution that paralleled a similar crisis in material representation. Both the Qing state and a succession of later Chinese states would seek to reinvent the polity through a specific choreography of material objects and human subjects at these grand events. This study traces the efforts of state officials, nationalist elites and intellectuals to solve the dual crisis in socio-political constitution and material representation in a series of exposition events staged under the auspices of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese Republic(s) after 1911, and finally under the oversight of the Chinese Communist Party after 1949. Focusing on the convergence of new cultures of material display with an evolving nationalist pedagogy, this dissertation suggests that the material spectacle associated with the national campaigns of the revolutionary nineteen-fifties was not a new phenomenon but rather the product of an ongoing project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing dynasty—namely the transformation of an empire of Qing subjects into a nation of Chinese citizens ready to join the new regime of material production, and consumption, associated with the modern nation.