S09: New Publics
Misinformation and China
January 26, 2026
Key questions
- The sensation: How did two female melodramas blur the boundaries between art and life, fact and fiction? Why made them so popular?
- The press: How did media – from traditional newspapers to cinema to new social media – become platforms of public discourse? How do they affect the ways we act, perceive, feel, think?
- The public: How do viewers participate in media culture? What are the structural conditions for truth in politics?
Carving Up China
China at the End of Qing
1912 Revolution
A fledgling republic
Failed restoration and rise of warlords
May Fourth Movement
Shanghai: Paris of the East
Unequal foundations
Extra-territoriality:
- Foreign settlements under jurisdiction of representative consul, not Chinese gov
- Disjointed and irregular development among several powers
- Shanghai as three cities within a city: International Settlement, French Concession, and Chinese city
- Source of growth or Seed of destruction?
From fishing village to metropolis?
Shanghai was nothing but a swamp through which flowed innumerable creeks connecting the large fertile plains beyond and forming a breeding place for the mosquito and malaria. With true British characteristics this place was turned from a useless swamp until to-day, boasting magnificent roads, and every modern convenience, except sewerage, priding itself on its local government and the modernity seldom excelled either in Europe or America.
Far Eastern Review, 1919
Auden on China
In this city the gulf between society’s two halves is too grossly wide for any bridge …And we ourselves though we wear out our shoes walking the slums, though we take notes, though we are genuinely shocked and indignant, belong, unescapably, to the other world. We return, always, to Number One House for lunch. In our world, there are garden-parties and the night-clubs, the hot baths and the cocktails, the singsong girls and the Ambassador’s cook.
WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War, 1939.
Auden on China, continued
In our world, European business men write to the local newspapers, complaining that the Chinese are cruel to pigs, and saying that the refugees should be turned out of the Settlement because they are beginning to smell. And the well-meaning tourist, the liberal and humanitarian intellectual, can only wring his hands over all this and exclaim: ‘Oh dear, things are so awful here – so complicated. One doesn’t know where to start.’
WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War, 1939.
New publics
New politics
Women as objects of consumption
- Symbol of modernity: Elegant women in qipao dress
- Consumer culture oriented by desires of women
Women as objects of consumption, continued
New women
Shanghai culture: Commercial and cosmopolitan
- Print capitalism: 86% Chinese publishers in Shanghai in 1937
- Cinema as most popular forms of entertainment
- New literary societies: rebellious romanticism
Discuss: Life of Shi Jianqiao
- Who was Shi Jianqiao?
- How was her story dramatized? Why did they resonate with the public?
- How did this story of Shi reveal broader questions about female identity, modern subjectivity, and national identity in 20th century China?
Explain: Sensation and Subjectivity
“it is only through embodying the xia [knight errant] attributes of unmitigated bravery, an unstinting sense of moral justice, and absolute virtue that Shi proves capable not only of seeking filial revenge, but also of being a true modern woman.”
Public Sphere: What it is
- The bourgeois public sphere emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in coffee houses, salons, newspapers, and literary societies.
- Participants in the bourgeois public sphere were private individuals discussing public affairs.
- Critical reasoning skills developed in the literary public sphere were later applied to the political public sphere.
Public Sphere: What it is not
- The public architecture described by Habermas excluded women, colonial subjects, and the poor based on gender, race, and class status.
- In the twentieth century, private ownership became a threat to the critical functions of publicist institutions, leading to passive consumption replacing critical public debate.
Discuss: New Women
- What is the story? What is the story about?
- Discuss your emotional reactions to the film. At its conclusion, what are you feeling for the main character(s)?
- Is Ms. Wei a complex character? Does she develop over the course of the film?
Characters: Other women
Discuss: New Women, continued
- Thematically, what does the film suggest about individualism, feminism, capitalism, love, power, family, or friendship?
- What film genres can you see in the film? What effect does this have on the narrative and meaning of the film?
- Do you sense a change in the “mood” of the film as it progresses? Does it become lighter, darker, or stay the same?
Discuss: New Women, continued
- How might a contemporary viewer in the 1930s react to the film? Why?
Women in Shanghai: A Film Genre
Death of Ruan Lingyu
- Premier of New Women: Feb 7, 1935
- Suicide of main actress, Ruan Lingyu, on int’l women’s day, March 8, 1935
- Suicide note: “Gossip is a fearful thing”
Death of Ruan Lingyu, continued
- Predatory tabloid culture fuels celebrity but also feeds on their misadventures
- Life imitates art, or art imitates life? Women as both fetish objects and subjects of art