| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Madeleine Yue Dong. Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories. (Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. xxiii, 380. $50.00.
Madeleine Yue Dong has tackled an extraordinarily complicated subject and succeeded admirably. Republican-period Beijing was a city fraught with contradictions. Both manifest expression of Chinese national ambitions and a local backwater, the city was simultaneously the projected locus of political modernity and a proudly antiquated embodiment of Chinese imperial traditions. Beijing was, in a sense, not one but many "cities": the capital city of officials and bureaucrats; the scholarly city of universities and intellectuals; the Manchu city; the sacred pilgrimage site; the tourist destination; and the plebian city of guilds, artisans, and rickshaw pullers. Each of these "cities" overlapped, coexisted, and only imperfectly interacted, and each tends to be reflected in dramatically different kinds of sources, which greatly complicates the task of any historian attempting to address the city as a comprehensive whole.	1
Further complicating Dong's task is her decision to address a span of time that is for this city extraordinarily difficult to treat as a single period (even though, for the purposes of this book, the author narrowly defines the "Republican period" as lasting only from 1911 to 1937). Although this was in general a turbulent time, the moving of China's national capital to Nanjing in 1928 had an especially transformative impact on the city. Every aspect of city life was touched, and even the city's name was changed to Beiping as a result. That the title of Dong's work is, strictly speaking, anachronistic for the post-1928 period is an apt reflection of the difficulties facing the historian; the city defies even so simple a characterization as a single name.	. . .

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