Nationalist and Feminist Discourses on <i>Jianmei</i> (Robust Beauty) during China's ‘National Crisis’ in the 1930s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The female body -its meaning and ownership -has long served as a signifier for competing nationalist and feminist discourses on womanhood in modern China.Woman's body, as a site of contested meanings, reflected the uncertain status of women as national subjects.1 That uncertainty was particularly evident during China's 'national crisis' (guonan) following the 1931 Mukden Incident, which launched a series of Japanese aggressive military manoeuvres in the north and east coast and lasted until Japanese defeat in 1945.During that time, Chinese nationalists, attempting to reinforce the strength of their threatened nation, encouraged Chinese women to become physically strong.As part of the state-building project, the Nationalist government went as far as using legal and administrative procedures to enforce the development of strong physiques and participation in tiyu (sport; physical education; physical culture) 2 as a woman's civic obligation.At the same time, the female body was taken as the site to hold the unchanging essence and moral purity of the Chinese nation.3 The national leader Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) and his wife Song Meiling launched the New Life Movement during the 1930s to renew a wartime citizenry dedicated to family, society and national goals by instilling ideas of self-discipline and moral regulation, 'allegedly the factors behind China's historical greatness', and to purify and correct the morality of the masses who were corrupted by Communism.4 Jiang declared that 'today we all recognise the important place of the [Confucian] ideals of li, yi, lian, chi [civility, righteousness, incorruptibility, sense of shame] in revolutionary nation-building [gemin jianguo]'.Song Meiling described the spiritual and moral reinvigoration of Chinese society as the basis of the nation's political and economic reform.5 Physical discipline was soon connected to the state's control over the morality of its citizenry.For the 1933 Fifth National Games, Jiang cabled from Nanchang where he was stationed with Song Meiling to purge the Communists, stressing that 'all types of tiyu competition require a certain kind of discipline.Cultivating our national virtues of civility, righteousness, incorruptibility and sense of shame, while setting a good example for the younger generation, has much to do with tiyu as well'.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".