Events

Jointly organized by Department of Chinese Studies and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Kenneth Dean, Department of Chinese Studies, and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Aggressive domestic expansion of book distribution networks in China proper led competitors Commercial Press and Zhonghua Book Company to establish branches in Singapore by 1916 in a bid to access the overseas Chinese book market. Through their own branch stores and affiliated retailers, like Singapore’s Shanghai Book Company and Nanyang Book Company, both publishers heavily marketed their leading products—textbooks—to overseas Chinese schools throughout the region. By the 1920s and early 1930s, Commercial Press and Zhonghua textbooks effectively monopolized the market in overseas Chinese schools, especially in British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, selling the same textbooks there that they produced for the domestic market. However, the disconnect between the metropolitan Chinese world portrayed in the textbooks and the lived environment of students in Southeast Asia led overseas Chinese educators and students to criticize those textbooks for being out of touch with the overseas Chinese experience. In response, starting in 1932 both companies formulated South Seas Overseas Chinese (Nanyang huaqiao) textbook series that incorporated content about the region as well as China proper. The resulting textbooks, though, contained complex layers of overlapping and divergent material, which sent ambiguous signals about overseas Chinese identity, leaving students with room to position themselves culturally and politically.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Robert Culp is Professor of History and Asian Studies at Bard College. He holds an MA in Asian Studies from the University of Michigan and a PhD in History from Cornell University. He is the author of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912-1940 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007) and The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism (Columbia University Press, 2019). He is currently working on a book-length project on the distribution of Chinese-language publications in overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia from the 1910s into the 1950s that is tentatively called “Circuits of Meaning: Chinese Publishing Networks and the Sinophone Reader in Southeast Asia”.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed. However, we welcome walk-ins to join us if there are available seats.