Overview

A suicide scandal in Shanghai reveals the social fault lines of democratic visions in China's troubled Republic in the early 1920s. On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked. Although her death occurred outside of Chinese jurisdiction, her US-educated employer, Tang Jiezhi, was kidnapped by Chinese authorities and put on trial. In the unfolding scandal, novelists, filmmakers, suffragists, reformers, and even a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party seized upon the case as emblematic of deep social problems. Xi's family claimed that Tang had pressured her to be his concubine; his conviction instead for financial fraud only stirred further controversy. The creation of a republic ten years earlier had inspired a vision of popular sovereignty and citizenship premised upon gender equality and legal reform. After the quick suppression of the first Chinese parliament, commercial circles took up the banner of democracy in their pursuit of wealth. But, Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated ""new woman"" exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city. In the shadow of economic crisis, Tang's trial also exposed the frailty of legal mechanisms in a political landscape fragmented by warlords and enclaves of foreign colonial rule. The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China's early passage through democratic populism, in an ill-fated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen's rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.

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We will never be certain why Xi Shangzhen killed herself, but in this masterful study Goodman shows what we can learn from her death. Shanghai emerges more complicated than ever, roiled by a 1920s scandal involving office workers, feminists, civic notables, stock-market speculators, journalists, feckless judges, and military men. A flawless work of scholarship and a mesmerizing read.--Gail Hershatter, author of Women and China's Revolutions Through a detailed exploration of the scandalous 1922 suicide of the Shanghai female office worker Xi Shangzhen, this elegantly written book illuminates crucial facets of that strange interregnum in Chinese history when, in the absence of any effective government, a variety of experiments in civic sovereignty were put into practice. Goodman looks at commercial and civic organizations, gender, financial speculation, and a complicated legal system in piecing together the latent democratic possibilities in a space she provocatively calls 'a public without a republic.'--Theodore Huters, author of Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China In a vivid and compelling book, Goodman uses the workplace suicide of Xi Shangzhen to plumb transforming gender ideals regarding women in the workplace and the greater public realm, the utility and societal effects of financial and commodities markets, and the integrity of the law and the courts. Deeply researched and well written, this is a significant contribution to scholarship on modern Chinese history.--Peter J. Carroll, author of Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895-1937 A wonderfully evocative, beautifully written, and deeply researched account of life in 1920s Shanghai that brings together commerce, capitalism, democracy, and the new republic. We meet ambitious new women, scandalous men gambling on stock exchanges, and corrupt warlords pulling the strings of justice from behind the scenes. And throughout it all is the press, not merely as historical source, but as an active player in all that happens.--Henrietta Harrison, author of The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village, 1857-1942

Author Information

Bryna Goodman is Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of Oregon. She is author of Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 and coeditor of Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China.

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