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The Development of Female Physical Education in Taiwan During the Japanese Colonial Period / Yu Chien-ming Abstract Physical education formed part of the Japanese colonial government’s educational efforts. Under the strong control of the colonial system, female physical education promoted female body-building as the policies gradually developed. In this paper, focus of discussion will be on female physical education during the Japanese colonial period by probing into female student body-building efforts. Discussion will begin by touching on the institution and development of physical education classes through which issues in the development process and problems of female physical education will be addressed. Then, by focusing attention on physical skills training and sports competitions, a study will be made into various extracurricular physical fitness movements for female students. Lastly, a probe will be made into how female physical education changed the physical consistency of female students, as well as views of female students on their new bodies and the reactions from society in general. Female physical education during the Japanese colonial period was largely patterned on the west. However, to adapt to local Taiwanese environment, the colonial government started with drives aimed at discouraging the practice of foot-binding. This was followed by the promotion of physical education, done in the initial stage through games, then later evolving into calisthenics and competition training. This was followed by the promotion of national defense physical education. Owing to limited class hours in physical education, extracurricular physical training and sports meets were adopted as means to further create opportunities for body training. Thus, both curricular and extracurricular physical training activities helped mold female students’ new bodies in a way that influenced their sports mentalities, roles and status. This improvement in the physical conditions of female students caused Taiwan’s intellectuals to adopt a generally supportive attitude, thus contributing to a greater acceptance of female physical education. However, scarce physical education facilities and teachers, in addition to schools’ neglect of anomalies related to sports meets, created some difficulties in the development of female physical education. Despite all these, female physical education in the Japanese colonial period led to a change in the physical consistency of Taiwanese female students. By emphasizing group training and the goal of attaining physical consistency at par with those of Japanese nationals, the colonial government thus helped form the body of the Taiwanese female students.
It is now well recognized that historical writing has an underneath in the cultural process of national imagination. This article seeks to examine from this perspective the ways the late Qing (1895-1912) Chinese intellectuals invented a new kind of Chinese history with newfound “national heroes” and their exploits.
Under the sway of modern nationalism as an ideology, the Chinese intellectuals began to advocate a nationalized Chinese “new history” in the late nineteenth century. The concept of “national hero” and the national heroes found were nothing but the products of this nationalist project. Since differing in political stand, the Chinese intellectuals discovered different historical figures to serve their own purposes. Anti-Manchu Han revolutionaries emphasized the principle of ethnicity and focused their eyes only upon those who had fought heroically against the invasion of alien ethnic groups. The Constitutionalist reformers, on the other hand, emphasized the principle of state and brought into the pantheon of “national heroes” only those who had fought to aggrandize Chinese glory and territory in the past. The contrast reflects two different ways of imagining Chinese nation—either as an exclusive ethnic community of Han descents or as an inclusive state-centered political community. In the late Qing process of national imagination, the issue of Chinese “national heroes” thus appeared as a cultural field where intellectuals of different political visions debated, contested and negotiated with each other.
As soon as Chao Erfung received the order to put down the rebellion of Patang(巴塘), he set off to construct this frontier region of Suchuan which lasted for seven years, and laid the foundation of the establishment of the Shikang Province. Because of this, though the Patang Affair was not a tremendous in the frontier, was nevertheless regarded as a significant event in modern Chinese history by the government and scholars.
After the Patang Affair, the government made great military efforts. We may ignore those small scale combats, but we must pay more attention to the decisive warfare at Hsiangcheng(鄉城). This paper argues that the significance of Chao’s victory at Hsiangcheng should be as important as that at Patang. However, since the location of Hsiangcheng in the region is far remote than that of Patang, besides being neither a strategic point nor an administrative center, its role has usually been ignored. This paper intends to point out and reconstruct the process of the Hsiangcheng Battle by using available materials with a view to providing a new perspective.
Past researches into the relation between merchants and politics in early Republic on China, suffered from prejudices as a result a failure to take into consideration the factors of time and space. This is eapecially so with respect to the description of the collective activity of merchants after 1919, as it has been too much politicized. In author's opinion, the primary concerns of merchants before-and-after the May fourth Movement are consistent. To maintain order of a sort is always their fundamental purpose. The merchant's collective activity relating to politics was basically pushed by the current situations of the time, and not by the improvement of their political consciousness at large. And this can be seen clearly from their behaviors in war time.
The author will take The War between Luyongxiang and Qixiyuan in 1924 as a example, and probe that how did the merchants purse the stability of the order. Before the war, the merchants and gentry took their best to mediate between the governor of two provinces for preserving the peace. And they opposed any political act which probably harm the order. The war broke out lastly, even they got some fruits in the peace movement.
It brought tremendous damage. In the war time, the merchants made great efforts to retrieval order, undertook the obligation to build the local armed forces and save the refugees. They continue worked as a mediator different military groups, accelerated the end of the war in sequence and affected the transition of the situation.
According to the facts in the article, the author suggest that preserving the stability of social order is a key to understand the collective behaviors of Jiangzhe merchants. Their political participation were only some urgent responses when the peace face crisis, and also temporal cost expenditures in exchange with steady social order, but to some extends they made some important influences to the politic shift.
One of the big difficulties in the study of the thought of Chang Chun-mai lies in its variety, confusion and even contradictions. The causes for these are not simply to be attributed to the complicated elements that he derived from both traditional Chinese Confucian (especially new Confucian) and Western (especially German) thoughts, but also that he was not able to make clear what he wanted to hold onto among various conflicting thoughts. Thus, when he was faced with tremendous change in trends of thought in a short period, the varying, confusing or even contradictory state tended to deepen. This is a point that has been neglected unintentionally or even on purpose by scholars in the study of Chang’s works, and thus deserving emphasis.
The purpose of this article is to show that the sort of variety, confusion or contradictions that are to be found in Chang’s thought are also found in his views on WWI.In rough chronological sequence, and in brief, Chang’s first view on WWI was to regard it as a god-sent golden message and lesson to impel China to seek out ways and means to become a rich and powerful nation (this may be called “the key to the nation’s strength and power); his second view on WWI was to regard it as an opportunity to join the world of nations with equal status and dignity (this may be called “the necessity to declare war on Germany and Austria”); his third view on WWI was to regard it as a crisis of European civilization and as a harbinger to socialist society (this may be called “the advocacy of ‘socialism’”); his fourth view on WWI is contained in his book “On National Constitution” informing an attempt to collapse socialism with the chance to revive China’s civilization through regeneration of Confucianism (this may be called “the future of socialism and Confucian world”). His fifth view on WWI can be regarded as the question of “the polemic on science and metaphysics”. This article only deals with the first four views, as the last one has already been dealt with in another article.Chang’s first view on WWI is in diametrical opposition to his fourth view on WWI, not to say the fifth one. In his first view on WWI, he was not critical at all about the application of science, not to mention the spirit of science. While in his fourth view on WWI, not to say the fifth one, his criticism of both the application and the spirit of science reached its peak. Moreover, in his first view on WWI, though he was appreciative of socialism, this stopped short at the stage of attention and understanding, but when he reached his fourth and fifth views on WWI, he had reversed his praise of the application of science for a glorification of socialism.We notice that between the two contradictory views on WWI, there were his second and third views on WWI. His second view on WWI was confined to an larger extent than the other three views by the contingency of the time and place, for obvious reasons, and was thus a sort of judgment intended to take full account of the circumstances China was then in. So was his third view on WWI, though it already contained fledging elements of the fourth view on WWI. In sum, though we may argue that the changes as found in Chang’s four views on WWI were all attributable to the situation and currents of thought of the time, the question remains that there was no necessity accountable for Chang’s holding those four views on WWI, in fact, as the development of the situation and currents of thought unfolded, Chang’s views could not endure for long, each being qualified, replaced, or contradicted either by the one immediately succeeding it or by a combination of those he subsequently held. As judged by the standard of a thinker, it is shown that Chang did not have foresight on what were to come.