In modern textual and visual narratives, “footbinding” symbolizes China’s backwardness and barbarism. Traditionally viewed as a symbol of chastity, ethnicity, feminity, and the cultivated taste of the higher classes, the millennium-long practice of footbinding dramatically declined as soon as it was seen as a cultural stigma and accordingly evoked new intellectuals’ “anxiety of being (seen as) barbarian” at the turn of the twentieth century. This article argues that ocularcentric modernity played a significant role in the process whereby the civility/barbarism discourses about footbinding became reversed. It examines how the hegemonic technologies of seeing—such as journalism, photography, radiography (X-ray), and exhibitions—challenged the cultural invisibility of footbinding and visualized what had been concealed under the binding cloths. Under the “imperial gaze,” eventually, footbinding was constructed, represented, and displayed by foreign (and later, native) power elites as something evil, in accordance with the episteme of vision: pathologically, disease and filthiness; colonial-anthropologically, markers of barbarism; and aesthetically, hideous taste in beauty. These constructions reflected the scientific interest in human bodies, especially colonial bodies, of the imperial nations of the nineteenth century, invented a “convertible” image of the “modern” body for those who desired an identity of modernity, and contributed to the formation of an indigenous movement that sought to abolish the shameful spectacle of footbinding.

　　The Russian Revolution and the Karakhan Manifestos promoted the rise of revolutionary thought, and pro-Russian feeling ran high among the Chinese intelligentsia. For the first time the Chinese intelligentsia used revolutionary ideas to observe, participate, and influence the course of Chinese diplomacy. Revolution and diplomacy were the two pillars of Russia’s eastward expansion policy, though Sino-Russian negotiations still embraced the notion that “weak countries have no diplomacy.” Ordinary intellectuals’ attitudes toward Russia changed with the opening of Russia’s actual diplomatic moves; their belief in Bolshevism was weakened accordingly.

     On the whole, revolution and diplomacy were also the two major themes of the Chinese intelligentsia’s attitude toward Russia. A number of divergences, controversies, and conflicts emerged within this context. In the subsequent years of Sino-Russian negotiations, the Chinese intelligentsia formed two camps: one was a pro-Russian camp that considered Russia to be China’s revolutionary ally, while the other one resisted Russian foreign policy in order to preserve national sovereignty. Before the March 14, 1924 Secret Protocol, revolutionary sympathies formed the mainstream of Chinese diplomacy, while more purely nationalistic considerations gained the main position afterwards.

     Every group’s attitudes toward the Soviet Union were different. If we rank these groups according to their degree of revolutionary commitment, we can differentiate intellectuals belonging to the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League, Guomindang intellectuals, students, teachers and scholars, and the press. Following down this list, we can see that the degree of practical diplomatic concerns moves from low to high. As for the changing course of the intelligentsia’s general attitude toward Russia, the ordinary press, the teachers and scholars, students, the right wing of Guomindang intellectuals, and a few Communists and League members gradually peeled off from the pro-Russian camp. Those people who continued to support the Soviet Union were not always Russophiles. Ordinary intellectuals favored close relations with Russia simply because the Beijing government could not safeguard national sovereignty; since this was their own desire, they should not be regarded as Russophiles. During the years from 1919 to 1924, the Soviet Union’s overall influence in China increased rapidly, but its China policy weakened the pro-Russian element among the Chinese intelligentsia, leading to the steady diminution of the pro-Russian camp.

　　This article focuses on the Shanghai Spiritualism Society, which was founded in 1917 by Yu Fu, Lu Feikuei, Ding Fubao, Yang Xuan, and Yan Fu and which published The Journal of Spiritualism (1918-20), in order to explore the origins and development of spiritualist study in early Republican China. The study of spiritualism—including such topics as the souls, deities, ghosts, spirit photography, life, and death—flourished in Shanghai during the early twentieth century. It was a new, vibrant phenomenon and soon became a form of knowledge or a set of skills that could be purchased or consumed through the medium of newspaper advertisements and in the organizational form of “society.” The study of spiritualism on the one hand derived from fuji (to write in sand with a stick as a form of planchette) originating from ancient China, and, on the other hand, was influenced by Western and Japanese psychical research, mesmerism, demonology, and mentalism. Twentieth-century spiritualism in Shanghai thus illustrates the negotiations between the East and the West, old and new, metaphysics (or religion) and science, elite culture and popular culture, as well as urban and rural. Past studies have regarded spiritualism as superstition or anti-science. This article tries to avoid this clear-cut evaluation and emphasizes adopting descriptive and analytical methods to clarify the origin, significance, and limitations of the study of spiritualism in Shanghai in the 1910s and ’20s.