Modelling Diarists: Diary-writing and Moral Anxieties in China, 1918–62

Abstract

This thesis is a history of diary-writing in China from 1918 through 1961. Diaries are an increasingly popular but still inadequately understood primary source for historians of modern China. Previous scholars have suggested that, in the twentieth century, diary-writing became increasingly popular due to Japanese and Soviet influences, the increasing availability of manufactured blank diaries, and ruling governments that used diary-writing as a way of enforcing ideological conformity. This thesis traces an alternative history, starting from the popularization of published diaries in Shanghai in the long 1920s; to diaries’ emergence as a recognizable genre that could discoursed be theorized; to the moment the genre gained its reputation as a kind of self-expression par excellence; to its widespread inclusion into school curricula; to loosely connected attempts on the part of educators to delimit a normative way of diarywriting that, ironically, increasingly regimented self-expression. In doing so, this thesis contributes to the existing historiography by offering three correctives: I argue that 1) the initial proliferation of diaries was economically––not ideologically––motivated, 2) the popularization of diary-writing was not a concerted effort orchestrated by China’s political leaders but at best a loosely connected effort led by a middling class of educators, textbook writers, and intellectuals, and 3) diary-writing was not only regimented by communist ideology in the Maoist era but shifting moral principles and anxieties throughout the twentieth century. All in all, this thesis demonstrates the value of diaries for studying moral knowledge, epistemologies, and anxieties at the grassroots in midcentury China.