Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University—Bloomington
Professor Wang is a historian of modern China, particularly interested in how information, ideas, and practices were produced, transmitted, and consumed across different East Asian societies. Her research specializations include: Modern China; the history of historical imagination; the history of piracy and intellectual property rights; the history of books; the history of law and economic life; the history of cooking and cookbooks in East Asia; Chinese popular culture; and censorship and information control. Currently, she is the PI for IU’s Taiwan Studies Initiative under the East Asian Studies Center.
Her first English-language book, Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2019; Chinese translation by Taiwan Commercial Press, 2022), explores how copyright was understood, appropriated, codified, and, most importantly, practiced by the Chinese as a new legal doctrine from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time of profound sociopolitical changes. Drawing on a vast range of previously underutilized archival sources, she challenges the conventional wisdom about the incompatibility of copyright with Chinese culture and show instead how authors and publishers fought to establish their claims and protect their livelihoods. The book also brings an economic (and business) perspective on modern Chinese cultural and intellectual history.
She is currently working on three book-length projects. The first, tentatively entitled Phantoms of Empire, explores the long-lasting trends in China’s rich and vibrant cultural consumption of historical fantasies about the Qing Empire (1644-1911) from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century present. It examines how popular historical imagination becomes a channel to express and debate the desires and anxieties of Chinese nationalism and negotiate between fiction and reality, past and future. The second, entitled Minor Chaos, studies how ordinary Chinese used the state’s law and courts to reconfigure and repair social and economic value in the aftermath of WWII. This micro legal history project traces and reconstructs how people fought over minor stuff, such as bicycles, peanut oil, raw fish, and roof extension, when the country was experiencing a spiral hyperinflation and an ongoing civil war. Combining her passion for history and cooking, she is also working on a book on the social history of home cooking through cookbooks.
Panel 6 | Figural Representations of the Past and the Future
The Disappearance and Resurrection of the Fragrant Concubine in China’s New Era of Empire
Abstract
The Fragrant Concubine (Xiang fei) story has been immensely popular in the Han Chinese historical imagination of the Qing Empire throughout the 20th century. Likely based on an actual Uyghur concubine of Emperor Qianlong, Consort Rong (Rong fei), the plot involves the abduction of a Kashgarian Muslim woman with stunning beauty and magical fragrance (the Fragrant Concubine, or Iparhan) to the imperial palace, her subsequent resistance and forced compliance, and eventually tragic death.
Employing familiar tropes of sexual domination- imperial expansion, as well as female chastity-national resistance, the 20th-century variations of the Fragrant Concubine, as James Millward rightfully pointed out, could be read as a dual analogy of the Qing conquest of present-day Xinjiang and the anti-Manchu (and later anti- feudal) resistance. At the same time, the explicit and nearly pornographic language to describe Qianlong’s coercion and Iparhan’s resistance enables Han Chinese (male) readers to position themselves not as the oppressed but as the conqueror.
When the Qing legacy started to be summoned in political, academic, and popular discussions of the “prosperous age” (shengshi) at the turn of the 21st century as a historical precedent of the contemporary rise of China, the historical imagination of the Qing court simultaneously became potential political commentary of the People’s Republic, connecting empire and the modern national state, the political entity “Qing” and the national idea “China.” As part of the recent “Qing imperial fever” (Qing gong re) triggered by this shengshi discussion, the Fragrant Concubine story is brought back and reutilized in TV series, popular historical writings, and tourist sites to satisfy the voracious appetite of (Han) Chinese consumers for Qing historical fantasies.
This paper focuses on three overlapping yet contradicting reinventions of the Fragrant Concubine story through semi-fictive period dramas, semi-academic historical writings, and the construction of the Fragrant Concubine theme park in Kashgar. It demonstrates how the motifs of empire, racism, civilization, and sexual violence embedded in the story’s early 20th- century variations create new anxiety and tension in its 21st-century resurrections, especially amid the Chinese government’s changing ethnic policies toward the Uyghur and the Belt and Road Initiative, led to incomplete erasing of the Muslim character and mediocre replacing of sex and romance.
It further shows how primary sources, actual landmarks, and artifacts, fictive fictional narratives intertwined to shape and reinforce an imagined “historical reality” within transregional and national popular memory, as well as the mingling between history and imagination in a more metahistorical level.
