Paper-cuts in Modern China
The Search for Modernity, Cultural Tradition, and Women’s Liberation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6008169 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ka-Ming Wu (0000-0003-4087-7926, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong SAR, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 90-127 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modern China (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-7004 • E-ISSN: 1552-6836 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0097700414526133 |
| OpenAlex | W2160512445 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 20 |
In the twentieth century, paper-cuts have been variously regarded as a domestic craft, a site of rural purity, a marker of Chinese civilization, and more recently, a national intangible cultural heritage. This article analyzes paper-cuts not merely as a cultural practice but as a medium of articulation through which Chinese urban intellectuals have understood the countryside and traditions at specific historical moments. It also explores paper-cuts as a cultural medium through which urban elites have expressed their visions of the nation’s path to modernity and women’s liberation. During the Yan’an period (1937–1947), paper-cuts served as a Communist marker to distinguish an “art form of healthiness and honesty” from urban decadence under Nationalist rule. Since the 1980s, however, the art and practices of paper-cutting have come to share new discursive spaces: as the site of recovery of a lost Chinese civilization, an urban nostalgia for vanishing rural ritual practices, and most recently, a discourse of capital, profit, and personal success. By analyzing the shifting meanings assigned to paper-cuts, this article explores the relationship among the state, culture, and capital as it has been actively manufactured and negotiated through this folk practice
Aesthetics · Art · Capital (architecture · China · Civilization · Communism · Decadence · Lawlessness · Modernity · Modernization theory · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Urban culture · Vision · Anthropology · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law
Going to the People
War and Popular Culture
Other Modernities
Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China
The Gender of Modernity
Minority Rules
Woman-Nation-State
Culture as Leisure and Culture as Capital
Rescuing History from the Nation
Contentious Traditions
Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia
Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China
Imperial Leather
Specialization of the rural
State versus Islam
Neoliberalism as Exception
| Citations per year | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |