The nationalization of the hardship of travel in China, 1895–1949: progress, hygiene and national concern

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which, during the late Qing and Republican periods, notions of hardship of travel in China were increasingly influenced by growing concerns about the nation. In the nineteenth century, several factors related to technical development and industrialization rendered travel easier and more comfortable, particularly in the more developed areas of the world. In this context, the reality and perception of travel in China, including the practical hardship of travel within China and the common view in China that travel involved hardship, came to be compared negatively with the reality and perception of travel in the West and Japan and to be understood as examples of national backwardness. In such a way, they defined China and its mentality and simultaneously emerged as causes and symptoms for its condition. At the same time, the idea of travel as hardship was reshaped and even strengthened under nation-related emphases on progress and hygiene, which were ultimately linked to the sense of an urgent need to “save the nation”. This multi-layered nationalization of the hardship of travel, through its association with the nation, national deficiency and nation-building hygiene, is analyzed here in its various dimensions and is observed as an example of how the national issue was coming to the fore during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.