Description

This book examines the 1905 anti-American boycott movement, an important and yet neglected urban protest in Chinese social, political, and diplomatic history. It focuses on some of the areas that have been overlooked by existing works: a comparative study of the urban history of two boycott centers, Shanghai and Guangzhou; the involvement of the Chinese overseas; the role of the boycott in the 1911 Revolution; the propaganda techniques and mobilization strategies of this social movement; and the impact of the event on Chinese foreign relations. This book also draws attention to the legacy of the boycott: the nonviolent boycott as a means of resisting foreign aggression became both the dominant form of anti-foreign protests and an endemic feature of political life during the first decades of the Chinese Republic. The 1905 boycott, the author argues, signified the rise of the popular protests of twentieth-century China.