Nagatomi Hirayama
Ph.D. Student
nagatohi@sas.upenn.edu
Education
BA in Political Science, Waseda University, Tokyo; MA in East Asian Studies, Duke University, NC; University of Pennsylvania (2006-Present)
Fields
Modern China, Modern Japan, Late Imperial China
Research Interests
Modern Chinese Political History; Sino-Japanese Relations; China in regional and global context; History of Nationalist and Socialist Movements
Dissertation Topic
Title: “Staging a Young China: The Chinese Youth Party and Republican Mass Politics 1918-1949”
Abstract: My dissertation, entitled “Staging a Young China: The Chinese Youth Party and Republican Mass Politics 1918-1949,” focuses on mass party politics during the Republican era. The idea of a mass party, developed in China as a rejection of the élite party system, became mainstream in the 1920s and redefined links between the state, political organizations, and citizens. My dissertation studies this critical transformation through the prism of the Chinese Youth Party. It argues that this understudied and little known political party served as a bridge between elitist reformism in the late Qing and mass politics in the early 1920s, and contributed to the transformed political landscape of Republican China. I organize this dissertation around three phases of the rise and fall of the Youth Party: origins in Europe, growth in Sichuan, China, and ultimate defeat in civil war. My research complicates the current two-party paradigm in modern Chinese history dictated by struggles between the Communist and Nationalist Parties and highlights the Republican political transformation as a product of dynamic multi-party competition. It also contributes to the comparative study of mass party politics as a global development spurred by the rise of nationalism and socialism in the nineteenth century.
Advising Committee
Recent Conference papers
- “Partyfing Sichuan: The Chinese Youth Party in Sichuan 1927-1937” for Panel “Localism in Modern Chinese History: Sichuan in the Republican Era” at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) 2012 Annual Conference to be held in Toronto. (Accepted)
- “The Structuration of International Communism and the Politicization of Chinese Students in Europe, 1919-1923” at the 20th Annual Graduate Conference on East Asia at Columbia University, , 4-5 February 2011, NYC, NY.
