Joint Center for History and Economics Online Seminar

Fei-Hsien Wang - Bicycle Thieves, Peanut Tenants, and a Disputed Temple: Reconfiguring Value and Economic Life in Post-World War II China (1945-1949)

Despite its victory in World War II, China after 1945 was in chaos: resource shortage, financial crisis, traumatized environment, returning of displaced people and demobilized soldiers, and resuming of the civil war. This talk explores how ordinary Chinese tried to return to a “normal” daily life through law amid extreme political and economic uncertainties. Using minor disputes over seemingly mundane stuff as cases, I examine how conventional/prewar norms of property, value, and contract were contested and refined as people struggled to reorganize their economic lives and restabilize a postwar social order.