This panel investigates the history of modern China through the lens of everyday experiences of ordinary Chinese civilians. By drawing evidence from print media, archival sources, and oral histories, we demonstrate how the material and social content of everyday life shaped the emergence of new social forms, politics, and political consciousness, and thus transformed the cultural and socio-economic contours of Chinese society in turn.

The four papers in this panel share methodological similarities but differ in their geographical and temporal scopes. First, Sarah Yu shows how schools in Republican China embraced hygiene and health teachings and texts that advocated for changes in children’s individual behaviors. In turn, the institutions also became centers of health outreach to local communities during wartime as their quotidian expertise in hygiene education became valuable. Second, En Li analyzes disputes among audiences and troupes performing Hula dance in 1930s Shanghai, and how the former accused the latter of "false advertisement." This project explores the rising power of consumer culture and presence of commonplace urban entertainment, and how the public came to view female bodies as both real and symbolic figures. Focused on the 1940s, Di Luo then takes a closer look at social relations in North China, especially those among women literacy learners and their families and neighbors. Through leveraging their own education and slightly better reading and writing skills, women often renegotiated their processes of empowerment, and subsequently, what it meant for them to become liberated. Finally, Yi Ren examines the daily challenges encountered by rural, grassroots opera actors circa 1949 as they found themselves part of the new Party-state's propaganda apparatus. The investigation reveals that these individuals utilized the People's Republic of China's opera reform policies to obtain material benefits, helping them negotiate remuneration, working conditions, and other disputes with their rural audiences.

Paying close attention to everydayness in twentieth-century China, the four papers all demonstrate that dramatic changes and shifts in politics, culture, and society were not only reflected, but often grounded in, everyday repetition at the ground level. The panelists advocated for the value of exploring history through a more intimate, humanistic lens.