Popular culture in the making of anti-imperialist and nationalist sentiments in Sichuan

Existing Western scholarship on the rights recovery movement in Sichuan mainly focuses on the role played by elites. This article argues that popular culture, in the form of folk stories, songs, and children’s primers, also contributed to that movement by shaping and expressing popular anti-imperialist attitudes. Its analysis of primers available in late Qing Sichuan and popular stories about the activities of foreigners prevalent in the early 1900s serves to reveal a rich local cultural milieu of time-nurtured anti-imperialist sentiment among common people, which broadly influenced local political action. The protests over the Jiangbei mining concession encompassed both elite and ordinary people, although each group understood the issue differently.