Greene, Maggie2016-01-272016-01-272015-12Greene, M. (2015). The Game People Played: Mahjong in Modern Chinese Society and Culture. Cross-Currents E-Journal, 17.2158-9674https://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/9526This article considers the discourse surrounding the popular Chinese table game of mahjong in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, using it as a barometer to trace social and cultural changes during the late Qing and Republican periods. After analyzing the connection between mahjong; its forerunner, madiao; and their antithesis, weiqi (go), it traces the changing position of mahjong in Chinese society from a game seemingly loathed by literati to a staple of bourgeois parlors. Drawing on a variety of journals, newspapers, and visual sources, the article further explores culture from class and gender perspectives in the late Qing and Republican periods, as mahjong moved from a visibly male activity to one largely associated with women. Finally, it considers the relationship between games and discourses of modernity, and the important changes taking place regarding leisure time in the twentieth century. The article argues that mahjong has been uniquely resistant to regulation and control. Enjoyment of the game spread across class and gender lines, despite the efforts of reformers, for reasons that reflect and embody key shifts from the late Qing dynasty through the end of the Republican period.en-USThis is an open access journal licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License, which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full, unmodified texts of the articles in this journal for non-commercial purposes without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, if a full citation of the source is provided. This is in accordance with the BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative) definition of open access. If you have any questions or concerns about reproducing or using the content of Cross-Currents, please contact the Managing Editor at crosscurrents@berkeley.edu. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/privacy-policyhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/China, Republican, Qing, mahjong, madiao, weiqi, go, games, leisureArticle