Previous scholarship has made it abundantly clear that the Taiping War impacted urban hierarchies in the Yangzi delta region, wreaking havoc in economic, commercial, administrative, and cultural centers like Hangzhou, Suzhou, Yangzhou, Changzhou, and Wuxi, thereby hastening the rise of Shanghai. But how did this war affect cities beyond the core Jiangnan region? In a case study of the prefectural city of Hefei (Luzhou), this article explores the ways in which war led to the reconfiguration and reimagining of urban space, both through wartime destruction and the patronage of post-war reconstruction.

Jin He 金和 (1818–1885), a pioneering poet of mid-nineteenth century China, wrote in a colloquial style strongly influenced by the ballad tradition. Jin’s style was prose-like and broke all the structural limitations of earlier poetry in order to create formal innovations, while at the same time experimenting with new subject matter. Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) and Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) considered Jin He and Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848–1905) to be the major poets of the nineteenth century. Jin had a major impact both on other late nineteenth-century poets and on the “Poetic Revolution” that led to the rise of modern Chinese literature. However, his verse has been largely ignored ever since. Among the most striking contributions Jin made to the literary transition in the nineteenth century was his innovation in presenting the female knight-errant 女俠 (nüxia). This invented image of the female knight-errant reflected a new tradition of women’s voices in the literary works of his time, and had a great impact on the representation of swordswomen in modern literature. This paper examines how the image of nüxia in Jin’s writing is distinct from those found in past poetry, how the female knight-errant in Jin’s works inverts conventional gender norms, and how Jin’s female knight-errant image is both connected with and distinct from those in other literary forms.

In the 1939 New County Reforms, the Nationalist government made the baojia system the lowest level of self-government in the country. This decision was the result of more than ten years of discussion among Nationalist administrators and writers who were searching for a tutelary system to train the people in their political rights in preparation for constitutional rule. In the 1920s and 1930s, Nationalist writers claimed to be following Sun Zhongshan’s (Sun Yat-sen) philosophy by reinventing the baojia as a form of democracy. Harkening back to a reimagined national past, they “discovered” that the imperial baojia was not a system of local control, but a traditional model of bureaucratically-designed local self-government. Nationalist writers dovetailed this new baojia with Sun Zhongshan’s philosophy in order to rationalize its position as the foundation of the Three Principles of the People State. Once philosophically legitimized, Nationalist writers endorsed the baojia as a top-down bureaucratic system that would transform the political, social, and economic life of the country; it would become the core political unit of their state-making and nation-building projects. In so doing, the baojia came to represent the Nationalists’ deeply-held belief in the power of human agency to create state institutions capable of entirely remaking society and transforming the nation

This study focuses on the migration of middle school students to the interior of China after the Japanese invaded in 1937. It argues that the Guomindang (GMD) central government was generally successful in handling the 500,000 displaced students, making substantial efforts to monitor, register, educate, and provide training for them, as well as establishing government-run “national middle schools” during the war. Meanwhile, the GMD also exerted a strong influence on course curriculum, instructing educators how to implement the Three People’s Principles and other party doctrines in classrooms. These processes expanded the state’s hand in secondary education and allowed the GMD to include refugee students and schools in its wartime narrative of progress, praising the students’ patriotic participation in defying the Japanese occupiers and their contribution to “national reconstruction” (jianguo). However, there were still many challenges. Refugee students, teachers, and principals forcibly converted Buddhist temples into schools and clashed with local monks, farmers, villagers, and even the GMD military. With schools merging and moving inland, relocation also provided opportunities for unscrupulous administrators and teachers to exploit the situation for themselves, as government reports reveal many cases of corruption in the wartime schools.

This research is based on a short hand-written genealogy (shou chaoben 手抄本) of the kind that are appearing in flea markets in China these days. I surmise it was written in Shandong in 1944. Although its entries are brief, an analysis reveals much about the family, including female family members (often omitted from family genealogies), inter-family marriages practiced over hundreds of years, status markers used by the family such as the taking of second wives, the prevalence of patriarchal views. The Japanese occupation of Shandong in 1944 plays a role in my analysis of how this manuscript was compiled.

This review article surveys new studies of China’s economy in the early twentieth century that have been published in both China and the West. It analyses the nuances that we find in these recently published studies and how those might improve our conventional understanding of the era, with particular emphasis on the link between fiscal revenue and stock-exchanges. First, a detailed introduction treats the evolution, beginning in the nineteenth century, of Shanghai’s segmented stock exchanges in the context of wider global currents. Section two reprises the still common notion that heavy domestic borrowing by the Nationalist (Kuomintang, or GMD) government in the 1920s–1930s forestalled industrialization. Section three discusses at length the degree to which Chinese banks in that period may be seen as merely a GMD conduit of borrowing. Chinese banks were probably more conducive to Shanghai’s industrialization than is usually acknowledged, and they also played a key role in stabilizing China’s monetary environment well beyond their perceived focus on managing public debt. But more evidence needs to come to light, and this article sets out the areas in which future research might advance our knowledge. The conclusion will underscore how the various findings of scholars might, as a whole, remould current conceptions.