This paper traces the deeds and evolving images of Liu Mengyan (1219–ca.1295), the top candidate in the 1244 civil service examination who was later promoted to Chief Councilor of the Southern Song (1127–1279) in 1275. After the Southern Song collapse, Liu joined the Yuan (1271–1368) government and continued his career as a high official. In contrast to the prominent Song loyalist Wen Tianxiang (1236–83), who enjoyed excellent posthumous fame, Liu Mengyan was repeatedly denounced upon his death and even became an icon of disloyalty. This paper examines how this image of disloyalty was forged from the late-thirteenth century onwards. It suggests that the way Liu’s contemporaries and later literati interpreted and portrayed his deeds depended on political and social circumstances, and this in turn related to the ideal loyalist prototype by which they considered Liu, as well as on their interpretation of the concept of loyalty and their attitudes towards non-Han “barbarians.”

This paper analyzes the influence of forensic medicine on therapeutic medicine through a case study of Qian Xiuchang and Hu Tingguang, two Chinese doctors who specialized in treating traumatic injuries. During the early nineteenth century, both men compiled medical treatises that sought to improve on a scholarly model of “rectifying bones” articulated in 1742 by the Imperially-Compiled Golden Mirror of the Medical Lineage. Both texts also incorporated information from forensic medicine, including official inquest diagrams and checklists promulgated by the Qing government. I show that they drew on these forensic materials to help address two interlinked medical issues: understanding the effects of injury on different parts of the body, and clarifying the location and form of the body’s bones. Overall, I suggest that the exchange of ideas between the realm of therapeutic medicine and forensic medicine was an important epistemological strategy that doctors and officials alike employed to improve their knowledge of the material body.

In Indochina, overseas Chinese were organized by dialect group into associations called congregations, which shared many of the functions of huiguan in China. The spread of overseas Chinese economic and social networks followed a Skinnerian model in which large urban con?régations wielded more political and economic authority than did smaller, rural con?régations. By examining the impacts of French colonialism upon overseas Chinese networks within Indochina and upon overseas connections with their Chinese native places, this paper proposes that the Skinnerian model of local-system hierarchy fits quite comfortably when applied to the world of French colonial Indochina and its overseas Chinese. Furthermore, it argues that French colonialism actually reinforced the Skinnerian hierarchy of politics and markets in ways that endured long after the collapse of Imperial China.

The Nationalist Party (GMD) had been writing and issuing documents of many types for some years before Nanjing was established as the capital of the Republic of China in 1927/1928. From its earliest days, doctrines were advanced via cause-oriented newspapers and journals. Even more important, the Soviet-sponsored reorganization of the GMD in the early 1920s had yielded a far-reaching party propaganda operation tied to Sun Yat-sen’s notion of political tutelage. But how was propaganda to work in practice? And at whom was it to be aimed? This article seeks to address aspects of these questions by assessing a textbook for propaganda workers that was issued in the name of the GMD’s Zhejiang Provincial Executive Committee’s Propaganda Department in October 1929, half a year after the GMD’s foundational right-wing Third Party Congress. Although Essentials for Propaganda Workers does not fully operationalize Sun’s version of political tutelage, it can nonetheless be seen to reflect the central party’s efforts to implement tutelage and supervision, not only of the Chinese masses suggested by Sun’s program, but also of party propaganda workers in Zhejiang. In that regard, it reveals the astonishingly rapid ideological realignment of the GMD into an anti-Communist party, not only at the national level, which is well known, but also on the provincial and lower levels. Drawing on material from the GMD Archives in Taipei, this article addresses issues of party organization, control, mobilization, inner party dynamics, and message content in the GMD’s propaganda activities in Zhejiang province in the late 1920s. “Propaganda by the Book” adds to our knowledge of the organizational practices of both the central GMD in Nanjing and the Zhejiang provincial GMD as well as to the social history of Republican China’s official print culture.

Based on a newly constructed set of data, this paper offers a quantitative perspective on the Nationalist Government’s relations with China’s domestic bond markets during the period 1932–34. For all the recent revisionist scholarship on the achievements of Nationalist state-building, the perception of the Nationalist elite as corrupt is still widely accepted. In order to demonstrate the empirical potential of quantitative financial history, this paper tests one particular assertion: that members of the Nationalist elite manipulated the issue price of domestic government bonds in order to enrich themselves and their associates. We test this by calculating two price data correlations: that of a first sample of government bonds, all of them issued before 1932, and that of a second sample of government bonds, which includes bonds issued during the period under review. The price fluctuations of the first sample are correlated with each other to a much higher degree than those of the second sample. This indicates that the prices of bonds in the first sample were reacting similarly to the same range of influences, while the bonds issued during the period under review and included in the second sample were displaying individual price fluctuations. One possible explanation for this is that members of the Nationalist elite enriched themselves or their associates by issuing domestic government bonds at artificially low prices. In sum, the article illustrates both the potential and the limitations of quantitative history: it allows us to test and dismiss a precisely formulated hypothesis about Nationalist corruption, but it is only one possible way in which statistical analysis can be applied and does not cover the whole realm of state practices.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used suku (speaking bitterness) in ideological education movements to teach subaltern women to give voice to their personal narratives of oppression in accordance with Maoist political doctrine. Suku is thus a historically specific practice and a culturally specific form of women’s narrative practice. By listening to and observing the post-Mao suku narrative performance of my grandmother, a retired State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) worker, I show that her suku is a gendered performance, a form of labor that blurs production and reproduction, and a form of embedded personhood; and that suku as a form of narrative persisted through the period of economic reforms, even though its intent and audience became transformed. My kin relationship with this particular suku performance allows an analysis of the impact of suku on cross-generational relationships—those between first-generation SOE workers and laid-off SOE workers in former SOE families. Furthermore, I argue that suku can be seen as a form of labor and self-valorization of Chinese women workers discarded in the new economy, and contrary to its original disciplinary purposes, as a form of resistance.