This paper examines early discussions of stock exchanges by Max Weber, Liang Qichao, and Kang Youwei and considers their contemporaneity. Despite different contexts, the discussions shared a nineteenth-century preoccupation with global competition and Darwinian struggles for survival. All reveal the attendant anxieties of latecomer nations experiencing belated modernity. Weber, however, wrote from a position that embraced German colonialism, whereas Liang and Kang’s advocacy of stock exchanges was marked by concerns for the Chinese nation that emerged as a result of the experience of colonialism and economic imperialism.

This article is a study of the writings on food, cooking, and dining by the eighteenth-century poet, essayist, and gourmet Yuan Mei (1716–98) as found in his recipe book Suiyuan shidan. Starting with an overview of the organization and content of Suiyuan shidan, the article offers an analysis of Yuan Mei’s cultural attitudes reflected there and in his works in other genres. The value underlying Suiyuan shidan exemplifies Yuan’s personal response to the Chinese intellectual environment at the end of the eighteenth century. Building a connection between the recipe book and Yuan Mei’s controversial reputation in the literati community, the article explores the changing meaning of culture in eighteenth-century China and Yuan’s way of surviving the intense competition for voice and influence among the cultural elites of the time.

During the Nationalist Era, China dealt with its relatively weaker position in the global geopolitics of news communication by forging and managing strategic collaborations with the world’s leading news agencies. This study analyzes the case of the bilateral contractual relationship between Reuters and the Guomindang (GMD) government’s official news agency, the Central News Agency (CNA). By doing so, the article reveals that in the course of developing useful cooperation with the leading international news agencies to open up inter-institutional and interpersonal channels and networks for disseminating the GMD government’s official news and viewpoints abroad, the GMD government and CNA were also confronted with a growing necessity to manage and control protracted contentions, disputes, and even conflicts arising from the party-state’s persistent attempts to assert news communication sovereignty. The study also highlights the vital role of Zhao Minheng (1904–61)—a US-educated Chinese journalist in the employment of Reuters—as middleman in the CNA-Reuters relationship. Zhao’s career provides us with an important means to analyze CNA’s international news-agency relations from transnational and transcultural perspectives.

Modern assessments of a well-known sign in a Shanghai park that stated “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted” have established that the dog aspect of it was not true, but the sign remains highly visible in the Chinese historiography of Western imperialism. Such reassessments do not seem to recognize that the sign might have meant something considerably different to Chinese and foreigners in late Qing Shanghai than it would have in later periods of modern Chinese history. Dog–human relations had changed through a mix of two processes: dog-keeping as a social practice and the challenges of rabies in the management of urban space. Under the rule of the Shanghai Municipal Council, animals, health, and imperialism converged in the Shanghai International Settlement to destabilize the traditional roles of dogs and introduce modernity through the disciplining of both animal and human bodies and the demarcation and management of new urban spaces.

With the help of professionally trained agricultural scientists, the Guomindang’s Nationalist government drafted a large-scale program for agricultural reconstruction in the late 1920s and early 1930s. At the heart of the program was a scientific rice-breeding experiment with the potential to produce great numbers of new high-yield rice varieties. However, this scientific achievement could not assure success of the new rice varieties in the market because the marketability of rice was determined not by the scientific productivity improvement but by a series of processes required before the rice reached consumers. For this, local and practical contexts had to be considered. By juxtaposing two different forms of “rice expertise,” this paper illuminates the incompatibility between the state’s productivist understanding of agricultural improvement and the quality issue in the grain market.