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New textual forms, the magazine and the canon anthology, reveal new ways of considering the spectacle of revolution, modernity and nation-building in China. The concept of the paratext is applied in the analysis of the early modern Chinese periodical and the first modern literary canon anthology. The paratext of a book consists of textual “thresholds” (including the title and table of contents, prefaces, other commentary, as well as publishing details) that provide entry to the main text and determine reader reception. From the late-Qing through the May Fourth era, the paratext of the Chinese magazine operated to make the main texts more open to time and audience. In the magazine, periodic production, beginning texts like the manifesto and fakanci, miscellaneous or “za” editorial organization, the zagan or suiganlu essay, and readers' contributions, all point to a new porous dynamic between text, audience and time that defined the Chinese periodical's modernity and constituted a new literary technology. In contrast, when we turn to the Zhongguo Xinwenxue Daxi (Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature), the ordering practices of collection, the ten daoyan prefaces, and the marketing of the series, comprise a different kind of print language, one which deconstructed the open texts of the magazines and applied traditional museumifying practices to the recent past in order to assign a new beginning to history. An architectural model is developed to analyze both kinds of texts as social space, as structural homologies are explored between the magazine and the department store, and between the canon and museum. Both text and architecture comprise narrative strategies, chronotopes which structure time and space in new ways, changing the nature of reading and writing, and of production and consumption in China. The magazine and the department store manufacture the immediacies of the latest time, while the canon and museum push the present back into a premature past, static and utopian. At their heart lies the deep tension between belief and chance, between ideology and the exigencies of real time. This conflict continues in China, and can be seen in the various reconstructions of the paratext since 1949 to the present.

What can we learn about modern Chinese history by reading a marginalized set of materials from a widely neglected period? InRepublican Lens, Joan Judge retrieves and revalorizes the vital brand of commercial culture that arose in the period surrounding China's 1911 Revolution. Dismissed by high-minded ideologues of the late 1910s and largely overlooked in subsequent scholarship, this commercial culture has only recently begun to be rehabilitated in mainland China. Judge uses one of its most striking, innovative-and continually mischaracterized-products, the journalFunü shibao(The women's eastern times), as a lens onto the early years of China's first Republic. Redeeming both the value of the medium and the significance of the era, she demonstrates the extent to which the commercial press channeled and helped constitute key epistemic and gender trends in China's revolutionary twentieth century.The book develops a cross-genre and inter-media method for reading the periodical press and gaining access to the complexities of the past. Drawing on the full materiality of the medium, Judge reads cover art, photographs, advertisements, and poetry, editorials, essays, and readers' columns in conjunction with and against one another, as well as in their broader print, historical and global contexts. This yields insights into fundamental tensions that governed both the journal and the early Republic. It also highlights processes central to the arc of twentieth-century knowledge culture and social change: the valorization and scientization of the notion of \"experience,\" the public actualization of \"Republican Ladies,\" and the amalgamation of \"Chinese medicine\" and scientific biomedicine. It further revives the journal's editors, authors, medical experts, artists, and, most notably, its little known female contributors.Republican Lenscaptures the ingenuity of a journal that captures the chaotic potentialities within China's early Republic and its global twentieth century.

Bamboo is a perennial flowering plant with a distinctive life cycle: many bamboo species remain in the vegetative phase for decades, followed by mass synchronous flowering and subsequent death. The phenomenon of bamboo flowering is not fully understood, but its periodicity is a major research focus. Here, we collected information on bamboo flowering events by investigating historical documents and field studies at the Bamboo Research Institute of Nanjing Forestry University. We compiled information on more than 630 flowering events, 124 of which accurately recorded the flowering cycle time. We summarized the specific flowering cycles of 85 bamboo species, as well as four kinds of bamboo flowering habits in detail. We present a theory of the bamboo flowering cycle and discuss the reasons for the observed variations in bamboo flowering. This review also introduces two mechanisms by which bamboo forests are rejuvenated after flowering and explains the flowering phenomena of bamboo forests using the bamboo flowering cycle theory. Finally, we present suggestions for forest management strategies. Bamboo flowering is a normal physiological phenomenon, even though it has unique elements compared with flowering in other plants. The results presented here provide valuable reference material for understanding bamboo flowering and its periodicity.

Early twentieth-century China paired the local community to the worldùa place and time when English dominated urban-centered higher and secondary education and Chinese-edited English-language magazines surfaced as a new form of translingual practice. Cosmopolitan Publics focuses on China's \"cosmopolitans\"ùWestern-educated intellectuals who returned to Shanghai in the late 1920s to publish in English and who, ultimately, became both cultural translators and citizens of the wider world. Shuang Shen highlights their work in publications such as The China Critic and T'ien Hsia, providing readers with a broader understanding of the role and function of cultural mixing, translation, and multilingualism in China's cultural modernity. Decades later, as nationalist biases and political restrictions emerged within China, the influence of the cosmopolitans was neglected and the significance of cosmopolitan practice was underplayed. Shen's encompassing study revisits and presents the experience of Chinese modernity as far more heterogeneous, emergent, and transnational than it has been characterized until now.

A major form of meat abstinence in modern China was the observance of periodic fasting, as distinct from permanent vegetarianism. This article explores the various forms of such observances and their evolution from late imperial times to the Republican period. It describes the religious calendars that circulated widely from the late Qing onward and identifies the most common fasting regimens (and the associated gods) that people selected from a large choice of fasting days. It then draws on narrative material to tease out how and why people adopted such regimens and to discuss debates and polemics about them. Finally, it shows that periodic fasting continued to be popular during the twentieth century, exhibiting more continuities than current studies of modern changes in the discourses about vegetarianism would suggest.

This article rethinks the nature of power and its relation to territory in the photographic event. Focusing on thousands of photographs taken during the British Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa between 1903 and 1904, it reorients understandings of photography as either reproducing or enabling the “negotiation” or contestation of power inequalities between participants. It shows how, in the transitory relations between Tibetans, Chinese, and Britons during and after photographic events, photography acted as a means by which participants constituted themselves as responsible agents—as capable of responding and as “accountable”—in relation to one another and to Tibet as a political entity. Whether in photographs of Tibetans protesting British looting or of their “reading” periodicals containing photographs of themselves, photography, especially Kodak photography, proposed potential new ways of being politically “Tibetan” at a time when the meaning of Tibet as a territory was especially indeterminate. This article therefore examines how the shifting territorial meaning of Tibet, transformed by an ascendant Dalai Lama, weakening Qing empire, and Anglo-Russian competition, converged with transformations in the means of visually reflecting upon it. If photography entailed always-indeterminate power relations through which participants constituted themselves in relation to Tibet, then it also compels our own rethinking of Tibet itself as an event contingent on every event of photography, rather than pre-existing or “constructed” by it.

This article merges two approaches in what I am calling a horizontal reading of the women’s periodical press in early twentieth-century China. Feminism’s skepticism of all-encompassing narratives and attentiveness to the circuitous routes through which knowledge is produced make these multigenre, multivocal, and multiregistered materials legitimate objects of historical study. At the same time the methods of sinology, which combine competence in the mutating forms of Republican-era written Chinese with openness to new theoretically inflected approaches, help to unlock their aporetic richness. Aimed at capturing rather than disciplining the chaotic richness of these publications, this horizontal method reads the range of materials within women’s magazines against one another: discursive essays against photographic portraits, and advertisements against readers’ columns, for example. Rather than seeking the discursive logic articulated in selected essays—the prevailing scholarly approach to the periodical press—the horizontal method aims to capture the naturally occurring oddities of quotidian print matter. These oddities, in turn, highlight productive disjunctions inherent in Republican culture. Such a reading deepens our knowledge of the dramatic early twentieth-century changes that altered the course of modern Chinese history and enriches our understanding of the demographic that was arguably most affected by those changes—urban women. It also offers an alternate vision of how those dramatic changes were lived and understood, not in terms of a series of stark binaries that pitted “Western modernity” against “Chinese tradition” but through blended accommodations grounded in the intimate details of daily life.

Readings of two autobiographical essays by Yang Jiang (1911—) suggest that Confucian conventions of intimacy exert a major force on personal memories of the Chinese twentieth century. To resolve the anxieties of a life that extends over the entire Chinese era of revolution, Yang Jiang reinvents the values of the Confucian intellectual and the Confucian family. This work certainly draws on the business of sentimentality in Chinese popular literature, which begs the question: is Yang Jiang part of a Chinese intimate public?

The Alliance Israélite Universelle schools established in the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s propagated among their students the ideas of Franco-Judaism and the European model of Jewish existence. This was the only modern Jewish ideology available to Sephardim until the late 1890s, when new historical circumstances gave rise to the Zionist movement. Sephardi intellectuals were now forced to choose between the two models of emancipation advocated by their European coreligionists. Because Zionism was banned in the Ottoman Empire, the Ladino press could not embrace or even reject it openly. Nevertheless, Sephardi journalists found ways of doing both in the pages of their periodicals, camouflaging their polemics under various disguises. This article uncovers some of the hidden debates in the Ladino press at the turn of the twentieth century by analyzing accounts of the Viennese, Chinese, Ethiopian, and Russian Jewish communities published by the prominent Salonican journalist Sam Lévy.

1995 is the 35th year of publication of The China Quarterly. London has been the home of the journal throughout its existence and, as the world's leading scholarly journal on modern China, The China Quarterly has long been a distinguishing feature of British sinology. Since its inception The China Quarterly has been recognized world-wide as the journal of record on 20th-century Chinese affairs, publishing timely, reflective, informed and new research on a wide range of subjects. The journal's Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation (so ably compiled by Robert F. Ash since 1982) is a venerable history of all but the first decade of the People's Republic. The extensive list of books received and books reviewed (195 in 1994) are also histories of the China field in themselves.