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  • Editor's Note
  • Christopher A. Reed, Chief Editor

With this issue, we enter this journal's twenty-fifth year of publication. The first issue of Republican China (predecessor of Twentieth-Century China) appeared in Fall 1983. The November 2007 issue also marks the beginning of the second decade of the journal under its current title and continues our tradition of publishing noteworthy work by both junior and senior scholars. In this issue, we present four provocative articles, two by emerging scholars and two from mid-career historians.

Two of the four articles revise scholarly opinion concerning political events that we thought we understood. In doing so, these articles remind us of the large number of topics that have been analyzed in this journal since its inception only to be revisited and reassessed from different perspectives in subsequent issues and articles.1 The other two articles delve into the history of China's late Qing and early Republican print culture, recalling a thematic focus of articles we have published more recently that engage topics of newspaper culture and the role of the print media in modern China.2

Jane Leung Larson's article "Articulating China's First Mass Movement" aims to contribute to a transnational history of China by documenting a variety of little-known links between the overseas Chinese political organization, Baohuanghui (保皇會), and the 1905 anti-American boycott. Further, it explores how the organization provided much of the boycott's earliest inspiration, strategy, ideology, financial backing, propaganda and information channels, as well as some of its key personnel. Through its transnational network of newspapers, especially Shanghai's Shibao (時報 Eastern Times), she argues, the Baohuanghui played a crucial role in articulating and disseminating the boycott message, attempting both to awaken public support of the boycott and to tie the movement to reform-led discussion on the condition of the Chinese nation and the role of the Chinese citizen.

In his article "National Classicism," Michael Gibbs Hill revises our understanding of Lin Shu (林紓 1852-1924). Known mostly as a pioneering translator of Western fiction, Lin was a flagship author of the Commercial Press in the first three decades of the twentieth century. His fame as a translator, however, has obscured Lin's significant work in other areas, especially educational publishing. Hill examines the products of Lin's work as textbook editor and anthologist as part of what Hill calls Lin's "national classicism"-the packaging and marketing of "traditional" literati texts and values through the name and personality of Lin Shu. Through an analysis of the relationships between debates on the Chinese written language and literary canon, the dynamics of commercial publishing, and Lin Shu's own status as a cultural celebrity, Hill's essay provides a new means of [End Page 2] understanding how professional writers and intellectuals like Lin participated in and were shaped by the dynamics of cultural production in this turbulent period.

Haiyan Lee's contribution "'A Dime Store of Words'" discusses Ziyou zazhi (自由雜誌 Liberty magazine, 1913) a spin-off from Shenbao's (申報) successful literary supplement Ziyou tan (自由談 Free talk). Liberty marketed itself as a forum of free speech, a portal of knowledge, and a source of entertainment; it featured a diversity of genres including satirical essays, historical anecdotes, technological digests, doggerels, language games, mini-stories, and plays. Running for two issues before changing its name to Youxi zazhi (遊戲雜誌 Pastime, 1913-15), Liberty offers us a concrete glimpse into the world of leisure-oriented periodical publishing in the second decade of the twentieth century. Through a close examination of the only two surviving issues of Liberty, Lee seeks to understand its formal, topical, and social attractions and also how it negotiated changing conceptions of public and private and the conflicting pursuits of leisure and social engagement.

In "A May Fourth 'Peach Blossom Garden'," Shakar Rahav traces the rise and fall of a prominent experiment in communal living, the Gongdu huzhu tuan (工讀互助團 Work study mutual aid corps), that was active in Beijing between December 1919 and March 1920. The article examines the social practices and economic basis of the Corps, demonstrating how its utopian vision clashed with the strains of ideologically committed communal life as well as with external...

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