Editorial

West China is the topic of this special issue. Four of the articles were presented in earlier form as part of a panel at the 2014 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. They address Chinese conceptions of Kham and the “Northwest,” as well as development projects for these regions, such as Third Front railroad construction and the exploitation of northern Xinjiang’s oil fields in cooperation with the Soviet Union. Guest editor Kenneth Pomeranz provides an insightful introductory essay that draws out some of the broader implications of the articles and traces the patterns in Chinese policy toward the western regions revealed in the four studies. As he and our authors show, over the course of the twentieth century, many people were determined to make the West China hinterland more central in national economic and political planning in a variety of ways and for a range of reasons.

This issue’s book review section presents assessments of three new works on Chinese political history: Elizabeth Remick’s comparative study of the regulation of prostitution in three cities during the Republican period; the English-language translation by Michael Hill of Wang Hui’s analysis of China’s transition from empire to nation-state in the twentieth century; and Yiching Wu’s history of radical critiques of Maoism during the Cultural Revolution. We thank our reviewers for their contributions. The reviews are listed in the printed journal and available to all as a pdf online at www.maneyonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1179/1521538515Z.00000000063.