Editorial

The themes present in this issue may be familiar, but each of the four articles makes an original contribution to its subject and will, I think, challenge readers to reconsider ideas about gender equity, the growth of the middle class, leadership techniques, and regional identity.

Lisa Tran's "The ABCs of Monogamy in Republican China" takes as its focus a single phrase: yifu yiqi zhi. Often translated simply (and Tran would argue, simplistically) as "monogamy," this phrase in its various translations provides a powerful entrée into law, popular culture, and social analysis. Few issues cut to the heart of a social order more than marriage and other forms of partnership. Tran's detailed and thorough analysis of the way successive Chinese regimes managed this interplay between tradition and modernity finds echoes across a range of other institutions.

Accompanying the changes Tran documents was the transformation—or at least the development—of China's middle class. Miriam Gross's article, "Flights of Fancy from a Sedan Chair," complements Tran's work well, taking a similarly archival approach to the development of the tourism industry in the Nanjing decade. The nascent leisure travel industry shows early twentieth-century China in a light not often seen: separated from the political, social, and economic calamities that characterize textbook descriptions of the era. The article also provides fascinating insights into the creation of tourist destinations, a process that has only accelerated as time has passed.

The same class of people at the center of Gross's work are also a focus of Grace Huang's reconsideration of Chiang Kai-shek's political leadership. Like Tran's article on marriage custom and law, Huang takes as her point of departure a single phrase, in this case a single character: (chi). Translated variously as "shame" or "humiliation" among other possibilities, this Confucian concept underpins much of Chiang's rhetoric about the Chinese nation and the crises it endured under his leadership. Huang's careful reading of Chiang's official diaries shows the political power of this concept and the way that Chiang strategized to make defeat an asset in his political struggles with both the Japanese and the communists.

These first three articles all take as their subject what might be considered the traditional core of Twentieth-Century China: social and political history of the Nanjing decade, and the years preceding and following it. The fourth article in this issue, Mark Gamsa's "Writers from Anhui and Provinciality in Modern China" extends those boundaries considerably, right to the present day (although the article's roots are firmly in the May Fourth era). Gamsa takes on questions of identity, stereotype, regionalism, and modernity (among others) as he seeks the meaning of being from Anhui throughout the twentieth century. Labeled a backwater, Anhui can claim, in one form or another, many of China's most progressive and influential figures, yet neither side seems to suffer (or benefit) from the association. Local histories are always dogged, it seems, by questions of relevance: what can the particular say about the general? In this case, Gamsa's analysis of the changing identity of Anhui speaks volumes about China, its changes from the 1920s to today, and particularly the interaction between the cosmopolitan coast and its less-privileged inland relations.

Issue 36:2 should be appearing in your mailboxes just a few months after issue 36:1, after a gap of nearly a year separating 35:2 from 36:1! My apologies for the uneven production schedule, which accompanied the transition to our new publisher and the transition from an academic-year to a calendar-year production schedule. From here on, issue one of each volume should be mailed the first week of January, with each subsequent issue (remember, frequency is increasing to three issues per year in 2012) appearing at regular intervals.