Editorial

As these words are written, Beijing, and much of Eastern China, is recovering from the "airpocalypse": several days in early January when air-quality indices soared to record levels, far beyond what the World Health Organization considers "hazardous" and beyond even what the scale is able to assess. Days earlier, protesters in Guangzhou had taken to the streets, objecting to the rewriting—apparently at the direction of provincial party censors—of the Southern Weekend's traditional New Year's editorial. And all the while, tensions between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands increased steadily.

There is no telling what the state of these three events will be when these words appear in print. However, it is likely that questions of public health, political reform and dissent, and Sino-Japanese relations will remain central. These three issues are among the most persistent in twentieth- (and now twenty-first-)century China, and so it is perhaps grasping low-hanging fruit to use these headlines to draw together four apparently quite disparate articles in this issue of Twentieth-Century China.

Janet Y. Chen's article, "Will the Real Refugees Please Stand Up?" pulls together several of these threads, and more, showing how Faulkner's quotation—approaching cliché status—that the "past is never dead; it's not even past" is as applicable to China as to Yoknapatawpha County. In the waning years of the Civil War, migrants and refugees in Shanghai found themselves marginalized and struggling to survive on a scale remarkable even for that desperate era. Chen—who has written powerfully on poverty in twentieth-century China in her book Guilty of Indigence—shows how violently people contested over the right to called "refugees," and how the living were forced to share homes with the recently deceased. As books like Tom Miller's China's Urban Billion vividly document the social stresses in today's Chinese cities, Chen evokes powerfully the stresses of several generations ago.

Two of the articles in this issue address the role of ideology in the new Communist state, though in quite different ways. Resonating with the Southern Weekend protests of early January, Juan Wang's "The Sly Accomodationist" explores the career of Tang Dalang, a writer and journalist who accommodated the Communist regime in the 1940s and 1950s as the editor of the tabloid Yibao. Tang's dilemmas and decisions, as he balanced journalism, political pressures, censorship, and his own livelihood would ring true, I think, with many journalists working today in the PRC as they seek to understand and navigate the vague and shifting line between what is permitted and what is not.

Ideology and political pressure in a much different realm is the focus of Byungil Ahn's article, "Reinventing Scientific Medicine for the Socialist Republic." Ahn examines the introduction and implementation of the "Lamaze" method of childbirth in China, in the 1950s. This method (known as the "psycho-prophylactic method of delivery" in the Soviet Union, where it was developed) was promoted as "Socialist medicine," in contrast to the "Western," bourgeois methods of childbirth that were often employed in hospitals prior to 1949. Ahn documents the bureaucratic and ideological steps involved in implementing these methods, giving insight not only into debates over public health at the time, but also into the ways the state and party established control over areas of public life during this era.

The persistent and worsening environmental problems exemplified by the "airpocalypse" of January 2013 are often a catalyst, or at least a rallying point, for political action, and the state increasingly finds that environmental and political concerns are closely linked. This phenomenon is familiar to the several authors of this issue's final article, "China's New Sorrow." James Cook, Yesenia Gallardo, Derek Huls, and Marc Janke examine water policies in Qinghai province, analyzing not only the effectiveness and environmental implications of the policies themselves, but the impact of these policies on politics, particularly minority politics in a region where Tibetan and Salar peoples had lived and worked for many centuries. These groups are now confronting simultaneously the expanding and intensifying Chinese state as well as the environmental impacts of economic...