Editorial

Three of the four articles in this issue take on different aspects of China's foreign relations, broadly defined. The fourth casts new light on the state-building efforts of the new People's Republic. In all of these articles, the challenge of creating and sustaining a coherent Chinese nation—and Chinese state—amid foreign and domestic pressures is front and center. All of them also focus on the middle fifty years of the twentieth century, reflecting the increasing scholarly attention to the mechanisms that transformed China from an empire to a nation-state, not by documenting milestone dates like 1911 or 1949, but by carefully analyzing the dynamics that accompanied, preceded, and followed those often clichéd years.

Moving chronologically, we begin in the 1920s, in the northeastern city of Harbin, newly reclaimed from its Russian semi-colonial founders. It is here that Huang Xuelei begins to analyze Soviet cinema in China. The role of Soviet film in the People's Republic's early years may be more familiar to readers, but Huang emphasizes the period before the 1949 revolution. Just as the Soviet Union was seeking to recast itself as a modern state, redefining Russian culture after overthrowing an imperial past, Chinese in the Republican era—on both the left and the right—used Soviet cinema as a commercial and political tool in their quests to create a modern China. Huang shows that the popular and critical success of these films complicates the image projected later—in the context of the Civil War and the Cold War—that Soviet culture was a bête noire in pre-revolutionary China.

Controlling popular culture is also at the center of Shuge Wei's article "News as a Weapon." Wei documents the creation of the Guomindang's central propaganda office in 1937 and 1938 through the career of Hollington Tong. Tong, Wei asserts, was active in promoting the Guomindang's interests and—at the same time—Tong's connections with Chiang Kai-shek permitted him to centralize the propaganda activities of the Republican government in the early years of the war against Japan. China's image in the English-speaking world—one which led to massive amounts of aid and other means of support from the United States and Great Britain—was largely the product of Tong's aggressive role in foreign propaganda.

Hollington Tong was working not just to win support for the Republic of China abroad, he was also trying to unify a factionally divided Guomindang. At the same time as Tong was working to accomplish this, Zhou Fohai was looking to bolster the Guomindang state through negotiations with its communist rivals (and allies). As Brian G. Martin documents, Zhou's ongoing negotiations—despite his anti-communist attitudes—were directed at defending China in the face of Japanese encroachment and then invasion, yet he was stymied by the attitudes of Chiang Kai-shek and other leaders who insisted that military confrontation with the communists was a central policy goal. Ironically, just as Tong's propaganda abroad was winning support from overseas, Zhou's work within China left him increasingly doubtful that China could survive the war.

Finally, Mi Zhao moves past the 1949 divide, analyzing the mobilization of singing girls to be propagandists for the revolution in the early years of the People's Republic. This article, "From Singing Girl to Revolutionary Artist," challenges both the theoretical and methodological standards for analyzing this period. For one, gender becomes the crucial means of analysis, suggesting that socialism—at least in this aspect—was highly gendered, drawing on the performers' roles (both social and theatrical) in pre-revolutionary China. Methodologically, Zhao relies heavily on oral histories, and the article itself becomes part of the performance, enabling readers to see and experience the process by which history is formed, emphasizing the developing narrative rather than the "facts" of the case removed from context.

With the completion of this issue, I hand over the reins of Twentieth-Century China to my colleague and successor, Professor Kristin Stapleton, of the University at Buffalo. Twentieth-Century China will benefit greatly from Kristin's extensive experience as both an editor...