Editorial

This issue includes four research articles, two review essays, five book reviews, and a note on a collection of materials on Chinese Trotskyists.

Our first article, by Hongyue Liao, examines the history of dramatic troupes founded by the management of the Wing On Department Store in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the 1920s and used as a vehicle for the store's charitable activities as the idea of corporate philanthropy emerged in Chinese cities. Liao shows how amateur Cantonese opera performance offered a way for Wing On to develop its corporate culture and, at the same time, a reputation for social engagement.

Through a detailed exploration of essays on the Soviet Union written in China in the mid-1920s, John Knight analyzes the construction of an appealing vision of the Soviet Union that helped to energize the Chinese Revolution in 1925–1927. "Inspired by their imagination of their northern neighbor," Knight argues, "Chinese developed a unique form of internationalist-infused nationalism that promised to subvert the dominant East–West hierarchy by linking 'China' with 'proletarians' worldwide."

Steven Pieragastini draws on archival material to reveal how the 1951–1952 Thought Reform campaign affected Shanghai's universities. His research maps the higher education landscape in the city in the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and shows that implementation of the campaign varied across institutions in the years before the higher education system was reorganized along Soviet lines. Contradictions in the goals of the campaign helped insure its lack of success: instead of spreading socialist values among the intellectuals, it deepened distrust between academics and party cadres.

Our fourth article returns us to the topic of opera, although in a very different temporal and spatial context. Jeremy Taylor investigates the efforts of officials in the PRC to lay claim to and shape the tradition of Fujianese opera in the face of competing interpretations of that tradition promoted in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, and among Chinese diasporic communities in Southeast Asia. Through a case study of the 1957 film Chen San Wuniang, with its use of the language of southern Fujian (Minnanyu), Taylor sheds light on how "provincial forms of Chinese cultural production" became "realms of Cold War contestation."

In this issue, Peter Zarrow contributes a note on Gregor Benton's wide-ranging compilation of sources for the study of Chinese Trotskyism. Ji Li discusses the themes of resistance and adaptation in four recent books on religion and politics in modern China, and Covell Meyskens traces the creation of new forms of social stratification in the ostensibly egalitarian PRC by evaluating another set of recent books. In addition, five new book reviews accompany the issue and are available online: Jeremy Tai reviews Felix Boecking's study of trade and tariffs in the Nationalist era, Yurou Zhong reviews Felicity Lufkin's volume on folk art's role in modern culture and wartime propaganda, Sakura Christmas reviews Kate Merkel-Hess's book on rural reconstruction projects in the 1930s, Fabio Lanza reviews Jeremy Murray's history of the Communist movement in Hainan, and Sophia Lee reviews Pingchao Zhu's book on culture in Guilin during the War of Resistance against Japan.