Editorial

Twentieth-Century China is pleased to announce a new online feature presenting interviews with authors. The goals of this feature are to spotlight both young and established scholars and to trace current research trends and new emerging fields in the study of China in the long twentieth century. The interviews are hosted in the TCC Authors section of the website of the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China (http://hstcconline.org/). Each interview is accompanied by a link for free access to the article under discussion. The first interview appeared in conjunction with the October 2019 issue and spotlighted author Soonyi Lee. For the January 2020 issue, the website features an interview with Xiaobing Tang.

This issue offers five research articles. The first two articles focus on the development of new soundscapes in the late Republican and early People’s Republic periods. Xiao bing Tang discusses the creation of a new sonic culture in the 1930s, which emerged both from new technologies, such as sound movies and radio broadcasting, and from the new practices of choral and community singing. China’s new “singing nation” was also born out of growing nationalist and anti-Japanese feeling, becoming an important feature of nationalist artistic expression. In her article, Jie Li explores the soundscape of China during the Mao years, focusing particularly on the expansion of state-managed loudspeaker networks and on the practice of organized mass listening to radio broadcasts. This ever-present and homogeneous sonic environment was intended to revolutionize the everyday lives of the people by redefining time, space, and the rhythm of daily labor, as well as by promoting political mass mobilization.

In the third article, Yanqiu Zheng places the North American tour of the National Chinese Opera Theater within the context of the global Cold War and the 1970s dispute between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan over the meaning of Chineseness and the right to represent it internationally. As an offensive in cultural diplomacy, this tour aimed to present Taiwan as the legitimate representative of Chinese civilization by creating a direct contrast with the Cultural Revolution and Jiang Qing’s drastic reformulation of Chinese opera into revolutionary propaganda. Hongyan Xiang, the author of the fourth article, explores the Nanjing government’s efforts to reclaim the legal rights over foreign churches’ properties. According to Xiang, Nanjing proved quite successful in achieving increasing control over foreign missions by skillfully deploying regulations on land administration, civil law, and tax law. Previously an issue that had been almost exclusively the focus of negotiations in diplomatic relations with Western powers, the regulation of land holdings in the hands of foreign missions became part of Nanjing’s domestic nation-building effort.

Finally, Zhang Yun’s article explores the gendered implications of baihua (白話) in the late Qing period through the writings of a group of Chinese women studying in Japan. Originally intended by nationalist reformers as a vehicle for education of the lower classes and women—perceived as an illiterate collective—baihua came to be adopted by female writers as an expression of feminism and for redefining women’s identity and position in society. In their attempt to reverse the conceptualization of women as a symbol of national backwardness, these women writers redefined the use of the vernacular as a tool for female empowerment and self-improvement.

This issue also includes two review essays and two book reviews. Yuxin Ma reviews two books on women writers and their role in the print media of the late Qing and Republican periods. Rana Mitter’s essay focuses on recent writings on wartime China. The two book reviews are available online and include Nicole Elizabeth Barnes’s review of Emily Baum’s The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China and Clemens Büttner’s review of Patrick Fuliang Shan’s Yuan Shikai: A Reappraisal.

Featured in our online series of author interviews are Xiaobing Tang and his article, “Radio, Sound Cinema, and Community Singing: The Making of a New Sonic Culture in Modern China.”