Editorial

Abstract

Editorial Kristin Stapleton With this issue, Twentieth-Century China is pleased to be working with a new publishing partner, the Johns Hopkins University Press, which has a distinguished record of scholarly publishing and journal management. Among its lists of outstanding journals is Late Imperial China. We look forward to a long and productive relationship with our friends at JHU Press. We also welcome Dr. Kelly Hammond of the University of Arkansas as the new book review editor. The TCC editorial board is grateful to the outgoing book review editor, Dr. Susan Fernsebner, for her years of service to the journal. All of the articles in this issue address the circulation of ideas and practices among Chinese closely connected to communities outside China, including religious, business, and scholarly communities, in the first half of the twentieth century. Analyzing the history of an early Sino-Japanese joint venture, Craig Smith argues that the Chinese and Japanese elites who at the turn of the twentieth century set up “Datong” schools for Chinese students in Tokyo and Yokohama combined Confucian learning with nationalism and “Asianism” in an effort to counter Western imperialism. Through the schools, they produced a cadre of activist students, such as Feng Ziyou and Su Manshu, who contributed to an ongoing critique of Western culture and Western aggression even as Chinese-Japanese relations deteriorated in later years. Melissa Inouye’s article explores a different stream of cultural influence over the same decades. Her study of the Chinese Christian Intelligencer, founded in 1905, demonstrates that news of the latest scientific discoveries in the world’s laboratories shared space with news about miraculous events brought about by faith in the Holy Spirit. Charismatic Protestantism offered Chinese communities a vision of modern life that included science as well as a direct relationship between and God and believers. The expansion of print culture, she shows, spread this vision across China, despite the disdain with which such intellectuals as Chen Duxiu regarded it. Chen Duxiu’s own role in shaping how “modern China” has been understood is the topic of Ya-pei Kuo’s article. In it, she examines how Chen Duxiu and other theorists of the early 1920s shaped the dominant historical narrative about the May Fourth period by formulating and circulating the idea that a coherent New Culture Movement emerged in the second half of the 1910s. Kuo argues that this handy historical formulation has obscured the heterogeneity of thought that characterized the period and has created a foundation upon which subsequent Communist history has built. The introduction to China of a liberal, capitalist-friendly practice of philanthropy is the topic of an article by John Fitzgerald and Mei-fen Kuo, who explore the career of William Yinson [End Page 1] Lee, an Australian-born businessman who introduced a range of charitable practices to Shanghai. Lee and other such returned émigrés, the authors argue, were well positioned to take upon themselves the task of regaining China’s “welfare sovereignty”—control over the sort of charitable work that foreign benevolent societies had been carrying out in China for decades amid much fanfare. Brian Moloughney’s article explores the friendship and intellectual collaboration between two scholars—Gu Jiegang, whose work laid some of the foundations of the twentieth-century reevaluation of imperial China’s cultural legacy, and Arthur W. Hummel, a missionary whose work with Gu, Moloughney argues, helped establish the modern field of China studies outside of China. The issue presents four book reviews: Faith Skiles and Helen M. Schneider review Daughter of Good Fortune by Huiqin Chen with Shehong Chen, Xin Zhang reviews Stephen Halsey’s study of the evolution of Chinese statecraft in the era of European imperialism, Di Luo reviews Mette Halskov Hansen’s work on rural boarding schools in contemporary China, and Hongmei Sun reviews Selina Lai-Henderson’s Mark Twain in China. Book reviews appear online at Project Muse (muse.jhu.edu/journal/390). [End Page 2] Copyright © 2017 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc.