Editorial

Abstract

Editorial Joshua Howard The second issue of 2023 presents four research articles and one review essay. Hongling Liang explores how the “Paris group” of Chinese anarchists theorized education in their journal, the New Century, which circulated between 1907 and 1910. In contrast to contemporary educational reformers and a historiography that has linked education to nation building, the anarchists stressed a new kind of education based on scientism, the supralanguage of Esperanto, and moral enlightenment. Although Liang recognizes that the anarchists shared with practitioners of Confucianism a belief in the transformative power of education, she concludes that their cosmopolitan vision of education was significant for breaking free of existing traditions and imagining revolutionary and democratic forms through which education and learning could be implemented. Drawing on memoir literature of underground women operatives active during the Chinese Civil War, Amanda Zhang demonstrates how narratives that highlighted personal sacrifice and physical and psychological hardships were employed as an ideological tool. They refuted gender norms of the “fragile woman” prevalent during the 1940s but could also reproduce tropes of gender inequality. Above all, as part of the operatives’ political rehabilitation during the 1980s, such narratives served to affirm these women’s loyalty to the Communist Party. Emily Wilcox’s fine-grained study of a leading Japanese ballet company’s interpretation and production of The White-Haired Girl and its reception in China during a celebrated 1958 tour reveals more than just a critical missing chapter in the historical evolution of this iconic revolutionary drama. The exchanges ensuing from this instance of Sino-Japanese cultural diplomacy under Maoism, serving several purposes, were productive in multiple ways, not least as a means for audiences in China to “project international aspirations” through the “embodiment and imagination” of a Japanese “people” sharing a yearning for revolution. Zixian Liu’s attention to the material aspect of one popular brand of bedsheet in socialist China supports an argument for a method and a perspective that render visible and tangible the “endeavor to create a distinctive material culture” within the economic system of the Mao era. The Minguang “national bedsheet,” as designed, manufactured, consumed, used, and desired, evoked Maoist “values, sentiments, and ideals” during and long after this period. In his review essay, Edward Tyerman discusses three recent publications about the Sino-Russian border that examine the construction of differences across the borderland, as well as tensions between local and centralizing forces. The works include Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey’s On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border, [End Page 87] Mark Gamsa’s Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography, and Sören Urbansky’s Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border. Daniel Asen’s review of Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China by Linh D. Vu is available online at Project MUSE (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/390). Finally, Emily Wilcox is the author featured for this issue in our interview series, available at http://hstcconline.org/interviews-with-authors/. The interview includes a link for free access to her article, “Sino-Japanese Cultural Diplomacy in the 1950s: The Making and Reception of the Matsuyama Ballet’s The White-Haired Girl.” [End Page 88] Copyright © 2023 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc