Editorial

Abstract

Editorial Margherita Zanasi This May 2021 issue presents five research articles and five book reviews. The first two articles, by Jenny Huangfu Day and Helena F. S. Lopes, present two different views of the history of education during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Day reveals the increasingly nationalist and propagandist nature of education in the wartime base of the Nationalist government, while Lopes emphasizes the emerging cosmopolitanism of the refugee enclave of Macao, “a peripheral territory at the crossroads of several empires.” According to Day, the Second Sino-Japanese War offered the Nationalist Government an opportunity to realize its aims of unifying educational materials and turning textbooks into tools for political mobilization. The new textbooks were designed to inspire anti-Japanese and anti-Communist sentiments, engendering the kind of patriotic citizenry the government believed was essential to sustaining its war effort. The war, therefore, put an end to the earlier lively debates on educational materials and the more liberal trends they represented while also deeply transforming the textbook industry. Lopes’s article focuses on the activities of the Chinese students and educators who fled to Macao to escape the Japanese occupation. This mass migration contributed to the development of a cosmopolitan educational landscape because the schools that relocated to Macao relied for funding and operations on complex transnational networks. Students and educators also became the targets of competing mobilization attempts. While the Nationalist government hoped to gain their support for its war effort, Macao’s authorities viewed them as precious social and human capital to be tapped for the development of the colony. Juliane Noth’s and Qiliang He’s articles focus on Maoist China’s explorations of, respectively, gendered revolutionary propaganda and competing spatial practices. On the basis of an examination of images of young female activists and workers, Noth argues that these “idealized images” were part of Maoist propaganda intended to establish a militant interpretation of femininity. The militant aesthetic of the images ultimately legitimized violent class struggle during the Cultural Revolution. He’s article focuses on a park in Hangzhou that was designed and restructured by the Communist government with the intent to create a politicized space both for showcasing the new Socialist China and for the performance of participatory propaganda. This original intention, however, was ultimately derailed as different actors made use of the park in their own ways in pursuit of diverse agendas. In the fifth research article, Spencer Stewart discusses the important role played by scientists and extension workers in improving the quality of cotton grown in China during the Republican period. Influenced by international models of agricultural extension, these [End Page 103] scientists promoted community production to manage how newly imported standardized American cotton was cultivated, processed, and sold. These crop communities reorganized economic and social networks in the villages, creating new links among farmers, scientists, bankers, and industrialists. The five book reviews are available online through Project MUSE. Jie Li comments on Andrew F. Jones’s book, which places 1960s Chinese popular music in the global context of the Cold War. Norbert Francis reviews Fu-Lai Tony Yu and Diana Kwan’s work on pro-democracy social movements in Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong, and Hannah Theaker discusses Benno Weiner’s study of Tibet during the first decade of the People’s Republic of China. Finally, Juanjuan Peng reviews Robert Cliver’s book on the workers of the silk industry in the 1950s and Taomo Zhou comments on Covell Meyskens’s work on the Third Front industrialization campaign. Juliane Noth is the author featured for this issue in our interview series, available at http://hstcconline.org/interviews-with-authors/. [End Page 104] Copyright © 2021 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc