Editorial

Abstract

Editorial Kristin Stapleton Zhao Erfeng and Sheng Xuanhuai were two larger-than-life political actors in the last decade of Qing rule. After their deaths in the 1910s, they continued to figure in Chinese politics and culture. In this issue of Twentieth-Century China, Joohee Suh analyzes biographies of Zhao published in the early years of the Republic, exploring various interpretations of his role as conqueror of the Western border regions and adversary of the Sichuan railway protection movement. The lack of a consensus on the significance of the 1911 Revolution is apparent, she argues, in the different assessments of Zhao’s place in history. Qiliang He examines the extravagant funeral procession of Sheng Xuanhuai in Shanghai in 1917, detailing the negotiations that resulted in the particular procession route and discussing the motivations of those who participated, including more than a million spectators. He argues that such public spectacles created a shared experience that bound diverse immigrant communities together as city people. One of Sheng Xuanhuai’s successors as a leader of industry, Liu Hongsheng, is a central figure in The Lius of Shanghai, 1 in which Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh mined family letters to trace interpersonal relationships and cultural change. In his article in this issue, Micah Muscolino takes a close look at neglected aspects of Liu Hongsheng’s business career. In particular, Muscolino shows how Liu managed different business ventures so that they supported one another, using by-products from his coal operations as fuel and raw material for factories in other sectors. Through his study of the Liu business empire, Muscolino uncovers the history of China’s transition to an economy based on fossil fuels. Conceptions of childhood in a China at war are the subject of Xu Lanjun’s contribution to this issue. She sheds light on children’s traveling troupes that formed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, examining the educational philosophy that inspired them, as well as their role in wartime propaganda. Vulnerable children, including refugees and orphans, gained symbolic importance during the national crisis, and Xu discusses how educators and activists encouraged children to think of themselves as part of the resistance struggle. Three recent books are reviewed in this issue: Parks Coble’s work on Chinese wartime journalism in the 1930s and 1940s, Joan Judge’s analysis of visual and written representations of women in Shanghai’s Women’s Eastern Times (Funü shibao) during the first decade of the Republic, and Shellen Xiao Wu’s study of the evolution of mining engineering and the integration of China’s coal resources into the world economy. [End Page 109] Footnotes 1. Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh, The Lius of Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Copyright © 2016 Twentieth-Century China