Editor’s Note

Abstract

Editor’s Note Christopher A. Reed I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Twentieth-Century China’s new coeditor James (“Jay”) Carter of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Jay and I are co-editing volume 34 (2008–09) of the journal; Jay will assume full responsibility for editorship of the November 2009 (35:1) issue. In addition to being a historian of the Republican period, Jay is the incoming president of the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC, see below). In a related vein, Twentieth-Century China has been privileged to have several new members join our Editorial Board since November 2004 (30:1), my first issue as editor. The board has grown in number (from fifteen editors to seventeen) but also in intellectual and geographic range. This expansion reflects the deepening and broadening of historical scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese history as well as the maturation of this journal. Nearly half (eight) of our current editors have joined since 2005: Geremie R. Barmé, Morris L. Bian, John Fitzgerald, Bryna Goodman, Christian Henriot, Kubo Toru, Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, and Peter Zarrow. Each brings new scholarly specialties to the efforts of our long-time members to embrace the full range of scholarship on China in the twentieth-century. It is clear from the board’s composition that English-language, Chinese-documentbased scholarship on twentieth-century China must no longer be limited to the native-speaking Anglophone world. With members now hailing from Australia, Austria, France, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan in addition to the USA, our new board reflects the globalization of modern China historiography as well as the broad range of countries from which the journal typically receives submissions. Readers who are involved with the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China (HSTCC) already know that, at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, TCC and HSTCC affiliated with each other. Two years ago, I opened discussions with Keith Schoppa, head of TCC’s Editorial Board and, coincidentally, president of HSTCC’s executive board, about this project. In Atlanta, the HSTCC board voted unanimously to accept my proposal. Both partners are pleased with the outcome of this vote and look forward to future collaborations between TCC and HSTCC. The overlap in the two entities’ names suggests that this pairing might be destiny playing itself out, but to make everything more concrete, HSTCC members are now being offered preferential TCC subscription rates when they renew their membership. See page 111 in this issue and the HSTCC website ( www.towson.edu/hstcc ) for further details. In the current issue, we present three articles and one research note. In “Teaching Baihua: Textbook Publishing and the Production of Vernacular Language and a New Literary Canon in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Robert Culp explores three ways in which textbook publishing influenced the production and spread of China’s modern vernacular language. The article also demonstrates that commercial publishing houses enabled several different types of modern intellectual to play [End Page 2] active roles in producing China’s modern vernacular language. Through their activities, these intellectuals transformed China’s linguistic and print cultures while also creating new identities for themselves in the post-imperial socio-cultural order. Chieko Nakajima’s “Health and Hygiene in Mass Mobilization: Hygiene Campaigns in Shanghai, 1920–1945” examines Shanghai’s hygiene campaigns over a multi-decade period. The author argues that the campaigns connected personal hygiene practices with the larger goal of achieving national strength, and in the end, helped to strengthen the state’s authority, whether Nationalist or Japanese-Occupationist. This study demonstrates that through educational programs as well as various forms of political symbolism, the Nationalist and Japanese-Occupationist states penetrated residents’ everyday lives. Next, Lee S. Zhu’s “Communist Cadres on the Higher Education Front, 1955–1962” argues that Communist cadres in higher education played an important role in fomenting conflict between the Communist Party and academics. Because of their common prejudice against professors, these cadres responded with great reservations to the party center’s first attempts of 1955 and 1956 to integrate the high-level intellectuals into the new political system. From 1958 to 1960, encouraged by the general political environment...