This article examines the ways that the People's Republic of China (PRC) interpreted and commemorated historical events concerning ethnic Koreans in Manchuria, particularly from the period of the Japanese invasion and colonisation in the first half of the twentieth century, and analyses the underlying intentions and strategies behind changing state narratives and commemorative behaviours over time. Based on text analysis and field observations, it argues that changing geopolitical and ethnopolitical needs pushed the Chinese party-state to repeatedly attempt to align local memories with a China-centred historical narrative by evading and disavowing the memories that associate ethnic Koreans with Japan, North Korea and South Korea. National unity across ethnic boundaries remained China's core goal over decades, while fluid national identities among the ethnic Korean community and alternative historical claims from the two Koreas in the service of their respective nation-building projects pose major challenges to China's attempts to control the narrative.

In a village land reform experiment on the outskirts of Beijing, a work team dispatched by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) played a crucial role in carrying out the unprecedented city-oriented policy that nationalized land and redistributed land-use rights. After studying village socioeconomics, the work team, following the new requirement of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that rural land supply food to the cities and be reserved for urban development, implemented the policy of “leaving farming rights unchanged” (weichi yuangeng budong 维持原耕不动) in all villages under municipal jurisdiction. It soon became apparent, however, that this policy would not meet poor peasants’ and hired hands’ expectations of being granted their own share of land. With tactful persuasion and careful mobilization, the work team was able to implement the land policy in the village, adjusting power structures (including loosening control at certain points) in the subsequent stages of the reform. The work team not only acted as a flexible “local central connectivity,” as Elizabeth Perry has argued, but, more importantly, also led through everyday statecraft within complicated localities, eventually making the Communist regime’s agenda work at the grassroots level.

Chinese citizenship has been known to be largely inaccessible to persons not born in and associated with China through ancestry. However, this study argues that the naturalization of foreigners was common in the Nationalist era (1928–1949). Using 2,132 biographical cases from sources including the Gazette of the National Government (Guomin zhengfu gongbao) and the Gazette of the Presidential Office (Zongtongfu gongbao), I elucidate findings from the assessment of 2,126 cases of people who became Chinese from June 1928 to July 1949. Going beyond preceding studies on the existence and interpretation of the legal code pertaining to immigration and naturalization, the principal contribution of this study substantiates the instances in which naturalization was permitted through legal practices. This study furthermore reveals that although citizenship laws had set restrictive prerequisites for belonging to the Chinese nation, exceptions to these rules recurred as the immigration system developed.

Originally published in Chinese in the journal Qingshi yanjiu, this article provides an overview of developments in the field of Qing history with particular attention to the ways in which the field has been shaped by factors including the professionalization of core journals, the expanded range of academic presses and PhD-granting departments involved in the field, the availability of research funding and the opening of archives, and the emergence of shared curricula for the training of graduate students. The article is not comprehensive: It does not, for example, cover developments in important areas including diplomatic history, military history, Tibetan history during the Qing, and book history. Instead, it spotlights the important role of transnational exchange and the effects of theoretical and methodological trends in the discipline of history.

This essay argues that Eileen Chang’s fiction actively shapes Chinese intellectual history rather than merely reflecting it. We challenge the tendency in scholarship that treats Chang’s work as either literary fiction or a social illustration, instead positioning her as part of the broader modern intellectual history that engages with the contradictions and therefore multiple crises of (Chinese) modernity. The essay contributes to the literature by expanding the scope of Chang’s critical reception beyond aesthetic and feminist readings, proposing that her writing offers an alternative mode of historical engagement. Rather than embracing modernity as a grand revolutionary force, Chang’s work subtly negotiates its contradictions and crises through intimate, everyday details. By closely reading the short story “Sealed Off” (1943) and the novella Love in a Fallen City (1943), we demonstrate how Chang’s female protagonists navigate the crises produced by an intensification of the confrontation between tradition and modernity in their personal relationships, suggesting that modernity does not wholly liberate them but rather poses personal and interpersonal crises by reconfiguring existing constraints. Methodologically, the essay advances intellectual historiography by using literary analysis to uncover how fiction can serve as a historical force rather than a mere reflection of its time. History is treated here as (1) what has happened in light of what could have happened; and therefore (2) what has effectively happened but not deemed as “history.” This perspective seeks to encourage future researchers to consider literature as an active site of historical theorization, especially in contexts where intellectual discourse seems on the verge of being “tainted” by feminine details. The reception of Chang’s fiction in both popular culture and academic discourse—especially through international cinematic adaptations—demonstrates how her writing mediates between national and global modernisms. By shifting focus from grand historical narratives to the micro-politics of everyday life, the essay proposes “undercoming” modernity and its accompanying crises as an alternative framework for analyzing not just Chinese literature but also transnational modernist aesthetics more broadly.

The paper investigates the “new village” debate and proposals (1919-1929), which envisioned and materialised everyday spaces for workers in response to crises of capital accumulation, labour displacement and urbanisation. The “new village” proposals, which critiqued European modernity and the existing social order while emphasising personal conduct and responsibility, have not permeated the mainstream narrative of Chinese intellectual history. The article attributes this gap to the dominance of simplified, monolithic accounts of modernity, which often marginalise grassroots-based, conflict-driven and pluralistic perspectives. Methodologically, the approach of studies of the quotidian underscores the historicity of modernity and the sociospatial relations forged through ongoing, conflict-laden interactions between opposing strategies to address class antagonism. This perspective seeks to encourage future research in intellectual history that considers everyday space as an active site of knowledge production, especially in contexts where the discourse of modernity takes on various forms—singular, alternative, or fragmented—on the assumption that it originated from the West. The intellectual discourse of the “new village” adopted by social reformers and state elites demonstrates how the concept was considered effective in solving a crisis within modernity in the context of global capitalism and class antagonism. By shifting the focus from the nation-state to everyday spaces and sociospatial relations, the paper proposes “becoming modern” as an alternative framework for analysing not only nation-building and modernisation in China but also transnational community-building in the twentieth-century world.

How should we make sense of the life of an ordinary Egyptian who worked in China for thirty-two years in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century? Centering on the persistent crises, dislocation, and partial belonging that Ahmed Fahmy (1860–1933) experienced while moving along a gamut of linguistic, religious, geographic, and epistemic spaces in Egypt, Great Britain, China, and the United States, this article unpacks the complexity of Fahmy’s identities. His Afro-Asian transregional life reflects not simply the hybridity of a modern subject but also the contradictions of modernity in the Global South and the interplay of global structure and individual agency. For people like Fahmy, life is a fractured and contingent process where identity negotiations and survival were themselves forms of world-making.