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Article contents
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2011
Extract
This special issue of Urban History, which brings together a set of six case-studies of Chinese cities, all with a focus on the Republican era (1912–49), has different things to offer discrete sets of scholars. For example, to specialists in urban history who have only a passing interest in Chinese themes, the three works by scholars based in the People's Republic of China (PRC) offer a rare glimpse into the way that cities are studied in what remains (though not for long, if trends in India continue) the world's most populous country. The editors of Urban History are to be commended for making these articles, all of which were originally written in Chinese, available to Anglophone readers. When read beside other recent translations of pieces on cities by PRC-based authors in varied fields, such as the city-focused writings of cultural critic Xu Jilin and the journalist and oral historian Dai Qing that have appeared in the lively online journal China Heritage Quarterly, they give a sense of some of the main contours in contemporary Chinese discussions of and debates about the country's modern urban past.
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References
1 See, for example, Jilin, Xu, ‘Shanghai culture lost’, China Heritage Quarterly, 22 (Jun. 2010) (no paginationGoogle Scholar), translated into English by Geremie R. Barmé, www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=022_lost.inc&issue=022; and Qing, Dai, ‘How peaceful was the liberation of Beiping?’, China Heritage Quarterly, 14 (Jun. 2008) (no pagination)Google Scholar, translated into English by Geremie R. Barmé and John Minford, based on an initial draft by Anne Gunn, www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=014_daiqing.inc&issue=014. My focus throughout these footnotes will remain on material available in English. Relevant works in Chinese can be found, though, in the footnotes to the articles that follow and in the citations and in some cases bibliographies that accompany the English language books and articles I cite.
2 This may help explain why the English-language publication that emerged from the conference, Wakeman, Frederic Jr, and Yeh, Wen-hsin (eds.), Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar, was made up exclusively of chapters based on papers presented by scholars from outside the PRC.
3 Chris Buckley and Michael Martina, ‘China's population grows older and more urban’, Reuters (28 Apr. 2011); www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/28/us-china-census-idUSTRE73R0T420110428.
4 Hessler, Peter, ‘China's instant cities’, National Geographic, 4 (Jun. 2007), 88–117Google Scholar.
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7 For a survey of this literature, which brings in books on China, Africa and Latin America as well as Europe and the United States, see Gilfoyle, Timothy J., ‘Prostitutes in history: from parables of pornography to metaphors of modernity’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 117–41CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
8 Rogaski, Ruth, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty Port China (Berkeley, 2004)Google Scholar; see also her chapter, ‘Hygienic modernity in Tianjin’, in Esherick, Joseph (ed.), Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950 (Honolulu, 1999), 30–46Google Scholar. Esherick's introductory essay for that same volume, ‘Modernity and the nation in the Chinese city’, 1–16, remains the best place to turn for an overview of the nature of China's urban scene and the variation among the country's urban communities in the first half of the last century.
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10 The impact of these wars on Chinese society have been the focus of an ambitious multi-year project based at Oxford University under the direction of historian Rana Mitter, with which one contributor to this volume, Toby Lincoln, has been involved. For a multi-faceted look at the Japanese invasion's impact on one city, see Henriot, Christian and Yeh, Wen-hsin (eds.), In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar.