MCLC: China Heritage Quarterly, no. 30/31

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Geremie Barme <geremie.barme at anu.edu.au>
Subject: China Heritage Quarterly, no. 30/21
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‘China Heritage Quarterly’
Combined Issue 30/31 (June/September 2012) launched
http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org
10 October 2012

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

This combined June/September 2012 issue of China Heritage Quarterly
introduces readers of the early twenty-first century to an important, but
now little known, journal of the early twentieth century. Appearing at a
time of patriotic concern and social change, intellectual cosmopolitanism
and local contestation, the weekly English-language journal The China
Critic 中國評論週報 published its first issue in Shanghai in May 1928. Its
editors and writers confronted the issues of day with urgency and fluency.

The era of The Critic was also one of mounting international conflict and
patriotic fervour. It is timely to reconsider The Critic and also to make
available some of the insightful and controversial writing that appeared
in its pages over a fourteen-year period.

In our 're-publishing' of The China Critic I have been joined by William
Sima and Christopher Rea. A range of other scholars—Shuang Shen, Qian
Suoqiao, Michael Hill, Frank Dikötter, Leon Rocha, Fan Liya—have also
kindly offered work on various aspects of the era in which The China
Critic was published. In New Scholarship, Shuge Wei also introduces her
recently completed doctoral thesis on Republican era English-language
propaganda. This body of recent scholarship provides new insights into the
extraordinary period known as 'the Nanjing Decade'. It is fortuitous since
the December 2012 issue of China Heritage Quarterly takes as its focus the
city and world of Nanjing/Nanking (an issue devoted to 'Fakes, Phonies,
Forgeries and Follies' previously scheduled for September 2012 will appear
instead in 2013).

In T'ien Hsia we reproduce an essay by Lin Yutang, the irrepressible
'Little Critic', on censorship. It is a piece that, like so much of the
material presented in these virtual pages from The China Critic era, reads
as though it is addressing the realities of today's China, and not merely
those of eighty years hence. Jeffrey Wasserstrom remarks on the American
literary ingénue, Emily Hahn, who has previously featured in our work on
Shanghai and T'ien Hsia, and we conclude Pierre Ryckmans' 1996 Boyer
Lectures with his meditation on 'going abroad and staying home'.

In Articles Tina Kanagaratnam introduces the M Literary Festivals of
Shanghai and Beijing which, in recent years, have become a feature of the
neo-cosmopolitan cultural life of those two cities, and we reprint a
chapter from Randall Gould's 1946 book, China In the Sun. New Scholarship
continues our discussion of the Qing reformer/Republican thinker Kang
Youwei. Also in this section David Brophy, an historian with the
Australian Centre on China in the World, offers an update on Frontier
(Inner Asian) Studies. Our colleague Duncan Campbell and his team of young
scholars conclude this issue with a selection of letters from the great
late-Ming writer of belle-lettres, Yuan Hongdao.

The Dragon Year of 2012-2013 marks a major moment of national political
transition in China. Like so many dragon years in the past, this year has
been witness both to high drama and to political farce. It has also been a
period when, as in The China Critic years, Sino-Japanese tensions have
featured prominently. As work on this combined issue of China Heritage
Quarterly was drawing to an end, the Australian Centre on China in the
World, under whose aegis this e-journal appears, launched The China Story
Project, along with a yearbook (see: www.thechinastory.org). The Project
attempts to provide varying accounts of The China Story. It is a story
that has been told, debated, retold and contended since the end of the
Qing dynasty over a century ago. Reconsidering The China Critic some
eighty-five years since its debut is also timely as China confronts many
of the issues that relate to that country's 'unfinished twentieth century'.

Geremie R Barmé
Editor, ‘China Heritage Quarterly’