One of the most active areas of research in recent years concerns the urban history of Shanghai in the Republican period. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars have gone beyond an overview of Shanghai's rise as China's leading metropolis in the hundred years after the Opium War (1839–42), and produced richly contextualized analyses on the various aspects of the city's history and society.

The foundation of this association has now been laid. People call us Blue Shirts or terrorists. That is nothing. The important problem to be solved is how to create a new revolutionary atmosphere so as to lead the revolutionary masses⃜ In China today definite action must be taken for temporary relief as well as for fundamental cure. However, what we need now is a fundamental cure. Our present problem is not the Japanese. Our problem is not the invasion of our north-eastern provinces and Jehol. If we can maintain the status quo, it will be enough for the present time. As a revolutionary government, the loss of a little territory does not mean much. A revolutionary movement has both to advance and retreat. When our strength is not enough, it is natural to retreat. We have lost territory today, but we will take it back the next day when we have strength

The topic of government and administration in the Republican period (1911–9) has attracted periodic bursts of scholarly attention in the first three decades of the post–1950 period. Some of these works focused on the weakness of political institutions in the early Republic,1 several were sympathetic to the state–building efforts of the Kuomintang (KMT),2 and the remainder were overtly or covertly negative in their assessment of Republican, particularly KMT, government.3 Whether sympathetic to Republican–era government or not, this scholarship was largely informed by a constellation of three factors: the deep Cold War era divisions between left and right in the United States as to how the spread of Communism in Asia should be accounted for and dealt with, the lack of research access in China itself, and, perhaps most important, what might be called the prismatic event of 1949, when the Republican government was militarily defeated in the civil war, driven into exile on a small island, and replaced with a self–consciously revolutionary government which vigorously attempted to recreate and transform state and society. It is little wonder that this abrupt terminus of the Republican period slanted many of the questions implicitly posed in post–1949 scholarship towards explaining the Republics demise on mainland China. At best, the efforts and strategies of the Kuomintang were considered to have long–term promise until seriously undercut by the Japanese invasion in July 1937; at worst, the entire Republican period was relegated to the status of a transitional period that gave way before the inevitable primacy of bottom–up revolution.