In England in the late 1920s, authors like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden began to write about their experiences at the front of the Great War. They did not settle simply for a pacifist condemnation, but said goodbye to an old world of faith in progress and optimism about the future. A general questioning of the nature of the individual, the possibility of the good and the value of civilization followed in literature and elsewhere. A new sensibility especially of the individual but also of modernity and the nation was then formulated.1 Part of the new understanding was that an army could only serve to overcome the forces of militaristic and perverted societies. Military conflict was at best a temporarily inevitable aberration.

The opening of China to economic reforms from 1978 and subsequent political and social developments both in mainland China and in Taiwan have facilitated substantial reassessment of China's Republican era. The Republican years are seen by researchers increasingly as part of a continuous transition during which China modified its traditional society and adapted to new roles in world affairs - sometimes with considerable success. This special issue brings together recent studies of China's Republican era, the legacy of which can still be observed in current Chinese affairs

The basic structure of the Republican economy at its pre-1949 peak is not much in dispute.1 With a population probably in excess of 500 million, the economy was predominantly agrarian: nearly two-thirds of its GNP originated in agriculture, and probably three-quarters of its labour force derived most if not all of their living from farming. There was a small modern sector, comprising parts of manufacturing, transportation, finance and so on, that represented no more than a tenth of GNP and was largely concentrated in the treaty ports. A similar percentage of the population lived in urban areas. It was a relatively commercialized economy, with as much as 40–45 per cent of farm produce making its way primarily into domestic markets. And by most measures, it was also moderately “open.” Imports and exports combined totalled about one-eighth of GNP. It was, however, a very poor economy. Per capita GNP in the mid-1930s was only 60 yuan, which converting into current U.S. dollars is only $200–250. Purchasing power parity calculations suggest an estimate probably double or even triple this, but by today's standards, this would still rank China amongst the poorer “low-income” countries.2

Nothing mattered more. Chinese history during the era of the first Republic was defined and shaped - and must ultimately be interpreted - according to the nature of its foreign relations. While few would dispute the contributions of what Paul Cohen has called a “more interior approach”1 to modern Chinese historical studies in the past two decades, there is no point searching for some uniquely “China-centred” historical narrative for this period. Everything important had an international dimension. The period is bordered by the inauguration of two“new Chinas, ” the Republic of 1912 and the People's Republic of 1949, both of which were patterned on international designs. The difference between those governments shows the progression of international influences. Few Chinese were affected in a direct way by the parliamentary experiment of the early Republic. No Chinese would be unaffected by the lethal blend of Leninism and Stalinism that Mao Zedong called Chinese Communism.

The 1911 Revolution profoundly disrupted the mixture of bureaucratic power, cultural and religious symbolism, and force upon which the authority of the Qing imperial state had rested. Tacit agreements, shared assumptions and mutual interests defining balances between state and society could no longer determine political relationships. Thus the republican revolution opened the way for a long series of redefinitions, and changed the political contexts in which actions would take place. As knowledge of the early years of the Republic grows, so does appreciation of how actions were contingent upon unpredictable new circumstances.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, historians′ approach to Republican China was informed by a predominant concern for Revolution. Scholarly priorities were focused on the early history of the Chinese Communist Party and on the socio-economic analysis of the countryside where the Chinese revolution had achieved its first success. Few publications were devoted to urban China. The Maoist regime until its end was seen to maintain a strong anti-urban stance. Great ex-treaty port cities were condemned for their past co-operation with foreign imperialism. In the West, the Republican era was often perceived as a confused interregnum between the Qing dynasty and the Communist Empire. And more than a few historians shared the views of their Chinese colleagues and featured big cities of the 1920s and 1930s as outposts of foreign economic exploitation and political oppression, as citadels of cultural arrogance.

A number of recent publications have given detailed accounts of the gulag system in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), filling an important gap in the available literature. Comprehensive descriptions of the huge prison and labour camp network, which has administered the lives of 20 to 30 million convicts since 1949, are generally based either on the analysis of official documents, in particular notices and regulations,1 or on information gathered from former prisoners.2 The brutal treatment of political prisoners in the regimes penal institutions, the gradual destruc– tion of human beings in labour camps, and the widespread use of torture and physical violence in thought reform are some of the most disturbing aspects of a gulag system that have been vividly evoked in many autobiographies.3 Beyond these general descriptions, however, virtually f nothing is known about the number of camps, the scope of labour reform or even the daily lives of common prisoners. The major difficulty encountered in research on the gulag system is the lack of more substantial empirical evidence, as internal documents formulated by prison administrations, public security bureaus or other security departments are f difficult to find. Indeed, anyone found guilty of leaking special classified documents will be convicted of a counter–revolutionary crime.