This article presents a data-driven approach to the study of the social and political statuses of urban communities in modern Kunming. Such information is lacking in government maps and documents. Using data from a wide variety of sources, many unconventional, I subject them to critical evaluation and computational analysis to extract information that can be used to produce a land use map of sufficient detail and accuracy to allow scholars to address and even answer questions of a socio-political, economic and, indeed, humanistic nature. My method can also be applied to other Chinese cities and to cities elsewhere that lack accurate information.

The first known record of the Manchu origin myth is found in Qing documents dating from 1636. These documents provide an official account of the origin of the Aisin Gioro lineage, including the story of the ancestor Bukūri Yongšon, who is depicted as the Manchu primogenitor, from his birth to his ascension to the throne. This article argues that the Manchu origin myth reflected the dynamics of Manchu identity, which shifted from constructing a Manchu group to securing Manchu rule during the period from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. By tracing the development of this myth from its earliest version in the seventeenth century to four different versions that appeared by the mid-eighteenth century, written in both Manchu and Chinese, this article endeavors to shed new light on how the Manchus saw themselves, their ancestor, and their empire.

This article has two main objectives. First, we aim to revisit debates about the structure of Song Dynasty faction lists and the relationship between eleventh- and twelfth century factional politics on the basis of a large-scale network analysis of co-occurrence ties reported in the prose collections of those contemporary to the events. Second, we aim to innovate methodologically by developing a series of approaches to compare historical networks of different sizes with regard to overall network metrics as well as the significance of particular attributes such as native and workplace in their makeup. The probabilistic and sampling methods developed here should be applicable for various kinds of historical network analysis. The corresponding data can be found here: https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xtf-z3au.

After being recalled to Beijing in 1510 for evaluation and reassignment in the wake of his two-year exile to Guizhou and his period of service as a magistrate, Wang Yangming was assigned to a succession of posts at the capital that kept him there through 1512. During that short time, he remained disillusioned with the Ming court and high politics and chose to put his energies into fostering a philosophical movement. He believed that by restoring the “way of master-disciple relations and friendship,” he could help propagate the learning of the sages. To that end, he held jiangxue gatherings with colleagues and friends and carried on an active correspondence. In those venues, Wang Yangming engaged others with his ideas about the goal of sagehood, the obstacles to attaining it, and the methods for overcoming those obstacles. The following article reconstructs this critical period in Wang Yangming's philosophical development and the intellectual movement he sought to foster, as well as the status of his philosophy as of this point in time.

During the Tang period (618–907), war and the preparations for war significantly influenced the shape of the Chinese empire and the lives of its people. That influence can be found on at least four levels. The first of these is the state’s demand for military service, which imposed a variety of burdens upon a significant percentage of the population. The second is the state’s demand for cash, fabric, grain and other financial and material resources to meet the needs of the military establishment, a demand that affected the whole of the taxpaying population. Third is the loss and destruction caused directly by warfare, especially massive internal conflicts such as the rebellions of An Lushan and Huang Chao. Fourth, and most far-reaching and diffuse, is the range of cultural reactions to military affairs, from the emphatic embrace of martial attitudes and behaviors to their emphatic rejection.

Tales of filial piety became a standard element of the annals-biography style of historiography early on. Starting from the Song shu 宋書, almost every dynastic history contains a chapter that is devoted to filial men. An early—but often neglected—precursor is Chapter 39 of Fan Ye's 范曄 (398–446) Hou Han shu 後漢書. Inspired by his predecessor Hua Qiao 華嶠 (?–293), Fan inserted a chapter on filial men. The chapter was therefore compiled in times when the recommendation system of the Han and especially the recommendation as “filial and incorruptible” (xiaolian 孝廉) had lost influence. This paper tries to shed some light on its origins, form, and content, and attempts to distinguish the most common motives that were used to describe filial (xiao 孝) behavior in this early stage of its historiographical representation.

What would Chinese history look like with things taking the center stage? Our present understanding of this history is animated primarily by literate people in pursuit of examination degrees and sons, and often filtered through such modern social science categories as culture, ethnicity, and gender. In this introduction, I put the set of five articles in the special issue in conversation with recent research to identify new analytic categories and research strategies that accord agency to things, remap the parameters of Chinese history, and ponder the new directions afforded by the study of material cultures.

People routinely refer to the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong as two subjects that are “sensitive” to write and even talk about in today's People's Republic of China (PRC). This is true, but not all “sensitive” events and individuals are created equal—or handled the same way by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). When it comes to the June 4th Massacre, another “sensitive” event, and Liu Xiaobo, another “sensitive” figure, all public and even some relatively private forms of discussion are blocked. The goal is to make them both forgotten, as Louisa Lim argues in her important, aptly titled 2014 Oxford book, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. The CCP's aim with the Cultural Revolution and Mao, by contrast, is not to blot out but control memory, not stop but steer the direction and constrain the scope of research, discussion, and commemoration. Last year, when the fiftieth anniversary of the first Red Guard rallies passed, there was, tellingly, muted discussion in all parts of the PRC other than Hong Kong but, equally tellingly, not a complete June 4th anniversary style blackout. Mainland bookstores stock novels dealing with the Cultural Revolution but not June 4th, and texts by and biographies of Mao but not Liu. And so on.

This article explores the understudied issue of urban problems in pre-modern China and examines the responses to the negative impact of urban development on life in the populous city of Kaifeng in the Northern Song (960–1127). Although writers, painters, and historians have portrayed the capital city's splendor for centuries, various urban problems emerged as medieval China became a more urbanized society. This article investigates Ouyang Xiu's (1007–1072) accounts of how extreme weather conditions adversely affected the lives of Kaifeng residents. These experiences, which he discussed in letters and poems, are associated with longer trends that result in climatic anomalies and disasters in the city. Ouyang Xiu also complained about living costs and medical services in Kaifeng. These reflect the difficulties in maintaining good urban provisions and services in a city of this scale.

The study of ethnicity has long been shaped by a conflict between two broad positions, one of which may be called the circumstantialist or instrumentalist position, and the other the primordialist or affectivist position. The primordialists view ethnic sentiments as something existing prior to and not dependent on goal-oriented behavior and hence not subject to calculation. The circumstantialists, however, view ethnicity as a product of particular circumstances in which contingent groups, usually at the behest of elites within those groups, broaden and reconceptualize their particular group interests as being derived from a common primordial substance, thus generating ethnicity. These circumstantialist or instrumentalist arguments as a rule assume that the particular circumstances where such group redefinitions and extensions prove useful are either unique to, or at least much more common in, the modern age. Thus the circumstantialist approach usually implies a modernist one.

Instead of assuming “warlords” as a homogeneous counter-force to the May Fourth enlightenment while imagining Chinese intellectuals as a natural alliance for the “anti-warlordism” National Revolution, this article examines the prevailing idea exchange and political collaboration between Chen Jiongming, the Cantonese military strongman, and the May Fourth intellectual within and beyond regional borders. Between 1919 and 1922, Chen Jiongming not only fostered his anarcho-federalist blueprint, but also garnered support from prominent thinkers hailing from across different ideological camps such as Liang Bingxian, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi. Focusing on the ideological and intellectual aspects of warlord rule, this article attempts to situate the study of warlordism against the backdrop of the Chinese enlightenment, to downplay the differences between the man of guns and the man of letters, and thereby to redefine, re-characterize, and reappraise “warlords” as active agents—the initiators—of China's renewals during this formative period.

During the centuries after the fall of the Han dynasty, dozens of states rose and fell in geographic China, which was not only politically divided but also home to multiple separately named population groups, some of which were speakers of languages unrelated to Chinese. Yet, a single written language was used throughout the region, broadly common institutions were everywhere in place, and there was a widely shared collective historical memory. This memory included an assumed single line of legitimate sovereigns stretching back to the Sage Kings of legendary antiquity. Differently named population groups could adopt that written language, institutions, and historical memory, and their rulers could potentially even join that line of legitimate sovereigns. It was therefore relatively easy for the Sui and Tang dynasties, having militarily unified the geographic space of the old Han empire, to successfully depict themselves as heirs to a unitary China rooted in ancient memory.

This article investigates the formation of the Shatan scholarly group and the contribution of its leader, Zheng Zhen. Zheng benefitted from a vigorous trans-regional cultural network of returned local scholars such as Li Xun and Mo Yuchou and prominent scholar-officials from outside such as Cheng Enze and He Changling. Zheng Zhen remained true to the approaches and research topics of evidential research, i.e., historical philology and exegesis of pre-Qin classics, bibliography, and an inquiry into ancient institutions and technology, in an era when the general intellectual trend turned toward statecraft studies and the politicized Modern Text School, promoted by scholars like Gong Zizhen and Kang Youwei. The contribution of the Shatan group, Zheng Zhen in particular, embodies the rise of evidential research, a passion for facts, as well as concerns about society. More importantly, it prompts us to rethink Guizhou as an active agent in the late Qing Chinese cultural landscape.

The Ming Empire entertained relations with countries all across Asia and beyond. To deal with these many different polities, Ming China relied on a range of foreign policy instruments, among them the granting of special trading rights, the dissemination of cultural objects, and the use of military threats. This article puts the spotlight on the diversity of these foreign policy means. Building on the literature, it takes as its purview all relations that the Ming Empire entertained with foreign polities, exploring the many means that the Ming employed to further their interests. It does so by classifying the instruments into four categories—economic, diplomatic, cultural, and military—showing that the Ming made full use of instruments belonging to each of them.

The history of French Sinology—that is, of scholarly research on things Chinese by French-speaking authors working from Chinese sources—goes back to the seventeenth century and can be divided into several periods determined in large part by sociopolitical factors, and marked by different approaches and emphases: I propose to describe them as the missionary age (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries); the first academic efflorescence (nineteenth century); the advent of field research and the impact of colonialism and the social sciences (first half of twentieth century); and the postwar era of specialization and internationalization (second half of twentieth century), which marked the end of a certain French domination of Chinese studies in the West.1

This article discusses how the legendary general Yue Fei (1103–1142) and his legacy have been perceived and appropriated in Chinese history. Twentieth-century historians approached Yue's career by highlighting the tension between his dedication to the nation (baoguo) and his personal loyalty (jinzhong) to Emperor Gaozong (1107–1187) of the Song. I argue that for Yue Fei himself and those who wrote about him in late imperial China, Yue's guo, from which he derived his political identity and toward which he devoted his service, meant first and foremost the Song dynastic state. The pushing and pulling of multivalent themes of loyalty and state service in the “historic assessment” of Yue Fei since the turn of the twentieth century speak to the complexities embedded in different Chinese governments’ navigation of ethnic and class politics in their pursuit of a new national identity for China.

Here we have a pair of brothers whose relationship is known to us primarily through the hundreds of poems they exchanged with each other through their lives, during which they spent more time apart than together. To have a relationship rooted in literary work this way was not unusual in Chinese life. What was unusual was the fame these particular brothers attained, even while still alive. This article explores the nature of the brothers’ relationship as best we can discern it through their actions and what they wrote to each other, including their mutual affection, disagreements, and competition. Their lives were played out against a backdrop of high office, empire-wide renown, and political persecution. We see that their relationship to each other was in some ways the most enduring and sustaining aspect of their lives, even when their ultimate ideal of spending their final days together went unrealized.

Based on recently reopened files and publications in Nanjing, as well as published and newsreel accounts from the 1940s, this paper represents the first scholarly analysis of the rituals surrounding the death and burial of Wang Jingwei in Japanese-occupied China. Rather than locating this analysis purely in the literature on the history of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), however, this paper asks what Wang Jingwei's Re-organized National Government might tell us about personality cults in the political culture of modern China. While Wang's burial drew heavily on the precedent of Sun Yat-sen's funerals of the 1920s, it also presaged later spectacles of public mourning and posthumous commemoration, such as Chiang Kai-shek's funeral in 1975 in Taipei. In focusing on this one specific event in the life of a “puppet government,” this paper hopes to reignite scholarly interest in the study of “dead leaders” and their posthumous lives in modern Chinese history more generally.