This article examines the early history and evolution of the concept of jiaohua (教化 “educational transformation”) as a reference to civilizing missions in China. It explores Ru (Confucian) concepts advocating the widespread education of the masses, showing how such concepts were linked to notions of ethnicity and moral attainment. Then it contextualizes the first uses of educational transformation in writings concerning statecraft. Xunzi emerges as a pivotal figure who helped adapt the statecraft rhetoric on educational transformation to the largely Ru goal of spreading a morally superior Huaxia culture among the masses and to peoples of other cultures. I then move beyond this conceptual history to examine a few civilizing missions in the Han era. My purpose is to link large-scale, civilizing missions in Chinese history with the early philosophical rhetoric and show how history was shaped by these underlying conceptual orientations.

This article makes visible the complex social position of a previously overlooked class of Southern Song artists: freelance painters, who worked for the imperial court on a temporary, as-needed basis, but who have been mischaracterized as permanent, official “court painters” by post-Song historiographers. Through an analysis of the careers of freelance painters such as Chen Qingbo and Li Dong, I posit a hybrid class of adjunct-artists, who made their livings by operating fan shops in the capital's streets but at times also contracted with the court. How did the emperor exploit contingent artists while simultaneously allowing market agents (guilds and brokers) to protect their benefits? How did the freelance painters increase their profits by developing entrepreneurial relations with the court and by competing with other freelancers in a fierce market? By exploring how the Southern Song court mobilized non-court painters through consensual contracts, this article differentiates freelancers from court painters, thereby dismantling long-held myths about the Southern Song painting academy.

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.

Labor heroes are an important phenomenon in the history of socialist China, but they have received only little attention in Western scholarship. This article investigates the labor heroes of the Yan'an period as the pivot in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) attempt at reconceptualizing society, establishing new social relations and creating a socialist subjectivity. It reveals the new symbolic order constructed in the official media, primarily Jiefang Ribao (Liberation Daily), and highlights the relation between labor heroes (as representatives of the “masses”), intellectuals, and Mao Zedong in the construction of new hierarchies. In particular, it shows how the CCP chose work as the fundament of socialist society and the core of a new concept of “collective heroism”; how the stage of the first labor hero assembly was used to orchestrate Mao Zedong as a charismatic leader; and how labor heroes and writers, through direct encounter, redefined their respective place in society.

The Shanghai News was the People's Republic of China's (PRC's) first English-language newspaper. The News played an important, but forgotten, role in the development of the PRC's “external propaganda” apparatus, used to fight the ideological Cold War. The News was unusual in that it adopted a commercial business model and juxtaposed vehement anti-imperialist propaganda with advertising for multinational companies from “imperialist-capitalist countries.” This article argues that the News was a product of “New Democracy,” the central political paradigm of the PRC between 1949 and 1953. New Democracy, a policy of cross-class cooperation in the name of national reconstruction, is often dismissed as cynical tactic deployed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to diminish resistance during the takeover of China. The author argues for taking the real world impacts of New Democracy on life and work in early 1950s Shanghai seriously and cautions against teleological narratives.