Editorial

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Editorial James H. Carter This issue of Twentieth-Century China represents the first tangible demonstration of our increased frequency. Having published in January 2012, this issue is the second of three this calendar year, and our next issue will appear early in the fall. I believe that the continually increasing stream of quality submissions justifies this increase, and will enable us to continue bringing quality scholarship to our readers. The increased frequency will also permit us to bring accepted articles to print more quickly, an important consideration for, particularly, junior scholars who are facing tenure and promotion decisions. This issue of Twentieth-Century China takes at its heart questions of how Chinese were conceptualizing and legitimating China and their state, beginning in the late Qing but focusing on the early Republic, and in various arenas, from grammar and sovereignty-protection to banking and theater. The result is a wide-ranging and insightful cluster of articles that advance our understanding of how people were thinking about the Chinese national project from the 1890s to the 1930s. Bai Limin's article, "Creating 'Real Learning' For China's Survival," focuses on Liang Qichao and his dialogue with the Ma Brothers concerning the creation of a Chinese grammar. The act of translation is in some ways the most fundamental example of the sort Chinese-Western synthesis that Liang and the Mas aspired to. Bai's analysis and these men's reflections on this project, especially in the aftermath of 1898, give new insights into attitudes toward East and West—and what it meant to be Chinese—at the turn of the twentieth century. Chen Songchuan also looks at Sino-Western interaction, albeit in a much different form. "Shame On You!: Competing Narratives of the Nation in the Laoxikai Incident and the Tianjin Anti-French Campaign, 1916–1917" takes as its subject a little-analyzed incident in Tianjin that illustrated the tensions surrounding European imperialism in Republican China. Its situation during the Great War, prior to the May Fourth Incident, gives the Laoxikai incident great significance, tying events in China into world history at the apex of imperialism, and also showing the antecedents to the May Fourth nationalism that was already forming. Georgia A. Mickey's careful study of the founding of the Bank of China in 1912 also examines the relative rights and powers of the state. The Bank was an essential part, Mickey argues, of the Chinese Republic's campaign for legitimacy and played a crucial role in the transition from Empire to Republic. When compared with Chen's preceding article, "'Safeguarding National Credibility': Founding the Bank of China in 1912" makes clear that the formation of the new state was accompanied by both successes and failures. Mickey gives a clear picture of one of the institutions that is sometimes loss in the narrative of failure and chaos that surrounds the early Republic. [End Page 99] Finally, Kate Merkel-Hess examines a more grassroots approach to state building through the rural reconstruction. Through detailed analysis of the rural theater movement, focusing on one county, "Acting Out Reform: Theater And Village In The Republican Rural Reconstruction Movement" demonstrates that for many nationalists the heart of China's salvation lay in its rural communities. Taken as a whole, this issue returns to Twentieth-Century China's roots with a strong grounding in empirical studies of the Republican era. I believe that anyone interested in how the Chinese state defined itself in the early twentieth century will find these pages very provocative and insightful reading. [End Page 100] Copyright © 2012 Twentieth-Century China