Reviewed by: Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 by Carol Benedict Jia-Chen Fu Benedict, Carol. Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. xiii, 334 pp. $49.95 (cloth). The machine-rolled cigarette, which was first introduced into China in the 1890s, has become emblematic of broader transformations in modern China. As one of the first massmarketed products of the industrial age, it is often included among other items of distinctively modern provenance (e.g., toothpaste and kerosene), and has often been regarded as a key ingredient in the emergence of a modern mass consumer culture in China. But as Carol Benedict argues in her engaging new book, Golden-Silk Smoke, the extent to which the cigarette marks a clear departure from older patterns of consumption and production becomes tenuous when reconsidered in light of China's long engagement with all kinds of tobacco products. She challenges the narrative of modern rupture and transformation and offers her research as a link between the early modern consumption studies of Craig Clunas (Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, 1991) and Timothy Brook (The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, 1998) and the new urban histories by Madeleine Dong (Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, 2003) and Di Wang (The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900-1950, 2008). By lengthening her temporal framework to examine the historical factors shaping the history of Chinese tobacco production and consumption from the sixteenth century until the present, Benedict seeks to complicate analyses that posit a sharp divide between late imperial and modern Chinese consumer cultures and to demonstrate both continuity and change in the history of tobacco in China. She argues that the history of Chinese tobacco consumption was never a simple example of a Western practice spreading out from a single European source and transforming "traditional" Chinese culture. Nor was it demonstrative of a modern consumerism that arose in treaty-port Shanghai and demarcated a modern way of life and commerce apart from the rest of imperial China.1 Exclusive scholarly focus upon cigarettes has elided the extent to which the cigarette's extraordinary success during the twentieth century was predicated upon and shaped by enduring institutions and social practices relating to China's long engagement with tobacco of all forms. Throughout the sixteenth century, tobacco, a New World crop, traveled across the world's oceans on European ships and entered China first through the maritime zones along the southern coast and the northeastern Liaodong Peninsula. But the sea lanes that had long connected East Asia to the Indian Ocean and the newer ones crossing the Pacific were not the only routes into China. The northeastern frontier, particularly during the early seventeenth century, was also especially porous. Tobacco entered China via that route as well, and by the middle of the century, it was well established as a commercial crop in coastal and inland provinces. Its quick incorporation into the local economy was matched by extensive social diffusion among all classes in society. Initially, tobacco and the corresponding practice of smoking spread in a "trickle in, trickle up" fashion, from social and spatial peripheries to the center (p. 64), from the pouches of sailors and frontiersmen to the rarified spaces of merchants, scholars and poets, and courtesans. The considerable social mobility characteristic of late Ming and early Qing society—in part, a consequence of the highly commercialized economy—facilitated the movement of tobacco up the social hierarchy and the development of distinct smoking cultures around differentiated tobacco products (e.g., snuff versus water pipe tobacco versus smoke-cut tobacco). This social and spatial diffusion indicates an important way in which the history of tobacco in China was one of continuity, or perhaps continuous reinvention. Though the scale and magnitude changed with the introduction of high-volume mechanization and standardization technology as evidenced by the machine-rolled cigarette, the success of the cigarette had already been paved by other tobacco products in earlier times. To read the history of tobacco in China as an amplification...

When the Guomindang retreated to Taiwan in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and party leaders feared an imminent Communist invasion. Lacking soldiers in the reserve army, Chiang turned to high school and college students to recruit and train for the armed forces. In 1953, the Ministry of National Defense Political Department implemented mandatory military training in all senior high schools on the island and soon began educating and dispatching military instructors (jiaoguan), both male and female, to gender-segregated schools. Boys received basic infantry training (such as target shooting) while studying GMD revolutionary and military history. Meanwhile, girls participated in similar exercises but also acquired nursing skills. As a result, compulsory military training became a powerful force in Taiwanese high schools throughout the 1950s, preventing student protests against the government and successfully mobilizing male and female youth under an increasingly militarized GMD state.

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

Liang Qichao used the Taoist term zhenzhi to express his admiration for the Ma brothers who he felt personified his ideal of seamlessly blending together Chinese and Western knowledge. This article considers Liang's interaction with the Ma brothers as the vantage point from which to trace the formation and development of his concept of "real learning" and to show the Ma brothers' influence on his understanding of the West and Western learning prior to the 1898 Reform. It further analyzes Liang's thought by examining the rationale and logic behind his great appreciation for The Ma Grammar and his dialogue with Ma Jianzhong on how to train qualified translators. The final section employs the reflections of Liang Qichao and Ma Xiangbo in the aftermath of the 1898 Reform to examine the differences as well as their shared views on the synthesis of Chinese and Western learning, and the relationship between language and scholarship.

This article discusses the problems of Chinese local and national identity in relation to Anhui province in the twentieth century. It begins with Anhui's contradictory image as both the location of some of the country's most esteemed cultural sites and a place currently perceived as backward and impoverished. After explaining the social uses of local affiliation in the Republican era, it then focuses on the attempts of aspiring young writers from Anhui to join the national literary scene in Beijing during the early 1920s, and analyzes their subsequent reception. It looks at the personal and professional choices that these writers made and, following a selective survey of developments in Anhui since the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), concludes with a consideration of the evolving self-image and changing realities in the province today.

This article examines how the first Chinese-run travel agency, China Travel Service ('Zhongguo luxing she ) and its travel magazine (luxing zazhi) marketed the new idea of pleasure travel, the new roles of service industry and client, and the new location of a modern tourist site during the Republican era. Two populations were targeted: middle-class mainland Chinese and Asian overseas Chinese. The article first explores how the China Travel Service created a service industry and a network of services, and then uses magazine travelogues to examine the marketing process and site development in two sites with different characteristics: (i) Huangshan, a traditional site visited by mainland Chinese, and (z) South and Southeast Asia, places few mainland Chinese visited.

Editorial James Carter The themes present in this issue may be familiar, but each of the four articles makes an original contribution to its subject and will, I think, challenge readers to reconsider ideas about gender equity, the growth of the middle class, leadership techniques, and regional identity. Lisa Tran's "The ABCs of Monogamy in Republican China" takes as its focus a single phrase: yifu yiqi zhi. Often translated simply (and Tran would argue, simplistically) as "monogamy," this phrase in its various translations provides a powerful entrée into law, popular culture, and social analysis. Few issues cut to the heart of a social order more than marriage and other forms of partnership. Tran's detailed and thorough analysis of the way successive Chinese regimes managed this interplay between tradition and modernity finds echoes across a range of other institutions. Accompanying the changes Tran documents was the transformation—or at least the development—of China's middle class. Miriam Gross's article, "Flights of Fancy from a Sedan Chair," complements Tran's work well, taking a similarly archival approach to the development of the tourism industry in the Nanjing decade. The nascent leisure travel industry shows early twentieth-century China in a light not often seen: separated from the political, social, and economic calamities that characterize textbook descriptions of the era. The article also provides fascinating insights into the creation of tourist destinations, a process that has only accelerated as time has passed. The same class of people at the center of Gross's work are also a focus of Grace Huang's reconsideration of Chiang Kai-shek's political leadership. Like Tran's article on marriage custom and law, Huang takes as her point of departure a single phrase, in this case a single character: (chi). Translated variously as "shame" or "humiliation" among other possibilities, this Confucian concept underpins much of Chiang's rhetoric about the Chinese nation and the crises it endured under his leadership. Huang's careful reading of Chiang's official diaries shows the political power of this concept and the way that Chiang strategized to make defeat an asset in his political struggles with both the Japanese and the communists. These first three articles all take as their subject what might be considered the traditional core of Twentieth-Century China: social and political history of the Nanjing decade, and the years preceding and following it. The fourth article in this issue, Mark Gamsa's "Writers from Anhui and Provinciality in Modern China" extends those boundaries considerably, right to the present day (although the article's roots are firmly in the May Fourth era). Gamsa takes on questions of identity, stereotype, regionalism, and modernity (among others) as he seeks the meaning of being from Anhui throughout the twentieth century. Labeled a backwater, Anhui can claim, in one form or another, many of China's most [End Page 97] progressive and influential figures, yet neither side seems to suffer (or benefit) from the association. Local histories are always dogged, it seems, by questions of relevance: what can the particular say about the general? In this case, Gamsa's analysis of the changing identity of Anhui speaks volumes about China, its changes from the 1920s to today, and particularly the interaction between the cosmopolitan coast and its less-privileged inland relations. Issue 36:2 should be appearing in your mailboxes just a few months after issue 36:1, after a gap of nearly a year separating 35:2 from 36:1! My apologies for the uneven production schedule, which accompanied the transition to our new publisher and the transition from an academic-year to a calendar-year production schedule. From here on, issue one of each volume should be mailed the first week of January, with each subsequent issue (remember, frequency is increasing to three issues per year in 2012) appearing at regular intervals. [End Page 98] Copyright © 2011 Twentieth-Century China