Although the earliest political text from early China, namely the Canon of Documents, comprises speeches attributed to ancient kings, for most of the Eastern Zhou period (770–255 BCE) monarchs remained conspicuously silent. This article surveys the instances of the rulers’ speeches in major historical collections and a sample of philosophical texts from the Warring States period. I demonstrate that the rulers’ voice in these texts is overwhelmingly confined to short questions, approval of proposed policies, or other insignificant uttering. I argue that this silence was deliberately built into the texts by their composers, so as to preserve the intellectual authority in the hands of the educated elite. It was only with the imperial unification of 221 BCE and the dramatic change in the balance of power between the emperors and the intellectuals that the royal speech regained its prominence and political importance.

In 1853, a Taiping army infiltrated North China, threatening Beijing and the Qing dynasty itself. Though this army never reached Beijing, its northern siege had acute and lasting impacts on communities in the capital region (jifu 畿輔). Attention to the capital region invites reflection on the temporality and strategic nature of commemoration. Focusing on Cangzhou 滄州, I examine how capital region communities memorialized the northern chapter of the Taiping Civil War, even as for the rest of the empire, the war remained unfinished until 1864. In gazetteers, private histories, and commemorative records, local authors reframed ambiguous realities to write their localities into a story of northern victory, regardless of the fate of the south. The timeline for commemoration in Cangzhou was interrupted, not seamless, and took place over decades. Initially addressed to Beijing and elites along the Grand Canal, Cangzhou's commemorative project was later brought into the orbit of ascendant Tianjin.

In Republican China, the Factory Act was first promulgated in 1929, after almost thirty years of unregulated industrialization. Little academic effort has been made to comprehend its actual implementation. Some academics have dismissed it as completely useless, while others have credited it with various enhancements in working conditions. This article focuses on workplace health and safety issues and critically evaluates the implementation of the law to scrutinize its effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) in addressing workers’ life and death matters. This article aims to reassert the Factory Act in China's modern history of industrial development. It points out that despite its inadequate enforcement, the law was significant in laying the foundation for the national institutionalization of state responsibility to systematically monitor and regulate workplace health and safety and paving the way for further safety legislation. Nevertheless, the law fell short of safeguarding workers’ rights during industrial accidents.

The Qing dynasty enforced a policy of separate governance for the people of the Eight Banners, ruling that bannermen were neither to be administered under the regular civilian administrative system, nor listed on the civilian register. Institutionally and legally, the labels “Banner” (qi 旗) and “civilian” (min 民) marked a fundamental divide between different social groups in the Qing. However, in actual practice, the boundary between the two was less rigid. An ambiguous area existed within the seemingly strict legal and administrative regime, providing opportunists with an abundance of loopholes to exploit. Some changed their status from “civilian commoner” to “bannermen” to acquire land, while others moved from “bannermen” status to “civilian commoner” status to pursue promotion in the civil service. Shedding light on the everyday lives of these people, this article delves into the intricate Banner–civilian classification of the Qing dynasty, with a focus on the overlapping area between the parallel systems. It aims to rectify the conventional binary perspective that strictly dichotomizes Banner and civilian status. By doing so, it highlights the multifaceted nature and diversity inherent in Qing ethnic relations and local society.