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.

My interest in Song history emerged well after my initial training in pre-modern Chinese literature. When I first began to read Song historical texts, I knew nothing about historiographical theory, so I blithely used the same techniques for close reading that I had used to decipher Tang-Song poetry. Using these strategies for reading literature—nothing much beyond old school European philology—I was able to document the different chronological layers in the Song History (Songshi 宋史) biography of Qin Gui 秦檜 (1090–1155). When this article appeared in 1998, several colleagues more attuned to theoretical issues than I was told me its approach and findings were very much au courant. It seems, stumbling around in the dark, I had unwittingly taken the linguistic turn.

Forging and using personal networks were and still are common in the Chinese government. Scholars often connect officials’ networking to corruption and factionalism. This article, however, offers a different perspective, through an examination of how Southern Song local officials used personal connections to facilitate their official businesses. I argue that local officials operated networks as an informal means of dealing with governmental affairs outside the normative administrative system. This informal means enabled more efficient political communication that bypassed regular procedures. It also provided local officials with more effective negotiations, especially when defending the interest of their jurisdictions against other agents of the state. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that using connections for governmental affairs, in turn, consolidated and expanded officials’ networks. Altogether, the article depicts a political world in which the interest of “the public” intertwined with that of the “the private,” and the official and non-official means of governing were fused.

Often termed as wenjian zhizhi 聞見之知 (knowing from hearing and seeing), sensory knowing was a prominent topic in Song (960–1279) writings. Zhang Zai 張載 (1020–1077) developed a systematic critique of sense perception in the broad context of learning. While endorsing its utility, Zhang considered this way of knowing to be partial, superficial, and prone to error. He located the source of sensory errors inside the human body, arguing that the sense organs’ vulnerability to pathological changes constituted the cause for perceptual fallibility. This line of argument had solid corroborating evidence in contemporaneous medical knowledge, a field of study Zhang was interested in pursuing. In sum, Zhang's critique demonstrated the importance of the senses and the different ways in which middle-period Chinese literati conceptualized the problem of perception in comparison with Western epistemological traditions.

This article examines China’s efforts to restore cable telegraph rights from the establishment of the Republic of China to the end of World War II. Challenging the conventional dichotomy of “Chinese” and “Western” actors in rights recovery issues, this article explores the intricate power relations between foreign cable companies, international interests groups and various political factions in China. It analyses China’s reclaim of cable sovereignty in three phases, each characterised by a particular controversy—the intra-clique struggle of the Communications Clique during the early Republic and the warlord era; the rivalry between the Nationalist Party, military and the state during the Nanjing decade; and the direct Sino-Japanese conflict during wartime. The article presents the argument that for the various interest groups, ideologies such as imperialism and nationalism served as rhetoric in their respective pursuits. It was the daily political tensions that played a crucial role in shaping how cable policies were devised.

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.