The opening of China to economic reforms from 1978 and subsequent political and social developments both in mainland China and in Taiwan have facilitated substantial reassessment of China's Republican era. The Republican years are seen by researchers increasingly as part of a continuous transition during which China modified its traditional society and adapted to new roles in world affairs - sometimes with considerable success. This special issue brings together recent studies of China's Republican era, the legacy of which can still be observed in current Chinese affairs

The 1911 Revolution profoundly disrupted the mixture of bureaucratic power, cultural and religious symbolism, and force upon which the authority of the Qing imperial state had rested. Tacit agreements, shared assumptions and mutual interests defining balances between state and society could no longer determine political relationships. Thus the republican revolution opened the way for a long series of redefinitions, and changed the political contexts in which actions would take place. As knowledge of the early years of the Republic grows, so does appreciation of how actions were contingent upon unpredictable new circumstances.

The basic structure of the Republican economy at its pre-1949 peak is not much in dispute.1 With a population probably in excess of 500 million, the economy was predominantly agrarian: nearly two-thirds of its GNP originated in agriculture, and probably three-quarters of its labour force derived most if not all of their living from farming. There was a small modern sector, comprising parts of manufacturing, transportation, finance and so on, that represented no more than a tenth of GNP and was largely concentrated in the treaty ports. A similar percentage of the population lived in urban areas. It was a relatively commercialized economy, with as much as 40–45 per cent of farm produce making its way primarily into domestic markets. And by most measures, it was also moderately “open.” Imports and exports combined totalled about one-eighth of GNP. It was, however, a very poor economy. Per capita GNP in the mid-1930s was only 60 yuan, which converting into current U.S. dollars is only $200–250. Purchasing power parity calculations suggest an estimate probably double or even triple this, but by today's standards, this would still rank China amongst the poorer “low-income” countries.2

From the 1950s to the 1970s, historians′ approach to Republican China was informed by a predominant concern for Revolution. Scholarly priorities were focused on the early history of the Chinese Communist Party and on the socio-economic analysis of the countryside where the Chinese revolution had achieved its first success. Few publications were devoted to urban China. The Maoist regime until its end was seen to maintain a strong anti-urban stance. Great ex-treaty port cities were condemned for their past co-operation with foreign imperialism. In the West, the Republican era was often perceived as a confused interregnum between the Qing dynasty and the Communist Empire. And more than a few historians shared the views of their Chinese colleagues and featured big cities of the 1920s and 1930s as outposts of foreign economic exploitation and political oppression, as citadels of cultural arrogance.

The topic of government and administration in the Republican period (1911–9) has attracted periodic bursts of scholarly attention in the first three decades of the post–1950 period. Some of these works focused on the weakness of political institutions in the early Republic,1 several were sympathetic to the state–building efforts of the Kuomintang (KMT),2 and the remainder were overtly or covertly negative in their assessment of Republican, particularly KMT, government.3 Whether sympathetic to Republican–era government or not, this scholarship was largely informed by a constellation of three factors: the deep Cold War era divisions between left and right in the United States as to how the spread of Communism in Asia should be accounted for and dealt with, the lack of research access in China itself, and, perhaps most important, what might be called the prismatic event of 1949, when the Republican government was militarily defeated in the civil war, driven into exile on a small island, and replaced with a self–consciously revolutionary government which vigorously attempted to recreate and transform state and society. It is little wonder that this abrupt terminus of the Republican period slanted many of the questions implicitly posed in post–1949 scholarship towards explaining the Republics demise on mainland China. At best, the efforts and strategies of the Kuomintang were considered to have long–term promise until seriously undercut by the Japanese invasion in July 1937; at worst, the entire Republican period was relegated to the status of a transitional period that gave way before the inevitable primacy of bottom–up revolution.

In England in the late 1920s, authors like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden began to write about their experiences at the front of the Great War. They did not settle simply for a pacifist condemnation, but said goodbye to an old world of faith in progress and optimism about the future. A general questioning of the nature of the individual, the possibility of the good and the value of civilization followed in literature and elsewhere. A new sensibility especially of the individual but also of modernity and the nation was then formulated.1 Part of the new understanding was that an army could only serve to overcome the forces of militaristic and perverted societies. Military conflict was at best a temporarily inevitable aberration.

One of the most active areas of research in recent years concerns the urban history of Shanghai in the Republican period. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars have gone beyond an overview of Shanghai's rise as China's leading metropolis in the hundred years after the Opium War (1839–42), and produced richly contextualized analyses on the various aspects of the city's history and society.

The foundation of this association has now been laid. People call us Blue Shirts or terrorists. That is nothing. The important problem to be solved is how to create a new revolutionary atmosphere so as to lead the revolutionary masses⃜ In China today definite action must be taken for temporary relief as well as for fundamental cure. However, what we need now is a fundamental cure. Our present problem is not the Japanese. Our problem is not the invasion of our north-eastern provinces and Jehol. If we can maintain the status quo, it will be enough for the present time. As a revolutionary government, the loss of a little territory does not mean much. A revolutionary movement has both to advance and retreat. When our strength is not enough, it is natural to retreat. We have lost territory today, but we will take it back the next day when we have strength

Nothing mattered more. Chinese history during the era of the first Republic was defined and shaped - and must ultimately be interpreted - according to the nature of its foreign relations. While few would dispute the contributions of what Paul Cohen has called a “more interior approach”1 to modern Chinese historical studies in the past two decades, there is no point searching for some uniquely “China-centred” historical narrative for this period. Everything important had an international dimension. The period is bordered by the inauguration of two“new Chinas, ” the Republic of 1912 and the People's Republic of 1949, both of which were patterned on international designs. The difference between those governments shows the progression of international influences. Few Chinese were affected in a direct way by the parliamentary experiment of the early Republic. No Chinese would be unaffected by the lethal blend of Leninism and Stalinism that Mao Zedong called Chinese Communism.