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A Certain Cosmopolitanism:
Writing for The China Critic

Shuang Shen 沈雙
Penn State

The China Critic was founded on 31 May 1928 by a group of intellectuals who had studied in the United States. It was an English-language weekly that appeared between 1928 and 1945, its publication interrupted by the war from 1940 to 1945. Over the years, membership of the Editorial Board changed several times, but its long-term members, such as Ma Yinchu (马寅初, 1882-1982), Quentin Pan (潘光旦, 1898-1967), Gui Zhongshu (桂中樞, 1897-?) and Zhang Xinhai (張歆海, 1898-1972), shared a similar background: intensive Western schooling and a solid grounding in classical Chinese culture. They all graduated from the Tsinghua Preparatory School for Chinese Students Going to the United States 清華留美預備學校, which later evolved into Tsinghua University, and they studied literature, sociology, law, journalism and science at various American universities. After returning to China, several of them taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing before leaving for Shanghai to work for The China Critic.

A Liberal Cosmopolitan Club

In an editorial in the third anniversary issue of The China Critic published in 1930, the editors proposed to establish a 'liberal cosmopolitan club' in Shanghai.[1] The English magazine was itself a virtual cosmopolitan club. 'Cosmopolitan', a term the editors used to describe themselves, and one sometimes used interchangeably with 'citizen of the world', also referred to the reading community the editors wished to foster. The position of this club, according to this editorial, was to be 'non-political, non-nationalistic, and non-partisan'. It would foster 'international fellowship' based on common interests in 'intellectual issues'. As we shall see, the content of The China Critic at times contradicted each of these objectives.

A sense of the magazine's ideal reader can be garnered from the editors' report one year later that stated that: 'applications for membership [to the social cosmopolitan club] have come in from different classes, [including] college presidents, professors, men of letters, journalists, poets, judges, and public functionaries.'[2] These self-representations raise many questions about the historical position and rhetorical strategies of the editors and their Anglophone public. For instance, how do we interpret their claim to cosmopolitanism in relation to the social condition of Shanghai's partial colonization on the one hand, and the periodical as a cultural form on the other? How did English publications like The China Critic address global and local issues such as imperialism, nationalism, and modernity? What role did the English language play in a predominantly Chinese-language cultural environment, which itself was undergoing drastic reinvention? 'Cosmopolitan' is a keyword which, partly owing to the contradictions it summons, leads to the consideration of not just the magazine's position in Shanghai and China, but the historical significance of the Anglophone sphere in the context of Chinese modernity.

The term 'cosmopolitan' was as controversial in 1920s' China as it is today. The Marxist scholar Zheng Boqi wrote in an article titled 'On National Literature' in 1923 that: 'we are citizens of the world and are Cosmopolitans [the word appears in English]. This is our ideal; however, we are Chinese and members of the Han ethnicity. This is our reality.'[3] Zheng's main agenda was to promote national literature over Weltliteratur (world literature), which he characterized as idealistic and unlivable: 'the world is… like a Phantom [this word appears in English], a loose collectivity and ungraspable.'[4] Yet Zheng's use of English words reveals a certain textual cosmopolitanism. His views, furthermore, did not stop others from endeavoring to transform the world into a tangible and coherent collective through publishing and other cultural projects. Such cosmopolitan cultural practices were of such great variety that it would be hard to conclude that they shared the same politics.

Critical assessments of early twentieth-century Chinese cultural cosmopolitanism have, consequently, been mixed. Joseph Levenson, for one, considered the Shanghai cosmopolitans to be in opposition to the Chinese revolution and the nationalist thinking behind it, arguing that bourgeois cosmopolitans were alienated from society.[5] Leo Ou-fan Lee reached a starkly different conclusion as a result of his close analysis of modern culture in Shanghai. He argued that its cosmopolitans were in fact more 'Chinese' than 'colonial.'[6] We may well ask whether it is possible to state definitively whether Shanghai or Chinese cosmopolitans were 'colonial', 'nationalistic', 'bourgeois', or 'elitist'.

The recent reappearance of the word 'cosmopolitanism' in the academic discussions in the humanities and social sciences suggests that, as James Clifford argues, political and cultural formations and ethical orientations assumed to be local are also 'travelling cultures'. Vinay Dharwadker and the editors of the 2002 book Cosmopolitanism have observed variously that scholarly interest in cosmopolitanism can be attributed to three factors: 'the consolidation of new types of nationalism, based on… programs of racial, religious, or cultural purification', 'the empowerment of new immigrant communities in the national public spheres of the North and the West', and 'the accelerated globalization of capital and material production and consumption.'[7] Although these scholars refer specifically to the contemporary historical moment, it goes without saying that migration, nationalism and globalization are by no means new issues. Yet when considering cosmopolitan cultures in modern Chinese history in the light of contemporary academic discussions of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitcs, care needs to be taken to engage in both trans-historical and cross-cultural translation.

While a few admirable attempts have been made to go beyond the privileged West and uncover a 'rooted cosmopolitanism' in China, generalizing a particular cosmopolitan practice or linguistic approximation of the English term (such as 'Tianxia/T'ien Hsia', or 'All Under Heaven') in a Chinese context is a risky enterprise.[8] Indeed, promoting a singular and normative version of cosmopolitanism can prove to be an uncosmopolitan and even exclusionary gesture, as I show below. Cosmopolitics needs to be defined locally in order to be meaningful. It is with these cautionary notes in mind that I approach The China Critic's discourse of cosmopolitanism from two interrelated perspectives: the political and the cultural.

Despite the editors avowed preference for 'nonpolitical' discourse, The Critic's editorials and articles frequently discussed the presence of imperialism in Shanghai, debated the abolition of extraterritoriality and advocated equal access to public facilities in the concessions. The editors also participated in wider-ranging discussions about urban affairs—from the effectiveness of legal and political institutions to which foreign fashions suited the people of Shanghai. As the Sino-Japanese War approached, topics related to the Japanese invasion came to dominate the magazine's pages. Its editorial outlook, then, could be said to be a fusion of cosmopolitanism and anti-imperialist nationalism, the latter closely connected not only with the Chinese state but also with the urban context of Shanghai.

The culture of The China Critic's cosmopolitanism was rooted in it language—English—and its employment of modernist poetics for purposes of representing the magazine as an institution, its contributors, and the city that they inhabited. For a Chinese writer to write in English was a kind of performance that was at once a stylistic, political, metropolitan, and nationalistic statement. The cosmopolitanism of The China Critic did not exist in a vacuum. Below, I show the similarities between this rhetorical and linguistic posture and contemporaneous cultural expressions in other arenas, such as in Chinese-language print and visual culture and material culture. Such a comparison leads to the question of whether English can also be considered to be a modern Chinese language, and if so, what this means for the understanding of linguistic modernity and 'Chineseness' more generally.

Cosmopolitan Anti-Imperialism

In 1931, the editors defined the goal of the magazine to be a form of 'double translation':

Although our publication is in a foreign language, and it would be most natural for us to devote our efforts to making China better understood by the outside world, we nevertheless consider our important mission not fulfilled without also making the outside world better known to our own people.[9]

Such a self-definition aligned The China Critic with the long-term domestic practice of translating foreign culture into Chinese for purposes of self-strengthening and enlightenment, at the same time it clarified two key differences from that practice: first, its targeted readership was of mixed nationality and geographically far-flung, extending beyond China's borders. The magazine had a modest circulation abroad, and its domestic readership (discussed further below) consisted both of Chinese and non-Chinese. Second, English, rather than Chinese, was the language through which it undertook its 'translation.' As I argue below, English carried a specific cultural significance in the context of the social history of Shanghai in the late 1920s and was itself a kind of dueling ground between various nation-states in China.

Shanghai might be dubbed a 'semi-colonial' city in that it was marked by the simultaneous existence of sovereignty and colonialism. Its history of modernization is inseparable both from both the presence of foreign concessions and, since the late 1910s, the power of the Nationalist Party. In 1928, when The China Critic was founded, the concessions remained a reality of colonialism and they were a constant reminder of a history of past national humiliations. As such, they represented a challenge to the new nation-state headed by the Nationalist Party which had recently moved its capital to Nanjing, in nearby Jiangsu province. To an extent, The China Critic magazine was an embodiment of Shanghai's divided urban space and it was established as a cultural platform to compete with the influence, and voice, of the foreign powers in China.

This sense of contestation can be sensed palpably in advertisements that The China Critic featured. The China Critic editors also commented on the bilingual and interracial public sphere of the semi-colonial city in an editorial dated 26 September 1929. 'The Shanghai Evening Post' tells the story of an American-run English-language newspaper, the Shanghai Evening Post, being accused by another foreign-run publication as 'being the paid organ of the Chinese' because it regularly published editorial comments translated from the Chinese press. The writer of The China Critic editorial endorses the Post for its 'liberal policy' and 'attempt to give China a square deal', and expresses regret that it discontinued this practice for fear of 'unnecessary controversy'. The editorial then complains that:

after all Shanghai is still too 'hot' for fair-minded foreigners, and the power of indirect censorship is many times more dangerous than the actual censorship by the National Government. Our foreign friends clamor for the freedom of speech when Nanking attempts to exercise a certain amount of control over offending papers, but when a foreign paper practices the principle of freedom of speech by giving space to Chinese opinions, it is immediately subjected to all kinds of insidious rumors and abuses. We have read in [the] Annual Report of the Shanghai Municipal Council the criticism that the Chinese press has no opinions to express so as to inform the foreign public of what the Chinese are thinking. Now that we have had opinions to express, the foreign public seems to think we are 'making too much noise'. The under-dog must not remain quiet and yet must not be heard. The mind of the average foreigner is beyond comprehension. Perhaps the Oriental atmosphere is eroding it.[10]

This editorial reminds us that public culture in Shanghai was multilingual, with opinions circulating between different language groups. This was no peaceful coexistence, however. Government regulations and reader opinions ('indirect censorship') shaped a publication's politics. In this context, The China Critic defended the 'Chinese' position by invoking the rhetoric of freedom of expression and rendering talk about 'Oriental corruption' preposterous. The writer of this editorial clearly believed that freedom of expression did not exist in Shanghai, but instead of abandoning this Western liberal value, he held onto it in order to defend his own position.

This is a typical example of The China Critic's critical ethos, which mixed cosmopolitanism with nationalism. The writer and editor Lin Yutang 林語堂 was particularly skillful at negotiating the relationship between the two. Born in a village close to a major port in south Fujian province in 1895, Lin trained at Shanghai's St. John's University to become a minister. In the late 1910s, influenced by the New Culture Movement he changed his academic focus from religion to English and Western literature. He subsequently went to Harvard and the University of Leipzig, where he studied linguistics, before joining The China Critic as an editor and a columnist back in Shanghai. His approach to identifying common ground between China and the West can be seen in an article he published in his column 'The Little Critic' entitled 'The Spirit of Chinese Culture'. The essay was originally a speech Lin delivered before the Peace Group from Oxford University in 1932. One passage reads:

I wish first to establish the point that the Chinese are an intensely human people and that the Chinese culture is an intensely human culture. It is the culture of the old man, tolerant, humorous, peaceful, and content, with the mellow wisdom and weakness of old age. Much of that contempt of the West for China is that of an impatient young reformer for the old man, while the annoyance of China at the West is that of an old man, who has seen a great deal of life and knows what it amounts to, at being dragged away by the young and clever persons from his armchair by the fireside to take a sea bath on a September morn. You will perhaps perceive already why I would not even attempt to impose the calm philosophy of an old man on the young philosophers of the West. The danger is that while the old man will have enough commonsense to see the fun of a dip on a September morn, the young man will not have common sense enough to appreciate the beauty of a place by the fireside. It would be apparently foolish to ask the question who is happier? If you are truly Chinese and human, you would answer, 'Both are fairly happy and fairly unhappy.'[11]

The word 'human' in the above passage is of course not a neutral term that carries equal weight for 'the West' and 'the Chinese'. While this passage, in a sense, transports the term 'human' into the Chinese context, it also resolves the rhetorical struggle for the ownership of this value-laden term by conjoining two asymmetrical terms—'Chinese' and 'human'. While Lin can be accused of evoking a familiar Orientalist formula—the East equals spirituality and old age, the West equals materiality and youth—he employs this Orientalism strategically, even self-consciously, as if based on careful calculation of gains and losses.

Although The China Critic clearly articulated an anti-imperialist agenda, this political position was complicated by the cultural and linguistic borders it faced. These borders were both geographical—in particular the foreign concessions and International Settlement, which divided Chinese territory—and conceptual, as expressed in editors' relationship with the urban environment. They perceived Shanghai's mixed and changing urban environment as chaotic, rootless and even threatening to the identity of the Chinese. For this group, cosmopolitanism as an overall intellectual agenda was often in conflict with cosmopolitanism as a lived urban reality.

This conflict is apparent in an editorial curiously entitled 'Who Is Shanghai?' In it, the editor describes Shanghai as a 'person who is equally interested in everything that appears therein, the commercial pages, the correspondence, the leader, the outpost letters, the "locals", the news from all quarters of the earth.' The city, in the essay, is imagined in the figure of a modern man of letters with wide interests in the print cultures of the world. The mission of The China Critic, the writer tells us, is to expose people in power, which, for Shanghai, meant the 'men who represent and misrepresent it, who rule and misrule it, who squeeze and fatten on it, who trample on Chinese rights and prosper on Chinese money, who promise the Chinese one thing one day and give them something else the next, who come to power and stay in power. They make Shanghai go round and go wrong.'[12] Yet the magazine also often represents Shanghai, a city of growing heterogeneity, as a cognitive enigma for the intellectual, its cosmopolitanism coded by class and gender.

On issues related to social life, the editors of The Critic are unanimously critical of foreign powers and protective of the rights of the Chinese. At the same time, however, a moralistic overtone is pronounced throughout. Concerned with the so-called 'moral hygiene' of the Chinese, the editors repeatedly criticize what they perceive to be the 'moral degeneracy' of Shanghai. It is a criticism that often betrays certain kinds of gender and class bias that perhaps reflect their own lack of psychological preparedness in the face of the city's rapid modernization.

Their ambivalence towards contemporary social mores is particularly evident in their writings on sexuality. In a 1928 editorial on 'Shanghai's sexual obsession', the author suggests that the intermingling of different races has created a natural condition for the growth of 'sexual obsession': 'when different races come together, they feel that they have more ground to be disrespectful to one another than they could afford to be if they are cast among their own people.'[13] The writer also argues that while the overflow of immigrants ('outcasts, desperadoes, and opportunists') might contribute to the city's material prosperity, they have also sunk the city to 'its present level of grossness'. These conservative arguments contrast sharply with other Shanghai writers, such as Zhang Ruogu, who flaunted Shanghai's exotic flavor and elevated the city to the status of 'a cultural laboratory' for future China (see: Jonathan Hutt, 'Enfant du Siècle: The Urban Symphonies of Zhang Ruogu', China Heritage Quarterly, Issue 23, September 2010).[14] Their attitude to Shanghai was much more accepting than that of The China Critic editors.

The sensitivity of The China Critic's editors to gender issues was also less uniform than their defense of Chinese interests along racial or national lines. In an article entitled 'Nude Models and Public Morals', for example, the editor tells the story of a nude show of three Russian women in the French concession. Condemning the show as 'an exhibition of the human anatomy with emphasis on morbidity', the author criticizes the French concession authority for its double standard. Referring to a foreign concessions law that stipulates that scenes in movies or performances deemed to be demeaning to white women must be deleted, the author argues:

It [the concession authority] cannot allow one class of foreign women to be degraded without degrading white women as a whole. It cannot ignore accepted moral standards without corrupting public morals. It cannot permit an indecent show without encouraging indecency among the ignorant. Furthermore, as the Chinese constitute the bulk of the French Concession, their welfare should be given the utmost consideration. … If the Council were convinced that naked shows were what the French community would want or approve of, then let it have them in big order. But, mon dieu, keep them away from the Chinese![15]

While challenging the colonial regulation on the grounds that the French concession has a mixed residential population, the author lets his concern for public morality in general blind him to the specific moral issue of the exploitation of women. The Critic articles display a general tendency to speak of culture in lofty, homogeneous terms that ignore gender and class considerations. For a number of years, however, the magazine did publish a special 'Women's World' column that offered interesting discussions of women's place in the public sphere.

If the actors in the above-mentioned nude show had been Chinese women, would the editors have been equally insensitive to their interests? It is hard to say. The China Critic often presents the 'coolies', working-class Chinese, and women as easy victims of Western corruption; yet, in some articles, Chinese who participate in 'corrupt' activities are more harshly condemned than Westerners. Covering a so-called 'nudist movement' in Hong Kong for the 17 November 1932, issue of The China Critic, for instance, an editor expresses outrage toward what he interprets as an attempt to out-Westernize the Westerner: 'although three quarters of the membership of the [nudist] society are non-Chinese, it is only the Chinese who have taken to actual nude bathing. The westerners are more bashful and prudish… whereas the Chinese are truly enthusiastic, particularly Chinese girls.'[16]

Anglophone versus Sinophone

What does it matter that The China Critic was written in English? In order to answer this question, we need to situate the magazine in relation to local practices of cosmopolitanism, particularly in the context of 'May Fourth' culture. A number of scholars have characterized the May Fourth approach to culture as 'Occidentalism', that is 'the use of the West for specific discursive purposes, mainly as a means to produce symbolic power.'[17] Yet evaluations of the May Fourth legacy differ: some have argued that the May Fourth Movement was Occidentalist to the point of accepting Western domination, while others have suggested that its importation of things Western was a kind of 'localization'.[18] May Fourth culture embodies the unevenness of global modernity since it manifests what Shu-mei Shih calls 'a particularization of Chinese culture and a universalization of Western culture.'

Adopting the global language of English did not mean that the hierarchical relationship between the universal and the particular was changed in any fundamental way. Rather, an Anglophone publication such as The China Critic was a different yet parallel form of translational culture to the Chinese-language one. The implications of a Chinese writer deciding to write in English or Chinese is discussed in John Zou's study of the Western-trained Tsinghua graduate John Wong-Quincy's book about hunting trips in north China, which Wong-Quincy wrote in English.

Zou argues that English was a way for the writer to define himself both as a colonial subject and as upper-class Chinese. 'English…goes across the world to discover subjects of colonialism' in situations where a well- established colonial structure is absent and after migrant subjects have returned home from the West.[19] What Zou overlooks is the specific context of circulation for an English-language publication. John Wong-Quincy's book is mostly set in the rural areas of northern China, where an English book would have fewer local readers than it would in a treaty port such as Shanghai. The Anglophone cosmopolitanism of The China Critic, was inseparable from the activities of authors who utilized English as a form of cultural capital when advancing certain political and cultural agendas that were closely interwoven with local and national contexts.

While it might be assumed that English-language magazines were published primarily for foreign residents in Shanghai, local Chinese who understood English also became a part of The China Critic's readership. Although no circulation figures for the magazine are available, a 1931 editorial claimed that The China Critic had 'a large circulation among our intellectual class, including a large number of college undergraduates.'[20] In a 1940s preface to Lin Yutang's With Love and Irony Pearl Buck recalled that The China Critic was extremely influential among both foreigners and Chinese intellectuals in Shanghai. As early as 1928, the Shanghai scholar Ge Gongzhen had observed that although foreign-language newspapers were published primarily for foreigners, Chinese graduates from local foreign schools as well as other Chinese who had interests in foreign affairs were also among their readers. Therefore, 'one cannot say that these newspapers do not have direct relations with the Chinese community.'[21] It is even possible that this magazine had an audience outside China, since many issues of the magazine carried an advertisement of itself with the address of a New York bookstore as its overseas distributor.

If The China Critic's use of English can be considered as a performance of the global in the local context, then we have to agree with Shih that this performance could produce multiple effects and outcomes. Given that the periodical was written by many authors, it is no surprise that it used and politicized English in a variety of ways. In addition to using English as a medium to conduct political discussions, for example, Lin Yutang looked upon English as a modernist expression to create a de-familarizing effect in one's representations of the local environment.

In this respect, Lin's English writings offer an interesting contrast to the predominantly Chinese-language modernism of the Republican period. Similar to Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, who wrote in Chinese, Lin Yutang's modernism is most revealing in his articles on the city of Shanghai. Like Mu Shiying, he touches upon Shanghai's moral laxity and sensual stimulation, but he is more interested in the diverse cultures that made Shanghai into a uniquely 'modern' city. In an article written for 'The Little Critic' in the 14 August 1930 issue of The China Critic, Lin sings a 'hymn' to the 'Great Terrible City' that lists its many vices, ranging from poverty and moral degeneracy to the presence of colonial powers (see China Heritage Quarterly, Issue 22, June 2010). He depicts Shanghai as a city 'terrible in her strange mixture of eastern and western vulgarity, in her superficial refinements, in her naked and unmasked worship of Mammon, in her emptiness, commonness, and bad taste.'[22] For him, Shanghai was represented by 'denaturalized women, dehumanized coolies, devitalized newspapers, decapitalized banks, and denationalized creatures.'[23] Although he paints a dark picture, his highly 'denaturalized' style conveys a spirit of experimentalism that decreases the realism of his prose. In some sentences, he mixes Chinese with English to mirror the 'strange mixture' of nationalities and cultures he has just ridiculed: 'One thinketh of thy successful, pien-pien-bellied merchants, and forgeteth whether they are Italian, French, Russian, English or Chinese.' [24] 'Pien-pien'—which describes the posture of a pot-bellied and pompous merchant—and other stylistic devices indicate that Lin was appealing to readers with bilingual competence.

Lin's depictions of colonialism in Shanghai are highly aesthetic, making it seem like but one layer in a collage of local colors. For instance, in the same essay on Shanghai, he depicts 'thy haughty, ungentlemanly foreigner…men with a moderate head, but stiff boots and strong-calf-muscles' as a part of the urban scene. In other essays analysing the essence of Chinese culture, he presents the point of view of an outsider, one that notices the myriad and strange colors of the colonial metropolis. As he argues in 'The Chinese People':

If I were a world tourist passing through Shanghai, I would not hesitate to tell you that the Chinese are a great people. To be great is to be misunderstood. When we call a man great, we mean by it our inability to understand him. Here is a Chinaman, a washerman, perhaps, or a rickshaw coolie, whose face is not particularly inspiring, and whom many white people would not think twice before kicking, and yet he represents a people that has somehow dragged on for four thousand years without seeming much the worse for it, a feat which neither the glorious Romans nor the illustrious Greeks were able to accomplish.[25]

Lin criticizes modernity from a Romanticist perspective that he attributes directly to Nietzsche but is more strongly resonant of Lin's contemporary Lu Xun. In both 'Zarathustra and the Jester' and 'A Pageant of Costumes', Lin calls on Nietzsche's Romantic hero to save the 'city where wisdom decays'. Adopting the voice of the court jester, Lin criticizes the superficial 'gaiety' of the city and calls for 'fire' and 'sun' to give warmth and life to the world.

The Contradictions of the Cosmopolitan

Overall, The China Critic is a bundle of contradictions that combines ownership of universal terms with commitment to local politics. As an institution, it wavered between accepting and criticizing an increasingly heterogeneous urban culture. The city it inhabited was one of contradiction and conflict—divided internally with the borders of the nation inscribed on its surface. The publication's founders charged it with multiple tasks: representing the national interest, representing the voice of the cosmopolitan intellectual, and representing the city. Its editorials reveal occasional strains of elitism, indicating that the public discourse it sought to create was not open to all. It is clear, however, that the magazine's cosmopolitanism was more than a romantic gesture to create a glamorous image of self or city. It was an earnest attempt by Chinese intellectuals to define the locality within a transnational context of unevenness and inequality.

Notes:

[1] 'Editorial', The China Critic, 13 November 1930, p.1085.

[2] The China Critic, 20 November 1931, p.1133.

[3] Zheng, 'On national literature' (Guomin wenxue lun), in Huang Houxing, ed., Chuangzuoshe congshu: Wenyi lilun juan, Beijing: Wenyuan Chubanshe, 1992, p.110.

[4] Ibid., 109

[5] Joseph Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

[6] Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture, 1930–1945, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

[7] Vinay Dharwadker, ed., Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, New York: Routledge, 2001. See also Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds. Cosmopolitanism: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, p.1.

[8] For a recent discussion of a certain kind of mainland-inflected discussion of Chinese cosmopolitianism, see Zhao Tingyang's 'Rethinking empire from a Chinese concept "All-under-Heaven" (Tian-xia)', Social Identities 12 (1): 29-41.

[9] 'Editorial', The China Critic, 1 January 1931, p.3.

[10] 'The Shanghai Evening Post', in The China Critic, 26 September 1929, p.766.

[11] Lin, The Little Critic, Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937, p.5.

[12] The China Critic, 24 October 1929, p.846.

[13] The China Critic, 28 June 1928, p.84.

[14] Heinrich Fruehauf uses this term to describe the modernist experiments in Shanghai in the 1930s in his article 'Urban Exoticism on Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature'. See Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang, eds, From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993, pp.133-164.

[15] The China Critic, 31 July 1931, p.725.

[16] The China Critic, 17 November 1932, p.214.

[17] Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semi-Colonial China, 1917–1937, Berkeley: California University Press, 2001, p.128.

[18] According to Shu-mei Shih's discussion in chapter 5 of The Lure of the Modern, pp.134-135, these two different views are held by Xiaomei Chen and Tani Barlow respectively.

[19] John Zou, 'English Idiom and Republican China: Repatriated Subject in Wong-Quincey's Chinese Hunter', World Englishes 21 (February 2002): 291-303.

[20] The China Critic, 1 January 1931, p.4.

[21] Ge Gongzhen, Zhongguo baoxue shi, Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1928, p.105.

[22] The China Critic, 14 August 1930, p.779.

[23] Op. cit., p.780.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Lin, The Little Critic, p.227.