The China Heritage Quarterly, a terrific electronic journal cum research project, has published its August-September issue with a special focus on an early-twentieth century English-language journal called the China Critic. The editor writes:
The China Critic was a product of a cosmopolitan demeanour, a fluency in English-language expression and ideas and an informed concern for contemporary China, its achievements and its limitations. The era of The Critic was also one of mounting international conflict and patriotic fervour. It is timely to reconsider The Critic and also to make available some of the insightful and controversial writing that appeared in its pages over a fourteen-year period.
There’s a tremendous amount of material available at the site: scores of original articles available as pdfs (much of it available via this annotated chronology), insightful commentary, articles about related figures, and so on. One thing that caught my eye was the journal’s endorsement of Chiang Kai-shek’s “New Life Movement.” Certainly there is much about the Nanjing Decade (1927-37) that resonates with contemporary China!
I should add that Sam Crane — who blogged about this same site a few days ago, though I only just noticed it (what can I say, I’m faced with a pile of papers to grade and I’m procrastinating!) — has called attention to one of the China Critic‘s essays in particular, Lin Yutang offering an amusing send-up of Confucius.