1. As this is a volume that seeks to problematize Chinese modernity and does not purport to be a comprehensive treatment of modern Chinese history in the first half of the twentieth century, it is organized with a certain selectivity and does not attempt to engage all issues of historical importance. Specifically, recent scholarship has made significant contributions to a better understanding of the early history of the socialist revolutionary movement;

2. For a succinct, classic, paradigmatic statement of the thesis of "stages of revolution" in modern Chinese history, see Mary C. Wright, "Introduction: The Rising Tide of Change," in China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913, ed. Mary C. Wright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

3. There were lively debates over the nature of the Chinese revolutions of 1911 and 1927, as well as that of 1949, along with competing interpretations of their relative success and failure at each stage. For an overview of relevant research results, see John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 13, Republican China, 1912–1949, pt. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially chapters 3, 11, and 12.

4. Modernity is seen in this volume as multifarious and complex. It operates simultaneously on several levels. The topics include projects of intellectual enlightenment, urban cosmopolitanism and consumerism, global enterprises and transnational capitalism, bureaucratic rationalization and industrial technology, the transformation of material culture, municipal planning, urbanization, professionalization, the rise of the nation-state, the disciplining of a new citizenry, and the emergence of a nationalist discourse.

5. For a discussion of the prominent themes and wealth of information in this area of research, see Wen-hsin Yeh, "Shanghai Modernity: Commerce and Culture in a Republican City," China Quarterly, no. 150 (June 1997): 375–94.

6. There is a large body of scholarship on the May Fourth Movement. Standard texts on the subject include Chow Tsetsung's groundbreaking work, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), and more recently, Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).

7. David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 2. See also Strand, "Conclusion: Historical Perspectives," in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China, ed. Deborah S. Davis, Richard Kraus, Barry Naughton, and Elizabeth J. Perry (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 394–426.

8. On the state as a transformative force in modern Chinese political structure, see the seminal work by Philip Kuhn, "Local Self-Government under the Republic: Problems of Control, Autonomy, and Mobilization," in Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China, ed. Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Carolyn Grant (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 257–98. See also Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

9. William C. Kirby, Germany and Republican China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). For related discussion, see Thomas B. Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1986).

10. See John Israel, Student Nationalism in China, 1927–1937 (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1966); and John Israel and Donald W. Klein, Rebels and Bureaucrats: China's December 9ers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).

11. Lucian W. Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), xviii.

12. Fredric Jameson, "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Social Text 15 (1986): 69.

13. Note that Wang Hui's treatment of authoritarianism in Chinese culture is different from Madsen's, which postulates respect for authority as a traditional Chinese cultural trait.

14. See also Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

15. Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937–1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).