A review of Sex, Eugenics, Aesthetics, Utopia in the Life and Work of Zhang Jingsheng (1888-1970), by LEON ANTONIO ROCHA.  In 1927, a popular science author wrote that “in the beginning sex was morally decent.” This was apparent to him in the first line of the children’s basic Confucian text, the Three Character Classic (re zhi chu, xing ben shan, xing xiang jin, xi xiang yuan 人之初性本善性相近習相遠 ). It was clear to his reviewer, Zhou Zuoren, as it should be to anyone familiar with classical Chinese, that before the twentieth century, xing referred not to ‘sex’...

A review of Law and Sensibility of Empire in the Making of Modern China, 1750-1900, by LI CHEN. Li Chen’s dissertation title is too modest. The dissertation goes a long way toward demonstrating not just how law (British) and sensibility (British) made and remade modern China (a significant accomplishment), but also how law (Chinese) and sensibility (Chinese) made and remade modern Britain and the British empire. Or rather, that it was the circulations of a discourse of law and sensibility, backed by competing imperial assertions of sovereignty, which remade Qing China and Britain. The argument...