The Shanghai Polytechnic Institution was one among many initiatives in the 1870s to bring Western scientific knowledge and technology to China. Its origins were closely connected to the Western community in the Shanghai Settlement, more specifically the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. The Institution’s initial program was to promote the diffusion of useful knowledge through a public library and reading-room. Then, by supplementing the reading-room with scientific equipment and models, the nature of the establishment was changed into a complex kind of school, following the example of the London Polytechnic. The Shanghai Polytechnic Institution thus planned operations on three levels: first, the library and reading-room; second, lectures and classes; and third, the exhibition of machinery, equipment and manufactured goods for educational purposes. This last aspect gained more and more importance, to the point that it absorbed the greatest portion of both the energy and the resources of the Institution’s governing board. It also marked the first attempt to stage a public exhibition in China.

      After efforts that lasted for six years, the board abandoned the exhibition scheme. But many requirements for exhibitions, whether educational or commercial, were revealed in this seeming failure. This article reviews the history of the Institution’s exhibition in relation to the functions of the library and lectures on scientific subjects.

　　This paper explores how epidemics spread across disparate regions more frequently and violently in the early twentieth-century than that in the nineteenth century. The interactions between environmental, ecological and unprecedented social and economic changes laid a new basis for epidemics to spread. Along with Manchuria, Shanghai had reached a state of great industrialization, becoming one of the most important bases for food supplies, industry, and mining in China. Meantime, plague and cholera swept across the nation several times. Unlike previous studies which have focused mainly on the affected areas and routes of the epidemics, this paper deals with the relationship between epidemics and socio-economic change.

     The impact that socio-economic change had on the interregional spread of epidemics can be examined from the following three aspects: first, the expansion of a regional economic system eliminated regional separation, which in turn accelerated the dissemination of epidemics; second, railways became the main form of transportation, which not only accelerated the spread of epidemics but also brought diseases to remote areas where transportation was previously unavailable; and third, the existence of a large floating population in urban areas under filthy conditions easily triggered the eruption of epidemics. In sum, before the twentieth century, the interregional spread of epidemics mainly resulted from wars and natural disasters (famine, floods, and so forth). In the twentieth century, however, socio-economic changes became the primary factor behind the dissemination of epidemics, and it also started a turning point in the history of diseases and life in China.

　　On 25 September 1937, more than five thousand soldiers of the 115th Division, the main force of the Eighth Army led by the Chinese Communist Party, laid an ambush near Pingxing Gate and killed about five hundred trapped Japanese transportation personnel. But the Red Army also suffered heavy casualties—almost one thousand Communist soldiers lost their lives. This ambush should neither be considered “great” nor should it be labeled a “victory” in comparison with many more important battles such as the Tai-Er-Zhuang (臺兒莊) Campaign or the Kun-Lun-Guan (崑崙關) Campaign launched by Guomindang troops during the War of Resistance against Japan. This article aims at examining why and how the ambush was immediately promoted as the first and the “greatest victory” of the War of Resistance in later Communist propaganda. It also examines why and how the so-called “great victory” was constructed as the collective memory of the new generations of citizens of the People’s Republic of China, as well as its later deconstruction in the era of post Maoism.