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| 1937, Jan. 28 |
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| Negotiations terminated the long anti-Communist campaign and brought the Yan'an government into surface harmony with Nanjing. | 1 |
| The Hankou-Guangzhou Railway was completed with help from British Boxer indemnity funds, and a new Hangzhou-Nanchang Railway was opened. | 2 |
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| June 1 |
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| Sichuan was brought into the new national union, made effective by telegraph, long-distance telephone, and radio communication. | 3 |
| The achievement of political unity and a measure of stability (1927–37, the “Nanjing decade”) supplemented and accelerated fundamental changes that had been in progress since 1912 in many areas of life, often led by students who had returned from study abroad. Vital to China's clearly approaching struggle with Japan was the introduction of modern finance and banking. Finance Minister Song Zewen in 1932 announced a balanced budget and abolition of the lijin transit dues which had been a vexation since the Taiping Rebellion. Substitution (Nov. 1934) of paper silver certificates for the new standard silver dollars (minted March 1, 1933) served to concentrate in the treasury large deposits of silver bullion. The U.S. treasury under the Putman Act agreed (July 9, 1937) to exchange these for gold, thus affording a large volume of credits abroad just when they were urgently required for the purchase of arms. | 4 |
| Scholarship was profoundly stimulated by contact with Western thought and literature. An official commission (1914–28) wrote up from the state archives the Qing shi gao (Draft History of the Qing Dynasty) to complete the standard series. Wang Guowei (1877–1927) was a traditional scholar brilliant in deciphering and elucidating Shang oracle bone inscriptions, as well as in textual and historical scholarship. His older friend Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) was as well known for his work on the oracle bones as he was for his loyalty to the Qing dynasty. Younger scholars brought Western methodologies into every domain of the humanities and social sciences. Hu Shi, professor at Beijing University, played a major role in developing a written style in the vernacular, which would be easier to learn and would enable larger numbers of people to become literate. It won general acceptance, though not without difficulties, for scholarly, literary, and practical purposes. The introduction of Western-style punctuation facilitated understanding of both ancient and modern texts, and the preparation of indexes made their content accessible to a greater degree than ever before. Hu Shi's disciple Gu Jiegang (1893–1980) did important work opening up China's high antiquity to modern scholarly criticism. A flood of periodicals of all sorts afforded a medium for scholarly publication and interchange of current views scarcely present in 1912. | 5 |
| Education was altered as much in content and method as in diffusion. Elementary school pupils increased (1912–35) from 2,793,633 to 11,667,888, and high school students from 52,100 to roughly 500,000. In place of four colleges in 1912, there were (in 1933) 40 universities, 40 colleges, and 29 technical schools, with 43,000 students, libraries totaling 4.5 million volumes, and a budget of over U.S.$20 million silver. | 6 |
| Literature flourished and became highly politicized under the harsh realities of these years, as well as under the stimulus of realism, especially among Chinese novelists and short story writers. Ding Ling (1904–86) launched her literary career with “The Diary of Miss Sophie” (Dec. 1927) and stressed themes in defense of feminism and freedom. Lao She (1899–1966) was a master of both symbolic satire (Cat Country, 1932) and realistic tales of great sadness and tragedy (Rickshaw, 1937). Lu Xun (See July) ceased writing short stories and concentrated instead on piercingly critical essays of a topical nature. Mao Dun (1896–1982) wrote realistic novels about life in Shanghai (Midnight, 1932) and elsewhere. | 7 |
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