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The article discusses themes of nationalism and experiences of border-crossing in the historical fiction stories of Chinese author Shi Zhecun that were written and published between 1929 and 1931. It examines the political and historical context of Shi Zhecun's stories, identification with the Republic of China, and Westernization.

The offence of abortion was a Western legal disposition introduced into late Qing China in the 1900s and it remained in effect during the Republican period. In Imperial China, abortion did not constitute a criminal offence, and foetal life was generally considered inferior to human life. The widespread humanization of the foetus in early twentieth-century China was closely intertwined with the nationalist ideology that exhorted women to reproduce for the nation. In this narrative, the foetus was valued as a future citizen, and abortion came to be seen as a demographic calamity for the nation. Abortion was also condemned by conservatives who depreciated it as a scandalous act mostly attempted by women engaged in 'illicit' sexual relationships. Although the 1935 Criminal Code decriminalized therapeutic abortion, it was still illegal to terminate a pregnancy resulting from rape. In this regard, the vision of legal Orientalism that portrays Chinese law as the inferior other to modern Western law is problematic, as certain aspects of Chinese legal tradition may provide a more appropriate protection of personal choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1932, with the help of the League of Nations, the Chinese government sent an educational mission consisting of five scholars to Europe, in order to investigate education in different countries as reference points for ongoing Chinese educational reform. This article argues that educators in the mission used foreign examples to support their existing educational reform proposals, and that such a situation resulted from their understanding of the function of national education and China's practical situation. In doing so, the article adopts a transntional perspective and focuses on the discussions around national educational aims and general impressions of education in European countries, with a particular emphasis on two educators of the mission – Cheng Qibao and Yang Lian. To begin with, the article introduces the educational reform background of the mission – namely, what the Kuomintang (KMT) wanted national education to contribute. In the second part, the article discusses the understanding of the two educators regarding the social function of education, and reveals that, although they admired idealised internationalism, they considered that Chinese education should still prioritise a nationalist viewpoint. In the third part, the article analyses how the two educators constructed their impressions of education in those European countries, and used these impressions to remind readers about the Chinese situation. In the final part, the article discusses the proposals the two educators put forward and analyses the potential factors that prevented their proposals from having a concrete impact on Chinese educational reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the Chinese Nationalist Army at the tactical level, examining how the Nationalists deployed and employed forces to achieve victory from the earliest battles in 1925 to the first stage of the war against the Japanese in 1937-1938. It argues that certain "core characteristics" of the Nationalist Army shaped its tactics in a way that maximized its strengths and minimized its weaknesses, producing a number of important victories from 1925 to 1930. Importantly, the year 1930 marked a key turning point as new enemies and conditions led the Nationalists away from the successful tactics of the 1920s, contributing to the weaker record of the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the financial context of the development of modern science in Republican China (1912–1949) during the 1920s. At that time, funding for related endeavors was channeled first through the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation and then through the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, a body that oversaw part of America's remission of indemnities paid by China under the Boxer Protocol (1901). Although both entities drew their entire funding from U.S. sources, the transition from the private foundation as principal patron to the backflow of indemnities can be seen as a process through which Chinese promoters and practitioners of science earnestly sought and eventually secured control of resources for their own institution-building efforts. Still more important, active Chinese involvement extended the role of these funding agents from mere donors of physical assets to portals where concerned individuals and organizations intersected. It was this new capacity that smoothed the way for a self-perpetuating scientific community to emerge and prosper well into the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the late Dr. John Jingxiong Wu's work in drafting a new constitution for the Republic of China in the 1930s, and it mentions Wu's career, the history of Republican-era China from 1912 to 1949, and Wu's approach to civil liberties. The reasons why Wu left fundamental rights unprotected from government interference are addressed, along with China's Kuomintang Party. Chinese national security and the nation's legal culture are assessed.

The University of Hong Kong (HKU), following its establishment in 1911, has assumed the mission of bridging British and Chinese cultures, to prepare European and Chinese elite youth for political and other professional careers, and thus to improve Britain’s cultural influence in competition with other western powers with regard to China. Dominated by its colonial character and pragmatic orientation, Chinese education at HKU was confined to no more than a supplementary subject at the initial stage. However, colonial crisis and cultural changes in the 1920s and 1930s, together with the endeavours of local cultural and commercial elites, made advanced Chinese education at HKU necessary and possible, and led to an independent unit for Chinese education and Chinese studies being established and strengthened. Organisational and curricular reforms before the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 led to further modernisation and solidified the structure of Chinese education at this university, laying the essential foundation for its post-war recovery and development. The evolution of Chinese education at HKU demonstrated well the subtle entanglements of education, culture and politics in a colonial context, through which coexistence and tensions between tradition and modernity, between China and the West, and between the imperial and republican intellectuals were also vividly revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is part of a scholarly roundtable on presentism which focuses particularly on related philosophies of history regarding the past and present. It explores the history and historiography of China's Revolution, focusing on the reform period beginning in 1978 under leader Deng Xiaoping. Subjects considered include the periodization of the 20th century forwarded by historian Eric Hobsbawm, historian François Hartog's notions of "regimes of historicity," the book "Whig Interpretation of History" by Herbert Butterfield, and philosopher John Dewey's philosophy of history.

The emergence in the early Chinese periodical press of a new narrative genre, the shiyantan (實驗談) or account of experience, heralds a new epistemology and a new politics in the early twentieth century. A textual valorization of everyday experience, the shiyantan was situated at the point of intersection between public language and private subjectivity. Its historical significance lies in its assertion that pre-theorized quotidian experience was a -- if not the -- foundation of knowledge and social change. This genre serves as a critical entry point into an agenda of social, political, and gender concerns that has been marginalized in the historical record but which was arguably as historically important as the preceding late Qing reformist program and the subsequent May Fourth new culture project. Equally concerned with strengthening the nation, uplifting China's women, and creating a new knowledge culture, this alternate agenda located the starting and the endpoint of politics in everyday practice rather than in cultural or literary discourse. Less prescriptive in tone and more ethnographic in method than earlier or later calls for a "new novel," "new poetry," or "new literature," it purposefully made room for and sought insights from the messy materiality of personal experience. The paper uses the tools of the digital humanities to trace the definition of the term shiyan (實驗), map the genealogy of the shiyantan genre, and probe the ways the genre operated in what was arguably the most influential women's journal in the early Republican period, Funu Shibao (婦女時報, The Women's Eastern Times, Shanghai, 1911-1917). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-known that the basic ideas and principles of modern international law originated in Europe. In a period during the early twentieth century, however, a number of Chinese intellectuals examined and demonstrated that international law had already existed during the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States Periods in China. They committed themselves to exploring and carrying forward ancient Chinese international law as a way to maintain China's rich cultural tradition in a global order governed by the West. This may be a swan song of the Chinese intellectuals who rose up against the oppression of imperialist powers and sought a more balanced order in the then-contemporary world. Were their efforts to be revived in another way, however, the swan song could be akin to a phoenix rising, initiating a time of renewal, bringing such ideas back into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several photographs are presented including the Boxer Rebellion in China between 1898 and 1900, the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, and the May Fourth Movement in China in 1919.

As a historical study, this article attempts to objectively describe the state of modern China, its territories, and its peoples, and the process by which they came into being, focusing on how Chinese academic circles participated in reconstructing the historical narrative on “China” and the “Chinese people” in the 1920s and 1930s. It narrates a historical process: how mainstream Chinese academic circles participated in the movement to reconstruct “China” and the “Chinese people” after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, under the impetus of the historical, political, and social context of modern China. To a certain extent, their efforts to absorb the “four borderlands” into “China” may have hastened the rise of modern China, with its unique territories and peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various papers published in this issue including one by Ge Zhaoguang on the founding of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912, one by Wang Ke on the origin of the word 'Han traitor,' and one by Chen Bo on the views of the European travelers, missionaries and scholars on China.

This study investigates the significance of Xu Baohuang's 1919 textbook Xin wen xue on the articulation of an objectivity norm in the early Republican era in China. It addresses issues raised by cross-cultural or comparative analysis of journalistic norms. It also considers the need to maintain awareness of differences in the political and journalistic field in Republican-era China. Following Michael Schudson's essay, “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism”, our analysis focuses on the articulation of the objectivity norm and looks for unique aspects of norm formation arising out of the Chinese context. As such, we see Xu's role as more than importing an American norm into China. Rather he codifies and legitimizes a norm that has a distinct relationship to local issues and media practice. We argue that while Xu's text articulates what can only be considered a nascent ideal, and not a fully matured objectivity norm, his work nevertheless codifies a new sense of news, and also a journalistic commitment to the cultivation of healthy public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on an investigation of rural women in north China during the Republican period when Chinese society experienced tremendous political and social turmoil. A standard view of rural women prior to 1949 is that they were hapless victims of patriarchal structure and culture. However, patriarchal family relations were far from being static, but were rather fluid and being constantly contested. This paper examines the lives of rural women through studying especially the experiences of four young women from one affluent rural family in Shandong Province during the early part of the twentieth century. Having been brought up in a traditional milieu and then caught up in the vicissitudes of life after marriage, these women were forced to adapt to a rapidly changing world and to forces of circumstances. Their stories reflect the enduring tension between changing social and cultural norms and continuing influence of tradition. Being forced to fend for themselves, they often had to conduct a certain amount of maneuvering. Their experiences also testify to the strength, fortitude, and resourcefulness of Chinese rural women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Second Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Chinese Civil War that followed it (1946–1949) were the first total wars China experienced. Large-scale, long-term wartime mobilization and the reorganization of society are necessary to wage total war. This article will examine the characteristics of and changes in wartime mobilization under the Republican Chinese government, focusing on the above two wartime periods. It will compare China with the example of contemporary Japan and will carefully observe the process of changes in the methods of mobilization, as well as the social contradictions brought out by mobilization. Eventually, the Nationalist government could not overcome these contradictions and collapsed after its defeat in the Chinese Civil war. While groping for strategies to stave off defeat, the Nationalist government created elements that continued after 1949 in the People’s Republic of China. That is to say, the experience of wartime mobilization during total war had a great influence on China’s future historical path. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Christianity, as practised by missionary educational institutions and the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), was an important means of introducing and popularizing Western physical education and sport in modern China from 1840 to the 1920s. The research investigates how and why missionary educational institutions and the YMCA and YWCA contributed to the rise of physical education and sport in modern China. This analysis examines the activities of missionary educational institutions and the YMCA and YWCA in China during this period to uncover what really contributed to pave the way for Christianity, as well as led to this rise of Western physical education and sport in modern China from 1840 to the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By investigating four cases from the Qing Dynasty (1622–1911) and from the Republic of China (1911–1949), it was found that inter-village disputes normally arose because of uneven distribution of public resources in China's rural society. To settle the disputes, villagers tended to apply civil mediation, normally conducting endurance contests, rather than seek governmental arbitration. The authority and social order was thereby based on endurance contests. Conducting such contests was certainly advantageous to larger villages in their quest for more public resources. However, it simultaneously restricted their privatization of public resources, as the smaller villagers were able to equally raise their voices to resist them and to obtain their own public resources by proposing and participating in endurance contests. Although originally it was an unfair way of settling the disputes over uneven distribution of public resources in rural China, it gave hope to the disadvantaged to protect their own rights and interests at a time when governmental arbitration could not be relied upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Republican era of China's history, cooperative loans were very common in rural areas of Sichuan, as were overdue loans. The amount of overdue loans was large and accounted for a high proportion of total loans. On the one hand, credit loans did not effectively improve the rural economy. Many farmers were still in heavy debt, with limited ability to pay back. On the other hand, lack of supervision in the cooperative financial system resulted in malpractice on the part of some cooperative staff members who often misappropriated payments. The relevant authorities made policies to collect overdue loans, but these turned out to be inefficient, for cooperative members often applied for loan deferments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Modern Chinese Folklore Movement in the first half of the twentieth century was a literary movement, but it was also profoundly political and social. A new generation of intellectuals that participated in the movement believed that their efforts could "save" the Chinese nation by rediscovering traditions and enlightening the common people during a period of great upheaval. This article examines the origins of the Folklore Movement based out of Beijing University between 1918 and 1926 in the context of a crisis of Chinese nationhood and the New Culture Movement. It addresses Chinese intellectuals' struggles during the national crisis that came after WWI, their decision to study folklore as a means of connecting to the common people, and the influence of domestic political power on this nationalist intellectual movement. Specifically, this article probes why this movement rose to prominence in the early twentieth century, how folklore researchers advanced it, and why it ultimately came to a standstill in Beijing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented that discusses issue articles on topics including American influences on the Chinese film industry during the Republican era, the presence of foreign film companies in Shanghai, China during that period, and the relation of wenyi literature and art to film.

This article re-examines the film theatre companies managed by Chinese individuals but registered under foreign laws, focusing on the representative film theatre owner. He Tingran and his companies. The article elucidates three roles of the foreign-registered film theatre companies: the capitalist, nationalist and social reformer. The owners of these companies occasionally switched between their Chinese and foreign identities to obtain various benefits, enjoying the various privileges of extraterritoriality, as well as maintaining control over the unconditional oligopoly of foreign distributors. This tactic included proclaiming the interests of the entire Chinese film industry within the foreign companies' association, on which they exerted a strong influence. The identity of being a foreign-registered film theatre company became crucial for resisting foreign pressures and protecting the domestic film market and film theatre culture post 1930s. However, these practices by the foreign-registered film theatre companies were not concluded either in terms of simple capitalist activities or blind nationalism; the many owners of those companies aimed to reform society through establishing a universal cinema culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualizes the rise of "early religious studies in China" with its apex in the 1920s within the heated debates on the role of religion in a modern Chinese society. While the most recent development of religious studies (zongjiaoxue) in China (including Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) is well known, its early emergence in the late Qing and Republican periods (ca. 1890-1949) has been a neglected topic. The author demonstrates first how antagonistic anti-religious and affirmative positions, received from Western modernization discourse and informed by the contested character of the concept of religion itself, led to the emergence of this new discipline in Republican China as a product of broader discourses on modernization. Secondly, the article evaluates the limited institutionalization of religious studies as a distinct " full" discipline in relation to the broader interdisciplinary " field" of research and public debates on religion. While the interdisciplinary character is typical of the field in general (also in the West), the limited degree of "full disciplinarity" depended on specific, local discursive and political factors of its time. As "religion" appears as an important modern discourse in East Asia, the early emergence of religious studies in China thereby reflects social, political, and intellectual transitions from Imperial to Republican China, and offers a unique perspective on Asian discourses on religious and secular modernities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces English-language scholars to The Compilation of Chinese Medicine Periodicals from the Late Qing and Republican Periods, a valuable new scholarly resource edited by Wang Youpeng. Compilation projects like this one have been a major field of scholarship in China from imperial times and serve the purpose of both preserving and selecting texts from around the empire. The medical journals included in this compilation took advantage of the newly available technology of print capitalism in Shanghai to respond to the challenge posed by a rapidly organizing Western medicine that sought to regulate and abolish Chinese medical practitioners. This article is a translation of Wang Youpeng's introduction to The Compilation and was first published in the China Reader's Journal (Zhonghua dushu bao) in August 2012. Wang argues that Chinese medical journals of this period are one of the best sources for observing the changing nature of medical practice and education during the late Qing and Republican eras so crucial to the development of medicine and science in China. The Compilation is a massive primary source not only for understanding the modern transformation of Chinese medicine from a private to a public endeavor, but also the larger role of medicine in Chinese society, seen through published documents on the battle between proponents and enemies of Chinese medicine. Literature specialists will be interested in the many short stories on medicine by important Chinese writers like Bing Xin. Ultimately, Wang argues, The Compilation should stimulate a multitude of new research projects. Given its importance in bringing together these journals from repositories all over China, we might add that research libraries and specialists may consider acquiring this substantive source and the separate index and abstracted table of contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period of the Beijing government of Republican China (1912–1928) occurred after the 1911 Revolution that toppled the imperial system and before the rule of the Nanjing Nationalist government. For modern China, it was an era of frequent trial and error in implementing political systems, as well as a significant phase of institutional transition following the New Policy reforms of the late Qing. Many twists and turns during this period of historical evolution stemmed from problems of the late Qing political reform. The three major issues occurring during the 1912–1928 era, namely the legitimacy of the government, the relationship between its legislative and executive branches, and the relationship between the central government and the provinces, were all dominated by the profound influence of traditional Chinese political and cultural frameworks. All of this made the 1912–1928 era more complicated than the late Qing period, increased the difference between one stage of institutional change and another, and accelerated the change in political systems while also broadening the choices available. Therefore, we should not only focus on the complex contention among all parties, but also acquire a deeper understanding of the limits imposed upon institutional renovation by tradition and circumstances through examination of the institutional adaptations behind the chaotic partisan politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This essay links and analyzes the South Society of late Qing China with the May Fourth Movement of the modern period. It shows that when the founders of the South Society were first contemplating its establishment, they emphasized two points: first, nationalism and patriotism; and second, democracy and antifeudalism. The patriotic May Fourth Movement of the modern era was an extension of the patriotic and democratic sentiment developed in the late Qing period. The May Fourth Movement was both a "natural development" and an active refining of the ideas of pre-1911 student movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a leader of the influential literary group known as the South Society, Chen Qubing used words as a weapon in concert with the Revolutionary Alliance to raise anti-Qing sentiment during the revolutionary period surrounding 1911. After the Republic of China was established, he followed Sun Yat-sen by undertaking political duties, launching armed conflict, and publicizing revolution. Because of Chen's shared political views with, devotion to, and whole-hearted efforts on behalf of Sun Yat-sen, the two developed a deep and long-lasting friendship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chen Qubin was an activist during the 1911 Revolution and an important essayist, thinker, and poet. This article details the highlights of his life and career in that era, offering a comprehensive discussion and analysis of how Chen changed from a traditional member of the literati to a committed revolutionary against the Qing dynasty. Though not so atypical of the time, the author argues, Chen's career path was par excellence for his generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of the nation has been considered to have delivered political modernity from its native Europe to the rest of the world. The same applies, though more implicitly, to those paradoxes inherent to the nationalist ideology - that between universalism and national particularity and that between liberal nationalism and imperialism. This article seeks to complicate these theses by looking at the interpretations of nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism provided by Liang Qichao, one of the most influential Chinese intellectuals in early twentieth century, during his exile in Japan when increasingly exposed to the encounter between worlds. This reading also engages with the wider debates on modernity/modernities in non- Western societies through showing that neither the 'consumers of modernity' approach nor the 'creative adaptations' approach can be easily applied here. I argue that the various tensions, contingencies and historical situatedness in Liang's accounts of the nation-state structure represent and constitute the paradox of the structure itself. They also shed light on contemporary debates about the limits of our political imagination in the misnamed 'global politics' beyond the false opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the policies and plans of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, GMD) regarding wireless radio broadcasting, arguing that they laid the foundations for the development of a national-level modem cultural institution aimed, for the first time in China, at mass propaganda and education. During the Nanjing decade, notwithstanding its limits beyond the most developed urban areas, the Nationalists' approach was the extensive use of radio broadcasting for the 'partyfication' (danghua) of Chinese state structure and the Chinese people' s social and cultural life. Nevertheless, their aspirations were greater than their ability to transform the plan into reality. Unable to impose an effective state monopoly on radio communication and broadcasting infrastructures, the Nationalists' aims to exert stronger control and to gain a hegemonic position in the Chinese 'ether' could be achieved only by resorting to technical, administrative and legal measures whose efficacy was rather limited, because it was subordinated to a capacity to have them implemented. The Nationalists' main accomplishments were the establishment of a powerful national radio broadcasting station under the control of the Party in Nanjing and of a central-level commission aimed at coordinating the work of the different state, Party and military bureaucracies involved in radio broadcasting propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study of Republican China's most widely read women's periodical, The Ladies' Journal (Fund zazhi), argues that the New Woman remained a highly contested ideal throughout the journal's publication from 1915 to 1931. Editors and contributors endorsed competing models of modem femininity that shifted over time, shaped by volatile political conditions and social trends. With a focus on sexual morality, this article subjects normative visions of the modern Chinese woman, as depicted in The Ladies' Journal, to a queer reading. By exploring the tension between widely circulated heteronormative discourses and their inherent slippages that revealed and fostered subversion, this article demonstrates that, rather than advocating for a clearly defined and radically new icon of sexual liberation, The Ladies' Journal presented a vision of the New Woman that was capricious, contested, and in some ways conservative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the period from 1906 to 1949, the local education administration system in China underwent the following changes; from establishing education promotion department (EPD); to replacing EPD with education department (ED); to restoring EPD; to establishing education bureau (EB); to reorganizing EB; to replacing EB with ED; and to restoring EB. The whole process shows modem China's efforts to establish a standardized, democratic, independent, professional and open administration system of education. At the same time, it also reveals that the education administration at that period was chaotic in organization, idealistic in goal-setting, westernized in content, and radical in manner. A review of this process will shed much light on the current reform in local education administration system in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Changsha Street Corps originated in the local militia during the period of the Taiping Rebellion, and it played an important part in Changsha's urban social management at the grassroots level. However, the role and influence of the street corps underwent changes during the process of modernization and the building of the modern nation-state. By 1920, although the street corps of Changsha still worked as the agent of the state at the grassroots level, its autonomy had been curtailed, and its social influence weakened. In the new social environment, even the maintenance of neighborhood interests became a challenge for the street corps. This article illustrates the readjustments in geopolitical and industrial relations during the process of urban modernization. It also illustrates how a new form of state power, namely the police, infiltrated the social management system, affected the traditional social structure, and complicated the interaction between modern state and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soviet cinema as part of the socialist cultural landscape in Maoist China has been well recognized and extensively researched. This article looks at the earlier exhibition history of Soviet movies in pre-socialist China (from the 1920s to 1940s). It demonstrates that the early Chinese consumption and reception of this film culture involved two intertwined attitudes. On the one hand, Soviet movies were greeted as a much-needed Hero in the Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist discourses. On the other hand, the exhibition of Soviet movies operated commercially, and commercial sectors promoted the popular appeal of these movies to fulfill the carnal desire of spectators. By examining film reviews, advertisements, and censorship reports, this article explores the ways in which the Hero image and the banal side of the Hero were constructed in the pre-socialist milieu of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban ills existed prior to the modern era, but modern urban ills differed from their traditional counterparts in that they were strongly characterized by "low levels of industrialization and high levels of urban ills." Many factors contributed to the rise of urban ills, including the failure to establish national and state authority in the late Qing and Republican eras, the impact of the divergent development of urban and rural areas, social stratification and unbalanced development of the social structure occurring during the urbanization of Tianjin, and the untimely methods and management systems adopted to regulate and control these problems. Many additional factors caused the urban ills of modern Tianjin to become increasingly severe, while the steady rise in urban problems hindered Tianjin's urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]