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The railroad junction city of Zhengzhou in Henan Province was a key Nationalist strongpoint in the Chinese Civil War, a well-guarded city that would be "defended to the death." But what did the encroaching conflict mean for the city and its inhabitants? This article breaks new ground by exploring the tense relationship between local authorities and residents during the last months of Nationalist rule. Using eyewitness accounts, newspapers, and sources surviving in the municipal archive, it uncovers struggles over refugees, taxes, corvée labor, and the militarization of the city. In each case, state-society relations in Zhengzhou were damaged by both Nationalist misgovernance and the sheer cost of total war in an exhausted region. By the long, hot summer of 1948, the authorities had little to offer Zhengzhou's residents and were concerned only with their own institutional survival. The Nationalist government had become what we might call a "state for itself."

This article argues that famines have rapid as well as slow temporalities. Using newspapers, contemporary eyewitness accounts and subsequent memoirs, it uncovers the mixed temporalities of causation and experience in the 1942–43 famine in Henan Province, north-central China. It begins by exploring how the slow elements of famine played out in Henan: endemic poverty and malnutrition, years of war in the province, and the drawn-out experience of drought and starvation in 1942–43. More importantly, though, it then demonstrates that it was rapid processes that tipped much of Henan into what one observer called a 'blitz famine': hailstorms, price spikes and the violence of military requisitioning. The experience of famine, too, had fast temporalities, including snap decisions about flight, individual or collective acts of violence, and the sudden bodily collapse that often followed the slow process of starvation. But if all famines have mixed temporalities, this article closes by showing that these elements of time are not politically neutral. Comparing 1942–43 with Henan's other major twentieth-century famines (1920–21, 1928–30 and 1958–61), I argue that the growing role of the state in causing famine led to faster temporalities of disaster.

AbstractThe cleansing service is primarily a question of adaptability and cost. Methods of collection, transportation and disposal are not related to health. It should be entrusted to the public words department.