This article investigates the impact of male migration on left-behind women in nineteenth-century Chongqing, focusing on the intersection among gender, migration, and religion. It analyze the unintended consequences of failed male migration, in which the husband's failure to send regular remittances was prone to cause tremendous anxiety and financial difficulties for his wife. In the absence of strong male-centered kinship organizations, Chongqingese women exploited unorthodox options to support themselves. Buddhist monasticism proved appealing because it provided both a stable source of livelihood and an inclusive all-female space. However, female renunciation was controversial because it challenged state-sponsored patriarchal values. Returned husbands enlisted the state's help in revoking their wives' religious decisions. Paradoxically, for vulnerable women like concubines, nunhood proved an attractive option because it helped them obtain migration-triggered divorces on favorable terms. They strategically synergized the bodily practice of monastic celibacy with the discourse of female chastity to assure their estranged spouses of lifelong commitments to non-remarriage. By doing so, these women succeeded in receiving generous financial compensation. This study highlights how the combination of religion and translocality enabled women to renegotiate their positionality within the patriarchy.

This article investigates the collective responsibility organizations among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing, when the city became one of the most important metropolises on the southwest Qing frontier. It also introduces two successive turning points in self-organization that were associated with two different classes of boatmen – skippers and sailors. First, in 1803, skippers gained the authority to institutionalize their organizations through their negotiations with the local state regarding official services and service fees. Second, when similar service and fiscal tensions emerged between skippers and sailors in the mid-nineteenth century, the skippers facilitated and supervised the institutionalization of collective responsibility organizations that were run by the sailors themselves. By contextualizing this expansion of collective responsibility organizations within the multilayered interactions between skippers and sailors, this article proposes that the perspective of interclass networks is crucial for deepening the study of state−society interactions, the capital−labor relationship, as well as the tension between imperial integration and regional diversity in early modern China.

With the rapid rise in the prevalence of non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) diseases across the world, the microbiological diagnosis of NTM isolates is becoming increasingly important for the diagnosis and treatment of NTM disease. In this study, the clinical presentation, species distribution and drug susceptibility of patients with NTM disease visiting the Chongqing Public Health Medical Centre during March 2016–April 2019 were retrospectively analysed. Among the 146 patients with NTM disease, eight NTM species (complex) were identified. The predominant NTM species in these patients were identified to be Mycobacterium abscessus complex (53, 36.3%), M. intracellulare (38, 26%) and M. fortuitum (17, 11.7%). In addition, two or more species were isolated from 7.5% of the patients. Pulmonary NTM disease (142, 97.3%) showed the highest prevalence among the patients. It was observed that 40.1% of the patients with pulmonary NTM disease had chronic pulmonary obstructive disease and bronchiectasis, while 22.5% had prior tuberculosis. Male patients showed more association with the conditions of cough and haemoptysis than the female patients. In an in vitro antimicrobial susceptibility testing, most of the species showed susceptibility to linezolid, amikacin and clarithromycin, while M. fortuitum exhibited low susceptibility to tobramycin. In conclusion, the prevalence of NTM disease, especially that of the pulmonary NTM disease, is common in Southwest China. Species identification and drug susceptibility testing are thus extremely important to ensure appropriate treatment regimens for patient care and management.

The burial of war dead was a key element of displacement and community formation during wartime and postwar China and Taiwan, 1937–1955. Reckoning with the physical burial and spiritual pacification of civilian as well as military dead posed practical and epistemological problems for the tens of millions forced to migrate amid shifting political and military boundaries. Various populations of living and dead refugees became increasingly politicized on the national and international levels, affecting local rituals and family burials. The accumulation of unidentified or lost bodies raised the stakes for the incorporation of the known dead into local, translocal, or national communities. The moral imperative of families and lineages to reconstitute themselves in the aftermath of war was made concrete via the extensive networks of locally-identified charitable organizations who worked to transport coffins back “home” from China's interior. The Nationalist government, meanwhile, prioritized symbolic control over military heroes in ways that ignored or eschewed burial and family ritual. The KMT and those who fled with them to Taiwan in 1949 were then cut off from their national as well as family graves, and struggled to find ritual and practical methods of overcoming or temporarily ameliorating political boundaries, geographic distance, and the passage of time.

From September 2009 to September 2010 we undertook a survey of the Endangered François’ langur Trachypithecus francoisi in south-east Chongqing to compare the species' present status with historical records from the 1990s. Based on a literature review, interviews with local people and our survey we found François’ langurs in only three isolated sites, across four counties, with a total area of occurrence of c. 57 km2. The total population was estimated to be c. 200 individuals in 27 mixed sex groups. There were 21 groups (149 individuals) within a reserve (Jinfoshan), and four groups (36) in Furongjiang and two groups (13) in Heishangu were not within any reserve. The primary threat to the langur is habitat loss caused by traditional firewood use and agricultural encroachment but there is also increasing loss of forest to hydroelectric projects and construction of tourism infrastructure and facilities such as highways, hotels and telephone lines. The three sites in southern Chongqing province are adjacent to four areas in north-east Guizhou province that contain c. 60% of the wild population of the species in China. The seven sites combined are the main stronghold of this species and the geographical proximity of the sites raises the possibility of setting up ecological corridors between some of them.