| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Barbara Mittler. A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai's News Media, 1872–1912. (Harvard East Asian Studies Monographs, number 226.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2004. Pp. xvi, 504. $60.00.
The Shenbao was founded in Shanghai in 1872 by the British merchant Ernest Major. It became one of the longest running and most widely read of China's newspapers and has assumed, in various ways, a high profile in the study of modern China.	1
This book, an in-depth examination of the Shenbao during the first four decades of its operation, offers many fresh insights on the subject. The three chapters in part one explore the conditions that made Chinese readers accept so readily a foreign medium. By combing through a large body of text from the paper and analyzing it meticulously, Barbara Mittler concludes that it was the familiar literary forms, language, layout, and contents employed by the Shenbao that made it appealing. The three chapters in part two explore the "act of reading" (p. 245) and the way the Shenbao constructed its reading public. Here, Mittler shows that in an effort to reach as wide a market as possible the paper avoided targeting any one group, such as women or political activists. Nor, given the multiplicity of images and messages that filled its pages, did it promote any simple, unitary identities such as "the new woman" or the Shanghairen (Shanghai person).	. . .

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