Book Review

Asia

Academic research on late Qing and Republican China has in recent years produced diverse and exciting challenges to conventional narratives of "Chinese modernity." Wen-hsin Yeh has brought together some of these in a scholarly collection of essays that makes for rewarding reading. Stimulated by unprecedented access to rich archival sources and a refreshing (though none-too-timely) engagement with contemporary debates in cultural studies and the social sciences, much of this research has also been inspired by the demise of the revolutionary paradigm dominating intellectual approaches to Chinese modernity until 1989. The result is a conceptualization of Chinese modernity not as an already assumed entity defined according to a basically linear historical trajectory but as a changing configuration, the meanings of which are culturally produced through multiple spaces and subjects.	1
A rethinking of the approaches to modernity associated with the intellectual and political orientations of dominant May Fourth narratives emerges in Leo Ou-fan Lee's analysis of the role of Shanghai's publishing culture between the late Qing and the 1930s. Led by the commercial press, popular publications offered an imaginary of the modern, linked to the nation, as a culture of consumption, accompanied by a new demarcation of the boundaries between public and private space. Images of beautiful women at home, of department stores, hotels, and cinemas, positioned individuals, particularly women, in a public culture of domestic consumption and pleasure, in which the relationship between individual and society was necessarily redrawn. The advertisement of diverse products contributed to the dissemination of this social imaginary. Sherman Cochran explores the advertising success of Huang Chujiu, a manufacturer and distributor of "new medicine," also known as the "King of Advertising." The huge profits Huang made out of his Ailuo Brain Tonic, a medicine of unproven benefits, were, Cochran argues, due to his skill in presenting a "Western-style" product in a terminology embedded in Chinese medical principles. The appeal of the calendar advertisements of beautiful women, painted by artisan painters who were to become famous for their work, could be similarly explained by the seamless merging of "traditional" images with a modern message. Nor were these images of modernity restricted to the cosmopolitan urban areas. The regional and local spread of advertising as a "formidable medium of mass culture" before 1949 suggests that modernity was also present as an aspect of visual culture in the rural areas.	2
In David Strand's conceptualization, modernity should not only be associated with the commercial vibrancy of the large cosmopolitan centers. In his analysis of the making of urban China, with a particular focus on Lanzhou, he argues that modernity was a cultural process of exchange of commerce and technology and the moving publics associated with them. In this, there was no hierarchically constituted national urban network; the large urban centers functioned as nodal centers of exchange of people, commerce, and ideas, the effects of which were diffuse in promoting a practice and an ideal of city life. The constitution of towns and cities through the import of technologies and organizational forms further signified a new range of opportunities for officials and technocrats to deploy their "social capital." The result was a decentralization of political power under the new municipal administrations, but not a process of democratization. The social and political elites controlling technological and commercial urban development functioned as "brakes on municipal reform rather than as engines of civic leadership" (p. 126).	. . .