Book Review

Asia

Shanghai's Nanjing Road was one of the very few urban streets in former Western concessions or settlements in China whose name did not change to become more politically correct during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The name Nanjing lu (road), which distinguished the commercial heart of the largest commercial city in China, was simply too famous to be altered.	1
The articles collected in Sherman Cochran's new book came out of a series of conferences sponsored by the Luce Foundation, at Cornell, Shanghai, and Berkeley. Cochran has assembled a very effective team, combining the work of established scholars like himself and Wellington K. K. Chan with the efforts of an exciting new group of young Chinese and American scholars from several U.S. institutions. This volume focuses on the development of commercial culture in and around the nucleus of Nanjing Road during the first half of the twentieth century—a politically tumultuous period. Nanjing Road was created in the mid-nineteenth century as the major east-west road of what soon became known as the "International Settlement," an area reserved by treaty, populated mainly by British but also American and a few French foreigners. (The French had their own, separate concession just to the south.) By the latter part of the century, it had become the retail center of the city, second only to the famous waterfront Bund as a place of commerce.	2
In the early twentieth century, Nanjing Road emerged as the locus of a burgeoning commercial culture that combined both Western and Chinese elements. The two articles making up part one of the book are by Chan on the development of the first major department stores on Nanjing Road and by Cochran on the British American Tobacco Company's advertising strategies. These papers establish the evolution of a mingled Chinese and Western culture whose major features were imported from the West, with adaptations to the Chinese ambiance, in a process that elsewhere in the book is likened to "dubbing" a film in a foreign language (p. 244). Tobacco advertising is a quintessential example: the techniques of mass advertising, a direct import from the West, were directed by Westerners and implemented by Chinese subordinates. Only when familiar Chinese art and images were introduced into the ads did they become successful in the Chinese market. Department stores, by contrast, were developed by Chinese entrepreneurs from Guangdong (Canton) who had become familiar with western prototypes in Hong Kong and Australia. Thanks in part to intensive advertising, they became enormously popular and economically successful.	3
As Carrie Waara demonstrates in a chapter on art magazines of the 1930s that leads off part two, art, images, and advertising became intermingled in Shanghai's commercial culture during the republican period. One hallmark of the newly integrated culture was the image of the "modern" Chinese woman, wearing a traditional dress and Western high-heeled shoes, who exemplified the consummate consumer.	4
The essays in the book are divided chronologically into three sections. Part one focuses on developments in the first two decades of the twentieth century; part two is situated in the republican period (1924–1936); while part three deals with the Japanese occupation (1937–1945). These articles depart from a strict adherence to Nanjing Road as a geographic location and discuss commercialization more broadly. The creation of a consumer society in Shanghai in the 1930s is the focus of an article by Carleton Benson that carries on the themes established by Chan, Cochran, and Waara. Here Benson discusses the effects of Chiang Kai-shek's "New Life" movement and radio broadcasting, using. Radio ads used popular songs to advertise articles for mass consumption, while at the same time preaching conservative restraint. Consumers embraced consumption and rejected "New Life" morality.	. . .