| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Qin Shao. Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890–1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 351. $60.00.

Urban modernity in China in the early twentieth century is most commonly associated with Shanghai, a fast-moving city with electric lights, department stores, and a cosmopolitan population. Qin Shao takes the reader north of Shanghai to Nantong, situated on the other side of the Yangzi. A modest administrative town in a rather poor region, Nantong was transformed in the early Republican era into a showcase of Chinese urban development. The creative force behind this transformation was Zhang Jian (1853–1926), founder of Nantong's famous Dasheng cotton mills and the dominant figure in Nantong politics in the early twentieth century. In the post-Mao reform era, as Shao records, Zhang was rescued from the dustbin of Maoist history and held up as a model worth emulating, posthumously attaining in person what he had hoped his model city would achieve. He is the central character in the story of the making of modernity (or, as Shao would argue, of something that looked like modernity) in Nantong.

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