This article offers the first sustained and focused study of how electricity and electrical devices were marketed to Chinese consumers in early twentieth-century China. Focusing on Chinese-language advertisements placed in the well-known newspaper Shenbao by the Shanghai Municipal Council’s Electricity Department and its successor, the Shanghai Power Company, the article conceptualizes “electrical modernity” as a bundle of purchasable promises through which electrification was promoted to potential customers. The article shows that these advertisements fulfilled both a general educational function, informing readers of the uses and advantages of electricity, and connected electricity to three domains central to contemporary modern aspirations: economic modernization, hygiene, and the modern home and family. The article also demonstrates how electricity was marketed differently to industrial customers and urban households with the use of distinct vocabularies and imagery.

This article examines how Huizhou merchants shaped their identities during their economic ascent from the fifteenth century onward. Because commerce carried a stigma in Confucian ideology, they shifted the basis of self-presentation from mercantile success to moral excellence. This produced a competition in virtue, where the moral capital accumulated in a single lifetime could not rival that amassed across generations. Merchants therefore redirected identity claims from personal virtue to membership in lineages where virtue had been cultivated over generations. In doing so, they moved the foundation of identity from individual achievement to collective lineage affiliation. This shift provides a new explanation for the rise of lineages and genealogies from the perspective of identity formation. By underscoring the initiative, creativity, and adaptability of merchants in driving these changes, the article also repositions them from the cultural margins to the center of identity-making in late imperial China.