This volume comes out of a conference held at Stanford University on social networks in Republican Shanghai. Most of the authors of the ten chapters have published at least one major work on the history of Shanghai or a related subject. For them, therefore, the conference was to some extent a revisiting of their previous work with a focus on social networks and state building.

The authors ask how Republican Shanghai, a city “at the crossroads of empires,” divided among three often-contending administrations, not only endured but prospered. The consensus is that, in large measure, the answer is to be found in the powerful cement of social networks based largely on interpersonal connections.

The volume is organized in three parts in addition to an introduction by the two editors. The first part covers three of the city's well-known personalities: Huang Yanpei (1878–1965), a provincial minister who fervently advocated “vocational education” for the masses; Wang Yiting (1867–1938), a comprador, artist, and a supporter of Sun Yat-sen's revolution; and Du Yuesheng (1888–1951), Shanghai's formidable Green Gang boss. The chapters on these three, by Wen-hsin Yeh, Kuiyi Shen, and Brian G. Martin, respectively, provide lively portraits of remarkable individuals who rose from divergent socioeconomic backgrounds—Huang Yanpei was a former jinshi degree holder; Wang Yiting had been an apprentice in a modest qianzhuang (traditional bank); and Du Yuesheng had been an assistant in a fruit shop—to become major social network builders.

The next three chapters focus on events and social movements. Elizabeth J. Perry's chapter illustrates “the centrality of social networks in facilitating mobilization” (p. 88) in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, and the Shanghai Workers' Three Armed Uprisings of 1926–27. It casts doubts on conventional sociological accounts of the role of collective identities in popular protests. Parks M. Coble uses the National Salvation Movement, a national campaign centered in Shanghai during the 1930s to pressure the Nanjing government to take a firm stand against Japan, as a case study to show how effectively different nongovernmental organizations and social elites could be brought together for a common course. Sei Jeong Chin's chapter on the trial of Du Zhongyuan, the publisher of a mainstream anti-Japanese magazine, The New Life Weekly, confirms the role played by the city's elite networks in the formation of “negotiated public opinion” prior to the Sino-Japanese War.

The third and last part of the book is on organization and connection. Bryna Goodman's and Nara Dillon's chapters pair well in dealing with Shanghai's charity and welfare-providing organizations. Goodman's study of tongxianghui (native-place associations) reveals that, as “building blocks of the larger public” (p. 177), these organizations were conductive not to equal citizenship but rather to a differentiated citizenship. Moreover, these organizations were increasingly penetrated by the state. Dillon's chapter details refugee relief and the politics of philanthropy in three wars that caused a tide of refugees to flow into Shanghai: the Japanese attacks in 1931 and 1937 and the Chinese civil war of 1946–49. Jeffrey Wasserstrom's chapter takes a somewhat different approach from the others by focusing on what he calls the “border crossers” or “compradors of sociability,” from the famous Soong Mei-ling to the virtually unknown George Fitch (a YMCA activist), Norwood Allman (an American lawyer), and William Yinsom Lee (an Australian-born Chinese banker). Wasserstrom also discusses social clubs that allowed Westerners and Chinese elites to intermingle. He suggests that these “middlemen” and their clubs in Republican Shanghai formed a particular type of social network, one that warrants further study.

The editors and authors have done an admirable job of bringing the issue of social networking and its role in modern Shanghai to the fore. One may wonder whether the question of what held the city together could also be asked of modern China's other administratively divided cities, such as Tianjin and Hankou. Indeed, one may ask a much bigger and more significant question: What held the nation together in a century of turmoil from 1850 to 1949? There must have been tremendous dynamics at work in Chinese culture that created a milieu in which middlemen and social networks could counteract the formidable forces that threatened to divide the nation. Despite the enormous power of these divisive forces, ranging from foreign powers that sought to carve out spheres of influence, if not simply take control of the entire country, to rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars, China did not fall apart but rose to an unprecedented level of unity under communism. The theme of this book, one hopes, may be taken up by other researchers to grapple with the exceedingly complicated, and crucial, issue of the sources of the resilience and adaptability of China as a nation and the Chinese as a people to the rapidly changing modern world.