The subtitle of Charles Musgrove's book—”Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing”—is perhaps not the most elegant and might even strike some readers as a little abstruse, but it does capture nicely the grand ambition of this interesting work. The book is not so much about Nanjing itself as it is about what Nanjing meant or “did” for the Nationalist regime when it served as the capital of the republic from 1928 until it was occupied by the Japanese in 1937. In particular, much of the book focuses on how the architecture and the use of urban space in Nanjing were tied to the regime's ritual performances and their political effects. In that vein, Musgrove's research follows—and indeed joins together—two historiographical trajectories in twentieth-century Chinese studies in recent years: First: a steady stream of works that explore the political and sociocultural ramifications of the urban transformation and changes—both planned and unplanned—in republican China. Second: a growing corpus of historical literature that implicitly or explicitly challenges, to varying degrees, the once popular depiction of the Nationalist regime as, at best, incompetent and lacking in popular support or, at worst, an utter failure. As Musgrove points out, his research is about understanding what the Nationalists did accomplish, rather than what they did not (p. 15).

The first two chapters trace the strife and debate that led to Nanjing being declared as the capital of the republic in 1928. To its supporters, Nanjing was the symbol of a new beginning, in stark contrast to Beijing as home to the corruption of the old regime under foreign domination. Once established, planners, armed with the latest theories in scientific planning and management, set out to reconfigure the landscape of the city in ways that were repeated in many other Chinese urban centers. Musgrove maintains, however, that the fact that Nanjing was the capital lent its process of change added significance and that “Nanjing was not simply just another city” (p. 16). As he puts it, the Nationalist government “was not just constructing a capital but a new symbolic order that operated on a different set of spatial principles reflecting a new desire to take the previously unseen power of the state and place it—monumentally and ritually—within public view” (p. 76). As elsewhere in China, funding was a consistent issue and urban renewal was often met with popular resistance, as “[t]he planners claimed to know more about what people needed than the people themselves” (p. 88).

Musgrove then follows with a chapter that provides some fascinating details on the “architectural aesthetics” of Nanjing government buildings. Beyond documenting the familiar struggles of the architects to come up with designs that they deemed both modern and Chinese, Musgrove also highlights the apparent contradictory impulse of the government: On the one hand, buildings were often designed to be more open and more deliberately visible to the public as a way to “invite” the people to connect with the government as citizens of the new state. On the other hand, “the citizen's invitation was not a completely open one” (p. 117). Buildings also were often guarded by high walls and gates. Their typical large windows hence did not so much suggest an invitation to the populace from outside looking in as they reminded the citizenry of the coercive power of the state watching over its own people (p. 124).

Musgrove's main argument, however, is that the result of all these changes carried out by the Nationalist government amounted to much more than simply the “remaking” of Nanjing. Nanjing's transformation, despite various setbacks, laid the groundwork for the government to carry out its agenda of ritual performances that in turn had a cumulative effect—indeed positive effects at least from the perspective of the government—on the people: first on the people of the city and then by extension on the people of the country, as Nanjing was constructed to be the undisputed ceremonial center of the nation. As Musgrove explains, the physical makeover of the city enabled the people to “participate in the new parades, mass meetings, and pilgrimages to the nation's sacred monuments.… [T]he capital itself was conceived as a sacred space where the people would be changed and the nation take shape. These transformations would be replicated throughout the land” (p. 17). Musgrove then elaborates by taking the reader through the construction of the Sun Yat-sen mausoleum and memorial park, and the efforts of the Nationalist government to literally “lure” the people to participate in their newfangled ceremonies and activities.

It is at this point of the book that Musgrove's argument becomes a little stretched. He insists that the government-sponsored rituals had cumulative effects in bolstering the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime, even though he readily concedes that “[t]here is little if any description of what the common participants and observers of these ceremonies thought or said about them” (p. 196). Instead, Musgrove tells us that “just taking part—whether sincerely or insincerely—gradually changes perception and builds acceptance of the myths that the rituals represent” (p. 257). That might be the case in some instances, but whether such reasoning can shoulder the weight of Musgrove's contention that Nanjing “emerged as an effective symbol of the modern Chinese nation and supplied the central government with an important aura of legitimacy as well” (p. 245) is perhaps debatable. Musgrove also repeatedly refers to Nanjing as the embodiment of a new cosmology of the Nationalist government, which he eventually clarifies as “one-part Sun Yat-sen ideology, one part rationalized template of what planners considered natural and scientific space and time, and one part reverence of a Chinese ‘essence’ as represented in the rites and aesthetics of the capital” (p. 251). This all sounds reasonable, although the reader might wonder how this “cosmology” actually worked and connected to people's participation in the mass ritual performance.

Finally, the book's penultimate chapter on Nanjing as the ritual center for street protests poses still more questions than answers with regard to Musgrove's central argument. He suggests, for example, that “[p]rotests in the capital, while potentially challenging GMD [Nationalist] legitimacy due to the unrealistic claims the party made about its role in the nation, ultimately served to further associate Nanjing with symbolic notions of nationhood” (pp. 241–42). Being the seat of the central government, it is surely not surprising that protesters chose to voice their discontent with the regime in Nanjing. Perhaps legitimacy “is the product of conflict, not unanimity” (p. 20), as Musgrove contends, but the chapter still left this reader pondering how exactly conflicts led to “symbolic notions of nationhood” and enhanced the legitimacy of the Nationalists instead of undermining it.

Such quibbles aside, China's Contested Capital certainly provides the reader with plenty of food for thought, and represents a significant contribution and addition to what can be called “revisionist” literature on the history of the Nanjing decade.