In her study of Shenbao, Shanghai's largest daily newspaper, in the years between the May Fourth Movement and the beginning of the Chinese-Japanese War, Weipin Tsai sets out to examine “the conflicts, challenges and opportunities generated through encounters between nationalism and commercialism” (p. 1) as they present themselves on the pages of Shenbao. She hopes to find how Shenbao's readers responded to the multifaceted image of Chinese modernity presented to them on the pages of Shenbao (p. 2).

In six chapters, the elegantly slim volume touches upon issues reflecting the turbulent atmosphere of the period: nationalism, shame and guilt (chapters one and four), changing gender (chapters two and three) and class relations (chapters five and six). Each of these is well-chosen, as it appears pivotal to the experience of early Republican China. The book is an easy read, providing new angles on topics of import to historians of Republican China. Based on discourse and image analysis, Tsai redefines the meanings of individualism and individuality, for example. She asks how to interpret “objectifications” of both men and women in advertising, and she muses the importance of the newly developing so-called “small family” on spending as well as “householding” patterns. Throughout her study, she shows that newspapers like Shenbao may indeed have had a role to play in knowledge production, from hygiene to thriftiness to morality: by introducing modernity to its readers, they themselves constituted, according to Tsai, a Chinese “public sphere.”

Each of the chapters is based on a different (often very limited) set of Shenbao materials, sometimes adding supplementary documentation from other print media. To thus contextualize the Shenbao text from other, so-called “popular” media (such as literary or women's magazines: the use of the term “popular” in this context is problematic; Tsai only implicitly acknowledges how many different degrees of “popular” the Shenbao text offered) is very helpful, to be sure, but how significant and representative the articles and advertisements chosen for discussion are is not always clear: how many of them and in what time frame actually speak in the tongues that Tsai reports? Tsai is right to point to the many different voices with which Shenbao was able to speak, but to give each of these different voices a time frame, a historical context, and a “statistical rating” on how representative of the whole text of Shenbao at a particular time this kind of voice is, would have been very helpful.

In most of the chapters, more pages are spent on drawing the background from existing studies of the phenomena at hand than on foregrounding Shenbao's particular position: how does the detailed history of banks in chapter two help us in the discussion of texts and advertisements advocating saving accounts? How does the elaboration on the (already well-researched) discourse on revolutionary literature and literary revolution relate to the types of articles included in the reformed Random Talk section that is really the topic of chapter five?

In drawing backgrounds, then, there may be bit too much of everything – laudable, but characteristically (too) short are the occasional comparative forays to European print culture, for example. Accordingly, the text ends up a bit too sweeping and general but skimpy in the details that bear in particular on the analysis to follow. By being broad and yet not detailed enough when it comes to declared key issues, the book is missing important dialogues, with Paul Cohen on shame, with Karl Gerth on nationalist advertising, with Pang Laikwan on advertising and women, and with Zhou Xun on smoking in Republican China.

Except with advertising, the concrete genre of the materials (news or editorial matter) analysed or the column in which they appear is seldom discussed, their chronology is not sufficiently foregrounded either, even the titles of the articles discussed and analysed are sometimes missing (a listing of the articles and advertisements taken from Shenbao is not included in the book: they only appear scattered in the footnotes). This neglect, which may be due to publication policies, can be very sad, especially when it entails missing particular allusions – so, for example in the article by Liao Maosha who actually cites the name of Lin Yutang's journal (which he attacks) in the title of his critical article, but with a different meaning, a detail which is completely lost in translation (p. 151). The lack of Chinese characters in a book which repeatedly discusses crucial changes in terminology is puzzling, but most likely, the author is not to be blamed for this. All of this may sound nitty-gritty critical, but it is a reflection only of the disappointment with what may have been a much better book had it been for different publishing guidelines.

One of the major achievements in this book is its attempt to get closer at the Shenbao reader. Tsai does so by retrieving the image projected of the (implied) reader on the pages of Shenbao itself, by discussing the social and historical circumstances of reading (strangely enough she never discusses the price for Shenbao), and by paying much attention to the kinds of texts that could be attributed to readers. Tsai shows convincingly that Shenbao reached out toward many different social groups and – for commercial reasons among others – sought to extend its audience to include ever new groups: by changing existing columns, such as the Random Talk to “May Fourth spirit,” for example (chapter five) and by creating new columns (such as Spring and Autumn) not to lose old readerships either (and thus to preserve the type of literature that would be condemned by May Fourth protagonists as “mandarin duck and butterfly literature”). Her conclusion may be slightly too optimistic: to say that Shenbao was positioning itself to become a newspaper for the whole of society (which it did from its first days in 1872, one only needs to read the first inaugural statement) is true, but to conclude that it truly did so may be to go just one step too far. Nevertheless, her point is well taken: Tsai's book makes an important contribution by showing that the Shenbao reader was indeed much more diverse in class (and gender) background than is generally assumed.