Pingchao Zhu's meticulously researched book on Guilin's wartime culture fills a lacuna in studies on the period of China's War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45). Although much has been published about wartime culture in other cities, such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Yan'an, Kunming, and Chongqing, very little has been written about Guilin in English language scholarship. Drawing extensively on archival and Chinese-language sources, Zhu shows that the current understanding of wartime culture in Chinese scholarship as anti-Japanese propaganda, produced and orchestrated predominantly by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is largely inaccurate as regards Guilin. Instead, wartime literature, journalism, and drama in this city are found to be diverse, innovative, and cosmopolitan. Zhu adeptly illustrates how these trends mirror the complex political and social scene in Guilin, marked by shifting alliances between the Nationalist government, CCP, and Guilin warlords, massive displacement, and an influx of foreign war correspondents, writers, politicians, and military.

The first chapter of Zhu's study looks at the Guangxi warlords and their relationship with the Nationalist government. Despite having supported Chiang Kai-shek during the Northern Expedition (1926–1928), local warlords became dissatisfied with his unwillingness to fight the Japanese and with his use of force against CCP armies after the war broke out. Zhu argues that, compared to other warlords in Chengdu and Kunming, the Guangxi System was stronger militarily and played a crucial role in supporting wartime cultural activities they believed would contribute to the war effort. As a result, warlords exhibited tolerance towards the CCP and allowed party members to participate in cultural activities and publish their work, a topic Zhu explores in more depth in the second chapter on Guangxi warlords’ relationship with the CCP. As she points out, this relationship remains understudied in Western scholarship, which has focused instead on interactions between the CCP and the Nationalist government.

In the third chapter, Zhu discusses fiction and poetry written or published in Guilin during the war. Literary productions are shown to be formally experimental and produced by intellectuals from different political parties, professional affiliations, and geographical locations. As she writes, “numerous literary schools and writing styles blossomed to diversify the cultural development in the society” (109). While displaced wartime intellectuals rallied around the cause of national salvation, at the same time they sought to work within the tradition of the New Culture Movement begun in China's urban, coastal cities in previous decades. Zhu argues that the diversity and creativity of Guilin's culture was the product not only of wartime displacement, but also of a relatively open political atmosphere. In contrast to Yan'an and Chongqing, the Guilin warlords’ alliances with both the Nationalist government and the CCP created an environment where culture was not as constrained by political controls and government ideology.

The fourth chapter examines the proliferation of journals, newspapers, and drama in wartime Guilin. Over sixty journals, magazines, and newspapers were moved to this city during the war. Guilin's first Southwestern Drama Festival, in 1944, was a hallmark event that brought together dramatists from around China, working in a wide array of traditional and modern dramatic art forms. Together with Tian Han, Ouyang Yuqian organized this event and wrote sixteen plays during his stay in Guilin. Moreover, Ouyang made important innovations in modern drama by intermixing local opera and Western drama in an effort to appeal to regional audiences and promote the war effort.

In addition to the influx of intellectuals and publishing houses from coastal cities, Zhu shows in the last chapter how Guilin's culture was enriched by international influences. Described by American war correspondent Brooks Atkinson as the “Paris of Free China” (168), the city was the destination of famous Western writers and correspondents, including Agnes Smedley, Ernest Hemingway, John Fairbank, and others. Many translated works were published in Guilin, and books printed in Guilin were subsequently translated to other languages and published abroad.

Arguably, one shortcoming of this study is that it does not draw as much from existing Western scholarship on the war period. Zhu cites James Sheridan's observation from his 1975 book China in Disintegration that “Western scholarship on China's War of Resistance has generally focused on the political and military aspects of the war while research on wartime culture and intellectual activities remains quite limited” (xxiv). Though this statement is partially true, Zhu only briefly includes several quotes from Chang-tai Hung's War and Popular Culture and John Israel's Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution. Cultural studies dealing with this period are mostly omitted. A few examples of such studies include Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s, Edward Gunn, Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937–1945, Kirk Denton, The Problematic of Self in Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, and Carolyn FitzGerald, Fragmenting Modernisms: Wartime Literature, Art, and Film, 1937–49, and “Mandarin Ducks at the Battlefield: Ouyang Yuqian's Shifting Reconfigurations of Nora and Mulan.”

Even though Guilin was clearly a thriving cultural center with distinctive qualities, viewed in the context of existing English language scholarship, the cultural scene in wartime Guilin does not appear to be as unique. Rather, in some ways, Zhu's findings corroborate with those of other scholars. Like Zhu, the authors listed above examine formally experimental, diverse, and cosmopolitan elements of wartime culture in other cities. Zhu's book thus adds to a growing body of scholarship that analyzes how intellectuals continued the project of the New Culture Movement during the war, in contrast to the CCP view of wartime culture as solely propaganda. In particular, her study does an excellent job of historicizing developments in wartime culture within the political fragmentation and displacement of this period. In doing so, she not only illustrates Guilin's role as a vibrant cultural center, but also provides a historical framework to better understand formal innovations and new kinds of modernism that emerged during the chaotic years of the war.