In this book Jin Dalu draws on years of archival research as well as a deep knowledge of other published and unpublished sources to produce a magisterial survey of Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution that moves away from the existing focus on causes and responsibility and looks instead at the interweaving of the extraordinary events of that period with Shanghai people's experiences of everyday life. Each chapter covers a different topic, ranging from the construction of giant statues of Mao on university campuses to the changing types of fish available in the city's markets. Unlike most scholars up till now who have asked of the Cultural Revolution “Why did this happen?” Jin asks “What happened?” The effect is to shift the focus of attention away from political elites and leading Red Guards and onto ordinary people and everyday life.

Historians are shaped by the sources they read, and Jin's work is clearly the product of his reading in the Shanghai Municipal Archives. An important result is that the reader gradually comes to see the Cultural Revolution as a municipal campaign. One of the parts of the book that best illustrates this is the description of how the city was organized to receive the four million young people who arrived from elsewhere in the country between August and December 1966 to “exchange revolutionary experiences.” The city government took responsibility for setting up reception offices; organizing accommodation in universities and hotels; and providing food, bedding, and even warm clothes. More than 150,000 people, many of them older women, were mobilized to look after the visitors. Special trains were laid on, railway tickets were provided and allocated, and souvenirs were manufactured to be given as an inducement to students who signed up to return home. While many of those who came spent much of their time sightseeing, others took an active part in political events in Shanghai. The city government provided these visiting Red Guards with offices and equipment, even though many of them were engaged in attacking that same government. All this reminds us that although the Cultural Revolution was initiated by political maneuvering in the highest levels of the national elite and although it sometimes caused the collapse of effective local government, it was also a huge state-run campaign: a bureaucratic operation requiring negotiations between different government bodies, committees, reports, and funding to achieve its goals.

It was also through the processes of local government that the radical ideals and policies of the Cultural Revolution affected ordinary people's everyday lives. For Shanghai people one characteristic feature of the period was the difficulty of getting hold of items that were a normal part of their diet. The reasons varied, and not all were explicitly linked to the Cultural Revolution: after a century of rapid industrial development pollution was beginning to affect farmland around the city. However, the immediate cause of most of the shortages was the disruption of vegetable markets due to attacks on capitalist practices that were at the heart of the radical rhetoric of the period. One of the more bizarre results that Jin notes was a rise in vegetable robberies as boats bringing vegetables into the city were raided and large quantities of vegetables stolen for sale on the black market. Jin argues that corruption usually associated with the introduction of the market economy in the 1980s in fact had its origins in the politically induced shortages and disruptions of the supply system during the Cultural Revolution.

However, this is not just a history of the Cultural Revolution, it is also a history of Shanghai. His study reminds us that the Shanghai of the Cultural Revolution was the same city whose integration into global capitalist systems has been condemned, or more recently celebrated, by generations of historians writing on the early twentieth century. Its inhabitants included entrepreneurs and vast numbers of factory workers, but also the people who ran China's leading modern institutions and were entranced by the global consumer culture of the 1930s and ‘40s. One of the areas in which the continuities are most unexpected and most striking is the production and sale of news and information, which had been such an important feature of Shanghai's economy in the early twentieth century. Jin traces the history of various newspapers and journals produced and sold by Red Guard groups, district governments, low-ranking work units, and even middle-school students who might best be described as independent entrepreneurs. One group issued a journal that included reports of fighting from across the country, compiled by questioning Red Guards arriving from those areas. They printed 20,000–30,000 copies of each issue, and it circulated well beyond the city. Of course some of the impetus for publication was political activism but there were also financial incentives: informal markets developed (and were repeatedly closed down), and some publications made significant sums of money. Another area of continuity notably at odds with most Western images of Cultural Revolution China is the continued importance of personal self-expression through clothing. The alternative to fashionable but hard to obtain military uniforms was for everyone to look the same, and this was never popular: at the height of the Cultural Revolution, in 1968, a person was trampled to death and six others were injured in a crush of people trying to buy decron, a fashionable new Chinese-made polyester cloth. Jin also catalogues a series of campaigns against “weird clothes,” which included much criticism of people wearing clothes that were clearly influenced by contemporary Western fashions. Mini-skirts were surprisingly popular: a 1975 crackdown on the city's main shopping streets found that of 1,095 women wearing skirts 169 were wearing skirts with the hem more than 3 inches above the knee.

Each chapter of the book is followed by appendices containing documents, memoirs, statistical data, transcriptions of interviews, and occasional autobiographical essays by the author. These lively and personal texts, which allow the subjects to speak directly to the reader, both contribute to Jin's argument and make the book highly readable, suggesting interesting possibilities for reshaping the largely rigid format to which we are accustomed in academic monographs.

The book's length (two volumes), detail, and great variety of material make it almost impossible to summarize, but its unusual structure means that it remains an engrossing read. It is also an exceptionally illuminating study that changes our perceptions of both the Cultural Revolution and the history of Shanghai.