This new collection of essays provides a most welcome and refreshing perspective on media, culture, and communications in modern China. Celebrity in China departs from the existing scholarship in two respects. First, Louise Edwards and Elaine Jeffreys have assembled a team of international China-watchers working in assorted but cognate academic fields. This lends the collection a rich multi- and inter-disciplinary dynamic that is poorly represented in similar work. Second, the China focus provides an indispensable corrective to the idea that celebrity is associated only with “western” consumer cultures. These essays demonstrate the multiple ways of defining and analysing the concept of “celebrity”—its manufacture, circulation and reception—within a distinct cultural context. At the same time, it is clear that the development of culture in China has embraced and adapted regional (Taiwan, Hong Kong) and global influences, as well as capitalist practices that are prevalent after the country's “opening up” after 1978. Hence an interrogation of celebrity, a modern phenomenon in China that the book argues has evolved in part due to rapid advances in communications technologies, requires an understanding of how culture interacts with politics, economics, market reforms, new social processes, and the rise of nationalism. How else to explain the way military heroes—old and new—continue to be the focus of celebration in “new” media if not by the interface of technology with politics and the party-state? Or the campaign to promote “exemplary” mothers who represent the virtues most favoured by the Communist Party? Or the entrapment of young women into China's flourishing sex-trade who become “accidental” celebrities by escaping and almost killing themselves in the process?

Many of the essays address unfamiliar subjects: Jin Xing, “China's Transexual Star of Dance”; singers from the Miao ethnic group, performing what is called “Miao pop”; celebrity entrepreneurs as models of national development, and advocates of health activism. There is much to learn here, even for the most seasoned and cynical of China Hands, and many challenging ideas to engage the reader. In their excellent introduction to the collection, Edwards and Jeffreys provide the context and framework to understand the case studies analyzed by their contributors. In particular they recount the recent transformation of Mao Zedong from respected but much criticised political leader to “posthumous celebrity-commodity,” and remind us that Mao only became a “celebrity after his death” (p. 10). Mao remains in the top 20 list of famous Chinese figures according to internet search data, and his new-found popularity as a celebrity alongside representatives of China's modern popular culture suggests the complexity of fame and simultaneous co-existence of different forms of celebrity. Edwards and Jeffreys also note that many critics question the rise of the celebrity culture in China and lament its role in creating a passive and apolitical consumer society (p. 12). However, one recognises that this is a universal and long-standing debate within media and cultural studies and is far from unique to China: In many western countries the new celebrity culture—being famous for being famous with no discernible talent—has saturated the broadcast, print, and internet media with becoming a celebrity now a common aspiration among the youngest of children. The example here of Furong Jiejie—described by I. D. Roberts as “just an unremarkable young Chinese woman, with conservative interests” who writes about herself “in a self indulgent fashion on the internet” (p. 234)—clearly demonstrates the interaction of communications technology, market economics, the power of on-line consumers, and her own self-promotion and opportunism.

Other arguments are culturally specific and raise many new questions for China watchers. For example, writing about military heroes Louise Edwards says: “Acts of selflessness and dedication to the common good are qualities that most Chinese people would accept as positive. Behaviors that Australians or Americans would regard as reckless often gain favour among Chinese audiences” (p. 40). This is an intriguing idea and helps to explain not only the celebration of fallen military heroes from past conflicts and campaigns, but also the search for modern heroes throughout Chinese society who can act as role models. As Edwards tells us, it also explains why some Chinese are so surprised when heroes do not step up in other societies (Edwards cites reaction to the Virginia college campus shooting as an example), but resists the temptation to explain the absence of admiration for other possible Chinese heroes from the realm of politics who also stand up in self defence or for what they believe.

Celebrity in China travels across a terrain marked by inventive media technologies and creative cultural forms that can represent both individual and national expression. It is a terrain also characterised by complex interactions between culture, politics and economics. Above all, Celebrity in China demonstrates that the quest for, and circulation of fame is universal, even though its specific forms may be culturally distinct.