Juan Wang's wide-ranging, bold analysis of the tabloid press (xiaobao) in turn-of-the-century Shanghai is, fundamentally, a study on the relationship between culture, class, and politics at the end of the Qing. Wang views the tabloid press as a space wherein lower- and middle-ranked literati came together as writers and readers to form a “tabloid community” characterized by an anti-establishment, populist mood that signaled and contributed to the erosion of the long-enduring bonds that linked the literati to the dynastic state. Wang posits that the tabloids’ treatment of politics and officialdom as a source of endless entertainment and target for ribald mockery subverted the authority of the Qing state. Asserting that “successful revolutions are always vocalized before they are enacted” (pp. 83–84), Wang contends that the tabloids unwittingly prepared the ground for the overthrow of the Qing in 1911.

We have many studies on enlightenment-minded elite intellectuals who shaped Chinese politics at the turn of the century. Far fewer shine light on the much larger cohort of deracinated intellectuals, however, the type who comprised the tabloid community featured here. Through a subtle reading of tabloid newspapers and their companion literary journals, presented by means of a generous number of translated passages, Wang captures that cohort's worldview, how its anxieties, prejudices, pleasures, and values reflected the conflicted social position in which it found itself. Shanghai was the natural gathering place for such men who, although well-educated and better off than most Chinese, nevertheless found themselves shut out of officialdom and ill-prepared to take advantage of opportunities provided by the reform institutions launched in these years. Socially marooned, they sought escape and pleasure in the city's sophisticated courtesan world and in its brothels.

Li Boyuan and Wu Jianren, the founders of the first tabloids, self-consciously catered to that cohort's thirst for entertainment by departing from the stuffier tone that typified “mainstream newspapers” in favor of lighter fare. At the outset, the tabloids published extensively on courtesans, prostitutes, and the men who patronized them (including the tabloids' readers). Unapologetically commercial in nature, the tabloids generated significant profits while nurturing a self-referential population of readers that developed a sense of identity through the journalism it consumed. As Wang shows, writers and readers engaged dialectically in shaping the tabloids' contents. Readers announced their tastes by means of their power as consumers, and to attract readers, writers in turn did their best to cultivate and meet those tastes.

In their liberal and open attitude towards sex and pleasure, the earliest tabloids represented a rejection of orthodox morality. By the earliest years of the twentieth century, however, when Empress Dowager Cixi declared reform, it became safer to discuss political subjects. The tabloids jumped at the opportunity. Their turn of attention to the political revealed that the men who wrote for and read the tabloids had not traveled so far from orthodox morality, after all. While on the one hand tabloids celebrated hedonism, on the other hand they evinced outrage at what their writers and readers considered officials' ubiquitous corruption, which they poked fun at and condemned in highly moralistic terms. In Wang's estimation, the tabloids' most defining feature, in fact, was their sustained excoriation of officialdom in moralistic language. In their pages, officialdom was stripped of all dignity; scolding and laughing at powerful men became a form of sport that revealed just how little legitimacy the old order retained.

But as Wang observes, such outrage also indicated that the tabloid community still subscribed to the moral norms of late imperial society. The community was disgusted by the pervasive corruption and cynical about officialdom's ability to make meaningful change to save China, but it distrusted revolutionaries even more. Although tabloid writers and readers adopted the posture of “we” as against the elite “them,” embraced key reform ideas, and spoke out for the underprivileged, they did not make common cause with elite reformers or the revolutionaries, both of whom they mocked as self-interested social climbers. Deeply populist, they looked upon all who possessed or seemed to be seeking after social status with a jaundiced eye. The tabloids were not politically conservative, but neither were they in favor of radical political change or wholesale Westernization. One of Wang's most intriguing points is that the community's irreverent and satirical style, for all its playfulness, had the ironic effect of hastening a revolution that its members did not want.

This study is delightful to read and represents an important contribution to the fields of late Qing politics, culture, literature, society, and print journalism. On a few occasions Wang alludes to the national reach and significance of the story told here. It would be useful to learn more about the extent to which the mood Wang taps into in Shanghai represented something that was more geographically pervasive on the eve of the 1911 revolution.