Introducing Contemporary Chinese Print Media: Cultivating Middle-Class Taste, Yi Zheng sets an ambitious goal: parsing the evolution of “contemporary Chinese taste literature” amid the “Party-led, market-driven developmentalism” of the post-Mao era.

After three chapters of more modestly etched scope (and about a hundred leanly breezy pages), the Afterword sums up media firms' “championing of a post-socialist affluence that predicates the focused production of taste literature [as] more than luxury lifestyle manuals” but also “middlebrow genres and forms” (p. 106). These reform-era print products lean on “political and social evocation of traditional as well as modern cosmopolitan culture as an essential resource for post-reform Chinese middle-class life” (p. 106). Contemporary Chinese Print Media largely succeeds in substantiating the Afterword's synopsis.

Chapter one, “Exemplary tastes, memories of class: history as a cultural source,” introduces a wide array of cultural actors who have mined China's many pasts in service of a present agenda. She spotlights when former “Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Jingtao [sic], demonstrated how vague reference to traditional culture could anchor a new state-sponsored civility in his proposal for an ‘Eight-Step Programme’” (p. 18) of virtues and vices; then pivots to how “personal memoirs and cultural histories, which became a major genre of the diversified print media of the 2000s,” rely on “an enduring an traceable elite lineage” to “redress the spiritual wreckage caused by violent political revolution and breakneck economic development” (p. 19). Classically trained survivors of that tumult, now elderly, re-emerge in books like The Last of the Cultural Aristocracy (Zui hou de wenhua guizu, by Chen Chao Hua, Nanfang Daily Press, 2007), which trade on their subjects' classicist cachet. As Zheng aptly notes, accelerating marketization and digitization of modern Chinese society paradoxically entrenches print industry sectors aimed at cultural elites: paper is now a taste-defining luxury item resonating with traditional literati culture, rather than a daily necessity of Mao-era mass-literacy. Zheng repeatedly invokes lyricism as a signature component of post-Reform taste literature, notably in an extended section on Yu Qiuyu. Her anatomy of Yu Dan's Confucianism-driven celebrity offers another intriguing look at “the new self-made participants, inheritors, and guardians of siwen [literary culture] for post-socialist China” (p. 48).

Chapter two, “Narrating city: placing class,” examines how particular urban spaces generate class and taste narratives through books, glossy magazines, and other media sold to emerging and aspiring middle classes. “A new cultural imagination based on lyrically invoked cultural associations … [that are] imprinted with comforting lyricism for the locals for safekeeping, and recreated to provide in-depth and discerning sightseeing” (p. 54). Cheng Naishan, in particular, emerges as a pivotal in parlaying her social “circles of old Shanghai bourgeois” into “underwriting the trends of the post-Reform present” (p. 57) through fiction, commentary, and her illustrated essay collection called Shanghai Fashion (Shanghai shishang, with Huo Youzhi, Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2005). Cities, and their affluent classes, generate standards of taste; but while “class here can be emulated, and tasteful,” it is “not simply a sum total of wealth” (p. 59). An examination of Chengdu's laid-back image through Elle and a gourmet's guide to Sichuan cuisine balance out the chapter.

Chapter three, “Aesthetic-politics of prosperity: romancing the middle class,” delves into white-collar romances as a “major print genre” (p. 79) often brought to the screen (though increasingly vice-versa). Books and glossy magazines again form the backbone of this chapter's source material. Zheng intriguingly finds “romance” to be less genre definition and more “chuanqi (fantastic tales)”-style plot device reset in a post-socialist middle class professional landscape. Indeed, Zheng sees “the corporate world as a model for contemporary professional taste culture” far beyond white-collar romance. In a Guangzhou municipal government personnel handbook advising civil servants on “trendy but conservative” dress, she finds “a taste elaborated in these specifications as improvable, and class cultivation as uniting rather than divisive (the governing and governed are re-grouped into the serving and served...as clearly as members of one class)...[and] are redefined from government representatives to state sector professionals” (p. 84). The chapter continues with an elaboration on analyses of “‘petit-bourgeois’ (xiaozhi)[sic, several times]” that have built through the book. It concludes with readings of Rayli and other lifestyle magazines as pathways to taste development for, especially, lower-middle class women seeking a less intimidating means of “moulding one's desires according to good taste sanctioned by a cosmopolitan class standard” (p. 101).

Contemporary Chinese Print Culture offers some highlights. The opening discussion of the Chinese language's complex accretion and erosion of meanings around “jieji” [class] is a useful primer, though the flexibility is not fully explored in close readings.

Zheng's broad and creative use of sources, from magazines to business books, is both a strength and a weakness. Her grounding in the class-based aesthetic taste-making of Bourdieu's habitus and his expanded Weberian notion of Europe's bourgeoisie offers a promising framework for analysing a broad range of texts, many outside the traditional purview of literary scholars but well within the middle class print market mainstream. But handling such a wide range of material in a slim volume not only raises questions of source selection; it also appears to generate many typos and confusing references that frustrate efforts to verify Zheng's work. The bibliography is problematic – Yu Zhi's Modern Shanghai (Modeng Shanghai) is repeatedly rendered as Shanghai Modeng. This invites confusion with Leo Ou-fan Lee's seminal work known by the latter title in Chinese (and oddly unmentioned in this volume despite its theorizing of “cultural imaginaries,” such as on p. 72).

After chapter one, the argument loses its focus on the materiality and primacy of print culture, selecting sources whose iterations in film or digital media may precede, or which lack any special distinction from their paper counterparts.

And borrowing a working definition of “xiaokang” (arguably “moderately well-off”) from an American book written for multinationals marketing in China is questionable; in stressing this gloss, Zheng fails to note how the Party propaganda's recent stress on xiaokang reads as both a reaffirmation of Ruist canonical frameworks and, in aiming down a rung from “Datong,” a step away from messianic, Maoist utopianism.

Contemporary Chinese Print Media may not entirely clear its Introduction's high bar; in their breadth and brevity, the chapters do not entirely cohere to support its theoretical framework. The book does remain an engaging and worthwhile contribution towards improving scholarly analysis of the developments and dislocations in China's post-socialist media landscape.