The subject of this book is the cultural consequences of the evolving relationship between the state and society during China's transition from a socialist to postsocialist system. Yipeng Shen seeks to demonstrate the ways that the narration of the nation generates various public discourses of contemporary China. He characterizes the myriad cultural consequences in terms of a transition from socialist mass line aesthetics to neoliberal nationalism. His central argument is that, to varying degrees, Chinese subjects have transformed the state project of modernization into their own through mass aestheticization of the nation (p. 1).

This is indeed an ambitious book, as Tze-lan Deborah Sang comments on the back cover. The narration of the Chinese nation over the past three decades is no doubt a broad topic, and it is explored through case studies of cultural products from a wide range of media, including documentary films, feature films, TV drama, novels and Internet literature. To make the formidable task even more daunting, the case studies are carried out within the limited space of four chapters (excluding the Introduction and Conclusion) and about 140 pages. It is thus not realistic to expect Shen to deal with the questions he raises at great length.

The Introduction is dense and hard to read, not least because Shen discusses numerous concepts only briefly using specialized jargon, and tends to make general statements without unpacking them. A result of this is that the book's key concepts appear to be floating signifiers. This is certainly the case with “narration of the nation,” “ethnography of the nation,” “nationalism,” “mass nationalism,” ‘intellectual nationalism,” “cyber nationalism,” “state nationalism,” “patriotism,” “aestheticization of the nation” and “mass aestheticization.” It also makes it difficult to have a clear idea about the book's analytical framework or the development of the thesis. The Conclusion is unexpected. It does not include conclusions to be drawn from the previous analysis but introduces the new topic of “dreams in the 21^st century,” including Xi Jinping's “China Dream” and American Dreams in China (2013). It looks like a short chapter that is added as an afterthought to bring the book closer to the present from 2007, when Cool Evil – the most recent work discussed in the chapters – was published.

The best part of the book is the four chapters, which comprise case studies of a wide range of well-known cultural products. Though these products have been the subject of no small number of academic studies, Shen's contribution to the field is nonetheless significant as he offers fresh readings of each. Chapter one delves into the Chinese national character as represented in the 1988 TV series River Elegy and contextualizes the case study through comparisons with the Ah Q psyche and the Lei Feng spirit. The case study has much to say about broader questions of subjective modalities, developmentalism, the revival of Confucianism and the “socialist spiritual civilization.” Chapter two turns to the aesthetics of a bestselling book Manhattan's China Lady (1992) and a popular TV drama A Beijinger in New York (1993). The analysis in the chapter highlights a prevalent sentiment in Chinese society during the 1990s that making money is patriotic, and brings to the fore configurations of gender, class, and ideologies of everyday life.

Chapter three continues to focus on cultural products of the 1990s – this time state-sponsored leitmotif films of the late 1990s, including The Opium War (1997) and Grief over the Yellow River (1999). Whilst largely reinforcing official ideology, the two films under discussion respond to Party-state imperatives quite differently from the works of fifth-generation directors and articulate alternative visions of history and sentiments that do not agree with the Party line. Chapter four proceeds to look at popular Internet novels, particularly The Commercial Three Kingdoms (1999–2000) and Cool Evil (2007). Shen calls attention to the more flexible relationship emerging between netizens and the state as a result of Internet literature, taking the literature to be “a cardinal embodiment of Chinese cyber nationalism” as well as one of postmodernism and Chinese literary modernity. Another consequence of the literature that Shen spotlights is the erosion of differences between pastiche and parody and between postmodernism and modernism which germinates alternative senses of history.

Shen's analyses of these important works are insightful and make interesting reading. Questions remain though as to what to make of their import, or Shen's interpretations, in relation to the narration of the Chinese nation and politic-cultural change in contemporary China. There can be little doubt that the case studies provide illustrative examples of literary works, films and TV drama of the post-Mao era, but it is debatable whether or not the examples can be treated as a reasonably representative sample of “public discourses of contemporary China,” and whether the stories actually can be read as national allegories or narration of the nation, as Shen suggests. Theoretical assumptions alone cannot settle the issue; much more is needed in the way of convincing empirical evidence.

These questions are compounded by inadequate attention to agency in the book. Shen stresses the historical significance of nationalism for “mass imagination and identification,” “mass nationalism,” “mass aestheticization,” and “public discourses.” Yet, there is little description of public or mass reception of the works under discussion; the only identified subjects are a small number of novelists, filmmakers and producers of TV drama and some of those who have participated in debates about their works, who are metonymically referred to as, and expanded into, postsocialist subjects, intellectuals, netizens, media elites and so on. In other words, the public and masses are virtually absent. Furthermore, little is known about the intention and sentiments of the postsocialist subjects as explicitly stated by themselves at interviews or in blogs and Weibo. What the reader is left with are Shen's interpretations. As such, the analysed works do not enable one to say anything about China's mass imagination and identification, mass nationalism, mass aestheticization or public discourses with any certainty.

This raises a methodological question not just about Shen's book but also about literary and cultural studies which explore social, political and cultural change through case studies of novels, films, TV drama and other cultural products. The book should be of interest to those who conduct similar research. It should be of even more interest to those who look for fresh and insightful readings of the prominent works analysed in the book and who wish to have some idea about China's shifting cultural ethos from the late 1980s to the first decade of the 21st century.