Shanghai Filmmaking is a meticulously researched monograph that makes a dual contribution to Chinese film studies. First, it provides us with a detailed but straightforwardly written history of the Mingxing film studio. This production house was one of the most significant in Republican China, and Huang's monograph will be the standard work for scholars interested in Mingxing for years to come. Zhang Zhen's brilliant An Amorous History of the Silver Screen (University of Chicago Press, 2006) already completely changed our understanding of early Chinese films and their role in the cultural negotiation of modernization. But Huang's approach is pioneering in a different way; focusing on the institutions of filmmaking and what John Caldwell calls “production culture” (Production Culture; Duke University Press, 2008) remains rare in film studies in general, and even rarer in Chinese film studies.

Second, Shanghai Filmmaking's analysis of Mingxing is structured as an explicit correction of Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai and Xing Zuwen's Zhongguo dianying fazhanshi (History of the Development of Chinese Cinema; Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1963). Since the inception of Chinese film studies in English, scholars have used this work as a source of information, all the while knowing that its perspective is heavily shaped by the era and circumstances of its production. In the internal struggles in the People's Republic film world between figures with Yan'an and Shanghai roots, the book was part of an honourable but ultimately futile effort on the eve of the Cultural Revolution to defend those with Shanghai origins by highlighting their revolutionary pedigree. Huang's work reveals significant and intriguing omissions in Cheng et al.'s work. For example (pp. 211–13), a Ding Ling novella is not included as source for the famous 1933 Leftist film Kuangliu (Torrent). Ding Ling had been criticized in the Anti-Rightist campaign of the late 1950s and it would not have benefitted Xia Yan, screenwriter of Kuangliu and vice-minister of culture in Maoist China, to be associated with her.

However, Shanghai Filmmaking does more than provide missing information. It is also a systematic challenge to Cheng et al.'s perspective. They dismissed all filmmaking prior to the “Left-wing progressive film movement” in the 1930s as short-lived business speculation. In her first part, Huang demonstrates that Mingxing was a serious attempt to build a studio that would follow the Hollywood vertical integration model and pursue a national cinema as part of the effort to fight back against Hollywood's domination of the Chinese film market and to modernize Chinese culture. She also traces the histories of the founders of the studio and some of its major filmmakers to debunk the idea that there was a clearly demarcated Left and Right wing. Instead, Huang is able to show more complex patterning, including: cooperation based on shared cities of origin or education background; hiring of Left-wingers in anticipation of increased sales rather than for political reasons; and a shared nationalistic commitment to post-May Fourth modernization values that also borrowed internationally.

The second part of Shanghai Filmmaking turns to Mingxing's films and their reception. Enabled by vastly improved access to archives in the People's Republic, Huang does not restrict herself to the 25 out of 193 Mingxing feature films that have survived, but uses scripts, publicity materials, stills in magazines and so on to reach out further. First, she uses Appadurai's concept of the “mediascape” to show how Shanghai cinema was one hub on an international and intermedial network of textual borrowing and transformation. For example, she traces Mingxing's 1926 hit Konggu Lan (Orchid in an Empty Valley) back to the Victorian novella East Lynne.

Second, Huang takes on board Peter Brooks's concept of melodrama as a mode that enables the ethical negotiation of modernity – a new order that had overthrown old ethical structures left citizens without ethical bearings – and also Linda Williams's five characteristics of melodramatic film narrative. This enables her to analyse key texts to argue, against Cheng et al., that the vast majority of Mingxing films cannot be plausibly separated into opposed cinematic renderings of “Butterfly” literature, Left-wing collective analyses of class struggle, or Right-wing “soft cinema.” Instead, they share an investment in melodrama as a mode that engages the audience intellectually and affectively in what Huang calls a “sentimental education.”

Of course, it would be naïve not to note that the new insights provided by Shanghai Filmmaking suit current perspectives, with their emphasis on global linkages and shared Chinese KMT Nationalist and Communist commitments to modernizing the country, just as surely as Cheng et al.'s history met the needs of his era. After all, all history is written from the present. But this does not detract from the huge contribution of Huang's work. It is not only a carefully researched and richly detailed work that provides numerous new insights into the cinematic culture of Republican China through a case study of the Mingxing Studio. It is also a meticulously produced volume, with Chinese characters for all names and film titles, and a comprehensive filmography of Mingxing's films as well as a listing of their key personnel. All these achievements make Shanghai Filmmaking a key volume in the rapidly expanding library of books on Chinese cinema of the Republican era, and one which will have lasting value for scholars for years to come.