On the evening of September 8, 1922, Xi Shangzhen, a twenty-four-year-old female clerk, hung herself in the office of her employer, Tang Jiezhi, the managing director of the Journal of Commerce. The city's newspapers were ignited with impassioned debates on what had led Xi to suicide: her failed investment in the stock market bubble of 1921, which would burst a year later, or her employer's insult toward her personhood as a new woman? Three months later, Tang was sentenced by a Chinese court to three years in prison and then held in a military prison until 1928, three years after the expiration of his original sentence. In this creatively structured book, Bryna Goodman masterfully tracks the evidentiary trails of this “multifaceted event—a suicide, social scandal, speculative bubble, and legal case” (p. 209). By parsing the warps and wefts spun with “office spaces, print culture, associational practices, financial and legal calculations, the market, and the courts” (p. 27) and woven into the dense fabric of Shanghai society, Goodman examines the everyday practices of citizenship, nation, and democracy and reflects on a crucial question on the nature and quality of the early Chinese Republic: what happened to the public that was trying to emerge and survive in a Republic that was empty of institutional structure?

Focusing on Shanghai in The Suicide of Miss Xi allows Goodman to unfold an understudied dimension of early Republican politics. Goodman demonstrates how the ideals of science, democracy, equality, and nationalism articulated by intellectuals and students in Beijing were adapted in Shanghai by journalists, businessmen, and members of various associations. In this city, new women, like Xi, made an independent livelihood in sexually integrated offices, and businessmen, such as Tang, participated in the May Fourth Movement and tried to influence national politics through their economic activities. After Xi's suicide, the media, by virtue of the profusion of reports, were able to collectively provide a full picture of the event, despite each individual paper's shortcomings. As Goodman enunciates, there existed in Shanghai a “fragile republican public of citizens that embraced gender equality, property rights and market access, and, with some ambivalence, law” (p. 209).

The simultaneous energy and fragility of this public are examined in the three main chapters of the book, which are centered on gender, market, and law—“three constitutive elements of the imagined democratic and more egalitarian nation that inspired the new public realm” (p. 56). Chapter 2 presents fascinating discussions of the unstable historical construction of the new woman, as well as a broad array of social and cultural concepts and practices that embodied the fissures in this modern creation—suicide and modernity, debates on women's personhood, concubinage in the Republic, the eroticized public, and the melancholy aesthetic in which female suicides were represented. The new woman was imagined as a participant in the republican civic order, but, as Goodman argues, she experienced in the reality of her everyday life conflicting expectations and ambiguities in the definition of her social and economic role. In a Republic that lacked institutional substance and a society that presented conflicting moral codes on gender relations, moral failures of individual new men were often dramatized and magnified to explain the tragic fate of the new woman.

The book makes a critical contribution by bringing the economy, market, and capitalism into our understanding of May Fourth politics. Goodman highlights the forgotten frenzy of creating stock exchanges and trust companies overnight in 1921 Shanghai, and she points out that this wave of economic opportunism was advocated by many elites who drew upon Western economic theories, ideas of national strengthening and development, and, by extension, the regaining of China's sovereignty. As Goodman argues, this economic nationalism was, ironically, marred by the divided sovereignty and lack of state regulations in semicolonial Shanghai. The extraordinarily large number of stock exchanges and trust companies was partly made possible by registering companies with the representatives of different countries in the concessions and the corresponding lack of control by the Chinese state.

The problems caused by divided sovereignty and lack of Republican institutional structure were similarly exhibited in the execution of Tang's trial. Xi's suicide occurred in the International Settlement, but Tang was arrested by the Chinese police and tried in the Chinese court. Tang's lawyers believed that evidence would hold ultimate sway in court and prepared defense arguments that were later adopted as exemplary models in law textbooks. However, the judge's decision was made following the outcry for a moral justice unsubstantiated by evidence, as well as behind-the-curtain political influences from the local military leader, whom Tang had openly criticized in his journal. Goodman sorts through a jumble of conflicting laws, legal institutions, and judicial cultures and brings to light fundamental contradictions in the early Republican system. While the ideals of the Rrepublic were betrayed at the state level and there was no institutional or legal protection of democratic practices, a multitude of associations adopted the neologism of equality, democracy, and national sovereignty. Each group utilized the same vocabulary of that neologism to attack its rivals, making an already struggling public even more fragile. In the end, as Goodman demonstrates, neither traditional moral justice nor Republican legal justice was realized.

There is much more to learn from this rich, nuanced, and engaging book, which reflects both an experienced historian's deep thinking on modern Chinese history and a comprehensive dialogue with previous scholarship. What makes the book particularly useful for students is its explanation of the historical and historiographical context necessary for understanding the case. This research also sheds light on some of the constitutive issues in today's China, such as rule of or by law, and the social and political roles of the private sector.