How, Robin Visser asks in this timely and valuable study, is Chinese culture changing in the wake of the unprecedented rapidity and scope of its urbanization process? Visser's answer takes the form of a series of field reports from across the fluid and fast-transforming topography of postsocialist urban culture, touching on phenomena ranging from city planning practices to the rise of cultural studies in the Chinese academy, avant-garde art, cinema, and urban popular fiction. As Visser makes clear, to pose the “urban question” in contemporary China is also to invoke the fault lines of a postsocialist (and particularly post-1992) moment, in which an aggressively developmentalist state and the logic of capital grinds up against local communities, histories, and practices. Visser not only provides a sensitive account of the massive urban demolition and dislocation that has been one product of this seismic encounter, but also chronicles the sparks of creative and critical reflection that have been thrown up by that social and political friction.

One of the strengths of the book is that it does not analyze the Chinese situation in isolation. Instead, drawing on the work of materialist geographers such as David Harvey as well as Chinese scholars associated with “New Left” critiques of capitalist modernization, Visser places Chinese urban aesthetics within the global trend toward neoliberal deregulation, privatization, and globalization since the late 1970s. This approach yields startling insights, as when Visser imaginatively juxtaposes Xu Tan's 1997 photographs of airliners taking off over a dilapidated migrant workers' settlement (Welcome to Southern China Airlines), Cai Guo-qiang's 1996 photographic evocation of the Manhattan skyline placed alongside a recreation of a mushroom cloud above the Nevada desert, and Chen Shaoxiong's Landscape, in which dueling fighter planes are sketched in above video stills of the burgeoning Guangzhou cityscape. These images linking “urban violence” with “global capitalism” (p. 73) are eerily reduplicated by the literary evocation, in a Qiu Huadong story from 1998, of a helicopter deliberately piloted into a gleaming Beijing skyscraper. What this sequence—eerily foreshadowing the events of September 11—makes clear is not only the prevalence in Chinese cultural production of the late 1990s of images reflecting the high anxiety and inequities of new forms of urban mobility, but also the global mobility of such images themselves.

Visser's survey breaks down into three sections: “Conceiving the Postsocialist City,” “The City as Subject,” and the “Subject in the City.” The first provides a useful account of the historical context in which China's urban transformation has taken place, and the ways in which urban space has been imagined by urban planners and contested by citizens, creative artists, and public intellectuals. Visser here straddles vastly disparate disciplines—from architecture and urban geography to political economy, intellectual history, and cultural studies—in an ambitious attempt to capture the multifaceted reality of the postsocialist city and the discourses through which it has been conceived and represented. While this attempt is not always seamless—one might argue with her account of urban development in the 1980s as a product of direct foreign investment or regret the lack of a fuller characterization of the architecture of the socialist city—it is admirably syncretic and wide-ranging.

The second section provides case studies of the capitol city of Beijing and the commercial center of Shanghai, and outlines the divergent ways in which they are represented in post-Mao fiction, film, and art. At stake here are the ways in which each city has renegotiated a local identity while at the same time serving as a node in a network of cultural and financial flows. The final section, drawing on urban sociology as well as Levinasian ethics, looks at fiction as an arena in which new—and often fragmented and pathological—urban subjectivities are formed in the crucible of an alienated market society.

Although consistently lucid and informative, the interdisciplinary breadth of these chapters does raise methodological questions. Materials are deployed largely for what they have to say about urban China, but there is somewhat less attention given to close readings of artistic form. A fuller and more self-consciously theorized elaboration of “urban aesthetics” on a formal level could help us learn to see the postsocialist city not just in works nominally about urban life, but also in the changing formal characteristics of genres that willfully escape its boundaries, such as martial arts, fantasy, romance, and the pastoral. There is also a notable focus on artistic and cinematic works that have, sometimes by design, circulated internationally (Lou Ye's Suzhou River, the novels of Mian Mian), rather than equally telling but more distinctly vernacular forms of urban popular culture, such as the work of the Shanghai comedian Zhou Libo.

These quibbles, however, should not detract from the considerable achievements of this stimulating study, which will be an indispensable guide for students and scholars of contemporary Chinese urban culture.