Contemporary Chinese Studies. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015. xiv, 329 pp. (Tables, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 9780774827805.
This volume about cultural production contributes to the growing literature bridging the divide between Republican China (1912–1949) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) established in 1949, and brings together studies of south China and its “frontier enclaves”—to borrow a term from Philip Kuhn—in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. It also contributes to recent scholarship that has aspired to incorporate Chinese material into global theory and knowledge production. The volume aims to inspire an enquiry into the “global dimension” of cultural production by exploring Chinese “cultural entrepreneurship” (4). The concept of cultural entrepreneurship encompasses the customary labels of poet, writer, publisher, and businessperson, and represents a form of cultural agency that transforms the cultural sphere. That is, it represents the business of culture in China and Southeast Asia (3–4).
A theoretical analysis of entrepreneurship relies on non-Chinese conceptualizations as well—among others, on Joseph Schumpeter’s definition of entrepreneurship as a “new combination of means of production” (15) in a broader sense, including political actors. This conceptualization is applied to Mao’s China, too (261). The epilogue, by Christopher A. Reed and Nicolai Volland, explores how the papers in the volume shed light on cultural entrepreneurship in the PRC as well as on transformations in the reform era and parallel trajectories of cultural entrepreneurship in other temporal and geographical contexts. The goal of the book is “to enrich our understanding of historical and contemporary patterns of cultural agency” (278). The collection also seeks to redeem overseas Chinese from their popular image as “the race of entrepreneurial geniuses” (4) by offering a new categorization of Chinese entrepreneurs.
The essays are grouped according to three categories of entrepreneurs, or cultural agents, in the Chinese cultural marketplace that have emerged over the past twenty years, as explained in the epilogue. These entrepreneurs resemble those of the Republican period. The first category comprises cultural personality models, one of whom, Wang Shuo, re-emerged and was able to capitalize on market possibilities in the reform era (Reed and Volland, 270). Essays in this section cover the overseas experience of the Republican-era “new woman” (Grace Fong), the “Butterfly brand” built on the image of actress Hu Die (Eugenia Lean), and the role of self-improvement discourse and gramophone technology in the marketing strategies of new correspondence schools in the teaching of Mandarin (Michael Hill).
The second category comprises tycoon models and entrepreneurs of culture, ranging from the transregional pharmaceutical Tiger Balm mogul and philanthropist Aw Boon Haw (Sin Yee Theng and Volland) to Hong Kong émigré media moguls such as Jin Yong (Sai-Shing Yung and Christopher Rea).
The third category comprises collective enterprise models, less apparent in contemporary China, from non-profit, hometown-oriented journals reaching a Cantonese audience at home and in the diaspora in Republican China (Robert Culp), to the pre-1949 Singapore film industry (Chua Ai Lin), to the decline of cultural entrepreneurship in the PRC publishing industry (Nicolai Volland). Individual chapters offer contributions to ongoing debates, for example, regarding how print capitalism worked in China through social and cultural goals, not through profits (Culp, 200), and examine little-studied topics such as the economic side of the film industry and Anglophone Asian channels (Chua Ai Lin). They also suggest useful analytical tools for examining self-branding as a modern cultural technique possible only in the world of “new global regimes of law, transportation and communication” (Lean, 86), the role competition between small and large publishing companies played in bringing about the end of the professional association of Shanghai booksellers, and, ultimately, cultural entrepreneurship in the PRC (Volland, 254).
The epilogue explains how these three categories evolved in the command economy of the Mao era, in the reform period, and beyond. The account of painting production during the Mao era stresses the agency of artists and their artistic entrepreneurship before the Cultural Revolution. This history of art as a history of cultural entrepreneurship is productive in that it offers an account of the history of intellectual production in the PRC and contributes to the narrative of party-state relations in the Chinese cultural milieu. The volume contributes to, though does not engage with, a rich historiography of Chinese intellectuals. Its theoretical goal is the application of contemporary analytical categories, such as the business of culture, to China in the first half of the twentieth century. This collection of essays represents a new period in the historiography of China, and the vantage point, that of capitalist China revived and flourishing, fits well with the analyses presented in the volume. Indeed, as Rea’s theoretical chapter on the concept of cultural entrepreneurship notes, this offers a new approach to “pluralism and mobility in the cultural sphere” (27) beyond the categories imposed by a political analysis.
Anna Belogurova
Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
pp. 781-783