Business of Culture

Christopher Rea is an associate professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. Nicolai Volland is an assistant professor of Asian studies and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University.Contributors: Chua Ai Lin, Robert Culp, Grace Fong, Michael Gibbs Hill, Eugenia Lean, Christopher A. Reed, Sin Yee Theng, Wang Gungwu, and Sai-Shing Yung

• Foreword by Wang GungwuIntroduction / Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland1 Enter the Cultural Entrepreneur / Christopher ReaPart 1: Cultural Personalities2 Between the Literata and the New Woman: Lü Bicheng as Cultural Entrepreneur / Grace Fong3The Butterfly Mark: Chen Diexian, His Brand, and Cultural Entrepreneurism in Republican China / Eugenia Lean4 Culture by Post: Correspondence Schools in Early Republican China / Michael Gibbs HillPart 2: Tycoons5 Aw Boon Haw, the Tiger from Nanyang: Social Entrepreneurship, Transregional Journalism, and Public Culture / Sin Yee Theng and Nicolai Volland6 One Chicken, Three Dishes: The Cultural Enterprises of Law Bun / Sai-Shing Yung and Christopher ReaPart 3: Collective Enterprises7 Local Entrepreneurs, Transnational Networks: Publishing Markets and Cantonese Communities within and across National Borders / Robert Culp8 Cultural Consumption and Cosmopolitan Connections: Chinese Cinema Entrepreneurs in 1920s and 1930s Singapore / Chua Ai Lin9 Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Twilight: The Shanghai Book Trade Association, 1945-57 / Nicolai VollandEpilogue: Beyond the Age of Cultural Entrepreneurship, 1949-Present / Christopher A. Reed and Nicolai VollandGlossary; Bibliography; List of Contributors; Index

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 Universitat Gottingen, Germany (Pacific Affairs)