In a brief afterword, Frederic Wakeman asks himself why he devoted “so much effort to fathoming such a morally monstruous” figure as Dai Li, the chief of Chiang Kai-shek's secret service and he confessed that he was motivated by “a real fascination” for “cobra-like Dai Li” (p. 367). A biographer needs a minimal empathy with his hero. In the present case, however, it was an unwilling empathy for which the author felt that he had to justify himself. How to dissociate understanding and exonerating? Trying to avoid any revisionism, Wakeman opted for an implicit compromise: understanding and condemnation.

This book illuminates the dread world of secret police, spy and counterespionage organizations in Nationalist China. Wakeman has turned every stone and used every kind of source: Chinese, American and Old Shanghai municipal archives, memoirs of agents and observers, contemporary newspapers and magazines, as well as all available secondary literature, including some novels. Notes take up 152 pages, representing about 40% of the text's 365 pages. An exhaustive bibliography takes 38 more pages and readers will find the detailed and well-organized glossary-index very useful in navigating an enormous number of personal names and administrative and political labels.

What, another book about Sun Yat-sen? The sceptical reader should not be deterred. He or she will learn much by reading this informative, lucid history of Sun Yat-sen's career, his thinking, and his influence on China as well as on various leaders of developing nations of the last century.

Wells portrays Sun as a rare, humane revolutionary who could have unified China and facilitated China's transition to a peaceful, modern society and state. Such achievements were well in his grasp but the foreign leaders of Sun's time preferred a weak, divided China and ignored his pleas for assistance.

Although Sun was famous in China immediately after his death, Sun's “synthesis of Eastern and Western ideas” attracted few outstanding Chinese leaders to his cause. As Ssu-yu Teng and John K. Fairbank stated in their China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (p. 276) “the doom of the Kuomintang was sealed from the time when Dr. Sun failed to convince the scholars of Peita that his “Three People's Principles” could give them intellectual leadership.” Why Sun's political thought did not attract a broad segment of the leading elite to agree with his message and follow his revolutionary path is still a puzzle.

Finally, one is inclined to sigh, a scholarly study of the Shanghai illustrated magazine Dianshizhi huabao, one of the most significant pictorials in late-Qing China, founded by an Englishman, Ernest Major, who had successfully launched the Shanghai daily Shenbao a dozen years earlier. A handful of coffee table books hitherto featured illustrations from this pictorial, but there is no systematic study of its background and contents to date. This book is not that study either, but it presents a valuable mine of material. With its aim of reading the Dianshizhai huabao as a “source of Shanghai social history” (p. 2), it not only covers a wide range of material from the pictorial itself (laudably, it includes 137 illustrations), but also makes extensive use of the Shenbao, as well as contemporary memoirs and literary works.

The book consists of four parts, a short introduction and an afterword. Part one gives a brief history of the Dianshizhai, parts two and three deal with stories depicting Shanghai as a city between old and new and the source of a new urban culture, respectively. Part four turns to religious practices depicted in the Dianshizhai. No explanation is given for why these particular topics have been chosen. In the 1991 dissertation on which this book is based, an argument about urban popular culture had served to connect the several parts. This argument created coherence. It has been eschewed here.

This is an important work from a scholar who has already made wide-ranging contributions to our understanding of modern Chinese literature. With Love-Letters and Privacy in Modern China, Bonnie S. McDougall now adds a valuable study of its most prominent figure, Lu Xun (1881–1936), contributing in particular to the fast-growing scholarship on the private life of this modern icon. Her study focuses on his relationship with Xu Guangping (1898–1968), the student who became his partner, mother of his son, and for three decades after his death, editor and memoirist.

Two wider aims, named in the title, are to examine love letters as a literary genre and privacy as a social variable. Such research performs the task of bringing Chinese data to issues of general concern. The matter is not just a territorial one. As the author says of investigating privacy in modern China, “privacy is a human rights issue: deny a sense of privacy . . . , or claim that it is substantially different, and we deny the people of that culture basic rights of association and communication” (p. 209).

This book is a detailed examination of reform in the writing of minority languages under the PRC, including the adaptation of languages to scripts never before used to write them. Considering how closely language is related to culture and society, this entails a good deal of treatment of issues such as PRC politics, external influences, such as from the Soviet Union and the West, the impact of modernization and factors like education and religion. Of course, there is quite a bit about China's spoken minority languages as well.

The book is generally well written, though there are places where the language becomes dense and difficult to follow. The source material for the book is four summers of fieldwork in China's minority areas (1997–2000) and a vast amount of printed material. The list of references takes up no less than 40 pages (pp. 407–446). All items are in Chinese or English. The author makes judicious use of this array of material to mould his own viewpoints on specific issues.

My only real problem with this book as a work of scholarship is the lack of clarity in the aims and central argument. The introduction gives extensive historical background on China's ethnic relations and policies, including in the PRC. It also forecasts the topics of the individual chapters, concluding with the author's hope that China's experiences in multilingualism will “facilitate the maintenance and development of minority languages in the world community” (p. 35). The conclusion summarizes answers to some of the crucial questions the book tackles, and again returns to the hope that the Chinese experience will be of use to the world as a whole.

This book is a welcome addition to the relatively small number of monograph-length studies dedicated to living Chinese opera traditions. Its focus on one of the hundreds of regional opera forms, Shanghai huju, as opposed to the better-known Peking opera (jingju), makes this book even more exceptional. Stock has designed his tome with the admirable goal of situating his study within the disciplinary frame of ethnomusicology. Broadly speaking, Chinese music has not achieved the same prominence in the general ethnomusicological discourse or the emerging “world music canon” as music of other regions, such as Bali or India. The reasons for this are many, and Stock should be commended for recognizing and aiming to tackle the problem. In his opening pages, Stock lays out the conundrum and questions where to position his study on a plane ranging from dry description to theoretical introspection. The book achieves a middle ground between these two extremes with most chapters organized around specific themes or theoretical concerns.

The recent success of Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, Jet Li, Wong Kar-wai, and John Woo in reaching a global audience, along with the enormous changes in Hong Kong since the early 1990s, has attracted a lot of critical attention to Hong Kong cinema around the world. Beginning with Stephen Teo's Hong Kong Cinema (1997) and David Bordwell's Planet Hong Kong (2000), scholarship on the cinema of Hong Kong – whether from the perspective of cultural identity, global culture, film history, or film art – has greatly expanded. Australian scholar Yingchi Chu's book, Hong Kong Cinema: Coloniser, Motherland and Self, contributes to this growing trend.

Hong Kong Cinema is a brief but ambitious book. In less than 150 pages, it tries to map out the entire history of the cinema, from the 1910s to developments after the 1997 takeover. The book draws on a provocative conceptual framework to provide a sweeping overview of Hong Kong cinema and offers some fascinating observations on the industry. However, the book needs further revisions to bring out its rich potential.

This list of books received at The China Quarterly during the period stated is intended to serve as an up-to-date guide to books published on imperial, modern and contemporary China

Sources

The principal sources of information on which this chronicle is based are British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line — Asia-Pacific Political and British Broadcasting Corporation, Monitoring Global News line — Asia-Pacific Economic. These sources, now only available electronically, do not have reference numbers and are only identifiable by date of publication of material. The inclusion of each of these dates would unnecessarily clutter the text and such dates have therefore been omitted, except, at many points, for the original sources from which the BBC reports themselves are taken.

The following is a glossary of Chinese terms used in the main text of all articles and research reports. All characters have been supplied by authors.