Trust in Troubled Times is an important addition to the still relatively small body of literature on banking and finance in Republican China. In this careful and thoughtful study of the development of banking and paper money in Tianjin from late Qing to the eve of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Brett Sheehan analyses the rise of modern banks and the growth of social trust in such financial institutions, and examines their relations to the process of state-building. The work is solidly based on a wealth of primary sources including newspapers published in Tianjin, Beijing and Shanghai, archival materials in China, Taiwan and the United States, as well as interviews with individuals who had worked in Tianjin banks in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, one of the main contributions of this book is the tremendous amount of data amassed by the author that illuminates the complexity of the problems associated with banking and finance in the pre-1949 period.

Drawing on Western theories on banking and social trust, Sheehan begins his study with a discussion of a theoretical framework which provides not only a foundation for the analysis of developments in Tianjin, but also the basis for comparative studies of institution and state-building in different political, social and economic milieus. He then examines a series of financial crises, from the moratorium on exchange in 1916, the bank runs under the warlord governments, the financial instability created by the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932, and the monetary reforms of the Nationalist government in 1935. The responses of government officials, bankers and the local elites to the crises, the strategies they used to establish and promote impersonal trust in Tianjin banks, and the impact of these crises on the elites, the banking profession and state-society relations constitute the main body of the study. The story is both encouraging and disheartening: encouraging because by 1937, trust in Chinese-owned and operated banks was indeed established; disheartening because the banks failed to gain the autonomy that could have shielded them from the abuses of the government.

In A Bitter Revolution, Rana Mitter offers a broad-brushed interpretive essay intended for a general reader rather than a focused academic study. Because of his target audience and the expansiveness of his topic, Mitter's prose is informal and he frequently inserts textbook-style passages. Mitter intermittently offers his own illuminating readings of primary source material and throughout the work he engages with an impressive range of recently published scholarly research findings but, in the main, this book's originality lies in its integrative and sweeping narrative reading of China's modern revolutionary history.

Mitter's account is organized around a number of biographical sketches (most prominently of Zou Taofen and Du Zhongyuan) and several key historiographical contentions. Cumulatively, those contentions serve to open modern Chinese history to a range of new approaches and questions. First, Mitter argues that Chinese historians must resist the habit of centring their interpretive focus on the Communist story given the relative brevity of the Communist revolution and the fact that three very important decades have passed since its high point. This leads to the second contention – namely that in important ways contemporary Chinese politics and society share more in common with the May Fourth period than they do with the Maoist era. As Mitter sees it, the May Fourth movement, and the political and cultural pluralism of the pre-war Republican period more broadly, have remained highly relevant over the course of modern Chinese history. For this reason, he chooses to weave his narrative around that generation's passage through life during the 20th century. Thirdly, interpreters of modern Chinese history must do more to foreground the complex and multiple ways that the broader international political environment influenced China's revolutionary process over the course of the 20th century. And fourthly, it is as important to understand daily life and how it has changed over time as it is to study the large, abstract forces that shape society. In recent decades these historiographical ideas have steadily gained ground within the field of modern Chinese history, yet Mitter is among the first to build a sustained narrative statement on 20th-century China around them. In presenting this synthetic account, Mitter has performed an important and very useful service to the field.

Anru Lee's In The Name of Harmony and Prosperity examines the labour and gender politics in the latest phase of Taiwan's economic restructuring. The author argues that the conventional wisdom that regards the interaction between culture and economy as a static relationship is problematic, and she sets out to develop a dialectic approach to culture and economy. Lee has collected a huge amount of data from fieldwork interviews and observational skills, and the research outcome further affirms the idea that the cultural dimension has to be taken into account in order to understand fully Taiwan's economic success. The book is divided into seven broad chapters: Taiwan's great transformation; From sunrise to sunset; The waning of a hard work ethic; The meaning of work; Between filial daughter and loyal sister; Guests from the tropics; and Bringing the global and the local.

The author begins with a general description of Taiwan's economic transformation in recent decades, and then focuses on the latest changes in the textile industry in Homei, analysing how the local residents responded to and engaged in the changes. In chapter two, “From sunrise to sunset,” Lee highlights the significance of the cultural ideal in Taiwan's decentralized production system. She argues that the “black-hand becoming boss” (heishou bian toujia) cultural notion helps to thwart the development of class consciousness in Taiwan's society and adds legitimacy to the factory owner's complaint of labour shortages and society's declining work ethic. Chapter three, “The waning of a hard work ethic,” shows the paradoxical nature of the claims about the shortage of labour and explores the New Generation moral discourse, which involves a network value of hard work, equal opportunity and social mobility. Chapter four presents the life stories of three women from different generations and discusses the meaning of work to them. The author argues that not only gender but also other social institutions (such as the patrilineal kinship system, family and relations in production) have to be examined in order to fully comprehend the relationship between the economy and the formation of women's subjectivity.

From the early 1990s, the study of Taiwan has flourished into what is almost a field in its own right. Yet, despite this growth, Taiwan Studies remains an unstable and inchoate area of scholarship. Beyond key issues like democratization, national identity and the “miracle economy,” it has no dominant problematics, discursive structures or proscribed methodologies. And, unlike Chinese Studies, it is too small a field to be clearly demarcated into sub-fields.

As a result, the study of Taiwan is unusually open to any and all possible topics for study. Indeed, the free play of the range of subjects in Taiwan studies is one aspect of the continuing establishment and consolidation of the meaning of “Taiwan” itself, and of a Taiwanese identity, over the last ten to 20 years.

The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular culture in Taiwan is in the first instance an excellent contribution to this developing field, but it is also indicative of the challenges to producing legitimate academic knowledge of Taiwan.

The book begins with a review of Taiwanese history, which, even now, is a necessary opening step to establish the discursive boundaries of a scholarly project on Taiwan. The introductory chapter presents what has become a received history of Taiwan, organizing it by ruling regimes over the last four centuries. This history was established most clearly in English by the work of Thomas Gold in the mid-1980s and here it is filled out with much detail and nuance.

The body of the book is divided into four sections organized into generalizing categories: religion, the public sphere, economic life and popular entertainment. The methodologies include social history in Morris's chapter on baseball, anthropology in Katz's work on chicken-beheading rites, and media studies in Chu's chapter on talk-back television. Simon's work on gay and lesbian identity and Chin-ju Lin's chapter on Filipino domestic workers in Taiwan also add important critical dimensions.

In open contrast to the abundance of studies concerning the first millennium of Chinese history, many aspects of the institutional, intellectual and cultural history of Chinese Buddhism during the past one thousand years remain, with some notable exceptions, largely unstudied. In particular, Western language scholarly accounts of Chinese Buddhism since the end of the 19th century are still rare and, with regards to the first part of the 20th century, largely limited to the efforts of one individual, the late American scholar, Holmes Welch (1921–1981). During the last ten or 15 years, however, there have been signs of a reversal of this tendency as an increasing number of researchers began to devote themselves to the study of modern and contemporary Chinese Buddhism. The lion's share of this emerging scholarly trend belongs to studies of Taiwanese rather than mainland Chinese Buddhism. This choice can partly be attributed to the increasing international visibility of Taiwanese Buddhist associations, but I also suspect that funding opportunities and a comparatively more welcoming research environment may have something to do with it!

The two books under review are also concerned with contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism. Their authors adopt different but somehow complementary approaches. Whereas André Laliberté's instructive study of the attitudes towards the active political participation of Taiwanese Buddhist organizations focuses on the activities of the three main Taiwanese Buddhist organizations, namely the Buddha Light Mountain (or Foguangshan) monastic order, the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Association (or Ciji gongdehui), and the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China (Zhongguo fojiaohui), Stuart Chandler's engaging study focuses on Foguangshan and the views of its founder and charismatic leader, Ven. Xingyun.

This is the first intellectual biography of Lu Xun (1881–1936) published in English in nearly 20 years. Arguably, it may be the first one ever. Cheung skilfully utilizes the prism of Lu Xun's interest in Nietzsche to examine not only his influence on the development of the Chinese writer's thought, but also a host of other issues from the interpretation of Lu Xun's works to his marital status. In order to do this, Cheung must first come to terms with Nietzsche's intellectual legacy, which he defines as that of the “gentle” Nietzsche – the Nietzsche sans Nachlass familiar to us through Walter Kaufmann, not the Nietzsche of the Will to Power created posthumously by his sister and others from fragments of the philosopher's unpublished manuscripts. In fact, it is best to read Nietzsche as rumination, Cheung tells us, or to pick up his Leitworte or main terms (p. 9). Cheung then asserts that Lu Xun was the “chosen one” to realize Nietzsche's influence on China (p. 17).

Central to all this was Thus Spake Zarathustra and Lu Xun's understanding of it as well as what he had gleaned from secondary sources during his years of study in Japan, probably Takayama Chogyuu's 1901 essay “Bunmei hihyooka to shite no bungakusha” (“The litterateur as cultural critic”), derived from Ziegler's Die geistigen und sozialen Stroemungen Deutschlands in neunzehnten Jahrhundert [The German Intellectual and Social Movements in the Nineteenth Century] (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1911), which, Cheung informs us, is based on Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations (p. 23). If that is the case, the young Lu Xun is to be commended for his choice of sources.

This is a delightful book. It opens up a cultural arena much neglected in scholarship on China. Nine engagingly narrated chapters take us through the history of Sino-foreign musical contact since the late 19th century, with one digression, which goes back to encounters since the 16th century (chapter two). The book follows the life story of three important institutions (the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, the Shanghai Conservatory and the Central Conservatory) and three important men: violinist Tan Shuzhen, who was the first Chinese to join the orchestra in colonial Shanghai; conductor Li Delun, who was trained in Moscow and managed to serve the government before, during and after the Cultural Revolution; and composer He Luting, one of the most outspoken protagonists in China's music world and long-time principal at the Shanghai Conservatory. The authors' approach of choosing “white elephants” to present the history of classical music in China, although unfashionable since Jauss, brings much cohesion and structural elegance to the volume.

The book is at its best when using material from interviews conducted by the authors. Based on this evidence, the book comes to one important conclusion: contact between Chinese and foreign musicians in China was generally not antagonistic, either before or after 1949. Foreign musicians did not behave in a condescending manner, as “imperialists” and Chinese musicians hardly ever perceived them to do so. For obvious reasons, few Chinese (and, surprisingly, few foreign studies) on China's classical music scene have acknowledged this fact.

The authors have done a beautiful job in telling their story. They must be lauded for having gone through a great variety of sources including contemporary newspaper articles, propaganda magazines, Party documents, as well as films, recordings and some of the very recent, and mostly biographical, secondary literature on the subject published in China. Since the book is conceived as a collective biography, it lacks detailed musical and historical analysis and it would have benefited from a few closer readings. For example, what precisely is the meaning of “national style” for people as different as Tcherepnin, Mao Zedong or Guo Wenjing? Musical analysis would have provided an answer. Why do the authors not make more of the fact that Jiang Qing advised the musicians writing a model symphony to watch – and, more importantly, listen – to music in Hollywood films in order to improve their compositional skills? A more explicit engagement with the technical and musical styles of the model works (the term model opera should really be reserved for the operas in the set and not all of the pieces which also comprised ballets and symphonic compositions) would have been illuminating here, for it would have shown how indebted they were to the same principles of music-making as Hollywood film music on the one hand and the Butterfly Violin Concerto on the other – both officially condemned during the Cultural Revolution. It is sad, too, that the balanced account of the Cultural Revolution years – which describes both the pain it caused to many an intellectual and the benefits it brought for Chinese musical life generally – focuses almost entirely on the first set of eight model works and leaves out the second, equally important set of ten produced later (chapter seven). There are a number of non sequiturs in this book that are inevitable in any pioneering work of this size.

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 on-line, 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.