Before the advent of Western technology, printing had been a Chinese cultural industry for more than nine centuries. However, the traditional Chinese printing industry was based on woodblock technology, and it was managed in a much less organized form. Between 1876 and 1937, Reed argues, Chinese-language printing underwent a boom in Shanghai when a variety of foreign printing technologies were imported, followed by the implementation of a new managerial skill, based on centralized capital and markets. Because the Shanghai print capitalists had control over the economic and cultural capitals at a scale unprecedented in traditional markets, they were able to set the national agendas for educational and intellectual life.

The notion of print capitalism has been made popular in recent years thanks to Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. Reed considers, nevertheless, that Anderson falls short in articulating the material circumstances underlying the varied, indigenous manifestations of print capitalism. He reminds us that "mechanization laid the material foundation that made Chinese print capitalism possible" (p. 9), and he provides abundant evidence regarding the print technologies available at the time. But Reed is quick to suggest that Chinese print investors had to make adaptations which were determined as much by cultural factors as technological ones. His case-in-point is these printers' preference for lithography, already deemed out of fashion in Europe, over the more up-to-date letter-press fonts. He suggests that this decision was made not so much because Chinese investors lacked technological know-how because they were concerned about the undesirable aesthetics of the Chinese letter-press fonts, which they felt were not acceptable by readers. Chinese letter-press fonts were not commonly adopted till after they had been improved at the end of the nineteenth century. Reed's conclusion may entail debates, but he merits praise for refusing to succumb to any form of infrastructural reductionism.

As his book moves on, Reed brings to his argument more social and economic elements pertaining to print capitalism and print technology. He describes the rise of three major lithographic presses, the Dianshizhai, the Tongwenguan, and the Feiyingge (chapter two); tracks the development of Shanghai printing industry from small-scale business to full-fledged enterprises, with even occasional ventures into markets in Japan and Southeast Asia (chapter three); and delineates the organizational forms of Shanghai print houses as well as communal activities of the industry such as the guild system and joint-stock investment (chapter four). In chapter five, Reed comes to the golden moment of the early Republican era of the Shanghai print industry, focusing on its three major firms: the Commercial Press, Zhonghua Books, and World Books. These three firms, together with dozens of others, dominated China's book market, to the point where they could prescribe the consumers' needs and tastes, and thus fashion China's national imaginaries. Reed concludes by suggesting that Shanghai's "wenhuajie" (field of culture) represented a space in which cultural and educational praxis was closely related to the publishers' economic interests and marketing strategies.

At a time when scholars and students of Chinese cultural studies are eager to accept trendy notions such as "print capitalism," "the field of cultural production," and "mechanical reproduction," Reed's examination of China's "Gutenberg Revolution" no doubt appears well in tune with popular discourse. But this book distinguishes itself by contesting rather than unconditionally endorsing these terms' universal assumptions; above all the book sets out to truly engage the material conditions under which these terms were invoked. As he claims in his conclusion, Reed would like to study "the reciprocal influences of the mental and the material cultures that played a major part in establishing Shanghai as China's leading intellectual, cultural, and educational center" (p. 257). twentieth century [The Golden Age of Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937 (Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1989), but Reed's book has to be hailed as the first its kind for taking a multifaceted

Bergère's study of Shanghai's rising bourgeoisie in early approach to the technological, economic, cultural, and geographical impact of the modern Chinese print industry. His book deserves to be read by everyone who is interested in the burgeoning history of modern Chinese cultural production.

Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1867-1937, by Christopher A. Reed. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2004. xxvi, 391 pp. $85.00 US (cloth), $24.00 US (paper).

Author David Der-wei Wang
Harvard University
Copyright Canadian Journal of History
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Shanghai Pinting