%0 Journal Article
%T The Cultural Imaginary of ˇ°Middle Societyˇ± in Early Republican Shanghai
%A Peijie Mao
%J Modern China
%@ 1552-6836
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0097700418766827
%X This article explores the cultural imaginary of ˇ°middle societyˇ± in China through popular writings of the early twentieth century. It pays particular attention to popular print media in early Republican Shanghai, which played a central role in constructing a middle-class cultural identity by offering new sources for imagination and for the configuration of urban modernity. I suggest that the popular imagination of the Chinese middle class can be traced back to the discourse of ˇ°middle society,ˇ± ˇ°utopian stories,ˇ± and ˇ°industrial fictionˇ± in the 1910s and 1920s. This imaginary of middle society was defined and supported by a broad range of cultural expressions in popular media. It revealed both the social anxiety and tensions brought about by the socioeconomic transformations in early twentieth-century China and the middle-class ˇ°cultural dreamsˇ± of Chinese society and modern life
%K middle class
%K popular fiction in Shanghai
%K Saturday
%K Bao Tianxiao
%K Shenbao
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0097700418766827