Introduction: taste, class culture and the print media in contemporary China -- Exemplary tastes, memories of class. History as cultural sources: postreform nostalgia and select memories of the past -- Narrating city, placing class. Reconfiguration of space as "fix" and "niche" -- Writing Shanghai for good taste and affluence -- Looking for the peach blossom spring: Chengdu mode -- Aesthetic-politics of prosperity: romancing the middle class. White-collar romance -- Re-establishing bourgeois and middleclass sentiments -- Afterword
Summary
This book examines the transformations in form, genre, and content of contemporary Chinese print media. It describes and analyses the role of post-reform social stratification in the media, focusing particularly on how the changing practices and institutions of the industry correspond to and accelerate the emergence of a relatively affluent urban leisure-reading market
