Culturing Modernity: The Nantong Model, 1890-1930

This is a multidimensional study of a socially engineered simulation of modernity that transformed Nantong, a provincial town, from a rural backwater to a model of progress in early twentieth-century China. The author analyzes this transformation by a depiction of new institutional and cultural phenomena-for example, a museum, cinema, theater, sports, parks, name cards, paper money-employed by local elite to exhibit the modern.