The Cultural Imaginary of “Middle Society” in Early Republican Shanghai

Abstract

This article explores the cultural imaginary of “middle society” 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 “middle society,” “utopian stories,” and “industrial fiction” 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 “cultural dreams” of Chinese society and modern life.