The Business of Culture

Christopher Rea is an associate professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. Nicolai Volland is an assistant professor of Asian studies and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University.

Contributors: Chua Ai Lin, Robert Culp, Grace Fong, Michael Gibbs Hill, Eugenia Lean, Christopher A. Reed, Sin Yee Theng, Wang Gungwu, and Sai-Shing Yung

This collection of essays represents a new period in the historiography of China, and the vantage point, that of capitalist China revived and flourishing, fits well with the analyses presented in the volume. Indeed, as Rea’s theoretical chapter on the concept of cultural entrepreneurship notes, this offers a new approach to "pluralism and mobility in the cultural sphere" (27) beyond the categories imposed by a political analysis.

Richard King, author of Milestones on a Golden Road: Writing for Chinese Socialism, 1945-80 :
The Business of Culture guides readers through the historical transition of the late imperial “man of letters,” to the “cultural entrepreneur” enabled by new technologies, followed by the PRC’s "worker in the arts," and concluding with the reemergence in China of the kinds of cultural entrepreneurship that had developed in other sinophone countries. Edited by two distinguished scholars, this volume will be essential to those studying the history of culture and commerce in China and Southeast Asia.

Thomas Mullaney, author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China:
The voices, lives, and enterprises that emerge from this delightful volume are vivid and illuminating – a captivating read.