Scandal and the New Woman: Identities and Media Culture in 1920s China

Abstract

The circulation numbers of two major Shanghai dailies (Xinwen Bao and Shenbao), for example, exceeded one hundred thousand in the early 1920s whereas the numbers had been lower than ten thousand at the turn of the twentieth century; the publishing and printing industry in Shanghai grew by twenty-fold between 1912 and 1932, 4 and three major publishers in Shanghai published two thirds of all Chinese books nationwide;5 and a film industry sprouted to anticipate a "golden age" of the Chinese motion picture in the 1930s and 1940s.6 An array of studies has been devoted to the Shanghai-based cultural industry. According to the paper, Huang Huiru was twenty-two years old.