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Missions to China's Heartland: The Letters of Hazel Todd of the China Inland Mission, 1920–1941 . Edited by Robert Gardella. Portland, ME: MerwinAsia, 2009. xviii + 237 pp. $45.00. ISBN 9781878282910

nationalist advertising, with Pang Laikwan on advertising and women, and with Zhou Xun on smoking in Republican China. Except with advertising, the concrete genre of the materials (news or editorial matter) analysed or the column in which they appear is seldom discussed, their chronology is not sufficiently foregrounded either, even the titles of the articles discussed and analysed are sometimes missing (a listing of the articles and advertisements taken from Shenbao is not included in the book: they only appear scattered in the footnotes). This neglect, which may be due to publication policies, can be very sad, especially when it entails missing particular allusions – so, for example in the article by Liao Maosha who actually cites the name of Lin Yutang’s journal (which he attacks) in the title of his critical article, but with a different meaning, a detail which is completely lost in translation (p. 151). The lack of Chinese characters in a book which repeatedly discusses crucial changes in terminology is puzzling, but most likely, the author is not to be blamed for this. All of this may sound nitty-gritty critical, but it is a reflection only of the disappointment with what may have been a much better book had it been for different publishing guidelines. One of the major achievements in this book is its attempt to get closer at the Shenbao reader. Tsai does so by retrieving the image projected of the (implied) reader on the pages of Shenbao itself, by discussing the social and historical circumstances of reading (strangely enough she never discusses the price for Shenbao), and by paying much attention to the kinds of texts that could be attributed to readers. Tsai shows convincingly that Shenbao reached out toward many different social groups and – for commercial reasons among others – sought to extend its audience to include ever new groups: by changing existing columns, such as the Random Talk to “May Fourth spirit,” for example (chapter five) and by creating new columns (such as Spring and Autumn) not to lose old readerships either (and thus to preserve the type of literature that would be condemned by May Fourth protagonists as “mandarin duck and butterfly literature”). Her conclusion may be slightly too optimistic: to say that Shenbao was positioning itself to become a newspaper for the whole of society (which it did from its first days in 1872, one only needs to read the first inaugural statement) is true, but to conclude that it truly did so may be to go just one step too far. Nevertheless, her point is well taken: Tsai’s book makes an important contribution by showing that the Shenbao reader was indeed much more diverse in class (and gender) background than is generally assumed.