Peijie Mao is currently an associate professor of Chinese at ShanghaiTech University and the author of Popular Magazines and Fiction in Shanghai, 1914–1925: Modernity, the Cultural Imaginary, and the Middle Society (Lexington Books, 2021). This book is the first English-language monograph on the rise of Shanghai-based popular magazines in early twentieth-century China. It examines the national, gender, family, and social imaginaries constructed and negotiated in various forms of popular narratives, which were intrinsically linked and integral to the search for cultural identity of the emerging Chinese “middle society.” The author suggests that these imaginaries became uniquely instrumental in catalyzing the process of Chinese modernity, which emerged and developed along the symbiotic interrelations between the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, and the real and the imaginary.