The Shanghai Modern Woman’s American Dreams: Imagining America’s Depravity to produce China’s 'moderate modernity'

Abstract

This article explores images of the United States featured in the 1930s Shanghai women's magazine Linglong. This imagined America reflected a reorientation in ideas about how to be simultaneously modern and Chinese. The United States became a symbolic location for Linglong's readers as they grappled with personal concerns in their negotiations with families and communities about appropriate feminine behavior for Chinese women seeking to be modern and cosmopolitan. These readers found in the depiction of American life answers to their anxieties about appropriate limits for their modern city lifestyle. The imagined America provided convenient boundaries for readers and editors alike. Linglong presented a vision of unbridled, limit-free American lifestyles as “the extreme,” allowing China's modern women to plot their behavior along an imagined continuum stretching between American depravity and the prison of Confucian morality.