“On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked.... [As] Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated ‘new woman’ exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city....The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China’s early passage through democratic populism, in an illfated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen’s rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.” 

Harvard University Press, 352 pages