Article Excerpt:

Situated in Republican-era Shanghai, already a great metropolitan city, Daoist Modern leads the readers through a Daoist inner-alchemy revivalist (no pun intended) movement that actively participated in China’s transformation from its imperial past toward modernization. Xun Liu’s book traces the way in which Chen Yingning (1880–1969) and his followers infused both intellectual discourse and the cultivation of immortality with issues pertinent to their own identity as Chinese urban elites: Nationalism and the roles of elite Daoist practitioners in a time of crisis; gender equality and women’s rights; and changing modes of information dissemination.