Part 3 is on Cultural Revolution soundscapes beyond the Mao era. It begins with a chapter that contextualizes the innovations of the yangbanxi as having occurred within a century of musical experimentation. The following chapter, by Nancy Yun- hwa Rao, is a refreshing study of the effect of the yangbanxi on social and cultural practices of ordinary people during the Cultural Revolution and the enduring ef- fect of that musical environment in post–Cultural Revolution China. Rao demon- strates that the musical taste established in people’s youth during the Cultural Revolution has directly led to the innovative and energetic aesthetics of the now internationally acclaimed “Class of ’78” composers and musicians, including Tian Hao-Jiang, Tan Dun, and Chen Yi, whose “modes of cultural synthesis were par- adoxically shaped by the music canon of the decade they sought to leave behind.” The book ends on a high note with a chapter by Barbara Mittler that offers a brilliant and entertaining analysis of the incorporation of Cultural Revolution mu- sic into contemporary youth pop culture. Mittler uses this as a platform to draw together the findings of the whole book. Its fundamental insight is that Cultural Revolution musical culture was primarily a form of popular culture, which drew on deeply embedded popular culture traditions that will continue to resonate into the future. Rosemary Roberts University of Queensland Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism, by Ka-Ming Wu. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xv+186 pp. US$85.00 (cloth), $25.00 (paper). In this thought-provoking book, Ka-ming Wu directly investigates the curious mix of old and new that characterizes rural folk culture (minjian 民间) in contemporary China. Eschewing theoretical models that view folk culture as largely dictated by state and market forces, Wu successfully argues that folk culture is best seen as a contested realm, where rural citizens play an active role in using their own tradi- tions to forge new identities in the uncertain era of post-Mao reform. Wu’s close attention to theory and her ethnographic work will be welcomed by specialists. For her inquiry into the modern uses of folk culture, Wu focuses on the coun- tryside surrounding Yan’an, the famed wartime capital of the Chinese Commu- nist Party. This was a wise choice. It was in Yan’an that Mao instructed Party artists to redirect their efforts to winning over rural audiences, and Yan’an still represents the seedbed for the Communists’ attempt to use folk culture for revolutionary pur- poses. The Yan’an countryside has not escaped urban encroachment, and Wu makes note of the changes, mostly unwelcome, that urbanization has brought to the rural Reviews • 157