The nine articles in this volume explore "the question of tabloid newspapers" that emerged in modern Chinese cities from the perspectives of cultural construction, social movements, and political actions. In spite of being a putatively "marginal medium," tabloid newspapers reveal much of the multi­‐layered urban life in China, serving as an exhibitor of new ideas and cultural norms, a window into the psychological state of the men of letters who wrote for them, a vehicle that helped organize readers and writers into communities, a source of insight into gender relations within intellectual circles, the source of alternative and implicitly subversive discourses on society and politics that were difficult for the state to monitor, and a field of conquest within which elites sought to cement their social authority and which they attempted to use to promote an enlightenment agenda. Through a variety of research angles, this book points to the potential of further research on tabloid newspapers: they not only provide insight into urban history, but themselves constitute an urban phenomenon that deserves scholarly attention.