Linguists and media scholars have long noticed the declining use of Shanghai Wu in China's reform years, particularly since the 1990s. Yet this issue has been mainly explored in the field of Chinese (socio)linguistics, such as in Qian Nairong's work. Edward Gunn and Jin Liu briefly identified four factors accounting for the Shanghai media's preference for Putonghua Mandarin rather than Shanghai Wu, yet they did not elaborate further.1 Fang Xu's is the first book-length work devoted to this issue from the perspective of urban sociology. With a decidedly interdisciplinary nature, Xu's book situates the dialect crisis in the context of political agendas and language policies, economic development and urban transformation, and demographic migration and massive dislocation in contemporary China. With a rich trove of field research and resources, Xu's book provides a comprehensive and timely account of the dramatic changes in the linguistic and urban landscapes in Shanghai, particularly in the past two decades.Xu lays out the analytical framework for her research in the introduction. She clearly articulates and smoothly transits between different theories and concepts (linguistic capital, language ideology, right to the city, place identity, and nationalism) in relation to her research topic. In chapter 1, Xu traces the contested origin of both the city and its dialect and provides the necessary historical and socioeconomic context, including the city's history of migration, the traditional upper/lower corner divide, recent hukou (household registration system) reform, and the hybrid nature of the “young” Shanghai dialect formed “around the 1920s” (54).In the following chapters, drawing on rich and valuable empirical fieldwork data (70 interviews and 248 survey responses as well as personal experience and ethnographic observations), Xu dwells on three factors leading to Shanghai Wu's decline and possible demise. In chapter 2, Xu focuses on the state's political agendas and language policies, which have dramatically diminished the linguistic space for Shanghai Wu. Yet the author finds that although the dominant language ideology has been successfully promoted as top-down panopticon, the competing, alternative language ideology, in which Shanghai Wu is endowed with covert prestige, solidarity, and local pride, “still thrives in the city” (89). In chapter 3, Xu discusses in detail how the geographical displacement and involuntary relocation of local residents accelerates the disappearance of Shikumen vernacular architecture and the dispersal of their vernacular speech community. Coupled with her intimate knowledge of the city districts, particularly in Puxi, the author vividly cites many personal experiences of alienation and placelessness. In chapters 4 and 5, Xu focuses on the recent migrants who are highly educated and well off. Although the newcomers received the official identity of “new Shanghairen,” their authenticity is challenged by the earlier migrants due to the former's lack of proficiency in Shanghai Wu, which is seen as the “exclusive last pillar of Shanghairen identity” (133). For the recent migrants themselves, “language is the ultimate barrier for them to self-identify... as genuine Shanghairen” (181), too. This, again, highlights the intricate relationship between language and identity, the subtitle of this book.The book sets up to investigate the tension between the global (“Shanghai's emergence as a global city”) and the local (“the marginalization of... the Shanghai dialect”) (1–2). It ends up tackling the conflict between the national and the local by subduing Shanghai's globalization exclusively as a state project. The author is very explicit in her harsh criticism of the authoritarian nation-state and attributes all the factors for the dialect's endangerment simply to the top-down “state policies” (2). Yet, among others, the heterogeneous Shanghai Wu itself is also intrinsically a factor in the limited role played by mass media, which is “crucial for the fate of the dialect” (210). It is “virtually impossible” for Shanghai media to find performers with identical accents, and Shanghai Wu as a media language “evoked disparities and controversy as much as community.”2 In contrast, Xu's book treats the global largely with a sympathetic tone. She touches on the “uniformity and McDonaldization” of the urban landscapes (121), but the target is still the national. The arguments would be more sophisticated if the book recognized the globalization as a separate yet related homogenizing factor. In this sense, the function of the nation-state is more aligned with globalization and its concomitant homogenization.Another simplification may relate to the methodology, particularly sampling bias. According to the book, “more than one million households” (15) were displaced among the “sixteen million native Shanghairen” (17). Since all of the “native Shanghairen” whom the author interviewed experienced relocation (22), through synecdochic substitution, the “native Shanghairen” as a whole are depicted as victimized and marginalized. Readers may wonder about different narratives, such as the experiences of the wealthy and highly educated local elites. Have they developed a similar “flexible resident identity” as the recent migrants? The book only hints a little about this subgroup, such as by mentioning their professionalism (179), but does not provide a complex picture of Shanghairen's experiences.Moreover, in exploring the issue of language and identity, the book would benefit from a more solid scholarship in linguistics. For example, a statement such as “Shanghai Wu belongs to a different language family from Mandarin” (italics mine) is far beyond the linguistic norms. Similarly, the author consistently uses “artificial” or “newly invented” (92) to label Putonghua, which “inherited the Beijing-pronunciation-based Guoyin” (5). Xu confuses the old guoyin and new guoyin and misinterprets Robert Ramsey's The Languages of China (1989) when citing Ramsey on page 65. The allegation of artificiality only applies to old guoyin, not new guoyin. There are also some minor mistakes. For example, the place-names in the 1919 map, such as Whangpoo River (Xu misread it as Hwangpoo) and Soochow Creek used the Postal romanization, not the “Wade-Gile system” (45). In addition, Pinyin spelling mistakes such as yangjingbang as yangjinbang (44) and Minhang as Minghang (103) betray traces of her native tongue's influence, as the author honestly acknowledges.Despite these flaws, Xu's book is a unique addition both to the already rich scholarship on Shanghai and to the still fairly limited literature on language politics in contemporary China. It maps out Shanghai's dramatic social transformation in the past decades from a unique perspective of language/dialect. Besides rich firsthand materials on language attitudes and language shift, the book, written in a very approachable style, addresses broadly Shanghai's history, architecture, housing reform, resident permit policies, and new social classes in the making. I would recommend the book not only to scholars of language and urban studies but also to general readers interested in contemporary China, especially Shanghai.