This sabbatical year allowed me to spend nine months in Shanghai, as planned.  Formally I was received by Fudan University, Department of Chinese, and the Fudan Nordic Centre.  But my most important partner institution was the journal ”Gushihui” and its editors as well as their former and retired colleagues.  They were all extremely generous with their time and rich experiences, and those of them that were too ill to be interviewed, helped me in other ways to find sources of importance.  These relevant contacts have continued to this day, with editor-in-chief Xia Yiming making a visit to Stockholm in September 2017, which allowed me to do more interviews.  I was also invited to participate in a unique conference in May 2018 on stories, storytelling and story writing, an occasion where I was able to meet leading cultural politicians of Shanghai and some of its suburban prefectures.  Many of these individuals had earlier written stories for ”Gushihui”, and had plenty of experiences to share.  The conference also gave me a chance to interview present writers from other provinces, and meet university researchers from many parts of the country.  It was a rare occasion indeed, as interest in this form of culture is unusual among researchers in the very elitist Chinese academia.
   This project has focussed on a small journal put out in Shanghai since 1963, ”Gushihui” (Story Session).  It can be described as a popular literature journal, although it does not resemble anything that we might come across with in Sweden these days.  It is a family journal of small stories and some jokes, usually dealing with some surprising aspect or incident of everyday life anywhere in China.  All the texts are carefully edited so that everything unsuitable for children is excluded – although in China this does not  mean violence or crime.  On the other hand, sex, foul language and anything that reminds of political protest is cut out.  But many popular stories have dealt with corruption, to such an extent that the editor has received a formal letter of criticism from the very highest leadership in the country.  Being an editor is not easy.  ”Gushihui” contains no informative texts, no photos, and almost no advertisements.  The illustrations are small drawings, mainly black-and-white, with only a few pages printed on better paper so as to allow for colour print.  The price of the journal has always been kept as low as possible in order to reach a maximum amount of readers.  Although the journal is produced in Shanghai, its contents try to cover the entire society, and many writers live in the countryside.  My impression is that an urban style is consciously avoided.
   ”Gushihui” was started as a publication for spreading new, revolutionary stories to professional or semi-professional storytellers, in a period when political contents had to impregnate everything, including entertainment.  At that time, entertainment for the common people usually meant listening to stories told during work breaks or in teahouses.  During some years of the Cultural Revolution, the journal was discontinued just as all other journals were, but it was restarted unusually early, in 1974, under the title ”Revolutionary Story Session”, with basically unchanged function and mission.  When the economic reforms started in 1978, the journal was changed radically, the ”revolution” was removed from the titel, and the contents were to offer interesting and entertaining reading experiences – stories – to average citizens, now defined as people with ”middle level education”.  With living standards rising continuously, the market for all kinds of entertainment kept growing, and in the 1980s, ”Gushihui” managed surprisingly to become the largest journal of entertainment literature among hundreds of others.  The success continued for some years with millions of copies sold every month, until digitalization started to mix up things, the internet increased the choice of entertainment, and beginning writers found new, paperless channels to find a readership for themselves.  Today, ”Gushihui” is waging a desperate battle for the favors of readers – and even writers –, while old and young editors have very different views about the strategies that would save the journal.
   The story of this journal mirrors the meandering road the Chinese society has taken from the Maoist ultra-left cultural ideas to the infinite optimism of the market economy, while Xi Jinping’s China today seems headed back to the cultural policies dictated from the very top.  I have investigated this 55-year development as a history of the journal ”Gushihui” from the point of view of history, cultural policies, editorial work, marketing, reader contacts, and story contents.  Different aspects of this development have allowed for various degrees of scrutiny; naturally there is more to find about more recent decades.  On the other hand, there is more of earlier research done on Maoist culture and cultural policies than on the later phases of ”Gushihui”; people with higher education look down on ”Gushihui” although they have all read it when young.  Thanks to my stay in Shanghai and the good contacts established with the editors of ”Gushihui”, I have been able to illustrate in detail the editorial work with the national ”san-shen” triple censorship system, and the ways in which the editors select and revise received manuscripts.  I give concrete and unique examples of how this system judges what is language-wise, content-wise, and stylistically acceptable, how and why manuscripts are changed, revised, rejected, and graded in the different levels of the system.  Even the editors’ communication with the writers reveals important changes over time.
   I gave an open lecture on the topic "Gushihui – entertainment reading for the masses" at the Department of Asian, Middle East & Turkish Studies at Stockholm University on 2017.02.20.
   This project will result in a monography in English, so as to reach an international public.  Two book companies have been contacted and are interested, but no contract has been signed yet.