Creating Entertaining Lawsuits: Defamation and Tabloid Publicity in 1920s Shanghai

Abstract:This article examines the coverage of defamation disputes and lawsuits in the Holmes tabloid in the late 1920s. In 1928, the famous poet Xu Zhimo took the tabloid to court for alleging that his wife, Lu Xiaoman, was having an affair. The tabloid strategically used the trial to validate and market newsworthy events. I argue that the tabloid publicity surrounding the defamation lawsuit embedded multifaceted meanings into a legal discourse that both facilitated legal knowledge circulation and allowed leisure consumption. Modern legal knowledge was thus combined with scandalous narrative to create a new and distinctive type of public knowledge. This playful engagement in the making of legal knowledge enhanced vernacular legal understanding but challenged the legal professionals by turning a procedure of law into a mechanism of gossip production for profit.