Abstract: Shanghai Modern was once misunderstood as a “spokesperson” of the official mainstream ideology, but it is in fact a serious academic work. Its contributions can be described in such a way: it uncovers the “urban narrative group” represented by Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying, which has been ignored in modern Chinese literature as a discipline before 1980s due to the “decadence”; it discovers two typical “non-Western” modernity in modern Shanghai, that is, “identity depression” and “criticism deficiency”, so that it illustrates a feasibility of examining modernity through modern literature.