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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom* [Go to interactive discussion forum]
With the People’s Republic of China gaining full membership in the World Trade Organization and much of the ensuing new investment likely to center in Shanghai, 2002 promised from the start to be a pivotal year for this most celebrated—and infamous— of Chinese port cities. Several things added to the heady sense of expectation that took hold a year ago by the banks of the muddy Huangpu River, perhaps the most important of which was the highly publicized bid local officials were gearing up to make to host the 2010 World Exposition. In an earlier era, bringing a world’s fair to town could solidify a city’s reputation as a global hub (think New York 1939) or put emergent world cities on the international map (think Chicago 1893). Shanghai’s leaders began 2002 hoping that a successful bid would accomplish the latter for their metropolis as it strives to regain the reputation that it had in the 1930s (but lost between the 1940s and 1980s), not just as China’s main industrial metropolis but as one of the world’s great global cities. And at the close of last year, there was jubilation when word broke that the second world exposition of the twenty-first century would indeed be held beside the Huangpu. Two thousand and two was destined to be a year of high expectations since, as everyone knows who follows the history of this protean metropolis that is now sometimes called "New Shanghai" (to distinguish it from pre1949 "Old Shanghai"), it marked a milestone anniversary—and not just for the city’s main English-language newspaper. It is no accident that the Shanghai Star was launched in 1992, for that was when China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, announced that the Yangzi River Delta of which this metropolis is the central commercial hub, and the city’s Pudong district on the eastern bank of the Huangpu in particular, would play a central role in China’s opening up to the outside world. During the first dozen years or so of the Reform Era (which began in 1978), Shanghai had been bypassed as a major focus of development. Beijing had gambled on the potential of urban centers further south. The regime hoped that Shenzhen, a new city of the Pearl River Delta, and the great southern metropolis of Canton would emerge as China’s key twenty-first-century centers of commerce and the mainland’s strongest economic competitors to Hong Kong. Efforts were made to encourage foreign investors to pour money into those cities rather than Shanghai, which was associated with not just one but two stigmas: imperialist domination and the ultra-radical excesses of the decade of the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. Between the 1840s and the 1940s, parts of the city were under foreign control, and then, in the last years of Mao Zedong’s life, Shanghai became the main base of operations of his wife, Jiang Qing, and the three other members of the notorious Gang of Four. By the start of the 1990s, however, two things made a change in strategy both possible and attractive. First, it had become clear that Shenzhen and Canton, given their proximity to Hong Kong, were unlikely ever to be able to emerge from the latter’s shadow. Second, in the wake of the Tiananmen protests and party leader Zhao Ziyang’s fall from power, Jiang Zemin and other officials with Shanghai roots had risen to prominent positions in the Communist Party leadership. Worried that come 1997 Hong Kong would appear to be the only city in China worthy of the title "global metropolis," and with his chosen successor, Jiang, linked to Shanghai, Deng reversed his stance on Shanghai’s role in the country’s development strategy. The associations of its past had come to seem less important than its potential to reclaim its historic position as a leading center of international trade. In a famous 1992 speech, Deng announced that henceforth the Yangzi Delta would serve as the "dragon’s head" of China’s modernization and opening to the world. He thus gave his personal blessing to the energetic program of urban renewal and internationalization that has, in a surprisingly brief period of time, transformed Pudong from a relatively undeveloped riverfront zone into a high-tech forest of glittering skyscrapers, and changed Shanghai from a city that had largely become cut off from the capitalist West to a place where more than half of the world’s 500 leading corporations have branch offices. By the late 1990s, as the British ethnographer Jos Gamble puts it in Shanghai in Transition, the city was firmly "embarked upon one of the most adventurous and frenetic" urban renewal drives that "the world has ever known." As a result, there were around "23,000 building sites and some 20 per cent of the world’s cranes" in Shanghai at the turn of the millennium. 1In the wake of the regime’s about-face in 1992, Hong Kong financiers and venture capitalists looking to gain a foothold on the mainland turned to Shanghai. Investors from Taiwan soon followed suit. Investment from these two parts of "Greater China," as well as from Singapore, has continued to grow in the new century, and the cultural influence of Hong Kong styles on the city’s nightlife and fashion industry in particular has become increasingly pronounced. It is no surprise, therefore, that local boosters began 2002 in an exuberant mood, hoping the year would go down in history as a coming-out party of sorts for their once-and-now-again world-class metropolis. A brief stay in Shanghai in June 2002—I lived in the city for ten months beginning in August 1986 and have since revisited it often— revealed that the spirit of optimism with which the year had begun had continued to gather steam throughout the spring. Each day of my visit brought fresh evidence of the intense local pride that is being encouraged by newspaper headlines proclaiming Shanghai a "City of the Future" that is on its way to joining Tokyo and London in the ranks of the great urban centers of the world.
Old friends asked: Didn’t I find it hard to believe how much more there was to do at night in Shanghai now than in the 1980s when we had first become friends? Didn’t I find it amazing how many skyscrapers and elegant department stores had been built in the last few years, how many bars and coffeehouses had opened, how many more nicely kept up parks there were to stroll in? Weren’t the new art museum and the new public library impressive? Wasn’t it a relief to be able to get around town via subway, rather than fighting your way onto old crowded buses or making your way by bike through streets thronged with other cyclists? Didn’t I find it easier to buy things to read these days, thanks to the opening of places like Shucheng (Book City), with its computerized stock list, and the Jifeng Bookstore, with its excellent selection of translations of Western literary and philosophical works? Didn’t I agree that, while in the 1980s Hong Kong might have been much more "modern" and "international" than Shanghai, now the situation was very different? There was also visual evidence of renewed local pride—and of the official efforts to stir up enthusiasm for the city—in the billboards lining the streets, which called on the world to make Shanghai’s "wishes a reality" by allowing it to host the 2010 Exposition. Public spaces that in the 1980s were reserved exclusively for advertising the glories of the Communist Party and the special characteristics of the Chinese nation were now as likely to be given over to displays calling attention to the glories of the city. The festivities for this grand coming-out party for the latest incarnation of New Shanghai began before 2002 had even started. Among other things, there was the APEC Summit of October 2001 that brought Pacific Rim business luminaries (such as Bill Gates) and political heavyweights (such as Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush) to Shanghai. Summit participants heard a good deal about the city’s recent accomplishments and splendid future. Watching a display of fireworks explode above the colonial landmarks of the old Bund, they were no doubt struck, as so many visitors have been, by how small those old buildings (once among the grandest structures in Asia) looked in comparison to the new glass palaces of Pudong. Is Shanghai really poised to become one of the great global cities of the new century? Will it become a cosmopolitan cultural center as well as major business hub? Last June, Les Misérables, the first lavish Broadway musical to come to a mainland Chinese city with its main touring company opened at Shanghai’s elegant new Grand Theater. At the end of the year, Universal Studios signed a deal to open the first international-standard theme park on the mainland in the city. And before being forced to cancel their tour due to the SARS epidemic, Shanghai was to be one of the two cities (Beijing was the other) to be included in the first Rolling Stones tour of China. Are these signs of a cultural awakening? What significance does it have, more generally, that national as well as local pride has been spurred by real and imagined signals that Shanghai is again, as it unquestionably once was, one of the hottest cities in the world for globetrotting travelers and foreign investors? In his influential study of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, urban theorist and California historian Mike Davis argues persuasively that the political economies and cultural lives of major urban centers are shaped in part by what boosters and detractors— and Shanghai has those as well—say about them. If this is the case, what should we make of the "city myths" (to borrow his term) now in play in the newest New Shanghai of them all? 2 Looking BackwardThere are always reasons to look backward before gazing into the future, but this is particularly true with respect to New Shanghai because the city’s current resurgence is tied in complex ways to its emergence in the late 1800s and early 1900s as the premier Chinese center for international economic and cultural flows. "Modern Chinese banking and finance, manufacturing and organization (and the new class of Chinese associated with them and divorced from traditional China) all got their start there, are still largely concentrated there, and for the last hundred years have spread out from there as from the center of a whirlpool." This is what the geographer and historian Rhoads Murphey wrote about the city in the immediate aftermath of the 1949 revolution in his now classic study, Shanghai: Key to Modern China. 3 Along the Huangpu, much is now made of the notion that since Shanghai once brought China into the "modern" world it is uniquely positioned to lead the country’s effort to become a dominant economic and cultural power in the new century. The local fascination with history is also evidenced by the nostalgia craze that has led to the recent opening of so many restaurants and nightspots with 1930s themes. Another reason to look backward is that the present moment is by no means the first time that local pride and boosterism have been significant factors on the Shanghai scene. How far back should we look? There are many places in history to begin. The most obvious is the two decades following the First World War, which was when the image of the city as an anything-goes cosmopolitan center of dramatic events, decadent lifestyles, and dangerous characters took hold in the West, thanks largely to Hollywood films. However, I think one should begin several decades earlier: in 1893, to be precise. Why that particular year? Because it was one in which local pride reached a high-water mark and newly constructed city myths were promulgated with particular force. This was in part due to the fact that 1893, like 2002, saw the arrival of a key anniversary—the end of the first half-century of the existence in Shanghai of foreign run enclaves. (The first of these was created in 1843 under the provisions of the Treaty of Nanjing, which ended the First Opium War, when a section of Shanghai was opened to British trade and settlement.) This was also a time for pyrotechnic displays— mounted to accompany the Shanghai Jubilee, when proud local residents boasted about the great things in store for their city. It is worth noting that, as different as the present moment is from 1893, the "city myths" articulated during the Shanghai Jubilee were not completely unlike those one encounters today. In 1893, as in 2002, for example, Shanghai was touted as a city that had just undergone a series of transformations that were nothing short of miraculous. These had, according to hyperbolic boosters, changed Shanghai into a stunning symbol of modernity different from anything else found on the Chinese mainland. Then, as later during the APEC Summit, the organizers went to great lengths to use a splashy gathering, complete with speeches by local and visiting notables, to present their urban center as a truly world-class city. Then, as more recently, the main focus of celebratory activity was a strip of land running along the bank of the Huangpu that, boosters stressed, within living memory had contained no buildings of any note. Even the rhetoric of the two eras is similar. A Jubilee commemorative volume issued in 1893 spoke of Old Shanghai developing as if "by enchantment." This finds a direct parallel in the many references to "magic" that abound in contemporary newspaper reports and guidebook descriptions of New Shanghai’s recent rise. 4There are, however, some noteworthy differences between the Jubilee and the current generation of Shanghai celebrations, beginning with the fact that the main hosts of the 1893 festivities were not Chinese. The Shanghai Jubilee, with its name redolent of Victorian pomp and circumstance, was not coincidentally largely the work of British settlers. (Members of other local foreign communities, especially the Americans, pitched in as well; the Japanese, then relative newcomers among the foreigners in Shanghai, supplied the fireworks.) Another difference is that the 1893 Jubilee was not intended to link Shanghai’s development to China’s rise as a nation. The Western "Shanghailanders" of the time were obsessed with the idea that they were living not so much in a part of China as in a displaced piece of the West. True, their houses, places of business, parks, and churches were surrounded by an "alien empire" (as one Jubilee commemorative album put it). But they insisted that the International Settlement was not part of any country but rather a free-floating "republic," a throwback to Venice of the city-state era. 5 Moreover, though Chinese architectural influences could be seen in the settlement by that point and the enclave’s population was made up largely of people from different parts of China, there was much about this part of Shanghai that was more reminiscent of a British than of an Asian metropolis. The International Settlement’s race course and foreigners’ clubs, for example, looked much like those to be found in Liverpool or London, and had little in common with anything one would have encountered on a visit to an inland Chinese city such as Chengdu or Chongqing. And the restaurants in the neighboring French Concession (a more straightforwardly colonial enclave) were more like those of Paris than those of Beijing. To the Anglophone Shanghailanders and their French neighbors, Shanghai’s development was about the spread of Christendom and Western forms of commerce to the far corners of the globe. Celebrating the rise of Shanghai, in their minds, had nothing to do with celebrating the rise of China. In fact, at the 1893 event much was made of a moment in the then recent past, the end of the First Opium War, when China had been laid particularly low. Had China not been defeated by Britain in 1842, Westerners would not have begun to arrive in Shanghai in November 1843, and hence no Jubilee would have been possible. By contrast, in contemporary Shanghai local pride (at least in its official manifestations) is generally linked to nationalism. The city’s resurgence as a great metropolis is treated as inextricably tied to China’s renewed prominence as a global economic and political power. This means that there is a tension now, which was not evident in 1893, between the emphasis boosters put on Shanghai’s uniqueness and the efforts they make to present it as providing a template for what other Chinese cities could soon become. Another major contrast between Shanghai of the 1890s and Shanghai of today is that the metropolis is now a unified city completely under the control of the Communist Party. In the days of the Jubilee, it was a fragmented collection of three different districts, each run in a distinctive fashion. Under the quasi-colonial "treaty-port system" that was well in place by 1893, Shanghai was subdivided into a Chinese municipality and the two smaller but more prosperous foreign-run districts. The larger and more economically vibrant of the two, the International Settlement, was run by a locally elected municipal council that did not have to answer directly to any foreign government. The French Concession, just to the south of the settlement, had a municipal council, too, but one that was run by an individual appointed by Paris. One thing to keep in mind is that, by 1893, there were majority Chinese populations in all parts of the quasi-colonial three-cities in one that was Old Shanghai. Another is that the municipal councils of both foreign-run districts depended on income from taxes paid by the small minority of Chinese residents wealthy enough to own land and pay rates. And yet, until the 1920s, no Chinese—not even the wealthy ones—could vote or stand for office in either district. In addition, for much of the treaty-port era, all Chinese other than servants were banned from entering some of the nicest "public" parks that the foreign municipal councils maintained. They were banned, for example, from the elegant riverfront Public Garden that was one of the showplaces of the Settlement. 6 Members of the Chinese majority population of Shanghai were, it should be noted, invited to attend the Jubilee—and some of the socalled "native guilds" even organized parades to accompany the gala. 7 Never-the-less, it was clearly a ritual that was not just mainly put on by but also for the Shanghai-landers. A central theme of the celebration was the notion—so crucial to the Shanghailander city myth—that Western settlers had created an oasis of "civilization" in an inhospitable setting largely on their own. In Jubilee commemorative volumes, there were any number of omissions about the city’s past. One was that Shanghai had been a bustling market town long before the start of the First Opium War in 1839, and was home to some 200,000 people and to trading companies that moved goods from the Chinese hinterland provinces to Southeast Asia. Noting these details would have undermined the Shanghailander fairy tale of pioneers rapidly transforming a small "fishing village" and the "wilderness of marshes" surrounding it into a showplace of Western modernity. To reinforce this effacing of the pre-Western past, the Shanghailanders described the Jubilee as commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the "birth" of the city, not just their arrival in it. And when the Jubilee Oration was delivered (in which the Reverend William Muirhead celebrated Shanghai’s emergence as "the centre of our higher civilisation and Christian influence for all of China"), though foreigners could stand near the stage, Chinese were kept back behind a police cordon. 8 Yet another contrast between the current moment and the days of the Shanghai Jubilee has to do with the relationship between the metropolis by the Huangpu and the cities to its south. Consider, for example, the relationship between Shanghai and the most important southern Chinese port, which in 1893 was Canton and now is Hong Kong. In the mid-nineteenth century, Shanghai was in Canton’s shadow in terms of economic importance, whether measured in volume of trade or level of engagement with Western business. By the end of the century, their relationship had been reversed. Now, although Shanghai has begun to rival Hong Kong in many ways and to surpass it in others, the latter continues to outstrip the former in certain areas. Hong Kong’s stock market, for example, is still much more important than Shanghai’s. And, to cite a much more trivial, though still symbolically telling, case in point, while Shanghai is getting a Universal Studios theme park, it is Hong Kong that is getting the first Chinese Disneyland. 9 Old Problems
in New Times More generally, throughout the last decade or so, more and more parts of Shanghai have once again effectively, if not always officially, become off-limits to migrants from the countryside who have streamed into Shanghai in search of work ever since the Maoistera restrictions on rural-to-urban movement were loosened in the 1980s. (According to some estimates, such migrants, some of whom have struck it rich as entrepreneurs but most of whom struggle to make ends meet by moving from one low-paying construction or service-sector job to another with no health care or social security benefits, now make up roughly a quarter of the city’s population.) 11 Special steps were taken during the summit to keep them as far from view as possible when international business and political leaders were in town. This new pattern of exclusion is different from the old quasi-colonial one, since it is not rooted in nationality. It is, though, reminiscent of the past, since it is linked with other forms of discrimination. For example, the police apply one set of rules to migrants, another to "real" citizens, just as foreign-run law enforcement agencies once treated Chinese and non-Chinese residents differently. In addition, even among Shanghai’s long-term residents there is a growing sense of the city as a place divided between rich and poor that stirs up worrying echoes of the past. For all their problems, Chinese cities of the Maoist era, including Shanghai, were ones in which most people (high-ranking officials being the main exceptions) lived lives that, in material terms, were quite similar. The Shanghai of 1960, or even of 1980, was not the sort of place where one foreign visitor in the 1930s described "the gulf between society’s two halves" as "too grossly wide for any bridge." 12 That gulf has now reappeared. As the ethnographer Jos Gamble puts it, the "frantic" pace of development has led formerly stable social boundaries to be "dismantled, fractured, undermined, and reconfigured." There are now many more ways to spend money and more people with money to spend, he writes. "Evidence of this is readily apparent in the well-stocked stores and Hong Kong-style shopping plazas packed with shoppers, the proliferation of advertising billboards, neon signs, numerous lavishly furnished new restaurants filled with diners, expensive nightclubs, karaoke bars, jewelry shops, and fancy bakeries." But there is also a sizable "largely hidden underclass unable to participate in popular consumption. For these people... a meal at McDonald’s is beyond their means, let alone, for instance, the designer-label ties on sale in Shanghai’s fashionable Maison Mode" that cost more than $100 apiece. 13Local officials should remember what happened to Old Shanghai in the early 1900s. Political and economic inequality turned it into a hotbed of protests. These included tax boycotts that eventually helped native merchants gain a voice on the municipal councils of the two enclaves; multiclass studentled general strikes against imperialism that brought the city to a standstill; and labor uprisings that in 1927 drove from power the warlord regime that had previously controlled the Chinese-run part of the metropolis. It matters that the political leaders calling the shots as Shanghai reasserts its status as a global city are not foreigners. It matters that the tallest buildings are now the Pudong skyscrapers from which you can peer down at the tops of the Bund’s landmark Western-style edifices. It would be foolish to conclude, though, that the city will never again witness scenes of protest and violence from those who think that being treated like a second-class citizen of a first-class place is just not good enough. I am not sure that there are many officials in New Shanghai, though, who are interested in considering this possibility. After all, one consistent element in Shanghai’s history has been the tendency for pride to go before each fall, no matter who has been in charge. This leads to a final note about the Shanghai Jubilee, or more accurately, about the sequel that never was. In 1893, some Shanghailanders looked forward optimistically to the day 50 years hence when a second celebration would be organized by their descendants, who they assumed would live in a city governed in much the same way as the Shanghai in which they lived. This was not to be. When 1943 arrived, neither the Shanghailanders nor most local Chinese residents were in the mood for celebration. This was because, by that point, control of the city had fallen into very different hands. Parts of it were directly run by the Japanese military, the French Concession was controlled by officials linked to France’s Vichy government, and still other sections of the metropolis were in the hands of Chinese puppet regimes under Tokyo’s thumb. A Great City?Contemporary boosters and foreign observers interested in where China is heading also might want to keep in mind a comment that Christopher Isherwood made about Shanghai in the 1930s. Isherwood, who was traveling across China with his friend W. H. Auden—with whom he later wrote the fascinating half-prose, half-verse travelogue, Journey to a War—arrived in Shanghai just as the Japanese invaders were beating at the city’s door. Like other visitors before him, Isherwood was struck upon arrival by the impressive set of buildings that lined the waterfront, but unlike most others he thought they constituted merely the "façade of a great city." There was not "anything civic at all" to be found by the Huangpu, he wrote. The spirit in Shanghai was too "purely and brutally competitive" to foster the kind of creativity that needed to be present for an urban center to be more than just an engine of economic growth. 14 Whether the same thing will be said about New Shanghai 40 years from now is an open question. But I found myself thinking of Isherwood’s comments on façades and about the necessary components of a great city during my recent stay in the metropolis. Take the new Shanghai cafés. Local boosters proudly compare them to the cafés in Amsterdam or Paris, where one can loiter and read the newspapers and the latest magazines. Foreign commentators point to them as positive signs that the free market is bringing greater openness to China. The problem is that the only reading materials available in many of the cafés I visited were fashion magazines. Outside one café, I noticed a lifelike sculpture of a street musician playing a saxophone. Yet on my last several trips to the city, I have never actually encountered a street musician. In a truly great city, the public sphere is one in which more than fashion can be discussed. It is one in which street musicians can play songs of protest if they wish. This is not the Shanghai—or any other mainland city— of today. Perhaps, over time, Shanghai—which has indeed become a much more exciting, vibrant, and in some ways a much more open place than when I first visited it 15 years ago—will gain a public sphere worthy of its present façade. Since Shanghai is a city I grew very fond of when I lived there in the 1980s, have enjoyed revisiting in recent years, and where I have good friends, I very much hope it will. However, I do not share the optimism of free market fundamentalists who believe that economic choice automatically leads to political openness. One only has to look at Singapore, where authoritarian structures remain firmly in place. For all the talk of Shanghai’s "magical" transformation into a world-class city, I am haunted by a comment by a local resident whom Jos Gamble interviewed while con ducting fieldwork for his new ethnography. According to this Shanghainese, who like many of his fellow citizens seems torn between excitement and concern when thinking about the changes going on in his city, the appearance of total transformation is actually just a "conjuring trick." 15 Has there been real change in Shanghai? This is a valid question, one that may take years to answer. We would do well to keep in mind the dazzling record that both Shanghai and China itself have for confecting beguiling illusions. When it comes to China, I am thinking not just of the foreigners who were so entranced by mistaken images of Chiang Kaishek or Mao Zedong that they overlooked the authoritarian sides of these two rulers, but also of the unsettling difficulty in recent months of distinguishing what is fact and what is smokescreen with respect to official pronouncements about the spread of the SARS virus. And when it
comes to Shanghai, I am thinking not just of the bewitching effect
of its skyscrapers, but also of the cautionary note in one of the
most entertaining guides to the city ever written. In Shanghai:
High Lights, Low Lights, Tael Lights, published in the mid1930s,
Maurice Karns and Pat Patterson, two longtime residents, wrote of
the "many otherwise intelligent people misled by gaudy fiction
on the East and by wacky movies" made by directors without
any firsthand knowledge of Asia, who had fallen prey to the "Shanghai
illusion"—a vision of the city that had as little relationship
to the actual metropolis as a "Hollywood opium joint"
had to the real thing. 16 Notes 1. Jos Gamble, Shanghai in Transition: Changing Perspectives and Social Contours of a Chinese Metropolis (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003), pp. x–xi. See also Y. M. Yeung and Sung Yunwing, eds., Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization under China’s Open Policy (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1996); and Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002). Among the works in English that address specific aspects of Shanghai’s recent changes, see James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). There are a number of recent English-language studies that do not focus directly on Shanghai but do a good job of placing its recent changes into a larger regional context. See, for example, Carolyn L. Cartier, Globalizing South China (Oxford: Blackwells, 2001); and David R. Meyers, Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Since this essay is intended primarily for non-specialists, I will not cite works that belong to the burgeoning Chinese-language literature on New Shanghai, although my thinking on the subject has been strongly influenced by the writings of such Shanghai-based scholars as Li Tiangang. I have also benefited from conversations about Shanghai with Lynn Pan, the author of several works on the city that are aimed at popular audiences but confirm to rigorous scholarly standards; John Gittings, until recently the head of the Guardian’s China bureau; and Elizabeth Perry, a Harvard political scientist currently completing a book on labor activism in Shanghai in the twentieth century. 2. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1990). 3. Rhoads Murphey, Shanghai: Key to Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 3. 4. The line "as if by enchantment" comes from The Jubilee of Shanghai (Shanghai: North China Daily News, 1893), p. 21; for the "magic returns to Shanghai" motif, see Heinrich Fruehauf, "Urban Exoticism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature," in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Derwei Wang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 133–164, esp. p. 152. 5. For the Venice analogy, see North China Herald, June 16, 1870; here, Venice is described as a "prototype" for Shanghai. 6. On access to public parks and related issues, see Robert Bickers and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Shanghai’s ‘Chinese Dogs Not Admitted’ Sign: History, Legend and Contemporary Symbol," China Quarterly, vol. 142 (June 1995), pp. 444–66. 7. On Chinese participation in and reactions to the Jubilee, see Bryna Goodman, "Improvisations on a Semi-Colonial Theme, or, How to read a Celebration of Transnational Urban Community," Journal of Asian Studies (November 2000). 8. All quotes from Jubilee of Shanghai. 9. A great deal has been written about the current competition as well as the connections between Hong Kong and Shanghai. A variety of positions on this are staked out effectively in Yeung and Sung, Shanghai, and a strong case is made for Hong Kong’s continued financial and commercial centrality in Meyers, Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis, which includes useful comparative comments on Shanghai, as well as in Yatsko, New Shanghai. For Shanghai’s displacement of Canton in the late 1800s and the current relationship between Shanghai and Hong Kong, see Cartier, Globalizing South China. 10. John Gittings, "Fortress Shanghai Awaits Bush," The Guardian (London), October 16, 2001. 11. Gamble, Shanghai in Transition, pp. 76–77 and passim. For the most important general study of rural-urban migration, see Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 12. Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, Journey to a War (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), p. 237. 13. Gamble, Shanghai in Transition, pp. 139, 154. 14. Isherwood and Auden, Journey to a War, p. 252. 15. Gamble, Shanghai in Transition, p. 18. 16. This formerly hard-to-locate text, originally published by Tridon Press in Shanghai, is now available online at www.talesofoldchina.com. *Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is the director of the East Asian Studies Center at Indiana University, Bloomington. His recent publications include Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities (University of California Press, 2002) and Twentieth Century China: New Approaches (Routledge, 2003). He is at work on Global Shanghai, 1850–2000, which will be published by Routledge. [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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