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THINKING SHANGHAI A Foucauldian Interrogation of the Postsocialist Metropolis

Proefschrift

ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Technische Universiteit Delft, op gezag van de Rector Magniﬁ cus prof.dr.ir. J.T. Fokkema, voorzitter van het College voor Promoties, in het openbaar te verdedigen

op donderdag 4 juni 2009 om 10.00 uur

door

Gregory BRACKEN Master of Science in Architecture, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Bachelor of Science in Architecture, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland Diploma in Architecture, Bolton Street College of Technology, Dublin, Ireland

geboren te Dublin, Ierland

1 Dit proefschrift is goedgekeurd door de promotor: Prof.dr. A. Graaﬂ and

Samenstelling promotiecommissie:

Rector Magniﬁ cus, voorzitter Prof.dr. A. Graaﬂ and, Technische Universiteit Delft, promotor Prof.dr.ir. T. de Jong, Technische Universiteit Delft Prof. M. Sparreboom, Universiteit Leiden Mw prof.dr. C. van Eyck, Universiteit Leiden Prof. B. de Meulder, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Mw prof. M.C. Boyer, Princeton University, USA Dean prof. Heng C.K., National University of Singapore Prof.ir. U. Barbieri, Technische Universiteit Delft

2 SUMMARY

This work is an investigation into Shanghai’s role in the twenty-fi rst century as it attempts to rejoin the global city network. It also examines the effects this move is having on the city, its people, and its public spaces. Shanghai’s intention to turn itself into the New York of Asia is not succeeding, in fact the city might be better trying to become the Chicago of Asia instead. As one of Saskia Sassen’s ‘global cities’ Shanghai functions as part of a network that requires face-to-face contact, but it has also been able to benefi t from links that were forged during the colonial era (1842 to c.1949). In fact, the new global elites who have made cities like Shanghai their home have ended up living much like former ones; with the result that their needs are pushing out the very people who used to call this city home. These are the people who inhabit what Manuel Castells calls the ‘Fourth World’ (what this research refers to as the ‘analogue archipelago’). Manuel Castells’s notion of the ‘network society’ also shows how recent developments in globalisation have resulted in qualitative social and economic changes because they operate in real time. Globalisation, however, does not necessarily mean Westernisation. In fact, there is a strong neo-Confu- cian ethos underpinning China’s recent resurgence, which in turn has important ramifi cations for how Chinese people perceive public space. Shanghai’s new public space is curiously dead – and while Asians tend to blur distinctions between public and private more than we do in the West (which can render these spaces harder to read for Westerners) – the fault lies more with the fact that some of Shanghai’s new public spaces are simply ‘left-over’ spaces, particularly in front of the newer skyscrapers. This space has been designed for movement, not for use, and it contrasts starkly with the traditional alleyway houses of the colonial-era city where communal activity, graduated privacy, and organised complexity made for a rich and dynamic street life. Part II of this thesis deals with colonialism, noting how Shanghai has benefi tted from its justly famous colonial history in its attempts to rejoin the global city network. Colonialism is carefully differentiated from imperialism, although it is noted that both were premised on industrial innovations, particularly Britain’s, in the nineteenth century. Part II also examines Hong Kong’s and Singapore’s role in the global city network, the better to understand Shanghai; and a useful comparison has been made between Shanghai’s alleyway houses and the Singapore shophouse with regard to public space and the possibilities for rehabilitation and reuse. Part III is perhaps the most important section of this thesis, particularly its use of Michel Fou- cault’s theories of space and power relations and how these are inscribed in a built environment. This Part also highlights the use that has been made of Foucault’s work by other academics, notably Edward W. Said in Orientalism. Said saw some good things as having resulted from Western hegemony over that part of the world he defi nes as the Orient but generally tends to regard imperialistic infl uence as debilitating and dangerous. Use has also been made of some critics of Said’s work, notably Robert Irwin and Ibn Warraq, who maintain that Said overvalued the role of the intellectual, and more dangerously, misunderstood the Foucauldian notion of discourse, which is what led him to make some of his most damaging statements about European racism against the Orient. By way of contrast, David Grahame Shane’s application of the Foucauldian notion of the heterotopia – to Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City – is an apposite and accurate use of one of Foucault’s theories. Part IV examines China’s rich and ancient culture, noting as it does so that cultures are constructed, and more importantly, asking how they are constructed. Manuel Castells sees the construction of identities as using materials from history, geography, biology, productive and reproductive institutions, as well as from collective memory and personal fantasies, and even from power apparatuses and religious revelation; this thesis’s examination of the Chinese mentalité is an important exercise in helping to comprehend what is happening in Shanghai today. Cities are not about buildings and streets; cities are about people, and their networks of interaction. Any study of a city must take account of the warm life of its inhabitants and not allow itself to be blinded by the cold geometries of stone. This examination of what has gone wrong with Shanghai’s new

3 public spaces was greatly aided by an understanding of the Chinese language itself, which in turn led to the conclusion that the Western term ‘public’ might be better transliterated into Chinese as chang (which means ‘open-air’) rather than the more usual gong (or ‘public’), especially when describing Shanghai’s new public space.

4 SUMMARY (in Dutch)

Dit proefschrift is een onderzoek naar de rol die Shanghai’s in de 21e eeuw speelde in haar poging tot aansluiting aan het ‘global city network’. Het behandelt tevens het effect die deze ontwikkeling heeft op de stad, de mensen, en zijn openbare ruimte. Shanghai’s intentie zich te transformeren tot het New York van Asia blijft echter zonder success en het zou er in plaats daarvan wellicht beter aan doen zich te meten met Chicago. Als één van Sakia Sassen’s ‘global cities’ functioneert Shanghai als deel van een network dat direct contact behoeft, het is echter ook in staat geweest te profi teren van connecties die opgelegd werden gedurende het koloniale tijdperk (van 1842 tot c.1949). De werkelijkheid is dat de nieuwe wereld elite, die steden als Shanghai met hun hogere levensstandaard tot hun residentie gemaakt hebben hetzelfde pad volgen als hun voorgangers daarmee de mensen die het voordien hun thuis noemde verdrijven. Dit zijn de mensen die wat Manuel Castells de ‘Fourth World’ noemt bewonen (in dit onderzoek gerefereerd aan als ‘analogue archipelago’). Manuel Castells’s idee van de ‘network society’ laat ook zien hoe recente ontwikkelingen in de globalisatie geresulteerd heeft in kwalitatieve sociale en economische veranderingen omdat ze plaats- vinden in ‘real time’ Echter globalisatie betekent niet zonder meer verwestering. Er is in feite een sterke neo-Confuciaanse stemming dien de recente opgang van China ondersteunt, wat op zich weer een belangrijke invloed heeft op de manier waarop de Chinese mensen met openbare ruimte omgaan. De nieuwe publieke ruimtes van Shanghai is merkwaardig genoeg zo goed levenloos – en terwijl bij de Aziaten het onderscheid tussen publieke en openbare ruimten meer schijnt te vervagen dan in het Westen (wat het voor Westerners moeilijker maakt deze ruimtes te bevatten), de fout ligt eigenlijk meer bij het feit dat somige openbare ruimtes bestaan uit overgebleven plekken, speciaal voor de nieuwe wolkenkrab- bers. Deze openbare ruimtes zijn ontworpen voor doorgang niet voor gebruik, en ze staan in fel contrast met de traditionele ‘Alleyway Houses’ van de koloniale-tijdperk stad waar gemeenschaps activiteiten, ‘graduated privacy’, en georganiseerde complexiteit de grondvesten waren voor een rijk en dynamisch straatleven. Deel II van dit proefschrift behandelt het kolonialisme, waar we kunnen vaststellen dat Shanghai geprofi teerd heeft van zijn koloniale erfgoed bij zijn pogingen om zich weer met het ‘Global City Net- work’ te verenigen. Kolonialisme wordt uitgebreid in vergeliking gebracht met imperialisme maar het is duidelijk dat beide hun basis vonden in de industriele innovatie, met name in het Verenigd Koninkrijk in de negentiende eeuw. Om Shanghai beter te begrijpen behandelt deel II ook de rol van Hong Kong en Singapore binnen het ‘Global City Network’ en een nuttige vergelijking is gemaakt tussen de Shanghai’s ‘Alleyway Houses’ en de Singapore ‘Shophouse’ met betrekking tot de openbare ruimtes en de mogeli- jkheid voor herstel en hergebruik. Deel III is misschien wel het belangrijkste deel van dit proefschrift, met name door het gebruik van Michel Foucault’s theorien over ruimte en kracht relaties en hoe deze zijn vertaald naar een bebou- wde omgeving. Dit gedeelte benadrukt tevens het gebruik van Foucault’s werk door andere academici in het bijzonder Edward Said in Orientalism. Said zag enige goede zaken die voortkwamen van de Westerse hegemonie over dat gedeelte van de wereld dat hij defi nieert als de Orient maar over het al- gemeen imperialistische invloed als slopend en gevaarlijk beschouwd. Er is ook gebruik gemaakt van sommige critici van Said’s werk, met name Robert Erwin en Ibn Warraq die beweren dat Said de rol van de intellectuelen overschatte, en, erger nog, hij begreep de Foucauldian notie van betoog niet, hetgeen hem bracht tot het maken van een van zijn meest schadelijke bewering over Europees racisme tegenover de Orient. Daarentegen is David Grahame Shane’s toepassing van de Foucauldian notie van de ‘heterotopia’ – op Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City – een treffend en nauwgezet gebruik van een van Fou- cault’s theorieen. Deel IV behandelt China’s rijke en aloude kultuur, vaststellend dat kulturen gebouwd worden, en belangrijker, hoe ze gebouwd worden. Manuel Castells ziet de contructie van identiteiten als het ge- bruikmaken van materialen uit de geschiedenis, geografi e, biologie, produktieve en reproduktieve insti- tuten, alsmede van collectief geheugen en persoonlijke fantasieen, en zelfs meer van krachtmiddelen en

5 religieuse onthullingen; het onderzoek naar de Chinese ‘mentalité’ in dit proefschrift is een belangrijke oefening om te helpen te begrijpen wat er momenteel in Shanghai plaatsvindt. Het gaat in steden niet om gebouwen en straten, steden zin mensen, en hun netwerk van in- teractie. Bij iedere studie van een stad moet het warme leven van zijn bewoners betrokken worden en men moet zich niet blind staren op de koude geometrie van steen. Begrip van de Chinese taal zelf heeft aanzienlijk bijgedragen aan het onderzoek naar wat er mis is gegaan met Shanghai’s nieuwe openbare ruimtes wat leidde tot de conclusie dat de Westerse term ‘openbaar’ beter vertaald kan worden in het Chinees als chang (wat ‘openlucht’ betekend) dan het gebruikelijke gong (ofwel ‘openbaar’), met name wanneer we het hebben over Shanghai’s nieuwe openbare ruimtes.

6 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 9

Introduction 10

PART I: SHANGHAI 1. Shanghai Now 14 2. The Global City Network 23 3. China Resurgent 41 4. Pudong 54 5. Public Space, Empty Space 60 6. The ‘Alleyway House’ and Xintiandi 73

PART II: COLONIALISM 1. Colonial Shanghai 84 2. Colonialism v. Imperialism 97 3. Hong Kong and Singapore 112

PART III: MICHEL FOUCAULT 1. Poststructuralism 125 2. Another Power, Another Knowledge 131 3. Punishment and Discipline 144 4. The Alleyway House: A Benign Panopticon 151 5. Orientalism: ‘The Necessary Furniture of Empire’ 160 6. The ‘Double Heterotopia’ of Kowloon Walled City 179

PART IV: CHINA AND CULTURE 1. The Chinese Mentalité 186 2. A Note on Language 196 3. Culture and Perception: Shanghai in Film and Literature 208

Conclusion 220

Appendices 1. Russia and Japan as part of the ‘West’ 222 2. Chinese Dynasties 224 3. Chinese Inventions 225 4. Chinese Terms 226 5. Chinese Philosophy and Religion 231

Bibliography 238

Curriculum Vitae 245

7 List of Illustrations

1. Map of Shanghai 10 2. Map of East Asia 11 3. Pudong 13 4. The Bund 14 5. Map of Greater Shanghai 54 6. Shanghai city model 55 7. Lujiazui, artist’s impression 60 8. Century Avenue, Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, Pudong 61 9. Jin Mao Tower 62 10. World Financial Centre 63 11. Alleyway house, Jing An Villa, aerial view 73 12. Shikumen, Wenmiao Road 74 13. Alleyway house, Jing An Villa, main alleyway 75 14. Alleyway house, Jing An Villa, side alleyway 76 15. Xintiandi, aerial view 77 16. Map of Shanghai, 1929 84 17. Map of pre-colonial Shanghai 86 18. Map of Shanghai’s colonial growth, 1842-1914 87 19. Shanghai’s colonial growth superimposed on current city 88 20. Cut-away isometric of a typical Singapore shophouse 119 21. Plan of alleyway house cluster, Beijing Road West 121 22. Plan of alleyway houses 121 23. Plan of Singapore city centre 122 24. Kowloon Walled City, aerial view 179 25. Plan of Kowloon Walled City 181 26. Siheyuan, artist’s impression 194

8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to Prof Arie Graafl and for the opportunity of doing this work in the fi rst place, and for his excellent reading recommendations, mostly I would like to thank Arie for his carefully considered critique of my work, the insightful nature of which has greatly enriched it. I would also like to thank Patrick Healy, whose advice and support has been wonderful – consisting of encouragement (when it was needed) and coffee (when it wasn’t) – I also owe Patrick a huge debt of gratitude for undertaking the thank- less task of reading this thesis in MS form at its early stages. To Gerhard Bruyns I owe a special debt of gratitude for all his help in compiling this thesis MS into book form, I simply could not have done it without him. My thanks, too, go to Dr Heidi Sohn for all her support, enthusiasm and also her excellent reading recommendations; Prof Taeke de Jong for his enthusiasm, constructive criticism, and the won- derfully useful map he made for me (which can be seen at fi g.19); Thian Hoe Yeo, for being such an excellent (and patient) Chinese teacher; Darren Ying, for helping with my Chinese (as well as the weekly lunches at the Empire Café in Singapore’s Raffl es Hotel which got me out and about when I needed it); and fi nally to Robert Cortlever, for simply everything else.

9 INTRODUCTION

I have seen places that were, no doubt, as busy and as thickly populous as the Chinese city in Shanghai, but none that so overwhelmingly impressed me with its business and populousness. In no city, West or East, have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank, richly clotted life. Old Shanghai is Bergson’s élan vital in the raw, so to speak, and with the lid off. It is life itself. Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey1

‘Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgement and disposition of business’, so says Francis Bacon in Of Empire. This examination of Shanghai aims to engage in the rich discourse that has surrounded the city since China once again opened up to the world. Judgments will not be made on the new architecture of the city, good or bad; nor is it intended to be a eulogy for the vanishing way of life in its colonial core. What is of primary concern to this research is the new phenomena of Shang- hai’s urban environment, particularly its public space. Studies of Shanghai seem to concentrate an undue amount of attention on the price of property in Pudong and other newly developed areas, sometimes to the exclusion of other, less tangible concerns, like the quality of Figure 1. Map of Shanghai (source: Shanghai shi di tu) life. This investigation will make use of relevant statistics – how could it not and claim to be a complete survey? – but is concerned more with issues of a less tangible nature. The title Thinking Shanghai comes from the fact that Michel Foucault was concerned with questioning our ways of thinking rather than simply locating themes to apply (as in the ‘toolkit’ metaphor). Translating the verb ‘to think’ into Chinese is rather difﬁ cult as there are a number of ways for doing so: for example, jue de; ren wei; xiang, among others. These terms can capture – depending on their context – the act of thinking as either an intention, or as a feeling or emotion, or as the idea that results from a process of reasoning. The difﬁ culties and delights of the Chinese language will be examined in Part IV, it is enough to mention here the nuanced and multi-faceted way the Chinese have of approaching the act of thinking, making it the point of departure for this thesis’s exploration of Shanghai. M. Christine Boyer asks: ‘Can Shanghai regain its status as one of the great metropolises of the world with a new cosmopolitan spirit open to the West?’2. Or as the Chinese like to put it, can Shanghai turn itself into the New York of Asia? The short answer is no, it may make more sense to try and become the Chicago of Asia instead. Part I of this research looks at China’s recent and remarkable resurgence, noting the neo-Confucian ethos that underpins it. The phenomenon known as ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ has led to a resurgence that has profound implications for the Chinese way of life, and potentially for the rest of the world. Shanghai’s global ambitions are examined through the lens of Sas-

Huxley seems to have taken the title Jesting Pilate from a quotation of Francis Bacon: ‘What is Truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer’. M. Christine Boyer, ‘Approaching the Memory of Shanghai: The Case of Zhang Yimou and “Shanghai Triad” (1995)’ from Shanghai Refl ections, Mario Gandalsonas, ed., p. 59. 10 kia Sassen’s defi nition of the ‘global city’ as well as Manuel Castells’s ‘network society’, the resultant ‘global city network’ takes cognisance of Hong Kong and Singapore’s roles in this network, the better to understand Shanghai’s position today. Asians tend to blur distinctions between public and private, in examining the effects globalisation is having on the public spaces of Shanghai, the city’s newer spaces will be contrasted to those of the older and more vibrant colonial parts of city, particularly the alleyway houses. One of the most important points this research will make is that Shanghai’s new public space is simply ‘left-over’ space, with empty plazas in front of new skyscrapers designed for movement not for use, with the result that they lack the richness and variety of the old alleyway house spaces. Part II deals with colonialism and imperialism because Shanghai’s colonial history has lent the city’s attempts to rejoin the global city network a certain weight. Hong Kong and Singapore’s roles as cities that have made the transition from colonial enclaves to nodes in the global city network will also be examined, including the fact that all of these cities enjoy an enviable geographical position which has helped underpin their success. Part II also examines the shophouse typology of Singapore to see if it can act as a useful model for the rehabilitation and reuse of Shanghai’s dwindling stock of alleyway houses. Part III looks at the work of Michel Foucault, particularly his analysis of space and its role in how power relations are inscribed in the built environment. Beginning with an overview of his archaeological and genealogical analyses, these are developed into a newer and more dynamic methodology known as ‘consanguinity’. This analysis will show how power is exercised on the body not as a property but as a strategy, and how domination can be achieved via manoeuvres and tactics in a network of relations that is constantly in tension. In examining the public space of Shanghai’s alleyway houses, this research will contend that the use of this space refl ects the Foucauldian notion of the Panopticon, but in a benign way. Jeremy Bentham’s Figure 2. Map of East Asia (source: author famous creation rendered visibility into a trap, in drawing) the Shanghai alleyway house visibility occurs in the hierarchical arrangement of the space – the graduated privacy – and it is this which enables its rich social life to develop. Without a central control tower (as in the Benthamite Panopticon), the Shanghai alleyway house renders people visible from every point, to every point. In positing this theory, Foucault’s pessimistic notion of the panoptic society, and the carceral archipelago, are rejected. Distancing this research from the more usual reading of Foucault has enabled it to posit the thesis that the social visibility of the benign panopticon in the Shanghai alleyway house has engendered the rich and vibrant social life it enjoys; and it is this that the city should be seeking to recapture when attempting gentrifi cation projects such as Xintiandi, not merely trying to retain the shells of empty houses. Part III also highlights some of Foucault’s theories as used by other scholars, notably Edward W. Said, who maintained that Western hegemony over the Orient resulted from an imperialism that was directly infl uenced and facilitated by the discourse of Orientalism. David Grahame Shane’s use of the Foucauldian notion of the heterotopia (to describe Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong) is also highlighted as an example of an apposite use of Foucault’s theory. Part IV deals with China and culture in an attempt to understand the Chinese mentalité. China’s early development led it into a high-level equilibrium trap, this was further enhanced by the remarkable cultural cohesion in China which resulted from a literary canon that included such seminal texts as

11 Confucius’s The Analects, and which were written to inculcate good citizenship and loyalty to the state. Part IV also outlines how Western perceptions of China have changed from the chinoiserie of the eighteenth century to the ‘Yellow Peril’ of the nineteenth, and how, now, in the twenty-fi rst century, attention is once again being focussed on a China that has grown strong by the judicious application of practices borrowed from the West. Foucault saw China as being devoted to the ordering of space, and wondered how it was possible to name, and to speak, and to think using Chinese categories. To do so, it is of course necessary to be able to speak, to read, and to write Chinese. The Chinese language has more scope for subtlety of expression than the more concise Western languages. Michel Foucault’s theory that the alphabetic system changed history is valid because ideas were no longer seen as transcribed in space – sounds were – and it also led Foucault to explore how a language could become the object of a given period’s knowledge, which led to this research’s investigations into the Chinese language. What resulted is perhaps the most important fi nding in the entire study: the mistransliteration of the word ‘public’ into Chinese as gong, when it might be more accurate to use the character chang, which means ‘open-air’, instead – especially when describing the new public spaces of a city like Shanghai. Finally, Part IV also examines Shanghai’s recent re-emergence as a fi lm location, with works as diverse as Mission: Impossible III and Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad (this analysis also includes reference to M. Christine Boyer’s commentary on the latter). The main focus of this section is Kazuo Ishig- uro’s novel When We Were Orphans which highlights the dangers implicit in overly nostalgic readings of the city. It might be nice to end this Introduction with another quote from Francis Bacon: ‘Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation’. This study of Shanghai, and Chi- na, has attempted to open a door onto another culture. The Chinese way of looking at the world is exquisitely logical and yet can seem so very alien to us in the West; yet with China such a resurgent culture at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century, might it not be a good idea for everyone to try and study it?

12 PART I SHANGHAI

This is the city at rush hour: All sorts of vehicles and pedestrians, all their invisible desires and countless secrets, merge with the ﬂ ow like rapids plunging through a deep gorge. The sun shines down on the street, hemmed in on both sides by skyscrapers – the mad creations of humans – towering between sky and earth. The petty details of daily life are like dust suspended in the air. They are a monotonous theme of our materialistic age. Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby

This section looks at Shanghai now, and its place in the global city network. China is resurgent as a world power, Neil Leach claims that ‘[t]he twentieth century might have been American, but the twenty- ﬁ rst century will be Chinese’1: and Shanghai is to be its New York City. In fact Shanghai has played this role in the country since its establishment as a Western colonial enclave in 1842, and today it remains the most visible manifestation of China’s links to the global economy. These links are spectacularly apparent in Pudong, the new area facing the Bund and located to the east of the old city centre, (pudong in Chinese literally means ‘east of the (Huang) Po’). The Bund originally formed the eastern edge of the foreign concessions, which were known in Chi- nese as the Shili Yang Chang (ten miles of foreign businesses) and was the beating heart of the colonial city. At the heart of Pudong sits Luji- azui, whose name means ‘the village of the Lu family’. Its new village green, as it were, is a pretty park, with refurbished Figure 3. Pudong (source: author photograph) brick godowns2 housing a permanent exhibition on the history of the area. Sur- rounded by towering skyscrapers, the headquarters of global corporations and branches of luxury hotels, this park is beautifully landscaped but invariably empty, as such it is typical of the new public space in Shanghai: quite dead, even when the weather is good. Of course this park happens to be rather difﬁ cult to get into, ringed as it is by wide and busy roads, but that is not the only problem, Part I outlines why Shanghai’s new public space is so curiously dead, why it is not so much public space as empty space.

Neil Leach, China, p. 10. Warehouse, from the Malay gedong (building). 13 1 SHANGHAI NOW

Shanghai is constantly changing and growing. The pace of growth since 1990 (the start of the development of the Pudong area) has been staggering, but the city is in fact simply reverting to a pattern that was seen between 1842 and 1949, when the city experience a century of sustained and startling development. Shanghai used to be known as the Dongfang Bali (Paris of the East), and before 1949 it was without doubt Asia’s pre-eminent metropolis. Now, after nearly a half-century behind the ‘bamboo curtain’, it is once again trying to reposition itself, this time as the New York of Asia. It could be argued that Shanghai was not a colony at all, at least not in the usual understanding of that term. It was in fact a self-governing enclave, perched on the coast of China, and backed up by British, American, and French navel power. The city’s most important area – the International Settle- ment – governed itself by a Municipal Council, which was run by prominent local business people (Westerners all – Chinese and (initially) Japanese were excluded from sitting on it). Within decades of its foundation as a Western enclave Shanghai had become, according to Stel- la Dong, ‘…Asia’s greatest metropolis, a brash sprawling juggernaut of a city that dominated the rest of the country with its power, sophistication, and, most of Figure 4. The Bund (source: author photograph) all, money’1. But as Pamela Yatsko has so cogently pointed out, ‘[o]ld Shanghai was a freak of nature – its wildness born of a unique combination of conditions never to be repeated. These included weak central government in China; a huge foreign population that did not have to worry about Chinese law; foreign settlements managed by businessmen of the most laissez-faire mindset; a position as China’s major opium transship- ment point; and an immigration policy that did not require passports’2. The city was indeed a strange place, an anomaly, and according to Stella Dong it was ‘[h]alf Ori- ental, half Occidental; half land, half water; neither a colony nor wholly belonging to China; inhabited by the citizens of every nation in the world but ruled by none…’3. A city of 3 million people in 1930, 2.85 million of whom were Chinese, yet this vast majority was ruled by a tiny elite of foreigners. The 1930s is also the era most often evoked by Shanghai’s image builders, as it is seen as a shining moment in the city’s global adventure, an urban legend; it was, however, an insidious model – for all its veneer of wealth and glamour and sophistication, Shanghai in the 1930s masked a city of gross inequality and depravity, one where ‘…morality’, according to Dong, ‘[was] as every Shanghai resident knew, [...] irrelevant’4. Shanghai was notorious, in fact it is the only city whose name has become a verb for a despica- ble act: to shanghai. (To shanghai is to ‘“render insensible by drugs or opium, and ship on a vessel wanting hands”, [and] dates from the habit of press-ganging sailors. Men, many of whom were found drunk in “Blood Alley” (off modern-day Jinling Lu), were forced onto ships, which then set sail, leaving the

Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 2. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 199. Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 2. Ibid., p. 1. 14 comatose sailors no choice but to make up the defi cient crew numbers when they sobered up’5.) This research intends to understand why Shanghai’s history took the trajectory it did, and so will also be comparing Shanghai to its erstwhile colonial sister-cities of Hong Kong and Singapore. These three cities were the British Empire’s outposts in the Far East. Hong Kong and Shanghai formed part of a chain of cities strung along the coast of China between 1842 and 1949 and known as ‘treaty ports’. Not so much the edge of empire as the wedges the imperial powers used to prise open China’s vast markets as well as tap the huge store of valuable exports, such as tea, silk, and porcelain (this latter commodity is still known in the West simply as ‘china’). Shanghai, with its foreign concessions, particularly the larger British- and American-dominated International Settlement, was far ahead of its time. It was not, like the French Concession, an enclave run from a colonial offi ce elsewhere; it was a self-governing entity, in fact it could be argued that it was the forerunner of the global city, the sort of command post city that Saskia Sassen so often highlights; a city that was able to make its own decisions, facilitated by a government too afraid to give it anything less than it wanted lest the multi-national corporations move elsewhere. Shanghai foreshadowed these command post cities with its heady mix of international expertise and wealth-generating business, and in many ways formed a pattern that is readily recognisable today and hence represented what was to be the future of global capital. It is to the world of global capital that we shall fi rst turn our attention in Shanghai. In the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century the city is attempting to regain its once pre-eminent position in the global network of cities; what Ted C. Fishman calls ‘a gamble on a global scale’6. But what is happening to the city as a result, and to its people, as well as the spaces they call home? We will be taking a look at what constitutes a global city by citing Saskia Sassen’s defi nition of one, as well as analysing global infl uences on Shanghai, and China (which, by the way, is not to say globalisation is some sort of Wester- nising behemoth). Globalisation is a two-way street, more than that, it is a phenomenon which can work in many different directions at once. As Manuel Castells has presciently pointed out: ‘in a world increasingly saturated by information, the most effective messages are the most simple, and the most ambivalent, so that they leave room for people’s own projections’7. One of the most interesting developments to watch unfolding in this coming century will be not so much the effects globalisation will have on China, rather the effect China will have on globalisation. According to Neil Leach, ‘China is the new America. But it is not as if China is replicating America. Not at all. What is so remarkable about China is that it is forging a new socio-economic outlook, quite different from the dominant Western paradigm, but perhaps just as effective’8. As Ted C. Fishman reminds us: ‘[t]he words “Made in China” are as universal as money: the nation sews more clothes and stitches more shoes and assembles more toys for the world’s children than any other. But moving up the technological ladder, China has also become the world’s largest maker of consumer electronics, pump- ing out more televisions, DVD players, and mobile phones than any other country. And more recently, China is ascending even higher still, moving quickly and expertly into biotech and computer manufacturing’9. China is not, in fact, home to the cheapest workforce in the world, the country has become the world’s workshop because, according to Fishman, ‘it sits in a relatively stable part of the globe and offers the world’s manufacturers a reliable, docile, and capable industrial workforce, groomed by government-enforced discipline’10. The story of the twentieth century has sometimes been presented, at least according to Niall Ferguson as ‘…a triumph of the West; the greater part of it has been called the “American Century”. The Second World War is often represented as the apogee of American power and virtue; the victory of the

Shanghai: Lonely Planet, p. 48. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 117. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 372. Neil Leach, China, p. 10. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 1. Ibid., p. 7. 15 “Greatest Generation”’11. Globalisation has followed, and is often misunderstood as Westernisation, yet even the term ‘the West’ is a slippery concept, defi ned more often by what it is not (i.e. not the East, the Orient, Africa, etc.). As a geographical entity the West roughly consists of Europe and North America – so far so Western – but it also includes Australia and New Zealand – and here the geographical defi nition begins to break down somewhat. Of course the West is understood to be more of a concept, a way of life, than anything else, the product of a century-and-a-half of industrialisation, and as such can be said to include Russia, which was part of what was understood as the West, at least until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 (and is a country that is increasingly fi nding itself sheltering under the Western umbrella once again – appropriately enough given the fact that the Russian Federation is home to the Caucasus, the region that gave us the word ‘Caucasian’, the rather fanciful ethnic term invariably invoked in preference to the less politically correct ‘white’). Which brings us to another potential defi nition of the West: one based on race. This, however, is also unsatisfactory because of course the countries of the West comprise a veritable rainbow of ethnici- ties – in some cases the result of a creeping reverse colonialism from areas to the south and east of the Mediterranean. But it is also unsatisfactory because Japan, an astonishingly homogeneous country in ethnic terms, but an Asian one, simply has to be included in any modern understanding of the West as a concept. This interesting question will be explored more fully in Part II. As Niall Ferguson has pointed out: ‘…the end of the Cold War led Francis Fukuyama famously to proclaim “the end of history” and the victory of the Western (if not Anglo-American) model of liberal democratic capitalism. Yet this seems fundamentally to misread the trajectory of the past hundred years, which has seen something more like a reorientation of the world towards the East’12. East Asia is one of the world’s fastest-growing regions, and Shanghai is one of its fastest-growing cities. It is indeed, brave or not, a new world. Known in Chinese as the buye cheng (the sleepless city), Shanghai is emerging as a potential centre of world economic activity in the twenty-fi rst century. Shanghai intends to be a showcase for China’s economic reforms and its success or failure as it re-emergences as an international fi nancial, commercial, and cultural hub will have international ramifi cations. Neil Leach maintains that ‘[i]n the 20th century the cry was “Go West!” In the 21st century, as Rem Koolhaas repeatedly reminds us, the cry is “Go East”’13. What is being outlined here in this thesis, however, is the effect these reforms are having on the city, as well as its inhabitants. This research, like that of Manuel Castells, is not in the business of making predictions as, to quote Castells, ‘…this is beyond the task of the researcher’14; rather, this investigation is intended to try and understand what is happening in Shanghai today, especially why the new public space being built in the city is so curiously dead; it is also intended to try and understand what is happening to the once rich and vibrant street life in older parts of the city, which are rapidly disappearing to make way for the new.

Postsocialist Shanghai China’s recent re-emergence as a world power is one of the transformative events of our time, and the most visible manifestations of the country’s continuing rise can be seen in its two greatest cities: Bei- jing – particularly the landmark projects built for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games – and in Shanghai – as the city makes its bid for regional pre-eminence. Since its inception as a colonial enclave in 1842, Shanghai has been one of the world’s largest, richest, and most important cities. Traditionally it has set the pace of change in China, and acted as a model for the rest of the country, both as an icon of capitalism before 1949 and as a paragon of state-planning after that period. Apart from a brief period of depres-

Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. lxvii. Ibid., p. lxvii. Neil Leach, referring to Horace Greeley’s famous exhortation ‘Go West, young man’, China, p. 10. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. xv. 16 sion in the 1980s, Shanghai has had nothing but uninterrupted economic growth, and has managed to produce wealth on a staggering scale. Shanghai today, with a population of around 20 million, is generally regarded as a mega-city, and the sometimes bewildering pace of development since 1990 has seen it grow even richer as it re-emerges onto the international stage. Existing global cities present themselves as role models for Shanghai’s urban renewal, with the new Special Economic Zone of Pudong being conceived as a city like New York, London, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. On a trip to North America in April 1999, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji optimistically compared Shanghai to New York (and, rather less accurately perhaps, Hong Kong to Toronto). Pamela Yatsko reminds us that no less an organ than Time magazine has labelled Shanghai ‘…a rival to New York City as the “Center of the World” in the 21st century’15. The Shanghai Pudong New Area Handbook intends to Manhattanise Pudong: ‘“It [Lujiazui] will be the CBD [central business district] of Pudong, as well as the new CBD of Shanghai. It is intended to be developed as the Manhattan of Shanghai”’16. This chapter asks if Shanghai can really reclaim its position as Asia’s regional hegemon? Can the city really become the New York of Asia? An enviable geographical position – halfway up China’s Pacifi c coast, and located at the mouth of the Yangtze River – had ensured Shanghai’s growth into one of China’s key ports by the sixteenth century. At almost 6,500 kilometres, the Yangtze is the world’s third longest river; a major shipping artery, it is large enough to allow ocean-going vessels to sail for several hundred kilometres upstream. After fl owing out of Yunnan it carves it way through the famously beautiful Yangtze Gorges in the mountains of eastern Sichuan and western Hubei, where it then meanders for hundreds of kilometres across fertile lowland plains dotted with lakes before fi nally debouching into the East China Sea less than twenty kilometres from Shanghai. Even a cursory reading of Chinese history would have led one to expect Shanghai to be a natural leader in China’s long march towards capitalism begun back in 1978. Shanghai has traditionally been seen as the ‘dragon’s head’ directing the development of the provinces further inland along the Yangtze River; this was certainly the case in the heyday of colonialism, but even after the Communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai continued to be the engine room of China’s industry, with industrial growth averag- ing 11.3% per annum for the three decades following that date. By 1980 the city provided one-eighth of China’s total industrial output, one-quarter of its exports, and one-sixth of the government’s revenues17. And yet, in the fi rst decade after the Open Door economic-reform policy of 1978, Shanghai actually seemed to lose its place. Shanghai-Pudong was not even included in the fi rst round of Special Economic Zones set up after the 1978 reforms18. During the 1980s Shanghai began to fi nd itself falling behind other parts of the country. Industrial growth averaged 7.5% between 1982 and 1986, modest compared to neighbouring Zhejiang Province’s staggering 21% jump during the same period19. ‘By 1991’, according to Pamela Yatsko, ‘it [Shanghai] accounted for only one-fourteenth of China’s total industrial output. In 1986, for the fi rst time in 130 years, exports from Guangdong, whose provincial capital was previously known as Canton, exceeded Shanghai’s’20. The side effects of this stagnation were even more depressing. Yatsko writes that at the time she was posted to the city in 1986 it was not possible to get a meal in a restaurant after 6.30 in the evening. She also highlighted the antiquated chit system used in the city’s shops at the time, the result of stringent currency controls. To the Shanghainese who began to return after having fl ed the Communists in 1949, the city looked eerily unchanged, this time warp delighted tourists, not to mention fi lm crews looking for authentic-looking 1930’s locations, but what was fascinating for tourists and fi lm crews was dis-

Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 9. Cited in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 104 (italics in original). Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 15. It had to wait until 1984 for that coveted status. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. 17 mal for residents. Lack of investment in housing and infrastructure – surely the hardware of any global metropolis – meant the city had fallen badly behind its regional competitors. As late as 1986, more than 60% of homes did not have toilets, residents were forced to make use of the time-honoured, though hardly sanitary, chamber pot21. And although there were 18 times more people using the city’s buses by the end of the 1980s than in 1949, their number had only increased fourfold22. By 1979, overcrowding in the city meant that the average Shanghai resident had to make do with 4.3 square metres, and they enjoyed less than half a square metre of greenery23. Uncertain whether their policies of market-oriented change would succeed, the Chinese government decided to experiment with southern China before letting the country’s pre-eminent metropolis rejoin the global network. This hesitation has in all likelihood held Shanghai back from joining the fi rst rank of global cities. While southern China soared, Shanghai foundered. Government-owned enterprises reacted more slowly to market changes than their non-state competitors in the south. The Shanghai- nese, who for decades had done little more than meet government-set production targets, had lost their entrepreneurial edge, and the city’s non-state sector, which was small in any case, was lumbered with a heavier tax burden than other provinces along China’s coast. It was not until 18 April 1990 that Shanghai began to compete seriously at a global level. This was the date that China’s then Premier, Li Peng, announced the decision of the Party Central Committee and the State Council to develop the Pudong area. A 520-square-kilometre swathe of marshy farmland between Shanghai and the coast, it was intended to symbolise China’s future role in the global economy, as well as be the showcase for the next phase of economic reform. Pudong Special Economic Zone rose like an exhalation across the Huangpo River from the Bund. Formerly a low-density residential, agricultural, and industrial area, today it is home to nearly 6,000 foreign-funded businesses, including the offi ces of nearly 300 of the Fortune 500 companies (while the Shanghai Puxi side has another 100)24; it is also home to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which re-opened in December 1990 and is one of only two in the country25. Shanghai Municipality covers just under 350 square kilometres, but the city region covers 6,340 square kilometres, the result of a series of phased expansions since January 1958 when the Shanghai Municipal Government was authorised by the State Council to establish the City Region, extending its jurisdiction over three adjacent counties at the same time26. By the end of that year the City Region was further extended to include seven neighbouring counties27. The diffi culty of making a global fi nancial hub in the over-crowded streets and alleyways of Puxi made Pudong a more logical choice for the city’s urban expansion. The Chinese government invested more than $12 billion28 in infrastructure projects just to prepare Pudong for construction29, after all the area is a marsh. In fact, seven times more was invested in Shanghai between 1992 and 1997 than during the whole of the 1980s30. More than 1,300 kilometres of roads have been built, including a 27-kilometre ring road which shot up in just two years; Shanghai opened its fi rst subway line in 1995; and broke ground in 1997 for the new Pudong Airport, which opened for business in 199931. Shanghai is home also to the world’s fastest train, a Maglev (mag-

Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., pp. 16-17. Ibid., p. 16. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 30. The other is in Shenzhen. Rebecca L.H. Chiu, China’s Rapid Urbanisation: Is Compact Shanghai Sustainable? A Preliminary Study. Ibid. Whenever the fi gure one billion is mentioned it is to be understood as American usage, i.e. 19 and not the European 112; in Europe, 19 is known as a ‘milliard’. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 31. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. 18 netic levitation) line that links suburban Shanghai to the new Pudong Airport, and the city has built more than fi ve thousand new buildings over fi fteen storeys tall by 200432. The special economic zones are China’s visible and practical attempts to open up to the outside world. Apart from Pudong and Shenzhen, there are Da Bei, adjacent to Dalian in the north, and Hainan, in the south of the country. New infrastructure was provided, along with manufacturing and warehouse facilities within these zones, which are modelled somewhat along the same lines as Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan’s earlier and successful efforts to attract foreign direct investment. Pudong is further divided into a number of smaller zones, including the Jinqiao Export Processing Zone, the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone, and the Lujiazui Financial District. Lujiazui is a fi nancial and trade development zone and is where the city’s stock market re-opened as well as being the base for foreign exchange and interbank markets. Like Shenzhen to the south, incentives were implemented here to attract foreign investment and to enable Shanghai to fuel development in the provinces further inland along the Yangtze. Part of this fuelling is facilitated by major international projects. The forthcoming Shanghai Expo in 2010 is part of such efforts, as are the construction of landmark towers for the city. Skidmore, Owing and Merrill’s Jin Mao Tower is 420 metres high and used to be China’s tallest building, it has just been overshadowed by Kohn Pedersohn Fox’s neighbouring World Finance Centre, which just topped out at 468 metres. Shang- hai is now home to more skyscrapers than Manhattan, and they are not just to be found in Pudong, they have mushroomed all over the city. According to the Pudong New Area Municipal Administrative Com- mittee, more than 180 high-rises dominated the skyline by 199933, and one-fi fth of the world’s construction cranes were in use at one point during that decade34. Shanghai had about 270,000 square metres of high-grade offi ce space in 1995, but this was expected to grow to 3.24 million square metres by 2000. By comparison, it took Hong Kong 35 years to build the equivalent amount35. The city now supplies over 12% of the municipal revenue of China as well as handling more than 25% of the total trade of all of China’s ports. In 2005 Shanghai’s Gross Domestic Product reached US$7,683 per capita (of registered population), despite a very large population base. This is over four times the average of the United States itself (which is $1,750)36. As the nation’s pre-eminent commercial and industrial metropolis, most of Shanghai’s recent and rapid population growth has been the result of migration. The city’s offi cial population reached 17.78 million in 2005 (77% of whom were registered residents)37. But it has to asked if the provision of so much offi ce space is not a little misguided? It is perhaps somewhat reminiscent of the Chinese mania for producing steel during the Great Leap Forward (1958-60). At that time steel production was seen as a useful index of a country’s economic prowess, Chairman Mao’s error seems to have been to mistake this index for something that could be an end in itself. Taken simply as an index of a nation’s economic growth, steel production was a useful indicator, just like railways had been a century earlier. While not suggesting this overproduction of offi ce space is anything like what happened during the disastrous Great Leap Forward (when people, eager to boost their villages’ steel quotas melted down pots and pans), it might be valid, however, to ask what is happening with all of this new space that is being created? And, perhaps even more importantly, what is life like for the people who inhabit it on a daily basis, as well as the people who have been forced to make way for it all? As the Odyssey Illustrated Guide

Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 24. Cited in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 35. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 112. Ibid., pp. 108-109. Walcott and Pannell, 2006, cited in Rebecca L.H. Chiu, China’s Rapid Urbanisation: Is Compact Shanghai Sustainable? A Preliminary Study. Rebecca L.H. Chiu, China’s Rapid Urbanisation: Is Compact Shanghai Sustainable? A Preliminary Study. 19 to Shanghai rather perspicaciously points out: ‘Paradoxically, the revitalisation of the city under the new economic policies and the return of the foreigner through the “open door” may be posing a greater threat to the old buildings than three decades of communist rule’38. As for the new city, Pudong has become a sort of playground for international ‘starchitects’ where, according to Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, they can ‘…employ their ideas of high modernity in spatial terms in order to impose an interpretive grid on the city’39. And while Pudong has undoubtedly acted as an engine driving Shanghai’s urban development into a new era, turning the city into another London, New York, Tokyo, or Hong Kong, Huang adroitly points out that the social confl icts that result from this are invariably downplayed. These cities, at least according to Saskia Sassen, consist of ‘…nice airports, prime-site business districts, and a large variety of leisure establishments’40. Huang also quotes Sassen in highlighting one increasingly obvious feature of these global cities, and that is the ‘the widening gap between two types of city users, a small group of professionals and a large number of low-income people’41. The slick offi ce buildings, fi ve-star hotels, and fashionable restaurants, the new upmarket residential developments, and of course the infrastructure that links them, can all be identifi ed as what Huang calls the ‘…forceful articulation of the Shanghai service class’s claims to the new urban space…’42, with an attendant devaluation of the lived space of the more general population. The claims of the international business elite are rarely questioned, something that Huang and Sassen both indignantly see as a burgeoning problem, resulting from the fact that the ‘…urban space of a global city is ceaselessly subjected to the claims imposed by the new users’43. According to Huang, to clear the way for the new development of Pudong, 52,000 households (169,000 people) were forci- bly moved to suburbs44. She sees Shanghai in its role of a global city as ‘…more of a monumental space, a capitalist showcase rather than the lived space the novelist [Wang Anyi] would call home’45. Huang’s thoughtful and timely Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai analyses the three cities of the title using the notion of the fl âneur, and makes meaningful use of the Shanghai writer Wang Anyi’s novels in her effort to record the rapidly vanishing life of the city’s alleyway houses.

Shanghai as home Shanghai is one of the world’s most densely populated cities, and despite efforts to decentralise the population via a massive program of satellite towns the city centre is still the most densely populated area, at least according to Rebecca L.H. Chiu46. While the city’s average density is supposedly lower than most of Asia’s premier metropolises (for example, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and Tokyo), at approximately 13,400 people per square kilometre in urban areas it actually surpasses all of these cities except Hong Kong47. As Chiu astutely points out, overcrowded living environment, lack of green space, reduced domestic living space, poorer health resulting from air pollution, as well as reduced housing af-

Odyssey Illustrated Guide to Shanghai, p. 48. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 105. Cited in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 108. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 108. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 101. Rebecca L.H. Chiu, China’s Rapid Urbanisation: Is Compact Shanghai Sustainable? A Preliminary Study. Ibid. 20 fordability owing to rising land values, are all huge disadvantages to the quality of life in any city. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang sees Shanghai’s urban restructuring, modelled as it primarily is on the image of the generic global city, as highlighting the ‘…problematics of globalization which subsumes the concrete space of people’s daily life under the logic of capital accumulation’48. Yet there is another group who has yet to be mentioned: the ‘fl oating population’ of predominantly rural migrants to the city, estimated in 1997 to be around three million49. This vast population of voiceless workers are to be found everywhere in the city: on construction sites, in intensive manual labour, anything that will keep body and soul together, yet they have no say in how the city they call home is run, it is almost as if they did not exist. What is perhaps most remarkable about this fact is that Shanghai is just so vast, and so busy, that it can simply swallow up such a large number of labourers, rendering them to all intents and purposes invisible. Pamela Yatsko has pointed out another of Shanghai’s problems as being the fact that ‘[i]mportant fi nancial, business, and personnel decisions that affect the city’s fate are still made in the nation’s capital’50, yet according to Peter G. Rowe’s analysis, the shift away from a consolidation of state-owned enterprises since the economic reforms began in 1978 had meant that work and political units throughout the country now have more autonomy and freedom of action in economic matters. This has facilitated modernisation as well as economic growth, but it has also loosened the grip the central government in Beijing and provincial and municipal governments, especially in areas such as Guangdong, Hubei, the Changjiang Delta, Bohai Bay, and cities like Shanghai, Dalian, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Wenzhou, and Qingdao51. Rowe also points out that there is resistance in these newly wealthy eastern provinces to sharing their spoils with other parts of the country, as well as rumblings in central government about the wisdom ‘…of “slipstreaming” the nation’s economy behind the burgeoning coastal region…’52. This is beginning to look like a case of ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’: too much central control is undoubtedly bad for a city like Shanghai, yet loosening these controls may well be even more damaging for China as a whole. Peter G. Rowe has also noted, somewhat ruefully, that the adoption of what he calls such a thoroughly technological temperament and outlook has seen Shanghai’s reaction to the sudden onslaught of modernisation as being damaging (this sudden onslaught evolved more gradually in the West). The West also had another advantage: within this technological orientation there was the belief in an empirical understanding of the issues at hand, and the ability to predict outcomes, as well as adopt problem-solving measures, something which is hampered in Shanghai by ‘…the sheer size and scope of these operations [which] have exceeded similar applications in the West’53. Pamela Yatsko’s example of the city’s department stores is a case in point: most of these are unable to attract enough customers to break even, something she suggests is the result of ‘lightening- speed growth’ which sadly indicates ‘…incompetent planning, poor market research, half-baked state enterprise reform, and overzealous investment’54. Yatsko has also been vociferous in pointing out that in wanting to become the New York of Asia Shanghai still has a long way to go in other ways as well. Its underdeveloped capital markets are largely ignored outside of China and are rife with speculation, government intervention, and scandal. The city’s fi xation with building an international economic hub has tended to focus on the hardware of such a hub, its physical infrastructure, while dangerously undervalu- ing the importance of the necessary software, in Yatsko’s view, ‘…a fair and effective legal system, ac-

Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 101. A 1997 study on urban transportation in Shanghai, cited in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, pp. 111-112. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 10. Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 72. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 90. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 9. 21 cess to accurate information, and market-oriented corporate incentives’55. It might be useful to end this chapter by reiterating the social conﬂ ict between the different groups of city users, as highlighted by Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, and reiterate the primary concern of this thesis: the spaces they call home.

Ibid., p. 12. 22 2 THE GLOBAL CITY NETWORK

‘Over the centuries,’ Saskia Sassen writes, ‘cities have been at the cross-roads of major, often worldwide processes. What is different today is the intensity, complexity and global span of these networks, the extent to which signifi cant portions of economies are now dematerialized and digitalized and hence the extent to which they can travel at great speeds through some of these networks, and, thirdly, the numbers of cities that are part of cross-border networks operating at vast geographic scales’1. What this means is that cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore constitute a system rather than simply competing with each other; markets are integrated in order to maximise growth in all centres. According to David R. Meyer, ‘[a] crisis in Tokyo or Hong Kong does not create advantages for other centers… there is little to gain for the larger fi nancial system in Hong Kong’s or Tokyo’s decline’2. In examining Hong Kong’s role as a strategic node for capital exchange between China and the rest of the world, Meyer highlights the extent to which it is social connectivity that has produced this strategic role, he also points out that intermediaries build transactions on trust in order to minimise risks of exchange across international boundaries; this they do through friendship, family, ethnic, or religious ties. Intermediaries require face-to-face exchange to acquire information from one another, to develop strategies, and to acquire trustworthy partners. Control rests in the social networks of capital that meet in Hong Kong, and these networks are rooted in long-standing relationships and bonds of trust linking fi rms locally, throughout Asia, and across the globe.

The ‘global city’ The terms ‘global city’ and the ‘network society’ have become commonplaces in recent times. Useful terms in their own right, it might be helpful to defi ne what is understood by them, and in so doing draw attention to the work of the people who coined them, namely Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells. The term ‘global city’ was fi rst mentioned by Saskia Sassen in 19843. Her book, The Global City, states that global cities constitute a system rather than merely competing with each other; there is a certain amount of competition, to be sure, but it is tempered by strategic collaborations and a division of labour all of which take cognisance of the fact that these systems fi t into a hierarchy. The term itself, Sassen explains, is a development of the notion of the ‘world city’, which was attributed to Goethe, and was relaunched in the work of Peter Hall (1966) and, subsequently, by John Friedmann (1982). According to Sassen, economic processes have been crossing borders for a long time – for example fl ows of capital and labour, goods and raw materials – but to a large extent these took place within empires. For economic activity to be global it entails a new type of organisational structure, one that requires a new type of conceptual architecture. Constructs such as the global city are, according to Sassen, important elements in this new conceptual architecture. But why does it need a new conceptual architecture? The answer, according to Sassen, lies in the changes that capitalism has been undergoing since the 1970s. Manuel Castells reminds us that ‘…globalization was not a natural process, but a political decision’4; the 1970s was a time when new forms of geographic dispersal and internationalisation began to make themselves known. We can usefully think of this era as what Sassen calls ‘…the beginning of a new transnational logic in the form of multinational fi rms’5. According to Sassen, the major source of capital in the 1970s was revenue from the increasing price of oil6. But with faith in Keynesian

Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. xxii. David R. Meyer, ‘Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange’, from Global Networks, Linked Cities, Saskia Sassen, ed., p. 19. Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. xix. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 145. Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. 24. Ibid., p. 66. 23 economics beginning to be undermined – the scourge of stagfl ation, at least according to Jane Jacobs, had begun to bite as early as 1967 when infl ation was not quite managing to trade off against drops in unemployment, and by about 1971 Keynesians began to suspect that their faith in a system that had held all the answers since World War II was beginning to look somewhat misplaced7. According to Jane Jacobs, high interest rates made borrowing uneconomical for producers, even bankrupting some, and with production contracting and unemployment soaring, lower tax rates were not producing the yields needed to defl ect massive government defi cits. In Jacobs’s view the measures required to fi ght infl ation were ruining producers (and their attendant work forces), while the measures that were then designed to help the situation were simply exacerbating and enlarging government defi - cits, this led Arthur M. Okun, one of President Johnson’s economic advisors, to suggest –somewhat facetiously – that unemployment and infl ation could be merged into a single new rate known as ‘the economic discomfort index’8. Rulers of Marxist-driven economies might have gloated when they saw what was happening to capitalism, however, they could ill afford to do so: stagfl ation was victimising them too. One suggestion to the problem was to have governments take full responsibility for issuing all the money an economy required (instead of relying on banks), but this led to another problem, and a startling one, because, for any number of technical reasons, it was proving diffi cult to defi ne exactly what money was9. This was all part and parcel of what was happening to the global economy in the 1980s; it was not just that confi dence in the industrial complex known as Fordism was eroding, the very complex itself, according to Sassen, was under threat 10. Old industrial centres in countries that had attained a high degree of development were being dismantled, and there were even attempts to dismantle the capital-labour relations around which these production processes had been built (at least in countries with a well-organised labour component). The world had entered the era of post-Fordism, where economic growth became linked to international securities transactions – the main vehicle for cross-border borrowing – and which brought to the fore the issue of capital mobility, along with attendant deregulation in domestic fi nancial markets (the most spectacular being London’s ‘Big Bang’ in October 1986) as well as the liberalisation of international capital fl ows. While banks remain a relatively simple mechanism of intermediation, fi nancial markets are ‘… complex, competitive, innovative, and risky’, and require ‘…a vast infrastructure of fi nancial centers with highly specialized services’11. But, as Saskia Sassen warns, to benefi t from the new information technologies a complex mix of resources is needed, not just infrastructure. Which brings us to another important factor in the mobility of capital, perhaps even more interesting than the transnational nature of the ownership and control of corporations, at least from the point of view of urbanism, and that is the mobility of people. As Sassen puts it: ‘The mobility of capital has contributed to new forms in the mobility of labor’12; this labour consists of the sort of people that the government of Singapore refers to as ‘foreign talent’: the bankers, brokers, architects, and engineers whose expertise helps build the city- state’s economy. This has in turn led to a new sort of centralisation, something that Saskia Sassen highlights in The Global City (where she shows that spatial dispersion of economic activity, as well as the reorganisation of the fi nancial sector, have combined to result in new forms of centralisation)13. Ironically, the technologies that have made long-distance management and services possible (as well as the instantaneous transfer of money on which they depend), requires complex physical infrastructure that is extremely immobile and thus needs massive investment to maximise the benefi ts they

Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 20. Quoted in Jane Jacobs’s Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 24. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 22. Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. 25, footnote 1. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 19. 24 can derive from such systems14. This effectively creates barriers to less-developed economies. The management of the complex interaction between massive concentrations of material resources that information technologies allow have reconfi gured the interaction between capital fi xity and hypermobility, they have also, and more importantly, given cities that were already major global players a new competitive advantage; this is perhaps the most important point in Sassen’s The Global City, and is one which she develops, albeit more through the writings of others, in the follow-on publication, Global Networks, Linked Cities, which she edited. Information technology has turned producer services into tradable goods, but the cities that are home to these new and increasingly mobile services are less important as nodal points for the co-ordina- tion of global processes, they have become (once again) sites of production in their own right. But what is it they are producing? Not steel or cotton: they are producing information. Saskia Sassen identifi es two kinds of ‘information’: the fi rst is what she calls ‘the datum’, and is relatively straightforward, in that it is standardised and easily available (Sassen gives the example of the details of a privatisation in another country); the second kind is far more diffi cult to obtain because it is non-standardised and requires interpretation and evaluation; which in turn requires judgement (invariably that of an expert). When this interpretation becomes what Sassen calls ‘authoritative’ it has become ‘information’ and is then available to all. To give an analogy: this is not unlike looking something up on the Internet; there is a lot of data out there – not all of it accurate – and what a researcher needs to do is compare this data against what they know, to see if it can tell them anything new and useful, i.e. if it can become information. This process of course requires knowledge in the fi rst place, as well as judgement, and (very often) patience; as Sassen puts it, ‘[i]t [this process] entails negotiating a series of datums [sic] and a series of interpretations of a mix of datums [sic] in the hope of producing a higher order type of information’, and as she correctly points out, ‘[a]ccess to the fi rst kind of information is now global and immediate thanks to the digital revolution. But it is the second type of information that requires a complicated mixture of elements, not only technical but also social’15. Her point is that the technical infrastructure required for connectivity can be reproduced anywhere (at least in principle), but its social connectivity cannot. This ties in to what Manuel Castells calls ‘informationalism’, which he defi nes as the ‘…mode of development in which the main source of productivity is the qualitative capacity to optimize the combination and use of factors of production on the basis of knowledge and information’, as opposed to ‘industrialism’, where the main sources of productivity are ‘…the quantitative increase of factors of production (labor, capital, and natural resources), together with the use of new sources of energy’16. Accord- ing to Castells, ‘[t]he rise of informationalism is inseparable from a new social structure, the network society’17. Castells’s notion of the network society is one we shall be turning to shortly, fi rst it might be useful to fi nish off this brief survey of Saskia Sassen’s work by pointing out that she too has touched upon the notion of the network society in her own work on global cities – so observant a commentator could scarcely have done otherwise. Sassen states quite unequivocally (hence linking her own work to that of Castells) that ‘…the global city is not a place but a network’18; an idea she goes on to develop in Global Networks, Linked Cities. Capital can fl ow out of a city quite as easily and quickly as it fl ows in; and what was once thought of as ‘national’ capital can now just as easily join the exodus19. But as Sassen is at pains to point out in The Global City, there is little to gain for the larger fi nancial system if one or more cities in it suffer a decline. What she terms the ‘geography of globalisation’ is not a planetary event, it is a changing

Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 120. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 8. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 8, (also dealt with in Chapter 1 of The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age, Volume I). Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. 349. Saskia Sassen, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities, p. 129. 25 geography, and ‘…one that has undergone multiple, often specialized transformations over the last few centuries and over the last two decades, and most recently has come to include electronic space’20. Some places have been left out of these transformation processes – both Sassen and Castells highlight the lamentable dearth of telephones in sub-Saharan Africa (where there are fewer than in Manhattan). There is a vast region of the world that lies unconnected to any but the most peripheral fringes of the global economy, and while many factors have been used to explain why these places lack development: corrupt governments, internecine strife, lack of investment in infrastructure, even of the most basic roads-and- bridges type, etc., Jane Jacobs’s highlighting of the stunning success of Pacifi c-Rim economies seems to give the lie to this, as some of these economies have suffered similar problems and yet have managed to achieve success. Of course, as Jacobs also points out: ‘…success has turned out to be as puzzling as failure because any measures, policies or combinations of them that are conventionally singled out as responsible for these successes can only too readily be matched by equivalent measures and policies followed only by failures somewhere else’21. It is this region of unconnectedness that will be referred to in this thesis as the ‘analogue archipelago’22. Michel Foucault also famously made use of the term ‘archipelago’, admittedly only once, to des- ignate ‘…via the title of Solzhenitsyn’s work, the carceral archipelago: the way in which a form of punitive system is physically dispersed yet at the same time covers the entirety of a society’23. It is an understanding similar to Foucault’s that is designated here, the term ‘analogue archipelago’ is intended to describe those who fi nd themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide. Economists, and others, in trying to explain this uneven development, sometimes fall back on cultural platitudes: Japanese are hard-working and intelligent; Chinese are good traders, etc., but as Jane Jacobs witheringly puts it: ‘For enlightenment of this quality [or lack thereof] we don’t need economics or economists. Perceptive tourists do quite as well’24. Perhaps Singapore points us in the right direction, where we saw earlier their clever use of ‘foreign talent’. The Singapore authorities understand that it is people who drive an economy, talented, hard-working people, whether Japanese or Chinese, Caucasian or African. People who are good at what they do, and who are prepared to do it wherever they feel most appreciated (i.e. invariably wherever they earn the best remuneration); this goes to the heart of what attracts foreign talent. What keeps them in a city, however, can depend on other, less tangible attractions than simply a large paycheque. How pleasant is the city to live in? How easy is it to get around? What are the restaurants and galleries like? What is the standard of schooling? Is there access to nature (other than the ubiquitous golf course)? Is the city polluted? These are issues that have been highlighted by Pamela Yatsko in New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City and to which we shall be returning later in this chapter, but for the moment it is probably enough to point out that there are many, sometimes quite intangible, reasons why people to move to, and then stay in, any given city, global or otherwise. The effects globalisation has on a city contribute to an urban spatiality that often massively transforms certain portions of it. Where the focus in a city is on the architecture of networks there is invariably a tension between what Saskia Sassen calls global span and particular sites. In Global Net- works, Linked Cities these tensions are explored by a number of different researchers who examine the global architecture of these networks, as well as the interactions they have had with specifi c environments in different cities. David R. Meyer’s ‘Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange’ examines the role

Ibid., p. 10. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 6. Ironically, economies in sub-Saharan Africa grew by more than 5 per cent in 2005, their best economic performance for three decades, according to David Smith in The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order (pp. 125-126) this, signifi cantly, was not due to development aid from the West but thanks to investment from China. The term ‘analogue archipelago’ is inspired by the novel, Killing Time, by Caleb Carr. Michel Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’ from Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon, ed., p. 68. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 6. 26 that that city plays as a strategic node for capital exchange between China and the world. He points to Hong Kong’s extraordinary social connectivity as a factor in producing and maintaining its strategic role. Meyer dismisses any fears that advances in telecommunications may disperse these key actors in fi nance, commodity exchange, corporate management, and other businesses, from their metropolitan base – not unlike the much-heralded ‘paperless offi ce’ which singularly failed to materialise once the new information age settled in. Ironically it is the need to control and co-ordinate these increasingly complicated exchanges that has led to an increase in the need for face-to-face communication. Intermediaries, according to Meyer, need relationships to be built on trust, particularly if they are across international boundaries, and this they do, at least in the case of Hong Kong (as we have just seen) through friendship, family, ethnic, and/ or religious ties. This is one aspect of the Chinese way of doing business, based on mutual trust, and it is one we will be seeing again in this thesis when we look at the history of colonial Shanghai, where the city’s business intermediaries formed their own powerful and distinct social group known as ‘compra- dors’. Hong Kong, because it acted, according to Meyer, as a leading embarkation point for the Chinese going abroad, found its business community could more effectively monitor changes in the wider Chi- nese diaspora. Modern telecommunications, while permitting instantaneous communication of vast amounts of information, has not created a network system where none existed before. These nodal points in the network of global cities have formed themselves in place where people had already established networks. Hong Kong now operates the largest teleport in Asia, according to Meyer, and ‘[i]t has the greatest array of fi bre-optic international cables of any metropolis in Asia; numerous submarine cable systems link it with Asia, Oceania, North America, and Europe, and its satellite contacts permit global reach’25. But, as Saskia Sassen points out, the historical reasons for this is that fi bre systems are not easily spliced (hence less able to connect multiple lateral sites), so these systems tend to be installed along existing rights of way, such as rail, waterways, and/or roads – what Niall Ferguson would call ‘the sinews of Western imperial power’26. A good example of this might be Bangalore in India. A globally connected city, known as India’s ‘Silicon Valley’, it is a place that has built its global connectedness on a colonial past. Developed by the British in the 1920s as a Garden City with railways, telegraph, and postal links, it was the fi rst place in the country to have electricity. In the 1980s it was still a quiet settlement with a relatively small population (for India) of 3 million, now an important ICT centre, its population has grown to 6.5 million27. It is these older and erstwhile imperial networks that have underscored the success of key cities in Asia’s tiger economies, which can be seen as their inheritors. But we must never forget that it is people who makes these places and their networks actually operate, and it is people who are the main reason they come into being in the fi rst place, something David R. Meyer zealously points out in his article: ‘…construction and improvements of telematics cannot substitute for social networks’28. As Saskia Sassen says, ‘[b]eing in a city becomes synonymous with being in an extremely intense and dense information loop’29, because people’s talent and expertise in various specialised fi elds makes certain types of urban environments function as information centres, and this is something that still cannot be replicated in cyberspace. Sassen also points out that being in such a city has one other remarkable value-added feature, and that is that unplanned, indeed unforeseeable, mixes of information, expertise, and talent take places in these cities, something Sassen sees as being key in producing what

David R. Meyer, ‘Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange’ in Global Networks, Linked Cities, Saskia Sassen, ed., p. 264. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 15. David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 139. David R. Meyer, ‘Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange’ in Global Networks, Linked Cities, Saskia Sas- sen, ed., p. 268. Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. xx. 27 she calls ‘a higher order of information’30.

The ‘network society’ Turning now to the work of Manuel Castells, particularly his analysis of the network society as outlined in the magisterial trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. It is in Volume III, End of Millennium, that Castells gives us the clearest defi nition of what he calls the ‘network society’, something he sees as being ‘…made up of networks of production, power, and experience, which construct a culture of virtuality in the global fl ows that transcend time and space’31. However, Volume II, The Power of Identity, might be the best place to begin. In this book Castells states that ‘[i]t has been often argued that globalization is not a new phenomenon, and has occurred in different historical periods, particularly with the expansion of capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century’32; while he does not disagree with this statement, Castells does point out that such a view pays insuffi cient attention to ‘radically new processes in technology, fi nance, production, communications, and politics’ that have occurred more recently, so that while they may be right from the point of view of an historical perspective, he is wary of this view of the present as being simply ‘a repetition of past experience’, or the ‘rather pedestrian view that there is nothing new under the sun’33. Clearly Castells is convinced that this ‘new infrastructure based on information technology’ has actually introduced a qualitative social and economic change, by the very fact that, for the fi rst time, global processes can and do operate in real time34; fi nancial and currency markets around the world operate as an interdependent unit in real time. Nation states have been forced to restructure in order to react to this global complexity. In this age of multilateralism they have begun to evolve towards a new institutional form, something Castells calls ‘the network state’. This state, with its attendant political challenges and emergent social movements, is seen as being opposed to the ‘…one-dimensional logic that dominates the network society in the fi rst stage of its constitution’35. Undoubtedly one of the most important points Castells has to make is that ‘[c]hanges in relationships of production, power, and experience converge toward the transformation of material foundations of social life, space, and time’36. Basically, spaces of fl ows dominate spaces of place (i.e. of people’s cultures), and that the annihilation of time by technology has now supervened over the clock time of the industrial era. This ‘network society’ is disembodying social relationships and has introduced a culture of ‘real virtuality’37. Yet the network society does not escape from what Castells calls ‘the general law of societies throughout history’38: that sequence of power relations where domination is countered by resistance; where views and projects on how to organise social life encounter opposition. This is something that shall be examined in greater detail in Part III with the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault maintains that there can be no power without the possibility of resistance; Castells’s point is to warn us about the information being gathered on individuals by businesses and organisations eager to take it to market, stating that this means that ‘[t]he credit card, more than the ID card, is giving away privacy’39. Leading on from this is the point, which is of vital importance to anyone studying the urban environment, that Castells states as follows:

Ibid., p. xx. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 381. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 304, footnote 4. Ibid., p. 305, footnote 4. Ibid., p. 304, footnote 4. Ibid., p. xvi. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 380 (italics in original). Ibid., p. 371. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. xvii. Ibid., p. 342. 28 With the exception of a small elite of globopolitans (half beings, half ﬂ ows), people all over the world resent the loss of control over their lives, over their environment, over their jobs, over their economies, over their governments, over their countries, and, ultimately, over the fate of the Earth. Thus, following an old law of social evolution, resistance confronts domination, empowerment reacts against powerlessness, and alternative projects challenge the logic embedded in the new global order, increasingly sensed as disorder by people around the planet.40

This is something that ties in to Saskia Sassen’s work, which we will see again in a moment, but Castells states in End of Millennium (Volume III of The Information Age) that ‘[s]ocial exclusion is often expressed in spatial terms. The territorial conﬁ nement of systemically worthless populations, disconnected from networks of valuable functions and people, is indeed a major characteristic of the spatial logic of the network society’41. He has also brought this to our attention earlier in the trilogy (in chapter 6 of Volume I, The Information Age), but in Volume III, End of Millennium, he see global capitalism as having a global reach; it is ‘a new brand of leaner, meaner capitalism’, one that no longer has to face competition from Soviet or Chinese-style communism, the former having imploded in the early 1990s, and the latter having in effect embraced capitalism under the rubric of ‘Chinese characteristics’ – a development which will also be explored later on in Part I.

The ‘analogue archipelago’ As we have seen in the writings of Saskia Sassen and Jane Jacobs, it is capitalism’s ability to restructure itself, which it has done spectacularly since the 1970s, that has revealed its real versatility, as well as its ability to effi ciently use networking logic in facilitating such dramatic spurts in production and economic growth. It is also this versatility that has enabled it to be embraced by China’s one-party state and set so effectively to work since the 1978 ‘Open Door’ economic reforms. Yet, as Manuel Castells uneasily points out, this new ‘leaner and meaner’ capitalism also displays a potentially devastating exclusionary logic, with millions of people, and whole parts of the planet, being excluded from the very benefi ts that all of this informationalism can provide, and this is not just something that is happening in the developing world, this ‘Fourth World’ that Castells refers to is a patchwork of ‘multiple black holes of social exclusion throughout the planet’42. Unlike its predecessors, the First, Second, and Third Worlds, which were more or less geographically cohesive, this Fourth World is dotted everywhere, and anywhere. Castells lists Sub-Saharan Africa (whose dismal telephone statistics we have already seen), he also includes parts of Latin America and Asia; but this Fourth World is not limited to these specifi c geographical areas, it can occur anywhere, in any country, and in any city. It is a rash of social exclusion that includes America’s inner-cities, France’s banlieues, Japan’s Yoseba quarters, and Asia’s shantytowns; not to mention the homeless, the incarcerated, and the illiterate everywhere. Because these people are not to be found in any specifi c geographical area, they can be seen as inhabiting an ‘analogue archipelago’, one that is increasing in numbers and which Castells see as being inseparable from the rise of informational global capitalism. This is the downside of the network society, and, as Castells has shown us, this Fourth World is there to be seen – for those with eyes to see –everywhere in the world, even in the sparkling new global cities, sometimes especially in them, because the contrast with the new way of life on offer for the international elite of ‘foreign talent’ is so stark when seen against the lives of those being left behind. These people have been pushed aside in the cities they once called home to make way for these new elites and their new spaces. Castells’s view, that the new infrastructure based on information technology has introduced a ‘qualitative social and economic change’, can be likened to David Harvey’s formula-

Ibid., p. 72 (italics in original). Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 167. Ibid., p. 168. 29 tion of ‘time-space compression’, which he outlines in The Condition of Postmodernity, where he states that ‘strong a priori grounds can be adduced for the proposition that there is some kind of necessary relation between the rise of the postmodernist cultural forms, the emergence of more fl exible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of “time-space compression” in the organization of capitalism’43. This ties in to Harvey’s analysis of the previous round of time-space compression which occurred in the early years of the twentieth century where he quotes Stephen Kern as saying that new systems of transportation and communication ‘“tightened the skein of internationalism and facilitated international co-operation” at the same time as they “divided nations as they all grabbed for empire and clashed in a series of crises”. It is, he [Kern] suggests, “one of the great ironies of the period that a world war [World War I] became possible only after the world had become so highly united”’44. David Harvey tells us that ‘[t]ime-space compression always exacts its toll on our capacity to grapple with the realities unfolding around us’45. Manuel Castells’s analysis can be understood as reinforcing this point of view, with globalisation being seen as something that has happened before, at different times throughout history – most particularly, as Castells already mentioned, with the expansion of capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century. But Castells vigorously rejects the view that the ‘radically new processes’ we are seeing today are simply a repetition of these patterns that have gone before, we must not forget that Castells sees this new round of globalisation as a qualitative change, a view that coincides with that of this research. Globalisation has indeed begun to change in ways that the ‘pedestrian’ view (Castells’s well-chosen word) does not take account of. Globalisation is often simply equated with Westernisation. It will be argued later in Part I that globalisation has undergone – as has its generator, capitalism – a qualitative change, one that is highlighted by, and in turn also facilitated by, China’s embracing of it, and the Chinese desire to imbue it with their own unique characteristics. Firstly, it might be helpful to return to the work of David Harvey, namely his more recent publication, The New Imperialism, where he says that ‘…the world is heavily committed still to capital accumulation without limit’46, and that ‘[t]he collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of China entailed a massive release of hitherto unavailable assets into the mainstream of capital accumulation’47. This, Harvey posits, was necessary because either new arenas of profi table capital accumulation (such as China) must be opened up, (as subsequently happened,) or there would have to be a new round of devaluation of capital. Harvey then goes on to quote Giovanni Arraghi as suggesting that ‘we are in the midst of a major transition towards Asia as the hegemonic centre of global power’48, which is something Har- vey fi nds hard to imagine the United States as accepting peacefully. This, it has to be stressed, is very far from being the purview of this study, but a work such as The New Imperialism could not have been included in any survey of Harvey’s oeuvre without at least making reference to its somewhat shrill anti- American stance. What is of primary interest here is Harvey’s excellent analysis of the ‘new and signifi - cant complexes of industrial production’ arising in East and Southeast Asia49 (a phenomenon which Jane Jacobs has also drawn our attention to). Harvey feels that the survival of capitalism in the face of ‘… multiple crises and reorganisations accompanied by dire predictions, from both the left and the right, of its imminent demise, is a mystery that requires illumination’50. Harvey sees the period between 1945 and 1970 as ‘the second stage in the political rule of the bourgeoisie operating under global US dominance and hegemony’51. It was a period of strong economic growth with the understanding among the major capitalist powers to avoid war. The geographical expansion of capital accumulation that occurred at

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. vii. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 306. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 35. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 57. 30 the same time was, according to Harvey, achieved through the processes of decolonisation and what he terms ‘developmentalism’ as being more or less the accepted goal for the rest of the world. The reduction in the cost and time of movement that has accompanied and facilitated the developments inherent in all of this, which Harvey also terms ‘globalisation’, and the ‘…evolution of the geographical landscape of capitalist activity is driven remorselessly by round after round of time-space compression’52. In answer to K. Anthony Appiah’s question ‘Why does a transnational system that is so diffuse need to have its management and fi nance so concentrated?’53, we have already seen David R. Meyer’s cogent explanation for this in Hong Kong, and Harvey reinforces this by telling us that ‘[f]luid movement over space can be achieved only by fi xing certain physical infrastructures in space’54. Physi- cal infrastructures such as railways, roads, airports, port facilities, cable networks, fi bre-optic systems, electricity grids, water and sewerage systems, pipelines, etc., are listed by Harvey who states that these ‘…absorb a lot of capital, the recovery of which depends upon their use in situ’55. Harvey’s fundamental point is that ‘a certain informal, porous but nevertheless identifi able territorial logic of power – “re- gionality” – necessarily and unavoidably arises out of the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time, and that inter-regional competition and specialization in and among those regional economies consequently becomes a fundamental feature of how capitalism works’56, thereby leading to the global city becoming, in the words of K. Anthony Appiah ‘…increasingly isolated from – indeed, actively antagonistic to – a regional culture and economy’57. China’s Pearl River Delta (Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen) and the Lower Yangtze region (Shanghai) are areas that David Harvey says ‘encapsulate dynamic power centres within China that economically (though not necessarily politically) dominate the rest of the country’58. This is correct, however these regions need to be mindful of the sort of risks that Harvey and Appiah have drawn our attention to in such a timely manner. Harvey sees the Chinese government’s massive programme of public works as ‘one possible way in which global overaccumulation will fi nd at least a partial outlet in the near future (in much the same way that the interstate highway system and its ancillary works of sub- urbanization and the development of the south and west in the United States helped absorb surplus capitals in the 1950s and 1960s)’59, but the governments of these vast regions must be mindful of the roles they play, and should be expected to play, in the larger national context. Especially as these huge urban regions (each with an estimated 20 million people) are located in a country that is still predominantly rural. But what about the effect on the people who call these vast urban regions their home? Cities, Saskia Sassen reminds us, have ‘typically been deeply embedded in the economies of their region’, but as she also points out, they, as ‘strategic sites in the global economy tend, in part, to become disconnected from their region and even nation’60. Sassen’s focus has always been more intimately concerned with the citizens of these global cities than with their city regions as a whole, highlighting the winners: the new professionals, the managers and brokers whose numbers have dramatically increased in recent years, as well as the losers: the marginalised, the homeless, the inhabitants of the analogue archipelago, whose rights are trampled on in the rush to create new ways of life centred on Western concepts of rights (and wrongs). It might be useful to highlight one fi nal but telling point that Sassen makes about these so-called winners before turning our attention to three of these cities in detail, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai, and that is that while these new managers are rich in the sense that their earn a

Ibid., p. 98. K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Foreword’ in Globalization and its Discontents, Saskia Sassen, ed., p. XII. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 99 (italics in original). Ibid., pp. 99-100. Ibid., p. 103. K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Foreword’ in Globalization and its Discontents, Saskia Sassen, ed., p. XII. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 105. Ibid., p. 113. Saskia Sassen, ed., Globalization and its Discontents, p. XXVI. 31 lot of money, they are not wealthy, a subtle distinction Sassen draws our attention to when she highlights the fact that these new global elites actually have ‘no signiﬁ cant control or ownership in the large corporation and investment banks for which they work’61; their earned income, while signiﬁ cant, is actually too little to be investment capital, hence the emergence of the spending habits of this new class, a class that is not interested in mere food anymore but cuisine, not in mere clothing but designer labels, and not in decoration but in objets d’art62.

The global city network and the history of empire Now we turn our attention from general notions of the global city and the network society to the specif- ics of what is happening in some of Asia’s leading metropolises. This is done primarily with the aim of seeing what role Hong Kong and Singapore can assume in either helping or hindering Shanghai’s bid for global greatness. As such it will be dealt with in detail at the end of Part II, but for the moment it should be noted that these new global elites – the foreign talent who call these cities home (even if only for a time) – live lives not too dissimilar from the old colonial elites. Both groups, the global elite and the colonial, tend to consist of foreigners, in the colonial case these had their own set of special rights and privileges, sometimes explicit, such as extra-territoriality, sometimes implicit, such as the unquestioned assumptions of racial superiority (which were not always the one-way street it is imagined). As we have seen, many commentators have drawn astute comparisons between what is happening today in the network society and its similarity to what has gone before. These patterns are everywhere to be seen in the former colonial enclaves of Hong Kong and Singapore and, perhaps, more obviously, at least architecturally, given its unusual lack of development between 1949 to 1990, in Shanghai. Saskia Sassen estimates the international fi nancial market of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century to having been as massive as today’s. Certainly if its volume is measured in relation to the national economies of the time, ‘[t]he international capital market in that earlier period was large and dynamic, highly internationalized and backed by a healthy dose of Pax Britanica [sic] to keep order’63. Indeed, according to Sassen, London can be seen as having less global infl uence now than it had in the era of the British Empire. Indeed, it was the British, at least according to John Darwin, who were ‘among the fi rst to imagine a globalized world, though the free-traders of the 1830s and ’40s, who drew their inspiration from Adam Smith’64. In fact this could be dated even earlier, with Sir Thomas Stamford Raffl es’s founding of Singapore as a free-trade port in 1819. This was the ‘empire of free trade’ that Britain tried to force on the rest of the world (and which they managed to do with considerable success in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia). John Darwin makes the interesting point that ‘[The Brit- ish Empire] had required the new transport technology to draw the rest of the world towards the high- pressure zone of Euro-American commerce’65, it could be further posited that it was not so much this ‘new transport technology’ that enabled Britain to do what it did, as desire and technology combined in a symbiotic relationship; much like the way today’s network society depends on its new technologies to facilitate societal changes. Darwin’s thesis was that ‘[t]he world economy of the later nineteenth century was partly the consequence of extending the dense commercial networks of the North Atlantic basin to new parts of the globe: South America, parts of Africa, India, South East Asia, Australasia, and East Asia. One of its distinguishing features was that, right across the world, the price not just of luxuries but of even quite common commodities (like food grains) was decided not by local or regional factors but by market forces on a global scale’66. This clearly contradicts Saskia Sassen’s notion that ‘[t]here is no such entity as a single

Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. 340. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 76. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 8. Ibid., p. 334. Ibid., p. 330. 32 global city – and in this sense there is a sharp contrast with the erstwhile capitals of empires’67; the erstwhile capitals of empire were very much part of a network, usually their own dedicated imperial system, be it British, French, or Dutch, but these cities were never the stand-alone entities Sassen seems to be suggesting. Within the confi nes of the technology of its day, however revolutionary and far-reaching as it may have seemed at the time, these were network that were ‘…connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort’68. Again, as we have seen with Manuel Castells’s analysis, today’s networks are qualitatively different, as also is the fact that we have one single global network as opposed to a series of differing imperial ones. Of course, then as now, some areas of the world remained ‘…outside the pull of international commerce because they were too inaccessible, too poor, or too insulated by political or religious controls from external contact’69: this was the analogue archipelago of another era. One other fact that Darwin draws to our attention to is that ‘…the commodities that circulated in this new global exchange were not staples but luxuries; their volume was tiny’70; what was important was not so much the type of product that was being circulated, as ‘the growth of a Europe-centred international economy, the extension of a Europe-centred international system with its own laws and norms, and the spread of European ideas via Europe-owned media (like the telegraph, mail and steamship services) [that] created a new environment at the “macro” level. Europeans, it seemed, controlled all the lines of communication. Above the very local level, nothing could move unless it adapted to their ways’71. As we have just seen, the prices of common commodities (like food grains) were decided by market forces on a global scale and this was thanks to these very lines of communication; even if it was still largely luxury items that were being actually transported, the lines of communication that went along with them were having a very profound effect on items that would be classed as non-luxury or even basic. Again, a very different world from the one we inhabit today; but this ‘Europeanisation’, or perhaps one could say ‘Westernisa- tion’, of the globe goes some way towards explaining why some of these former colonial enclaves have become such effective nodes in the global network; and as cities, some of them have been playing this role for centuries. Indeed this Europeanisation can perhaps be identifi ed as Westernisation because, as Darwin tells us, ‘[g]eneral peace and a signifi cant degree of ideological convergence were vital elements in the ability of the emergent West to assert its economic dominance and to fashion a world economy to meet its needs’72. This was the period that Saskia Sassen has identifi ed as having an ‘international fi nancial market as massive as today’s’; and we can probably safely identify her ‘late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century’ as falling roughly between 1871 (the end of the Franco-Prussian War) and 1914 (the beginning of World War I). This was a period which economists would now refer to as a ‘supercycle’. A second such supercycle occurred during the twenty-fi ve to thirty years following World War II, another era of phenomenal growth (and one highlighted by Saskia Sassen, Jane Jacobs, and others). Economists are now beginning to think that China’s recent economic emergence may well spark off a third supercycle73. John Darwin has identifi ed another crucial factor in this development: ‘the progress towards economic integration between the Western countries themselves’74, without which there could hardly have been the huge increase in the volume, and value, of international trade. Volume of trade grew twenty- fi ve times between 1820 and 1913, with the fastest growth occurring between 1840 and 1870. Darwin also sees the wider integration of international markets as possible because of the extent to which the

Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. xxi. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 106. Ibid., p. 237. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 238. David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, pp. 40-42. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 238. 33 West itself had become a single economic space75. The recession of the 1870s, coupled with the more imperialistic stance of the era’s empires, particularly the British (the world’s largest), could explain this shortfall in the growth rate after 1870, a period that has been identifi ed elsewhere as having seen Britain’s turn from colonialism to imperialism, a distinction that we shall be returning to in Part II. For the moment it is enough to point out that colonies were seen as something to grab – the example of the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the 1880s is a case in point – they were only later examined to see if they could be made to pay. The rationale was that if a given country did not take over a territory then some other might; this led imperialism into its last and most extensive phase, one that J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (which effectively demolished the ‘trade follows the fl ag’ argument when it was published in 1902) did little to abate. It is important to point out that Niall Ferguson has actually contradicted John Darwin by stating that ‘[t]he world economy grew faster between 1870 and 1913 than in any previous period’76; It probably does not matter which of these two historians is correct (although this research tends to lean towards Darwin’s analysis), the main thrust of their arguments still obtain: as Niall Ferguson succinctly puts it, ‘[i]t is inconceivable[…] that such high levels of international economic integration would have come about in the absence of empires’77. In the nearly half-century up to World War I Ferguson states that trade, migration, and international lending all reached levels not seen again until the 1990s. Freedom and mobility of goods, capital and labour was unprecedented and has, according to Ferguson, ‘only recently and partially been equalled’78. And nearly every major economy at that time had also adopted the gold standard – in effect a single monetary system. Of course, Ferguson has inserted an important caveat along with his listing of the pre-World War I era’s globalised ‘golden age’, and that is: ‘[t]he ultima ratio of the Western empires was, of course, force’79; but he also reasonably points out that ‘they would not have lasted as long as they did if they had relied primarily on coercion. Their strongest foundation was their ability to create multiple scale- models of themselves through colonial settlement and collaboration with indigenous peoples, giving rise to a kind of “fractal geometry of empire”’80. Evidence of this globalised outlook can be seen in phrases such as ‘the annihilation of distance’ and ‘the world had shrunk’, which, according to John Darwin, had become clichéd as early as 1880. One important change, however, and one which we saw earlier, was that by about 1880 this newly globalised era of empire had set the prices of basic commodities according to what they could fetch on the world market; levels of credit and investment also tended to refl ect international, not local, demand; a development that saw the spread of Western-style banking all over the globe. As well as Western-organised shipping lines, merchants houses, and insurance companies, all of which tended to displace local merchant elites wherever they came up against them in the rapidly expanding empires81. Global colonialism, as John Darwin tells us, was an impressive construct, but it was one that was erected hastily, and whose foundations were shallow82. Economic theory, and increasingly economic practice, tended to divide the imperial world along labour lines. Imperial powers tended to be industrialised powers; they manufactured goods and provided the investment, technical expertise, and skilled personnel to bring them to market. The role of colonies, and of ‘semi-colonial’ lands such as China, was to produce raw materials, and the food that the industrialised world needed to manufacture these goods so that they could then sell them back to the colonies, often via a forced system of commerce which they somewhat disingenuously referred to as ‘free trade’. Niall Ferguson has called the empires of this era

Ibid., p. 238. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 16. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. lx. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 16. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 238. Ibid., p. 299. 34 the product of ‘three centuries of commerce, conquest and colonization’83, and they represented a really remarkable global division of labour. Ferguson also recognises that at the heart of imperialism lay a few great cities84. John Darwin has pointed out the importance of building in these cities when he states that:

The outward sign of commercial success was the rapid construction of customs houses, railways stations, banks and hotels, as well as lavish clubs and residences for the new merchant class. Bombay railway station, the Rafﬂ es’ [sic] Hotel in Singapore, the ‘Parisian’ splendour of the new Buenos Aires, Cape Town’s Standard Bank (where Rhodes had his account), the Shanghai Bund, Collins Street in Melbourne and the exuberant architecture of Sydney’s leading banks (around Martin Place) showed the conﬁ dence and prosperity of this commercial world85.

This is also a point which Brenda S.A. Yeoh highlights in her own analysis of the contested spaces of colonial Singapore, which we will see at the end of Part II. The Europeans’ desire to impress using the built environment refl ects what John Darwin calls the projection of ‘a cultural hierarchy of astonishing force and pervasive infl uence’86. Even though the buildings, and the cities that housed them, were often undeniably elegantly planned, what they were asserting was the simple fact of a Western cultural primacy. This architectural elegance must not be allowed to distract the reader because it must be remembered that its assertion was nothing if not aggressive. In fact it could be posited that these buildings can be seen as an index (not unlike the mid-twentieth century’s index of steel production as an indicator of economic growth), and that what they represented was something that John Darwin sees as ‘[t]he sheer scale of Europe’s physical predominance after 1880 across Asia, Africa and the Pacifi c…’87. This was Europe’s

[C]ultural inﬂ uence [which] was disseminated more widely and authoritatively than in earlier times. European categories of thought, forms of scientiﬁ c inquiry, interpretations of the past, ideas of social order, models of public morality, concepts of crime and justice, and modes of literary expression, as well as European recipes for health, notions of leisure, and even styles of dress, became the civilized ‘standard’ against which other cultures were measured and usually found wanting88.

It was this conﬁ dence in what Darwin calls ‘their unique command of progress’ that goes some way towards explaining this arrogance89. Something that Edward W. Said also draws our attention to, with his notion of the European construction of an Oriental ‘Other’. Darwin also refers to this Ori- ent, but without actually referring to Said, as being ‘…sunk in the quagmires of moral and intellectual “backwardness”’90, something Darwin sees as being somehow essential to Europeans’ progressive self- image. Said’s work is also something that shall be examined in detail in Part III, but for the moment it is enough to point out that Darwin’s statement that it was ‘[o]nly by insisting on the failings of the “Ori- ent” (in practice all non-Western peoples) could the Europeans be sure of their own progressive identity’91 is an accurate one. The reader will notice that Darwin, at least until this last quotation, has invariably made use of the terms ‘European’ and ‘Europe’ in his work; in order to quote him as accurately as possible these

Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 333. Ibid., p. 339. Ibid., p. 339. Ibid., p. 339. Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 340. 35 have been left alone, it is felt, however, that it might be more inclusive, as well as more accurate, to refer to them simply as ‘Westerners’ and ‘the West’, certainly in what is trying to be communicated here. Any reading of this era should include the United States as an imperial power, Russia too; even Japan, an Asian nation, but one whose role in Asia, and the world, from around 1895 is generally considered to be Western in outlook, certainly it was imperialistic. Europeans, in Darwin’s theory, (and Westerners in this research), assumed their sudden rise to dominance as having resulted from breaking the cycle of growth and decay that doomed all other civilisations. With unequalled technological mastery they had freed themselves from the age-old barriers of ‘superstition and myth to found their intellectual life on the rigorous collation of empirical knowledge’92. What actually constitutes this knowledge, indeed the very question of what knowledge is or could be, will be addressed in Part III with the examination of Michel Foucault’s work, as well as Ed- ward W. Said’s appropriation of it to underpin his own theories on Orientalism. These arrogant assertions by Westerners became a sort of self-fulﬁ lling prophesy because, as Darwin points out, the very ‘disorders occasioned by the European intrusion were [taken as] positive proof of the chaos and barbar- ity of the pre-colonial order93. Darwin takes the view that this ‘European racism often appeared less like a cultural theory than like a set of crude social attitudes, bluntly and often aggressively displayed’, which were used as a bulwark against ‘[t]he need for security, fears of disease, and a pervasive suspicion that, left to their own devices, unattached Europeans would simply “go native” (subverting the social and cultural order) encouraged varying degrees of segregation and separateness’94. Europeans living in colonial environments in Africa and Asia ‘knew perfectly well that their status and income depended on claims of insurmountable difference between themselves and the locals. It required little ingenuity to attach these claims to the story of Europe’s material advancement and to reinvent themselves as the indispensable agents of civilization and progress’95. We will see the contrast between how these different groups lived – the colonial elite versus the local population – when we examine Shanghai’s colonial history later in Part I. We will also be highlighting, in Part IV, how these contrasting cultures were constructed, particularly by use of language and dress. Before that, however, it might now be useful to turn our attention to the new global elites to be found in the former colonial cities of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, to see what effects their social and work networks are having on the cities themselves, as well as their other inhabitants.

Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore According to what we have already seen, cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore should have the advantage over some of their more traditional Asian competitors, like Beijing and Tokyo, in the trajectory towards global greatness. These erstwhile colonies have Western footprints, and in the case of the latter two, also have a Western (i.e. a British-based) legal and commercial infrastructure. Brenda S.A. Yeoh maintains that ‘[t]he built environment of colonial cities [that were] incorporated into the capitalist world system[…] bore the impress of capital in a number of ways’96. She states that ‘[c]olonial cities were[…] planted as “headlinks” and designed to facilitate European capitalist penetration’97. What Yeoh terms ‘headlinks’ have been elsewhere termed the ‘bridgeheads of empire’98, a development of Jürgen Osterhammel’s term ‘maritime enclave’ (as cited in Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An

Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 348. Ibid., p. 348. Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 8. Ibid., p. 8. Gregory Bracken, The Interface of Empire, International Forum on Urbanism, Tsinghua University, Bei- jing, October, 2006. 36 Historical Introduction). And, as has already been mentioned, this study of Shanghai has incorporated Hong Kong and Singapore because of these three cities’ shared British colonial history – which links colonial networks to global cities – but there is another interesting and potentially even more useful connection between them, one that has been highlighted convincingly by Peter G. Rowe: their shared neo- Confucian heritage99. According to Brenda S.A. Yeoh, colonial authorities structured their urban environments in order to facilitate colonial rule as well as express colonial aspirations and ideals. This they did through the formation of municipal authorities and other institutions of local urban governance. The colonial city was seen as an ideal, one that was intended to refl ect the power and prestige of the colonists. These cities were intended to be ‘…ordered, sanitized, and amenable to regulation, and structured to enhance the fl ow of economic activities such as trade and communications which were crucial to the entire colonial economy’100. This probably also explains why the neoclassical style was so popular for colonial public buildings; Gothic Revival architecture, all the rage in the United Kingdom in the late-nineteenth century, never became widespread in its colonies, except for some churches. The neoclassical style, apart from hinting at the all-important link to ancient Greece and Rome, which we will see again in Part II, also presented a neat and orderly façade to those being colonised. This methodology can once again be discerned in the global city network’s generic skyscrapers, which are often seen as expressing a city’s global credentials. According to Yeoh, ‘[c]olonial investment and expenditure tended to favour the construction of dendritic communication systems linking the hinterland to colonial cities to expedite the channelling of commodities to the metropolitan core; fi nancial, banking, insurance, and warehousing complexes proliferated to facilitate entrepot trade, whilst the persistence of slums, squatters, and tenements testifi ed to the neglect of housing and welfare facilities in the colonial city’101. So there was a downside to all of this idealised planning, another pattern that seems to be repeating itself – albeit in a slightly different way – in the global city. Some groups found (and still fi nd) themselves marginalised in this rush to market, their homes and lives swept away in the eagerness to make these cities places where international elites, colonial or contemporary, will want to settle. What is happening to these marginalised people in Shanghai is one of the most important parts of this entire investigation, and will be examined in detail later in Part I, fi rst we will return to Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s cogent analysis of what happened to such groups in Singapore during the colonial era (i.e. 1819 to c.1965). Yeoh identifi es three features intrinsic to colonial cities: fi rstly, racial, cultural, social and religious pluralism; secondly, a new class system which neither resembles industrial nor pre-industrial cities; and thirdly, the fact that social, economic, and political power is concentrated in the hands of the colonisers (who often tend to be a racially distinct group)102. The colonial city is often seen as sitting somewhere between traditionalism and modernisation. In the perception of a linear series of stages that lead to the form and function of a modern Western-style city, Yeoh sees the colonial city as articulat- ing the transition from one to the other, containing as it does ‘modern’ spaces, such as the commercial centre, the port, and the upmarket residential districts; as well as the native bazaars and sacred places, which exist as the remnants of the pre-colonial era. This pattern refl ects what Yeoh calls ‘a dual economic structure - an upper circuit or “fi rm-centred” economy characterized by Western capitalistic forms such as banks and trading fi rms, and a lower circuit or “bazaar” economy with pre-industrial and semi-capitalistic forms of economic organization such as Chinese loan associations and mobile street markets’. In Yeoh’s view, this dual economic structure is the ‘“basic determinant’ of urban landuse patterns’ in colonial cities such as Singapore103. Yeoh then identifi es a second approach in trying to understand the built form of colonial cities,

Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 9. Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 16. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., pp. 1-3. Ibid., p. 4. 37 what she calls the tendency to ‘…view their morphological elements as spatial expressions of the composition of an alien culture on an existing one’104. She identifi es anthropologists R. Redfi eld and M.S. Singer’s work on ‘the culture role of cities’ as being pioneering in this tradition. It must be pointed out here that while the premise of their argument, as quoted by Yeoh, is convincing, its application to a city like Singapore is somewhat wide of the mark. First of all there was no urban environment before Sir Thomas Stamford Raffl es settled the city in 1819 – unlike Shanghai which had been for centuries an important Chinese city before the British established themselves there in 1842. In 1819 the island of Singapore was home to a number of Malay villages, mostly coastal fi shing ones, so Redfi eld and Sing- er’s premise that the composition of an alien culture onto an existing one can certainly hold true, but morphological elements cannot be seen to act as the spatial expression of anything for the simply reason there was nothing for these elements to impose themselves on. Malays, traditionally, are not city dwellers, the kampong was only as large as to allow the houses farthest out to still be within earshot of the mosque’s call to prayer, traditionally using a drum, later, the voice of a muezzin; recently of course, the advent of the loudspeaker has shattered this tradition. Brenda S.A. Yeoh also cites Anthony D. King’s theory of colonial urban development as proposing to examine ‘cultural responses to the environment[...] within a particular distribution of power’105. This she does in order to emphasise the importance of ‘the transformed and transplanted culture of the European community in shaping urban spaces such as the cantonment, the bungalow compound, and the hill-station, which respectively epitomized the essence of military, residential, and social space in colonial societies’106. This, as it does not rely on juxtapositions with existing settlements per se, is a more useful theory and leads us into some really interesting territory: the colonial city where ‘the active dominance of the colonizing culture in shaping the built environment and dispossessing other cultures’ resonates with Edward W. Said’s notion that the ‘Orient’ itself is a creation of European colonialism. Singapore was a planned colonial city, so rigorously planned, in fact, that it was divided along racial lines. The indigenous Malays lived in Kampong Gelam, Indians (some of whom were brought to the colony as convict labourers) in Little India, the Chinese, the overwhelming majority of the population, in Chinatown, and the Europeans, initially in a European town centred on the Padang, and later in the leafy Tanglin district. This was a residential distribution that refl ected ‘the intentions of the European rulers to an amazing degree’107, it also refl ected the socially constructed environment of colonial cities as ‘not simply an unpeopled “landscape” acquiring an “imperial imprint” but [as] a disciplinary terrain, a mechanism for inducing new practices, an arena [in] which new discourses are created, a resource for some, a weapon for others, with which to harass, reclassify, categorize and control’108. This disciplinary terrain is still very visible in Singapore today, most of these racially designated areas are still more or less intact – in urban terms Singapore’s cityscape still very much bears its imperial imprint. We now turn our attention to another planned colonial city, but one whose imperial imprint has been all but erased: Hong Kong. Singapore was the planned colonial city par excellence (it had to be with its myriad different races and ethnic groups), Hong Kong, too, was planned, but it was always a city with a less, shall we say, ‘colourful’ racial mix. A simpler set of race relationships obtained here: basically that of colonials (i.e. the British) and the Chinese (Cantonese). Hong Kong, unlike Singapore, has developed what Ackbar Abbas calls a ‘culture of disappearance’109, it has jettisoned its colonial bag- gage with surprising speed and effi ciency in order to remake itself in the image of a global city. What

Ibid., p. 5. Cited in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment, p. 6 (ellipses in original). Ibid., p. 6. Terence G. McGee, quoted in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Rela- tions and the Urban Built Environment, p. 3. Michael Peter Smith and Richard Tardanico, cited in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment, p. 10. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, pp. 7, 14, etc. 38 is perhaps most interesting about Abbas’s analysis is the fact that, like Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Abbas has also made use of Anthony King’s work, in this case the argument that there is a connection between the colonial city and the global one. Abbas points out that colonialism itself pioneered the methods required to incorporate these pre-capitalist, pre-industrial, non-European societies into the world economy and established the ways of dealing with ethnically, racially, and culturally different societies. He cites Anthony King as stating that the surprising consequence of this ‘historically signifi cant phenomenon’ is that ‘colonial cities can be viewed as the forerunners of what the contemporary capitalist world city would eventually become’110. Ackbar Abbas also suggests that one of the implications of this argument is that it was colonialism that allowed imperialism to make the leap into globalism. While the broad thrust of this argument is sound, this research would perhaps couch its terms somewhat differently, beginning with some clear defi nitions of what constituted ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ (which shall be undertaken in Part II); for the moment it is probably enough to look to Abbas as he tells us that ‘the colonial city can also prefi gure the global city. The rise of globalism spells the end of the old empires, but not before the offspring of these empires, the previous colonial cities, have been primed to perform well as global cities’111. One other profoundly important point made by Abbas is that Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems’ formula – the one invariably used to describe the former British colony’s somewhat anomalous situation within Communist China (it is a Special Administrative Region, and will remain so until 2047) – is that the city’s built form speaks less of one country, two systems, and rather more of ‘one system’ (i.e. that of international capital) at ‘different stages of development’112, something that will be interesting to watch as capitalism takes on ‘Chinese characteristics’. Finally, we turn our attention to Shanghai. The whole point of exploring what happened to Hong Kong and Singapore in the colonial era is to cast some light on Shanghai’s own colonial experience, the better to understand what is going on in the city today. The reason for this is to examine the trajectory these three colonial cites have been following as they turn themselves into global cities. Before examining the physical effects this has had on the city, it might be useful to turn our attention to Mi- chelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, a book which also explores some of the themes that are being explored in this research. Huang’s book cites both Saskia Sassen’s network of the ‘new geography of centrality and marginality’ and David Harvey’s ‘time-space compression’. The former, in her effort to ‘understand the global city as a dual city with the intensifi cation of two classes – the new elite or the international business people and the low income “others”’, which is facilitated by the latter’s time-space compression as being the advancement of technology that facilitates logistics to assure the fast return of profi t113. Huang’s understanding of the notion of the global city is premised on Sassen’s, which she says ‘represents a strategic space where global processes materialize in national territories and global dynamics use national institutional arrangements’114. Huang and Sassen both see global cities as those which function as international business and fi nancial centres and which ‘…are sites for direct transactions with world markets that take place without government inspection’115. Huang also astutely identifi es Sassen’s ‘dual city model’ as pointing towards ‘the concealed spatiality, the uneven development the global city that is often glossed over by government offi cials, urban planners, or multinational corpora-

Anthony King, quoted in Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 3 (italics in original). Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 3. Ibid., p. 6. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 5. Saskia Sassen, cited in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 5. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 5. 39 tions as “our shared future”, a prosperous space of hope for every inhabitant regardless of their gender, class, or ethnic identity’116. Huang points to Shanghai’s frenzied urban redevelopment in the 1990s, which she sees as demonstrating ‘how global capital changes the landscape of the city. The cluster of dazzling skyscrapers in Pudong and the newly constructed buildings everywhere in the whole city account for the disappearance of the traditional alley houses and relocation, voluntary or not, a shared experience for the majority of Shanghainese’117. This globalisation brings about quite speciﬁ c spatial forms in the city but also results in a new social structure, where she laments that ‘…the open space embodied by the global city for the capital accumulation is paradoxically conﬁ ning and oppressive for many of the city-users’118. Huang also cites Sassen as saying that this new urban geography is a place where ‘unbridgeable differences’ arise between different types of city user, on the one hand the small number of ‘international business people (the new elite)’ and on the other, a much larger population of ‘low-income “others” (the underprivileged)’119. This is what she scathingly refers to as ‘[t]he invading power of global capital’ as it imprints itself indelibly on the urban landscape120. Ultimately, this is what this study of Shanghai is all about: the frenzied pace of redevelopment as the city tries to turn itself into a node in the global network, and also, and even more importantly, what effect this move is having on the city’s new public spaces, as well as on the lives of the ‘new elite’ who are supposed to be making use of them, not to mention the ‘low-income “others”’ who are being pushed aside to make way for them.

Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 19. 40 3 CHINA RESURGENT

In the nineteenth century, the label ‘Made in Britain’ refl ected that country’s industrial and imperial might; the twentieth century saw goods with the logo ‘Made in USA’, again a refl ection of industrial power and expertise. Increasingly we are now seeing the label ‘Made in China’; are we about to see a ‘Chinese Century’? as some commentators would have us believe. China now has the world’s fourth largest economy, the result of just under 10 percent growth per annum for the best part of three decades. As a country it now surpasses Japan in terms of international trade, making it third behind the United States and Germany. China is second only to the United States as a recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI), and because the country is so large, and its economy growing so rapidly, it has been said to account for some 12 percent of all growth in world trade in recent years. China has been called the world’s workshop, not because it is home to the world’s cheapest workforce (Southeast Asian and African workers get paid less), but because it sits in a relatively stable part of the globe and offers reliable and capable workers kept in line by government-enforced discipline. A number of countries in the early stages of economic reform have experienced rapid growth, but nothing has ever come close to the speed achieved by China in recent years. According to Ted C. Fishman, the country’s economy has doubled nearly three times over in the last thirty years1. This impressive rate is all the more remarkable for having been achieved not by right-wing capitalists but what Niall Ferguson calls ‘card-carrying Communists’2. Indeed, Ferguson points out that ‘the man responsible for China’s economic miracle was the same man who ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square’3. What has been happening in China is in stark contrast to Eastern Europe, where the Soviet leadership tried to introduce economic reform and ended up with a revolution and economic collapse. The Chinese wanted, and got, economic reconstruction without political reform. How were they able to do this? Ferguson maintains the answer is simple: when a potentially revolutionary situation developed in 1989, the regime did what Communist regimes have routinely done when confronted with internal dissent, they sent in the tanks: on 4 June 1989 the Democracy Wall movement was ruthlessly suppressed. This answer is perhaps too simple. The Chinese authorities may have suppressed dissent, even brutally so, but they have also managed to lift more people out of poverty in the last thirty years than any other regime in history, communist or capitalist. Hundreds of millions of people have seen their lives vastly improved thanks to China’s agricultural and economic reforms. China’s rise as a global economic and political power is seen by the Institute for International Economics and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies as being ‘one of the transformative events of our time’4. Yet what are other world powers making of this transformation? According to the IIEC and CSIS, ‘[s]ome devotees of realpolitik [sic] will fear that China’s size and growing military capabilities will produce a new strategic threat to the United States and its allies while other observers see a strong and more self-confi dent China as a likely force for stability in the region and the world’5. Ted C. Fishman quotes Tom Saler, a fi nancial journalist for the Milwakee Journal Sentinel, in saying that ‘twenty-one recessions, a depression, two stock-market crashes, and two world wars were not about to stop the American economy from growing over the last century from $118 billion ($367 billion in 2000 dollars) to over $10 trillion. In constant dollars, that is a twenty-seven-fold increase’6. China, by all appearances, seems poised for similar growth in this century. Along with this growth comes new-found power, Beijing is now calling for the creation of a

Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 12. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 635. Ibid., p. 635. IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. ix. Ibid., p. x. Quoted in Ted C. Fishman’s China, Inc., p. 17. 41 ‘multi-polar world’, widely seen as a thinly veiled challenge to the United States7. Is it any wonder that in some quarters the ‘Made in China’ label is now being touted as a warning label? Products made in the country are often assumed to be shoddy or unsafe, particularly vulnerable are children’s toys, where a number of recalls in recent years have shaken confi dence – yet some of these product fl aws were not the fault of the Chinese (for example some of Mattel’s toys). Labour unions in the United States and elsewhere have seized on these opportunities to try and reverse the tide of production facilities fl owing out of their own countries and into China, though it has proved to be something of a Canute-like struggle so far. This may well put a somewhat different complexion on calls for concern over China’s (admittedly poor) record on human rights, some of these seemingly selfl ess calls for better pay and conditions for Chinese workers are coming from the very people whose jobs and livelihoods are being threatened by them, perhaps they are somewhat less than altruistic. It is a fact that China, not only by virtue of its size, but because of what will happen to the world economy if the country’s economic expansion continues unabated, does indeed pose unprecedented challenges. And not just for economies, there are environmental challenges as well. China is poorly endowed with natural resources (apart from coal), and its increasing use of coal and other fossil fuels is exacerbating global pollution. China’s thirst for fuel is also causing other concerns around the world, particularly its relationships with less-developed countries, which are beginning to look strikingly similar to colonial ones. A useful place to begin might be David Smith’s comparative economic analysis of India and Chi- na. Smith quotes Maddison’s The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective to show that 2,000 years ago China and India held a 59 percent share of the world economy (with India having 33 percent, and China 26). Smith is also quick to point out that ‘[t]here is nothing preordained about the fact that once- great powers will reassert themselves; indeed the opposite is more often true. As is the case for ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome’8. This immediately raises a number of concerns. First of all, the question of what is India? It only became a country when achieving independence from Britain in 1947. Smith does at least quote Meghnad Desai in stating that ‘there never was any authority which has ruled over all of India... India has been an idea in world culture for millennia but its borders were fi xed only in the late 19th century sometime after the British gave up on Afghanistan and drew the Durand line’9. China, however, is very different. The country has long had recognisable borders, and while these may have shifted considerably in the last 2,000 years (hence the location of the Great Wall well within the country), as a polity it has always been more identifi ably Chinese than anything that happened to be clustered together on the South-Asian subcontinent. However, this does not take away from the main thrust of David Smith’s argument, there are concerns, however, with a statement like: ‘[t]here is nothing preordained about the fact that once-great powers will reassert themselves; indeed the opposite is more often true. As is the case for ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome’. While no one could deny that the actual empires of ancient Egypt and Rome have gone, Michel Foucault has convincingly highlighted that we in the West have actually descended in a far more direct line from the ancients than may at fi rst be apparent, particularly if we look at the Greeks and Romans. Foucault’s theory of how Greek concepts, such as askesis, turned themselves into bleaker Christian notions like asceticism will be examined in Part III, it is enough to highlight here that we are not so far removed from the ancients as Smith would have us believe. And, as shall be shown in Part II, the British Empire always made a conscious effort to link itself to ancient Greece and Rome because it saw itself as their natural successor in imperial terms. David Smith’s view of India and China as being somehow unchanged over millennia is a false one. China has undeniably enjoyed a remarkable degree of cultural continuity and cohesion over the last two-and-a-half thousand years, but to think of it as being somehow timeless is to fall into a very old

IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 14. David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 9. Meghnad Desai, quoted in David Smith’s The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 14. 42 trap, one that this research will warn against time and again, especially in Part IV where Western perceptions of China will be examined in greater detail. Suffi ce to say that Smith’s work, while a useful addition in the fi eld of popular economics, continues to perpetuate the same sort of ignorant myths of the Orient that are doing more harm than good for anyone really interested in trying to understand what is going on in China today (surely the point of Smith’s book in the fi rst place). The only unchanging aspect exhibited by all of this work would seem to be the tenaciousness with which the West clings to these outmoded and frankly false assumptions about Asia.

East Asia China has once again begun to dominate Asia, it is becoming a regional hegemon garnering increasing global infl uence. One signifi cant factor in China’s remarkable economic growth in recent years has been rapid and massive urbanisation. As such it is fast catching up with the rest of the East-Asian region where urban development has long been impressive. Peter G. Rowe lists fi ve of the world’s top ten fastest growing cities in the world as being in Asia, with eight of the top twenty, by size of population, located here, and six of the top ten most densely populated, (Hong Kong takes the lead with 28,405 people per square kilometre and with spot densities of up to 2,500 people per hectare)10. In the last three decades, the region Manuel Castells refers to as the Asia Pacifi c, has become ‘the major center of capital accumulation in the planet, the largest manufacturing producer, the most competitive trading region, one of the two leading centers of information technology innovation and production (the other was the US), and the fastest growing market’11. China’s recent rise, seen alongside Japan’s long-standing technological and fi nancial might, seems to be ushering in ‘a geo-economic tectonic shift’, establishing a new Pacifi c connection to the global economy and with it the ‘Pacifi c Era’12. Given that China and Japan have never been strong at the same time, and that China still feels considerable bitterness towards Japan over its aggression in the twentieth century, it remains to be seen how ‘pacifi c’ this era will actually be. One seemingly inevitable outcome of industrialisation, at least according to Peter G. Rowe, is urbanisation: workers tend to migrate to be close to centres of manufacturing13. It could just as easily be argued that industrialisation was a product or urbanisation, though the more balanced view might be that they enjoy a symbiotic relationship, i.e. one would not happen without the other. Rowe, in his examination of East-Asian cities, poses the question of how well do cities in this region conform of modernisation as it is understood elsewhere in the world, particularly the West? And to what extent does it describe a regional modernity that is ‘…different in kind, as well as degree, from other modern cities?’14 He then rather cleverly answers this by equating any understanding of these views as being a question of perspective. Modernisation, in Rowe’s view, is ‘commonly understood through an ensemble of inter- related characteristics. Chief among them is industrialisation, or the conversion of raw materials into marketable manufactured products and sources of power and propulsion, along with tertiary functions to deal with the mass distribution and information transactions involved’15. In other words, it was often defi ned by a combination of processes: including ‘industrialization, urbanization, labour diversifi cation, social mobility and, as a result, substantially improved material standards of living’16. This, according to Rowe, invariably brought with it ‘the rule of law, social pluralism and a reliance on representative bodies for governance’17 – all factors we have already seen in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s analysis of Singapore, where she showed them to be essential for the good governance of a colonial city,

Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 7. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 213. Ibid., p. 213. Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 11. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 12. 43 and where these ‘modern’ factors could exist quite happily alongside more indigenous or ‘native’ elements. The rule of law, however, raises the vexed question of human rights, or lack of them, as is often understood to be the case in China. While an exploration of human rights, and their abuses, in China or elsewhere, is not the purview of this study, it must be pointed out that any understanding of a transcen- dent ‘human’ right is a peculiarly Western concept, and one that must be approached with caution. We have already seen how concern for China’s human rights abuses can mask concerns that originate closer to home, but the very foundations on which such a construction is premised is going to be, for all the good it tries to do, culturally biased to say the least (and that is when its intentions are genuine). It is, as Rowe says, a question of perspective, and is somewhat reminiscent of the so-called ‘free trade’ foisted on colonial cities by their colonial masters, which invariably meant freedom to trade with the metropolitan centre. As in the colonial era, to modernise meant to Westernise, i.e. adopt Western modes of dress, customs, language, laws, and moral outlook. Peter G. Rowe dextrously reminds us that this is not necessarily a case of Westernisation per se, rather it is more a question of there being only ‘…a comparatively limited number of ways of accomplishing something efﬁ ciently, with the result that things begin to look much the same’18. To give an analogy from the motor industry: motor cars are increasingly beginning to resemble one another because they are all designed with the same aerodynamic principles in mind. Rowe’s point that ‘the similarity in modern building design between one place and the other need not mean that one culture is being converted to another’ is a valid one, his notion that modern architectural expression, which begun in the West and can be proﬁ tably deployed elsewhere, ‘represents, in effect, an expansion of local cultural identity in a manner that suits the social, economic and material transformations taking place’19. In other words, globalisation is not necessarily Westernisation. One other point raised by Peter G. Rowe is that:

[T]he globalization of capital and commissions, as well as the presence of multinational corporations[…], has increased the number of designers from one place producing projects somewhere else. Many well-known and sizeable American and European architectural ﬁ rms now have projects and branch ofﬁ ces overseas, including East Asia. Constant information sharing, over the Internet, or through internationally circulating design magazines and professional journals, together with the widespread adoptions of Western building practices, almost ensures that any tendency towards parochialism is quickly overcome.20

While this thesis is convincing, there is a downside, something which Rowe himself also mentions, although not in a negative way; he sees another of the developments of modernism as being ‘the technological advancement of building materials and mechanical systems’ which bring with it ‘an independence from local climate and other geographical circumstances, as well as from local building materials, all of which formerly shaped local architectural expressions quite strongly’21. This was of course the concern of architects like Team Ten, and the later Critical Regionalists, who sought to raise valid concerns about the monolith of High Modernism. What this study is primarily interested in today is the endless sameness of architectural expression, not so much to decry how appalling it is (though it can be pretty appalling in Shanghai), but more by way of contrasting this expression (or lack of it) with earlier incarnations of Western style that occurred in the urban environment of former colonial cities. Before the advent of air-conditioning, factors such as local climate and traditional building methods were taken into account, resulting in environmentally responsible, and often extremely elegant styles of architecture. The Singapore black-and-white bungalow would be a good example of this hybrid style; a subtle mix of the then globally ascendant neoclassicism, coupled with a thorough understanding of indigenous

Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., pp. 144-145. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 17. 44 Malay building techniques (i.e. raising the house on stilts, making use of overhanging eves, open veran- das, etc.), which resulted in an elegant and remarkably comfortable home, and a style which has since become an icon. China’s current embrace of experimental architecture, particularly for state-sponsored projects like Beijing’s Olympic venues, is something Rowe sees ‘…spectators in the future might be forgiven for labelling this form of hyper-modernism as a Chinese style’22. The fact that most of these projects’ architects are Westerners makes this a little unlikely, but Rowe does raise a valid point: what is Western and what Chinese? Is it a Chinese building simply because it is built in China? Would it be Chinese if it were designed by a Chinese but built in New York? What if there were equal numbers of Westerners and Chi- nese on the design team? And what about the places those designers have been educated? If Chinese, or Asians, or Africans for that matter, borrow from the West selectively and cleverly, as the Chinese have been doing, then they are creating a new hybrid, one that has every potential to be as successful as the Singapore black-and-white bungalow. One point underlying this entire discussion, and one that will be looked at in detail in Part IV, is what Peter G. Rowe calls the underlying ‘socio-cultural matrix’ in East Asia23: basically neo-Confucian- ism. This harks back to the rule of law issue touched on earlier, and the diffi culty of defi ning a universal human right (without its being some sort of overtly Western construction). Rowe correctly identifi es the fact that ‘[c]ivil society, strong in the West, is almost uniformly weak [in Asia] and a bifurcated view was often taken in pursuit of Westernized practical applications alongside indigenous socio-cultural biases and practices that often stressed collectivism, consensus and the interests of relations, clans, companies and other circumscribed politico-economic groups’24. While not interested in the politics of this bifurcation per se, what this research wishes to investigate is how it is inscribed in the built environment, particularly in Shanghai. Rowe correctly identifi es what he calls the ‘ambiguity between public and private realms in East Asian cities’25; deeply rooted cultural concepts underlie this ambiguity, relationships that we as Western- ers often overlook, or simply cannot see because they are too far removed from our own understanding of what constitutes public space, and this is perhaps the most important point that can be made in this entire thesis: the wish to show how ‘ambiguous realms’ operate, which will be done in the practical examination of the Shanghai alleyway house, and also, and more importantly, the examination of the cultural concepts underpinning the Chinese understanding of what actually constitutes public space.

China’s development When Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics it was clearly seen as an endorsement of Japan’s re- emergence onto the world stage. Japan had managed to put its aggressive past behind it and, thanks to the economic miracle of the 1950s and ’60s, was seen as having come of age. South Korea, with an economic career closely modelled on that of its near neighbour and former colonial master, hosted the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988, again after a period of remarkable economic growth, it too was also able to lay to rest the unfortunate Korean War (1950-53), (at least the southern portion of the peninsula was). Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Summer Games, a mere seven years after being admitted to the World Trade Organisation (in December 2001), and less than twenty after the disastrous Tiananmen Square incident, is one very clear way in which the global community can recognise China’s arrival. Summer 2008 is almost precisely thirty years since Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Open Door’ policy was launched. Deng was China’s arch-survivor, he had accompanied Chairman Mao on the Long March, had made it through the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, where he survived being labelled the ‘Number 2 capitalist-roader’ by the Red Guards, and the fact that the notorious Gang of Four (led by Mao’s wife

Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 194. 45 Jiang Qing) twice tried to get rid of him; yet through all of this he continued to work to bring about what he considered to be the best policies for China. In December of 1978 (not September as David Smith would have us believe26), the decision was taken, at the Third Plenum of the 11th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, to re-orient China’s economy towards the market. Deng’s economic pragmatism, untainted by impractical idealism or theoretical fanaticism of any kind, was intended as a new direction for China. According to Manuel Castells it was also intended as ‘an answer to the impact of Taiwan’s economic miracle’27; it actively encouraged entrepreneurs as well as establishing a productive and profi table relationship with the West – the bedrock on which the new China’s ‘economic miracle’ is founded. As we have already seen, China’s has been the world’s fastest growing economy for the past three decades. It has expanded at an average rate of almost 10 percent per year (and between 2000 and 2005 averaged 9.5 percent in real terms, with imports tripling from $225 billion to $660 billion). The country has in fact accounted for some 12 percent of all growth in world trade in recent years, an even more impressive fi gure when it is remembered that in 2000 it had accounted for less than 4 percent. The IIEC and CSIS have listed some other impressive statistics: in 2005 China was the world’s fourth largest economy (measured in dollars at the 2005 exchange rate), up two places from Ted C. Fishman’s estimate of seventh place in 2003 (when it had a GDP of $1.4 trillion); China has increased its output by a factor of nine since 1978 and is now second only to the United States as a recipient of foreign direct investment; China is also now the world’s third largest trading nation, behind the United States and Germany, and ahead of regional rival Japan28. Manuel Castells see China’s development as already having changed world history. The country’s economic growth and competitiveness has stunned governments and business alike, and have resulted in some contradictory feelings. The lure of more than one billion Chinese consumers may well diffuse any crisis in overproduction for the short-term future, something that Castells quite cannily sees as consolidating global capitalism’s hegemony in the twenty-fi rst century. Yet the emergence of what is also a major military power, and the persistence in the Chinese Communist Party’s control over Chinese society has triggered concerns about a potential Cold War. Castells, being the enlightened commentator that he is, sees things from a broader perspective, concentrating more on the benefi ts that can accrue from the growing interaction between the rest of the world and what is ‘humankind’s oldest civilization, with its extraordinary cultural tradition [as] certain to enhance spiritual enrichment and reciprocal learning’29. Global capitalism’s rise in the twenty-fi rst century, particularly its infl uence by ‘Chinese characteristics’, may well see transformations every bit as dramatic as those that occurred since the 1970s. Victor Nee and Sonja Opper, in a 2006 paper for the World Bank, defi ned China’s system as ‘politicized capitalism’30, they see the state apparatus as setting the regulatory framework in which business operates but also as actually interfering in its decisions; this they correctly characterise as a ‘hybrid economic order’ arguing that it should be viewed as a transitional stage31. The Chinese are, according to David Smith, ‘breaking the normal rules of economic development’32, something he sees in China’s efforts to gain access to high technology, sometimes with the connivance of multi-national corporations interested in making money (sometimes by dint of even more creative methods). According to the IIEC and CSIS, China’s failure to protect intellectual property rights is probably the second most important source of friction in bilateral ties with the United States33. Though The Economist makes the

David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 56. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 286. IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet; Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 3. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 308. Cited in David Smith’s The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 188. Victor Nee and Sonja Opper, cited in David Smith’s The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 188. David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 233. IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 95. 46 important point that these intellectual-property violations actually cost American fi rms far less than many of them would have us believe: pirated DVDs may sell for a fraction of their cost in Shanghai’s fl ea markets, but the people who buy them could ill afford them at the full price34. The Chinese may well have a different understanding of what constitutes intellectual property rights, certainly it is different from that which usually obtains in the West, but if they want to join the global market, they simply have to abide by the rules laid down by international trading bodies such as the World Trade Organisation, why else would they go to all that trouble to join them? However, as global capitalism is constantly undergoing transformation, might not this be one other aspect of it that will have to change in order to keep up? The Internet has already begun to alter how music and fi lms are bought, or at least accessed and downloaded – this is all part of Manuel Castells’s qualitative changes in society. And is not one of the hallmarks of the entrepreneurial mindset the ability to bend or even break the rules? If so, the West can hardly complain when, having set the rules in the fi rst place, a country like China comes along and beats them at their own game. Manuel Castells reminds us that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 was primarily ‘a nationalist revolution with socialist characteristics’35. It followed a prolonged period of Japanese aggression in China (1894-1945), which was ineptly resisted by a corrupt Kuomintang government, which later fl ed to Taiwan and set up a military dictatorship; an action that has resulted in a dangerous situation which still requires considerable delicacy in handling; Taiwan is still seen as a ‘renegade province’ by China. Castells’s analysis of China’s recent history is as good a place as any to start in trying to make sense of what is happening in the country today. The basic fact that no one can ignore is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has survived the upheavals of the last half-century and is still in power. Often in spite of what Castells calls ‘its own suicidal tendencies (that is Maoism)’, what he means here is that the CCP has shown a ‘political strength far greater than that of any other communist experience’36. Maoism may have done a lot of damage – no one, least of Castells, is denying that – but students of China’s history must be wary of the sort of shrill excesses indulged in by commentators such as Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, who seem determined to paint as bleak a picture as possible37. Maoism, according to Castells, ‘actually expressed one answer to the fundamental problem of the Chinese revolution: how to make China strong, and independent, while preserving Communist power, in a world dominated by superpowers, and where technological and economic development were proceeding apace on the opposite shores of the China Sea’38. Chairman Mao’s path to self-reliance, emphasising ideology and the preservation of rural life (backed up by guerrilla warfare where necessary – with a nuclear deterrent as a last resort), was directly opposed to Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shao-shi’s accelerated industrialisation, economic growth, and technological modernisation (admittedly along the Soviet model at the time). Zhou En-Lai managed to steer a centrist course, preserving China’s technological-military complex – seen as the guarantee of national independence – which managed to survive the turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s. With the defeat of the Gang of Four, Deng returned to power (he had spent the Cultural Revolution sweeping the streets in his hometown Chongqing), fi nally he was able to implement his economic plans. In Castells’s view the timing of this was vitally important because after the excesses of Mao’s decade-long, Red-Guard- led madness (what Castells calls ‘a murderous ideological orgy’), only ‘the immediate improvement of living conditions, the diffusion of property rights, and the prospects of a better life in their lifetime, could rally the Chinese again around a revamped Communist regime’39. So Deng not only introduced economic reform, leading to the transformative, hybrid capitalism we are seeing today, but also, ironically, strengthened the Communist Party’s grip on the country in the process.

The Economist, May 19-25, 2007, ‘America’s Fear of China’. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 309 (italicised in original). Ibid., p. 311. These are only mention here because David Smith has so copiously quoted them in his own book. Ibid., p. 311. Ibid., p. 311. 47 By the time the reforms were introduced, the Soviet Union had become China’s enemy; the issue of Russian-Chinese rivalry is something that will be touched on briefl y later (in the colonialism versus imperialism chapter), suffi ce to say that these two Asian giants have traditionally been enemies, often bitter ones. Added to this was the fact that Soviet-style economics was clearly ailing, whereas throughout the Asia Pacifi c, economies were growing at the fastest rate in history, (often led, ironically, by ethnic Chinese minorities). Deng wanted to draw on the lessons seen in these new Asian ‘tiger’ economies, but in a way that would preserve socialism, as well as the Communist Party’s grip on power. As Castells says, this was not fundamentally different from what Gorbachev tried to do in the Soviet Union, a mere seven years later, but Gorbachev’s fatal error was to be ‘too arrogant to imagine he could fail’40. Deng understood that to ease the Party’s control over society, particularly in a period of rapid economic change, could derail the reform process; Gorbachev’s subsequent fate, as well as that of the Soviet Union as a whole, seems to have confi rmed this view. Castells maintains that this is why the ‘Singapore model’ is so popular with the current Chinese leadership41; that economic and technological development can proceed without yielding to the pressures of a civil society must certainly appeal to a political party whose assertion of China as a world power is so strongly linked to its desire to remain in control. However, Castells questions the wisdom of using a place the size of Singapore as a model for a country that ‘accounts for 20 percent of humankind’42. Jane Jacobs would agree, she points out that it ‘…affronts common sense, if nothing else, to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States[…] as economic common denominators. All they really have in common is the political fact of sovereignty’43, yet Singapore is actually an ideal model for China, we have already seen Peter G. Rowe highlight their shared neo-Confucian values. Singapore also has an overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese population, and is ruled by a socialist government, one that has been in place a very long time (and certainly it has been the ruling party since Singapore’s independence from Malaysia in 1965), and as a city-state it is in fact an excellent model for similar-sized Special Economic Zones in China such as Pudong and Shenzhen. Castells has also picked up on the extraordinary role ‘the ethnic connection’ has played in China’s global integration44, i.e. the group known as the ‘Overseas Chinese’. Castells sees this group, with their ethnic-based business networks as essential to contemporary Chinese development, something that was only able to come about after the Open Door policy was introduced. Chinese investors, particularly those from Hong Kong and Taiwan (at least initially), began to decentralise their production, setting up factories in the Pearl River Delta and other part of southern China. In order to minimise risks, they used the time-honoured tradition of guanxi (network of relationships), preferring to deal with relatives or friends, or, failing that, preferring to deal with people who at least came from the same place of origin (tong xiang), or who spoke the same dialect. This is exactly the sort of social and/or family network we saw David R. Meyer highlight earlier when looking at Hong Kong’s business networks. Niall Ferguson would agree, he sees the ‘Chinese diaspora that had continued to operate within the capitalist system even as the mainland languished under Mao’s tyranny’ as a vital ingredient in China’s success45. Manuel Castells makes it very clear that ‘[i]t is only thanks to this access to outside fi nancial resources that Guangdong, Shanghai, and other fast-growing areas in China have been able to short-circuit economic controls from the central planning system’46. He sees China’s new capitalism as being highly decentralised because ‘it follows the contours of provincial and local alliances, and of the business networks to which they connect: a capitalism that is oligopolistic in local markets, and

Ibid., p. 312. Ibid., p. 312. Ibid., p. 312. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, p. 32. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 315. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 637. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 317. 48 competitive at the national and international levels’47. However, as the market economy spreads it is becoming increasingly diffi cult to exercise political control without creating chaos. Manuel Castells identifi es three main reasons for this. First, the centres of capital accumulation are mainly controlled by provincial or local enterprises, with direct links to foreign markets and fi nancial resources. Second, the rapid growth of gumin (stock- crazed speculators) who are using information technology to trade in Shanghai and Shenzhen’s stock markets from anywhere in China and hence bypassing government controls. And third, the new power equilibrium in China has taken on a complex pattern of interdependence between the centre and its regions. Castells thinks that any attempt by the centre to curtail a region’s economic autonomy could not only derail the economic reforms, but could upset the fragile status quo that has been reached in this communist-capitalist state. With the Soviet experience of a communist state’s effort to make the transition to capitalism ending in such disaster, the Chinese leadership is understandably proceeding with extreme caution. Castells sums up by saying that China’s economic development and technological modernisation is being pursued by a communist leadership as the indispensable tool for national power, as well as a new principle of legitimacy for the one-party state. He sees this as an historical merger between a developmental state and a revolutionary one, a complex balancing act but one with ‘reasonable, but not certain, chances of future success’48.

The downside of economic growth China’s economic growth is having some negative side effects. We have already seen the importance of the face-to-face contact in an increasingly wired world, so alongside the exponential growth in telecom- munication networks China is also beginning to see a huge growth in air travel. Ted C. Fishman quotes Airbus as estimating the Chinese market for air travel will grow fi vefold by 2022, and that the country will need at least 1,300 aeroplanes seating one hundred or more to meet this demand49. China’s motorway network, at 34,000 kilometres (at the end of 2004), is the second largest in the world (only the United States’s is larger), this is astonishing considering the fi rst motorway was only built in China in the 1980s, and that the network has actually doubled in size since 2000 50. As with earlier examples of economic growth in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, resource constraints are not necessarily impediments to development. According to David Smith, China was not an oil im- porter of any consequence until well into the 1990s51, but that by 2003, according to Stephen Roach (chief economist at Morgan Stanley), the Chinese were buying 7 percent of the world’s oil, a quarter of its aluminium and steel, and nearly a third of the all its iron ore and coal, not to mention 40 percent of the world’s cement52. China, as has already been mentioned, is poorly endowed with natural resources, arable land is only 0.095 hectares per capita (60 percent below the world average), China only has something between 7 and 15 percent of the world’s arable land (fi gures vary) but has to feed one fi fth of the world’s population. Water availability is 75 percent below the world average, and the availability of most key mineral resources is well under half. The only important natural resource China has in any abundance is, unfortunately, coal53. China is said to be opening a new coal-fi red power plant every week, and as a result was set to surpass America as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases sometime in 200854. China’s energy consumption (per unit of output) is more than double the world average, and sixteen of the world’s twenty most air-polluted cities are in China; two-thirds of Chinese cities fail to

Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 313 (italicised in original). Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 227. David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 109. Ibid., p. 41. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 14. IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 33. The Economist, May 19-25, 2007, ‘America’s Fear of China’. 49 meet even their own air emission standards, while nearly 200 of them fall short of the World Health Or- ganisation’s standard for airborne particulates55. Indeed, as Ted C. Fishman quotes from the Far Eastern Economic Review, the United States State Department refuses permission for diplomats with asthmatic family members to be posted to a number of Chinese cities56. Apart from the potential damage to the environment caused by China’s rapid economic growth, the fact of its increasingly bad pollution record seems to have emboldened the United States to persist in its own less than stellar efforts to clean up its own act; America’s failure to sign the Kyoto Accord has been seen by many as a sort of shrug of the metaphorical shoulders, but if anything, China’s increasing environmental damage should be seen as advancing rather than regressing the cause of global environ- mentalism. One other, and somewhat odd, side-effect of China’s thirst for natural resources is the emergence of an almost colonial relationship between it and some of the world’s less developed countries, particularly in Africa. With 90 percent of China’s oil imports being transported by ocean-going tankers, the country’s energy requirements are having a very real effect on its diplomatic policies. Beijing’s attempts to bypass potential chokepoints, such as the Straits of Malacca (through which the IIEC and CSIS reck- on 80 percent of its oil imports pass), has spurred the development of port facilities in Pakistan, Bangla- desh, and Burma (Myanmar)57. Much as the world’s sea lanes were kept open for trade in the nineteenth century by Britain’s sea power and the Pax Britannica, so too are the world’s waterways today patrolled by the United States Navy, a fact which China can only view as a strategic vulnerability should bilateral relations ever sour. Ted C. Fishman agrees, apart from the risk of collision, or piracy, or a terrorist attack, China sees the patrolling of the world’s sea lanes for itself as of central strategic importance, while also exploring other options, such as the laying of new oil pipelines via Thailand and Russia58. David Smith has also highlighted the rapid growth of China’s percentage in the African trade, with the ‘share of sub-Saharan Africa’s exports going to China increasing more than twentyfold between 1990 and 2004. China-Africa trade is closing fast on trade between America and Africa’59. David Smith quotes Vivienne Walt of Fortune as saying that ‘China refuses to join in Western rebuke of Afri- can corruption and human rights abuses… Much like the militant Islamic offi cials in Tehran – another of China’s key oil suppliers – many African leaders regard China as a balance to Western meddling’60. Smith sees China as hard at work building ‘close, almost colonial relationships with small commodity- producing countries’61. China is in fact one of the world’s few surviving political entities that can reasonably be described as an empire. Large swathes of territory that fall within China’s borders today have been annexed or otherwise taken over in a way that is typically colonial or imperial, for example, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Tibet. These regions, imperial annexations or not, are to all intents and purposes Chi- nese, and commentary of a political nature on their status today is not the purview of this study. One other fi nal point regarding oil supply is that Japan’s post-war constitution forbade them an army (or a navy), hence even at the height of their economic prowess in the 1980s they were always beholden to the United States who could have choked off their oil supply any time they chose. China, on the other hand, is doing everything it can to ensure that it shall never fi nd itself in such an invidious position. Now we turn from the general to the particular, with a look at the effects this rapid development is having on Shanghai, particularly as it is supposed to be in the vanguard of China’s bid for global greatness. When this study began in 2005, it was commonplace to hear of Hong Kong’s coming eclipse

IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 54. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 118. IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 130. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 293. David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 127. Quoted in David Smith’s The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 127. David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 220. 50 by Shanghai. Such talk is now rare. Ultimately Shanghai is still aiming to become a leading global fi - nancial centre, but, as David Smith has pointed out, this is understood to be a long-term goal62. China, according to Smith, has failed in its attempt to develop sophisticated and liquid stock markets; while Shanghai, home to one of the country’s two stock markets, has found out to its cost that ‘there is more to establishing successful fi nancial centres than concrete and glass’63. Pamela Yatsko, writing nearly a decade ago, has said the same thing. She saw Shanghai as doing ‘a fi ne job’ in the 1990s when it came to ‘building the bricks and mortar of an international fi nancial hub – it has a state-of-the-art stock exchange building, modern company headquarters, and plenty of new highways. However, it did not focus enough on building soft infrastructure, including consistently enforced regulations, good companies, reliable intermediaries, transparency, and a strong independent business information network’64. As far back as 2001 she saw Shanghai as:

[D]ominated by little-reformed state enterprises, a powerful bureaucracy that does not understand the underpinnings of healthy ﬁ nancial markets, and a Communist Party that doles out preferential policies and promotions to those who kowtow to it. Under current conditions, the full abilities of the Shanghainese have yet to be tested. Only when market forces hold sway, the city gets over s state-enterprise bias, and it is free to run itself will the Shanghainese be able to take advantage of their city’s myriad advantages to make Shanghai a serious contender.65

Shanghai’s experience from 2001 to 2005 saw share prices halve and stockbrokers who had offered guaranteed returns found themselves badly exposed. Something that, according to David Smith, ‘set back the cause of investor-led capitalism in China for years’66. Smith also reminds us that in Sep- tember of 2006 Chen Liangyu, Shanghai’s Communist Party Secretary, was removed from offi ce for alleged corruption, which Smith sees as ‘a refl ection in microcosm of China’s problems; overbearing bureaucracy combined, paradoxically, with weak regulation’67, something which may well be a result of the neo-Confucian underpinning of the socio-cultural matrix in East Asia highlighted by Peter G. Rowe earlier. Fewer than 1,000 fi rms are listed on the Shanghai stock market, with China’s best companies tending to go further afi eld: to Hong Kong or Singapore, London or New York68. Pamela Yatsko also foresaw Shanghai’s problems in its attempts to catch up with Hong Kong despite having advantages such as ‘a huge domestic market, lower costs, a larger labor pool, an up-and-coming reputation, and Beijing’s backing’69. Hong Kong has enjoyed a larger pool of fi nancial talent than Shanghai for decades, something that Yatsko was quick to point out back in 2001, this is also something we saw David R. Meyer highlight when discussing the social aspects of a global city’s place in a network. Hong Kong has other advantages over Shanghai as well, not the least of which is the fact that it offers a better standard of living, better medical care, better schools, better English, and has easy access to nature70. Although Shanghai is improving, it is still considered a ‘hardship post’ for most expatriates; the city lacks many of the advantages that are taken for granted in Hong Kong or Singapore. One of the most challenging for any foreigner posted to Shanghai must be a lack of basic English, meaning that in order to engage in anything other than the most rudimentary of daily transactions in the city profi ciency in Chinese is needed.

Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 190. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 87. Ibid., p. 89. David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 190. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 190. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 85. Ibid., p. 85. 51 To end this chapter on China’s resurgence it might be useful to take a look at life in China’s cities for the people who are not members of the global elite. These are the people who form the vast majority in a city like Shanghai, and they are being increasingly excluded from parts of the city that they used to call home. Ted C. Fishman sees China’s huge population as being the basic fact behind the country’s rapid economic ascendance in recent years. Hundreds of millions of peasants are now leaving the countryside; the largest such migration in human history71. China had anything from 100 to 160 cities with one million or more (America, by comparison, has 9, while Eastern and Western Europe combined have 36)72. Peter G. Rowe tells us that China is only about 32 percent urban, although he points out that it is ‘…well on its way to becoming a predominantly urban nation by about 2035, before going on to stabilize, with a 60 per cent proportion of urban dwellers, probably around 2050’73. Rowe also notes that the rise in the proportion of urban dwellers is being driven by the very shift in distribution that Fishman has mentioned earlier, rather than by overall growth. According to Fishman, during the last four decades of the twentieth century the world experienced unprecedented urban growth, most of it the result of migration from rural areas. In 1950, approximately 30 percent of the world’s population lived in cities (a mere six percentage points under China’s current fi gure). In fact, for most of the second half of the twentieth century China’s pace of urbanisation lagged behind the rest of the world, so is it any wonder that it is trying to catch up? However, according to the IIEC and CSIS, China’s current pace of urbanisation is unparalleled in history, the estimate is that China’s urban population will balloon by 200 million within the space of a decade74. One of the most important challenges facing China’s government in the future will be lessening the income gap between urban and rural areas. One other area of inequality that has long existed in China is that of the developed coastal areas and inland regions, a gap that has continued to increase in recent years. The infrastructure that is being created in order for the country to compete globally (we have already seen the increase in road and air travel networks), is also causing populations to become displaced, forcing them to make way for the new roads, airports, dams, and factories. According to a 2005 report, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that up to 40 million peasants have been forced off their land to make way for these infrastructure projects, with an additional two million being displaced every year75; these millions become China’s ‘fl oating population’ and are fl ocking into urban areas in search of new means of livelihood. Vast migrant-worker ‘towns’ are springing up on the edges of major cities, storing up potential environmental, health and safety issues, as well as poverty and rising levels of dissatisfaction with the way the country is being run. According to the IIEC and CSIS, China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission estimated the number of internal migrants to be 53.5 million in 1995 and well over 140 million by 200476. In fact, migrant workers account for approximately 20 percent of China’s working-age population (i.e. those between 15 and 64 years old)77. In the early 1980s Deng Xiaoping dismissed any potential problems regarding future inequality with the memorable phrase ‘some people have to get rich fi rst’, recently Chinese leaders have begun to take cognisance of the fact that such inequalities, if they are allowed to increase unabated, could lead to political instability, with the result that they have begun to implement policies designed to accelerate both the pace of farm-income growth and the economic development of interior provinces that have been left behind in the rush to the market. In the new China some people may very well get rich fi rst, but some others are going to get old before they get rich: China’s ageing population is going to face some unusual as well as unpleasant

Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 7. Ibid., p. 1. Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 24. IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 31. Cited in IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 41. Cited in IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 46. IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 46. 52 problems. First of all the country has yet to develop a proper (and well-funded) pension system, hence most Chinese people continue to rely on the traditional family structure to cater for their old age, but this, too, has come under attack in recent decades, the one-child policy has now been in place for a generation and will eventually result in people fi nding themselves forced to look after as many as four grandparents. Another downside to the one-child policy is that it has resulted in a shocking gender imbalance: there are far more men than women in China. China now has the starkest gender imbalance in the world, with 117 males born for every 100 females (Ted C. Fishman puts this fi gure at 118) – yet the global norm is 105 boys to every 100 girls78. This unnatural ratio of male to female is also the result of high abortion rates for female foetuses (a practice which, while illegal, is still carried out), female infanticide is also supposed to be relatively common, but this, by its very nature, is a diffi cult practice to gather any fi rm data on. The Chinese call the surplus males ‘bare branches’, and they are fast becoming a permanent subclass in the lowest socio-economic order, which is in turn leading to all kinds of other problems, including the increased incidence of bride kidnapping for those desperate for marriage. There are some exceptions to the one-child policy: some city couples are allowed to have more than one child, but only if the husband and wife are both in a second marriage and want to have a child together; couples who are themselves only children may have two children; and in rural areas families may legally have two children, provided the fi rst is a girl and they wish to try again for a boy79. According to David Harvey, the Chinese have been seeking to absorb their vast labour surpluses since at least 1998 by investing in mega-projects, one of these is the proposal to divert water from the Yangtze to the Yellow River (at a cost of at least $60 billion). Harvey also cites as ‘even more dramatic are the prospects for long-term infrastructural investment’80: new subway lines and motorways are being built, as well as around 13,500 kilometres (8,500 miles) of new railroads in a bid to connect the country’s interior to its economically more dynamic coast81. According to Harvey, this effort is even larger than similar efforts in the United States in the 1950s and ’60s. China is seeking to absorb the surplus capital that is required to keep the current round of capitalist expansion afl oat with these infrastructural projects, however, as Harvey sinisterly points out, these projects are defi cit fi nanced, entailing huge risks, because if these investments do not make a good return then there could be a crisis, and it could be one that could potentially engulf the whole country, thereby stalling economic development and stymie- ing the social stability they are designed to ensure82. Of course, as we have already seen, these projects are also engendering their own sets of social problems, but like the market-driven innovations that were introduced in the wake of the Cultural Revo- lution, and which had the effect of staving off total collapse for a system that had become increasingly discredited (not to mention dangerously unpopular), these newer efforts will continue to do what they were supposed to, at least for as long as some of China’s citizens are indeed ‘getting rich fi rst’, the rest will just have to wait a little longer. What David Harvey calls this ‘remarkable version of a spatio-temporal fi x’ is one for which he sees ‘global implications not only for absorbing overaccumulated capital, but also for shifting the balance of economic and political power to China as the regional hegemon and perhaps placing the Asian region, under Chinese leadership’83. And, as we have already seen, China is not going to allow itself to be dominated by the United States in the way Japan was in the past, therefore it will not only have the willingness to take on a territorial leadership role within the Asia region, it will have the capacity to do so as well.

Ibid., p. 48. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 102.. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 123. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 123. 53 4 PUDONG

The word ‘modern’ was fi rst transliterated into Chinese in Shanghai. Since the city’s inception as a colonial enclave in 1842 Shanghai has long been synonymous with the new, the innovative, and the daring. For a century and a half, any changes that China has seen have typically been visible in Shanghai before anywhere else. In its colonial heyday – the 1920s and ’30s – Shanghai was ranked as one of the world’s fi ve most important commercial centres, (the other four were London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo1); the city was also reckoned to be the world’s second-busiest port at the time2. After the hiatus of 1949-90 Shanghai is once again China’s most modern city, the testbed for economic innovation and the nexus of the country’s global fi nancial ambitions. Darryl Chen calls Shang- hai ‘…more a process than a static cityscape, with its explosion of object buildings tempered by new infrastructure, parks and conservation the city presents an almost unique control-model kind of urban subject matter among the world’s major metropolises’3. Chen also warns against drawing hasty conclusions in a city which lends itself so easily to cliché and whose presence in popular imagination is potently fuelled by what he calls ‘a mythologized past’4. One must indeed beware of nostalgia in any study of Shanghai, an issue that will be touched on later in Chapter 6 of Part I, in the analysis of the Xintiandi redevelopment in the city’s former French Concession, and again in Part IV, Chapter 3, when the role of nostalgia in the cultural construction of perception will be examined. Shanghai’s recent rise to dizzying global heights has made the city synonymous with urban redevelopment of the most brutal kind. According to Richard Turnbull, ‘[b]y 2000 half the buildings from the late 1940s, the vast majority colonial, had been razed to Figure 5. Map of Greater Shanghai (source: 5 Shanghai shi di tu) make way for 200,000 high-rises’ , he also refers to the city as ‘the world’s largest construction site’6. The government is investing heavily in urban infrastructure, what Darryl Chen calls the ‘hardware of any global city’7. It opened its fi rst metro line in 1994 (it now has three, and is currently constructing three more), and as we have just seen it is also home to the world’s fi rst commercial Maglev (magnetic levitation) line, which links the new Pudong Airport to the city. Overhead expressways have been snaking their way across the city since the 1990s, as have new river bridges, and an outer ring road. Shanghai is also home to China’s fi rst Formula One racetrack, and the city has also successfully bid for the World Expo in 2010. But before we go into these infrastructural developments in detail, it may be useful to give some background to the development of Pudong.

Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. Darryl Chen, ‘View from Shanghai’, Architectural Review, February 2003. Ibid. Richard Turnbull, ‘View from Shanghai’, Architectural Review, December 2004. Ibid. Darryl Chen, ‘View from Shanghai’, Architectural Review, February 2003. 54 Pudong Special Economic Zone Pudong Special Economic Zone is a 520-square-kilometre swathe of former marshland between Shang- hai and the coast. It is now being transformed into what Neil Leach calls ‘a shameless expression of Chinese expansionism’8. What was once a ‘shameful run down area on the wrong side of town, teem- ing with the fl otsam of Chinese society’9 became, on 18 April 1990, the fl agship economic zone for the new China, for that was the date on which Chinese Premier Li Peng announced the decision of China’s Communist Party Cen- tral Committee, and the State Council, to develop Pudong. Shanghai Mayor Zhu Rongji announced ten preferential policies for Shanghai, including permission to set up new service industries, establish a free trade zone, and attract foreign banks. Beijing also made Shanghai the site of one of the country’s two new stock exchanges (the other one is in Shenzhen – the Shang- hai exchange is not actually new, its December 1990 opening can Figure 6. Shanghai city model, Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition be seen as a re-opening of the (source: author photograph) city’s old colonial-era exchange, but in a new location). Pudong was seen as central to the effort of rebranding Shanghai’s global city image, what Michelle Tsung-yi Huang calls ‘the symbolic vision of China’s future role in the global economy, and the material site for accumulating capital’10. What Neil Leach refers to as ‘an orgy of construction’ followed11. Shang- hai became the latest site of skyscraper-mania, turning Pudong into a new Manhattan – at least from a distance. Pudong’s skyscrapers are home to the local offi ces of international banks and insurance companies – and Pudong’s status as a Special Economic Zone means that companies who base their offi ces here enjoy tax breaks and other incentives. As we have seen, nearly 6,000 foreign-funded businesses, including 300 of the Global Fortune 500 companies are based here (Shanghai has 400 of these companies in total)12. Pudong is also home to China’s foreign exchange and interbank markets. Shanghai’s ‘orgy of construction’ is nothing if not impressive. According to Ted C. Fishman, more than 5,000 new buildings over 15 storeys were built by 200413. Pamela Yatsko states that seven times more was invested in infrastructure between 1992 and 1997 than during the whole of the 1980s (with a 27-kilometre ring road being built in just two years14), and more than 1,300 kilometres of

Neil Leach, China, p. 70. Ibid., p. 70. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 103. Neil Leach, China, p. 70. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 30. Ibid., p. 24. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 27. 55 new roads were built between 1990 and 199715. Shanghai’s fi rst metro line opened in 199516, while the Pudong International Airport broke ground in 1997 and yet was able to process its fi rst passengers a mere two years later17. Linking this airport to the city is the world’s fastest train, a magnetic levitation (Maglev) line that cost $1.2 billion18 (unfortunately this train only runs as far as Longyang Road in the south-eastern suburbs of the city, but at 431 kilometres per hour it is well worth the ride). By early 1998, the supply of offi ce space had surged 10 times over its 1994 level19, and in that year per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) had reached 28,200 yuan (US$3,400); four times the national average, and high enough to rank Shanghai as among the World Bank’s ‘medium-income-level countries’20. By 1999, the average family income in Shanghai had surpassed 8,700 yuan (US$1,048) per capita, which was more than triple its 1991 level21. And as for the buildings of this new Shanghai, some of the architects’ names read like a Who’s Who: Richard Rogers (the master plan for Pudong), Foster and Partners (Jiushi Corporation Headquar- ters), Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (the Jin Mao Tower), Kenzo Tange (the Bank of Shanghai), John Portman (Tomorrow Square), Kohn Pederson Fox (Plaza 66 and the World Financial Centre), Paul An- dreu (Shanghai Oriental Arts Centre). Then there is also the local talent, with Xing Tong He, the master- mind behind Shanghai’s successful bid for Expo 2010, and architect of the beautiful Shanghai Museum. It may be worth while to look at some of these iconic new skyscrapers to see what they actually tell us about the city. Beginning with the Jin Mao Tower, a building that Ted C. Fishman sees as ‘the kind of muscular, opulent skyscraper once built in New York and Chicago to express their cities’ gilded ambitions, proclaiming that Shanghai intends to take its place among the world’s top cities, but in its own sinocized version of global moneyed culture’22. According to Non Arkaraprasertkul, the tower’s design was intended to instil a sense of nationalism in the local population; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, an American fi rm, are said to have based their design on the eleventh-century Kaifang pagoda (a legendary brick pagoda in Henan Province)23. David Harvey sees a quality of permanence in urban monuments such as these, and he quotes Aldo Rossi as seeing them as signs of ‘the collective will as expressed through the principles of architecture’; they ‘offer themselves as primary elements, fi xed points in the urban dynamic’24. A building such as the Jin Mao Tower seems to epitomise the sort of schizophrenia that David Harvey identifi es as ‘a general characteristic of the postmodern mind-set’25, at least in his discussion of Charles Jencks as ‘chief chronicler of the postmodern movement in architecture’. Harvey cites Jencks as arguing that architecture must embody ‘a double-coding, “a popular traditional one which like spoken language is slow-changing, full of clichés and rooted in family life”, and a modern one rooted in a “fast- changing society, with its new functional tasks, new materials, new technologies and ideologies” as well as quick-changing art and fashion’26. American architects designing would-be Chinese architecture in China may be seen as just one more manifestation of globalisation, something we shall be returning to in a moment, fi rst, however, there is another icon rising on the Shanghai skyline: the World Financial Centre. This has been designed by another American fi rm, Kohn Pedersen Fox. Originally intended to be the world’s tallest building,

Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 27. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 33. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 28. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 32. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 32. Non Arkaraprasertkul, ‘Politicisation and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism’, Footprint, spring 2008. Aldo Rossi, quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 83. Ibid., p. 83. Charles Jencks, quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 83. 56 delays in its construction have meant that it will now never achieve that coveted status. Even as an icon it has raised some awkward issues, the circular opening at its top was originally planned to contain a Ferris wheel, but this has since been scrapped and the opening changed to a rectangle because its shape was felt to be too reminiscent of the Japanese fl ag. The project developer, a Japanese called Mori, wisely took these concerns to heart – memories of World War II are, as we have already seen, bitter in China. Quite apart from the irony that the World Financial Centre also seems somehow to refl ect in microcosm the sort of problems plaguing the city’s efforts to rebrand itself as a global leader (namely over- confi dence and a slightly misplaced ambition) what we are seeing here is the manifestation of an even more interesting global phenomenon: Deyan Sudjic has pointed out that something interesting happened to the global balance of cultural power in February 1996, when the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were fi nished. Their completion meant that for the fi rst time since the Gothic cathedral the world’s tallest structure was no longer in the West27. The tallest towers in the world are now being built in places that few Westerners could even fi nd on a map: Pusan in South Korea; Tianjin and Guangzhou in China; and seven years after the Petronas Towers were completed they were surpassed by Taiwan’s Taipei 101, a further 30 metres higher. While this desire to built the tallest, the biggest, and the most daring, may seem to be somewhat childish, there can be no denying that the Petronas Towers have lifted Kuala Lumpur, and Malaysia, out of Asian anonymity; Taipei 101 has done the same for Taiwan. In fact, since the middle of the 1990s most of the world’s tallest buildings are being constructed in Asia, the largest too, as well as the most daring and innovative in engineering and design terms. If we are going to see the infl uence of one part of the world on another in the twenty-fi rst century it may well be fl owing from Asia to the West; and that would hardly be for the fi rst time. Of course this can also be seen as just another example of increased globalisation, but this can no longer simply be characterised as Westernisation. So much for the buildings, what of the institutions that have been set up in them? Shanghai’s capital markets grew into China’s largest during the 1990s. The Shanghai exchange had a total market capitalisation of 1.06 trillion yuan (US$128 billion) by 1999, which was comfortably ahead of its national rival in Shenzhen (which achieved 0.888 trillion yuan (US$107 billion)28). The Shanghai exchange has some 480 companies listed (53 more than Shenzhen), and it also handles most of China’s treasury bond trading and repurchasing29. In terms of the sheer number of companies listed, and the volume traded, Shanghai’s exchange seemed set to surpass Hong Kong’s within the fi rst few years of the twenty-fi rst century, and in 1996 and 1997 Shanghai’s daily turnover actually exceeded Hong Kong’s on some days30. But Shanghai, as we have seen from David Smith’s analysis earlier, has not overtaken Hong Kong. There are a number of factors that may explain this. In the run up to the handover of Hong Kong to China (1 July 1997), investors were uncertain of the colony’s future, which may have damp- ened market activity; this was not helped by the Asian crisis, which was sparked off by the Thai baht’s collapse the very next day (2 July) and which sent shockwaves throughout the region. As the dust began to settle Hong Kong, now a Special Administrative Region of a China being seen to honour its com- mitments to the former colony, began to regain some of its confi dence. The crisis, even though its most devastating effects were felt in Southeast Asia, must have made Shanghai investors think twice before parting with their hard-earned cash, certainly the markets suffered (we have already seen Manuel Cas- tells highlighting the behaviour of the gumin (stock-crazed speculators)). Pamela Yatsko had foreseen some of the problems Shanghai was likely to face; she quoted Jack Wadsworth when listing the steps Shanghai would need to take if it was to operate as a fully fl edged fi nancial centre: ‘a yuan convertible on the capital account; high-quality listed companies; a national securities law, uniform disclosure, and consistent regulation; a series of reliable intermediaries (i.e. se-

Deyan Sudjic, The Edifi ce Complex, p. 317. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 61. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 61. 57 curities companies); and fi nally, the development of derivative instruments and options’31. Yatsko also perspicaciously pointed out that ‘[w]hile no one expected Shanghai’s rise to maturity to occur overnight, the decade’s progress fell far short of what the city’s new modern fi nancial gadgetry suggested and foreign fi nancial fi rms anticipated’32. As we have seen, the Shanghai exchange’s total market capitalisation had reached a total of 1.06 trillion yuan (US$128 billion) in 1999, but actually that was little more than one third that of Hong Kong’s33, and was so low that war-torn Sri Lanka’s total was higher (US$1.7 billion34). This level is so low because foreign investment houses are only allowed to trade in B-shares. Pamela Yatsko also points to the number of ‘corporate duds’ listed on the Shanghai exchange, and states unequivocally that this has been allowed to happen because ‘instead of viewing stock markets as a way to mobilize capital for the country’s most promising fi rms, the government clings to the notion that they are tools for restructuring the state sector’35. Unlike in more market-oriented countries, where any company that meets certain specifi ed criteria can list itself on the exchange, China’s government decides who gets on Shanghai’s exchange, and who does not. Shenzhen, oddly enough, enjoys far greater freedom in deciding who it can list, something it can do even in defi ance of the CSRC (China Securities Regulatory Commission). Of course the central authorities would probably be more vigilant with a showcase like Shanghai, but it also goes to illustrate a very old Chinese saying: ‘the mountains are high and the emperor is far away’. The vigilance of the central authorities probably explains the reluctance to fully open up Shanghai’s markets, and as we saw earlier, the Chinese government is reluctant to allow the sort of laissez-faire fi nancial climate that led Russia to ruin. However, if they are not careful they may well fi nd that they have choked off growth even before it has begun; this degree of control is never going to allow Shanghai to blossom into the a major fi nancial hub the Chinese want; something Pamela Yatsko had long foreseen, and it is also something that more recent publications (by analysts like David Smith) are telling us has in fact happened. Shanghai is not expected to overtake Hong Kong any time soon. So, Shanghai’s fi nancial foundations are not quite as fi rm as they might seem, but what of the city’s actual foundations? Stella Dong reminds us that Shanghai is actually built on ground so porous that one American engineer described it as ‘not much more solid than dirty water’36. Shanghai sits on a river delta, with alluvial soil, as a result Pudong is ‘sinking at an alarming rate’37, at least according to Neil Leach. And the greater the number of tall buildings, the more it will sink. Shanghai may be trying to emulate Manhattan, but without the rocky substratum that underpins that island, Pudong can hardly be seen as the ideal ground for the building of very tall structures. Neil Leach poses the very valid question: why does Shanghai need so many tall buildings? With all that space at Pudong’s disposal there was never the sort of constraint that forced Manhattan to build high. Shanghai is also so smoggy that the tops of these buildings are often invisible from the ground. Ted C. Fishman sees Pudong as what he colourfully calls ‘one of the biggest boondoggles of all time’38, he thinks it ‘no accident that a disproportionate number of the Communist Party’s highest leadership came from this city’39, and while it is not uninteresting to note that China’s economic reforms have indeed been the result of the work of Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, both of whom originally came from Shanghai, this is probably nothing more than a coincidence. These men had no agenda, other than to improve China’s standing in the global community, and if they made Shanghai their chosen vehicle they

Jack Wadsworth, quoted in Pamela Yatsko’s New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 62. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, pp. 62-63. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 79. Cited in Stella Dong’s Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 10. Neil Leach, China, p. 70. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 31. Ibid., p. 21. 58 were simply availing themselves of the most logical choice. What must be highlighted here, however, is the misguided notion that has driven Shanghai’s city planners to build endless arrays of skyscrapers, thinking that global greatness will somehow invariably follow. It is not the hardware of a global city that determines whether it will succeed or not (i.e. the buildings and infrastructure), but the software (the people). It is Hong Kong’s people who are keeping that city at the forefront of the international market. Shanghai may be improving but its perception of being a ‘hardship posting’ will have to change if the city wants to attract members of the global elite in signiﬁ cant numbers. One other factor that is of concern is that while Shanghai is indeed building the hardware of a global city, it has cleared away as much as 10 percent of the 4.7 million households that make up the city to make room for all of this new development. These people have been moved to new housing developments on the outskirts of the city40. At one level this has led to a material improvement in many people’s lives, who now ﬁ nd themselves living in more spacious apartments, but it has also had a devastating effect on their way of life, shattering the delicately woven web of social networks that they used to enjoy while living in the city centre, especially that of the now rapidly vanishing alleyway houses. People may be living more comfortably in the suburbs but they are increasingly cut off from old friends and neighbours. Living so far out means it can take the best part of a day (even using the city’s impressive new public transport) to revisit old neighbourhoods (if they are still there), not to mention former friends who may live right across this vast city.

Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 33. 59 5 PUBLIC SPACE, EMPTY SPACE

This chapter examines the new public spaces of Shanghai in order to try and fi nd out why some of them are so curiously dead. What has gone wrong here is a failure to understand exactly what is public space, the same failing that manifested itself so disastrously during the twentieth- century’s era of High Modernism. There was a curious, even threatening, feeling in British council estates, or American ‘projects’, an unsettling deadness in the so-called ‘streets in the sky’ that were so beloved of the designers of social housing after World War II, and which had so little in common with real streets. Jane Jacobs has made some profoundly important points about what actually makes a street work. She sees the pavement (which she refers to as a ‘sidewalk’) as nothing in and of itself, its meaning comes ‘only in conjunction with the buildings and other Figure 7. Lujiazui, artist’s impression (source: Shanghai: uses that border it’1. According to Jacobs: Architecture and Urbaniam for Modern China, p.91) if a city’s streets look interesting, then the city looks interesting; conversely if they look dull, the city looks dull2. This may sound obvious, but then many of Jacobs’s points are obvious, and none the less valuable for that: ‘…[t]he sight of people attracts still other people’3, ‘[o]nce a street is well equipped to handle strangers, once it has both a good, effective demarcation between private and public spaces and has a basic supply of activity and eyes, the more strangers the merrier’4. All obvious points and yet all profoundly important. Yet it is simple points such as these that were missed by some of the architects of the Modern period, leading to disastrously awful social housing, with all its attendant social problems. And while the view that housing conditions cause social problems is of course too simplistic, sometimes it can act as a contributory factor. It is this same sort of misunderstanding of what constitutes public spaces that is plaguing Shanghai today. David Harvey has emphasised the importance of Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, not least because ‘…it was one of the earliest, most articulate, and most infl uential of the anti-modernist tracts, but also because it sought to defi ne a whole mode of approach to understanding urban life’5. He quotes her as blaming the ‘Great Blight of Dullness’ as having arisen from ‘a profound misunderstanding of what cities are about’6: that is that cities are ‘…an intricate system of organized rather than disorganised complexity’7. According to Harvey, modernists saw space as something to be shaped for social purposes and hence subservient to the construction of a social project8. He undertakes his analysis the better to articulate what postmodernism actually is, or was, but in so doing manages to set out quite cogently what modernism was all about as well, not to mention where it went

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 37. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 52. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 71. Quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 72. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 72-73 (italics in original). Ibid., p. 66. 60 awry. Harvey sees postmodern architecture and urban design as breaking away from the ‘…modernist idea that planning and development should focus on large-scale, metropolis-wide, technologically rational and efﬁ cient urban plans, backed by absolutely no-frills architecture (the austere “functionalist” surfaces of “international style” modernism)’9, and he quotes Roland Barthes as saying that ‘the city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language’10; as a result, ‘we ought to pay close attention to what is being said’11. Jane Jacobs was paying close attention to what American cities were saying, and what she heard was the healthy hum of an intricate system of organised rather than disorganised complexity that was steadily declining in the wake of modernist ‘improvements’. She saw that ‘[u]nder the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change…’12. Jacobs is quick to point out that ‘there is nothing simple about the order itself, or the bewildering number of components that go into it. Most of these components are specialized in one way or another. They unite in Figure 8. Century Avenue at the Shanghai Science and their joint effort upon the sidewalk, which Technology Museum, Pudong (source: author photograph) is not specialized in the least. That is its strength’13. What she brilliantly infers from all of this is the fact that while most of what goes on on a city’s pavements (or sidewalks) is ‘ostensibly utterly trivial’ the sum of all this activity is ‘not trivial at all’14. Very little of this is being understood in the new public spaces of Shanghai, yet the older spaces – in the alleyway houses – did not need any understanding of theory in order to work, their inhabitants got on with their daily lives, the million trivial tasks that constitute the life force of these vibrant streets and lanes, and all in spaces that would hardly constitute public space at all, at least as it would be understood in the West. Taking Jane Jacobs’s reading of a city’s sidewalks as a point of departure, it is possible to discern a rich street life in Shanghai’s alleyways, a life that was lived in public, in a way native to the Chinese, and often invisible to Western observers. Yet if the observer takes a closer look, they will indeed be able see an ‘intricate system of organised rather than disorganised complexity’. This organised complexity will be analysed in the next chapter, ﬁ rst it is important to highlight some of the older spaces that have enjoyed such a rich and vibrant life for so many generations. Sadly it is a way of life now under threat, often from designers who are trying to re-create a new public life for the city’s spaces, but it is one which often fails to compare with the old ones that are being destroyed. David Harvey maintains that space tends to get treated as ‘a fact of nature’, becoming natura- lised through the assigning of common-sense, everyday meanings15. A sort of homogenisation of space

Ibid., p. 66 (italics in original). Quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 67. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 67. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 65. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 73. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 201-203. 61 then results, which can pose serious diffi culties for conceptions of place. According to Harvey, postmodern ‘Becoming’ entails a spatial politics that renders place subservient to transformations of space – in other words, absolute space yields to relative space16. Yet if we are to experience architecture as communication, as Harvey would have us believe, just what is it that the architects of Shanghai’s new public spaces are trying to say to us? Is it that the new spaces of global-city Shanghai are intended to be used by the new elite, to the exclusion of the city’s former inhabitants? Certainly the fact that these people can no longer afford to go to the places they used to call home is resulting in exclusionary zones every bit as effective as that of the Modernist planners from an earlier era. Harvey indignantly points out that ‘[s]uperior command over space has always been a vital aspect of class (and intra-class) struggle’17, he cites the example of how Nathan Rothschild was able to use information networks to get news of Wel- lington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, enabling him to sell short, which triggered a panic during which he was able to establish his family’s vast fortune18. In this Harvey invokes a simple rule: ‘those who command space can always control the politics of place even though, and this is a vital corollary, it takes control of some place to command space in the fi rst instance’19. Here we have a number of the themes we have been looking at united in a most elegant way: fi rstly, those who control space also get to control who uses it (and how it is used), secondly, these methods of control are dependant on other factors (i.e. the ‘control of some place to command space’) which in Shanghai means that new public spaces are seen as a necessary ancillary to the architectural articulation of global ambitions, and thirdly (which can safely be inferred from Harvey’s statement), it takes money to effect this control. But, as Jane Jacobs crisply points out, money ‘cannot buy inherent success for cities where the conditions for inherent success are lacking and where the use of the money fails to supply them’20. In other words, money can be used to clear away a city’s old public spaces (in order to make room for the new ones), but it cannot guarantee that the new public spaces will be used either as well as the old ones, or even at all.

Imperfect imports (and their effects on the city) Shanghai’s embrace of modernist icons like the skyscraper, the plaza, and the wide avenue (with anything from six to ten lanes of trafﬁ c), indicate this same failure to understand the richness and diversity of street life. It is never going to be enough to simply import a model from the West, especially if it has not been fully understood. The idea that you can build some tall buildings, lay plazas out in front of them and then think that it is going to turn into another New York City is naïve to say the least. Jane Jacobs convincingly highlighted the example of Peter the Figure 9. Jin Mao Tower (source: Great’s doomed attempts to import Western technology into author photograph) Russia in the early eighteenth century. She showed how he tried to purchase a developed economy simply by buying the products of it (mainly expertise in shipping from Holland and Britain). Peter was much admired at the time for what seemed like excellent efforts at modernising21, yet, in spite of all the money that was spent, and the trappings of progress it seemed to purchase, Russia’s economy did not develop they way the Tsar

Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., pp. 232-233. Ibid., p. 234. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 380. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, pp. 139-144. 62 thought it would, (i.e. like the countries he was buying from). Jane Jacobs scathingly points out that the Tsar seems to have mistaken development for the collecting of the things required for producing it; a dangerous exercise in self-deception. Development is actually a process of change, and one of the most important points in Jacobs’s insightful book is the fact that this process cannot be bought. This thesis is not for one moment suggesting that China is making the same mistakes as Russia’s former Tsar, indeed, the Chinese are making far too canny a use of the technologies that have given the West its wealth for them ever to be accused of such a blunder. It is merely pointing out that the curious deadness of some of Shanghai’s new public space could be the result of a similarly blinkered vision (and do not forget that many of these spaces are being designed by Western- ers). This only goes to highlight the point that it is never enough to simply rely on the importation of what Pamela Yatsko calls the hardware of a global city, certainly not if in so doing the software, i.e. the people, are harmed. The clearing away of the Shanghai’s alleyway houses to make way for plazas and skyscrapers, regret- table and all as this is, is not just about the fundamental dialogue between the rich and the poor, a phenomenon that could hardly be termed new – the poor have always been swept away by the rich who have seen them as an impediment to their getting even richer (one notorious historical example would be the great Scottish estates in the nineteenth century, where crofters who had farmed the land for centuries were forced to move out simply to give the aristocratic owners more room for grouse shoot- ing). Michelle Tsung-yi Huang quotes Saskia Sassen in stating that the heart of this problem for Shanghai is the Figure 10. World Financial Centre (source: fact that ‘…the claims of the professional managerial class author photograph) are rarely questioned, and as a result the urban space of a global city is ceaselessly subjected to the claims imposed by the new users’22. This ‘refl exive life-planning’, as Manuel Castells calls it, ‘becomes impossible, except for the elite inhabiting the timeless space of fl ows of global networks and their ancillary locales’23. As we have seen, as many as 10 percent of Shanghai’s households have been forced to move to make way for all of this global hardware, in Lujiazui alone, the four-square-kilometre heart of Pudong, 52,000 households (approximately 169,000 people) were moved to clear the way for the iconic headquarters of these global corporate players24; while across town, in places like Hongqiao and Gubei, the simple matter of market price has had an equally devastating effect; those unable to pay up to US$2,650 per square metre for an apartment have also found themselves with no option other than to move to cheaper areas further away from the centre. Lessening the income gaps that have opened up between various city dwellers, as well as between urban and rural areas, and coastal and inland regions which we have seen earlier, is going to be one of the key challenges facing China in the twenty-fi rst century.

Quoted in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 108. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 11. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 113. 63 Public space or left-over space? The space between Shanghai’s iconic new buildings is even more interesting than the buildings themselves. The Pudong district may resemble Manhattan from a distance, but if one wanders around between the soaring towers one soon realises that this area has nothing of the vibrancy and dynamism of New York. The space that has been left between these huge new corporate headquarters is just that: left over. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang investigates this phenomenon by examining the effects globalisation is having on the lived space of everyday lives in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. She defi nes the Baudelairean fl âneur strolling aimlessly through the city as the right and freedom to derive pleasure from wandering the streets; walking was a means of exploring the shifting social space while also attempting to assert the privilege of being at home in the world. She also highlights Shanghai writer’s Wang Anyi’s work, where life in old Shanghai is lovingly portrayed, particularly life in the alleyway houses, which Huang sees as illustrating the gap between the ‘…dazzling new look of the city against the vanished older version represented by the minutia of daily life…’25. Walking, especially when seen against the backdrop of the fast-paced global city, serves Huang as a metaphor for remembering the past or as a practice of everyday life. Globalisation not only brings specifi c spatial forms into being in the city, it also creates new social structures as well. This new globalisation creates what Saskia Sassen calls ‘a sort of urban glamour zone’26. Some- thing Sassen says ‘sets in motion a whole series of new dynamics of inequality’27, forcing her to pose the very valid question ‘whose city is it?’. With the denationalising of urban space, and its contestation thanks to the ‘formation of new claims by transnational actors’, Sassen sees the city as the strategic terrain for the operations of these transnational actors, one that she is quick to point out is hardly ‘a balanced playing fi eld’28. What Peter G. Rowe sees as ‘monotonous or jumbled arrays of architecturally nondescript buildings and urban landscapes’, with their ‘almost casual juxtapositions of muscular infrastructure against neighbourhood communities, as well the at times jarring, outlandish and incongruous instances of architectural production’ seems to characterise the East-Asian urban environment for him29. He sees it as the result of a top-down control ‘which places emphasis on relatively basic, even crude, regulatory codes’30, and maintains that because civil society is weak in East Asia this deprives most cities in the region from ‘…an effective bottom-up capacity to resist constructively the sometimes corrupt- ed and overwhelming weight of top-down authority’31. Coupled with Saskia Sassen’s claim that ‘[g]lobal cities are the sites of the overvalorisation of corporate capital…’32 we can see a further devalorisation of those already disadvantaged. The disparities between the ‘urban glamour zone’ and what Sassen refers to as ‘the urban war zone’ have become enormous33. While this may paint too dramatic picture of what is happening in Shanghai, a city with a remarkably cohesive and peaceable population, it could well be a refl ection of Peter G. Rowe’s view that it does indeed have a weak civil society, but this in turn more refl ects the neo- Confucian ‘shared heritage’ that East Asia as a whole enjoys. This is in fact a very civil society indeed, not civil in the Western sense (with its the tradition of the Greek agora or Roman forum), but civil in the simplest sense of the word, as being polite, well-mannered, and friendly. Peter G. Rowe also quite adroitly points out that the built environment of East-Asian cities is becoming increasingly homogeneous, with their department stores, shopping malls, fi nancial districts, pedestrian streets, subways, and neon-lit entertainment districts ‘…all now seemingly produced effort-

Ibid., p. 10. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, p. XXXIII. Ibid., p. XXIV. Ibid., p. XXXIV. Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 37. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 41. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, p. XX. Ibid., p. XXXIII. 64 lessly, in spite of the varied mechanisms of power, politics, relative economic circumstances and other societal relations’34. There is also the preponderance of uniformly tall buildings in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, all of which seem to be increasingly interchangeable. Transportation infrastructure often snakes its way between these high-rises without any attempt at disguise or integration, something that would be considered normal, even necessary, in the West. Rowe sees a greater acceptance of the expediency of these systems in East-Asian cities, they are seen as a necessary and indeed familiar part of the urban landscape. The fact that East Asia’s rush to urbanise coincided with ‘…widely available, sophisticated building technology and stronger means of building protection, resulting in the very real possibility of constructing more buildings and infrastructure more rapidly’35. Rowe maintains that historic preservation is weak in most East-Asian cities, that ‘in the mad dash to modernise, old was often equated with being poor in quality and outmoded’36. The perception of historical heritage as being useful for tourism is a relatively recent phenomenon in Asia, ‘[c]onsequently, large tracts have been destroyed, as it seemed the most expedient solution to squalor and overcrowding in many cities…’37. Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, in their analysis of what constitutes ‘new public domain’, see public space as important because it is, or should be, used as a space for encounter38. They defi ne public domain as ‘…those places where an exchange between different social groups is possible and also actually occurs’39, they also see public space as fulfi lling ‘…an important role in increasing the “social cohesion” in society’40. In their work they draw an important distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’. Space is what we saw David Harvey warning us about earlier, especially the danger of treating it as something that can be measured. Hajer and Reijndorp see this understanding of space as being associated with Enlightenment thinking, of space as denoting emptiness, something that can ‘…be arranged in unambiguous rational units’41. Place, however, is something they see as a direct criticism of this Enlight- enment thinking. Space, in their formulation, is not actually empty, nor does it allow a rational fi lling-in; place, on the other hand, is ‘…associated with real events (which have taken place there), with myths, with history and memories’42. Everyday life makes this sort of place take on different meanings; people put together their ‘…own polycentric urban area and thus [create] a new form of urbanity that is characterised more by agility than by movement’43. This ties in rather neatly with Jane Jacobs’s analysis of sidewalk or pavement usage in a city. Hajer and Reijndorp also see this ‘new urbanity’ as refl ecting new and highly dynamic ‘“time-space patterns” of citizens’ – which is also a direct link to David Harvey’s famous formula – in which they see the ‘increasing fl exibility in the world of employment, changes in the form of personal relationships, shared responsibilities in the home, cultural trends in home life and recreation’44. The result of all of this is an ‘ephemeral quality’ which Hajer and Reijndorp see as resulting from ‘…the exponential growth in the use of mobile telephones’45. Meeting people is no longer a matter of coincidence or, even more importantly, a matter of routine (like visiting a local pub or café), meetings are now organised on the spur of the moment and via the mobile telephone; this is one of the qualitative changes highlighted by Manuel Castells earlier on; Hajer and Reijndorp even make use of the term ‘net-

Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 32. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., pp. 34-35. Ibid., p. 35. Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 65. 65 work society’ when describing how ‘everyone puts together their own city’46. They see public domain as an ‘archipelago of enclaves’, where the citizens are continuously occupied with maintaining their own networks, eschewing potential friction with other groups in what they call a ‘mobility of avoidance’47. It is this notion of the archipelago of enclaves that is most interesting here because it goes right to the heart of Hajer and Reijndorp’s defi nition of public domain as ‘…not so much a place as an experience’48. And in cases where space, as opposed to place, has being designed to encourage certain modes of behaviour, it tends to discourage the very diversity we normally understand to be its greatest feature. What this means is that many empty public spaces are not the result of poor design, in fact the opposite may be the case, they may have been over-designed, with what Marc Auge would call an ‘excess of program- ming’49. These arguments are correct, coherent, and compelling. They would certainly explain some of the problems that have occurred in the new public domain as it has emerged recently in the West. In Asia, however, we fi nd a different set of issues, one of the most important of which is the blurring of the public and private realm, a blurring so subtle that Western observers are often incapable of seeing it. Westerners, used to reading the streets of their own cities, can tell at a glance what the social and cultural hierarchies are, and can make intelligent use of the spaces to move through them and get to where they want to go – the archipelago of enclaves we are all constantly constructing. Asian cities, however, are much harder to read, not because they are any more complex or diverse than the West, but simply because they are different. They operate according to different sets of social and cultural rules, each one as valid as those that obtain in the West, and each as carefully constructed over time due to the myriad little changes that veer society off into unexpected tangents. And yet there is nothing that cannot be understood by anyone who makes the effort. According to Richard Sennett, the contemporary Western defi nition of ‘public’ and ‘private’ as entirely separate and diametrically opposed domains dates from the end of the seventeenth century. Public meant open to public scrutiny, whereas private denoted the sheltered region of home life (i.e. family and friends)50. Peter G. Rowe sees distinctions between community and privacy in Asian cities as being ‘…less sharply drawn than, say, in the US or Europe, often with a corresponding blurring of public, semi-public, semi-private and private spatial realms and a stronger social emphasis on communality, propriety and conformance’51. While according to Brenda S.A. Yeoh, the Chinese always saw civic authority as being vested in the various clan associations to which they belonged52. Yeoh is, of course, writing about colonial Singapore, where the role of the Municipal Commission in improving civic life, indeed, even the very concept of the ‘public good’ itself, was ‘…little appreciated if not totally misunderstood’ by Asian people53. There are numerous examples of colonised Asians’ complete lack of understanding in the face of Western institutions. Hong Kong abounds with such cases: when the plague bacillus was isolated there in the early twentieth century a rumour started that Western doctors needed Chinese children’s eyes as part of the process, unsurprisingly this caused an exodus from the colony’s schools; another example, also related to this breakthrough in containing the plague, came from the colonial authorities’ offering of rewards for rats that were caught and turned in for destruction, the authorities soon found the response

Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 116. Cited in Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp’s In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy, p. 96. Richard Sennett, cited in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment, p. 271, footnote 3. Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 27. Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 30. Ibid., p. 30. 66 so overwhelming that rats were suspected of having been ‘imported’ from the Chinese mainland. While this latter example may be seen less as a case of misunderstanding than a cynical attempt to milk the colonial authorities of cash, the point of the exercise – to reduce the number of rats in the colony – was something the fraudsters failed to understand, paradoxically resulting in an increased danger of infection from the increased number of rats54. There were many confl icts between colonial authorities and Asian communities, with one of the major sources of diffi culty being the fundamental, and mutual, failure to understand what constituted public space. Colonial authorities increasingly took on the mantle of public guardians, ‘…organizing, maintaining, and regulating public spaces such as streets, verandahs, open spaces, parks, halls, markets, and slaughterhouses in the interest of an abstract entity called “the public”’55. The introduction of professional policemen to Singapore in the 1830s and ’40s further controlled these public streets and places56. Brenda S.A. Yeoh sees the emergence of a modern sense of public space, to which everyone had the right to access, and where ‘encounters in it between individual users are unplanned and unexcep- tional’57 also ties in to Hajer and Reijndorp’s defi nition of public space. This emergent public space was not only modern, but Western, and Yeoh sees Asian communities as tending to prefer ‘…a style of land and property use which emphasises diversity, and which is small in scale and mixed in function’58, they tended to minimise the need for travel and maximize the versatility of individual localities. According to Yeoh, ‘[n]o economic opportunity, however small, was scorned and niches for survival were created wherever possible in a city where space commanded a high premium’59. In other words, the Asian city tended to refl ect a multiplicity of use and fl exibility, with the juxtaposition of different activities in close proximity to one another.

People Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s intention in examining the effects of globalisation on the spaces of everyday lives in Shanghai is to show how the ‘shrinking world’ phenomenon is literally reducing space for many of the inhabitants of new global cities as they are forced to make room for re-zoning and new infrastructure. Huang somewhat mischievously suggests that the reason so many skyscrapers are made of glass is to fool us into thinking we can see into them, and that what goes on in them, which should seem crystal clear, is actually opaque: the operation of global capital. The seemingly transparent nature of the spaces of the global city is merely a mirage, and a cunning one, designed to deﬂ ect our gaze by an architectural sleight of hand. What is really going on is the increased accommodation of the needs and wants of the global elite (Huang’s term is ‘service class’) at the expense of other city users. Huang’s work focuses on the interaction between urban inhabitants in three East-Asian global cities (Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai), and she examines ‘the politics of walking as a practice and metaphor’60. Taking the work of Shanghai writer Wang Anyi, who was dedicated to portraying the minutiae of everyday life in the city’s alleyway houses, Huang highlights the stark gap between the ‘dazzling new look of the city’ and its old and vanishing way of life61. Shanghai’s regaining of its former glory as a global city, with its increasing feeling of ‘being

G. Byrne Bracken, Hong Kong: A Walking Tour, pp. 70-71. Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 243. Ibid., p. 244. Chua Beng-Huat and Norman Edwards, quoted in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Sin- gapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment, p. 244. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 246. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 3. Ibid., p. 10. 67 (re)connected with the world’, has ironically increased its sense of loss (and nostalgia), and this is illustrated by Wang Anyi’s characters62. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang fi nds Wang’s efforts to bridge the gap between the disappearing local and the newly built global as prescient and important, but cannot help noticing the fundamental limitations of such a project, something Huang correctly identifi es with the ‘nostalgia craze for the Old Shanghai’63. This is indeed something that is endemic in the city today. Huang sees ‘[t]he authentic Shanghai that supposedly works as a supplement to the homogenizing space of the global city [as having] already been reduced to nothing more than fl at, stereotyped images for public consumption’64. Huang also sees Shanghai’s glittering new skyscrapers as the sites where inhabitants project their desire for ‘…a space of limitless aspirations despite the fact that many of them never get to use the monumental space in their everyday life’65; the irony is that these people are not able to make use of this space, they are singularly unable to tap into these new networks of global fl ows that are coursing through their city. They fi nd themselves increasingly isolated; stuck fast in the analogue archipelago. Yet, are the new global elites any better off? What use do they actually make of these new city spaces? Precious little, as far as can be seen. The parks, and squares, and plazas of the new Shanghai are invariably empty. Why? The new global elite have perhaps less time that any other group of city users, and without time on their hands they are unable to avail themselves of the pleasures the city has to offer. It is ironic, is it not, that those most able to afford these facilities are the least able to do so? Particularly as the time constraints they suffer from are imposed by the very nature of the networks that have made them rich in the fi rst place. ironically these people simply do not have enough time to enjoy the fruits of their labours. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang sums this dilemma up most elegantly when she states that ‘[i]n essence, both the service class and the migrant workers are a “fl oating population”, brought into Shanghai by the global fl ows’66. As populations, of course they make use of different facets of the city, but do either of them really call Shanghai home? Probably not. No more than did the colonial elite. In summary, while Huang raises some important points, the fact that she does not differentiate enough between Hong Kong and Shanghai (cities which have colonial histories) and Tokyo (which does not) has important ramifi cations for the kinds of public spaces that have been constructed in these different cities. This is something we shall be returning to again in Part IV when examining the notion of what constitutes public space in Shanghai, particularly the diffi culty of translating a concept such as ‘public’ from the West to the East.

Culture One small but important point about life in Shanghai today is the strangely impoverished state of its cultural climate. Just as Shanghai is building the hardware of the global city, so too it is building the cultural hardware that one would normally expect to fi nd in any such metropolis. The Shanghai Museum, the Grand Theatre, and the Shanghai Library have all recently been built, and all are impressive. Yet why is it that in a city of approximately 20 million people the number of cultural events on any given day can barely fi ll one page of a daily newspaper? Why, with Shanghai’s enviable history of cultural innovation, is the city’s arts scene so pallid? Shanghai’s residents now enjoy more free time than ever before, the country’s central government reduced the working week from six to fi ve days in 199767, yet artists continue to fi nd Shanghai a lonely city. Perhaps China’s education system is at fault? Perhaps arts are seen as something less important than other, more lucrative endeavours? There may well be a lack of funding for state-run

Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 112. Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 140. 68 troupes68, but with such a global elite fl ooding into the city should not these cultural venues be fi lled anyway? Of course, as we have seen, Shanghai is still considered a hardship posting so it simply does not get the number of expatriates that Hong Kong and Singapore does – and both of these cities have thriving arts scenes. Maybe Shanghai’s elite simply does not have the time? Or maybe they do not have the inclination? Shanghai’s arts scene could hardly be characterised as cutting-edge, yet Shanghai used to be China’s most active and infl uential arts hub, attracting writers, composers, directors, actors, painters, and musicians from all over the country. In the 1920s and ’30s it had the highest concentration of artists anywhere in the country69, it was home to the ‘Butterfl y School’ and the ‘New Saturday School’ of writers, and because Shanghai’s foreign concessions, despite being perceived as a humiliation by some, offered China’s artists and intellectuals conditions that did not exist anywhere else in the country, particularly when compared with the war-torn interior of China at the time, Shanghai offered a haven of stability and freedom, one where artists and writers were also subjected to a minimum of censorship. In fact, for some writers, like the infl uential Lu Xun, Shanghai was the only place where they could get their work published70. Shanghai also provided rich opportunities for meeting other artists; major Western fi gures frequently visited the city, including, among others, Aldous Huxley, W. Somerset Maugham, and Noel Coward (who is said to have written the play Private Lives while staying at the Cathay Hotel). Artists and writers were also able to indulge in behaviour that would be frowned on or even disallowed at home, such as living with a lover. Beijing’s culture at that time was known as jingpai, and was seen to have grown stale; it found itself stuck in a dull tradition of elitism. Shanghai, on the other hand, was seen as tolerant, modern, and popular; its culture was known as haipai71. After 1949 Shanghai found itself cut off from international artistic infl uence, while at the same time the Chinese Communist Party insisted on socialist realism for artistic expression (i.e. propaganda). Muscular, smiling peasants toiling in the fi elds and factories replaced the sort of effete, decadent characters that peopled the urbane novellas of Eileen Chang. The state further controlled artistic endeavour by controlling access to funds, and because art was considered less important than industry and technology artists were severely under-funded, particularly in Shanghai. According to Pamela Yatsko, ‘[s]pending on cultural activities in Shanghai, which included education, science and technology, and sanitation as well as culture, accounted for 1.8% to 4.4% of the total amount invested annually in Shanghai between 1971 and 1984, compared with 16.6% just after the revolution’72. The Shanghai authorities now recognise that they cannot portray themselves as a leading global metropolis without a certain amount of cultural credibility, hence they have built some fl agship projects, which we have seen listed above, yet according to Pamela Yatsko this is exactly the sort of reaction one would expect from Chinese bureaucrats used to state planning, this typically top-down approach may not be the most conducive for cultural development. Culture is a delicate fl ower, as is democracy, and civic life. All of these things depend on a growth that comes from the bottom up in order to blossom. While Shanghai’s arts scene is suffering, Beijing’s is fl ourishing. Besides being the centre of the country’s increasingly well-respected fi lm industry, it is also home to China’s best orchestra and corps de ballet. The city has also begun to make an international name for itself for innovation and creativity. So why is Beijing’s arts scene so much better than Shanghai’s? The answer is simple: talent. China’s talent fl ocks to the capital for the simple reason that, as Arie Graafl and tells us: ‘[c]ulture tends to go where the money goes’73, and as Beijing is where the decision makers are, it is here that the decisions are made about what the nation’s money gets spent on. Shanghai has a long way to go if it wants to

Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 139. Arie Graaﬂ and (citing Edward Seidensticker) in The Socius of Architecture: Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, p. 139. 69 catch up with its northern neighbour, and as for any attempt to try and recreate its golden age during the colonial heyday, that is something that may well be gone forever.

Public versus private Where does that leave the Shanghainese? The city is not without its problems yet it is prosperous. A lot of money is being made from service industries as well as from foreign investment; the city is, as Pamela Yatsko points out, not a bad place to be. Shanghai has done well at building the hardware of the global city, especially as it has done so in such a short period of time, it has also managed to rehouse large numbers of inhabitants, usually in better and larger homes. It has also successfully managed to recast itself as a service rather than a manufacturing centre, with the attendant removal of polluting industries from the city centre. And it has managed to do all of this without sparking off any serious social unrest, which is no mean achievement. However, the city does have a long way to go before it can be considered a contender to Hong Kong, let alone Tokyo, as a regional hegemon. As we have seen from David Smith’s analysis, this is now a long-term goal, rather than the short-term certainty it seemed less than a decade ago. State-planning, combined with what Pamela Yatsko refers to as the ‘…detail-oriented and conscientious nature of many Shanghainese…’ makes the city’s government good at implementing big projects and achieving tangible objectives, and usually to deadline74, but global cities require more than just skilful top-down intervention, they require something less tangible, something we have seen in David R. Meyer’s analysis of Hong Kong and its social and business networks; what Pamela Yatsko calls the ‘software’ of the city: its people. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang has shown how the increased re-connectedness of Shanghai to the global network has paradoxically shrunk the available space for many of the city’s inhabitants. As has been shown, this is not a phenomenon confi ned to the analogue archipelago, even the members of the global elite for whom this displacement is being caused are failing to make use of the city’s new spaces. Ironically, it is some of the older colonial spaces of Shanghai that are most used today: Fuxing Park, in the former French Concession, and the Bund are popular; it is the new public spaces of Pudong that are empty. At the heart of this problem lies a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes public space in China. Public space should be about the possibility for encounter, yet in Shanghai these spaces seem to eschew such a possibility. The failure of these spaces is not in their spatial articulation, rather it is in how they are being conceived. It is not enough to simply copy Western models and hope that by emulating a shape you will magically engender a liveliness. Shanghai’s planners have confused public space with open space, a point that we will return to in greater detail in Part IV, fi rst we need to take a look at Richard Sennett’s work on what constitutes public versus private as regards space in the West. It might be useful to begin with that icon of the global city: the skyscraper. Richard Sennett sees the form of what he calls ‘the international-type skyscraper’ as being at odds with its function, which he states is supposed to be ‘a miniature public square revivifi ed’75. How- ever, the skyscraper’s very function ‘destroys the nature of a public square, which is to intermix persons and diverse activities’76. With walls consisting almost entirely of glass, the differentiation between inside and outside can be dissolved, leading to the ultimate in visibility, yet, as Sennett points out, these walls are hermetically sealed, he sees this as a merging of ‘the aesthetics of visibility and social isolation…’77. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang has also presciently pointed to the skyscraper’s deceptive transparency, showing it to be a mask for the opaque nature of capital accumulation. Sennett’s point is not dissimilar, in that the apparent visibility acts also as a mask, one that fools the viewer into thinking that the wall is permeable, whereas by its very nature – being hermetically sealed – it is anything but. This

Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 294. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 12. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 13. 70 is particularly obvious in a city like Singapore where hermetically sealed skyscrapers are important in keeping an interior cool through air-conditioning, which is, of course, at odds with the traditional way of building in the region. As for the so-called public space in front of these skyscrapers, Sennett dismisses them as ‘…an area to move through, not be in’, and he gives us the perfect example of La Defense in Paris (with Lever House and the Brunswick Centre)78. We can probably safely add Lujiazui to Sennett’s list. Sennett also quotes one planner as saying that this ground is supposed to be ‘the traffi c-fl ow-support-nexus for the vertical whole’79, which Sennett translates into more elegant English as ‘public space has become a derivative of movement’80. Interestingly, Brenda S.A. Yeoh also sees the contestation of public space in colonial Singapore as stemming from this sort of problematic (although in her case the articulation of the space is very different). The fi ve-foot-way (veranda) at the front of the Singapore shophouse was seen by the shopowner as being their own space to do with as they liked (i.e. sell goods), the colonial authorities saw it as a public thoroughfare (i.e. the ‘traffi c-fl ow-support-nexus’). (Of course the fi ve-foot-way also presents us with an interesting and peculiarly Asian problem, that of differentiating what is public and private, something we shall be returning to later.) So what is public space? Richard Sennett sees the word ‘public’ as having taken on its modern meaning in early-eighteenth-century Paris and London. The sense of ‘the public’ became enlarged, it encompassed ‘…not only a region of social life located apart from the realm of family and close friends, but also that this public realm of acquaintances and strangers included a wide diversity of people’81. Sen- nett sees these changes as being ‘…correlated with conditions of behaviour and terms of belief in the 18th Century [sic] cosmopolis. As the cities grew, and developed networks of sociability independent of direct royal control, places where strangers might regularly meet grew up’82. The focus of this public life was the capital city, with its parks, streets, and squares, all of which had been designed for the ‘special purpose of pedestrian strolling as a form of relaxation’83. This was the era when the coffee house became a social centre (something which Hajer and Reijndorp are also keen to point out as an excellent example of public domain84). Theatres and opera houses became open to a wider public thanks to the sale of tick- ets (rather than the practice of aristocratic patrons distributing places, as had formerly been the case). Sennett sees urban amenities as being diffused to a broader spectrum of society, with even the labouring classes beginning to adopt some of the habits of sociability, like promenading in the park, something that had formerly been the exclusive province of the elite85. This change in the urban habits of cities like London and Paris, had their own effect on colonial cities, particularly British and French ones, because of course the capital city was also the metropolitan centre of empire, and was seen as the model for the new urban forms that were being transplanted to far-fl ung corners of the globe. As for the differentiation between public and private, Richard Sennett sees the line being drawn between the claims of civility (epitomised by cosmopolitan, public behaviour) and the claims of nature (epitomised by family life)86. Sennett maintains that these different claims were in confl ict with one another, and ‘the complexity of their vision lay in that they refused to prefer one over the other, but held the two in a state of equilibrium’87. The ability to interact with strangers in an emotionally satisfying way and yet remain aloof was seen as the means by which the human animal was transformed into a social

Ibid., p. 14. Quoted in Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man, p. 14. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p.14 . Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 17. Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy, p. 84. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 17. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 18. 71 being. As Sennett says, ‘while man made himself in public, he realised his nature in the private realm’88. The tension between the claims of civility and the rights of nature epitomised the divide between public and private in cosmopolitan life. As we shall see in Part IV of this thesis, there was no such bifurcation of civil and family life in Chinese society, either in the eighteenth century or at any other time. True, upper-class ladies would not permit themselves to be seen in public, invariably their bound feet meant that they could not get about very much anyway – at least without some form of transport such as the palanquin, but this tended to reﬂ ect traditional Confucian mores, this research is intended, however, to explore the street life of Shanghai, a life invariably bereft of the sort of social niceties traditionally associated with China’s Confucian elite. What Richard Sennett saw emerging during the eighteenth and nineteenth century was an erosion of the will to control and shape public order, people sought to shield themselves from it, with the family as one of its principal refuges; it also gradually became the ‘moral yardstick with which to measure the public realm’ (a realm which was often found wanting)89. By the mid-nineteenth century – the era of the ﬂ âneur – Sennett saw a pattern of behaviour begin to emerge in Western cities where strangers lost the right to speak to one another; this right which was then replaced with another: the right to be left alone. This he says was unlike the London and Paris of a century before, and is unlike any other city in most of the non-Western world today. Sennett is at pains to point out that ‘…public life did not begin in the 18th century; rather, a modern version of it took form…’90, and it is this paradox of visibility and isolation which today contributes so much to what is wrong with modern public life, this very paradoxical interplay of the visible yet inaccessible world of the glass skyscraper, and the public space in front of it that is designed for anything but public interaction.

Ibid., pp. 18-19 (italics in original). Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 48 (italics in original). 72 6 THE ‘ALLEYWAY HOUSE’ AND XINTIANDI

It might be interesting to start this chapter with a startling example of life in twenty-ﬁ rst-century Shang- hai: the boarding kindergarten. Shanghai’s new middle class wants the best for its children, and with only one child per family – and with both parents often out at work all day – one way of ensuring proper care is to use professionals. In the traditional Chinese family, grandparents used to take care of the children, China’s one-child policy has altered this. We have already seen the problems of China’s gender imbalance, as well as the looming problem of the country’s ageing population, however a sophisticated city like Shanghai had thrown up its own unique spin on these problems. Parents want to see their children (or child) succeed, and one way of ensuring this is to send them to a boarding kindergarten. The rationale is twofold: one, it is often a shortcut to getting a child into one of the city’s better schools, and thence onto a better university, and a better life, etc., but the second reason is more startling, and poignant. In a country where all children are increasingly only children, the concern of parents is that they might be inclined to be over indulged, rearing what the Chinese call ‘little emperors’. Boarding kindergarten give a child the opportunity to interact with other children, even if only in play. Pamela Yatsko interviewed one mother who was happy to see her child as ‘…part of a team, surrounded by children who are all the same age. No one will spoil him. It is good for him to develop a healthy temperament and learn how to deal with teammates’1. Shanghai’s parents are demonstrating love and devotion by sending their children away at so tender an age. Of course there is a more practical consideration: if the child grows to be successful they will better able to help their parents in their old age. Unfortunately many of these children will end up having to care for not just two parents but also four grandparents as well. The pressure to succeed begins early in a city like Shanghai, some children simply cannot cope. Pamela Yatsko cites doctors in Shanghai as diagnosing increasing numbers of young patients with nervous tics, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and other ‘mild’ mental conditions2. One other factor com- pounding these children’s problems is the fact that their middle-class parents now tend to live in apartment complexes in outlying areas, often gated, so unless there happen to be other children of a similar age to play with they will be left to their own devices. One of the main advantages of life in the old alleyway houses was that they acted as a sort of social safety net, with plenty of elderly neighbours only too willing to look after a neighbour’s child. This was the sort of street life exempliﬁ ed by Jane Jacobs’ as a ‘healthy sidewalk’. Sadly, as a way of life it is now vanishing in Shanghai.

The ‘alleyway house’ At a time when China was reeling from the humiliation of the ‘unequal treaties’, Shanghai was producing a new and remarkable housing typology, the alleyway house. As a typology it is unique to the city – think for a moment of how seldom we can describe anything as really unique and the importance Figure 11. Alleyway house, Jing An Villa of exploring this typology becomes immediately ap- (source: Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism parent. This study is not interested in the alleyway for Modern China, p.50) house simply as an interesting example of Shanghai architecture, or even urbanism, it sees it as an event,

Quoted in Pamela Yatsko’s New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 112. Ibid., p. 112. 73 an everyday event that is all about the ordinary lives of the people of Shanghai, but one which is also extraordinary, because of what it managed to engender for the city, and its people: the rich, diverse, and encounter-fi lled public spaces of the colonial-era. First of all it is essential to explain the usage of the term ‘alleyway house’, which has been chosen in an effort to try and clarify the numerous and confusing terms currently in use; there are at least seven: longtang, nongtang, lilong, linong, lilongtang, linongtang, and shikumen. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang says that ‘the Shanghainese call lilong, their characteristic residential design, as longtang. “Long” means alley or lane and “tang” parlor or hall’3. This is confusing, and Huang does not help matters by stating that in her ‘following discussion, lilong or longtang is sometimes referred to as alley houses’4. Huang is, presumably, a native Chinese speaker, so to her the Chinese terms would perhaps be clearer than to a West- ern reader. Peter G. Rowe states that ‘the terms nong, nontang and longtang are mainly used in Shanghai, as different expressions of “lane” or “alley”, instead of xiang in southern China and hutong in the north’5. While this is somewhat clearer, at least to a West- erner, we fi nd ourselves presented with yet another set of terms. Added to this is the confusion with the word shikumen, which is also sometimes used. In fact a shikumen is a specifi c type of Figure 12. Shikumen, Wenmiao house, usually two-storey, and L-shaped in plan, the front of which Road, Old Chinese City (source: consists of a small courtyard fronted by a high wall into which is author photograph) set an elaborately carved gate, hence the name: shi-ku-men which transliterates into English as stone-arch-gate (or -door). The Chi- nese character men, which can mean either gate or door, in fact denotes any method of ingress, or even simply a threshold, much like the Greek chora6. The alleyway house was a nineteenth-century commercial development. Peter G. Rowe identifi es them as being ‘[b]roadly synchronous with the urban development of the foreign concessions…’7. They were a hybrid of the traditional Chinese courtyard house, the siheyuen, and the Western-style terrace. Most were speculative real-estate ventures and consisted of large blocks, typical of inner-city Shanghai (and other Chinese cities), which were divided into three or four smaller blocks and developed separately. According to Rowe, each venture was approximately 100 dwelling units. The main alleyway was usually four to fi ve metres wide and invariably ran perpendicularly to the access street; in larger compounds smaller alleyways crossed this main one at right angles. The alleyways led to individual residences, with some commercial activity located along the boundary streets, although some informal commercial activity also occurred at the internal crossings. The houses themselves were usually two to four storeys in height and varied in size and opulence, with basic units of anything from 60 to 105 square metres, typically with two rooms per fl oor8. As the typology developed, the basic house type grew larger and more elaborate, with the New Lilong, which resembled a European townhouse, and the Garden Lilong, which had space on either side, and which sat on a larger plot of land9. Access to the

Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 160, endnote 4 (chapter 5). Ibid., p. 160, endnote 4 (chapter 5). Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, pp. 209-210, endnote 53 (chapter four). The word men also features in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which takes its name from the Forbidden City’s Gate of Heavenly Peace (tian: heaven, an: peace, men: gate). Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 123. Ibid., pp. 123-124. Ibid., p. 124. 74 main alleyway was via a gate, usually left open during the day, but which invariably causes a moment’s hesitation before entering; and as many of these alleyways are dead-ends they are generally only used by shortcuts by people who know them well. The alleyways were home to a variety of communal activities, from work to play, and the chief factor in their fl exibility of use was the hierarchical system of graduated privacy they afforded. Mov- ing from the main street (which was fully public) into a private home required a movement through a sequence of spaces that consisted of the main alleyway (which was semi-public) to the smaller, crossing alleyways (which were semi-private), before fi nally entering the actual privacy of the home. This graduated sequence of privacy determined the sort of activity that took place on the alleyways, for example, a fruit-seller might set up a stall at the crossing of the main and side alleyways, but they would stand on the main one, never on the smaller, semi-private ones. An elderly Chi- nese man or woman might sit out during the evening to watch the activity on the street, but they would always sit in the smaller side alleyway, where they could watch the main alleyway and yet not be in the way. These smaller alleyways were also where people Figure 13. Alleyway House, Jing An Villa, main alleyway would play mah-jong, or sit and chat, hang (source: author photograph) out washing, repair motorcycles, look after children, cook and wash, or tend miniature gardens; while the main alleyway was where they could buy things and salute passing acquaintances. These activities can at fi rst glance seem random, even haphazard, yet they actually follow a rigid and logical system of hierarchy, one that is not always apparent to a Western eye, and one that is very reminiscent of Jane Jacobs’s organised complexity. One other function these alleyways provided, especially the semi-private ones, was the fact that they guarded the approach to the private houses. Doors could be left open because while no one would (probably) challenge a visitor if they were simply passing through the main alleyway, they could be carefully watched to ensure they did not go where they did not belong. This is a benign and effective method of allowing residents to control and manage their contact with visitors and strangers, and as will be pointed out in Part III, exemplifi es the positive role surveillance can play in a well-regulated society. This subtle system of graduated privacy is typically Chinese and follows the pattern set out by the siheyuen. Though forms may vary of this traditional courtyard house typology, there is a remarkable degree of similarity in China’s traditional dwellings, urban and rural (which we shall also see in Part IV). It is probably also important to mention Beijing’s hutong. Peter G. Rowe has pointed out that these are similar to the courtyard houses of Wuhan and Guangzhou (where they are called xiangzi10), typically hutong blocks in inner-city Beijing are also four to fi ve hectares, traditionally composed of siheyuan – in this case single-storey houses arranged around a central courtyard (wealthier households might have more than one courtyard). Access was via a gate from the narrow laneway, which typically ran east to west between wider streets and roadways. Here again we see the graduated privacy so typical of Chinese home life, from public street, to semi-public laneway, to semi-private courtyard (where family members would interact), to the private pavilions of the different members of the household. Another consequence of the distinctive way of life afforded by the alleyway house, which we

Ibid., p. 123. 75 have also seen highlighted by Rowe, is that ‘…distinctions between community and privacy are less sharply drawn than, say, in the US or Europe, often with a corresponding blurring of public, semi- public, semi-private and private spatial realms and a stronger social emphasis on communality, propriety and conformance’11. The Chinese still seem to live on their streets to a much greater extent than do Westerners, and the subtle progression from public through semi-public/semi-private to private that took place in the alleyways between the houses ideally suited their lifestyle. It acted as a wonderful generator of social life, where, according to Rowe, ‘…residents could control and monitor their contact with visitors and strangers’12. This blurring of public and private, indoor and outdoor, is unknown in the West – coming as we have seen from traditional practices of house building in Asia, as well as from the feng shui that underpins these practices, which we will also be examining in Part IV in exploring what constitutes the Chinese mentalité and what has allowed it to engender such a rich and nuanced use of public space. As mentioned earlier, the Shanghai alleyway house may have resembled some of its precursors in the Chinese tradition, but it was and remains a typology unique to the city. Shanghai was a place where East and West met, hence new and hybrid forms could be expected to develop (much like the creative hybridity that resulted in Singapore’s black-and-white bungalow). The Shanghai alleyway house has a more or less traditional Chinese footprint, but this has been extruded upwards thanks to the pressure on space Figure 14. Alleyway House, Jing An Villa, side and the high value of land in the city. Its architectural alleyway (source: author photograph) expression certainly owes more to the West than the East, with jauntily applied neoclassical detailing, however its mode of life was clearly Chinese. What is perhaps most interesting is the fact that it was not any specifi c type of Chinese life, i.e. northern or southern, but was actually a new mode of existence, one that was specifi cally Shanghainese. This was because it was the fi rst time ever that people from different parts of China had ever met in large numbers, (the civil service examinations that had been held in Beijing for centuries can be discounted because the numbers of those attending were relatively small, and the meetings highly ritualised, plus the people who met there all tended to be members of the same class, the scholar gentry). The alleyway house was not just refl ecting a melding of East and West, it also refl ected the exotic, and unprecedented, mixing of differing Chinese cultures. As an urban typology Shanghai’s alleyway houses are under threat. According to Zheng Shiling, there were 9,417 of them in Shanghai in 194913. As land values in central areas continue to soar, people are forced to move out as their blocks becomes earmarked for redevelopment; this is something that happened in the case of Xintiandi, which we will see in a moment. Through neglect and overcrowding the stock of alleyway houses had become severely dilapidated and in many cases many were simply beyond repair. Indeed, as Peter G. Rowe has emphatically pointed out, the squalid, run-down conditions of these houses were often seen as a reminder of a way of life that the Chinese would sooner forget. Many of Shanghai’s citizens prefer to live in the cleaner, more comfortable, and spacious apartments that have been built further out of the city centre. Rowe has also pointed out that recently ‘[t]he traditional prac-

Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 124. Figure recorded by author in conversation with Prof. Zheng Shiling in 2006. 76 tice of housing extended families, including the elderly, have also eroded substantially in East Asia’14; in China this is further exacerbated by the one-child policy. Rowe also reminds us that historic preservation in East-Asian cities is weak, and it is only recently that Shanghai has begun to see the tourist potential for these old blocks. Although their numbers have signiﬁ cantly declined, there are still some good examples of alleyway houses to be seen: Si Ming Chun (between Yanan and Julu Roads, west of Shanxi Road), Jing An Villa (between Nanjing and Weihai Roads, east of Shanxi Road) and Shang Xian Fang (between Julu and Changle Roads, east of Ruijin No 1 Road) are some of the liveliest.

Xintiandi Recently there has been a change in the perception of Shanghai’s colonial-era stock of buildings. 400 structures and 11 districts have been identiﬁ ed as ‘ﬁ ne historic buildings and zones’ in the city, including the lavish villas of the former French Concession. Ted C. Fishman notes one subtle but effective change in the city has been the decision to force owners of these older houses to show them off, these lavish residences of Shanghai’s colonial elite were invariably secluded behind high walls, but now railings afford beautiful views of them15. The usefulness of architectural heritage in bringing in tourist dollars has not been lost on the authorities, and one good example of this increasing awareness of the city’s colonial heritage is the redevelopment of the Xintiandi area. Wood and Zapata have turned two blocks of alleyway housing in the former French Concession (mostly of the shikumen type) into a popular and attractive destination by restoring, and in some cases rebuilding, the old houses. Their design opens up a public walkway through these blocks to create a classic mixed-use development which is proving popular with wealthier locals and expatriates. The name Xintiandi means ‘new world’, from the Chinese xin for ‘new’ and tiandi, which is made up of tian (heaven) and di (earth), together which mean world or universe. As a name it follows in the footsteps of places like the Great World entertainment complex, which is located nearby and Figure 15. Xintiandi (source: Shanghai: Ar- was a multi-story pleasure palace in the 1930s. chitecture and Urbanism for Modern China, Yawei Chen maintains that the fact that Xin- p.142) tiandi proved to be ‘a critical as well as commercial hit’ was a surprise16. With hindsight, of course, the adaptive reuse of a piece of what Chen calls ‘Shang- hai’s historical tissue’ symbolising the meeting of East and West should have come as no surprise. ‘Xin- tiandi [became] a popular entertainment hub in the city centre imbued [with] Shanghai’s historical and cultural legacies’17. The reason Xintiandi is proving so popular is that the two different groups of people who use it see it in a very different light: the foreigners think it is typically Chinese while the Chinese see it as foreign.

Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 40. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 81. Yawei Chen, Regeneration and Sustainable Development in China’s Transformation . Ibid. 77 As an image of Old Shanghai it is undeniably successful, but it is what Peter G. Rowe would call ‘allegedly local’18. Its glamour is both seductive and illusory, what Michelle Tsung-yi Huang would call ‘…a phantasmagoric Old Shanghai, in the manner of a Hollywood diva like Greta Garbo, [which] re-enchants the foreign investors and the local residents with a cosmopolitan past as not only a cultural heritage but also the foundation for the global city’19. ‘The impulse to preserve the past is’, according to Robert Hewison, ‘part of the impulse to preserve the self. Without knowing where we have been, it is diffi cult to know where we are going’20. But it is invariably our own reinterpretations of the past that ap- peals to us, something that is actually a brand-new construction, and like the rebuilt shikumen houses of Xintiandi, it is basically fake. Another interesting phenomenon is the selectiveness with which we choose what to venerate or glamorise in the past; in Shanghai’s case this is undoubtedly the 1920s and ’30s. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang also draws our attention to this fact when pointing out that ‘what is often evoked as unforgettable is Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s, the time when the city was a cosmopolitan metropolis, rather than the years between 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976’21. Ironic then, is it not, that Xintiandi is where the Chinese Communist Party held its fi rst meeting (in a girls’ school on Wangzhi (now Xingye) Road in July 1921)? But such is the way of selectivity, or, to give it another name, nostalgia. Nostalgia, very much like the sort of gentrifi cation we are seeing in Xintiandi, is a sort of purging of the past, a cleansing of any hint of dirt or grime or misery, so that the newly washed and polished past can be repackaged for the global elite, so they can sit and sip caffe lattes in peaceful contemplation of just how pretty a city Shanghai really is. One alarming part of this cultural cleansing is the rumour that security guards exclude shabbily dressed locals from entering Xintiandi. This redevelopment project may be public space, but only if you are a member of the sort of public it wants to see. This is one very clear instance of how spaces of global capitalist accumulation are impinging on the everyday lives of those who used to call the city home. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang sees this as ‘one of the effects of the capitalist space of globalization [which] is to make everyone believe that this space is his or her own, regardless of the fact that the city was re- structured based on the assumed needs of a small group of multinational service class people, the human agents of global capital’22. In fact, this has become something of a moot point, the exclusionary practices of security guards are no longer needed for the simple reason that people in the area no longer even try to go there as they simply cannot afford to (they have perfectly pleasant (and cheaper) teahouses nearby). Of course this is still an exclusion, nothing so crude as a security guard barring the way, but just as effective. Yawei Chen also sees this as a social justice issue, because the result of a project like Xintiandi can only benefi t a certain group of ‘up-level users rather than the original communities’23. But this is exactly the sort of unevenness that often results from gentrifi cation. Gentrifi cation may well preserve some of an area’s traditional houses, or at least facsimiles of them, but ironically it is the success of the Xin- tiandi redevelopment that has meant that neighbouring communities have been forced out of their homes due to an attendant rise in the value of the land these homes were built on. Arie Graafl and has described gentrifi cation as the process whereby ‘the uneducated make way for more qualifi ed residents in certain neighborhoods of the city’24, and that is what is happening here. Ironically, once these surrounding ar-

Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 188. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 120. Robert Hewison, quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 86. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 119. Ibid., p. 110. Yawei Chen, Regeneration and Sustainable Development in China’s Transformation. Arie Graafl and, The Socius of Architecture: Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, p. 212. 78 eas have been freed up for development many of the houses are then demolished so that other alleyway houses can be ‘restored’ using authentic bricks. This is a singularly appropriate example of Sharon Zukin’s plain ‘vernacular’ being appropriated by capital and transformed into a desirable ‘landscape’25. Ackbar Abbas makes the point that preservation is not memory, he states that ‘[p]reservation is selective and tends to exclude the dirt and pain’26. He mentions this while lamenting how much that passes for post-coloniality in Hong Kong actually only amounts to a form of kitsch. And he is right. Xintiandi, too, is a form of kitsch, a kitsch that may well be enjoyable to visit once in a while, even wal- low in occasionally, but we must always be aware of the dangers of nostalgia, which is something we shall be returning to in Part IV when looking at recent portrayals of Shanghai in fi lm and literature. For the moment it is enough to be aware that we should not allow ourselves to be blinkered by the pretty kitschiness of places like Xintiandi because such selectiveness of vision can blind us the to very real fact of the misery that is being caused to bring these places into being. According to Abbas it is this same sort of denial that has made Hong Kong’s ‘[Kowloon] Walled City, with its traffi c in drugs, prostitution, and human misery, look so glamorous’27. This infamous (and now demolished) Walled City will be examined in Part III in relation to Michel Foucault’s work (particularly his notion of the heterotopia), it is mentioned here merely to stress what Ackbar Abbas states when describing Kowloon Walled City (or the Shanghai alleyway house) as really being glamorous only ‘after the fact’28. One other small factor that should be noted when dealing with a topic such as gentrifi cation, is that according to Saskia Sassen ‘[h]igh-income gentrifi cation generates a demand for goods and services that are typically not mass-produced or sold through mass outlets’29, as such it creates specialised niches for employment. Hence it is very far from simply being a juggernaut of mono-cultural kitschiness; such high-income gentrifi cation can actually result in a very different and diverse pattern of work organisation, with gourmet food stores and specialty boutiques replacing self-service supermarkets and generic department stores. Similarly, Sassen sees high-income residences making copious use of hired maintenance staff, again affording opportunities for employment that the middle-class suburban home, ‘with its heavy input of family labor and of machinery’, simply does not lend itself to30. Brenda S.A. Yeoh thinks that the colonial city is all too often not treated on its own terms, and that ‘…the contemporary signifi cance of the spatial confi gurations of the city for the actual habitants who live out their habitual lives within its confi nes remains uninterrogated’31. She is, of course, looking at ‘interrogating the reaction and strategies of the colonized’ but with such a clear genealogical link between the colonial and the global city in Asia, as well as the similarity of the articulation of the sort of power relations that make their presence felt there, we can see where Yeoh quotes James Akbar in maintaining that ‘the built environment is reduced to being the product of a capitalist logic rather than an arena of confl ict between social groups which have differing vested interests in the city’32, as it applies to both colonial and global-city models. Sadly, what is going on today is redevelopment without this ‘interrogating’ of reactions and strategies, and this lack of interrogation is resulting in exactly the sort of kitsch that Ackbar Abbas is complaining about in Hong Kong, and exactly the sort of uncritical reconstruction of would-be ‘authentic’ alleyway houses in Xintiandi. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang also points out that when the former residents of an area are forced to make way for gentrifi cation, it is not a simple matter of ‘renting a moving truck and getting on the

Cited in Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 88. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 66. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 66. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents, pp. 122-124. Ibid., p. 122. Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 9. Quoted in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment, p. 216, footnote 2. 79 road’, she worries that ‘being uprooted from the community one has been familiar with cannot be easily compensated for: what jackhammers and bulldozers demolish within minutes often takes generations to build’33. Highlighting Wang Anyi’s work has been one way of glorifying the essence of life in the alleyway house; life in all its seemingly insignifi cant detail. For Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, however, ‘Shang- hai’s glamour fi nds its foundation in the alley houses and thus has everything to do with daily life’34. Perhaps glamour is not quite the right word here, this reality was not really glamorous at all, not in the usual sense of the word, but Huang’s quoting of Wang Anyi is sound enough: ‘[t]he emotional power of alley houses lies in the sights and sounds of everyday life... It is not the power of the heroic epic, but that of the accumulation of ordinary life. Flowing among those lines of houses is nothing grand, but as minute as grains of sand, which can build a tower when brought together’35. This is what these buildings are all about: the people who called them home. Cities are not buildings and the streets in-between them, cities are people, and their networks of interaction: social, family, and commercial. A city’s constituent parts are, in many ways, not unlike the organs of a body that cluster together in order to allow that organism to live. Yet such an agglomeration is much more than simply a collection of organs – the whole exceeds the sum of its parts – that is how we maintain our human identity, or, in the case of an urban environment, the identity of a village, or a town, or a city. Human sense perceptions enable individuals to live together and interact with one another, and the environment. We do this within certain parameters that have been laid down for us by the limits imposed by our human condition, but it is a condition that is in constantly undergoing evolution. Every individual’s personality is unique, we are always more than a mere collection of traits, or instincts; we have a personality, and that is what makes us who we are. Variously called spirit, soul, or geist, in China it is known as qi. Any individual’s responses to a given situation can be altered, of course in the sophisticated social structures that humans tend to form we are always being trained how to act and interact. This interaction tends to follow certain rules, often the result of generations of interaction between people and the places they inhabit. This interaction forms a symbiotic relationship which is built up between the people and their environment, and which undergoes evolution from generation to generation. Cities, too, are formed out of networks of interaction. They are formed in space, and time, by humans interacting with one another. The environment these people fi nd themselves born into, and the products they produce (in this case, cities) are as much removed from being a mere summing-up of interactions, as the parts that go into making of a human being exceed being a mere sum of its parts. What lifts them above this mere summing-up can perhaps best be described by analogy. Take the example of a bird in fl ight. One bird fl ying through the air is very much like a human travelling through a given environment. When two birds fl y together the pattern of interaction becomes more complex, with more birds it becomes staggeringly beautiful: geese fl ying in V-formation heading south for the winter; fl ocks of starlings and swallows swooping and diving. Their motion may seem to the casual observer to be completely random, chaotic even, and yet they never falter, never crash into one another. Their behaviour is exquisitely complex and yet it is premised on two very simple rules: one, stay close together, and two, do not hit one another. In a similar way human beings will gather together based on equally simple rules, initially club- bing together to hunt and gather, now we club together to live in cities, in each case, like the birds in fl ight, the underlying principles are startlingly basic. We are territorial creatures and city life, in fact nearly all human life, is premised on the right to property. In the West this was such a basic assumption that when Europeans began their voyages of discovery at the end of the Middle Ages they came in contact with hunter-gatherers (for example, the nomads of the North-American plains) they thought they were not making full and proper use of their lands and so took it from them, enclosing livestock,

Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 114. Ibid., p. 122. Wang Anyi, quoted in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 122. 80 farming intensively, in other words, colonising. It is to colonisation that we shall next turn our attention, particularly in comparing it to its later, and more devastating development, imperialism. Finally, to reiterate, cities are not about buildings and streets, cities are about people and their networks of interaction. The changes we are seeing to the way of life in Shanghai’s alleyway houses is less about changes in buildings’ uses due to the forces of global capitalism, but more about the changes being wrought in Chinese society by, among other things, the one-child policy. It is not the buildings, no matter how superfi cially pretty these may be, that are interesting, it is the way of life they engendered, and which they in turn were engendered by, thanks to the symbiotic system human beings have developed with their environment. As we have seen, this way of life can be likened to the pattern birds make when they fl ock, remarkably beautiful to see, but, like the birds, done for a specifi c and practical purpose – any beauty it may have is a sort of by-product of this process, a bonus. In Shanghai today, without the extended family and the tradition of social and community life it entailed, what future can there really be for the alleyway house? There hardly seems any point in retain- ing them just so that international chains of coffee shops can have interesting-looking outlets for the local and international global elite to sit and chat in their urban glamour zone. Xintiandi is preserving nothing more than a shell – an interesting and attractive one, but a shell nonetheless – the life that once made these places really interesting is gone, perhaps forever. Maybe Western-style apartment living will actually be more conducive to China’s forced nuclear families; alleyway houses that face out onto empty alleyways seem rather pointless, except perhaps to highlight the rapidity with which things are changing in the new China.

81 Conclusion to Part I

Shanghai’s intention to turn itself into the New York of Asia is not succeeding; with no hint of disparagement this research has suggested that the city might try to become the Chicago of Asia instead. Part I has examined Saskia Sassen’s notion of the ‘global city’, showing how it functions as part of a network, a network that requires face-to-face contact, and one whose links have tended to form themselves where older and more established networks are already in place. Technologies, even new ones such as fi bre-op- tics, tend to follow existing infrastructure lines, such as railways, waterways, and roads, which were set up during the colonial era. Manuel Castells’s ‘network society’ was also examined, where globalisation was seen as nothing new per se, and yet has managed to result in a qualitative social and economic change because it operates in real time. Putting Sassen’s and Castells’s terms together resulted in the ‘global city network’, the rubric under which Shanghai was examined. One interesting fact is that the new global elites in a city such as Shanghai tend to live very much like the former colonial elites; and their needs are pushing people who are unable to access this brave new world of instantaneous technology into what Manuel Castells calls the ‘Fourth World’ – and what this research calls the ‘analogue archipelago’. Globalisation is not necessarily Westernisation, and there is a strong neo-Confucian element underpinning China’s recent resurgence. This has important ramifi cations for how Chinese people perceive public space. The downside of China’s rapid economic development includes rural-to-urban migration, which has resulted in a vast ‘fl oating population’ of people who fi nd themselves stuck in this analogue archipelago, yet even for those who have done well under ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ there are burgeoning problems, such as an ageing population and an increasingly stark gender imbalance. Shanghai’s new public space is curiously dead, giving the lie to the term ‘public’ as understood in the West. Asians tend to blur distinctions between public and private, which can render their spaces hard to read for Westerners. The fault with some of Shanghai’s new public space is that it is ‘left over’ space, particularly in front of the new skyscrapers. This is space that has been designed for movement not for use, and is the sort of space that contrasts so starkly with that of the traditional alleyway house, where communal activity, graduated privacy, and organised complexity render it so rich and vibrant. Gentrifi cation projects such as Xintiandi have only managed to preserve a shell of what was once a vibrant way of life, the nostalgia of projects such as these can often blind people to the fact that in preparing the way for them developers can destroy in minutes what has taken generations to build.

82 PART II COLONIALISM

To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. Edgar Allen Poe, To Helen

This section looks at colonialism in an effort to understand what this term has meant for a city like Shanghai, it also explores what sort of a colony Shanghai actually was, if it was a colony at all (in the normal understanding of the word). It also differentiates colonialism from its later and more insidious incarnation, imperialism. Taking as its point of departure the two empires that have had the most inﬂ u- ence on the city, namely the British and the French, it examines how both of these countries’ ‘civilising missions’ have left their stamp on a good portion of the globe, particularly as they expanded rapidly between 1871 and 1914. These inﬂ uences can still be felt in Shanghai today by having set their seal on the city’s streets and architecture. This section also examines the colonial histories of Shanghai’s regional competitors in the new global economy, Hong Kong and Singapore, to see how their erstwhile colonial heritage – in this case the British – has enabled them to embrace global capitalism so successfully, and also, from a practical point of view, how Shanghai’s efforts in this direction can compare with them, as well as to see if there are any lessons the city can learn from these, its better-developed East-Asian neighbours.

83 1 COLONIAL SHANGHAI

China was never fully colonised by any imperial power, however, during the nineteenth century its status became known as semi-colonial. The coastal and riparian toeholds of the Treaty Ports were valuable sources of revenue for the imperial powers, even if they failed to act as the bridgeheads of empire they were so clearly intended to be. The only great power that made its presence felt in any major way was Japan, at least in terms of territorial expansion, however Japan’s infl uence was also the last in coming and the shortest lived, barely a half-century, compared with Britain’s century and a half, and Portugal’s four hundred years in Macau. Semi-colonial or not, this period is still seen by China as one of the lowest points in its long history, with the coastal colonies and Treaty Ports still perceived as a lasting national wound. In 1949 when Mao Zedong and the People’s Liberation Army fi nally defeated Chiang Kai-shek and the Na- tionalists, the end of what was in effect a civil war was seen, and has been portrayed ever since, as the end of an era of foreign aggression. The era of colonialism (semi- or otherwise) was over. China had fi nally been liberated. Shanghai was, at that time, a unique urban entity. As a city it had consisted of three separate jurisdic- Figure 16. Shanghai in 1930 (source: Shanghai 1842-1949: tions: the Anglo-American Interna- The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p.xiii) tional Settlement (which was in effect self-governing), the French Concession (a French colony governed from Hanoi), and a Chinese city (consisting of an ancient city and newer suburbs). We have seen the staggering pace of change in the city since 1990 when Pudong was designated a Special Economic Zone, now it might be useful to turn our attention to the history of the city, the better to understand what is happening there today. For the century and a half after Britain defeated China in the First Opium War (1839-42) the currents of change in China were more visible in Shanghai than anywhere else in the country. As we have seen the word ‘modern’ was fi rst transliterated into Chinese here. Shanghai became known as the Paris of the East and was without doubt the greatest city in Asia until 1949. To the traditional-minded Chinese the city was a den of iniquity bereft of any of the Confucian virtues, but to the Shanghainese, and the foreigners who came here, it was the epitome of modernity. Shanghai was a city of fi rsts in China: it had the fi rst electric tram, the fi rst stock market, the fi rst night club, the fi rst movie industry. It also had the country’s tallest buildings, its largest population, the freest press, and the best social life, not to mention the country’s most dangerous gangsters, sultriest prostitutes, and the worst drug and gambling problems. Shanghai became East Asia’s most important commercial centre due to a number of interconnected factors, not least of which was the simple matter of geographical location: halfway up the China coast and at the mouth of the Yangtze River, which made it the ideal conduit for China’s trade. Britain’s laissez-faire approach to business set the tone for the colony, which meant that the city’s taipans were free to run things as they saw fi t. This freedom to manoeuvre was backed by the rule of law (Western law), and, if necessary, force of arms to make sure that these laws were imposed. Shang- hai’s city centre has a Western footprint, and, unlike other postcolonial cities, this footprint is still very much in evidence today. Shanghai’s remarkably intact colonial core is due in part to the dearth of development between 1949 and 1990, and also the fact that when it fi nally woke from its slumbers it opted to develop the Pudong district, leaving the Puxi side alone.

84 Shanghai was home to three million people in 1930, 2.85 million of them were Chinese. This was, as we have seen in Part I, the fi rst time that Chinese from different provinces were able to mix together in any great numbers in China. These vast numbers were governed by a tiny colonial elite who saw themselves as very much separate from the native population, in fact they even differentiated between a ‘Shanghailander’ (a foreigner) and a ‘Shanghainese’ (a native Chinese). Few, if any, of Shanghai’s colonists ever bothered to learn any dialect of Chinese. Pidgin, an execrable mix of English words with Chinese grammar, was the most they could ever manage. Most people communicated with their Chinese staff via a head servant (known as the ‘number one boy’). Some phrases of pidgin-English have made it into daily use in the West, such as ‘can do’, ‘chop chop’, and ‘look-see’. These colonists had no interest whatsoever in socialising with the vast majority of the city’s Chi- nese population, in fact some maps of the city even as late as the twentieth century invariably left the old Chinese City blank, as if assuming that no right-thinking person would even want to go there. The colonial elite preferred to stay within the Foreign Concessions, where they built for themselves impressive homes, all in Western styles, and often elaborate. There was everything from the French chateau to the Spanish hacienda, as well as numerous half-timbered Tudor mansions. The colonists also built the icons for which Shanghai was to become so famous: the neoclassical and Art Deco banks and offi ce buildings that line the Bund, Nanjing and Huaihai Roads (Nanking Road and Avenue Joffre as they were known at the time). Then came 1949 and Shanghai slumbered, or so it seemed. Actually, apart from a depressed period in the 1980s, Shanghai continued to grow economically, as we have seen in Part I, the city was regarded as a state-planning paragon by the Chinese Communist Party, the reason its infrastructure and building stock failed to develop during this period is because the city’s earnings were being used by the central government to fund development elsewhere in the country. As Pamela Yatsko has perceptively pointed out, ‘[i]f Guangzhou or Beijing were to announce their intention to become China’s and the region’s fi nancial capital, their lack of such an illustrious background would prevent them from being taken as seriously’1. Shanghai made it clear in the 1990s that it was trying to become the New York of Asia, as has been seen in Part I this is not likely to happen any time soon (if at all), and, as was also pointed out in Part I, perhaps Chicago might a better aspiration. Chicago’s business and cultural life, while not intending to disparage that city’s reputation in these areas, can hardly compare to New York’s, but as the birthplace of new and innovative architectural typologies such as the skyscraper (and the works of Frank Lloyd Wright) might it not make a more appropriate comparison to Shanghai’s own innovations, with its tall buildings and the alleyway house? Also, both cities have a something of a similarly mythologised past, particularly the gangster- ridden 1920s: Al Capone and the St Valentine’s Day massacre seem to resonate with Shanghai’s Green Gang and the larger-than life character of its leader, Big-eared Wu. Both of these cites found themselves prey to gangsters because of substances that had been enjoyed by large numbers of people until they suddenly became prohibited: the Volstead Act forbade alcohol consumption in the United States during the 1920s, turning millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals simply because they liked the odd glass of wine, or that fashionable new concoction, the cocktail; while opium, admittedly a more pernicious habit (though probably less socially damaging, as opium-eaters tend not to rampage in the way that drunken people often do) was fi nally made illegal in China in 1917.

Pre-colonial Shanghai The name Shanghai is usually transliterated into English as ‘above the sea’, which is based on the simplest reading of the character shang as meaning ‘above’ (as opposed to ‘below’: xia). Shang can also mean to start or a beginning, as in to begin a lesson or a class, so Shanghai could also be seen as the place where the sea starts, or where the landmass of China ends – the character hai is less open to in-

Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 57. 85 terpretation, simply meaning a large body of water such as the sea or the ocean; the Pacifi c is known as dahai, or ‘great ocean’. This makes even more sense when seen against the Chinese name for China, which is Zhongguo, which means ‘middle country’, so the sea can be seen as the place where the country ends. Chinese names do tend to be very straightforwardly descriptive, and frequently make use of geographical features such as mountains, rivers, lakes, etc, as well as the cardinal points (of which there are fi ve in Chinese reckoning: north, south, east, west, and centre). Places like Shandong and Shanxi, literally mean ‘east’ and ‘west of the mountains’ respectively, and we have already seen the Chinese terms for east and west being used in Shanghai, where the old colonial core, to the west of the Hunagpo River is called ‘Puxi’, and the new area to its east, ‘Pudong’. Beijing and Nanjing have similarly opposing geographical indications, meaning ‘northern’ and ‘southern capital’ respectively (while Tokyo is known as Dongjing, or ‘eastern capital’). So while the usual transliteration of Shanghai as ‘above the sea’ is a perfectly clear name, and is not wrong, it might be preferable to think of it as the place where the ocean begins; which captures more the nuance of the place name Figure 17. Pre-colonial Shanghai (source: Building as it would have been used by the Chinese Shanghai: The Story of China’s Gateway, p.20) who came here down the Yangtze River. (This point will be gone into in greater detail in Part IV when investigating the way in which the Chinese use names and language, mention of it has been made here simply to raise awareness of it as an issue, and to adumbrate the later analysis with a timely and practical example.) Shanghai as a town had existed as early as the tenth century CE, before which time it was a fi shing village called Hu Tu, (after the hu, or bamboo stakes, that fi shermen sank into the mud to anchor their nets)2. It seems to have become known as Shanghai around the time of the Song Dynasty (960- 1120 CE), by which time the fi shing village had grown into a busy market town. By the sixteenth century it was a walled city of regional importance, and a major port for China’s busy coastal junk trade3. The Japanese were the fi rst foreign nation to trade with China, and it was the activity of their pirates that forced the Shanghainese to build their city walls. Approximately fi ve-and-a-half kilometres in length (three-and-a-half miles) the circular walls4 were still standing as late as 1912. What is most interesting about these walls is that they actually describe a circle, or an oval, which is unusual as most important Chinese cities are square in plan. Ana Moya Pellitero cites The Rituals of Zhou as determining the principles of imperial city planning as early as the fi rst millennium BCE, where cities were constructed in the shape of a square, with three gates in each wall and three arteries connected these gates orthogonally. The city was formed of a series of concentric walled compounds following a clear social hierarchy, with the Imperial City at the centre, surrounded by an administrative or Inner City, which was in turn surrounded by an Outer City; this she sees as mirroring the division of the universe into three levels which symbolised what she calls ‘the moralist division of Chinese society into the emperor, scholar-administrators, and commoners’5. The Inner City was occupied by the privileged offi cials and gen-

Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 12. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 12-13. Ana Moya Pellitero, The Image of the Urban Landscape: The re-discovery of the city through different spaces of perception, p. 243. 86 try, whose homes would have followed the traditional courtyard-house pattern we have seen mentioned earlier, while the commercial functions were placed in the Outer City, as far from the centre of power as possible, where people lived in simpler shophouse-type structures. Merchants were tolerated as a necessary evil in Confucian society and tended to be treated as second-class citizens according to Pellitero. It could even be suggested that merchants were actually treated as fourth-class citizens, because traditional Confucianism society was divided into four classes: scholars, peasants, craftsmen, and merchants (in de- scending order of importance). Shanghai was a market town that had expanded from a fi shing settlement, as such it would have had no symbolic need to be constructed along the lines highlighted by Pellitero as bein laid down in The Rituals of Zhou. Pellitero also makes it abundantly clear that Chinese cities were administrative centres not commercial ones; commerce was merely tolerated as a necessary evil, certainly it was very far from being the main aim of urban centres. This would certainly help to explain the circular form of Shang- hai’s city walls, as opposed to the more traditional square-shape we would normally associate with a Chinese settlement6. In fact it was Shanghai’s success as a commercial centre that fi rst drew it to the attention of the Western powers, particularly Britain, who wanted a share in the lucrative trade in tea, porcelain, silk, and cotton. Shanghai’s entrepot function later gained it the nickname ‘Gateway to the Celestial Empire’, but up to the 1840s China’s control of this trade was causing a dangerous imbalance between it and the Western powers, particularly Britain (which had taken to drinking tea more than most), in fact this trade imbalance was so bad that it was in danger of bankrupting the country so Britain decided to import something more profi table, notoriously deciding on Bengali opium. When the Governor of Canton (Canton was Britain’s toehold in China up to 1842) ordered stocks of the drug to be destroyed the Brit- ish retaliated in the action that became known to history as the First Opium War (1839-42). This resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Chinese, and the Treaty of Nanking (now Nanjing), which ended the war, opened up fi ve cities to international trade, thenceforth known as ‘treaty ports’, this treaty also allowed Britain to establish colonies at Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Colonial Shanghai Under the terms of the Treaty of Nanking, Shanghai came into being as a Western entity on 29 August 1842. Earlier that year, on 11 June, a fl otilla of British gunboats, led by the Nemesis, sailed into the Yangtze estuary and opened fi re on the fortifi cations that guarded Shanghai, the city fell with barely any resistance; three weeks later the invaders were at Nanking (Nanjing) and Peking (Beijing) found itself forced to surrender. The Treaty opened up Shanghai, and four other ports, to British trade and residence. Britain also enjoyed ‘most favoured nation’ status, which entitled it to a number of privileges, Figure 18. Shanghai’s colonial growth (source: author the main one being ‘extra-territoriality’, drawing) usually called ‘extrality’ for short, which meant that British citizens were exempt from Chinese law (being in theory subject to their own at home). From the moment it became a treaty port, Shanghai supplanted Canton (Guang- zhou) as China’s leading entrepot. Shanghai’s potential as the gateway to China had been recognised by British merchants as early as 1832 when the British East India Company had dispatched a warship from

I am grateful to Ana Moya Pellitero for fi rst drawing this fact to my attention. 87 Canton to reconnoitre. The city also enjoyed a more temperate climate than Canton (lying on the same latitude as New Orleans and Cairo), so it only really became uncomfortably hot in the summer. It also had four seasons, sometimes with snow in winter. One other advantage was that the Shanghainese were considered amiable and peace-loving, in contrast to the vicious and hostile Cantonese. The fi rst British merchants arrived in 1843. They were given 56 hectares (140 acres) on the foreshore north of the Chinese city which became known as the British Settle- ment7, the population of which did not exceed 100 until 18488. The Americans established an unoffi cial settlement north of the British at the same time, on the other side of the Suzhou River (or Soochow Creek as it was then known). Running along the Figure 19. Shanghai’s colonial growth superimposed on current Huangpo River’s western bank, the city (source: Taeke de Jong) British settlement’s foreshore was little more than a muddy towpath where coolies had pulled the city’s grain junks. This towpath or, to give it the traditional British colonial term for a waterfront, bund (from the Hindi), would later become one of the world’s most famous waterfronts, with the highest skyline east of Suez9. At fi rst there was a sort of no-man’s-land between the British settlement and the old Chinese city, but then the French arrived in 1849 and squeezed themselves into this leftover space. From the very beginning Shanghai experienced remarkable growth, with every part of the city increasing steadily in size until World War II. The city’s morphological growth refl ected the geopolitical situation of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact the city grew in eight incremental stages, or at least the colonial parts of it did, with a ninth stage being disallowed by the Chinese authorities (the 1909 plan to extend the International Settlement’s northern boundary to follow the line of latitude: 31 degrees north). The Second Opium War (1856-60), also known as the Arrow War, was a joint French and British expedition, and it ended in another humiliating defeat for China. The British and French added insult to injury by burning down the Chinese Emperor’s Summer Palace outside Peking. The Treaty of Tientsin, which ended this war, was ratifi ed at the end of 1860 and opened the Yangtze River to Western trade, it also forced the Chinese government to allow tariffs on the importation of opium – effectively legalising the drug trade – stocks of the drug were now allowed to be stored on a pair of old sailing hulks moored at Shanghai’s Bund. Opium dens, known as ‘divans’ proliferated, particularly in Shanghai, and a habit which had long been regarded as a vice of the upper classes rapidly spread to every level of society, with devastating social consequences. Shanghai, the Paris of the East, had earned itself another nickname: the ‘Whore of Asia’. Opium was far from the city’s only source of wealth, however, the American Civil War (1861- 65) had cut off Europe’s supply of cotton, with a resulting boom for China. And with the Yangtze River

Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 10 (although in another of her books, Shanghai: Gateway to the Celestial Empire, 1860-1949, Dong states that the British were given 43 acres (on p. 9); it is generally accepted that the fi gure of 140 acres is the correct one). Ibid., p. 11. For an example of another British-colonial use of the term ‘bund’, see Agatha Christie’s They Came to Baghdad: ‘His eyes, unfocused in a wide stare, looked out blearily over the river bund’, p. 43. 88 fi nally opened to international trade (which the British, despite the methods they used to impose it, quite without irony insisted on calling ‘free trade’), Shanghai’s customs revenues soared, tripling in the fi rst year alone10. Property speculation also made many people rich, the cost of an acre went from about 50 pounds in 1850 to 20,000 by 186211. The Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), which was causing major havoc in China in the late 1850s, meant that Shanghai saw an infl ux of people fl eeing the terror; as many as 300,000 newcomers fl ooded in, making it, according to Stella Dong, ‘the fastest growing city in the world, fast than any of the other boomtowns such as San Francisco, Chicago, or Melbourne’12. By the early 1860s Shanghai’s port was the world’s sixth-largest13. With rapid growth fuelling the frenzied property speculation, not to mention the existence of four different enclaves (Chinese, British, American, and French), there was no overall plan for the city. Development was haphazard to say the least. Then in 1863 the Shanghai Municipal Council was set up to administer the British and American Settlements, which amalgamated to become the International Settlement. The French Concession briefl y joined them but then opted out, preferring to remain under French colonial administration from Hanoi14. Shanghai was thus located at the nexus of different imperial ambitions: the British, American, and French had consolidated their positions, and backed their claims by force of arms when necessary. Elsewhere in China, the Russians and Germans were doing the same. Shanghai could well be described as an ‘interface of empire’ during this period, with the great powers vying with each other in much the same way as they did in the rest of the world, from the Amer- icas, to Africa, and the rest of Asia. By the 1890s, China was being seen as the next Africa (which had been divided up by the Western powers in their ‘scramble’ the previous decade). The pickings were going to be rich when China’s seemingly inevitable collapse fi nally came about. China, however, was not Africa, it was a unifi ed and ancient country, one which was fi nding it hard to adjust to the new world, a world where Western powers were in the ascendant. But it had a re- silience that proved surprising to its would-be conquerors. However, it was weak, its imperial system was about to collapse (which it fi nally did in 1911), and while it tottered towards this fi nal crisis it found itself forced to make ever more humiliating concessions to powers that were, for a time, stronger than they. This was the underpinning of Shanghai’s colonialism. From 1842 Shanghai was forced to allow the British, American, and French to establish what were known as ‘concessions’. Again, we need to look at the meaning of this word. People tend to think of the French Concession simply as a name given to a pretty part of the city, yet the verb ‘to concede’ means to grant a right or a privilege, and in turn is related to the verb ‘to cede’, which means to give up one’s right to, or possession of, something. (It can also mean to admit something to be true – but that is not particularly relevant here.) Generally it denotes defeat. The Chinese may have granted the British, Americans, and French their Concessions, but they did so reluctantly, but they were not the only ones forced to do so. Another example would be the ‘capitulations’ that were forced upon the Ottoman Em- pire at more or less the same time. As a word, capitulation may seem to carry even more weight than a concession, but basically they both amounted to the same thing: humiliation at the hands of a stronger foreign power. Shanghai, as have seen, consisted of three different jurisdictions: Chinese, French, and the self- governing International Settlement. Despite the potential nightmare of these different jurisdictions, the city functioned remarkably cohesively. There was the odd colourful incident (as illustrated by Hergé in the Tintin adventure The Blue Lotus, where criminals could evade the police by crossing from one en-

Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 23. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 21 (although earlier in her book (p.18) Dong states that the French Concession was governed by a consul; it very probably was, but he would most likely have been answerable to the colonial authorities in Ha- noi). 89 clave to another), but actually the city had rather a conventional footprint, with commercial, industrial, and residential areas all following patterns that resembled any other city (i.e. any other Western city). Despite these three different jurisdictions, there were, in effect, no borders in Shanghai – this was not Cold War Berlin – the old Chinese city did have some no-go areas, indeed some Western residents probably regarded the whole place as one big no-go area, but generally the city seems to have operated as a seamless whole. Streets at right angles to the Bund were named after Chinese cities, for example, Soochow (Su- zhou), Peking (Beijing), Nanking (Nanjing), and Canton (Guangzhou); while those parallel to it were named after provinces: Szechwan (Sichuan), Honan (Hunan), Shantung (Shangdong), etc. Nanjing Road, today the city’s partially pedestrianised main shopping street, meanders through the heart of what used to be the southern half of the International Settlement, whereas Huaihai Road (the former Avenue Joffre) runs straight as a dye down the centre of the French Concession. Nanjing Road’s odd shape could have resulted from Britain’s more laissez-faire attitude to town planning, but probably owes more to the fact that it was originally two roads, running through quite different parts of the city: the former Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road) was the main thoroughfare of the commercial heart of the colony; while Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing West Road) was an arterial route through an upmarket residential district. The French, having arrived later, and having to make do with what might have been considered less desirable land, with typical panache went on to make more of it: the French Concession is today the smartest part of town, with the most beautiful villas and apartment complexes, as well as the most exclusive shops and restaurants (this is also where the Xintiandi development is located). West of the Concessions lay an area known as the Badlands. This was actually a misnomer because this district was distinctly upmarket, with large villas peeping through the secluded shrubbery of tree-lined streets like Xinhau Road (formerly Amherst Avenue) which is a continuation of fashionable Huaihai Road and runs west into the Hongqiao and Gubei areas, districts popular today with expatriates, both Asian and Western. The Badlands, as befi tted its status as a notional extension of the foreign concessions, was serviced by the same utilities, but the increasingly diffi cult political situation in the 1930s, meant that the area’s foreign residents occasionally had to fl ee their homes. As we have already seen, the two Shanghais, Western and Chinese, did not always see eye to eye, there was even the differentiation between Shanghainese and Shanghailanders, but while the foreign concessions’ growth was impressive, it was as nothing compared to the Chinese city that surrounded them. The city’s population doubled between 1895 and 1910, and then nearly tripled by 193015. The Chinese, under the modernising infl uence of the Nationalists, planned a new Civic Centre to the north of the city in 1931, it was intended to draw attention away from the foreign concessions, and facilitate business, as it was closer to the mouth of the Huangpo. Designed along Beaux Arts principles by Ameri- can-educated Chinese architect Dong Dayou, it incorporated Chinese and Art Deco elements attractively in the few (now sadly neglected) buildings that were built. It failed as a plan, principally probably due to the Japanese invasions of 1932 and 1937, but could perhaps be seen as a precursor to the 1990’s Pu- dong, another ambitious new plan drawing attention away from the former colonial enclaves, this time eastwards instead of north. Which brings us back to China as the nexus of imperial ambitions. By the end of the nineteenth century there was a new power to be reckoned with in China, and it was not one that came from the West: it was Japan.

Economic and social life The decision in 1907 to phase out opium over a period of ten years had hardly any effect on Shanghai’s continued growth, which remained prodigious. By the 1930s, the port was the ﬁ fth-largest in the world, handling 51% of China’s imports and 30% of her exports16. That shock to the capitalist system, the

Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 209. 90 Great Depression, was barely felt here; land prices tripled in fi ve years, making rents along the Bund more expensive than the Champs Elysees or Fifth Avenue. This was the era when the rich and famous fl ocked to the city. We have already seen writers such as Aldous Huxley, W. Somerset Maugham, and Noel Coward, all of whom have written about their experiences of the city, directly or indirectly. Names that have not perhaps remained in the fi rst rank of celebrity over the succeeding decades include Emily Hahn (who visited with her per gibbon, Mr Mills), Edda Ciano (Mussolini’s daughter, whose husband, Count Ciano, was Italy’s consul-general). Others, whose fame has proved somewhat more enduring, included Wallis Warfi eld Simpson (later the Duchess of Windsor) and Ho Chi Minh, who spent a year in Shanghai (staying at the YMCA on Hankow Road) after having spent the previous twelve months making pastries at Escoffi er’s establishment in Paris (where he had been friends with Zhou En-lai)17. This is also of course the era most often mythologised in increasingly rose-tinted portrayals of the city’s past. With lavish re-creations by Western as well as Eastern auteurs, including Merchant Ivo- ry’s The White Countess, Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. The nostalgia that pervades these fi lms is something that shall be looked at in great detail in Part IV when examining the novel When We Were Orphans, which is by Kazuo Ishiguro (the screenwriter of the fi lm The White Countess), and which explores themes of loss and longing. One theme that is touched on by the fi lm The White Countess is the loss of prestige Westerners suffered after the infl ux of stateless White Russians fl eeing the Civil War that follwed the Bolshevik Revolution. These newcomers did not enjoy the benefi ts of extra-territoriality (as they refused Soviet citizenship), they were therefore subject to Chinese law. Their poverty and destitution did much to undermine what Stella Dong calls ‘the prestige of the white man in China’18. They took work where they could fi nd it, men as bodyguards or nightclub bouncers, women (as in the case of the eponymous ‘white countess’) as taxi dancers – often a euphemism for a prostitute. Many of them ended up as drunks and could be seen littering the streets of the poorer parts of the city. This was actually the second blow infl icted by Russia on ‘the prestige of the white man in Chi- na’, the fi rst was their defeat in their war with Japan in 1905, which we will see later in this section. The fact that these Russians could not be sent home, as there was no ‘home’ for them to go to, was a constant source of vexation to the colonial powers. Shanghai’s foreign communities had long operated a fund to repatriate undesirables – destitute whites who were, according to Stella Dong, sent back home lest they lessen their race’s prestige19. The reason the White Russians were able to make it to Shanghai in the fi rst place was because the city was the only place in the world where there were no restrictions on immigrants. No visas or documents of any kind were required to enter the city. From 1938 onwards there was also an infl ux of some 20,000 European Jews20, (another of the sub-themes of The White Countess), although it has to be said that Shanghai has always had a large and important Jewish community (often Sephardic, particularly from what is modern-day Iraq). Niall Ferguson places the fi gure at closer to 18,000, but these ‘stateless’ Jewish refugees, who were confi ned to the Hongkew area in February 1943, all managed to survive the war, despite German pressure on Japan for their extermination21. Such a relaxed offi cial attitude towards visitors may have been fortunate for those fl eeing Nazi oppression in Europe, but it also made the city a haven for outlaws and adventurers. Shanghai at this time had a reputation for criminality matched only by Chicago’s. One odd mention of Pudong during this period is the fact that when numbers of beggars in Shanghai’s foreign concessions got out of hand, police would round them up and ferry them across to Pudong, where they were stuck until they could earn (or beg, or steal) enough money for the passage back to the Puxi side of the river22.

Ibid., p. 236. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 258. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 275. Lynn Pan, Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise, p. 7. 91 In the 1930s, Shanghai’s International Settlement alone was home to the citizens of more than sixty different countries23. It may have been a cosmopolitan city – what Kazuo Ishiguro calls ‘multi- culturalism avant la lettre’24 – but it was the British, by dominating the Municipal Council, who set the tone. By 1930, however, the Japanese formed the largest group of foreigners in the city, and had begun to agitate for more of a say in the Settlement’s running25. The Bund had, by this time, taken on the appearance it has today, a broad and busy esplanade with muscular neoclassical and Art Deco banks and offi ce buildings overlooking its busy quays. Each building seemed to vie with its neighbours for grandeur and prestige, what Jennifer Cody Epstein likens to the ‘bickering members of some enormous concrete clan’26. The architecture was known as ‘compradoric’, a play on the word for the robust Greek order and the Portuguese ‘comprador’, a go-between for commercial transactions. The word ‘comprador’ actually means ‘buyer’ and was used to describe Chinese or Eurasian businessman who facilitated business between the Chinese and foreign merchants. As we have seen, most of the rest of the interaction that took place between the races in Shang- hai used that frightful mix of Chinese and English known as pidgin. Gore Vidal relates having dined with the Duchess of Windsor in New York who, even though they were in a French restaurant, insisted on saying that, ‘I did learn one sentence of Chinese after all those years out there’, then she clapped her hands and called out to the startled waiter: ‘Champagne chop chop!’ When the waiter did not react the Duchess confi ded in Vidal, ‘They do that deliberately, you know. Pretend they don’t understand perfect Chinese’27. Admittedly Vidal has pointed out that the waiter was probably Puerto Rican and blames the Duchess’s confusion as having resulted from one plastic surgery procedure too many (hence her brain may not have been what it once was); as an anecdote it illustrates perfectly the sort of language, and tone, that would have been used by a ‘white Missy’ to a Chinese subaltern in colonial Shanghai. Pidgin, which was meant to be a means of communication between the races only served to keep them apart. As it could never be used for any discourse more sophisticated than giving orders, and that imperfectly, it only reinforced Westerners’ views of Chinese as stupid and shiftless people. Furthermore, as Stella Dong tells us, ‘[t]aking a serious interest in anything Chinese was to risk the label of “going native”’28. Young British men working at the hongs (companies), who were known as ‘griffi ns’ (probably a corruption of the Dutch word for a clerk: griffi er) had contracts forbidding them to marry until they had been at least fi ve years in China. They were then expected to fi nd a suitable wife while on ‘home leave’ as the diffi culties of fi nding a suitable partner in a city where foreign men outnumbered foreign women ten to one were legion. If the foreigners had been able to communicate with the Chinese it is questionable what level of sophistication would have been attained, Shanghai did not attract Western intellectuals, the few well- known writers who did visit tended to make their trips short, leaving once they had gathered enough material for the play or short story or reportage they were working on. Stella Dong describes the city as ‘convivial rather than cultural’, reporting that the Shanghai Club spent $72 on its library in the year 1870 (compared to $6,724 for wine and spirits)29. Once opium was declared illegal in 1917, the underworld seized the opportunity for spectacular new profi ts. The Green Gang became the city’s most important triad and forged alliances with Shang- hai’s foreign and Chinese authorities, but also with the warlords who controlled the newest source of the deadly crop: the rich poppy fi elds of south-western China. It is this gangster life of the city’s underworld that Zhang Yimou captures so deftly in his fi lm Shanghai Triad. It is this state of affairs that prompted the comparison between the Shanghai of this era and Chicago, however, Shanghai’s scope for illegal ac-

Stella Dong, Shanghai: Gateway to the Celestial Empire, 1860-1949, p. 14. Quoted in a BBC interview about The White Countess (2006). Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 211. Jennifer Cody Epstein, The Painter of Shanghai, p. 348. Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir, p. 207. Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 34. Stella Dong, Shanghai: Gateway to the Celestial Empire, 1860-1949, p. 41. 92 tivities was much wider than its American counterpart thanks in part to the city’s unique system of three jurisdictions: the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese-administered city; this ‘complex political ulcer’ as Stella Dong refers to it, was ‘a paradise for adventurers and rascals’30. We have already seen how the lack of a central law enforcement agency meant that a thief could escape the police simply by crossing from one enclave to another, often simply a matter of crossing the street, so that the police in the district where the crime had been committed could not follow him; in addition to this, most Westerners enjoyed the added protection of extra-territoriality. As Vicki Baum states in her novel Shanghai ’37, ‘No one asks why anyone comes to Shanghai; one assumes they have something to hide’31. Lynn Pan makes the point that the colonial authorities were happy enough to pretend not to notice some of the more blatant infractions, provided crime stayed within tolerable limits – because they often materially rewarded for turning a blind eye 32. However, it was not crime or lawlessness that was the biggest threat to Shanghai in the 1930s, but the colonial ambitions of near neighbour Japan. We have already seen how Japan had dealt a blow to the ‘white man’s prestige’ by defeating Russia in 1905, but actually the Japanese had begun to make their imperial ambitions felt a decade earlier, in the war with China of 1894-95, a war which also resulted in a devastating defeat for the larger power.

The end of an era Only about 150,000 of the 3 million people who called Shanghai home in 1930 were actually foreigners, and of that group the Japanese, at 90,000, formed by far the largest minority. They also controlled a number of the city’s key industries, including cotton, textile, and paper mills, chemical works and tanneries, as well as tobacco and match factories, most of which were located along the Huangpo and Suzhou Rivers. The Japanese also began to demand control of the International Settlement’s Municipal Council (on which they had been granted seats after their defeat of China in 1895 made them a treaty power). It was not only in Shanghai, however, that the Japanese were making their presence felt. On 18 September 1931 a small bomb exploded on the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway in Mukden (the capital of Manchuria). This is thought to have been planted by the Japanese themselves as a pretext for occupying the province, which they did by December. They renamed it Manchukuo and placed Chi- na’s last emperor, Puyi, on its throne as a puppet ruler33. Then on 18 January 1932, a group of Japanese monks was attacked in the Chapei district of Shanghai, two of whom were killed. Three days later the Japanese issued an ultimatum for the arrest of the perpetrators, and an end to the anti-Japanese boycott that was going on at the time (which was in protest against Japan’s annexation of Manchuria). Despite Shanghai Mayor Wu Te-chen’s acceptance of their demands, on 28 January the Japanese went ahead and invaded Chapei. The fi ve-week battle that followed was another ‘fi rst’ for Shanghai – the world’s fi rst experience of urban warfare. Chapei, Shanghai’s industrial heartland, was almost completely fl attened. The action did not result in the success the Japanese had hoped for, mainly thanks to the proximity of Asia’s largest press core, who were busy transmitting the horrifying images to the rest of the world. On 5 May 1932 Japan found itself obliged to remove all but garrison troops from Shanghai34. Then on 7 July 1937 the Japanese staged another ‘incident’, one of their soldiers had gone missing, they used this as a pretext to bring troops into China. World War II, whether the Western world knew it or not, had begun. (The soldier in question is said to have been found two days later completely unharmed, he had been spending his time in a Beijing brothel.) On 12 August the Japanese advance fl eet

Ibid., p. 12. From Vicki Baum’s Shanghai ’37, quoted in Stella Dong’s Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 127. Lynn Pan, Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise, p. 24. Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, pp. 212-213. Ibid., p. 216. 93 arrived in Shanghai and the following day sporadic fi ring started. On the 14th, a stream of refugees ten miles long was making its way across the Garden Bridge (the point where the Suzhou River debouches into the Huangpo), Chinese bombers, trying to bomb the Japanese warship Idzumo, panicked when they saw the ship’s guns trained on them and accidentally dropped their payload onto the Bund, right in front of the Cathay Hotel, as well as through the roof of the Peace Hotel next door. Unfortunately, because of the unusually large number of refugees there at the time, the number of casualties was appalling: 729 killed and 861 wounded35. More bombs were dropped shortly afterwards at the intersection of Avenue Edouard VII (Yunnan Road) and Thibet (Tibet) Road, where the Great World amusement centre was distributing free rice and tea, another 1,011 were killed and 570 in- jured36; this was the worst civilian carnage anywhere in the world up to that time. Two months of fi ghting followed, again mostly in Chapei. By the time of the Rape of Nanking (12 December 1937, with as many as 300,000 civilians raped and murdered), Shanghai’s port had been destroyed, along with most of its trade and industry37. The Japanese celebrated a Victory Parade along Nanking Road on 3 December, by which time the foreign concessions, still under foreign jurisdiction, were being referred to as the ‘Lonely Island’. Then on 8 December 1941 (7 December in the United States), the Japanese bombed the United States’s naval base of Pearl Harbour in Hawaii and World War II was fi nally fully underway. Shanghai’s foreign concessions were immediately annexed by the Japanese and the city found itself under one administration for the fi rst time in a century, albeit a Japanese one. All clocks were set to Tokyo time38, and of the 8,000 or so citizens of Allied countries who were still living in the city, all had to wear armbands denoting their nationality: ‘A’ for American, ‘B’ for British, etc. Ethnic Asians, such as Filipinos, did not have to undergo this indignity because the Japanese considered them part of their so-called Asian Co- Prosperity Sphere. August 1943 saw the revocation of the treaty port status, which the Chinese saw as the end of just over a century of humiliation. In July 1944 the fi rst United States aircraft were seen in the skies over Shanghai, and in November of that year air raids began. Japan fi nally surrendered uncondi- tionally the following year on 16 August.

The postcolonial city With Shanghai liberated from the Japanese the city went through a brief boom, fuelled in part by United States servicemen passing through the port on their way home. Britain’s prestige as a colonial power, however, was gone. An American cruiser was moored at their No.1 Buoy on the Bund, the No.2 Buoy, which had traditionally been the American one, was assigned to the Chinese, but as they had no ships they let another American ship take its place as well39. By the end of 1946 the boom had ended, to be replaced by a brief but cataclysmic period of corruption and economic mismanagement: millions of dollars of American aid were siphoned off by Gen- eralissimo Chiang Kai-chek’s relatives and friends, relief supplies were even publicly auctioned off40 (so notorious were his activities that a BBC Radio satirical programme even referred to the Nationalist leader as General ‘Cash-My-Cheque’). Shanghai’s smart money began to move out, a lot of it went to Hong Kong, where as we have seen, the British maintained their colony until 1997, turning the city into the main conduit for trade with China. On 24 April 1949, Shanghai was liberated by the communist forces of the People’s Liberation Army, and on 1 October that year the People’s Republic of China was declared from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, by which time the defeated remnants of the Nationalist

Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., p. 256. Although Niall Ferguson places this fi gure somewhat lower in The War of the World by estimating it to be around 260,000 (p. 477) it was still a massive massacre by any standards. Lynn Pan, Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise, p. 138. Ibid., p. 189. Stella Dong, Shanghai: Gateway to the Celestial Empire, 1860-1949, p. 30. 94 forces had fl ed to Taiwan. So, just as the colonial-era Shanghai was seen as being in the front ranks of China’s march towards progress, the city under Communist leadership loomed large in the Chinese psyche as a guiding light. According to Pamela Yatsko ‘It stood for prosperity (fuyu), wealth (fanhua), fashion (shimao), civilization (wenming), modernity (xiandai), and excellence (youxiu)’41. Shanghainese competence, adaptability, and obedience – attributes that had stood them in good stead under the century of foreign control – now served them well under the new Communist regime. Shanghai, that paragon of capitalist accumulation, became, under the communists, a model for state control. Shanghai was the place where the Cultural Revolution started. Chairman Mao, with the help of his wife, Jiang Qing (who used to work as an actress in the city), used Shanghai as the launch pad for their attacks on political rivals in the capital. As we have seen in Part I, Shanghai, despite its importance to the country’s economy, and its willingness to accede to Beijing’s wishes, suffered badly between 1949 and 1990. The central government was ‘draining the pond to catch the fi sh’ as the Chinese saying goes. Hundreds of billions of yuan were earned by the city in the fi rst 30 years of Communist rule, yet the vast majority of this was remitted to Beijing for redistribution elsewhere. Budgets allocated to Shanghai for basic construction amounted to a paltry 7.4% of the amount the city sent up north, and of that fraction, the city spent the vast majority of it on manufacturing, thereby neglecting items seen as non-productive, such as housing, culture, health, and education42. Shanghai had turned into an ageing industrial relic, barely able to function as a city, let alone lead the rest of the country. Meanwhile, the city’s central importance to the national budget meant that Deng Xiaoping was reluctant to include it in his fi rst wave of economic reform, in case something went wrong. That is why when it was decided to set up four Special Economic Zones in 1979, which would offer new infrastructure, tax holidays, and other perquisites to foreign investors, they were located along China’s south-east coast, close to Hong Kong. Shanghai’s situation was not helped by the turmoil caused by Chairman Mao’s death in 1976. The city spent most of the next decade purging itself of its Gang of Four associations (the gang had consisted of Mao’s wife and three of her Shanghai-linked favourites), this left the city’s economy further adrift43. Mao’s successor, Hua Guofeng, replaced the city’s leadership with bureaucrats who could be relied on be follow the new Party line. These leaders, loyal to Hua, as well as the traditional communist orthodoxy, were reluctant to allow the sort of changes that Deng Xiaoping was envisaging, another reason why Deng did not rush to experiment with the city. Even after these leaders’ departures in 1980 their successors did not hold positions in the national decision-making bodies, which were located in Beijing, neither did they enjoy close connections with the central government, Shanghai, as a result, was poorly positioned to lobby for more favourable policies, and, as we have seen, it was the 1980s that saw the city’s only period of relative recession in a century and a half of otherwise stellar economic growth. Finally, in 1984, Beijing allowed Shanghai to open up to foreign investment. It opened the Yangtze River Delta the following year, and by 1986 Shanghai was being allowed to set up three small economic zones. Yet while these small steps were being taken in Shanghai, much of southern China was taking off in a spectacular manner. Shanghai’s Mayor, Wang Daohan, then pushed for the development of a 520-square-kilometer Special Economic Zone in Pudong, which, as we have seen, was launched in April 1990. Finally Shanghai was able to reassert itself as an economic powerhouse. Ironically, the Tiananmen Square incident of 4 June 1989 probably did more to help than hinder Shanghai’s case. Despite large numbers of students protesting in the city, the Shanghai city government, led by Party Secretary Jiang Zemin and the new Mayor Zhu, kept things well under control. Instead of deploying the police or the military, as the Beijing leadership had done, with such disastrous results,

Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 14. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 19-20. 95 Mayor Zhu sent in 100,000 workers from state enterprises and this managed to quell the protests44.

Ibid., p. 21. 96 2 COLONIALISM VERSUS IMPERIALISM

Colonial-era Shanghai was an amalgam of different jurisdictions: namely the foreign concessions and a Chinese-administered city. But did this mean it was actually a colony? The French Concession was indeed governed as a colony, from Hanoi, but the International Settlement was rather more unusual. It was, in effect, a self-governing enclave, one that, of course, could not have survived without the implicit (and sometimes explicit) backing of British and American force of arms, but it was very much its own entity, and was answerable, ultimately, to no one but itself. So what exactly is a colony? Indeed, what is colonialism? And how does it differ from imperialism? There can be little doubt in anyone’s mind that the political systems that Britain and France stretched across the globe in the latter half of the nineteenth century were empires. But what about the United States? Its imperial ambitions were made clear when it annexed the Philippines in 1898, and even though it granted that country independence in 1946, most of the mainland United States, the famous Union, was achieved through conquest and purchase, with genocidal clearings of autochthonous population where it was felt this was needed (what today might be called ‘ethnic cleansing’). The Union is still intact, but only after a bloody civil conﬂ ict between 1861 and 1865, but is the United Stated an empire? David Harvey certainly seems to think that some if its recent actions smack of imperialism. And what about China? Is it an empire? Certainly it was regarded as such when it was ruled by an emperor. And while the imperial system of governance may have disappeared in 1911, the country, coincidentally about the same size as the United States, and lying at roughly the same latitudes, still occupies most of what it annexed during its imperial eras of expansion (with the major exception of the vast territories conquered by Genghis Khan). Formerly independent countries such as (Inner) Mongolia, Manchuria, and Tibet are now all part of China; even Taiwan is regarded as a ‘renegade province’ and any moves for it to declare full independence from China – a condition it enjoys in everything but name – are frowned on by the mainland. The imperial project – the move from colonialism to imperialism – took place as a result of certain countries’ ability to control strategic places; in Asia these would include the cities of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Whereas colonialism’s aims were never very clear, it tended to develop willy nilly – following trade routes, or often simply trade winds – imperialism had very different aims, still strategic, but more of a blanket theory that could be applied over a wider area indiscriminately, not merely the controlling of certain strategic points. The people who made it happen, the empire-builders and colonists, are familiar to us today through the pages of Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard. W. Somerset Maugham’s short story ‘The Door of Opportunity’ perfectly describes what was expected of a British colonial of- ﬁ cial in Malaya in the 1920s. In Maugham’s typically ironic way he highlights these characteristics by showing what Alban Torel, the anti-hero of the story, so conspicuously fails to do, with the result that a promising career in the colonial service is cut short and a life effectively ruined. Maugham also takes a sideswipe at the racist assertions that were current at the time, especially with regard to ‘half-castes’ or Eurasians. He also manages, all in one short story, to evoke the distaste any hint of an ‘aesthetic’ way of life provoked in a colonial situation. Related to all of the factors that Maugham has so expertly drawn together is the question of perception, something that shall be dealt with in Part III when examining Edward W. Said’s contention that nineteenth-century Europeans constructed an Oriental ‘Other’, and in Part IV where the role of dress in this construction will also be considered, again taking a W. Somerset Maugham short story as an illustration.

The new imperialism David Harvey asserts that a ‘new imperialism’ is now in operation, one that ‘calls for more explicit ac- knowledgement and a more solid commitment if it is to establish a Pax Americana that can bestow the

97 same benefi ts upon the world as the Pax Britannica secured in the last half of the nineteenth century’1. Saskia Sassen sees a link between these two eras of imperial peace with the newer forms of administrative, commercial, and development that had been set up by the European empires as ‘creating bridges for the fl ow of capital, information, and high-level personnel’ under the Pax Americana2. According to John Darwin, ‘[e]mpire is often seen as the original sin of European peoples’, the European great powers which spread their imperial tentacles across the entire face of the planet are seen as having ‘corrupt- ed an innocent world’3. The word ‘empire’ actually still provokes a lot of hostility. According to Darwin this is because many post-colonial states ‘found it natural to base their political legitimacy on the rejection of empire as an alien, evil and oppressive force’4. We have seen the knee-jerk reaction in postcolonial Shanghai to the alleyway house, perceived as dirty and outmoded they were also a reminder of a humiliating past, with the result that huge numbers of them have been allowed to be destroyed. Ireland, too, experienced something similar in the decades after independence (1922) when countless numbers of houses, particularly in the Georgian style, were knocked down. Seen as despised reminders of British oppression, these fi ne dwellings were destroyed by people who failed to appreciate that they were largely built by Irish labour and talent, and as such represented a high point in that country’s native culture. The history of the world is a history of empire. It is a type of political organisation that recurs endlessly, yet why does the late-nineteenth-century European variation of it produce such conspicuous revulsion? First of all, of course, we are still emerging from that era, or at least the aftermath of its destruction. Secondly, and more importantly, there seems to have been a belief ‘that there was something qualitatively different about the empires that the Europeans made’5. Unlike traditional empires where the main characteristic was the accumulation of land and people, the European model tended to expropri- ate land. Land was expected to meet the requirements of plantations and mines, that were, in turn, engaged in long-distance commerce. Native peoples were displaced, their property rights nullifi ed (on the grounds that, like the native American Indians mentioned earlier, they had failed to make full and proper use of their land). Slaves were also shipped between continents. Even culture and identity were appropriated in the effort to ‘civilise’. John Darwin’s analysis of the history of global empire is magisterial, and while most of it is convincing, the theory that Europe’s domination was primarily the result of a series of accidents is too fanciful. It is too reminiscent of Sir John Seeley’s contention that the British picked up their empire in a fi t of ‘absence of mind’. It can certainly be acknowledged that some of the results of empire-building were unexpected, accidental even, but they were still the result of planning and effort. Much like Christopher Colombus’s ‘accidental’ discovery of America while looking for a trade route to China. As we shall see in the work of Michel Foucault, the forces that have operated in history are not controlled by some sort of manifest destiny or its regulative mechanisms, instead they simply operate in response to conditions, sometimes quite haphazard ones. There have been many different kinds of empire: David Harvey lists the ‘Roman, Ottoman, Im- perial Chinese, Russian, Soviet, Austro-Hungarian, Napoleonic, British, French, etc.’ and ascertains that ‘[f]rom this motley crew we can easily conclude there is considerable room for manoeuvre as to how empire should be construed, administered, and actively constructed’6. The modern-day nation state has a similar degree of manoeuvrability in asserting itself, but as we saw with the ridiculousness of comparing a country like the United States to one like Singapore simply on the grounds that they both happen to be states, the same could be said of empires. John Darwin points out that the United States has conventionally tended to have been left out of the narrative of nineteenth-century imperialism because, as we have just seen, it entering the game at

David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 4 (where he also refers to the work of Niall Ferguson). Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, p. XXXVI, endnote 12. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 22. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 23. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 5. 98 such a late stage (with its annexing of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898). But the United States has long had a colonial presence in Asia, it was intimately involved with Shanghai since its inception as a foreign settlement in 1842. It was also the United States that forced Japan to open up after centuries of isolation, with Commodore Perry’s ships entering Edo (Tokyo) Bay on 8 July 1853. In fact, John Darwin sees the United States’s peculiar route to empire as being extremely infl uential. Its industrial and fi nancial capacity made it a part of what he sees as the Atlantic ‘core’ which aided the expansion and integration of Europe. The United States’s trade enriched its trans-Atlantic partners, but without consuming too much of their available capital. Its innovations in agricultural, mining, hy- draulic and railway technology were readily deployed elsewhere, thanks to Europe’s ever increasing expansion over the globe. And then there were its inventions, without which we would never have seen quite such an increase in European, or perhaps we had better simply say Western, colonial expansion: the telegraph, the Colt revolver, the Gatling and Maxim guns7, etc. The United States, however, has never had to contend with the sort of troubles that usually be- devil overseas empires: the Irish Republican Army, the Khmer Rouge, the Boxers, et al. There may have been a lot of opposition to America’s involvement in Vietnam, but there has never been an Alaskan independence movement, or trouble with Florida freedom fi ghters. Imperial rule usually engenders opposition, it certainly did so for the British in India and Ireland, and we can see it again today with China’s diffi culties in Tibet, but as empires go, the United States has seemed to buck this trend. (Of course the United States was more than usually thorough in removing any potential threat from indigenous populations – of whom there were fewer in the fi rst place.) America’s recent history also shows how adept the country is at distancing itself from the stigma of imperialism. David Harvey identifi es Henry Luce’s infl uential 1941 editorial in Life magazine, which was titled ‘The American Century’8, as a particularly clever move. Luce (coincidentally born in China) was an isolationist, and he considered history to have conferred global leadership on the United States, and that this role, thrust upon the country it may have been, was one that had to be actively embraced. The power thus conferred was seen by Luce as global and universal rather than territorially specifi c, Luce as a result, preferred to talk of an American ‘century’ rather than an American ‘empire’. Harvey cites Neil Smith’s posing of the valid question: ‘How does one challenge a century?’9. How indeed? And yet the United States’s leadership is still engaging in such sleight of hand: President George W. Bush’s declaration of a ‘War on Terror’ is an example. How can one declare war on a concept like terror? Any more than you can on a century? One might as well declare war on the colour blue. And surely it is one of the duties of government to resist terrorism anyway? As far as David Harvey is concerned, this move by Henry Luce was ‘beyond geography, [hence] the American Century was beyond empire and beyond reproof’10. America’s distinctive values tend to be presented as universals, with terms like freedom and democracy, respect for property, and for the individual,bundled together, becoming a code for the rest of the world to live by – the famous phrase ‘making the world safe for democracy’ springs to mind. But who gets to defi ne this ‘democracy’? Like the era of the British and French Empires, it is usually the person holding the biggest gun, which only serves to highlight the fl aw at the heart of Enlightenment thinking: one cannot force man to be free. No matter how well-intentioned motives are, and America’s, despite all the damage that has sometimes been done, are very often well-intentioned; as were the British and French before them. But good intentions can often do more damage than bad ones, the nineteenth-century’s missions to civilise did irreparable damage to the native cultures of the countries subjected to them. And of course we must never lose sight of the fact that often this desire to improve the lot of

John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 244. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 50. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, quoted in Da- vid Harvey’s The New Imperialism, p. 51. Ibid., p. 51. 99 those who found themselves in the hands of the Western powers went with a desire to grab what it was possible to get out of a territory while they were doing their good works. Britain’s concern for the Boers in the 1890s might not have been so heartfelt if they had not been sitting on such valuable diamond and gold concessions. President Bush’s administration’s concern for the democratic rights of Iraqi citizens is tacitly understood to be mitigated by the reserves of oil that the country has at its disposal. As David Harvey puts it:

The drive of the Bush administration to intervene militarily in the Middle East likewise has much to do with procuring fi rmer control over Middle Eastern oil resources. The need to exert that control had ratcheted steadily upwards since President Carter fi rst enunciated the doctrine that the United States was prepared to use military means to ensure the uninterrupted fl ow of Middle-Eastern oil into the global economy.11

And, as we saw in Part I, it is the desire for oil that is driving China to engage in its own neo-colonial activity in Africa and elsewhere, the only difference is that the Chinese do not choose to dress up their needs with distractions such as democracy (not that they could even if they wanted to, given their one- party state). This, however, it very far from being the purview of this research, David Harvey’s points just seemed to be something worthwhile to mention while on the topic of imperialism.

Colonialism versus imperialism By World War I the great powers occupied or controlled 90 percent of the globe. The British alone, its empire having quadrupled in size between 1860 and 1900, controlled fully one fi fth of the world’s surface area, and one quarter of its population. The word ‘empire’ comes from the Latin imperium, which roughly translates as ‘sovereignty’ or ‘rule’ in English. As a term it had been used for centuries without necessarily signifying ‘imperialism’; here a basic difference begins to emerge between an empire that was bureaucratically controlled by a government from the centre, and that which was developed for ideological as well as fi nancial reasons: a structure that can be called imperialism. An empire that was developed for settlement or for commercial purposes by a trading company is invariably called colonial. Karl Marx maintains that one of colonialism’s key motives was economic: ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’12. Colonialism, in other words, was simply an extension of capitalism from the metropolitan centre. Colonisation, as the term was originally understood by Europeans, primarily meant a community moving from their homeland in search of a better life, while maintaining a strong allegiance to their original culture. Their reasons for moving were economic, religious, or political, (the same motivations that move migrants today), not the desire to rule over indigenous peoples, or to extract a territory’s wealth in order to repatriate it. It was primarily an economically driven project, operating on the periphery, which was often diffi cult for a home government to control. According to Robert J.C. Young, the term ‘colonialism’ fi rst occurred in English in 1853, when it was quite neutral. It became introduced into French only at the beginning of the twentieth century, and was revived after World War II as a derogatory term. Imperialism, on the other hand, was a policy of state, centrally driven with rather more grandiose aims. Whereas colonisation, at least until the late-nineteenth century, tended to develop locally and in a haphazard way, with colonists establishing themselves according to pragmatic needs, and generally running things in the interests of business; imperialism was usually driven by an ideology which emanated from the centre and was invariably more concerned with the assertion and expansion of power.

Ibid., p. 180. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 223. 100 Also according to Robert J.C. Young, imperialism was a synonym for despotism when it fi rst began to be used in England in 1858, probably the result of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte of 1852, which was an attack on Napoleon III’s coup d’état of the previous year, which over- threw France’s constitution of 1848. This event launched a new period of French expansion in an effort to recapture the glory of the fi rst French Empire under the emperor’s uncle, Napoleon I, a situation the British found deplorable. Around 1870, the time Britain began to turn from colonialism to imperialism, the term began to be used in a less derogatory way, when it began to denote the broader system of economic domination that began to make itself felt in the British Empire, hence it was not perceived as being negative any more. Young cites Winfried Baumgart as calling imperialism a hybrid term, i.e. one that is used to denote a wide range of relationships of domination and dependence throughout history, including theoretical and organisational differences13, it is only since the collapse of the great imperial systems, notably that of France and Britain, that the term has taken on the universally negative connotation it has today. The British Empire was the product of three centuries of commerce, conquest, and colonisation, it was the benefi ciary of what Niall Ferguson has called ‘a remarkable global division of labour’14. As we have just seen, one of colonialism’s key motive was economic, and Britain was one part of Europe that experienced what John Darwin calls ‘a supercharged version of economic change’ in the nineteenth century15. Britain’s economic trajectory was steeper than the rest of Europe because after 1760 there was a huge shift from agriculture to manufacturing. Gains in productivity were concentrated in the textile industry, and the British also pioneered the use of steam power over coal. Steam and coal actually formed a symbiotic relationship because it was steam power that enabled water to be pumped out of the coalmines, and of course it was coal that powered the steam. Ac- cording to Darwin, without steam Britain’s coal production would have stagnated at around the 1700 level16. Britain’s government was also more attentive than most to the needs of trade and manufacturing (which is probably why Napoleon I’s jibe about Britain being ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ stung so badly), this was mainly because many industrialists actually sat in parliament and could thus direct government policy to suit their needs. With the possible exception of the Netherlands, no other country has had so commercially minded a ruling class. By 1880, Britain had become, arguably, the world’s most important power, certainly its empire covered the most territory, and it was continuing to expand. Empires are all about control. Earlier manifestations of them, as we have seen, were about control of land and people; nineteenth-century empires were about the control of trade and trade routes. The British led the other powers by controlling the world’s sea lanes, and with them the world’s maritime trade, this gave us the Pax Britannica, which we have seen mentioned by so many commentators. It was also the raison d’ être for cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, because they were so perfectly placed to capitalise on this trade. Britain’s success in the nineteenth century can be seen as having resulted from two inter-related factors: one, the Seven Years War (1756-63), which ushered in a half-century of war and revolution, but which ultimately ended France’s period of international pre-eminence. Britain defeated France in North America, and in India, establishing hegemony in the latter. The former (with the exception of Canada) was of course a short-lived rule (America declared independence in 1776). France’s bid for glory under Napoleon I was also short-lived but it ushered in the second of the two factors that allowed Britain to fl ourish: the century of peace that followed the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15. This peace was the result of a new and experimental international co-operation known as the ‘fi ve-power concert’. Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria all aimed at maintaining peace in Europe, and, with the odd not so terribly signifi cant exception, it worked. The Vienna settlement in fact

Winfried Baumgart’s Imperialism: The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, cited in Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, p. 26. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 15. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 194. Ibid., p. 195. 101 proved so durable that it allowed Britain (and Russia – of which more below) free to pursue extra-Euro- pean ambitions. And as for Asian colonialism, as John Darwin puts it, ‘Vienna opened the door to Asia’s encirclement from the north and the south’17. Some might think it strange to refer to the century from 1815 to 1914 as a period of peace in Europe: there was the Crimean War (1854-6), the War of Italian Unifi cation (1859-60), the War of the German Unifi cation (1866), the War of the Danish Duchies (1864), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870- 71); as well as wars between European powers and their near neighbours, such as the Russian-Ottoman confl ict (1877-8), and the British-Egyptian one (1882). Devastating as these wars undoubtedly were for those caught up in them, they remained limited confl icts, and as such did nothing to signifi cantly alter the balance of power on the continent. The stability that thus prevailed enabled Britain to enhance her control over the world’s sea lanes, particularly in the North Atlantic, something that John Darwin correctly points out would have been unthinkable in conditions of maritime disorder. This allowed for a huge increase in inter-continental trade, particularly the North-Atlantic one, which effectively included America in that vast Northern world which now stretched from Alaska eastwards to Siberia. The United States’s connectedness to Europe via fast and safe steamships enabled that country’s economy to grow rapidly. Also, the balance of power that obtained in Europe ensured that intervention in either North or South America was effectively ruled out by any other European power, thus allowing the United States an opportunity to develop without the unnecessary expense of external defence considerations. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 allowed for what Darwin calls ‘the single-minded pursuit of economic growth’18, it also allowed the United States to settle its bloody and protracted civil confl ict (1861-65) without an intervention by a foreign power. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this peace allowed Britain (and France and Russia) to pursue interests outside of Europe, with the understanding that they would always be under the scrutiny of the other powers, so that too bold a unilateral move in any given arena would result in intervention by another. This is how Britain, France, and Russia kept running up against each other, though it was Britain’s territory that usually acted as the buffer: with Russia on the North-West Frontier (Afghanistan), with France in South-East Asia, Africa, and, of course, in Shanghai. China was unique during the colonial era in that it was an arena in which all the great powers (with the exception of Austria-Hungary) met. This super-block in the northern hemisphere can be seen as the precursor of today’s ‘West’. John Darwin sees nineteenth-century Europe as transcending its limits and commanding what he calls the centre of the world. This ‘Greater Europe’ included both Russia and the United States in a vast zone that was unifi ed by a shared sense of what Darwin calls ‘Europeanness’ (in which ‘Americanness’ is seen as a sort of provincial variant). Europe had become something more than a mere geographical entity, it had begun to reinvent itself as the West. A collection of societies with ideological, political, and cultural differences: everything from American popular democracy to British parliamentary oligarchy to Rus- sian tsarist autocracy, but they all found that they had more in common with each other when confronted with other races in other parts of the world, which of course they increasingly did because of their territorial and commercial expansion. When seen against an African or an Asian backdrop, these new Eu- ropeans certainly seemed to have more to unite than to divide them. And this is the beginnings of what Edward W. Said identifi es as the European construction of the Oriental ‘Other’; an oriental ‘Other’ that was a mirror in which the old Europe began to see itself in a new light: as ‘the West’. Of course, because this West was being defi ned not by what it was, but by what it was not (i.e. not the Orient, neither Asia nor Africa), it has always been a slippery and somewhat unstable construct. Russia, initially, was very much part of it, certainly until 1917, after which time it became the Second World. Now it is back in the fold once more, even becoming a member of the G819. There were, of

Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 228. For a discussion of Russia (and Japan’s) role in the construction of the West please refer to Appendix 1. 102 course, differences between these newly Western countries, and these differences were refl ected in their systems of empire. The French had long distinguished between what they called colonisation and domination. The British, more classically, and decorously, differentiated between their ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ colonies. At imperialism’s heart lay the desire to civilise, this of course presupposed an unquestioned racial superiority on the part of those doing the ‘civilising’. This is an issue which has been dealt with at length elsewhere, by other, better qualifi ed commentators20, it is enough to mention here that it was an important factor, but not one that is of central importance to this research. Britain’s ‘white man’s burden’ and France’s mission civilisatrice meant that imperialism was not simply some vulgar grab for land or cash, it was seen as a moral imperative. France’s mission was to bring French culture, religion, and language to those races of the earth not fortunate enough to have thought of them for themselves. The British tended to be somewhat less proselytising, preferring not to interfere with a local culture. While this may seem at fi rst glance to be more liberal, it was essentially based on the racist assumption that the ‘natives’ were incapable of education to a European level; the corollary of this was of course that the natives were better off under colonial rule. France’s system tended to assimilate local cultures, which may seem the more progressive of the two, as it seems to assume a fundamental perception of equality between colonisers and colonised – the French integrated their colonies into their polity, calling them départments d’outre mer; strictly speaking they were not colonies at all – but actually the French system exhibited even less respect for local culture and language, because once united as an ‘equal’ part of the French heartland, local cultures tended to be subsumed by the metropolitan one; ironically eradicating them all the more effectively than Brit- ain’s laissez-faire system of non-interference. One factor France and Britain both had in common was the architectural expression of the buildings built in their colonial cities. We have already seen Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s analysis of these visible manifestations of colonial power with, among other things, the Singapore city plan. The penchant for neo-classical architecture in colonial cities not only refl ected colonial power relations, it also provided an important link, particularly for the British, to ancient Greece and Rome. Britain fl attered herself that she was taking up the mantle left to her by Rome. Edward W. Said, Robert Irwin, and others have cited the British insistence on teaching Latin and Greek in public schools; known as the ‘classics’, these were required subjects for anyone applying for a job in the civil, foreign, or colonial services. The architectural expression of these buildings represented the none-too-subtle set of power relations set up between the coloniser and the colonised. The colonists’ homes further represented the glamour of empire, that is what makes them so beautiful in the eyes of many today, and added to this nostalgic view is the poignant realisation that this was, after all, a doomed world, (at least during the 1920s and ’30s, the era so often romanticised in literature and fi lm). Of course labour was cheap in the colonies, so lavish homes could easily be built, and lavish staff hired to maintain them: in the colonies, a middle-class person could live like an aristocrat back home. One subtle but important part of colonial possession was the act of naming, the British tended to try and use local names where possible but in a typically dismissive gesture invariably got them subtly wrong. The fi rst thing a post-colonial country invariably does on independence is rename its places; in Ireland’s case Kingstown reverted to Dun Laoghaire, Queenstown to Cobh, Maryborough to Portlaoise, etc. In the case of China, where Peking is now known as Beijing, this is not a renaming in the postcolonial sense, but is something more complex and subtle, and has to do with language, which will be explained in Part IV when looking at the cultural construction of perception. Imperialism as a ‘moral imperative’ was really only window dressing for what was actually going on: the grab for land and cash. Colonialism had worked well up until the 1870s, the American Civil War (1861-65) would also have stimulated growth, but could it be a mere coincidence that Britain’s turn to imperialism occurred at a time when the world’s economy was experiencing a downturn? Ironi-

Robert J.C. Young, John Darwin, Stephen Howe, et al. 103 cally, just as Britain’s stance was becoming increasingly imperialistic – jingoistic even – its rationale for imperial expansion as an economic necessity was proved false. J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902) compared the cost of imperial expansion since 1870 with the relatively minor amount of trade conducted with the territories acquired, effectively demolishing the ‘trade follows the fl ag’ argument of the imperialists. His study also revealed that what was unprofi table overall was in fact extremely profi t- able for a privileged few. Spurious economic reasoning aside, in the run up to World War I the rationale for the annexation of new territories was increasingly actuated out of a sense of fear, namely that if a particular power did not annexe a territory, then another one would. This also explains why independence movements during this era invariably sought formulae like ‘home rule’ rather than outright independence (presumably in the fear that once they were free they might fall prey to some other, perhaps even less desirable, imperial power). This defl ation of the imperialists’ position highlights the fact that there were many people who were unhappy with colonialism and imperialism, even in the metropolitan centres of empire. Robert J.C. Young assiduously points out that it is too simplistic to assume that colonisers were uniformly pro-colonisation while those being colonised were uniformly against it; that all Europeans were ipso facto imperialists, and all non-Europeans the victims of imperialism, a contention we shall be returning to when we look at Edward W. Said’s work in Part III. Young correctly identifi es the fact that many of the colonised territories’ upper classes and comprador bourgeoisie did very nicely out of colonialism, and contrary to what is sometimes assumed, Europe was home to a strong tradition of anti-colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and not just in places like Ireland or Poland. The British Empire had always been contested at a political level at home. The century of peace that Europe enjoyed after the Congress of Vienna came to a bloody end in August 1914. World War I has been seen as the logical outcome of the imperial system: the world had reached a point where there was no more territory left to grab. The ‘scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s had moved the potential for confl ict between European powers into the colonial sphere. In this particular instance a major confl ict had only been prevented by the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-85, which had agreed upon an orderly partitioning of the continent. Once Africa had been arranged to everyone’s satisfaction (presumably excluding the Africans themselves), China was seen as next on the global agenda. China, however, proved to be more diffi cult to divvy up. It was a single nation, with an ancient and important culture, and soon proved to be impossible to carve up in the way that Africa had been; the most any of the great powers (and after 1895, we can include Japan in this group) was to gain strategic footholds for trade and exploitation, hence the increasingly strategic importance of cities such as Hong Kong and Shanghai. By 1914 the British Empire extended from the Pacifi c coast of Canada, through pockets of the Caribbean, via a huge swathe of Africa, through South and South-East Asia, right up to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other British Chinese enclaves. Much of this territory had been built up rapidly since the 1830s, when the British had found themselves pushed into formalising claims, sometimes having to back them up by force of arms. As the world was increasingly partitioned between the great powers, these powers found themselves obliged to confront one another again and again all over the globe (as we have already seen with Britain’s confronting of France and Russia). As John Darwin suggests, this resulted in the paradox of an ever-increasing territorial expansion which did not lead to the stability and security that was hoped for. It led instead to an increase in anxiety for these empires. As Vladimir Lenin noted in 1916: ‘For the fi rst time, the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivi- sion is possible’21. The Treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Sèvres which followed World War I in 1919-20 divided the spoils among the victors, but it also saw the age of imperialism enter its endgame.

V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, p. 223 (italics in original). 104 The technology of empire By 1920 the world had changed. The German, Austro-Hungarian (as of 1867) and Turkish (Ottoman) Empires had all been dismembered (at Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Sèvres respectively). There was no more Kaiser, or Emperor, or Sultan; neither was there a Tsar: Nicholas II had abdicated in 1917, ending more than three centuries of Romanov rule in Russia. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 (now Brest in Belarus) that followed his abdication, also dismembered the Russian Empire, but not to the same extent as the Allies infl icted on their enemies. One important point that is often overlooked in discussions of World War I is the fact that it ended in an armistice, not with the unconditional surrender of Germany and her allies. To those who had survived the ‘Great War’, and the deadly infl uenza epidemic that followed it, the world might not have seemed such a different place from just a few years earlier; but it was, everything had changed. Looking back from the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century, what strikes us now is how quaint and other-worldly the Edwardians seemed, and, by contrast, how recognisably modern the 1920s were (at least in the West): women could vote, they could go out to work, they could even wear trousers in public, people drove around in motorcars, used the telephone, drank cocktails, smoked (admittedly that is changing again today), they went to nightclubs, went away for the weekend (as opposed to the Edwardian ‘Saturday-to-Monday’), and when they wanted to travel they could fl y swiftly to distant destinations using aeroplanes. This is not to suggest that the world has experienced no further change since that time, we have already seen Manuel Castells’s comments about the qualitative differences the communication media have wrought on society, what is being pointed out here is that if someone from our world were to somehow fi nd themselves transported back in time, they would probably fi nd themselves more at home in 1920 than 1910. James Joyce, of course, perceived this immediately, his novel Ulysses, published in 1922, details the actions of Leopold Bloom, and others, as they make their way around Dublin on 16 June 1904. Da- vid Harvey sees Joyce as having begun his ‘quest to capture a sense of simultaneity in space and time’ during this period, which, as we have seen already, Harvey refers to as an era of time-space compression, Harvey sees Joyce as ‘…insisting upon the present as the only real location of experience. He had his action take place in a plurality of spaces…’22, as opposed to the other great novelist writing at the sa- metime, Marcel Proust, who ‘…tried to recover past time and to create a sense of individuality and place that rested on a conception of experience across a space of time’23. This is why, when writing Ulysses at the end of the period that Harvey has identifi ed for us, Joyce chose to place his story at its beginning. As Harvey says (quoting Stephen Kern): ‘The two most innovative novelists of the period transformed the stage of modern literature from a series of fi xed settings in homogeneous space’ (as Harvey notes, of ‘the sort that realist novelists typically deployed’) ‘into a multitude of qualitatively different spaces that varied with the shifting moods and perspectives of human consciousness’24. But what had changed? In one way there was nothing really new in what happened in Europe (and, by extension, the world it controlled through empire) between 1914 and 1918. Europeans had long been fi ghting one another, and they had long been making use of technology to do so. What was different now was the fact that they were using these technological advances against one another and not against their colonial subjects. This they were able to do with an even more deadly accuracy after having had a century of peace. A new use for an old technology can be more powerful than the invention of something that is actually new. Innovation takes time to be accepted, whereas a new use of an old invention can be embraced more readily. Take the example of the mobile telephone, one of Castells’s qualitative changes in society. Neither the technology of the telephone itself, nor the wireless that made it mobile, was new in

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 267. Ibid., p. 267. Stephen Kern quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 267. 105 the 1980s, what was new, and clever, was putting these two older technologies together. People, familiar with both technologies, readily embraced this happy amalgam, with the result that the way we live has been revolutionised (as we saw in Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp’s ‘archipelago of enclaves’, a development that simply could not have happened without the use of the mobile telephone). We have already seen how technological innovation enabled Europeans, or Westerners, to impose themselves on the rest of the globe: the Gatling and Maxim machine guns, even the use of quinine and mosquito nets against malaria greatly facilitated imperial expansion; not to mention the steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph, as well as the later wireless and telephone. Michel Foucault highlights the emergence of these ‘other, apparently unmoving histories’ that occur beneath the rapidly changing history of governments, wars, and famine. He cites as important ‘the history of sea routes, the history of corn or of gold-mining, the history of drought and of irrigation, the history of crop rotation, the history of the balance achieved by the human species between hunger and abundance’25, these are every bit as important as the cataloguing of kings and battles. In World War I use was made of a genuinely new technology, one that has altered our way of life considerably: the aeroplane. Of course the motorcar has probably done more to alter our daily lives, and our cities, but this section deals specifi cally with imperialism, so it is important to point out that one of the crucial factors that led to the break up of the great Western empires in the twentieth century was probably the effect air travel had on what were essentially far-fl ung maritime constructions. A maritime empire is stitched together by sea lanes and the fast ships that can hold the whole entity together. Changes in technology can decrease sailing times between ports, and hence tighten an empire’s grip, however, when an entirely different transport matrix is overlaid onto an older one, i.e. an aerial network onto a maritime one, then everything must change. It can be no accident that the two political bodies that still exist today in the same form as during the age of imperialism are the United States and China, both of which are basically land-based entities. The British, French, and Dutch Em- pires, which were sea-based, vanished with an almost breathtaking swiftness in the decade or so after World War II. Their vanishing seems all the more rapid when compared to the backdrop of the long, slow, and sometimes painful, certainly bloody, centuries it took to build them up. From 1453, when the fall of Constantinople (Istanbul) cut Europe off from Asia, Europeans cast about for other routes to the Orient. John Darwin sees the ridding of Granada of its Moors in 1492 as ‘a high tide of fervour that helped carry Columbus to the West’26. Columbus, famously, was looking for a route to China when he discovered America. What Darwin sees as astonishing seamanship (Columbus established the sea lanes used for voyage between Spain and the Caribbean for the next three centuries, and with ‘sailing times that were hardly improved upon for more than 150 years’27) is not wrong per se, what his view fails to take account of is the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has currents, currents which not only facilitated Columbus’s voyage but in fact would have made virtually any other choice of route impossible given the sailing technology of the day. Darwin does concede later in his book that ‘[t]he disposition of Atlantic winds and currents made it likely that the Caribbean islands – the geographic projection of the Americas towards Europe – would be the fi rst landfall for Spanish or Portuguese sailors’28, but otherwise he fails to make the vital connection between Columbus’s undeniably remarkable achievement and the prevailing sea currents. John Darwin also points out that Europe was a ‘peninsula of peninsulas’, surrounded by what were known as the ‘seven seas’: the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the North Sea, the English Channel, the Irish Sea, and so on, it is hardly any wonder that the continent should have developed such a dense system of maritime communications. Also, the wide variety of conditions that obtained on these seas engendered a wide range of ship types and sailing techniques. Hemmed in between an Islamic world, a

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 3. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 57. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 58. 106 huge ocean, and the forests and tundra of the north, Europe was no happy ‘Middle Kingdom’. Even the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire’s ‘middle of the earth’, was, in the Middle Ages, a border. Is it any wonder that European scientifi c expertise was translated so rapidly into technical practice with mapping and navigational aids? With the industrial revolution came steam power, which we have already seen gave Britain a headstart in imperial conquest. Industrial technologies were able to supply (at relatively low cost) the technological means for domination in regions of the globe that had previously seemed un- reachable, and they could do so on a scale previously unimaginable. Steamships plying the shipping lanes, and an ever burgeoning railway network consolidated the imperialists’ grip on their new possessions, while the telegraph supported these efforts by its ability to rely information in hours, not weeks. Information is what John Darwin calls ‘the invisible weapon in the European arsenal, worth thousands of troops and millions of pounds’29. (We have already seen the potential value of intelligence with Nathan Rothschild’s manipulation of the information over Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.) Of course speed of information transferral backfi red horribly in August 1914 when, as David Harvey crisply pointed out, its role in a period of ‘time-space compression’ meant that generals did not have time to think through the ramifi cations of their decisions. Decisions had to be immediate, and the consequences, sadly, were all too often fatal. With the rapid spread of the telegraph came the press agencies: Havas (Paris, 1835); Associated Press (New York, 1848); and Reuters (London, 1851). With the diffusion of information becoming a new norm, what was now needed was ‘intelligence’ or expert knowledge. Exactly the sort of thing that Saskia Sassen’s global elites are paid today to provide in Hong Kong, New York, and London. John Darwin sees the most powerful agent in the economic development of empire as the railway. Railways galvanised the zones they entered and could drive down the cost of inland transport (where no waterways existed) by up to 80 percent30. Interestingly, it was China’s ancient and, by the nineteenth century, still effi cient system of inland waterways that made railway penetration of the interi- or so very diffi cult. Darwin points out that ‘[i]n 1890 there were virtually no railways in China’31. One of imperialism’s greatest weapons was thus rendered ineffective, if not completely nullifi ed in what should have been the last great imperial scramble. Darwin also sees railway mileage as a useful index of economic integration for the time. In 1850 Western countries had more than 18,500 kilometres (24,000 miles) of railway lines; Asia, Africa, and Latin America had barely 400 kilometres (combined). By 1860 this fi gure was over 100,000 kilometres (65,000 miles) to almost 2,900 (1,800). And even by 1880, when railway-building was well under way in British India, Western countries had just under 340,000 kilometres (210,000 miles) which was ten times as much as the rest of the world put together. Even Russia, the least developed of the northern ‘super-block’, had more miles of track in 1870 than India (which had three times its population)32. Railways were undoubtedly a useful index for seeing the nineteenth century’s economic growth. The twentieth century’s was steel production, one which caused Chairman Mao to make such a cata- strophic error during the Great Leap Forward. Indices are usually a useful snapshot of development at any given time, (when used correctly that is, as an index, not an end result to be emulated, as in Mao’s case). A useful index today would probably be the number of telephones in a region, or, for more developed regions, the size of bandwidth. Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen have been at pains to point out the remarkable fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan than in all of Africa south of the Sahara. It is also interesting that the really great fortunes in different eras tend to be made by the manipulation, or facilitation, of these networks. In the nineteenth century it was the Rothschilds, with networks of information, later the Vanderbilts, with railways, and in the twentieth century it was Bill Gates, with the development of the personal computer, which of course facilitated the organising of information. What resulted from all of these networks of technological innovation was that, for the fi rst time in his-

Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 239. 107 tory, there was a global hierarchy of physical, economic, and cultural power. As John Darwin says:

[T]he world of 1900 was an imperial world: of territorial empires spreading across much of the globe; and of informal empires of trade, unequal treaties and extraterritorial privilege (for Euro- peans) - and garrisons and gunboats to enforce it - over most of the rest. Concepts of international law (invented in Europe) dismissed claims to sovereignty (and justiﬁ ed foreign intervention) unless the state concerned met a ‘standard of civilization’ that was approved in Europe.33

But as we have seen all this expansion did nothing to ease the minds of those in control, if anything it made them even more anxious. As John Darwin puts it:

The strategists were just as nervous. They saw Britain’s naval power and small professional army as dangerously overextended. Some of the most acute observers wondered whether the spread of railways had turned the tables on the great sea power. Perhaps the balance of advantage now lay with the rulers of an impregnable land mass - like Russia, the “inland tyranny” – safe from British chastisement.34

Darwin is probably onto something there, but just as he missed the connection between Colum- bus and the Atlantic Ocean’s currents, here, too, he overlooks the effect air power was to have on the maritime empires. Aerial transport simply doomed these constructions to oblivion; by 1920 their days were numbered. Something else happened in World War I that was to profoundly change the world. Until this time war was seen as a profession; military organisation throughout the nineteenth century had became increasingly professional, with the introduction in the eighteenth century of uniforms, drilling, and an offi cer corps. This is something that Michel Foucault examines in great detail in Surveiller et punir35. The innovations that had been made in the military throughout the nineteenth century were all changed by World War I, particularly the introduction of conscription. European armies had evolved throughout the nineteenth century into highly specialised ma- chines. Until the Congress of Vienna they had mainly concentrated on fi ghting one another, after 1815 they fought the rest of the world. John Darwin sees this an age of equilibrium where ‘…no power in Eu- rope was strong enough to dominate the others completely…’36, neither was any power free to embark on a career of overseas conquest without fear of challenge from a rival. In 1914 they all turned on one another, with a resulting deadlock that had to rely on unprofessional soldiers to back up their professional armies. These were men who had to be trained quickly. While interesting, this is not the key point to be noted here, World War I also saw the beginning of that most terrible of twentieth-century innovations: total war. Not only did soldiering cease to be the domain of the professional, the civilian became fair game. The sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania on 7 May 1915, with the loss of 1,198 lives, was a turning point. The fi rst in a series of ever more atrocious steps which led inexorably to the Rape of Nanking in 1937 and the bombing of Dresden in 1945. (The Germans wasted no time in attacking civilian shipping in World War II, sinking the liner Athenia within hours of Britain’s declaration of war on 3 Septem- ber 1939.) The ‘contained confl ict’ of the nineteenth century was not to be seen again until the United States started its own late-twentieth-century campaigns. One other small but telling point about the beginning of World War I was the fact that immediately the war started Britain cut Germany’s telegraph cables. The British understood the importance of ‘intelligence’, and, even more importantly, keeping the enemy starved of it. This was possibly the fi rst act of techo-warfare the world has ever seen, it also effectively ended the era of globalisation we saw

Ibid., pp. 298-299. Ibid., p. 324. Surveiller et punir, III Discipline, I. Les corps dociles, pp. 159-199. Ibid., p. 116. 108 highlighted in Part I. The global economy, however, did not vanish overnight, it tottered on until the disaster of 1929’s Wall Street Crash, and the subsequent collapse of the gold standard, it can be seen, however, as having been effectively ended when Britain cut Germany’s telegraph cables in August 1914. Finally, one small but not insignifi cant point about John Darwin’s global history of empire. While it is a very cogent analysis (despite some of the fl aws already highlighted) there is one further oversight that must be pointed out: that is his failure to mention the link that existed between the various European countries at the outbreak of World War I via their heads of state. The United Kingdom, Ger- many, and Russia may all have had very different political systems but they were all still monarchies, and their thrones were occupied by members of the same family. Britain’s King George V, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II were all fi rst cousins, descendants of Britain’s Queen Victoria (and, through her, the German princely family of Coburg – from which they inherited their fl awed haemophiliac genes). These heads of state could communicate with one another directly by the simple fact that they were members of the same family, hence bilateral relations could be facilitated between these countries via a more frequent, and more cordial, certainly less offi cial, mode of communication. Sadly, these links were not enough to head off the inevitable, and August 1914 saw the start of the war, sparked off in June of that year by the assassination of a member of another royal family: the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. From the point of view of this thesis this may not be a terribly important point, because, as we have just seen, any efforts these royal cousins may have made were ultimately ineffectual; but from the point of view of an historian compiling a global history of empire, such as John Darwin, the overlooking of a connection of such importance is an odd oversight indeed.

The end of empire It may very well be asked of the British Empire that up to about 1870 it was all very well in practice but did it work in theory? We have identifi ed Britain’s turn to imperialism as around 1871, it is surely not insignifi cant that a mere fi ve years later Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India. Since about the middle of the eighteenth century (with the obvious Napoleonic hiatus) France may have been playing second fi ddle to Britain’s imperial ambitions, but that did not mean that Britain got to play solo. France’s overseas possessions grew by a factor of twelve between 1880 and 1910 (from around 560,000 square kilometres (350,000 square miles) to 7.4 million (4.6 million)), and her population by more than sixteen times (from 3 to 50 million)37. But despite the vast scale of the French colonial empire, its economic potential was still weak. France, as John Darwin so resolutely points out, had no India to pay its imperial bills, neither did it have settler colonies to be partners in trade and war38. The British tended to scorn what they saw as the French habit of annexing a territory and only then seeing if it could be made to pay. Of course, as we have seen in J.A. Hobson’s analysis, Britain may actually have been deluding herself on that account. Simon Schama sees Britain’s overseas possessions as the ‘wrong empire’. He sees the loss of the Americas as spurring a more controlling stance in India39, a not invalid assumption. John Darwin highlights some of imperialism’s seeming contradictions by showing Britain’s Caribbean sugar colonies as being a ‘bizarre offspring of European expansion’40, because everything that was needed to make them profi table (except the soil itself) – was brought in from abroad: the capital, the management (both of which were European), the labour (African, in the form of slaves), and even the sugar plant itself, brought to the Caribbean from the Canary Islands41. This was a manifestation of the European, or perhaps the more particularly British, ability to transform an alien environment into something completely different: a facsimile of home. In

Ibid., p. 328. Ibid., p. 328. Simon Schama, ‘The Wrong Empire’, Volume 4 1689-1836, A History of Britain (DVD). John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 108. Ibid., p. 108. 109 British colonies such as Barbados and Jamaica, planters lived as they would in England, they wore wigs and woollens, ate bread and meat (mostly salted and brought in from America), and they drank – a leitmotif of colonial life that was to be seen again and again in the writings of W. Somerset Maugham, Anthony Burgess, et al. As Simon Schama dryly put it: ‘Nobody settled in the West Indies to read the Bible unmolested’42. And it was not just the drinking, this insistence on dressing as if one were at home in England was something that W. Somerset Maugham was to make much of in his stories of colonial life in British Malaya in the 1920s, and was also something that was to play an important role in the colonials’ perceived superiority. John Darwin asserts that imperialism can be defi ned as ‘the attempt to impose one state’s predominance over other societies by assimilating them to its political, cultural and economic system’43. It was carried out using a variety of political apparatuses: sometimes with direct political control, for example, the crown colonies of Hong Kong or Singapore. Often it was disguised by leaving a notionally sovereign government in place, the patchwork of princely states in British India and Malaya, with their British Residents and Advisors, are a case in point. Sometimes it led to the displacement of indigenous peoples by an infl ux of new settlers; this describes Australia and New Zealand (and America). Invariably it was intended to delimit a sphere of economic exclusion, reserving trade and investment for the imperial power. Usually it was underpinned by some spurious ‘civilising mission’, based in turn on the racist assumption of the imperial power’s inherent superiority over those it ruled. Ironically, it was not the British or French imperial spheres that contained the worse racism but the United States. France, at least offi cially, espoused liberty, equality, and fraternity for all her citizens, and did not even differentiate between the mainland and the colonies. Britain had no race laws, neither had it any anti-miscegenation ones. True, as can be seen in the writings of people like W. Somerset Maugham, intermarriage between races was frowned upon, but it was very far from being illegal, the worst that might happen is that an ‘offender’ might fi nd himself snubbed at the club (admittedly the clubs themselves did tend to have strict rules about which races they admitted). Sadly it was ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ that enshrined racial inequality into law. The race question is one that this thesis has been at pains to avoid, it is one, however, that cannot go unmentioned in any survey of late-nineteenth-century imperialism that intends to be considered comprehensive. Jane Jacobs argues that the very policies and transactions that were necessary to win, hold, and exploit empires were destructive to an imperial power’s own cities and led inevitably to their stagnation and decay44. In Jacobs’s view successful imperialism wins wealth, yet successful empires have not remained rich, (she cites Persia, Rome, Byzantium, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, France, and Britain). Indeed, Jacobs sees it as the fate of empires to become too poor to sustain the cost of running them, and the longer an empire holds together, the poorer and more economically backward it will become. Jacobs saw imperial Britain as a fabulous exporter of capital, but while this money was used to build up the empire, British cities themselves were gradually stagnating, preparing for themselves a decline so deep that, until 1984 (the date of her book’s publication), it had proved irreversible. (The revival of Brit- ain’s economy in the second half of the 1980s, and the prosperity that came with it, would have seemed most unlikely at her time of writing.) Jacobs identifi es Britain’s imperial expansion as rendering Brit- ish production sterile for import-replacement, something she identifi es as a key element in a country’s economic well-being. With a sort of garrison economy opening up, vast sums were spent on defence, and on keeping the sea lanes open, cities came to rely on either exports to backward and inert economies or on the military, both of which are situations that Jacobs shows convincingly lead to a city’s decline. According to Jacobs, ‘[a]ll the wealth of the Indies could not compensate for the stagnation and decline of Britain’s own cities’ economies. But the stagnation and decline were built right into the very transactions necessary to win, hold, administer and exploit the wealth of the Indies’45.

Simon Schama, ‘The Wrong Empire’, Volume 4 1689-1836, A History of Britain (DVD). John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 416. Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 182. Ibid., p. 198. 110 Jane Jacobs also identifi es imperial powers that held together only briefl y as being more successful, and cites Germany and Japan. She also mentions those that abruptly contracted into small home nations, like the Netherlands and Austria, as being lucky to have done so. While Jacobs’s contention that imperialism damages the cities of the metropolitan centre is perfectly correct, her analysis does not differentiate enough between different sorts of empire. It also fails to take account of the fact that China and the United States can both be thought of as imperial systems. At the time of her writing the decline of the United Kingdom’s cities may well have seemed hopeless but, as has been seen, with the changes wrought by global capitalism’s reinvention of itself in the 1970s Britain’s change from a manufacturing to a service-based economy has rendered most of Jacobs’s perfectly valid points somewhat moot. Brit- ain has made a transition to the new economy with conspicuous success, and has won for herself a place once again at the forefront of the global economy. In Jacobs’s analysis imperial systems seem to inevitably fall prey to the second law of thermody- namics, slowly winding down and feeding off themselves. World War I changed everything. As we have seen it ended an era of globalisation, and ushered in an era of total war. The treaties of Versailles, Saint- Germain-en-Laye, and Sèvres dismembered the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires and led to the creation of ten independent new countries, but it did not mean the end of empire. The British and French snapped up the former Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, while Britain also got to take over Germany’s colonies in Africa and the South Pacifi c. It may not have been the end of empire, but it was certainly the beginning of the end. The turning point came in 1929, not because of the Wall Street Crash (which dealt global capitalism a near fatal blow, and one which it only recovered from during World War II when the West was lifted out of its Depression), but because this overtly territorial phase of imperialism ended when Britain restored tariff autonomy to China in that year. The Western powers had fi nally recognised that there could be no hope of making further inroads into China, certainly not along the lines of the scramble for Africa a half-century before. The Japanese did go on to make inroads, but those, like Nazi Germany’s in Europe and North Africa, were to be short- lived. The following year, 1930, Britain returned their North China naval base Wei Hai Wei to China (the lease had expired). This handing back of Wei Hai Wei is the high-tide mark of the British Empire, a point from which it began to shrink. It was a mere seventeen years later, in 1947, that Britain allowed India independence, and the following year, Ireland became a Republic. If India was the jewel in the crown, Ireland had been the keystone in Britain’s imperial arch, with both of them gone there was in effect no more British Empire. World War II accelerated the world’s pace of change. India’s support for Britain during the War was premised on the understanding that it would be granted independence immediately the confl ict ended. With the humiliating fall of Singapore to the Japanese on 15 February 1942 (following Hong Kong and Shanghai’s respective falls the previous December) Britain’s prestige as an imperial power in Asia had evaporated. After World War II we saw an American cruiser moored at Britain’s No.1 Buoy on Shanghai’s Bund, then with the communist victory in 1949, and Shanghai trapped behind the ‘bamboo curtain’ for a generation, all the city’s talent, and wealth, and expertise fl ed to Hong Kong (along with considerable manpower). It is to Hong Kong and Singapore that we shall now turn.

111 3 HONG KONG AND SINGAPORE

In order to gain a better understanding of reform-era Shanghai, the post-socialist city, we have been looking at its history: pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial; but in order to gain a better understanding of Shanghai’s history it is perhaps benefi cial to compare it to other cities in the East-Asian region which share its colonial heritage, namely Hong Kong and Singapore. Shanghai’s authorities could learn a lot from looking at these cities’ recent histories. Both went from being colonial enclaves, one could almost say backwaters, to global cities remarkably quickly, and for the most part against great odds. We have seen how a colonial history can actually increase a city’s chances of becoming a node in the global network, Hong Kong has benefi ted from this link to empire by maintaining its Chinese and Western business connections. The city may well have all but destroyed any visible manifestations of its links to empire, which is ironic as it remained a British crown colony until so very recently (becoming a Special Administrative Region of China in 1997) but, as was argued in Part I, the stability of its judiciary as well as the probity of its civil service have stood it in good stead (and here the city has a distinct advantage over Shanghai). For the fi rst century of its existence Hong Kong was the poor relation to its colonial cousins Shanghai and Singapore. Shanghai was, after all, the gateway to China, whereas Singapore was the entrepot for British Malaya (with all its tin and rubber, Malaya was one of the richest colonies in the Brit- ish Empire in the run up to World War II). Hong Kong, as we have seen, really only came into its own after 1949, when Shanghai vanished behind the ‘bamboo curtain’. Hong Kong found its position further enhanced when Singapore was expelled from the Malay Federation in 1965 (cut off from its traditional hinterland, the city-state was forced to reinvent itself). Singapore was not founded in the usual way of cities, at least according to novelist J.G. Farrell. In Farrell’s novel The Singapore Grip he points to the fact that there was no gradual accretion of commercial activity along the banks of the Singapore River, instead the city came into being virtually overnight because of an unusually able colonial administrator, Thomas Stamford Raffl es (later knighted for his efforts), who decided that Britain needed a ‘manufactory’ halfway between India and China. Raffl es looked at a map and decided on the island of Singapore as the perfect place for such a base. The British had been looking for a foothold in the region after they were forced to relinquish control of the Dutch East Indies (which they had administered while the Netherlands was occupied by Napoleon’s armies). Raffl es negotiated a series of treaties with local rulers culminating on the 6 February 1819 when the island of Singapore was ceded to the British in perpetuity. Raffl es, along with his Irish architect George Drumgoole Coleman, then drew up a town plan which, as we have already seen, dividing the city into different enclaves based on race. Like most colonial cities, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore were developed in a way that can be called parthenogenetic1, i.e. a Western footprint imprinted on or next to an older Asian city (Shanghai and Hong Kong both had walled Chinese settlements). Singapore’s colonial core is still relatively intact, certainly when compared to Hong Kong’s, and it is from Singapore’s longer-established tradition of rehabilitation and reuse of colonial-era buildings that Shanghai may well be able to learn something. Manuel Castells has identifi ed the towering fi gure of Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (in offi ce from 1959 to 1990), as ‘inventing a society out of nowhere, and making it the historical proof of the superiority of “Asian values”’2, a project Castells suggests Lee ‘probably dreamed in his Oxford years, as a nationalist without a nation’3. Actually Lee went to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, not Oxford, but this does not alter Castells’s point that it was while Lee was in the United

‘Parthenogensis’ is a biological term referring to a method of reproduction, usually that of ants or bees, for populating a colony by means of a fertile queen. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 305. Ibid., p. 305. 112 Kingdom that he ‘rediscovered Victorian England, with its cult of moral virtues, its obsession with cleanliness, its abhorrence of the undeserving poor, its belief in education, and in the natural superiority of the few highly educated’4. Castells is correct to point out that this is the moral tone that continues to permeate and infl uence Singapore’s political culture and institutions today. It is probably more balanced to add, however, that the infl uence of a brutal but effi cient criminal justice system imposed on Singapore during the Japanese occupation during World War II is what really underscores Lee’s views on strict punishment as effective in reducing crime, as Lee says in his memoirs, ‘[p]unishment was so severe that crime was very rare’, and he goes on to add, ‘[a]s as result I have never believed those who advocate a soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime. This was not my experience in Singapore before the war, during the Japanese occupation, or subsequently’5. A policy which, while it may have reduced crime at home, has probably done more harm than good to the city- state’s image abroad. Castells points out that Singapore and Hong Kong both created ‘an Asian version of the British welfare state, centered around public housing and social services’6, with the public housing estates playing a fundamental role in social integration. Hong Kong’s public housing acted as a de facto citizenship for its largely immigrant working class whereas Singapore’s social engineering used vehicles such as the Housing Development Board (HDB) and the development of new towns in helping to diffuse ethnic tensions. By independence in 1965 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffl es’s town plan had outlived its usefulness. The city had become something of a non-entity, the abandoned military outpost of a defunct British Empire, an entrepot cut off from its traditional hinterland (Malaysia), and a society riven by race riots. It was also in real danger of being annexed by Indonesia, who even instigated a terror campaign when Singapore joined the Malay Federation in 1963. Known as the Confrontasi, this campaign resulted in a number of bombings in the city. As Castells correctly points out, Singapore could quite easily have become another Sri Lanka. Singapore did not receive much aid in its early years, what it did benefi t from was the oil and ship-repairing industries that sprung up in the wake of American military involvement in Vietnam. This happy conjunction of regional proximity to, and political support for, an American involvement in the confl ict ensured Singapore’s survival. The fact that it also had a hard-headed, business-minded government was another crucial factor. Yet despite all that talent and drive, Singapore, without the enviable geographical position that had led Raffl es to found the city in the fi rst place, could well have disappeared as an independent political entity. Geopolitics, according to Manuel Castells, provided the grounds by which the politics of survival became successful developmental policies, and which paved the way for one of the tiger economies that so startled the world at the end of the twentieth century. This is yet another reminder of the important link between colonial networks and global cities: both depend to a large extent on their geographical position. A city’s ability to compete at a global level needs to have some basis on geography otherwise it may never prove to be viable. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai all occupy the most enviable of geographical positions, and it is this, more than anything else, that has ensured their continued success. Singapore continues to baffl e Manuel Castells. He sees it as different from the other tiger economies (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea) in that it has no civil society. The state seems to be as powerful and as active as ever, with authoritarian politics, strict controls on information, and a tight rein on the steering and monitoring of development. He scornfully dismisses the naïve view that the disci- plined, effi cient, and relatively cheap labour forces that have enabled these tiger economies to develop so spectacularly come from ‘the supposedly submissive nature of Asian labor’7, which he sees, correctly, as a plainly racist statement. Neither does he believe that it comes from Confucianism (neo- or other-

Ibid., pp. 305-306. Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story, p.74. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 292. Ibid., p. 281. 113 wise). (We have already seen Peter G. Rowe draw our attention to the role Confucianism (or at least neo-Confucianism) has played in Asian society.) While Castells admits that it explains ‘the high value placed on education, and therefore the high quality of labor once the state provides the conditions for access to education’8, he goes on to say that it ‘does not explain subordination since, in Confucian philosophy, authority must be legitimate, and exercised in legitimate ways, or else it should be resisted. Indeed, the long history of popular uprisings in China, as well as the tradition of revolutionary working-class movements in Shanghai and Canton, contradicts such ill-informed, ideological statements’9. This is obviously a reference to the Confucian notion of the ‘mandate of heaven’, whereby an emperor’s, or a dynasty’s, right to rule can be called into question, or even overthrown. While this is not an incorrect reading, it is somewhat less than convincing. That is not to say that there have not been ‘popular uprisings in China’ or ‘revolutionary working-class movements in Shanghai and Canton’ – indeed, the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions will be highlighted in Part IV, and we have already seen the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai – what is of concern is Castells’s trying to explain this so-called Asian subordination by being too quick to dismiss the role of Confucianism, especially when he then immediately turns around and tries to make use of it himself in justifying his own subsequent arguments. Quite apart from the dangers inherent in attempting to have it both ways, if Confucianism is going to be used as an argument then the least a commentator can do is deﬁ ne what they understand by the term. That, and the fact that Castells fails to even mention the mandate of heaven, seriously undermines whatever it is he was trying to say.

Hong Kong Hong Kong changed dramatically after 1949. As a consequence of the Communist victory in China, with money and expertise ﬂ ooding in from Shanghai, as well as manpower from southern China, the city’s segue into a manufacturing centre seemed a logical choice. Hong Kong, as it remained a British crown colony, was able to export not only to the British Commonwealth, but it also received a degree of support from the United Kingdom that Manuel Castells sees as decisive in securing export quotas for its early penetration of world markets. Castells also points out, again correctly, that it was the colony’s ‘role vis-à-vis China, together with its economic success, that prevented Hong Kong from joining the decolonization process, since neither the United Kingdom nor China could accept its independence’10. Hong Kong become a British Crown Colony in 1843, expanded its territory signiﬁ cantly under the terms of a lease in 1898, and reverted to China in 1997. Castells is somewhat less than correct when he states that ‘…the territory is now fully part of China’11, actually it is a Special Administrative Region, with a Beijing-appointed Chief Executive who must at least take note of the wishes of the democratically elected Legislative Council. This anomaly, in a China ruled by a Communist Party, has earned the territory the rubric of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (something we saw Ackbar Abbas comment on earlier), and which will remain in place until 2047. Abbas also maintains that any discussion of Hong Kong’s culture must ‘sooner or later raise the question of its relation to colonialism’12, he sees the history of Hong Kong as a history of colonialism, something that is of central relevance to understanding what the city has become today. Both Hong Kong and Shanghai came into being as colonial entities as a result of the First Opium War (1839-42), and the Treaty of Nanking which ended it. Hong Kong, unlike Shanghai, was largely uninhabited, being described by Lord Palmerston (Britain’s Prime Minister at the time) as ‘a barren is-

Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., p. 279. Ibid., p. 321. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 1. 114 land which will never be a mart of trade’13. Located at the point where the Pearl River debouches into the South China Sea it was established by Captain Elliot as a safe haven for British trade after the diffi culties they, and other foreign traders, had experienced in Canton (Guangzhou); diffi culties that had sparked off the Opium War in the fi rst place. Captain Elliot’s choice was not immediately appreciated, in fact he was pilloried for insisting on such paltry spoils after so decisive a victory, it was only later that the wisdom of his choice began to be perceived. Hong Kong possesses not only a magnifi cent natural harbour, it was also, according to Peter G. Rowe, ‘suffi ciently far afi eld from Guangzhou, as well as Portuguese Macau, to be defensible and a potential staging post for further naval operations’14. Initially consisting of the Island of Hong Kong and the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, the colony expanded into the New Territories under the terms of a lease foisted upon the Chinese in 1898. This was the result of concerns over the colony’s defence in the wake of the United States’s successful annexation of the Philippines earlier that year (until that time a Spanish colony). The capture of Manila had been ef- fected in May that year by the United States Navy operating out of Mirs Bay, which was seen as being too close to Hong Kong for comfort. Fear of French and Russian aggrandisement in the Far East was also a factor. According to G.B. Endacott, the French, after their acquisition of Tongking following the Sino-French War (1884-85), were threatening to control the whole of China’s southern provinces15, this was then followed by the surprise of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1893 (also a crucial step on the road to World War I). Germany was also perceived as a threat; although a small one, it was one more factor in an increasingly unstable regional equation. Japan too, after the defeat of China in the war of 1894-95, and the subsequent the Treaty of Shi- monoseki, had become a power in the region. Intervention by Russia, France, and Germany deprived Ja- pan of most of the spoils of this war (with Russia securing for herself the valuable railway concessions in Manchuria). Germany then occupied Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) in November 1897 and secured a 99-year lease on it the following March. Russia went on to occupy Port Arthur (Lushunkou) and to control the Liaodong Peninsula, while France secured the lease of Kwangchowan (Guangzhouwan) on the Kwang- tung (Guangdong) coast, with the right to build a railway from Tongking (Tonkin in Vietnam) to Yun- nan as well as other concessions from China. Britain’s wish to consolidate her position in Hong Kong was not vitiated by any concerns over what the Chinese might do, rather it was in response to rivalry between these other great powers. Britain also, at this time, secured the lease of Wei Hai Wei (in April 1898), the port which, as we have seen earlier, can be identifi ed as the high-tide mark of her empire. Un- der the terms of the lease of 1 July 1898, Hong Kong’s boundary was extended by 570 square kilometres (355 square miles), however, the crucial difference with the Treaty of 1842 was the fact that control of this vast new area was to revert to China after a period of 99 years16. Ackbar Abbas maintains that Hong Kong’s history is one of shock and radical change. He sees Hong Kong citizens’ lack of sentiment for the past as a protection against these historical traumas. And yet history does exist in Hong Kong, ‘if not in surviving monuments or written records, then in the jostling anachronisms and spatial juxtapositions that are seen on every street; that is, history is inscribed in spatial relations’17. Abbas is interested in investigating a specifi c cultural space in Hong Kong that he feels can be evoked through the discussion of cultural forms and practices; this is something that shall be dealt with in Part IV of this thesis, it is enough to mention here Abbas’s work in highlighting the important link between Hong Kong, as a colonial enclave, and Hong Kong the global city, which serves to reinforce the point made earlier in Part I about colonial networks being a useful foundation for global ones. Ackbar Abbas sees a strange dialectic between autonomy and dependency in Hong Kong’s relations with both Britain and China. The end of British rule and the handing back of sovereignty

Quoted in Peter G. Rowe’s, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 49. Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 49. G.B. Endacott, A History of Hong Kong, p. 260. Ibid., pp. 260-269. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 26. 115 to the Chinese was not a simple matter of returning a Chinese territory to the Chinese. Abbas sees Hong Kong’s colonial history as distancing the territory culturally and politically from the mainland, making their relationship anything but a simple reuniﬁ cation. Abbas sees what happened in Hong Kong as ‘a postcoloniality that precede[d] decolonization’18. He quite brilliantly deconstructs the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ formula by terming it as two systems (i.e. socialistic and capitalistic) that have become uniﬁ ed in the nexus of the territory of Hong Kong as ‘one system [but] at different stages of development’19. As he presciently points out:

Postcoloniality does not take the physical departure of the colonial power (or even the subject’s own departure) as its point of origin, just as colonialism in its effects does not end with the signing of a treaty. Postcoloniality begins, indeed it has already begun, when subjects ﬁ nd themselves thinking and acting in a certain way; in other words, postcoloniality is a tactic and a practice, not a legal-political contract, nor a historical accident.20

Ackbar Abbas examines Hong Kong cinema in his exploration of the culture of disappearance that exists in the territory, with the work of serious auteurs such as Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Allen Fong, John Woo, Stanley Kwan, and Wong Kar-wai, as well as some more popular local efforts. He sees the use of mainstream forms in Hong Kong cinema as ‘…not necessarily a sign of intellectual inertia or of pandering to the masses. It is more a sign of the slippery nature of Hong Kong’s cultural space’21. This is something that we shall be returning to at the end of Part IV when Shanghai’s recent portrayal in fi lm and literature will be examined. Shanghai has yet to establish a name for itself in the medium, however, it is increasingly being profi led in international cinema with fi lms such as The Painted Veil (a re-adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham novel, where the action has been moved from the Hong Kong of the book to Shanghai), The White Countess, the screenplay of which was written by Kazuo Ishiguro (whose novel When We Were Orphans will form the main focus of the last chapter of Part IV), and Lust, Caution, among others. Hong Kong is a global city, and, as we have seen earlier in David R. Meyer’s analysis, global cities are where decision makers, operating in local and inter-urban social networks, congregate. They do this because the ‘need to control and co-ordinate increasingly complex exchange requires that actors specialise, thus intensifying the need to communicate sophisticated information, often through face-to- face exchange’22. Intermediaries are forced ‘…to build transactions on trust in order to minimise risks of exchange across international boundaries; and they do this through friendship, family, ethnic, or religious ties’23. And as we have seen before ‘[t]he world city system always has had a network foundation; modern telematics, while permitting instantaneous communication of vast amounts of information, has not created a network system where none existed before’24. These social networks are the fundamental governing structure of these exchanges, and the intermediaries who use them require face-to-face contact to acquire their information, develop their strategies, and acquire trustworthy partners. According to Meyer, Hong Kong operates the largest teleport in Asia, and the Hong Kong government has been more the facilitator of development than the formal director of it. As we have seen, Hong Kong has the greatest array of fi bre-optic international cables of any metropolis in Asia, Oceania, North America, and Europe, and its satellite contacts permit global reach. Just another of the many reasons why Shanghai will have its work cut out for it if it is to be taken seriously as a competitor to Hong

Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 20 (italics in original). David R. Meyer, ‘Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange’ in Global Networks, Linked Cities, Saskia Sas- sen, ed., p. 249. Ibid., p. 251. Ibid., p. 252. 116 Kong. However, the main point that must be made here is that the construction or improvement of information and communication-technology networks cannot substitute for social networks, and what facilitated these social networks, the stability of the business environment, the investment in infrastructure, and the adherence to international standards of business law, was the fact that they were all founded by the British in Hong Kong, and as such are the foundations upon which the territory’s global pre-eminence today has been built. Manuel Castells sees this as being the result of what he calls an administrative class, a small group of elite civil servants who were recruited by the colonial and civil services in Britain, and who generally attended the better colleges such as those in Oxford and Cambridge. This was a class with ‘strong social and ideological cohesion, shared professional interests and cultural values, that seems to have controlled power within the Hong Kong state for most of the history of the Colony’25, they exercised their power the better to facilitate the interests of Hong Kong’s business community, a group which enjoyed far greater freedom in its operations than most others in the international capitalist system of the second half of the twentieth century. A fact which is perfectly illustrated in the novels of James Clavell, particularly Noble House. According to Manuel Castells, this administrative class’s interest in relation to the future of Hong Kong was twofold:

[T]o maintain the Colony in the midst of the turmoil of decolonization and the threatening stands of the British Labour party; and to show the world that the Colonial Service, on behalf of what was left of the tradition of the British Empire, was more able than any other political institution (including the new independent national states) to ensure the prosperity of the new Asian world, including to a large extent the well-being of its people, in a paternalistic attitude that evokes the historical precedent of ‘enlightened despotism’.26

Although Castells is quick to point out that his ethnographic material on the subject is

[T]oo unsystematic to be conclusive, it did convince [Castells] that the dedication and effectiveness of the elite Colonial Civil Service of Hong Kong was tantamount to the last hurrah of the British Empire. The ‘Hong Kong cadets’ aimed at building Hong Kong’s prosperity as an ideological monument to the historic memory of the lost Empire, while also taking care of their retirement years, in England.27

This assessment is sound, furthermore, it could be seen as being reinforced by Ibn Warraq’s more recent analysis of the Indian civil service, both prior to, and after, independence from Britain in 1947 (something that shall be mentioned in Part III when looking at Warraq’s critique of Edward W. Said’s work). Hong Kong’s civil service was the perfect vehicle for a symbiotic dovetailing of Chinese and British business expertise, and as a service itself could perhaps be seen as echoing the golden age of China’s own merit-based, neo-Confucian civil service which reached a peak of efﬁ ciency in the late- Ming and early-Qing Dynasties.

Singapore One would expect a degree of continuity in Hong Kong’s colonial civil service, after all the territory only recently ceased to be a British colony. Singapore’s civil service, however, has also enjoyed a remarkable degree of continuity, although it achieved a staggered independence as long ago as the 1960s (from Britain in 1963, and thence from the Malay Federation – from which it was expelled in 1965). Singapore has remained a staunch member of the British Commonwealth, and was a British

Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 288. Ibid., p. 288. Ibid., pp. 288-289. 117 military base until the 1970s. In fact Singapore was reluctant to see the British armed forces leave as they had been a useful source of income for the impoverished city-state, particularly after it found itself cut off from its traditional Malay hinterland. Singapore has been only too happy to continue the proud traditions of its civil service, judiciary, and parliamentary democracy, and, unusually for a postcolonial city, has continued to venerate its British founder, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffl es. Hong Kong, despite being a crown colony until 1997, seems to have had no qualms about cutting the visible trappings of colonialism, certainly it has done so to a much greater extent than Singapore – this is Abbas’s ‘culture of disappearance’. There seems to have been no emotional attachment to these trappings in Hong Kong, merely a canny use of their networks to enable business in the colony to survive and prosper. The colonial-era buildings may have gone from Hong Kong but the institutions they once housed are still very much in place. And are still working, as they always have done. This they do by working closely with the less visible but equally effective Chinese networks. Singapore was founded, as we have seen, in 1819. It was a port city strategically located close to the old Portuguese-Dutch settlement of Malacca, and straddling the narrow shipping passage linking the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. An Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 partitioned the Malay archipelago into British and Dutch spheres of infl uence (roughly approximating the countries of Malaysia and Indonesia today), and effectively ending the struggle for control of the Indian Ocean which had begun with the Seven Years War (1756-63), leaving Britain as the regional hegemon. Britain had acquired Prince of Wales Island (Penang) from Siam (now Thailand) in 1786, and Malacca from the Dutch in 1795. This was followed by Mauritius (from the French) in 1810. When Raffl es arrived on the island, the population of Singapore was around one thousand, mostly Malay, but with some Chinese, Bugis, and Orang Laut. There were some fi shing villages, but no settlement of any importance. Early Singapore was divided along racial lines and consisted of, in Peter G. Rowe’s words, a ‘settlement in the form of a necklace like string of communities stretching along 1.6 km of the coastline and dominated by the European town, refl ecting the Palladianism that was rife in England at the time’28. Perhaps ‘rife’ is not the pleasantest word to use for a style that is so elegant, and one which is so well suited to the tropical climate, but as a style it was certainly popular, and was undeniably an alien intervention in South-East Asian urbanism. Raffl es’s plan stipulated a European town to be laid out to the east of the government enclave, with the rest of the different Asian races that formed the population of Singapore allotted each their own area. The Chinese got the south bank of the Singapore River, the shape of which was supposed to lend it favourable feng shui, the Malay sultan, the erstwhile ruler of the island, was allocated approximately 22 hectares (56 acres) in Kampong Gelam, to the east of the European town (where the architect Coleman built him a handsome mansion), Arab traders occupied a kampung located between Kampong Gelam and the European settlement. While the Indians, who arrived later, some of whom were convict labour, were settled in the area that became known as Little India, to the north-west of Kampong Gelam. Singapore immediately experienced impressive growth, its status as a free-trade port, coupled with its strategic location, made it an ideal link between the Pacifi c and Indian Oceans, it also acted as the entrepot for the produce of the Malay Peninsula, initially tin, then coffee, and fi nally the hugely lucrative rubber trade. For these very reasons Singapore always outshone Hong Kong, and by 1903 had become the seventh largest port in the world, with its population doubling between 1900 and 1930 (rising from 225,000 to around 550,000)29. Chinese were attracted by the business opportunities the colony provided, although they had been settling on the Malay Peninsula for centuries. Their intermarriage with local Malays had resulted in a rich hybrid culture known as Peranakan (Malay for ‘born locally’), with the women known as Nyonyas and men Babas. They created a sophisticated and infl uential society, known for their shrewd business acumen and opulent lifestyles. The golden age of the Peranakans was the

Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 47. Ibid., p. 60. 118 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period when their upper classes assimilated easily into British colonial society, embracing Western ideas and evolving their own Malay dialect. The beginning of the twentieth century also saw a gradual substitution of their language by the Hokkien dialect and the conversion of many Peranakans from Buddhism to Christianity. One of their most enduring legacies is their spicy cuisine, the result of the blending of Chinese and local Malay ingredients, another is the colourful shophouses in which they lived and worked.

The Singapore shophouse The Singapore shophouse contained one great innovation, credited as Raffl es’s invention, the ‘fi ve-foot-way’. Basically a covered passageway running along the front of the building which provided shelter from the elements. Widely constructed throughout Southeast Asia, even today, the shophouse, as its name suggests, is a business premises with living accommodation overhead. The Singapore version of it was built between 1820 and the 1960s, when changes in the city-state’s social make-up rendered it obsolete. Traditionally it was about fi ve metres wide (the length of felled timber typically available), and the fi ve-foot-way which ran across its front was about 1.5 metres deep. The Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has identifi ed fi ve distinct shophouse styles: in roughly chronological order they are, Early, First-Transitional, Late, Second-Transitional, and Art Deco. Different parts of the city have their own individual twists on the classic three-storey, three-bay design, and it was Little India that had the most fl amboyant. They tended to be painted in very gay colours as Figure 20. Cut-away isometric of an the Chinese, Malays, and Peranakans all loved bright colour – Early Style shophouse, Singapore the black and white beloved of the British for their bungalows (source: Chinatown Historic District, would have been anathema to these groups as they were (Singapore Urban Redevelopment Au- associated with mourning, particularly for the Chinese. thority), p.46) According to Brenda S.A. Yeoh, the shophouse accounted at one time for more than half the dwellings in Singapore’s municipal area30. The reason the typology ceased to be built is probably dearth of space. Government policy since independence has preferred denser land-usage than a two- or three-storey shophouse could provide; it was also rehousing most of the city’s population in Housing Development Board (HDB) tower blocks in new towns around the island. The fi ve-foot-way was a brilliant innovation, Brenda S.A. Yeoh cites Raffl es as decreeing in 1822 that ‘each house should have a verandah of a certain depth open at all times as a continued and covered passage on each side of the street’31. This was done to secure a degree of uniformity, regularity and effi ciency in the usage of space in the newly established town. As has been seen in Part I, the colonial municipal authorities maintained that the fi ve-foot-way should be an unobstructed public space for pedestrians seeking protection from the tropical heat, torrential rains, and the disorderly congestion of the street traffi c, and this they enforced by means of bylaws. The word ‘verandah’, like ‘bungalow’, was originally introduced into the English language in India where it came from the Hindi (varanda), Bengali (baranda), and modern Sanskrit (baranda). Yeoh

Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 143. Quoted in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment, p. 245. 119 maintains, however, that all these words were adaptations of the Portuguese version of an older Spanish word, varanda, which means railing, balustrade, or balcony32. In colonial Singapore, the term ‘verandah’ is more often used to refer to the continuous open pillared portico around colonial bungalows; the arcade that runs across the front of a shophouse is invariably referred to as a ‘fi ve-foot-way’. The fi ve-foot-way acted as a pavement, an almost unknown luxury before 1800 even in most European cities, the fact that it was covered also provided an additional degree of comfort in a tropical climate. This covered walkway was also a feature in some European cities, with examples in Turin, Paris, and England (for example, the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, and the Rows in Chester and the Butterwalk in Dartmouth)33. By the late-nineteenth century, the Singapore fi ve-foot-way had become, as we have seen, a contested space. The blurring of public and private that resulted from its ambiguous location at the nexus of public thoroughfare and private retail space led to a confl ict between shop owners and the municipal authorities, culminating in what became known as the ‘Veranda Riots’ in February 188834. These were a confrontation between the municipal authorities and the shopkeepers over the right to use one particular element of public space – the fi ve-foot-way – but which rapidly escalated into a battle for control over the public streets and spaces of the city. The riots only ended when the authorities were forced to adopt a much less stringent defi nition of what constituted a public right of way. As we have also seen in Part I, the Chinese tend to draw less clear distinctions between what constitutes public and private than do Europeans. Those who could afford larger houses were able to avail themselves of the system of graduated privacy typical of the siheyuan or courtyard house as inhabitants and visitors moved from the street into the heart of the house. In the Singapore shophouse this transition was rapid, consisting simply of the narrow fi ve-foot-way. As Yeoh notes, ‘the notion of a boundary between the “private” house and the “public” street was always real and acknowledged, [but] it tended to become less elaborate as wealth decreased’35. Singapore’s Asian communities tended to see the fi ve-foot-way in an ambivalent light, as a space capable of accommodating more than one use at any given time; as such it was neither rigidly ‘public’ nor ‘private’, but suffi ciently elastic to allow for the co-existence of different defi nitions of use. In other words, it was as much a place as a passage. The municipal authorities tried to strip it down to one simple function, that of circulation, (which would have rendered them sterile, like the Modernist-inspired plazas in front of skyscrapers mentioned earlier), this would have meant few people would ever linger on them. The municipal authorities saw the fi ve-foot- way as a space to move through not a place to be in. The fi ve-foot-way may have survived the riots of 1888 with its dynamism and vibrancy intact, even enhanced, sadly it was to face another, even more serious challenge in the middle of the twentieth century: that of destruction. We have already seen the massive rehousing of Singapore’s population in the new towns undertaken by the Housing Development Board immediately after independence in 1965, the corollary of this was the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s attempts to clear the city centre of slums, replacing them for the most part with massive high-rise HBD housing blocks identical to those being constructed in the suburbs and new towns. The shophouse was perceived as being unnecessary, outmoded, and unhygienic. Signifi cant portions of the city centre were destroyed, and not just shophouses, but banks, department stores, government buildings, hotels, and schools all considered to have outlived their usefulness were razed as well. This destruction came to a head with the demolition of the Raffl es Institution in the 1980s. This was Singapore’s premier boys’ school, and had been founded by Raffl es himself. Housed in a cluster of low-rise neoclassical buildings, of no great architectural distinction, their destruction nonetheless provoked an outcry. The government took note and from that time on has made an effort to rehabilitate and reuse the city’s existing buildings. There have been some good and imaginative reuses made of the shophouse, often by foreigners

Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 271, endnote 13. Ibid., p. 272, endnote 18. Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 247. 120 (the ‘foreign talent’ the city so abundantly attracts). This destruction of colonial heritage would normally be seen as a typically postcolonial reaction where these sorts of buildings were seen as reminders of colonial oppression (as was the case with the Georgian buildings of Ireland, as shown earlier), but in Singapore’s case this was anything but the case, the city, as we have seen, actively embraces its colonial past. What probably happened here was a Western-inspired desire for a Modernist-style effi ciency in urban planning which has resulted in the destruction of large parts of a city centre that was perceived as being outdated. Fortu- nately it was stopped before it became too late. Singapore still has a relatively intact colonial core, unlike Hong Kong, which has altered itself beyond all recognition. Shanghai, too, has a relatively intact colonial core, with municipal authorities beginning to understand the value this architectural heritage can bring to a city. This part of the investigation began with the idea that Shanghai could learn from Figure 21. Plan of alleyway house cluster, Beijing Singapore’s more established pattern of reha- Road West (source: Lao Shanghai Shikumen, p.15) bilitation and reuse for colonial-era buildings. The shophouse, however, can never be an effective model for the alleyway house due to one simple reason: the different land-use pattern that obtain in these two cities. Singapore has a straightforward grid of streets and roadways, Shanghai, as we have seen, consists of blocks of alleyway houses, containing few entrances, invariably gated, and with many dead-ends. Despite some superfi cial architectural resemblances between these two typologies: the similarity of their respective widths and heights, their use of Western neoclassical detailing, etc., the alleyway house is a completely different typology from the shophouse. The semi-private/semi-public alleyway onto which the alleyway house faces is always a step or two removed from the public street, a degree of graduated privacy that the shophouse has never enjoyed. And as a generator of social and family life the alleyway house’s very success depended on this matrix of connections that the alleyway enabled; again something the shophouse never had. Both typologies may have been designed as private family homes, but the Singapore shophouse always had a more overtly commercial aspect, and it could simply never compete with the alleyway house for the sheer vibrancy and richness of the street life it engendered. Of course, as we have just seen, the fi ve-foot-way did provide a certain blurring of indoor and outdoor, public and private, but it never blossomed into the rich social life that Shanghai’s alleyways possessed. Whatever shortcomings the shophouse may have had vis-à-vis the alleyway house in social terms, it is these very shortcomings that Figure 22. Plan of alleyway have been the reason it has been able to be rehabilitated and reused so houses (source: Lao Shang- effectively. The majority of these premises can easily be adapted for re- hai Shikumen, p.17) use as a family home, or as an offi ce or retail or entertainment outlet in a way that the labyrinthine alleyway house can never be. Basically, Singapore’s shophouses are located on a grid of streets whereas Shanghai’s blocks of alleyway houses can be likened to a tree structure, with branches growing ever smaller the farther away they are from the trunk (i.e. the main road), and ending at the house itself. The pedestrian has no option

121 but to retrace their steps if they want to access the roadway again. This is nothing like Singapore where virtually any shophouse can be easily accessed from practically any roadway, they all enjoy more or less the same level of accessibility, which makes them more readily reusable. Shanghai’s alleyway houses are organised in such a strict hierarchy of accessibility that they can never be reused in the Singapore manner.

Figure 23. Plan of Singapore city centre (source: Periplus Editions [HK] Ltd.)

122 Conclusion to Part II

Part II of this thesis has dealt with colonialism, noting that Shanghai has been able to benefi t from its colonial history in its attempts to rejoin the global city network. Symbolism has long played an important role in Chinese cities’ shapes, and the fact that pre-colonial Shanghai was round serves to highlight the low-class status its merchant inhabitants were accorded in imperial China. In post-colonial terms 1943 saw the revocation of Shanghai’s treaty-port status and 1949 saw the city disappear behind the ‘bamboo curtain’. In examining the differences between colonialism and imperialism we saw John Darwin’s tracing of Britain’s imperial trajectory by highlighting that country’s remarkable economic growth in the nineteenth century, particularly the use of steam and coal, and the fact that the country was ruled by a commercially minded ruling class. That Britain was able to amass such a vast empire resulted not only from the new technologies engendered by this phenomenal economic growth, but also from the century of peace that was enjoyed after the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Air travel had a devastating effect on the maritime empires in the twentieth century, with the result that only two imperial systems are still in existence today, both land-based ones: the United States and China. The high-tide mark of the British Empire was identifi ed as being 1929, not because of the Wall Street Crash but because Britain restored tariff autonomy to China that year, and with the hand back of Wei Hai Wei the following year their vast empire began to shrink. Part II also looked at Hong Kong and Singapore, where we saw Ackbar Abbas’s ‘one system at different stages of development’ in the former, and Manuel Castells’s administrative class of elite Oxford and Cambridge civil servants who have so successfully served the business interests of both cities. It was also noted that without the enviable geographical position enjoyed by both of these cities, neither would have been developed in the fi rst place. A useful comparison was drawn between Shanghai’s alleyway house and the Singapore shophouse, particularly the latter’s fi ve-foot-way, where we saw the ease of access to the shophouse contrast starkly with the tree-like structure of the alleyway house, which meant it was ruled out as a viable model for rehabilitation and reuse. This section was not intended to be an apology for empire, simply an honest assessment of the histories of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The British Empire left in its wake the use of the English language, the rule of law, an elite civil service, not to mention the valuable infrastructural networks that underpin Saskia Sassen’s global cities. The French Empire did more or less the same thing, although the use of French is now less signifi cant internationally (this, however, is only a post-World War II phenomenon). People are very quick to dismiss the overtly racist assumptions of the cultural impositions of the imperial era: the ‘white man’s burden’ and the mission civilisatrice, yet if we take France as an example, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, we have the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé; the writings of Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Renan, Michelet, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Daudet, Zola, Leautaud; then there were the composers such as Saint-Saens and Bizet; and painters like Monet, Manet, Renoir, Courbet, Delacroix, Degas, et al. While arrogance is never a pleasant feature, it is only fair to point out that with artists of that calibre France can perhaps be forgiven for being proud of its culture.

123 PART III MICHEL FOUCAULT

[A]nimals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classifi cation, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fi ne camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like fl ies. Jorge Luis Borges, from a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’1.

In this section Michel Foucault’s theories of space and power relations are applied to the built environment of Shanghai, particularly the alleyway house. First of all a little background information will be given about Michel Foucault, as well as the intellectual climate in which he was writing (namely the transition from Structuralism to Poststructuralism). Taking certain specifi c texts of Foucault as the point of departure, primarily Discipline and Punish, where his theories of power relations are so specifi cally and so spatially articulated, we will then go on to look at The History of Sexuality, Volume I, An Intro- duction, as well as some of his other writings as they have appeared in various anthologies, (for example, Power/Knowledge, etc.). Use will also be made of some of the lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France in the 1970s, particularly Security, Territory, Population, as well as some of the interviews he gave (bearing in mind that in France, unlike in the Anglo-American academic tradition, the interview tends to be regarded as a de facto publication). Use will also be made, for the most part, of English translations of Michel Foucault’s writings, however, for some of his more important points it is felt that it might be better to revert to the French originals, to ensure that nothing has been ‘lost in translation’. It is this notion of translation that will be returned to later in Part III as it paves the way to the subsequent and fi nal part of the thesis, Part IV, where even greater emphasis is placed on the diffi culties of (in this case) ‘transliterating’ Western concepts into the Chinese language. Finally, to add to Michel Foucault’s justly famous methodologies of ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’, a third method has been developed in this research, namely ‘consanguinity’. Unlike archaeology and genealogy, which deal with the dead and the buried, consanguinity is primarily concerned with the living. It investigates the links between different social, business, and familial networks in Shanghai’s urban environment. This notion of consanguinity further represents the attempt to side-step the diffi culties that have beset so many of those who have attempted to make use of Michel Foucault’s theories in the past. This phenomenon is known as the ‘toolkit’ approach, and is one that is fraught with danger. In this regard Edward W. Said’s Orientalism will be highlighted, a wonderful work of literary criticism, but as a usage of Foucault’s theory of discourse a sadly unbalanced polemic. In an attempt to give a more balanced appraisal of some other Foucauldian commentators some of the more successful attempts at applying his theories will also be highlighted, notably Brenda S.A. Yeoh, whom we have seen already in our discussion of the Singapore shophouse, and David Grahame Shane, whose analysis of Hong Kong’s (now demolished) Kowloon Walled City is an excellent and apposite use of the theory of the heterotopia.

Quoted in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, p. XV. 124 1 POSTSTRUCTURALISM

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher who tried to show that basic ideas, normally taken as permanent truths about human beings and their society, change over the course of history. He was born in Poitiers, the son of a doctor, and educated at Paris. He attained a professorship at the Collège de France in 1970: History of Systems of Thought. His work explored the shifting patterns of power within society and the ways in which it relates to the self. He also studied how everyday practices enable people to defi ne their identities and systemise knowledge. His thinking is generally considered to have developed in three distinct stages. In 1961 Madness and Civilisation was published (as Histoire de la Folie à l’âge classique, it was translated into English in 1967), this was followed by The Birth of the Clinic (published in 1963 as Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical, and translated in 1973) where he traced changes in Western attitudes to madness. His second stage produced The Order of Things (published in 1966 as Les mots et les choses, translated 1970) and its sequel The Archaeology of Knowledge was published in 1969 as L’Archéologie du savoir (translated 1972). His last period began with Discipline and Punish (published in 1975 as Surveiller et punir, translated 1976), and asks whether imprisonment is really a more humane form of punishment than torture. His last three books form an unfi nished history of sexuality, beginning with The History of Sexuality, Volume I, An In- troduction (published in 1976 as Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir, translated 1978). His studies of madness, medicine, punishment, and sexuality were preoccupied with power relations in controlling what constitutes reason, knowledge, and truth. As the homosexual son of a provincial doctor in early twentieth-century France, Michel Foucault would no doubt have had an uncomfortable time of it growing up, it must be stressed here, however, that Foucault’s private life is not at issue here, nor the use of his thought that has been made in the fi eld of gender studies, some of which is valid, others, like James Miller’s misguided The Passion of Michel Foucault, is distasteful and in some places actually even scurrilous. It should be pointed out, however, that the invidious position in which a bright, sensitive young man would have found himself when forced to confront a dawning sexuality in the climate of provincial Roman Catholic France may have played no small role in the themes he chose to explore throughout his academic life. Foucault’s brilliance was that he was able to lift his enquiries out of the merely specifi c and personal to address issues of universal importance. Michel Foucault begins The Order of Things with the now famous quotation from Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’:

This book fi rst arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classifi cation, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fi ne camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like fl ies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.1

This one passage unites so many of the themes of this research that in many ways it is the heart

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. XV (italics in original). 125 of the thesis. First of all there is the delicious postmodern intertextuality of quoting Foucault who is in turn quoting Borges, then there is the fact that while this ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ almost certainly does not exist, at least not in the form that Borges has so playfully invented, such volumes do indeed exist; even something as simple as a Chinese-language dictionary is organised in a such a way that it seems completely alien to us in the West, used as we are to dealing with an alphabetical system for ordering things. As a system of taxonomy the alphabetic is actually a relatively recent innovation in Western scholarship, coming as it does from Barthelemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale. D’Herbelot (1625- 95) was the fi rst scholar to arrange an encyclopaedia in alphabetical order in the West, and was even apologetic about having done so at the time, claiming that it did not produce such confusion as might be imagined. (Edward Gibbon in his footnotes to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire though d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale an agreeable miscellany but claimed that he never could get used to the alphabetical ordering.) The primary concern in all of this is with Michel Foucault’s notion of power, especially given his concern with space and power relations, and his consideration of the corporeal, and the fact that the forces that drive our history do not so much operate on our thoughts, our social institutions, or even our environment as on our individual bodies. Manuel Castells sees Foucault’s extensions of the apparatuses of power into a sexually constructed or construed subject, and quotes Anthony Giddens as seeing a fi ght between power and identity in the battleground of the body2. Castells sees Foucault’s work on sexuality as dealing with normalisation when he states that ‘…as long as transgression consisted merely in expressing sexuality outside the family boundaries, society could easily cope with it, by channelling it through coded situations and organized contexts, such as prostitution, earmarked homosexuality, or condoned sexual harassment: this was Foucault’s world of sexuality as normalization’3. Normalisation operated though the deployment of specialised knowledge, knowledge that could have a transforming effect on the power structures that gave rise to it. It is important to note here that Foucault carefully differentiates between what he calls the underlying archaeological structures of knowledge (savoir) and the level of conscious knowledge of individuals (connaissance). The fact that there are two French terms for the English word ‘knowledge’ is important, and is something that will be returned to again shortly. Words like ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ can be emotive, so we must be very clear about how we defi ne them. ‘Public’ too, is another word fraught with diffi culty, which is why the usage of it is kept very specifi c here, with use being made of the spatial orderings as highlighted in Foucault’s power relations as a point of departure. This research is intended, in short, to use Foucault’s analysis of power relations for its exploration of the buildings and public spaces of Shanghai. Power in a colonial situation is exercised, as we have seen earlier with the work of Brenda S.A. Yeoh, via what she calls ‘the construction and imposition of categories of social and spatial relations which permeate both the private and public domains of colonial society’4. Yeoh thinks that this form of power is akin to Foucault’s ‘dividing practices’ (the confi nement of the poor, the insane, and the indigent in the seventeenth century), where the differences between the colonial masters and their ‘native’ subjects were clearly articulated in the built environment; this is not wrong but is perhaps too simple a reading. Or course these spatially articulated differentiations refl ect power relations, but that is not what needs to be explored here; anyone can point to the difference between Shanghai’s Bund and Shanghai’s Chinatown, the differences are obvious – too obvious – what we need to look at here are the less visible expressions of power relationships in a city such as Shanghai, as well as the ever-changing sequences of interactions that enable them to operate in a specifi c spatial environment like the alleyway house. Michel Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods often seem to take delight in erudition for its own sake; the archaeologist is supposed to have read a great number of things that others

Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 298. Ibid., p. 300. Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 12. 126 have not read; genealogy is supposed to be ‘gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary’5. Foucault, as we have seen, was clearly infl uenced by Jorge Luis Borges so it is interesting to see that Borges has also stated that ‘there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition’6. There is one thing, however, that this research seeks to avoid in Foucault’s work: his pessimism. According to Marshall Berman ‘Foucault denies the possibility of any sort of freedom’, Berman sees Foucault’s totalities as swallowing up every facet of modern life as he develops his themes with obsessive relentlessness and ‘with sadistic fl ourishes, clamping his ideas down on his readers like iron bars, twisting each dialectic to our fl esh like a new turn of the screw’7. The possibility of gaining a better understanding of the public life of a city like Shanghai is potentially liberating, even if taking an analysis of the carceral society as a point of departure. Indeed, anything that advances our understanding of the world must, by its very nature, be liberating.

Structuralism and poststructuralism Michel Foucault’s notion of the episteme (somewhat similar to the ‘paradigm’ of the English-speaking world) led many to link him with the structuralists – an association he vigorously denied. Although Foucault may have shared certain concepts with the structuralists, his writings are more generally considered to be poststructuralist. Poststructuralism is diffi cult in that it uses words in new and unfamiliar ways, or coins new ones to say what cannot otherwise be said. Language makes communication possible, but only on condition that we use it properly, i.e. using meanings that have already been ascribed – grammar, as the old saying goes, can govern kings. Language, understood in the broadest sense of the term to include all manner of signifying systems, including symbols, allows us to access information. Poststructuralism, as its name suggests, was a reaction to structuralism, a school of thought that fl ourished in the West in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (published in 1916) proposed that a language’s meaning did not depend on references to the world, or even to its ideas; on the contrary, he argued that if things or concepts already existed outside of languages then words would have exact equivalents from one language to another. But as anyone who has ever tried to translate a text knows, nothing could be further from the truth. So it must be a case that either some languages misrepresent the world, or language, which seems to make reference to things, is in fact differentiating between them. The notion that meaning is differential, not referential, has profound implications. For Saussure, meaning resided in the sign, which he divided into two: a signifi er (the sound or the visual appearance of a word, phrase, or image), and the signifi ed, or its meaning. Julia Kristeva calls this signifying capacity the ‘semiotic’; and it is something that exists prior to the acquisition of any meaning. Structuralism was seductive because it seemed to promise a key to all of human activity; it seemed to be able to unlock the single principle that held together the world’s disparate cultures. Vladimir Propp used its precepts to analyse different fairy tales, fi nding a structure with seven possible characters and thirty-one possible actions. Claude Levi-Strauss sought common elements that would link all the world’s cultures; Levi-Strauss has, however, been accused of being:

[I]nsuffi ciently critical of his source material. He always seems to be able to fi nd just what he is looking for. Any evidence, however dubious, is acceptable so long as it fi ts with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data run counter to the theory Levi-Strauss will either bypass the evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the heresy thrown out of court.... [H]e consistently behaves like an advocate defending a cause

Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected essays and interviews, p. 139. Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beasts, p. 11. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 34. 127 rather than a scientist searching for ultimate truth.8

Vladimir Propp treated difference as no more than superfi cial, and yet difference was the key to Saussure’s revolutionary theory of language. In looking below the surface appearance of things, Propp and Levi-Strauss sought to uncover the universal structures that were embedded deep within the human mind. Ironic, is it not, that Saussure’s attribution of meaning to difference should lead in the end to a sort of lowest common denominator, an undifferentiated set of stories, devoid of anything that actually made them special? This is what Roland Barthes has called the scrutiny of an ‘indifferent’ science (indifferent because it was undifferentiating, but also because it was boring). For the poststructuralists what was important was not what exists, but what could accurately be said to exist. Truths (or falsehoods) are told using language, and while poststructuralists do not deny that there is a world out there, they are more concerned with what we can claim to know about it with any certainty. Michel Foucault devoted most of his life’s work to analysing the effects culture has in permitting us to give an account of ourselves. He was interested in societies’ agendas for disciplining the body in order to construct a good citizen (i.e. ones who conform to its ‘norms’). The verb of choice here is of course ‘to subject’, which, importantly, can also be used as a noun, a ‘subject’. Anyone who tells or shows someone else how to do something is exerting a power over them; the transmission of knowledge involves instruction; learning entails submission. The examination system is a good example of this, in that it is the way in which a profession protects itself by making sure those who seek to join it know what they are doing, and know how its language is conventionally employed. But there is by defi nition no power without at least the possibility of resistance. Resistance is power’s defi ning difference. But power is not a thing that can be possessed, at least according to Michel Foucault, power is simply a set of relations. Poststructuralism formed an integral part of postmodern theory. The post-World-War-II era of great artists, such as Stockhausen, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, and Beuys, was succeeded, in turn, by an infl uential group of French theorists including Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, all of whom began their careers by examining the implications of High Modernism. Christopher Butler has helpfully identifi ed Althusser as being concerned with Brecht, Barthes with Flaubert and Proust, Derrida with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Mallarmé, and Foucault with Nietzsche and Bataille9. By the time of the student uprisings in Paris in 1968, philosophical thought had moved away from the fashionable existentialism of the post-war period (of the sort expounded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus) towards a more sceptical stance. This came to be known as deconstructive and poststructuralist, and spread to the English-speaking world amid the gloom and doom of the 1970s, where they seemed to resonate with a deeper truth. Christopher Butler has also identifi ed this postmodernist period as being one in which the work of academics dominated over that of actual artists. Eschewing the ‘brave new world’ of High Modernism, where everything in society could be fi xed (if only people would live up to the architects’ vision), there was a general feeling that these sort of ‘metanarratives’ (like the claims of the structuralists) were too simplistic, too idealistic, too utopian. Jean-Francois Lyotard argued in his La condition postmoderne (published in French in 1979, and translated into English in 1984) that the legitimising ‘master narratives’ were in crisis and decline. The two main narratives that Lyotard was attacking were the Marxist notion of utopia, and the triumph of science, which he considered to have lost their credibility since World War II. To put it simply, Lyotard defi ned postmodernism as an incredulity towards metanarratives. One of the chief fi gures around whom postmodernism coalesced, at least in the English-speaking world, was Charles Jencks. Jencks saw postmodernism as a movement that had remained a diffuse series of trends in the arts but that had quite quickly crystallised into an architectural movement during

Edmund Leach quoted in Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West, p. 245. Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 6. 128 the mid 1970s. One reason for this (and for this he mentions his indebtedness to Andreas Huyssen) is that ‘architecture more than any other art form succumbed to the alienating effects of modernization’10. The Modern Movement in architecture, according to Jencks, had ‘promoted industrialisation and correspondingly demoted local communities and the existing urban fabric, as it did virtually everything that stood in the way of the bulldozer’11. He saw ‘a tragic, indeed fatal, connection between Modern architecture and modernisation which was more or less directly opposed by the Modern Movement in the other arts’12, something we are still seeing in the devastation caused to the Shanghai alleyway house by the city’s global ambitions. What Jencks sees as the ‘tragic association of Modern architecture with modernisation’ became obvious in the late 1950s when the fi rst critiques began to arise within the movement itself. Team Ten architects, such as Aldo Van Eyck, produced what Jencks calls ‘a type of Revisionist Modernism’, a philosophy and practice of architecture that substituted the notion of ‘place’ for the more abstract ‘space’, and promoting high-density, low-rise building typologies which eventually became the ‘critical regionalism’ of Kenneth Frampton13. As a critique, this was very from being radical (as Jencks succinctly points out, it was of course an ‘in-house’ revolution), it certainly stopped short of answering what Jencks calls Jane Jacobs’s ‘withering attack’ in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jencks argues that the rise of postmodern architecture (and urbanism) dates from this timely warning by Jacobs, and that the ‘succession of urban and social critiques it spawned, resulted in the widespread demolition of Modernist housing estates’14. As Charles Jencks also points out, the other Modernisms, such as art, and music, and literature, did not have the sort of ‘violent and clear refutations’ of their tenets that architecture had, they did not have to endure the slow-motion of dust and dynamite as their Pruitt-Igoes were demolished on television. According to most commentators, Charles Jencks has clearly identifi ed the end of the Modern Movement (at least in architecture) as occurring at 3.32 p.m. on 15 July 1972, when that sad St. Louis housing project was fi nally blown to bits. What is interesting is the fact that Jencks simply made this date up – the 3.32 p.m. is a particularly nice touch – the actual demolition occurred on 16 March that year. This explosion, which was repeated endlessly throughout the world in the destruction of similar housing estates, came to take on a symbolic life of its own. And this was how Jencks had used it when he starting to lecture on the subject in 1974. He found that the notion of the sudden demise (coupled with graphic images of the actual explosion) had an enormously liberating impact on these lectures, and for the next few years he used the rhetorical formula of the ‘Death of Modernism/Rise of Post-Modernism’ fully aware that it could only ever be a symbolic fabrication. Jencks admits that he was pleasantly surprised when he found that nearly everyone (including the press) seemed to accept his date as the true one. Of course, as these things do, the myth took on a life of its own, and when he tried to point out that many Modern architects were still at work, and that his arguments were symbolic, like the boy who cried ‘wolf’, Jencks’s disclaimers were ignored. In fact the responses to his lectures and articles were so forceful, and widespread, that they ended up launching postmodernism as a social and architectural movement. Is it not the most delicious irony that the very date postmodernism is supposed to have begun on is a complete fabrication? What Jencks then tried to point out was that while he may have made up the date, he was not claiming to have coined the term or invented the trend, rather he seems to have stumbled across a deep-seated public need: the postmodern movement was seen as a wider social protest against modernisation, against the destruction of local culture by the combined forces of rationalisation, bureaucracy, large-scale development, as well as the excesses of the Modern International Style.

Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, pp. 26-27. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 27. 129 Before ending this brief chapter on poststructuralism, it might be interesting to point out one other interesting coincidence, which no discussion of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project can omit. That is the fact that it was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the same architect who designed New York’s World Trade Centre (which was blown up by terrorists on 11 September 2001). How odd that the same man should be responsible for both of these buildings, the destruction of which have gone down in recent history as some of the West’s most decisive moments.

130 2 ANOTHER POWER, ANOTHER KNOWLEDGE

According to Michel Foucault, things generally start badly, and then get worse. His questioning of whether the more humane forms of punishment that came to replace the torture of the Middle Ages were actually the advance they seemed have profound implications for our understanding of society, because the newer disciplines that resulted from this change were then able to recruit subjects far more effectively than the older and more overt displays of power. Michel Foucault’s exploration of the relationship between discourse and power has been identifi ed by Christopher Butler, among others, as one of the most important ethical arguments in postmodernism. A ‘discourse’ is understood to mean a set of interlocking and mutually supporting statements that have evolved over time, and which can be used to defi ne and describe any given subject matter. A discourse is what Christopher Butler calls ‘the language of the main intellectual disciplines, for example the “discursive practices” of law, medicine, aesthetic judgement, and so on’1. Butler sees discourse as being like a Derridean language, one that is not simply the property of controlling individuals because it goes beyond them. The more dominant a discourse is within a society, the more natural it will seem, and the more people will tend to justify it on the grounds that it is natural. This is why Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia seems so funny, because, as Foucault so delightedly points out, no one could possibly think like that. But they do, and to people like the Chinese our ways of doing things can seem every bit as odd. It is this awareness of difference that can also result in negative consequences, because on the one hand we may think of another society’s way of doing things as quaint, but so often this quaintness can turn into something threatening, as we will see in Part IV when we look at how the eighteenth-century’s chinoiserie turned into the nineteenth-century’s ‘Yellow Peril’. Michel Foucault’s studies of the histories of law, of penology, and of medicine saw these disciplines as being powerful discourses which were designed to exclude or control people (such as the criminal or the mentally ill). Foucault saw the insane and the criminal as society’s victims, and took the victims’ position in analysing power, which he did from the bottom up. He saw it as anything but the simple imposition of a will from above. Foucault was opposed to the Whiggish version of history, where everything was seen as leading up to the glorious moment of our own present time, instead he chronicled the rise of what Christopher Butler calls ‘unfreedom’, in doing this, he examines what he called the episteme, the ‘largely unconscious assumptions concerning intellectual order that underlie the historical states of particular societies’2. For Foucault discourse was something that has tangible effects, because it actually helped to create the subordinate identities of those it excluded from participating in it, in other words it got to defi ne who was mad, or normal, or criminal, and then decide whether these people could be useful members of society (or not) based on these defi nitions. Foucault’s work, particularly The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction is actually a critique of Marxism, his brilliant move was to steer clear of the more usual focus on class relations and concentrate instead on more abstract notions of power. This has led some commentators, notably Terry Eagleton in The Illusions of Postmodernism, to accuse Foucault of objecting to regimes of power simply on the grounds that they are regimes as such, and hence repressive; this misses the point, the main thrust of Foucault’s investigations was to examine the dynamics of power relations, not merely some specifi c examples of them.

Some key terms According to Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault was ‘sceptical of grand teleological narratives’, the sort of arguments that typiﬁ ed High Modernism, Foucault focused instead on ‘accounts based on many speciﬁ c

Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 44. Ibid., p. 46. 131 “little” causes, operating independently of one another, with no overall outcome in view’3. This was all part of what Gutting calls Foucault’s ‘strong personal commitment to oppose the normative exclusions that defi ne our society’4. According to another commentator, Paul Rabinow, Foucault felt that there was ‘…no external position of certainty, no universal understanding that is beyond history and society. His strategy is to proceed as far as possible in his analyses without recourse to universals. His main tactic is to historicize such supposedly universal categories as human nature each time he encounters them’5. Foucault called his attempt to historically locate, and analyse, the strands of discourse that deal with the subject, knowledge, and power a ‘genealogy’. It might be useful now to look at some of these key terms used by Michel Foucault. Firstly, the ‘subject’. Foucault’s work shows how the discourses of life, labour, and language were structured into disciplines, which in turn led to a high degree of internal autonomy and coherence, so much so that we have tended to take them for granted, seeing them as natural, as universal principles, against the backdrop of which we lead our lives. Foucault’s contribution to postmodern thought was in showing us how the progression of human social life throughout history has actually changed abruptly at several junctures, displaying a conceptual discontinuity from the disciplines that had immediately preceded them, hence rendering our current situation anything but natural – on the contrary, it is highly contingent. One of these changes was the turn to scientifi c classifi cation identifi ed in The Order of Things, Paul Rabinow sees this as having objectivised ‘the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and linguistics’, which helped to turn human beings into objectifi ed subjects, by the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology; or as productive subjects (i.e. those who labour) in economic analyses6. According to Rabinow, ‘[t]he sharp lines of discursive discontinuity in the human sciences and the longer lines of continuity in non-discursive practices provide Foucault with a powerful and fl exible grid of interpretation with which to approach relations of knowledge and power’7. And it is these modes of objectifying the subject (by categorising, distributing, and/or manipulating) that have enabled us to have an understanding of ourselves (in a more scientifi c way), and have also enabled us to form ourselves into what Rabinow refers to as ‘meaning-giving selves’8. Foucault’s work enables us to unpack the so-called truths about our existence, seeing the contingencies that have been disguised as necessities. The second key term is ‘knowledge’. Foucault tells us that ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’9. Knowledge can and does transform the power structures that give rise to it. Foucault, as we have seen, differentiates between connaissance (the conscious knowledge of individuals) and savoir (the underlying structure of knowledge), where connaissance refers to a particular corpus of knowledge, a particular discipline, like biology or economics, and savoir is usually defi ned as knowledge in general; or, as Foucault says, ‘[b]y connaissance I mean the relation of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it’, and ‘[s]avoir refers to the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to connaissance and for this or that enunciation to be formulated’10. This latter he also refers to as an ‘archaeology’, and is what underpins our understanding of the world in which we fi nd ourselves, a certain amount of which we will of course question, but, according to Foucault, much of what we believe tends to remain in place as the result of social conditioning. This is where his work resonates with Immanuel Kant’s notion of sapere aude – the whole point of the Enlightenment was to enable us to overcome our ‘immaturity’ by thinking

Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction, p. 46. Ibid., p. 6. Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, p. 4. Ibid., pp. 8-9. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 12. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow, ed.), p. 88. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 15, endnote 2. 132 for ourselves. Which brings us to the third key term, ‘power’. Michel Foucault points out that if knowledge simply equalled power then he would never have spent so much time examining the relationships between them. Here we begin to come across some of the diffi culties of translation. Foucault’s use of the word pouvoir is much the same as the German word Macht, a word more usually translated into French as puissance. In using pouvoir, which means ‘to be able to’11. Foucault has attempted to capture a creative, more productive nuance for the term, rather than a merely forceful or repressive one. Foucault’s understanding of power is not the same as the standard defi nitions, he seems to think we should abandon the notion of power rooted in a constitution or sovereignty, which is a very Marxist understanding (for example, power posed in relation to a state apparatus), power should instead be understood as something that is exercised, not possessed. Power as a strategy rather than a property. This was a concept that was perfectly understood by Louis XIV (1638 to 1715), King of France (and Navarre). Even though he reigned as an absolute monarch from shortly before his fi fth birthday, the Fronde (the name commonly used for the series of upheavals that plagued Paris in the early years of the Regency of his mother and Cardinal Mazarin) made him all too aware of the fragility of the sequence of relations on which a crown depended for its authority. Using elaborate court ritual Louis brilliantly created and maintained what can only be described as an apparatus of power relations (in Foucauldian terms a ‘dispositive de pouvoir’), which kept troublesome aristocrats at court busying themselves with issues of social precedence and prerogative instead of at home where they could ferment political unrest in the provinces. By differentiating these relations the king was able to render them productive and one of the vehicles that perfectly illustrates this was the ballet, an art from at which the king himself excelled12. Arie Graafl and has made an elegant analysis of this mechanism in the dynamics of power relations in his book Versailles and the Mechanics of Power: The Subjugation of Circe: An Essay. Graafl and also points to one of the glaring lacunae in Foucault’s scholarship, namely the role gender relations played in these relations. Graafl and’s mapping of the cabals at court clearly indicates the important positions some of the royal women occupied13, particularly the Queen and the Queen Mother (and there were others, for example, Louis’s morganatic wife Madame de Maintenon14). Louis was the Sun King, hence his wife could be seen as a moon, around whose orbit other satellites could revolve. Louis’s genius was to make the power relations in early-modern France productive, power could then be diffused throughout the social body, rather than being merely imposed from above. The King also subsumed every mode of artistic production to his political needs: painting, music, dance, architecture, all were used for the greater glory of France, with the King as personifi cation of the rich and powerful state. Louis understood that kings come and go but the offi ce of the state was here to stay, he is even reputed to have said on his deathbed, ‘Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours’15, something his successors lost sight of, with fatal consequences.

The difﬁ culties of translation As we have already seen in our discussion of structuralism and poststructuralism, translation is a

Brian Massumi’s translation of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia notes that Deleuze and Guattari’s use of puissance also signifi es this potential or capacity, much like the German Macht (which Massumi also notes derives from Nietzsche). Hyacinthe Rigaud’s 1701 portrait of the king prominently displays the ageing monarch’s still shapely legs, something the king seems to have been still clearly proud of. Arie Graafl and, Versailles and the Mechanics of Power: The Subjugation of Circe: An Essay, diagram pp. 64-65. Madame de Maintenon was known as the Indian Princess because she had been born in one of France’s colonies in India. ‘I depart, but the state shall always remain.’ 133 diffi cult business. This is why this study has been at such pains to point out the provenance of the English versions of some of Foucault’s terms (especially as the French for ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ are open to such a variety of interpretations for the simple reason that there are more words for them in French than in English). The same applies to the word ‘space’ (more on which in a moment), and even a word such as the ‘everyday’ (which can be translated as tous les jours or quotidien in French – and even this latter word tends to capture more nuance than its English counterpart). One other important term is dispositif. The English word ‘apparatus’ is the most usual translation, certainly it seems to best capture the French meaning of the term, it is also the word most commonly used to render this idea into English. It must be pointed out, however, that even Foucault himself has used the more usual appareil when referring to an apparatus (as he does when mentioning ‘a regulatory apparatus’ in Lecture Number Three (25 January 1978) as published in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, (edited by Michel Senellart and translated by Graham Burchell))16. Finally, we come to two of the most important terms in Michel Foucault’s work: archaeology and genealogy. Archaeology seems to have been used early in his work almost as an alternative to history, and during the 1960s it came to occupy a central role. Foucault claims he is justifi ed in using the term archaeology to describe his research because he examines archives, his choice of the term, however, has caused some misunderstanding: it is neither the search for an origin, as in the Greek arche, nor is it related to geological excavation. Foucault’s idea of an archaeology of thought is seen by many as being close to the modernist literary idea of language being a source of thought in its own right, not simply an instrument for expressing ideas. Foucault’s idea seems to be that every mode of thinking involves implicit rules (sometimes rules that those who use them cannot even formulate), and that these rules materially restrict the range of thought. In seeking to uncover these rules we should be able to see how a seemingly arbitrary constraint can actually make sense within such a framework. Just as Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia seems haphazard and arbitrary to us, representing a way of thinking that is alien to the West, so too will our own ways seem odd and arbitrary to the Chinese. As indeed will our own ways seem to those who follow us (even in the West), because rules which govern our behaviour change over time, so one day in the future our own way of doing things will seem as quaint and arbitrary to our descendants as our own ancestors’ do to us. Just as modernist writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Natalie Saurault aimed at writing without the author, Foucault’s archaeology aims at history without the subject. Conventional historians treats history as a story, chronicling the lives of individual subjects as they move through time. The worst excesses of this approach can be seen in the Whiggish interpretation of history, which sees everything that has gone before as nothing but a prelude to our own glorious present. (The term ‘Whiggish’ refers to the ideology of the British Whig Party, and is most famously illustrated by Lord Macaulay’s History of England.) Foucault’s archaeological period consisted of The History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. All four address scientifi cally based practices of exclusion; all show a profound respect for the period of the French Revolution; and all deal with the tacit relationships between such seemingly unrelated fi elds as clinical

French and English are so closely related as to lull those engaged in a desultory reading of texts in either language into a false sense of similarity. But they are not the same. To take an example, the novel Sylvie by Ge- rard de Nerval (a writer whom Foucault referred to in his own work, probably because he was a colourful eccen- tric – de Nerval used to take his ‘pet’ lobster out for a walk on a long pink ribbon, on the very valid grounds that people’s choices of pets were arbitrary, which would also tie in rather neatly to Foucault’s notion of what would be considered a ‘norm’ as a pet). De Nerval’s novel opens with the line ‘J’ai sortais du theatre’, which to all intents and purposes is untranslatable into English, at least directly. Nerval has made elegant use of the tense known as the past imperfect, one that loosens a reader’s sense of time, moving as it does in some vaguely defi ned past; a time before the present but we do not know exactly when, or for how long the events went on for. This sentence is diffi cult to render into English for the simple reason that the English language does not possess a past imperfect tense, hence the best that can be done is to say something like: ‘I left the theatre that I used to go to regularly’, which is somewhat less than poetic, certainly it lacks the nuance of de Nerval’s lovely prose. Furthermore, it is not even particularly succinct. 134 medicine, the medicalisation of madness, and the scientifi c status of various social inquiries, all of which have more in common with each other than with anything that went before. With genealogy Foucault tried to show how social and moral norms were really transfer nodes in the relations of power. We fi nd this methodology used in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. As we have already seen, Foucault called genealogy ‘grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a fi eld of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times’17. It ‘…requires patience and a knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material’18. ‘[G]enealogy demands relentless erudition. Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal signifi cations and indefi nite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins”.’19 According to Foucault, ‘the genealogist sets out to study the beginning – numberless beginnings, whose faint traces and hints of colour are readily seen by a historical eye’20. The genealogist ‘…must be able to recognize the events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats – the basis of all beginnings, atavisms, and heredities’21.

Friedrich Nietzsche According to Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault was ‘clearly impressed by and adopted Friedrich Nietzsche’s technique of looking for power behind sciences, religions, and other cognitive authorities that present themselves as grounded in nothing more the force of disinterested evidence and argument’22. Another area in which Foucault’s genealogy clearly evokes Friedrich Nietzsche is the claim that there is an intimate link between knowledge and power. A claim developed by Foucault to show that changes in thought are not due to thought itself but are caused by social forces that control individuals’ behaviour. Some commentators have dated Foucault’s interest in Nietzsche from Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy which was published in 1962, others maintain that Foucault had started to read Nietzsche as early as 1953, and continued to do so throughout the writing of Madness and Civilisation (1955-60). (It is also probably of some interest to point out here that Foucault spent those ﬁ ve years living in Sweden, hence away from the French intellectual scene.) Whichever is the case is of no particular moment, the important point is that Foucault was heavily inﬂ uenced by Nietzsche, particularly the problem of the ‘value of values’, as well as the evaluation from which they arise (the problem of their creation). Since this creation was primarily explained by Nietzsche in terms of force or will, he was for Foucault (as well as for Deleuze) the philosopher of ‘the will to power’. Which can clearly be seen in the subtitle to the French edition of The History of Sexuality, Volume I, An Introduction which is La volonté de savoir (the will to knowledge). As Michel Foucault himself writes:

In a sense, genealogy returns to the three modalities of history that Nietzsche recognized in 1874. It returns to them in spite of the objections that Nietzsche raised in the name of the afﬁ rmative and creative powers of life. But they are metamorphosed: the veneration of monuments becomes parody; the respect for ancient continuities becomes systematic dissociation; the critique of the injustices of the past by a truth held by men in the present becomes the destruction of the man who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge23.

Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow, ed.), p. 76. Ibid., pp. 76-77. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 80. Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction, p. 51. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow, ed.), p. 97. 135 It must be remembered that Nietzsche uses the word Ursprung interchangeably with the more neutral Herkunft, thus the origin of good and evil has an Ursprung, origin or source, but also an Herkunft, or descent or ancestry. Again we fi nd ourselves constantly returning to the importance of having a clear translation. However, Foucault sees the words Entstehung and Herkunft as being more exact than Ursprung in recording the true objective of genealogy, because while they are both originally translated as ‘origin’, he seeks to ‘reestablish their proper use’24. Entstehung designates emergence, or the moment of arising; while Herkunft is the equivalent of stock or descent, which Foucault sees as ‘… the ancient affi liation to a group, sustained by the bonds of blood, tradition, or social class’25. ‘The body – and everything that touches it: diet, climate, and soil – is the domain of the Herkunft.’26 Hence there can be a Herkunft for the social life in a city, and it is this that is being investigated in this analysis of Shanghai’s alleyway housing. Genealogy, as Foucault sees it, is ‘an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body’27. It ‘does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form on all its vicissitudes’28. This, interestingly, is a concept of time that resonates strongly with the Chinese for whom notions of time are very concrete. The Chinese approach to history is to see it as a normative pattern and not a series of discrete and disconnected events; the past and the present engage in a complex dialogue where the past is never static but is part of a living tradition that continues into the present29. As far as Foucault is concerned, any examination of a descent will also permit ‘…the discovery, under the unique aspect of a trait or a concept, of the myriad events through which – thanks to which, against which – they were formed’30. Foucault is at pains to point out that it would be wrong to search for an uninterrupted continuity in any descent, because ‘…we should avoid thinking of emergence as the fi nal term of a historical development’31. ‘The role of genealogy is to record its history: the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process.’32 And this is what has been attempted in this research into Shanghai. Although genealogy is sometimes seen as a replacement for archaeology (the fact that it follows on from this earlier method seems to suggest it might be), but in fact it is probably better to see the two methodologies as being side by side; as being the two halves of a complementary approach. Before we turn to Foucault’s texts there is one fi nal term that must be noted: ‘space’. Again we should consider that the French espace captures a wider range of meanings than does the English word. Foucault may have shared the structuralists’ predilection for spatial metaphors, but he was the only thinker to analyse actual spaces – perhaps this explains his fascination for architects. Whereas Foucault wrote only a small number of pieces that actually directly address space, the language of the works of his archaeological period is quite overtly spatialised, with terms such as ‘limit’, ‘boundary’, ‘transgression’, ‘threshold’, etc. Foucault conceived of madness and illness in spatial terms, and

Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 81. Gregory Bracken, ‘The past is never past: making sense of Chinese time’, IIAS Newsletter, Number 46, p. 34. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow, ed.) , p. 81. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 86. 136 examined the groups that inhabited liminal areas. Foucault tended not to see space as just another area to be analysed, it was a central tenet of his methodological approach. As Foucault himself states, ‘no one is responsible for an emergence; no one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the interstice’33, and that:

This relationship of domination is no more a ‘relationship’ than the place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is ﬁ xed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies. It makes itself accountable for debts and gives rise to the universe of rules, which is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy it.34

Which brings us to the notion of history, where Foucault asks how we can defi ne the relationship between genealogy (as an examination of Herkunft and Entstehung) and history. He suggests we could examine Nietzsche’s ‘celebrated apostrophes against history’, but decided that these had better be put aside while considering genealogy as a ‘wirkliche Historie’ instead, a characterisation of history as a ‘spirit’ or ‘sense’35. History in the traditional sense, at least according to Foucault, ‘…fi nds its support outside of time and pretends to base its judgments on an apocalyptic objectivity. This is only possible, however, because its belief in eternal truth, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of consciousness as always identical to itself’36. Historians ‘take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy – the unavoidable obstacles of their passion’37, but as he then points out, ‘[t]he forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conditions’38; it ‘…has a more important task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth and values; it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes’39. In pointing out that the body obeys the ‘exclusive laws of physiology’ Foucault seems to think historians are letting it escape from the infl uence of history, but this is false. ‘The body is moulded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances.’40 Foucault’s work was intimately concerned with the body, particularly the body in particular spaces. He was profoundly interested in what he called ‘dividing practices’, one of the most famous examples of which was the confi ning of the poor, the insane, and the vagabonds in Paris in the seventeenth century. Foucault saw this as a follow-on from the isolation of lepers during the Middle Ages. Later, the processes of social objectifi cation and categorisation – including the medicalisation, stigmatisation, and normalisation of deviance, sexual or otherwise – meant that human beings were given both a social and a personal identity. These were modes of manipulation that combined the mediation of science (or, in the case of psychiatry, a pseudo-science) and the actual practices of exclusion, usually spatial, and invariably social. These dividing practices form a substantial part of Foucault’s archaeological period. Michel Foucault’s spatialised thinking also found expression in other ways, his analysis of Velasquez’s Las Meninas in The Order of Things is an elegant case in point. A court painter during the reign of King Philip IV, Spain’s ‘Golden Age’, Valezquez’s bravura technique exactly suited the era in

Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 87. 137 which he was working. Las Meninas is remarkable for its seeming ability to speak to our own age so profoundly. Foucault’s brilliant analysis of it draws particular attention to the painting’s eerily empty heart with the mirror (we shall be seeing more on mirrors at the end of Part IV when examining M. Christine Boyer’s analysis of Zhang Yimou’s fi lm Shanghai Triad), the main point here is to highlight the fact that Foucault’s spatialised thinking could embrace fi elds that have surprised many, even his critics. And while on the subject of criticism, there is one fi nal point that must be mentioned before we move onto Foucault’s texts, and that is the fact that his work has often been attacked for containing errors. There are few people who can produce a work that does not contain at least some errors; critics, however, seem to latch onto anything that can discredit the person they are criticising. The fact that Fou- cault may have made some factual errors over his many years of writing is really of very little moment. One such error that seems to have been missed by his more trenchant critics is where Foucault states that the British ended the practice of transportation in 180741 – in fact the transportation of criminals (such as the Irish to Australia, and Indians to Malaya, etc.) was not outlawed until 1867 – what Foucault may have been confusing it with was slavery, which the British did abolish in 1807. But these sorts of quiddities leave the main thrust of Foucault’s work unaffected, one of the main themes of which is the fact that space is inherently political, and politics is inherently spatial.

Archaeological works The modern era has been characterised by the exercise of power which is itself invisible but which controls its subjects by rendering them visible. This contrasts with the premodern period, when the exercise of power was a highly visible affair: public executions, the presence of military in towns, etc. Each of us is subject to modern power, yet with that power being dispersed throughout society there seems to be no single centre around which to focus, there is no longer a privileged ‘us’ against a marginalised ‘them’, or vice versa. Gary Gutting thinks this dispersion is the result of there no longer being a teleology behind power’s development, no dominating class or world-historical process; modern power is the outcome of numerous small, uncoordinated causes: in brief, it is the result of chance. Foucault’s portrayal of modern power challenges the tenets of, in particular, Marxism, which tended to identify specifi c groups and institutions (for example, the bourgeoisie, the central bank, the government press, etc.) as sources of domination, the destruction or appropriation of which would lead to liberation. This is why the offi ces of just such organisations were invariably seized during revolutions, Dublin’s General Post Offi ce was the locus of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising. What might the world’s revolutionaries seize today? The Internet café? hardly likely. This probably refl ects one of the fundamental societal changes that Manuel Castells has so expertly shown, and is the very reason that authorities in places like China are so wary of letting citizens have unfettered access to the World Wide Web. Michel Foucault’s great move was to show that marginalised groups and individuals are in fact a part of society, even if they differ from the norm (like homosexuals, members of esoteric religions, or immigrants, etc.). They speak society’s language, share, if not all, at least many of its values, and play an essential social and economic role in its well being. The danger is, as we have seen in Part I, that many of these individuals are once again fi nding themselves increasingly marginalised, pushed into the analogue archipelago by the new face of global capitalism. There is yet another danger related to this: we must be wary of trying to speak for these groups because the very act of ‘our’ claiming to speak for ‘them’ may further marginalise them, thus undoing any good that was intended. Madness and Civilisation begins with a cursory survey of madness in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a time when it was seen as being part of the human experience; an alternative way of being, rather than something dangerous that should be locked away. Indeed exhibitions of strange

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 131. 138 behaviour were sometimes characterised as being mystical in nature and hence even open to admiration by the religious. As late as the Renaissance madness was seen as having a specifi c role to play in a culture, the character of the fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear is an example of someone whose madness entitles him to speak his mind without fear of reprisal. Another related form of this was known in ancient Greece as parrhesia, or ‘frankness in speaking the truth’, something about which Foucault lectured in 1983 at the University of California in Berkeley42. The character of the fool is also portrayed in the Tarot deck, where he is shown wearing motley, the tear in which reveals his bare bottom (signifying his unconcern with normal social mores). In Tarot lore the Fool is seen as having a benign infl uence, and ties in to the view of madness as an acceptable face of the human condition. The wisdom of fools is also referred to by Foucault in Madness and Civilization when he mentions the Ship of Fools, but the fools’ wisdom is a forbidden one, something denied the ordinary members of society43. The classical age, or, as its other name suggests, the age of reason, saw madness in no such terms. It saw madness as a rejection of reason, it regarded it as unreason (déraison) which plunged its sufferer into a condition akin to that of an animal. Foucault’s claim was that the asylum was more a moral than a medical authority, with doctors having authority not because they had the ability to cure but because they represent the moral demands of society. The modern therapeutic view of madness broke with the classical view, when the mad began to be seen as human once again. Foucault’s work then turned to the prison. He states that ‘[i]t was no longer merely a question of confi ning those out of work, but of giving work to those who had been confi ned and thus making them contribute to the prosperity of all’44. This provided cheap manpower in periods of full employment, and absorbed the idle, giving society some protection against agitation and uprisings in times of hardship. Foucault dextrously reminds us that the fi rst houses of confi nement appeared in England in the most industrialised parts of the country45. The obligation to work assumed a moral meaning as well as being an ethical exercise. As Foucault says, it served ‘as askesis, as punishment, as symptom of a certain disposition of the heart’46. But work was not only an occupation, it had to be productive as well; morality, as such, permitted itself to be administered just like any other trade or economy. The Birth of the Clinic is, according to Foucault, ‘about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze’47. ‘One must, as far as possible, make science ocular.’48 Foucault states that ‘[w]hat was fundamentally invisible [was] suddenly offered to the brightness of the gaze, in a movement of appearance so simple, so immediate that it seems to be the natural consequence of a more highly developed experience’49. He ties this offering up to the gaze into the seventeenth-century development of natural history, which ‘set out to analyse and classify natural beings according to their visible characters’50. Unfortunately, he saw nineteenth-century medicine as being more interested in normality than health, however it was this interest in rendering visible, as well as the emphasis on normality, that was to pave the way for Foucault’s greatest work, and the one that is of most immediate relevance to this investigation into Shanghai, namely Discipline and Punish, particularly the examination of the apparatus known as the Panopticon. Before we get onto that, however, we need briefl y to take a look at the last two books of Foucault’s archaeological period: The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Joseph Pearson, ed.), p. 7. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 22. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 51. ‘The Great Confi nement’, Madness and Civilisation, The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow, ed.), p. 137. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. ix. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 89. 139 Man is the central problem in Foucault’s history of modern philosophy. The aim of The Order of Things was to try and clarify the archaeological framework (episteme) underlying modern social sciences, but since Foucault thought this was dominated by the philosophical concept of ‘man’, a particularly Kantian stance, his discussion included a critical history of modern philosophy. Foucault found it hard to reconcile how a single unifi ed being could be a transcendental source of the possibility of knowledge and at the same time just another object of it. One immediate diffi culty with this book is its title (Les Mots et les choses (words and things) in French). We have already seen the diffi culty of translating words and concepts from one language to another, here, however, the words would seem to be simple and straightforward, so why the change? The answer lies in the fact that at the time Foucault’s book was being translated into English two other books had just appeared with the title Words and Things; the publisher, in agreement with Foucault, opted for this alternative title. However, the fact that the French title seems to indicate a work that deals with nomenclature, whereas its English translation seems to point towards a taxonomy is a concern. This may be a subtle shift, but it is a profound one. As we have already seen in The Birth of the Clinic, seventeenth-century science rendered the natural world visible, Foucault develops this in The Order of Things by saying that ‘[w]hat came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre and that of the catalogue was not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse. A new way of making history’51. Foucault dismisses the notion that the establishment of botanical and zoological gardens expressed a new curiosity about plants and animals, what changed was the space in which it was possible to see them, and from which it was possible to describe them. The essential problem of classical thought lay, according to Foucault, in the relations between name and order, hence, how to discover a nomenclature that would also be a taxonomy. Linnaeus thought that all of nature could be accommodated within his taxonomy, but others, like Buffon, held that the natural world was too rich and varied to fi t into so rigid a frame. Whether or not it could be is not of such relevance here, what was important was the fact that visible characteristics could establish relationships of adjacency and kinship, and, because they were thus related, could describe a totality of organic structures. Hence, according to Foucault, the centre of knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the table. One other interesting aspect of Foucault’s analysis is the small but important point he makes when he states that ‘[w]ithout imagination, there would be no resemblance between things’52. One taxonomy that seems to have made vivid use of the imagination is Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia. Foucault’s laughter in reading it shattered ‘all the familiar landmarks of [his] thought’; the thought that bears the stamp of ‘our age and our geography’. For Foucault the wonder of this taxonomy was that it demonstrated ‘the exotic charm of another system of thought’, but it also pointed out the limits of our own with the ‘stark impossibility of thinking that’53. This passage also caused a certain uneasiness in Foucault in that it awoke his suspicion ‘that there is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate’54. According to Foucault, Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia localised the powers of contagion, because it distinguished carefully between real animals (the frenzied or the one that have just broken the water pitcher) and those that are imaginary, and because of this, the possibility of dangerous mixtures was exorcised, the disorder of what he calls the ‘heteroclite’ was circumvented. In the heteroclite things are so laid out that it is impossible to fi nd an order, the fragments of so many potential orders glitter but are unable to allow the defi nition of a common locus. The Chinese encyclopaedia may have avoided the dangers of the heteroclite, but it is still an alien taxonomy (at least those in the West). We Westerners have other ways of organising the world, namely the alphabetical system (which may have been a relatively recent innovation, but one that has certainly caught on), yet Foucault sees

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 131. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. xv (italics in original). Ibid., p. xvii. (italics in original). 140 the function of the alphabetical system as transgressing the boundaries of imagination, of all possible thought, simply because it provides us with a way of linking all categories together. He sees Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia as leading to a ‘kind of thought without space, to words and categories that lack all life and place, but are rooted in a ceremonial space, overburdened with complex fi gures, with tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, and unexpected communications’55. This is understandable for anyone looking at a Chinese system of classifi cation who does not understand the Chinese language. And even with regard to the language, Foucault says ‘[Chinese] writing does not reproduce the fugitive fl ight of the voice in horizontal lines; it erects the motionless and still-recognizeable images of things themselves in vertical columns’56. This is true, and it also explains why an alphabetical ordering system can never be used in any dictionary of Chinese, or encyclopaedia for that matter. China does of course make use of its own organising systems for knowledge, a highly sophisticated one. Foucault visualises China as ‘a culture entirely devoted to the ordering of space, but one that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak, and think’57. This is not incorrect, it is of course possible to name, to speak, and to think using Chinese categories; fi rst however, one must learn the language. As we shall see in Part IV, when a certain profi ciency has been attained in naming and speaking Chinese it becomes no longer necessary to try and think in the language, because one will have already begun to do so. One other point that should be mentioned here is Foucault’s dislike of being labelled a structuralist. He claims to have used ‘none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis’58, this, however, he then contradicts by stating that ‘[t]here may well be certain similarities between the works of the structuralists and my own work. It would hardly behove me, of all people, to claim that my discourse is independent of conditions and rules of which I am very largely unaware, and which determine other work that is being done today’59. It was in The Archaeology of Knowledge that Foucault really attempted to distance himself once and for all from the structuralist camp, where he says ‘let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this – if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them – structuralism’60. He at least acknowledged that his work did intersect problems that were to be found in certain other fi elds, such as linguistics, ethnology, literary analysis, etc., saying that ‘[t]hese problems may, if one so wishes, be labelled structuralism’61. He also acknowledged the value of its insights when it came to analysing ‘… language (langue), mythologies, folk-tales, poems, dreams, works of literature, even fi lms perhaps, structural description reveals relations that could not otherwise be isolated; it makes it possible to defi ne recurrent elements, with their forms of opposition, and their criteria of individualization; it also makes it possible to lay down laws of construction, equivalences, and rules of transformation’62, but he did not wish ‘to carry the structuralist enterprise beyond its legitimate limits’63. He tries, somewhat unconvincingly, to wriggle off the hook by pointing out that he ‘never once used the word “structure” in The Order of Things’64, this may well be seen as quibbling, however the general consensus is that Foucault was in fact a poststructuralist. Although really only related to the other poststructuralists by a combined opposition to the structuralists who had preceded them (which would have overridden any similarities they may have had with each other). Foucault also uses The Order of Things to reject what he calls ‘the phenomenological approach’, which he says gave absolute

Ibid., p. xix. Ibid., p. xix. Ibid., p. xix. Ibid., p. xiv. Ibid., p. xiv. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 234. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., pp. 200-201. 141 priority to the observing subject, attributing a constituent role to an act, which ends up placing its own point of view as the origin of all historicity, hence leading to a transcendental consciousness65. The Archaeology of Knowledge was seen by Foucault as unifying and clarifying what he called the ‘imperfect sketches’ of his three earlier books of the archaeological period. An enterprise where he tried to measure the mutations that operated in the fi eld of history; where those methods, along with the limits and themes of the history of ideas were questioned; where anthropological constraints were thrown off, and an attempt was made to show how they had come about in the fi rst place. Foucault’s archaeology was not trying to defi ne ‘the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses’66, but wanted to defi ne the discourses themselves, to show them as practices that obeyed certain rules, and to show in what way these sets of rules were irreducible to any other. Archaeology was also ‘…more willing than the history of ideas to speak of discontinuities, ruptures, gaps, entirely new forms of positivity, and of sudden redistributions’67. As Foucault says, ‘[t]he frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the fi rst lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal confi guration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network’68. This network of references is not like a mathematical treatise, nor a textual commentary, neither is it like an historical account, nor an episode in a novel cycle; as Foucault states, ‘[t]he book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex fi eld of discourse’69. It is up to the scholar to reconstitute it as a unity, using their own words, and based on their own research, in order that they can place their own new-won knowledge properly within the ever- changing taxonomy of the world. This is the fi rst stage of what this study has been attempting in Shanghai: what Foucault would call a questioning of the already-said at the level of its existence, as well as the enunciative function within which it operates, and the general archive system to which it belongs; and in so doing the researcher can claim support by ‘[t]he right of words – which is not that of the philologists – [which] authorizes, therefore, the use of the term archaeology to describe all these searches’70.

Genealogical works From the start, Discipline and Punish was seen as a seminal work of radical social criticism, its most striking thesis was that the disciplinary techniques introduced for criminals become the model for schools, hospitals, and factories, etc., so that a prison-like discipline came to pervade all of modern society: what Foucault calls the ‘carceral archipelago’ in which we all live. Basically it questions the assumption that imprisonment rather than the torturing of criminals is the enlightened and progressive development it seems to be. Foucault seems to ﬁ nd this so-called development as a way not to punish less but to punish better. Because punishment in the pre-modern era violently assaulted the criminal’s body, society was attempting to achieve its retribution through pain. Modern methods of punishment, however, demand something subtler: an inner transformation, a conversion of the criminal, who must be sorry for what they have done, and must repent (note that the word ‘penitent’ is where the ‘penitentiary’ as a prison came from). Discipline and Punish is a genealogy rather than an archaeology because it is concerned with practices and institutions rather than experiences and ideas.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xiv. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 138. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 131. 142 Like The Order of Things, the translation of the title Discipline and Punish from the French Surveiller et punir is unsatisfactory. Whereas Les mots et les choses could have been directly translated, were not for the fact that the title Words and Things had already been used, with Surveiller et punir Foucault’s English translators faced an even more serious problem: the verb surveiller has no English equivalent. Secondly, Foucault has used the inﬁ nitive, which cleverly gives the effect of an impersonal imperative in French, sadly, the English language once again denies a French writer scope for nuance because of its relative paucity of expression. In the end it was Foucault himself who suggested Discipline and Punish, a title which seemed closely related to the book’s structure. This research’s examination of Discipline and Punish reverses that order for the simple reason that it is easier to illustrate its inﬂ uence on its analysis of Shanghai by so doing.

143 3 PUNISHMENT AND DISCIPLINE

Michel Foucault said that in writing about the history of the prison he was ‘writing the history of the present’1; he was not interested in the past, except as a means of writing such a history. He also notes that his study of the birth of the prison took account only of the French penal system, he thought that the ‘[d]ifferences in historical developments and institutions would make a detailed comparative examination too burdensome and any attempt to describe the phenomenon as a whole too schematic’2. He does note that:

In France, as in most European countries, with the notable exception of England, the entire criminal procedure, right up to the sentence, remained secret: that is to say, opaque, not only to the public but also to the accused himself. It took place without him, or at least without his having any knowledge either of the charges or of the evidence. In the order of criminal justice, knowledge was the absolute privilege of the prosecution.3

He also thinks it typical that the administration of prisons in France was for a long time the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior, while that of the bagnes (penal servitude on convict ships and in penal colonies) lay with either the Ministry of the Navy or the Colonies. It is interesting that he should mention these two things, one, the difference with the English criminal justice system, and two, the differentiation between prisons in France itself and her colonies. As we have already seen, the British often transported their criminals to penal colonies, such as Australia. They ended this practice in 1867 (a mere four years before their turn to imperialism). France also had penal colonies: Devil’s Island in French Guyana was the most notorious. Convicts who were sent there were stripped of their rights as French citizens, they were literally stripped naked before they left French soil, and once in Guyana and had served their sentence they were required to eke out an existence for the same number of years as their prison sentence while remaining in the colony, many people, unsurprisingly, ended up back ‘inside’. W. Somerset Maugham has written a number of chilling short stories describing life in this colony in the 1930s, not his most celebrated work perhaps, but worth reading for the insights they give into this overlooked part of the French criminal justice system. Michel Foucault was well aware that he was overlooking some elements in his investigation of power relations, so he deliberately chose examples from ‘military, medical, educational and industrial institutions’ as his examples while noting that ‘[o]ther examples might have been taken from colonization, slavery and child rearing’4. This history of the prison, Panopticism as Foucault called it, had received little attention up to the time of writing his book, certainly when he compared it to ‘the mining industries, the emerging chemical industries or methods of national accountancy’ or ‘the blast furnaces or the steam engine’5. This is no longer the case, there are endless references to Foucault’s pessimistic view of Western society: the carceral archipelago, the society of surveillance, etc., what is being investigating here is Foucault’s method of working in order to apply its principles to this research into Shanghai, particularly the alleyway house, so that we can get a better picture of what is going on there, and try and ﬁ nd out what made it work so well.

Punishment

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 30-31. Ibid., p. 309, endnote 3. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 314, endnote 1. Ibid., p. 224. 144 ‘The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power.’6 ‘The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.’7 Michel Foucault was led to articulate these two famous and startling formulations by asking if a penalty no longer addressed itself to the body, on what did it lay hold? The answer, according to Foucault, is ‘simple, almost obvious[…] since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul’8. He quotes Mably in formulating the principle: ‘Punishment, if I may so put it, should strike the soul rather than the body’9. The modern rituals of execution attested a double process: the disappearance of spectacle and the elimination of pain. One no longer touched the body, or at least one did so as little as possible, and even then it was only to reach something other than the body itself: the soul. Foucault saw Discipline and Punish as ‘a correlative history of the modern soul’, a ‘genealogy of the present scientifi co-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifi cations and rules’10. He saw this as following a series of four steps: one, punishment did not concentrate on the repressive effects of the punitive mechanisms but situated them in a series of their possible positive effects, in other words, punishment was seen as a complex social function. Two, punitive methods were not simply the consequences of legislation or indicators of social structures, but techniques in ways of exercising power, hence punishment was a political tactic. Three, penal law and the history of human sciences derive from a common matrix, a single ‘epistemologico-juridical’ process, meaning that the knowledge of man and the humanisation of the penal system result from the technology of power. And four, the appearance of the soul in legal practice is actually an effect of the transformation of the way in which the body is itself invested by power relations. Foucault thinks that by analysing penal leniency as a technique of power we might be able to understand how man and the soul, the normal, or the abnormal, can come to duplicate crime as objects of penal intervention, and as a result see how man became an object of knowledge for scientifi c discourse. Michel Foucault sees the assertion of guilt as ‘a strange scientifi co-juridical complex’11. A sentence is passed on the criminal, but this is not in direct relation to the crime, it is supposed to function as a way of treating the criminal. There is a punishment, but it is a way of wishing to obtain a cure. We can no longer simply ask who committed the crime, we have to ask why the crime was committed. ‘How can we assign the causal process that produced [the crime]? Where did it originate in the author himself?’12 Because behind the pretext of explaining the criminal action are ways of defi ning an individual. The older, pre-modern method of publicly punishing a criminal with torture and hanging obeyed a logic that obtained at that time, one that was inscribed in the system of punishment. The sovereign ‘demanded, decided and carried out punishments, in so far as it was he who, through the law, had been injured by the crime’13. It was on the body of the condemned that the vengeance of the sovereign was applied, Foucault describes it as ‘the anchoring point for a manifestation of power, an opportunity of affi rming the dissymmetry of forces’14. This public atrocity played a double role: it communicated the link between crime and punishment, but it was also the exacerbation of the punishment in relation to the crime. Foucault saw the public execution as a sort of ‘momentary saturnalia, when nothing remained to prohibit or to punish’15. This is somewhat less than convincing for the simple reason that a truly penitent criminal would surely regret what they had done when they were about to meet their maker,

Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 16. G. de Mably quoted in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, p. 16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 23. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 60. 145 even if bravado did lead some of them to call the king rude names (the crime of lese majesty was once though to be serious), but even this bravado was nothing more than a pathetic gesture, helpless and futile; as an exhibition of saturnalia, momentary or otherwise, it hardly merits the name. What the spectacle did provide, however, was a visible culmination of the ritual of the investigation with a ceremony in which the sovereign was soon to triumph. What is interesting here is the use of the word ‘investigation’. Foucault maintains that the spectacle that had surrounded the criminal was transposed to another class by the emergence in the nineteenth century of the genre known as crime literature. The newspapers took over the task of recounting the ‘grey, unheroic details of everyday crime and punishment’16, whereas the crime novel also fl ourished because people had been robbed of the old pride in crimes. As Foucault says, ‘the great murders had become the quiet game of the well behaved’17. In crime literature, crime is glorifi ed, because ‘it is one of the fi ne arts, because it can be the work only of exceptional natures, because it reveals the monstrousness of the strong and powerful, because villainy is yet another mode of privilege’18. With no more popular heroes or great executions, with the ‘man of the people’ now too simple to be the protagonist of subtle truths, this new genre, with its wickedly intelligent criminals, and even more devilishly clever detectives, answered a deep-seated need in society, that of seeing the wicked getting what they deserve. As Foucault says:

[F]rom the adventure story to de Quincey, or from the Castle of Otranto to Baudelaire, there is a whole aesthetic rewriting of crime, which is also the appropriation of criminality in acceptable forms. In appearance, it is the discovery of the beauty and greatness of crime; in fact, it is the afﬁ rmation that greatness too has a right to crime and that it even becomes the exclusive privilege of those who are really great. The great murders are not for the pedlars of petty crime. While, from Gaboriau onwards, the literature of crime follows this ﬁ rst shift: by his cunning, his tricks, his sharp-wittedness, the criminal represented in this literature has made himself impervious to suspicion; and the struggle between two pure minds – the murderer and the detective will constitute the essential form of the confrontation19.

While this is a theme that can only be considered of secondary importance in a work like Discipline and Punish it is obviously important enough for Foucault to return to it later in the book where he states:

The crime novel, which began to develop in the broadsheet and in mass-circulation literature, assumed an apparently opposite role. Above all, its function was to show that the delinquent belonged to an entirely different world, unrelated to familiar, everyday life. This strangeness was ﬁ rst that of the lower depths of society (Les Mysteres de Paris, Rocambole), then that of madness (especially in the latter half of the century) and lastly that of crime in high society (Arsene Lupin). The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of ‘crime stories’ in which delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place. Through the importance attributed to it and the surfeit of discourse surrounding it, a line is traced round it which, while exalting it, sets it apart20.

Michel Foucault’s point about the investigation was that he saw the sovereign power as ‘arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques’21. As a

Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., pp. 68-69. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., p. 225. 146 procedure it had developed with the reorganisation of the Church and the increase in the power of the princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At that time it permeated the jurisprudence of the ecclesiastical courts, and then the lay ones. Investigation was an authoritarian search for truth and as such was thus opposed to ‘the old procedures of the oath, the ordeal, the judicial duel, the judgement of God or even of the transaction between private individuals’22. Today the investigation is an integral part of Western justice, but Foucault does not want us to forget ‘either its political origin, its link with the birth of the states and of monarchical sovereignty, or its later extension and its role in the formation of knowledge’23. This is something he explores in great detail in both The History of Sexuality trilogy as well as his lectures at the Collège de France, which we will be examining later in this chapter. According to Foucault, the investigation was also a fundamental, albeit crude, element in the constitution of empirical science, which Foucault sees in the juridico-political matrix of this experimental knowledge, which grew rapidly at the end of the Middle Ages, and was seen as springing from practices of investigation (in much the same way that mathematics in ancient Greece was born from techniques of measurement). Although he later states that ‘[t]he great investigation that gave rise to the sciences of nature has become detached from its politico-juridical model’, he sees the examination, as ‘still caught up in disciplinary technology’24. He even goes so far as to say that ‘… the examination has remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that shaped it’25. This is an important concept. We already saw the importance of the examination at the beginning of this section as the means by which a profession ensures the competence of its members, and we will return to it later when we get to the Panopticon.

Power relations Foucault saw the body as being ‘directly involved in a political ﬁ eld; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’26. He took as his point of departure Rusche and Kirchheimer’s examination of prisons where he saw them as relating different systems of punishment within the systems of production. A slave economy used punitive measures to provide a workforce (as we have already seen in the Caribbean sugar colonies); feudalism saw an increase in corporal punishments, because the body was the most accessible property; forced labour in prison appeared with the development of the market economy. The nineteenth-century’s industrial revolution required a free market in labour hence forced labour ceased to be a feature of punishment, with corrective detention taking its place. So, as the economic take-off of the West was based on techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, the methods for administering accumulations of manpower provided the impetus for a parallel take-off in relation to the more traditional, ritual, costly, and violent forms of power, which fell into desuetude, to be superseded by a subtler, more calculated technology of subjection. Michel Foucault saw these two processes – the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital – as inseparable. As he says, ‘it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them. Conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital’27. These techniques had a long history, what was new in the eighteenth century was the combination and generalisation by which they attained a level whereby the formation of knowledge and the increase of power reinforced each another in a new sort of symbiosis. This is where the disciplines crossed what Foucault calls ‘the “technological” threshold’, and he states:

Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 221. 147 First the hospital, then the school, then, later, the workshop were not simply ‘reordered’ by the disciplines; they became, thanks to them, apparatuses such that any mechanism of objectiﬁ cation could be used in them as an instrument of subjection, and any growth of power could give rise in them to possible branches of knowledge; it was this link, proper to the technological systems, that made possible within the disciplinary element the formation of clinical medicine, psychiatry, child psychology, educational psychology, the rationalization of labour.28

The political investment of the body was bound up with a series of complex reciprocal relationships. The body’s economic use, as a force of production, became invested with relations of power and domination, but its constitution as labour power was possible only within a system of subjection; hence in Foucault’s formulation, it became ‘a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body’29. What is important here is the fact that this subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or ideology but can also be as a result of a direct, physical pitting of force against force, (without actually involving any violence). Organised, calculated, and technically thought out, this knowledge of the body constitutes what Foucault calls ‘the political technology of the body’30. This technology is diffuse, rarely can it be formulated in a continuous or systematic discourse. Made up of disparate tools or methods, it cannot be localised in any particular institution or state apparatus. What is operating here is what Foucault calls ‘a micro-physics of power’31, which presupposes that the power being exercised on the body is not so much a property as a strategy; its effects of domination are achieved through manoeuvres and tactics; a network of relations, constantly in tension as they are activated, rather than the more usual understanding of a privilege that can be possessed. Hence power is exercised, it is not the possession of a privileged elite, it is, in short, simply the overall effect of strategic positioning. The exercising of these power relations resonate throughout the whole of society, they are not localised in either the relationship between the state and its citizens or at the frontier of class relations. Power produces knowledge. In fact Foucault states quite baldly that one directly implies the other. There can be no power relation without ‘the correlative constitution of a ﬁ eld of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’32. Foucault wants us to examine these ‘power-knowledge relations’, but not in the tradition of thought that states that knowledge can only exist where power relations are suspended, that knowledge can only develop outside of its injunctions, demands, and interests. He wants the modalities of knowledge to be regarded as ‘so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations’33. As Foucault himself states, ‘it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge’34.

Discipline The methods which made possible a meticulous control of the body, and by which it is subjected to force, Foucault suggests might be called disciplines. He points out that different disciplinary methods have long been in existence (for example, the monastery, the army, the workshop, etc.), what was

Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 28. 148 different in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that discipline became a general formula of domination. The elegance of the disciplinary mode lay in the fact that it could reduce the cost (and violence) of relations like slavery, domestic service, or feudal vassalage, while achieving effects of utility at least as great. It was different, too, from asceticism, whose function was to renounce rather than increase utility and which was primarily aimed at an increased mastery of one’s own body. The disciplines render the human body more obedient and hence more useful, the body fi nds itself ‘entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’35. What was being formed here was a policy of coercions, a ‘calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour’36. What Foucault calls ‘[a] “political anatomy”, which was also a “mechanics of power”’37, was being born. Discipline, in short, produces subjected and practised bodies, what he calls ‘docile’ bodies. This new political anatomy must not be thought of a sudden discovery, it was a multiplicity of often minor processes that overlap, repeat, or imitate one another; the support they give one another in their various domains of application converge to produce what Foucault calls ‘the blueprint of a general method’38. What is interesting about all of this is that according to Foucault these disciplines came into being in response to particular needs; he cites industrial innovation, a renewed outbreak disease, or the invention of the rifl e as examples. And as we saw in Part II, these are exactly the sorts of contingent beginnings that enabled the West to colonise much of the rest of the world. ‘The “Enlightenment”, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.’39 Foucault states that here there can be no question of writing the history of different disciplinary institutions, he simply wants to map some of the essential techniques that spread most easily. These were meticulous, often minute, techniques, but were important because they defi ned a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body – what he refers to as a ‘new micro-physics’ of power. And because they reached out to broader domains, they tended to cover the entire social body. Foucault cites enclosures which confi ned the indigent, but the workshop also made use of enclosure (only in a different way), the machinery works’ space is even more fl exible, depending on the principle of elementary location or partitioning, with each individual assigned their own place, and each place its individual. Hospitals, especially military and naval ones, were functional sites which gradually coded their space so that particular places could correspond not only to the need to supervise, or to break dangerous communications, but also to create a useful space. The medical supervision of disease was inseparable from a whole series of other controls, for example the military’s control over deserters, or fi scal control over commodities, hence the need to distribute and partition off space in a rigorous manner. A port, especially a military one, was an even more complex version of this sort of space, with its fl ows of goods and men (some of whom were willingly signed up, others who were there by force – i.e. Shanghaied). Ports were crossroads for dangerous mixtures, what Foucault calls meeting places for forbidden circulations40. This was even more so the case in colonial ports like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and as has already been seen in Part II, the early nineteenth-century term for a colonial port city like Singapore was actually a ‘factory’ (from ‘manufactory’). Like the factories that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, the principle of individualised partitioning became ever more apparent. In Singapore we have seen the dividing practice of keeping the various races to their own areas, something that is clearly in keeping with Foucault’s analysis of ‘distributing individuals in a space in which one might isolate them and map them’41 for the industrial factory. So what seems shockingly racist to us today in a plan like Singapore’s seems to obey a compelling logic that, according

Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 144. 149 to Foucault, simply obtained at the time. Michel Foucault also, interestingly, goes on to give the example of the ‘class’ in Jesuit colleges, where groups of hundreds of pupils were divided into subgroups of ten, each with its respective decurion. Opposing camps, Roman or Carthaginian, rivalled one another, with each pupil competing directly against his opposite number in the opposing camp. This is also remarkably similar to the ‘house’ system to be found English public schools. What is interesting about this is the fact that the Jesuit cadet, as well as the English public-schoolboy, should both have gone on to be such important characters in empire-building. Both of these types seem to have made use of a startlingly similar system in their educational formation. Public schools in England also instilled a sense of continuity to ancient Rome and Greece in their curriculum, as has been pointed out in Part II, with the teaching of Latin and Greek, making these languages the basis for colonial and civil service examinations. Foucault also reminds us ﬁ nally that what he calls ‘the Roman model’42 played a dual role at the time of the Enlightenment: its republican aspect was the very embodiment of liberty, while its military aspect was the ideal schema for discipline.

Ibid., p. 146. 150 4 THE ALLEYWAY HOUSE: A BENIGN PANOPTICON

Having seen this link to the colonies that Michel Foucault himself has suggested, but never had the time (or perhaps the inclination) to develop, it might now be appropriate to turn our attention to the practical application of a Foucauldian theory to an actual space: the Shanghai alleyway house. This structure can be seen as a panopticon (small ‘p’ as an adjective, as opposed to the capital ‘P’ of the noun – or the Benthamite prison). This is not the empty-hearted and somewhat sinister apparatus of control that Foucault’s pessimistic (though accurate) reading of Jeremy Bentham’s prison plan has given us; rather it is a benign apparatus, one that helps its society to function in a way that enables a rich and varied street life to come into being – the sort of street life we saw highlighted in Part I. In the comparison that was drawn between the Shanghai alleyway house and the Singapore shophouse we saw the former consisting of a tree-structure, and the latter a network. Oddly, or perhaps not, these differing street structures have resulted in very different social and use patterns. In Singapore we saw how the network structure has enabled the shophouse to be effectively and dynamically reused, however it has never been able to engender the sort of vibrant social life that was such a feature of Shanghai’s alleyway houses – the ﬁ ve- foot-way (the zone where Singapore’s public and private melding took place) was far too small to allow for this. It can be argued that Shanghai’s alleyway house tree-structure has enabled a social life that was rich and vibrant, certainly when seen against the more pessimistic Foucauldian notion of the panoptic society. Michel Foucault tells us that ‘[s]tones can make people docile and knowable’1. The Panopticon was an apparatus of control whose effectiveness depended on visibility, the visibility of those under surveillance, which in turn depended on the central point from which they were watched (the word ‘surveyed’ might almost have been used here except that it does not quite capture the more active characteristics of the verb ‘to watch’ and would in all probability have suggested too benign a heart for such a sinisterly efﬁ cient apparatus). The point that needs to be made here, and which will need a brief summary of Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon in order to make it, is that an urban structure like the Shanghai alleyway house also depends on visibility for its social effectiveness, but not visibilities that radiates from a central control, rather one where everyone can act as a surveyor, as well as be surveyed (and here the more benign verb ‘to survey’ can actually usefully be employed). The alleyway house’s tree-structure produced an observed hierarchy of streets, graduating from the public to the private, and as such acted as a benign panopticon.

The Panopticon Michel Foucault states that the success of disciplinarity comes from the use of simple instruments, and he lists three of them: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and their combination in the third, the examination. Hierarchical observation is where the exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that can coerce simply by means of observation. As Foucault tells us, ‘an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible’2. Normalising judgement compares, differentiates, hierarchises, homogenises, and excludes; it normalises all points and supervises every instant in disciplinary institutions. The power of what Foucault calls ‘the Norm’ appears through discipline. He saw ‘the Normal’ as a principle of coercion in teaching that emerged when standardised education was introduced in France (with what were known, signiﬁ cantly, as the écoles normales). It reﬂ ected a national standardisation (particularly in medicine) of what constituted general norms. Like surveillance, normalisation was one of the

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 172. Ibid., p. 172. 151 great instruments of power at the end of the classical age because markers of status, privilege, and affi liation were increasingly replaced by a range of ‘degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classifi cation, hierarchization and the distribution of rank’3. The power of normalisation imposed a homogeneity but it also individualised by making the measurement of gaps, levels, and specialities possible. As Foucault says, ‘[i]t is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences’4. And, according to Foucault, the examination combined the techniques of an observing hierarchy with those of a normalising judgement because it was surveillance that made it possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish. It rendered individuals visible, thereby making it possible to differentiate between them, and to judge them. This is also why examinations tend to be highly ritualised. Jeremy Bentham is fi rst supposed to have thought of the Panopticon while on a visit to the École Militaire in Paris. Foucault notes that ‘[t]he very building of the École was to be an apparatus for observation’5. Foucault also notes that Bentham does not say whether he was inspired by Le Vaux’s menagerie at Versailles, with its centrally placed octagonal pavilion and large windows looking out in different directions. We can probably assume that he was not thus infl uenced, Foucault has tried to make a link here where none existed, this he does cleverly, but not quite cleverly enough. Cleverly because he has spotted the similarities, but not quite clever enough because he fails to make this ‘link’ a convincing one, especially when he goes on to say that by Bentham’s time the menagerie had disappeared. According to Foucault visibility is a trap, and it is visibility that renders the Panopticon so powerful and so effective. This ‘simple idea in architecture’6 is ‘a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power’7. Basically the Panopticon consisted of an observation tower at the centre of a circle of cells which faced it. Based on the principle that we can control people merely by observing them, the sinister beauty of this scheme was that those under surveillance could never know whether they were actually being watched or not, but they had to act as if they were. Prison as a punishment was now intended to reform the criminal, rather that simply torturing and executing them as had been the case before the Enlightenment, hence the Panopticon reversed the principle of the dungeon – the ‘…ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms of torture, to be seen in Piranese’s engravings’8, rendering visible those who had previously been shut away and forgotten (interestingly, another word for a dungeon cell in English was an oubliette, a place to forget, or a place in which one could be forgotten about). The Panopticon maximised effi ciency because large numbers of prisoners could be controlled using a minimal staff. According to Foucault, ‘the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system’9. Though a British invention, none was ever built in the United Kingdom. It went on to became a popular form of prison in the United States, however, where it tended to be known as a penitentiary, and the Netherlands seems also to have taken it to its heart, building at least three of them (in Haarlem, Breda, and Arnhem). Bentham’s Panopticon was intended to be a fl exible typology, it was to be polyvalent in its applications. Bentham himself thought it could be used for functions other than that of the prison. The central tower could be, in the case of a hospital, a place from which the director could ‘spy on all the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, warders; he [would] be able

Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 205. 152 to judge them continuously, alter their behaviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it will even be possible to observe the director himself’10. The point was that in each of its applications the perfection of the exercise of power was possible, and by reducing the number of those who exercised it (and increasing the number of those on whom it was exercised) it could allow for intervention at any moment. But of course intervention is never necessary, as Foucault ruefully points out, ‘[t]he panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its effi cacy by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms’11. Foucault sees the panoptic mechanism as not simply being a hinge, ‘a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function’, he sees it as ‘a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations’12. He saw that the panoptic schema could be used whenever it was necessary to deal with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour had to be imposed. In fact, Foucault saw the panoptic schema as destined to spread throughout the entire social body, and it would be able to do so without losing any of its properties. As Foucault says, ‘[w]e are much less Greeks [sic] than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism’13. Panopticism became, according to Foucault, the ‘general principle of a new “political anatomy” whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline’14. The panoptic arrangement provided for its own generalisation because it could programme the basic functioning of society thanks to its elementary and easily transferable mechanism. Disorder and agitation, disobedience and bad conduct, all of the things that plagued society could now be banished by this simple and elegant mechanism. And it is these very things which Ledoux had wanted to exclude from his architecturally perfect city, which, as Foucault tellingly shows us, Ledoux called ‘offences of non-surveillance’15. Of course the Panopticon never did manage to achieve a polyvalency, it was only ever built as a prison, particularly from the 1830s onwards. There was, however, one alternative which ties in to this thesis’s research into colonialism, and that was the transportation of criminals mentioned earlier. Transportation, which Foucault calls the only alternative to prison, was abandoned in England 1867, France, oddly enough, only took it up as a practice during the Second Empire (1852-1870). As a practice it was ‘mysterious and gloomy’, and Foucault contrasts it to Bentham’s more salutary method for dealing with criminals16. According to Foucault, the deportation of criminals was demanded by France’s Chamber of Deputies or the General Councils on several occasions during the Second Empire; it was seen as a way of potentially lightening the fi nancial burden imposed by the detention of prisoners. Plans were drawn up for the deportation of delinquents, undisciplined soldiers, prostitutes, and orphans to colonise Algeria. In fact Algeria was prevented from thus becoming a penal colony only by a law of 1854 which resulted in French Guiana and New Caledonia taking over this unhappy function. Foucault sees the panopticon as a very modern idea, but also one that is, conversely, completely archaic since the panoptic mechanism places someone at its centre. This he likens to the taking over of a sovereignty function, where none of the subjects can escape and none of their actions can be unknown. Foucault developed this thinking in his later lectures at the Collège de France, where he states that the central point of the panopticon can function as a perfect sovereign because it is not an idea of a power that takes the form of an exhaustive surveillance of individuals constantly under the eyes of this sovereign, rather it acts as a set of mechanisms that attach importance to specifi c phenomena

Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., pp. 206-207. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 208. Claude Nicolas Ledoux quoted in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, p. 214. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 264. 153 not to individual phenomena; even if individuals do sometimes appear, these are specifi c processes of individualisation17. He sees the relation between the individual and the collective, between the totality of the social body and its elementary fragments, as being made to function in a completely different way (and this ties into the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France where he examined the notion of population, among others). What is perhaps most interesting is the fact that Foucault seems to think the government of populations is ‘…completely different from the exercise of sovereignty over the fi ne grain of individual behaviours. It seems to me [Foucault] that we have two completely different systems of power’18. This is correct, it is also the very analysis that led to an understanding of the usefulness of the panopticon in this research’s attempts to understand what is happening in the Shanghai alleyway house. The visibility that was possible in such a hierarchical arrangement of streets – where strangers, and residents, could be monitored by one another – not only refl ected the way in which Chinese society makes use of its cities’ streets, but, in Shanghai’s specifi c case, with the British (or at least Western) ethos of its foreign concessions, this was further mitigated in these pockets of the more traditional Chinese way of life. In fact, it could even be argued that these fi nely grained alleyways managed to engender their unique street life because of their opposition to, or contrast with, the rest of the Western-style city, with its overarching Western footprint. Thus they can be seen as being similar to Beijing’s hutongs, yet subtler; and, as in the case of Singapore, have more scope for this subtlety for the simple reason that they have more space in which to operate. This is why it is possible to reject the Foucauldian pessimism of the carceral archipelago, at least for the Shanghai alleyway house – and note that the alleyway house accounted for the vast majority of the built-up area of the city during the colonial, as aerial photographs of the city will testify. The panoptic function engenders the alleyway house with a rich and vibrant street life, refl ecting the incredible fecundity of this unique colonial-era commingling of East and West. And it is this that we need to see in any reading of Shanghai today – this function of social visibility via the benign panopticon of the alleyway house – because it is this that has given the city streets their incredible richness and vibrancy. And it is this that we should be seeking to recapture when attempting to learn from the past, not simply redecorating empty alleyway houses so that international coffee-shop chains can have a prettier premises in which to do business.

‘The History of Sexuality’ It has become the stuff of legend that the day Michel Foucault completed his last draft of Discipline and Punish he began to write the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality. Such a commitment to continuity is refl ected in the fact that this latter work clearly continues the analysis of power begun in Discipline and Punish. Foucault’s initial treatment of sexuality is relatively straightforward, and is laid out using the genealogical method fi rst used in Discipline and Punish. His topic, the ethical formation of the self, emerged as a natural corollary of his investigations into power relations. The key issue here is his concept of problematisation, where fundamental issues and choices individuals make impact their existence. Foucault denies here the notion that modern power is exercised primarily through repression or that opposition to repression is an effective way of resisting it, rather, he thinks that new forms of sexuality were invented by what he calls a ‘discourse’. An example of this would be the fact that same-sex relations, which have occurred throughout human history, only became ‘homosexual’ with the advent of the modern sciences of sexuality (which treated these actions as a category in and of themselves). It is important to clarify here that the term ‘homosexual’ derives from Greek and not Latin, hence already means ‘same’ sex and has nothing to do with the Latin ‘homo’ for man, a distinction that

Michel Foucault, ‘Lecture Number Three’ (25 January 1978), from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., pp. 55-86. Ibid., p. 66. 154 seems lost on a world where ever more carefully graded categories show the homosexual as referring exclusively to males, lesbianism to females, and the emergence of even more subtle distinctions such as bi-sexual, transgender, etc. Of course there is, or should be, a distinction between sexuality and the act of coitus itself. Foucault rapidly moves beyond sexuality per se to develop a notion which he calls ‘bio- power’, which concerns itself with the task of administering life. This it does on two levels: one, the anatomo-politics of the human body, and two, the social group. Foucault also studied the notion of ‘governmentality’ in The History of Sexuality, which he saw as developing from medieval pastoral care, a time when a ruler had acted as a sort of shepherd to the ‘fl ock’ under his or her care. Foucault saw the emergence of the notion of ‘population’ (as an economic and political problem) in the eighteenth century. This was one of the great innovations in the techniques of power. Population was ‘everything that extends from biological rootedness through the species up to the surface that gives one a hold provided by the public’19. Population was balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Population was wealth and/or manpower. Governments realised that they were not simply dealing with subjects but with a ‘population’, one with specifi c phenomena, for example the variables of birth and death rates, life expectancy, health, and habitation20. The public was a population ‘seen under the aspect of its opinions, ways of doing things, forms of behaviour, customs, fears, prejudices, and requirements; it is what one gets a hold on through education, campaigns, and convictions’21. Here was a whole new fi eld of realities that were pertinent elements for the mechanisms of power, the ‘pertinent space within which and regarding which one must act’22. The transformation of sex into a discourse was sublimated into this new understanding. It was not a case that there was a discourse of power with another one running counter to it. Foucault saw discourses as being practical elements or blocks that operated within a fi eld of relations, with the result that different, even contradictory, discourses could exist side by side. The ‘question’ of sex would be a good example of this. Foucault saw sex as being both an interrogation and a problematisation (with its need for confession, as well as its integration into a fi eld of rationality), in his words, ‘we demand that sex speak the truth (but, since it is the secret and is oblivious to its own nature, we reserve for ourselves the function of telling the truth of its truth, revealed and deciphered at last), and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness’23. This in turn ties into Foucault’s notion of power as being able to mask a substantial part of itself because it is power’s ability to hide its own mechanisms that makes it tolerable. Power is omnipresent because it can be produced from one moment to the next. Power is everywhere not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere; it is simply an overall effect. Power is not an institution, neither is it a structure; power is the name we attribute to a complex series of strategies that operate in any given society. Power is not something that can be seized, or shared, because it is exercised from innumerable points, and in an interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations. Yet where there is power, there is resistance, and yet this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in its relation to power. Foucault’s notion of ‘bio-power’ as being an indispensable element in the development of capitalism is further confi rmed by his saying that it would not have been possible ‘… without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’24. The History of Sexuality, Volume II, The Use of Pleasure continues this analysis of the

Ibid., p. 75. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, p. 25. Michel Foucault, Lecture Number Three (25 January 1978), from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., p. 75. Ibid., p. 75. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, p. 69. Ibid., p. 141. 155 problematisation of sex which Foucault saw as not being so much directly related to the institution of marriage but with ‘the direct, symmetrical, and reciprocal obligation that might derive from it’25. He goes on to note in The History of Sexuality, Volume III, The Care of the Self that ‘[a]nyone who exercises power has to place himself in a ﬁ eld of complex relations where he occupies a transition point’26, and he quotes Epictetus as saying ‘[b]eating an ass is not governing men’27. One link to the colonial world which might be fruitful to highlight here is Foucault’s maintaining that the Roman administration had needed what he called a ‘managerial aristocracy’, (quoting R. Syme); an aristocratic service that would furnish the ‘different kinds of agents necessary to “administer the world”’28. In much the same way as the British colonial apparatus made use of a managerial class of people drawn from the higher echelons of society to administer its empire (the Oxford and Cambridge elite we saw highlighted by Manuel Castells in Part I). China, too, had long made use of a scholar gentry in a similar way in order to administer its own huge empire.

Lectures at the Collège de France While working on The History of Sexuality Foucault was clearly interested in exploring the links between the ancient world and the early Christian era. Instead of asking what elements of code had been borrowed from the former, he was more interested in seeing what had been added in order to defi ne what was permitted and what forbidden (within a sexuality that was assumed to be constant). Foucault clearly thought that it was more relevant to ask how codes that were continuously transferred (and the practices that were associated with them) were actually modifi ed, re-defi ned, and diversifi ed29. Improvements in recording technology in the 1970s meant that many of Michel Foucault’s lectures were recorded. An excellent series of transcriptions of these recordings is being edited by Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana (with a series of English translations being edited by Arnold I. Davidson). In these lectures Foucault elaborated on, and further developed, many of the themes he had outlined in his other writings. In many ways these lectures give an excellent background to Foucault’s thinking as there seems to have been more room to manoeuvre in the lecture hall. The issues that have been of particular concern to this research include Foucault’s development of the notion of ‘governmentality’, which he does in the 1978 lecture series Security, Territory, Population (and which was also covered in the 1975 series: Abnormal). Foucault saw in the Christian pastorate the birth of ‘an absolutely new form of power’30. The pastorate seems to have acted for Foucault as a precursor of governmentality through its constitution of a specifi c subject, a subject ‘whose merits are analytically identifi ed, who is subjected in continuous networks of obedience, and who is subjectifi ed (subjectivé) through the compulsory extraction of truth’31, but in a way that does not simply put ‘the principles of salvation, law, and truth into play, but rather, through all these kinds of diagonals, establishes other types of relationships under the law, salvation, and truth’32. The Christian pastorate was all about obedience, and it was this notion of a state of obedience that was something new and specifi c as well as unprecedented. Interestingly, Foucault ties the question of obedience to the work of Francis Bacon (a fi gure who, at the time of Foucault’s lecturing, was more or less ignored in France). According to Foucault, Bacon was one of the most interesting fi gures at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and while normally loath to give advice concerning

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, p. 150. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume III: The Care of the Self, p. 88. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 84. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, p. 31. Michel Foucault, Lecture Number Seven (22 February 1978), from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., p. 183. Ibid., pp. 184-185. Ibid., p. 184. 156 university work to his students Foucault thought that studying Bacon would not be a waste of time33. As Michel Senellart has pointed out in his copious footnotes, maybe this advice has been heeded, according to Senellart the study of Francis Bacon has ‘enjoyed an important expansion in France since the end of the 1970s, with the translation of the Essais (Aubier, 1979), La Nouvelle Atlantide (Payot, 1983; GF, 1995), Novum Organum (PUF, 1986), De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum/Du progres et de la promotion des savoirs (Gallimard, “Tel,” 1991), and La Sagesse des Anciens (Vrin, 1997)’34. It is in Michel Foucault’s exploration of what constitutes a town that we ﬁ nd the most elegant analysis in these lectures. Foucault cogently highlights the fact that the basic problem of a town is circulation. While this is prescient, it leads him further to state that the most important point of a town was that it could not, or should not, ‘be conceived or planned according to a static perception that would ensure the perfection of the function there and then, but will open onto a future that is not exactly controllable, not precisely measured or measurable, and a good town plan takes into account precisely what might happen’35. This ties in beautifully to what we have been looking at in the work of Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett, Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijendorp, Charles Jencks, et al., and is something that Modernist architects and urban planners were only beginning to dimly perceive for themselves at that time.

Some other writings One vital link to Michel Foucault’s notion of the Christian pastorate which he examined in the Collège de France lectures is also made in his essay ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’, which appears in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow) where Foucault states:

[P]ower of a pastoral type, which over centuries – for more than a millennium – had been linked to a deﬁ ned religious institution, suddenly spread out into the whole social body; it found support in a multitude of institutions. And, instead of a pastoral power and a political power, more or less linked to each other, more or less rival, there was an individualizing ‘tactic’ which characterized a series of powers; those of the family, medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers36.

It is in this essay that Foucault also states that the goal of his work for twenty years had not been to analyse the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis, but ‘to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’37. It is not power, but the subject that is the general theme of Foucault’s research. Foucault here defi nes a relationship of power as ‘a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future’38; and he goes on to neatly defi ne the act of governing as ‘to structure the possible fi eld of action of others’39. These defi nitions have become so well known that their brilliance, and their elegance, is sometimes almost overlooked. The ability to express such profundity

Michel Foucault, Lecture Number Ten (15 March 1978), from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., pp. 255-283. Ibid., p. 282, endnote 39. Michel Foucault, Lecture Number One (11 January 1978), from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., p. 20. Michel Foucault, ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’, from Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, p. 215. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 220. Ibid., p. 221. 157 with such concision can only result from having spent many years in hard work, broad study, and deep thought. The resultant wisdom should then be used carefully, and appropriately by others who study Foucault’s work, not bolted hastily onto some commentary in order to try and reinforce an otherwise undeveloped argument. One of the reasons Foucault is so popular with architects is, as we saw earlier, the fact that he spent much of his work analysing actual spaces. Foucault thought that ‘[s]pace is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power’40. Architects tend to analyse particular buildings, institutions such as hospitals or schools, and this they do in terms of their disciplinary functions, tending to focus on the walls; Foucault’s concern is more with the spaces that these walls create. Foucault tries to see architecture as an element of support, a way of ensuring ‘…a certain allocation of people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations. So it is not only considered as an element in space, but is especially thought of as a plunge into a ﬁ eld of social relations in which it brings about some speciﬁ c effects’41. This is what has been attempted in the analysis of the alleyway houses of colonial Shanghai contained in this thesis. Foucault was surprised that the problem of space took so long to emerge as an historico-political problem. He sees it as an economico-political issue which needs to be studied in detail. He also saw the practice of architecture at the end of the eighteenth century as becoming involved in problems of population, health, and what he calls the urban question, as he states:

Previously, the art of building corresponded to the need to make power, divinity and might manifest. The palace and the church were the great architectural forms, along with the stronghold. Architecture manifested might, the Sovereign, God. Its development was for long centred on these requirements. Then, late in the eighteenth century, new problems emerge: it becomes a question of using the disposition of space for economico-political ends.42

As far as Foucault was concerned:

A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers (both these terms in the plural) – from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via economic and political installations43.

As is so often the case in the history of techniques, it can take years or even centuries to implement them. What is certain, from Foucault’s analysis, is the fact that this new technique of architecture has had a formative inﬂ uence on human relations. The exploration of the Shanghai alleyway house that is contained in this thesis represents an attempt to write the history of this fertile hybrid of East and West, not just to analyse its pretty architectural articulation, nor simply to elucidate some background information about which of them were used as the backdrop for a given novel or short story or ﬁ lm, what has been attempted is an effort to engage in an archaeological analysis, the better to see what had gone before, and in a genealogical one, the better to understand the typology’s origins and descent to the present day. But most of all the aim was to try and trace the living links that are still be found there, in the social and familial organisations, and in the rich and vibrant street life of Shanghai. In other words, an effort to trace the consanguinities, the living links that circulate through these alleyway houses and link them to the still faintly beating heart of the old city; an analysis elegantly adumbrated in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures by his characterisation of the basic problem

‘Space, Knowledge and Power’, from The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow, ed., p. 252. Ibid., p. 253. ‘The Eye of Power’, from Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon, ed., p. 148. Ibid., p. 149. 158 of a town being circulation and the attendant analysis of town planning as needing to allow for the contingent and the unexpected. This is also why Foucault’s pessimistic notion of a carceral archipelago has been rejected here, the Shanghai alleyway house’s panoptic function engenders a rich and vibrant street life thanks to its function of social visibility – what has been called here the benign panopticon – and it is this that has resulted in such richness and vibrancy. It might be appropriate to end this chapter with the question of whether, having seen what underpins this lively street life, it could be possible to implement these lessons elsewhere? Perhaps even graft this old way of life onto the newer, and as yet, lifeless spaces that are being built elsewhere in the city as it reconnects itself to the global network?

159 5 ORIENTALISM: ‘THE NECESSARY FURNITURE OF EMPIRE’1

This chapter deals with the work of people who have either commented on Michel Foucault’s work or made use of his methodology in the fi eld of oriental and postcolonial studies. Jana Sawicki says that Foucauldian commentators ‘have certainly addressed the toolkit metaphor’2, while Stuart Elden feels that Foucault himself thought that his work could provide ‘a set of conceptual tools, a toolbox for use by others’, but he admits that ‘these tools have sometimes been used uncritically, without due attendance to their theoretical underpinnings’3. Sara Mills also states that there have been some obvious problems with this approach to Foucault’s theory, and she dismisses commentators who simply like to use the odd illustrative quotation to justify an argument. One of the most egregious examples of this sort of approach in recent decades has perhaps been that of Edward W. Said, whose understanding of the notion of discourse, as elucidated in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, has been refuted by the works of Orientalists such as Robert Irwin and Ibn Warraq, among others. These latter authors’ works – Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing and Warraq’s Defend- ing the West – shall be cited in detail later in the chapter, before moving onto the fi nal chapter in Part III which illustrates what is felt to be a more effective (and accurate) application of Foucault’s theory in an Asian urban environment, David Graham Shane’s analysis of the now demolished Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, which he refers to as a ‘heterotopia par excellence’ (but which is referred to in this thesis as a ‘double heterotopia’). ‘A book’, according to Jorge Luis Borges, ‘is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships’4, and as Sara Mills so reasonably points out, a book can be used for anything. Mills warns against the practice of taking sentences out of context in order to support whatever argument the reader wishes, she also sees the fashionable nature of Michel Foucault’s work as leading to some people having used it in an uncritical way. She cites Edward W. Said’s work on postcolonialism as such a one, pointing out that ‘the style of sweeping generalisation that Foucault often makes and which his followers have copied has irritated many people’5. This is the reason such a close reading (with such copious quotation) from Foucault’s oeuvre has been made in this thesis, with the focus being on such a relatively narrow selection of texts in the analysis of Shanghai, particularly that of Discipline and Punish. And yet, fashionable or not, Foucault’s work has been used with intelligence and discretion by many, Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s work on Singapore, which has already been highlighted, would be a good example. Brenda S.A. Yeoh makes use of Foucauldian notions such as what she calls the ‘norms and forms’ of what shapes a colonial city’s built environment, which serve as a refl ection of colonial aspirations, but also can be used (consciously and unconsciously) as strategies of power to incorporate, categorise, discipline, control, and reform the inhabitants of the city6. She sees the municipal ‘inspect- ing gaze’ as shifted from an overseeing of daily practices in Singapore’s Asian population, which were carried out in specifi c spaces such as the house, the street, or the market, to controlling ‘the dimensions, arrangements, and legibility of particular spaces (such as the house, the building block, and, ultimately, the city as a whole) in order to infl uence the practices of those who inhabited or used such spaces’7. An-

Lord Curzon’s description of Oriental studies as being ‘[p]art of the necessary furniture of Empire’, quoted in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, p. 214. Jana Sawicki, ‘Queering Foucault and the Subject of Feminism’, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Gary Gutting, ed, p. 380. Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History, p. 93. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A Note on (towards) Bernard Shaw’, Labyrinths, p. 249. Sara Mills, Michel Foucault, p. 122. Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, pp. 16-17. Ibid., p. 146. 160 other instrument of control was the naming of a city’s spaces, the defi ning and assigning of ‘proper’ uses to particular spaces, and the relegating of more traditional uses of urban space to the periphery in order to accommodate the demands of urban expansion. It is important to bear in mind that according to Brenda S.A. Yeoh the Foucauldian techniques of disciplinary power exercised by the colonisers would ‘…not automatically preclude the exercise of counter-strategies on the part of those who are subject to such powers’8, she states quite unequivocally that ‘[p]ower was not the intrinsic property of any one group, but instead operated through an ensemble of strategies, of tactics and techniques’9. Yeoh’s investigations have uncovered practices the Chinese citizens of Singapore had brought with them from China, organisations such as clan and dialect associations, trade guilds, temples dedicated to particular deities, and, of course, secret societies (known as triads, we will see more about these secret societies in the last chapter of this thesis when examining Zhang Yimou’s fi lm Shanghai Triad). It was through these institutions that Chinese groups had access to a wide range of services which supported their lifestyle (Yeoh gives examples of medical care, job protection, education, entertainment, etc.). Facilities which catered to their own needs without having recourse to the colonial host society. And even when it came to resisting the colonial authorities, which, as we saw in Part II, the Chi- nese (and others) did successfully in the Veranda Riots, Yeoh points out that passive non-compliance by large numbers of Asians could become a power to be reckoned with in a colonial situation. More common than the more active or heroic forms of protest, and in the long run less costly in terms of effort and sacrifi ce, and, invariably, more successful.

The ‘Other’ Catherine Belsey maintains that some people fear foreigners because they demonstrate that there are other, alternative ways of being, and hence our own ways are not inevitable10. This ‘otherness’ is one of the key components of postmodern thought, particularly in postcolonial studies. Jacques Derrida argues that any culture is ‘colonial’, in the sense that it imposes itself by its power to name things and to lay down rules, particularly of conduct. As Jacques Derrida tells us: no one inhabits a culture by nature11. According to Christopher Butler, postmodern theorists do not give a particularly convincing account of the nature of the self because human identity is essentially seen as a sort of construction – he gives the example of Cindy Sherman’s photographic series called Untitled Film Stills from 1977-8012. The term postmodernists prefer for an individual is the ‘subject’ rather than the ‘self’, Butler claims this is because this word captures a notion of subjection, thereby hinting at unspecifi ed powers that are believed to dominate societies. He also sees this trend as being infl uenced by the work of Michel Foucault who showed the ways in which discourses of power were used in a society to marginalise subordinate groups. Postmodernists were enthusiastic about the potentially liberating effects of ethical or political doctrines, yet according to Christopher Butler they were ‘immensely dependent on the extraordinary prestige of these new intellectual authorities, whose infl uence was not a little sustained by their heavy reliance upon a neologizing jargon, which imparted a tremendous air of diffi culty and profundity to their deliberations and caused great diffi culties to their translators’13. He quotes John Searle as saying, ‘Michel Foucault once characterised Derrida’s prose style to me as “obscurantisme terroriste”. The text is written so obscurely that you can’t fi gure out exactly what the thesis is (hence “obscurantisme”) and then when one criticises this, the author says, “Vouz m’avez mal compris; vouz etes idiot”, (hence

Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 125. Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 63. Jacques Derrida cited in Catherine Belsey’s Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 64. Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, pp. 53-55. Ibid., p. 8. 161 “terroriste”)’14. We have touched on this issue earlier, and it might be useful to stress again here that this is why Foucault’s own work, as it has been applied to Shanghai, has been laid out so clearly. It is important to be as clear as possible, because if an idea is clear in a writer’s mind then he or she should then be able to set it down on paper clearly enough for others to make sense of it. Of course some people may not have such a clear conception of what it is they want to say, or indeed of what it is they think others are saying, as a result they cannot possibly hope to ever state anything with clarity. Sometimes this lack of clarity is mistaken for profundity, a particularly postmodern condition, however time has a way of clearing away these clouds, and after the space of a few decades those books that genuinely have something to say will still be read, while those that only impressed by some sort of academic sleight-of-hand will have their so-called insights proved as false as a phrenologist’s. Christopher Butler sees many of the academic proponents of postmodernist theory in England and the United States as having concentrated on what he calls ‘the inward translation of Continental thought’15, which led to a number of interestingly transplanted cultural ideas, and a sharp break with tradition. According to Butler this has led to a tension between postmodernism that derived from the French intellectual scene and the mainstream of Anglo-American liberal philosophical thought. He even goes so far as to suggest that ‘the often obscure, not to say obfuscating, modes of speech and writing of these intellectuals were sometimes even intended to signify a deﬁ ance of that “Cartesian” clarity of exposition which they said arose from a suspect reliance upon “bourgeois” certainties concerning the world order’16. Perhaps this is why Edward W. Said’s work has provoked such strong reactions in the Anglo-American academic world.

Orientalism and the Orient Because Shanghai is being studied in this thesis in its wider cultural context (historical, political, economic, geographical, etc.) it could be said to fall under any number of different disciplines. In fact, it could even be said to inhabit a number of them simultaneously. This study concentrates on the city of Shanghai in much the same way a jeweller looks at a jewel: it can be examined facet by facet while at the same time always managing to keep in sight its total form. Studying Shanghai within its wider cultural context (of country, history, etc.,) could fall under the category of Sinology, one thing it does not make it, however, is Orientalist. So why has Edward W. Said’s work been chosen for examination here? The answer is fi rstly because Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism have both made use of Michel Foucault’s theories, and secondly because of the wider geopolitical context underpinning this study, (America’s current involvement in the Middle East, etc.,) which directly relates to any investigation into the China of the twenty-fi rst century. While it could be argued that China is in the Orient (as that term is generally understood – what the French would call l’extreme orient), China has never fallen under the purview of Orientalist studies, which seem to take a narrower geographical compass than the name might suggest. Orientalism covers the Near and Middle East, and North Africa, with India sometimes included. Edward W. Said’s defi nition does not even cover that much, basically limiting itself to the Holy Land (i.e. the countries mentioned in the Bible). Many Orientalists, as we shall see, have tended to limit themselves to the Muslim ‘Orient’, and yet even when they take this narrower focus, still manage to leave out Indonesia and Ma- laysia (both Muslim and Oriental), with the result that Orientalism seems to have been reduced to a sort of study of the Arab world, with an occasional nod to Judaism. There is something of the same diffi culty with the word ‘Asian’ in English today. For example, in the United Kingdom the word Asian invariably denotes someone of Indian or Pakistani descent,

John Searle in the New York Review of Books (27 October 1983), quoted in Christopher Butler’s Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 9. Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. 162 whereas in the United States it would mean a Chinese or a Japanese; this has led to commentators on the BBC having to clarify the term as specifi cally denoting a South-Asian if they are reporting a news item from London or the British Midlands to an international audience. There is a sort of subtle magic in the word ‘Orient’. We immediately begin to picture rich oriental rugs, or think of Edmund Burke’s ‘voluptuaries of the Orient’, or Shakespeare’s ‘the beds in the east are soft’. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express conjures up images redolent of luxury, romance, and intrigue, yet at its most basic, the word simply means the East. It is where we get the verb ‘to orient’, which comes from the Christian practice of building churches facing east – and not just the churches, the graves of the faithful departed were also thus oriented so that when Judgement Day came the dead could walk again in the risen Lord secure in the knowledge that they would at least be facing the right way. (Priests were buried facing the opposite direction so they would be better able to instruct their fl ock after all the waiting.) Homi K. Bhabha puts his fi nger on one of the main diffi culties with Orientalism when he says that ‘…one can see the mirror image (albeit reversed in content and intention) of that ahistorical nineteenth-century polarity of Orient and Occident which, in the name of progress, unleashed the exclusionary imperialist ideologies of self and other’17. He sees the transmutations and translations of indigenous traditions as demonstrating their opposition to colonial authority and how ‘the desire of the signifi er, the indeterminacy of intertextuality, can be deeply engaged in the postcolonial struggle against dominant relations of power and knowledge’18. Colonialism as a discourse of domination is one of the key notions introduced by Edward W. Said in his book Orientalism, a notion, which, according to Robert J.C. Young, is simultaneously enabling yet theoretically problematic, in that it moved the analysis of colonialism, imperialism, and the struggles against them, into the arena of discourse. Said, according to Young, took from Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge the idea that a discourse was an epistemological device which constructed ‘its objects of knowledge through the establishment of a practice of a certain linguistic register’, he then goes on to state that ‘[r]ather than simply describing the world as it is, as if language mediates reality directly, a discourse constructs the objects of reality and the ways in which they are perceived and understood’19. Or as Said put it, ‘such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality that they appear to describe’20. Many of the problems that have generated such intense critical response to Said’s text have been identifi ed by Young as being the direct result of the way in which Said formulates his idea of a discourse. The problem, as Young sees it, is that Said’s own discourse was ‘so inclusive as to make no distinction between colonialism and imperialism, or the different forms that they took, or, within the theoretical model elaborated, to make an opening for the impact of anti-colonial resistance’21 (something that this thesis has been at pains to clarify, as we have seen in Part II). Yet Said’s text remains of key importance precisely because he did manage to provide a general theory, demonstrating that habitual practices, as well as different effects colonialism had on the colonised territories (and their peoples), could actually be analysed conceptually and discursively. It was this, according to Young, which ‘…created the academic fi eld of postcolonialism and enabled such a range of subsequent theoretical and historical work’22. Although what he calls the ‘genealogy of postcolonial theory’ is, according to Young, ‘historically complex and wide-ranging, it could be seen as an example of the sort of transcultural admixture that it so often analyses’23. Said claims that Orientalism was ‘a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient’, but which amounted to no more than a fantasy world created by the West, a projection onto the

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 29. Ibid., p. 48. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, p. 388. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 94. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, p. 18. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 383. 163 ‘Other’ which produced nothing more than a knowledge of this ‘Other’24. One of Said’s key weaknesses, according to Young, is that the material he analyses was focused on a narrow fi eld of ‘oriental’ writers, and not on ‘the productions of institutions or the relations between them’25. Other commentators, such as Robert Irwin and Ibn Warraq have gone further in their criticism, both of which we will see in a moment, and both of these scholars are probably even better qualifi ed than Young to analyse Said’s work because they are themselves Orientalist scholars. Young’s thesis has been mentioned here because Orientalism’s lasting impact was the result of its having repositioned the fundamental argument of academic knowledge from its claims to objectivity and autonomy, which is where we come to the work of Michel Foucault. Postcolonial theory, according to Sara Mills, has consistently drawn on and reacted to Michel Foucault largely thanks to Edward W. Said’s work. Foucault’s reconceptualisation of power relations, where power is seen not as something that is imposed but as a network of relations which circulates throughout society, has infl uenced postcolonial theory, where colonialism is now no longer seen simply as an imposition on a passive native population, (as seen through invasion and violence), but also through the production of knowledge; information about these populations26. Mills draws our attention to the outpouring of scholarly and popular knowledge about India and Africa in Britain in the nineteenth century. Colonial authorities felt it was their duty to produce information about a colonised country, producing maps, describing architecture, compiling grammars and dictionaries, describing manners and customs, etc., this information was also the result of those who were involved with the colonial service, such as travel writers, novelists, and scientists, who saw the colonial sphere as an opportunity to expand global knowledge. This production of knowledge, as we shall see in Part IV, had an oddly symbiotic relationship with the lives of the colonists themselves, who actually went so far as to model themselves on the rugged types who peopled the novels of Rudyard Kipling or H. Rider-Haggard, thereby making these models more true to life in the generation following their publication than at their time of their writing: an interesting case of life imitating art. This interest in, and even sympathy for, native cultures led to some renaissance-like revivals, as happened in India, and Ireland, at the end of the nineteenth century. But like these revivals, which were led for the most part by colonial elites (in Ireland’s case the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, from whose ranks the fi gures of William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory sprang), it must be remembered that this compila- tion of knowledge was also being made by outsiders, and was being made in ways that suited their own view of the world. Western taxonomies imposed on indigenous systems of classifi cation often destroyed them. We have seen Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia’s ability to show a world that ordered things differently, so differently in fact we cannot even begin to comprehend it, all we can do is laugh. Yet this system is very far from being ridiculous, in fact it is our own ways, which seek to supplant these other taxonomies, that may well be ridiculous because they miss out so much simply by being inappropriately applied. Supplanting a system that has come into being over centuries is a dangerous business. Such a system will have built itself up as the best way of refl ecting a given culture at a given time, to simply replace it with another is traumatic, and not necessarily for the better. Imagine the diffi culty to West- ern scholarship if we were suddenly forced to arrange our dictionaries in the Chinese manner? So why should we expect others to jettison their own ways simply because we have been too lazy to try and understand them? (There is something similar in the United States’s zest for implementing American-style democracy in other parts of the world, places that may well have completely different social structures, and more ancient traditions – but that is not the purview of this study, it is merely mentioned here as being a pertinent example of this same sort of phenomenon.) Edward W. Said attempted to show the distorting effects Western imperialism had on Oriental societies. He saw imperialism in the guise of a grand narrative: a rational, ordered, peaceful, and law-

Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 95. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, p. 387. Sara Mills, Michel Foucault, p. 30. 164 abiding framework, which defi ned the Orient as its opposite: chaotic and in need of discipline. Homi K. Bhabha sees Said as proposing a semiotic of Orientalist power, examining the varied European discourses which constitute the Orient as a unifi ed racial, geographical, political, and cultural zone of the world and as such is revealing of, and relevant to, what he calls colonial discourse. Bhabha sees Said as continually hinting at a polarity at Orientalism’s centre: ‘on the one hand, a topic of learning, discovery, practice; on the other, it is the site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions and requirements’27. Bhabha sees this site as being ‘continually under threat from diachronic forms of history and narrative, signs of instability. And, fi nally, this line of thinking is given a shape analogical to the dreamwork, when Said refers explicitly to a distinction between “an unconscious positivity” which he terms latent Orien- talism, and the stated knowledges and views about the Orient which he calls manifest Orientalism’28. Said’s theories could be seen as engaging with what Bhabha calls the alterity and ambiva- lence of Orientalist discourse. Said tried to avoid the diffi culties this could lead to by ‘introducing a binarism within the argument which, in initially setting up an opposition between these two discursive scenes, fi nally allows them to be correlated as a congruent system of representation that is unifi ed through a political-ideological intention which, in his words, enables Europe to advance securely and unmetaphorically upon the Orient’29. Bhabha sees Said as identifying the content of Orientalism as an unconscious repository of fantasy, imaginative writings and essential ideas; and its form as the historically and discursively determined, diachronic aspect. This produces a problem for Bhabha with Said’s use of Foucauldian concepts such as power and discourse. For Bhabha, Said’s ‘inadequate attention to representation as a concept that articulates the historical and fantasy (as the scene of desire) in the production of the “political” effects of discourse’30, and having introduced the concept of discourse he ‘does not face up to the problems it creates for an instrumentalist notion of power/knowledge that he seems to require’31. Bhabha sees Foucault’s power/knowledge construct as placing subjects in a relation of power and recognising that they are not part of a symmetrical or dialectical relation self/other, master/slave – which can then be subverted by being inverted. It is then diffi cult to conceive of what he calls ‘the historical enunciations of colonial discourse’ without their being either functionally overdetermined or strategically elaborated (or even displaced) by ‘the unconscious scene of latent Orientalism’32. He also thinks the process of subjectifi cation that places ‘the dominated subject’ within Orientalist (or colonial) discourse would also place ‘the dominant’ within it as well. Bhabha’s says that his re-reading of Said is an attempt to establish this structural link33. According to David Couzens Hoy, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish surprised many because it seemed to admit that discourse did not constitute a social reality; instead, discursive knowledge was shown to be a product of expanding social power (particularly in institutions like the prison, army, school, and factory). Couzens Hoy maintains that discourse has now come to be recognised as a social practice, and he cites Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow in showing that Foucault came to see that the background of a social practice could never be fully articulated34. Foucault maintained that utterances that occur in a specifi c time and place are not determined by the conscious wishes of their speakers; their possibility of being true, or not, does not reside in any given person’s desire to communicate, hence their utterer (or author) is irrelevant to the analysis of what Ian Hacking calls such ‘conditions of possibility’35.

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 102. Ibid., p. 102 (italics in original). Ibid., p. 102 (italics in original). Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 103 (italics in original). Ibid., p. 106. David Couzens Hoy, ‘Introduction’, Foucault: A Critical Reader, David Couzens Hoy, ed., p. 5. Ian Hacking, ‘The Archaeology of Foucault’, Foucault: A Critical Reader, David Couzens Hoy, ed., p. 165 Discourse must be analysed, not in terms of who says what, but in terms of ‘the conditions under which those sentences will have a deﬁ nite truth value, and hence are capable of being uttered’36. The problem with this could be that Foucault’s archaeology seems to relativise knowledge to whatever discourse happened to be spoken at any given time, and, hence, to actually deny that there could ever by anything like an ultimate truth. While this is not an inaccurate reading of Foucault’s work it is precisely this sort of commentary that has resulted in the more shrill criticisms of it by less well-informed sources. Foucault has even been accused of denying the possibility of such an ultimate truth. David Couzens Hoy is correct in pointing out that in Foucault’s reading truth is relative, but this is much the same as saying that Newtonian physics will still obtain for our daily lives in spite of Einstein’s theories (for the simple reason that we are unlikely to travel to work at anything approaching the speed of light). Einstein’s theories and Newton’s laws both obtain within their relative frameworks of reference, so too do the basic truths that underpin our daily lives. To state that everything is relative and that there can be no possibility for objective truth is to take Foucault’s theories and develop them ad absurdum. Yes, the archaeologist cannot, or perhaps should not, criticise a discourse, past or present, by appealing to overarching notions such as truth or fal- sity – archaeology was after all designed to avoid such Whiggish assumptions, and shuns the view that superiority can result from a deliberate replacing of an earlier (i.e. false) theory with a later (true) one, but this does not mean that statements cannot be made, that statements, relatively speaking, can and do hold true for the ideas they wish to communicate. They just have to be seen for what they are, not some grand statement that must be taken on faith, rather an intelligent assessment based on observation and analysis (exactly the sort of work expected of Saskia Sassen’s global elite). After all, the sub-title of the book which followed Discipline and Punish was La volonté de savoir (the will to knowledge), this ‘will’ is no one’s in particular, it is simply the desire to be able to create the possibility of saying things that are true or false. One of the problems that has plagued theorists who make use of Foucault’s notion of discourse is that the archaeologist’s own utterances have to exempt themselves from their relativity, which can produce a somewhat contradictory stance. And this was not helped by Foucault himself, who seemed disinterested (while making utterances as an objective historian), and who could then turn around and act an engaged social critic (which he frequently did, witness his work on prison reform in France, etc). We have to admire Foucault’s social engagement, and respect his profound scholarship, but we must also bear in mind that sometimes they should be separated, after all people are not all of a piece, people can also change over time, indeed it is good that they should do so, it shows that they are open to new ideas, and fresh ways of seeing the world.

A note on decolonisation As some further background to Edward W. Said’s work it might be useful to brieﬂ y return to colonial history, particularly as so much of what happened to the world as the great empires disintegrated underpins Said’s investigations. World War I, as we have seen, ended the century of peace that followed the 1815 Congress of Vienna and which had allowed the more or less cooperative imperialism of the ﬁ ve great powers (Britain, France, Russia, Prussia (after 1871, Germany), and Austria-Hungary). (And for any discussion of Asian colonialism it is probably safe to include the United States and Japan on this list.) The War also scuppered the global economy by closing off trade routes and increasing protectionism. The War’s forced mobilisation of colonial resources, including manpower, was resented because, according to John Darwin, it was seen as having broken the bargain of colonial politics, but perhaps most importantly, it ruined the myth of Europe as being a uniquely progressive culture. One of the immediate effects of the War was the dismembering of the empires who had lost it:

30. Ibid., p. 32. 166 Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman. Russia had not lost as such, but she had certainly bowed out early, losing territory to the Axis powers as a result, though later reconsolidating her position during the Soviet Era and managing to hold her empire together until the 1990s. One of the side effects of this dismemberment was that for the fi rst time ever the Western powers had access to lands that had previously been under the Ottomans. One unforeseen development of this, and one that was to have such massive ramifi cations for the rest of the world in the twentieth century, was the establishment of the oil industry. The colonies of these three former empires became League of Nations Mandates, and as such were open to inspection by League offi cials, they were also, in theory, open to the commerce of all. However, they were in effect British and French colonies. The League was generally regarded as a paper tiger, and its subsequent failure to prevent the conquest of Abyssinia by Italy (itself a League member) showed this all too clearly. Yet there was actually little enthusiasm for an Arab empire in either Britain or France, especially if it was going to cost money. John Darwin sees the partition of the Middle East as the high tide of empire, and as he neatly points out, it was the tide that turned soonest37. It is one of history’s more recent ironies that the area that was to become of such geopolitical signifi cance after World War II (with the industrialised economies’ increasing dependence on oil) was, in the aftermath of World War I, seen as nothing more than desert, a place that was going to cost the imperial powers too much money to make it worthwhile keeping. In 1920 the Middle East produced only about one per cent of the world’s oil, and by 1939 this had hardly risen, accounting for some fi ve per cent (with most of this coming from south-west Iran). Oil however, rapidly turned into one of the world’s great geopolitical targets for both diplomacy and warfare by about the middle of the century. One of the fi rst examples of its strategic importance was Japan’s decision to invade the Dutch East Indies in 1941 to get their hands on its vast oil reserves. The waves of decolonization that followed World War II may have broken up the rest of the world’s empires (with the exception of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China), but John Darwin cautions us against thinking that this brought an end to colonial rule. Darwin sees the demolition of a European-based order, one that had been based on extra-territorial rights, as being built on a cultural hierarchy where the so-called superiority of North-West European (and American) societies were contrasted with the non-Western cultures over which they held sway. Yet ironically, in some parts of the decolonised world (particularly East Asia), the West’s infl uence has continued to be asserted. Darwin sees this as the creation of an American system which is imperial in all but name. Something, as we have seen, David Harvey would agree with. Real or imaginary fears about communism and Soviet expansion fuelled the United States’s readiness to assume a leadership role on the world stage, especially once the other imperial players had left it. The huge zone for which the United States provided strategic protection overlapped neatly with the new international economy of which America was the pivot; together they formed the Pax Americana. In the place of the old imperial territories, the new superpowers of America and Russia engaged in a Cold War, a protracted struggle for global hegemony where informal networks of clients and allies were held together by arms supplies, military missions, developmental aid, and (particularly in America’s case) commercial activity. As John Darwin says, ‘[d]ecolonization’s unexpected course seemed to have set the scene for new kinds of empire’38.

Edward W. Said’s ‘Orientalism’ Almost the ﬁ rst thing Edward W. Said says in his seminal book Orientalism is that ‘…one could discuss Europe’s experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its experience of the Far Orient’39. Said admits that the Orient extends ‘from China to the Mediterranean’, but differentiates his understanding

John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 387. Ibid., pp. 476-477. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 17. 167 of it from the study the Jesuits had opened up of China, which was of course called Sinology40. He states his principal methodological devices as ‘strategic location’, which is a way of describing an author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and ‘strategic formation’, which he defi nes as ‘a way of analysing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large’41. Edward W. Said was a Palestinian-American academic who had been brought up in Egypt. He was fi rst and foremost a literary critic, but the success of Orientalism lifted his work onto a higher plane (well, certainly a wider one), its success turned him into a celebrity (in more or less the same way French intellectuals can lay claim to that showy title). His success opened up vistas usually denied to academics in the Anglo-American tradition, and excited some considerable notoriety. His elegantly stated, though polemical views thrust him onto the world stage where his work continues to enrage and enrapture to this day. For Said, Orientalism has ‘a cumulative and corporate identity, one that is particularly strong given its associations with traditional learning (the classics, the Bible, philology), public institutions (governments, trading companies, geographical societies, universities), and generically determined writing (travel books, books of exploration, fantasy, exotic description)’42. It is less a place than a topos, ‘a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these’, and as such has little to do with direct observation43. Said then cites the scholar Gibb for whom the Orient ‘was not a place one encountered directly; it was something one read about, studied, wrote about within the confi nes of learned societies, the university, the scholarly conference’44. Such scholars produced ‘circumstantial descriptions’ of the Orient that were fi ctions, and they did this as a means to an end: and that end, according to Said, was imperialism. Edward W. Said makes use of Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse in order to try and identify the Orientalism he sees in relationship to the Occident; a relationship of power, with the West in the ascendant. Said sees Michel Foucault’s discourse as a tradition that is produced over time by knowledge and reality, ‘whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it’45. This he likens to Flaubert’s idees recues. A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances similar to the ones just described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes might warrant. More importantly, such texts can then create not only knowledge but also the very reality that they appear to describe. Said’s Orient was a European invention, ‘a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’46. He assumes, correctly, that Americans will not feel the same about this Orient, which he thinks is more likely to be associated with the Far East (mainly China and Japan). Unlike Americans, the French and British have ‘…a long tradition of what I [Said] shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience’47. Here Said is stating his case, defi ning the parameters of his study, and setting out his methodological apparatus. However, one error he falls into straight away is the discounting of some of the other traditions of Orientalism, particularly Germany’s (but also Spain’s and Russia’s). Said does, however, point out the differences between the British and French understanding

Ibid., pp. 42 and 51. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 275. Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 1. 168 of what constituted the Orient, particularly Britain’s, which was bound up in the administration of the Indian sub-continent, thereby circumscribing the role for imaginative play by the very real business of ‘administration, territorial legality, and executive power’48. But it is the ‘imaginative examination of things Oriental’49 that is his real area of interest, and, as a literary critic, his main area of expertise. Said sees this imaginative examination as being based ‘more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, fi rst according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections’, into which he lumps everything from ‘works of genuine scholarship like Silvestre de Sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe’ and ‘a great many Victorian pornographic novels’50. Said, interestingly, sees 1870 as the beginning of a period of great colonial expansion into the Orient, a period which culminated fi nally with World War II. This ties in quite neatly to this research’s analysis of Britain’s turn to imperialism at around the same time. France’s expansionist fervour was seen, again correctly, by Said as the desire ‘to compensate for the Prussian victory [over them] in 1870- 1871 and, no less important, the desire to match British imperial achievements’51. Being a ‘White Man’ in the colonies was, for Said, as much an idea as a reality; it meant ‘speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specifi c judgments, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend’52. ‘[T]o reside in the Orient is to live the privileged life, not of an ordinary citizen, but of a representative European whose empire (French or British) contains the Orient in its military, economic, and above all, cultural arms.’53 This is refl ected, as we have already seen, in the novels of H. Rider-Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, so too it can be seen in the work of W. Somerset Maugham, a writer we shall be returning to in Part IV when examining his short story The Outstation to show how a colonial offi cial so constructed his life the better to give the natives an idea of what it was to be an English gentleman. Said also draws our attention to Lord Cromer’s citing of ‘…the theoretical perfection of French administrative systems, at their elaborate detail, and at the provision which is apparently made to meet every possible contingency which may arise. Compare these features with the Englishman’s tactical systems, which lay down rules as to a few main points, and leave a mass of detail to individual discretion’54. This again is something highlighted by Somerset Maugham in yet another story, The Door of Opportunity, where Governor Hannay says that ‘[i]f the offi cers of this Government had hesitated to take unjustifi able risks it would never have become a province of the British Empire’55. This the Governor did in order to impress upon to his District Offi cer Alban Torel the embarrassment his failure to suppress a riot on a rubber plantation had caused the government; in typical Somerset Maugham fashion the portrait of the British empire-builder is highlighted by the story’s anti-hero who has so dismally failed to live up to it. Edward W. Said, in his analysis, also takes note of the institutional forms that colonial government took (its consular corps and commercial establishments) which made it ‘an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world’. We have already seen the architectural articulation of these colonial institutions, particularly in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s work on Singapore, but here we have Said further developing the point by maintaining that ‘within this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal communal idea of being a White Man ruled.

Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 156. Lord Cromer, quoted in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, p. 212. W. Somerset Maugham, ‘The Door of Opportunity’, Collected Short Stories Volume 2, p. 524. 169 Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specifi c style possible’56. While this is fundamentally sound, there are some problems with Said’s analysis, which we will see in a moment (particularly with the criticism of it by Robert Irwin, Ibn Warraq, et al.), where it is pointed out that the geopolitical climate at the time of Said’s writing of Orientalism would not only have affected him, but that the 1973 invasion of Palestine by Israel seems to have formed the impetus for the book in the fi rst place. Orientalism is a polemic, it even goes so far as to contain the statement that ‘…every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’57. This is outrageous, and is something that will also be returned to shortly when citing Irwin and Warraq’s work, in the meantime the thought of a scholar of Said’s reputation claiming the assumption ‘that Islam’s only worthwhile relations have been with the West’58 is not only shockingly naïve but simply false. First of all Said’s work seems to assume, or at least infer, an Arabic Islam, which simply ignores the rest of the Islamic world, particularly that of Asia. (We have already seen the strange silence the hovers over that vast region of the globe encompassing Malaysia and Indonesia, not to mention China’s vast Muslim population.) Secondly, it completely ignores centuries of maritime trade across the Indian and Pacifi c Oceans, and the land-based Silk Route. For someone who claims that geography is ‘the handmaid of history’59 and ‘was essentially the material underpinning for knowledge about the Orient’60 is it not strange that his own knowledge of it should seem to be so selective? One other important point is Said’s contention that ‘…for something more than the fi rst half of the nineteenth century Paris was the capital of the Orientalist world (and, according to Walter Benjamin, of the nineteenth century)’61, this statement (Benjamin notwithstanding) completely and unaccountably ignores German-speaking Orientalism, which, as we shall see, was actually far more important than the French. Edward W. Said is right, however, when he states that ‘[o]ne aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed’62. And not just the Orient. Said maintains that ‘[t]elevision, the fi lms, and all the media’s resources have forced information into more and more standardized moulds.’63 This could perhaps be best exemplifi ed by the CNN ‘soundbyte’, where every answer is prefaced with an interviewer’s admonition to ‘be brief’. In a world of constantly breaking news, who has the luxury of lavishing time on in-depth analysis? But this is exactly what Saskia Sassen’s global elite are being paid for. As we saw in Part I, these people take the time to analyse data so that they can give us their informed judgements. Said’s point that ‘[s]o far as the Orient is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensifi ed the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative demonology of “the mysterious Orient”’64, may not be untrue, but he spoils it rather by stating elsewhere that ‘[t]o say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justifi ed in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact’65. And it is here that we come to one of his most contentious points: that the study of Orientalism was simply, to use Said’s word again, the ‘handmaid’ of imperialism. That is, it was founded on racist assumptions of Western superiority, and while those in the West cannot deny that many of the attitudes that helped them to build up their vast empires were indeed race-based, to have to take seriously a comment like ‘…every European, in what he could say

Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 227. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 304. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 216. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 39. 170 about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’66 is simply unacceptable and deeply undermines the genuinely interesting and important scholarship of the rest of Said’s book. It is ironic, is it not, that Said should think a book that describes people, places and experiences can acquire ‘a greater authority, and use, even than the actuality it describes’67. Surely Ori- entalism is a case in point?

Edward W. Said’s ‘Culture and Imperialism’ Just as Foucault used The Archaeology of Knowledge to answer some the reactions that The Order of Things had provoked, so too did Edward W. Said use Culture and Imperialism to set straight some misconceptions about Orientalism. As Borges tells us ‘[a] book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships’68, this must hold doubly true for any book that has caused a stir. In Culture and Imperialism Edward W. Said again reiterates his indebtedness to Michel Foucault (and to Raymond Williams), notably what he calls their ‘genealogical discoveries’, yet he notes that for them ‘the imperial experience is quite irrelevant, a theoretical oversight that is the norm in Western cultural and scientifi c disciplines except in occasional studies of the history of anthropology – like Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other and Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter – or the development of sociology, such as Brian Turner’s Marx and the End of Orientalism’69. Said sees the development of dominant discourses and disciplinary traditions in the fi elds of scientifi c, social, and cultural inquiry as one of the canonical topics of modern intellectual history and points out that ‘[w]ithout exceptions I [Said] know of, the paradigms for this topic have been drawn from what are considered exclusively Western sources’70. Part of the impulse behind Orientalism was to show ‘the dependence of what appeared to be detached and apolitical cultural disciplines upon a quite sordid history of imperialist ideology and colonialist practice’71; what his other aims were we shall see in a moment, but fi rst let us take a look at some of the critical responses to Orientalism. Robert Irwin sees the Middle East crisis of 1973 as provoking a ‘not particularly political’ Edward W. Said to research and write Orientalism, (it was published in 1978)72. The Six Day War of 1967 and the consequent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was not just a military defeat for the Arabs, it was also ‘a challenge to their self-image and it drove Arab intellectuals to consider what was wrong within the Arab world, as well as the obvious injustices of an American and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East’73. Irwin sees Said as increasingly identifying with Arab issues, even going so far as to take Arabic lessons in the 1970s74. As Irwin points out, even admirers of Said’s book have conceded its many errors, but they have argued that it deserves ‘praise and attention because of the subsequent debate and research it has provoked’75. Irwin is not convinced, particularly because, as he disdainfully points out, ‘[m]ost of the subsequent debate has taken place within the parameters set out by Edward Said’76. Orientalism is not a history of Oriental studies, it is ‘a highly selective polemic on certain aspects of the relation of knowledge and power’77. ‘Orientalism Now’ is, according to Irwin, the book’s most polemical chapter, with Arabist scholars of past centuries being presented as largely

Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 93. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A Note on (towards) Bernard Shaw’, Labyrinths, p. 249. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 41. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 41. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 281. Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., p. 281. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., pp. 281-282. 171 responsible for recent Middle-East disasters. Ibn Warraq would concur, he maintains that ‘[o]ne of Said’s major theses is that Orientalism was not a disinterested, scholarly activity but a political one, with Orientalists preparing the ground for and colluding with imperialists’78. Scholars who were not Orientalists delighted in Edward W. Said’s book, seeing it as a way to ‘negotiate the other’ or ‘reinvent alterity’, and other equally delightful postmodern pursuits. Said was hailed as a leading light in postcolonial studies, and associated with fi gures as infl uential as Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. We have already had occasion to see examples of Bhabha’s singular prose style, Spivak’s is even more idiosyncratic (Irwin even goes so far as to mischievously quote one particularly recondite passage in Spivak, which hardly covers either author with glory). While these are not writers anyone would use to exemplify a lucid prose style (important and all as their work may have been), Said is being done a disservice by being placed alongside them by Irwin. Despite his many failings, and the unsustainability of some of his conclusions, Said’s writing style is nothing less than a model of elegance and concision, as might be expected from such a respected literary critic. Robert Irwin sees Said’s portrayal of Orientalism as ‘a canon of great but wicked books, almost all by dead white males’79, as the error of someone who ‘overvalued the contestatory role of the intellectual, [and] seems to have held the view that the political problems of the Middle East were ultimately textual ones that could be solved by critical reading skills’80. Said saw discourse and textual strategies as the engines that ‘drove the imperial project and set up the rubber plantations, dug out the Suez Canal and established garrisons of legionnaires in the Sahara’, this was the error of ‘a literary critic who wildly overvalued the importance of high literature in intellectual history’81. Said’s Orientalism was, according to Irwin, a discourse on the hegemony of (Western) imperialism, where everything that could be written and thought about the Orient (and more particularly about Islam and the Arabs) legitimised the Western penetration of Arab lands. Its discursive formation was not restricted to scholars, but included imperialist administrators, explorers, and novelists. The West enjoyed a monopoly over how the Orient was to be represented, and these representations invariably carried implications of Western superiority. As Irwin says, ‘[s]ince Orientalism is by its nature a Western sickness, the same must be true of imperialism’82, it thus ignored non-Western imperial histories (Persians in Turkey and Greece, and later India; the Ottomans in the Near and Middle East and North Africa; the Japanese, etc.). Orientalism and the later Culture and Imperialism saw Said present himself as being on the front line in a struggle against postcolonial Western hegemony. What Irwin most laments is the malign infl uence these books have had, particularly since they have been ‘surprisingly effective in discrediting and demoralizing an entire tradition of scholarship’83. Edward W. Said published Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography in 1966. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a classic tale from the dark side of colonialism, may well have sparked off Said’s interest in the evils of imperialism. Said’s next book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), was seen by Robert Irwin as being strongly infl uenced by Vico and Foucault, especially the notion that a literary work is infl uenced by a discursive formation rather than by any given author. The early reviews of Orientalism were mostly hostile, even by those whom Said had praised in the work (for example, Hourani, Watt, Berque, and Rodinson), yet the book began to acquire a cult status, particularly, as we have just seen, among those who were not actually Orientalists. Irwin saw what he calls ‘Said’s fashionable brandishing of Gramsci and Foucault’ as having attracted some students84, mea culpa, but like Irwin and Warraq, this researcher has found much to fault with Said’s work. Edward W. Said cites Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon as stressing ‘the unavoidable

Ibn Warraq, Defending the West, p. 43. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 286. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., p. 309. 172 problematic of immobilization and confi nement at the center of the Western system of knowledge and discipline’85. He sees Fanon’s work as seeking to treat colonial and metropolitan societies together, as discrepant but related entities, while Foucault moves ‘further and further away from serious consideration of social wholes, focussing instead upon the individual as dissolved in an ineluctably advancing “microphysics of power” that it is hopeless to resist’86. For Said, Fanon represents ‘the interests of a double constituency, native and Western, moving from confi nement to liberation; ignoring the imperial context of his own theories’, while Foucault ‘seems actually to represent an irresistible colonizing movement that paradoxically fortifi es the prestige of both the lonely individual scholar and the system that contains him’87. As Irwin points out, it was Said’s attempts to use Foucault’s theories that ‘got him into the worst muddles’88. Irwin also crisply points out that if Said was accusing the Orientalists of ‘wilfully misrepresenting objective reality’, then Foucault’s work would surely undermine this effort, as it seems to deny the possibility of such an objective reality89. Robert Irwin sees much of the obscurity to be found in Orientalism as arising from the frequent references to Foucault (and to Gramsci). But as Irwin bemusedly points out, these two thinkers have very different notions of what constitutes a discourse. Foucault’s discourse, as something that cannot be resisted, is harnessed by Said when he wants to show that Orientalism as an idea (or discursive formation) cannot be resisted, yet Said also seems to be blaming Orientalists for ‘embracing the evil discourse, or even for actively engaging in fabricating that discourse’, which would make them both victims and villains. Irwin also sees Foucault’s notion of discourse as being ‘…incompatible with that of the canonical tradition that Said seems to have acquired from his reading of Auerbach, as Foucault rejected the notion of a tradition that could survive the great disjunction of the nineteenth century’90. Gramsci had rather different ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge, he thought in terms of ‘hegemony’ rather than the Foucauldian formulation that ‘power is everywhere’. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony was used to describe the imposition of a system of beliefs on those who were ruled. His infl uence on Said can be seen in the inclination to believe in the primacy of ideology in history (rather than economic factors, for example). For both theorists, intellectuals seem to play a central role in maintaining the status quo as well as on occasion undermining it. According to Irwin, Said was unable to decide whether the discourse of Orientalism constrained Orientalists (making them victims of an archive from which they were powerless to escape), or whether they were ‘the willing and conscious collaborators in the fabrication of a hegemonic discourse which they employ to subjugate others’91. Interestingly, it is Said as a Foucauldian that sees him make his most damaging statement: ‘It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’. Robert Irwin points out that the whole point of Foucault’s use of the term ‘discursive formation’ is that it does not have individual authors, and that ‘an archive in the Foucauldian sense is the law governing what can or cannot be said in certain situations’, it is not supposed to be ‘a grab-bag of loaded terminology that individual authors can have recourse to when it suits them’92. Irwin sees Said’s denouncing of Dante, Renan, Lewis, et al., as supporting the view that they were ‘evil geniuses who actively fashioned a racist and imperialist discourse. At the same time, there seems to be no option for the Orientalist other than to be constrained by the discursive

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 278. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 278. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 300. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., p. 289. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., p. 290. 173 formation of Orientalism’93. Ibn Warraq also sees Said as having made much of Foucault’s notion of a discourse, but Warraq’s analysis is much less balanced than Irwin’s. Warraq refers to Foucault as ‘the French guru’94, and lumps him in with what he calls the ‘[c]ontinental charlatans – postmodemists and others’ who have ‘cast doubt on the possibility of objective knowledge, and they have further argued that the very notion of truth is coercive, imperialist, and a part of the discourse of power’95. This is exactly the sort of misreading of Foucault’s work that has been warned about earlier in this thesis (if Warraq has read Foucault at all, something that remains unclear from his writings). Ibn Warraq sees this ‘charlatanism’ as being part of a tradition and cites Edmund Leach’s comments on Levi-Strauss’s somewhat less than rigorous approach to scientifi c fi eldwork, where he says that he was ‘insuffi ciently critical of his source material’ which resulted in his behaving ‘like an advocate defending a cause rather than a scientist searching for ultimate truth’96. Warraq’s accusation that Michel Foucault was ‘surely one of the great charlatans of modern times’97 is totally unsubstantiated, and while it is atypical of Warraq’s otherwise quite good book, it is the sort of unwarranted diatribe that does no one’s work any favours. Not one book, nor even one remark of Foucault is cited, instead we get vague and sweeping statements about his malign infl uence. Certainly some people, Said included, have made free with Foucault’s theories, sometimes in a most ill-advised manner, but we can no more blame Michel Foucault for other people’s misuse of his work than we can hold Ludwig Mies van de Rohe responsible for the botched imitations his own architecture has spawned. When Said steers clear of fashionable postmodernism he does have some interesting and insightful things to say, for example, he saw the pattern of dominion or possession laid down in the imperial era as being:

[…T]he groundwork for what is in effect now a fully global world. Electronic communications, the global extent of trade, of availability of resources, of travel, of information about weather patterns and ecological change have joined together even the most distant corners of the world. This set of patterns, I believe, was ﬁ rst established and made possible by the modern empires.98

Said also saw the British, French, and American imperial experience as having a coherence and cultural centrality in which narrative played a large part, and therefore ﬁ nds it unsurprising that France and England have such unparalleled traditions of novel-writing, with America following in their wake in the twentieth century 99. According to Said, ‘…the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire’, something he sees Conrad as having realised100. Preparations are made for it within a culture rendering in its turn a kind of coherence for it, or, as W. Somerset Maugham so succinctly put it: ‘Rudyard Kipling is generally supposed to have rendered the British people conscious of their Empire’101. Said sees Conrad as being:

[…] considered along with Kipling, his slightly younger peer, to have rendered the experience of empire as the main subject of his work with such force; and even though the two artists are remarkably different in tone and style, they brought to a basically insular and provincial British audience the color, glamor, and romance of the British overseas enterprise, which was well-

Ibid., p. 290. Ibn Warraq, Defending the West, p. 43. Ibid., pp. 61-62. Edmund Leach cited in Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West, p. 245. Ibn Warraq, Defending the West, p. 245. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 6. Ibid., pp. xxii-xxiii. Ibid., p. 11 (italics in original). W. Somerset Maugham, ‘The Short Story’, Points of View, p. 143. 174 known to specialized sectors of the home society.102

W. Somerset Maugham was their natural successor (even if not quite so talented, it has to be said). Somerset Maugham wisely, having seen Kipling’s so expert handling of India (and Conrad’s Africa), turned his not inconsiderable talents to British Malaya, a suitably virgin territory in which to work. Edward W. Said believes a cultural form like the novel was immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, and references, and experiences, particularly in the Western empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He does not mean that only the novel was important, he simply considers it an aesthetic vehicle whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France made it an interesting one to study. If commentators on Said’s work would only bear this in mind they might not get so enraged by what they think he is saying. Yes, Said may have misused Foucault’s theories, but as a literary theorist he did have some interesting things to say. Said’s disquisition on Ireland’s colonial history will not be gone into here because David Fitzpatrick’s article ‘Ireland and the Empire’ answers many of the more troublesome questions it raises. As Ibn Warraq has pointed out: ‘the political expression of Irish attitudes towards Empire was far more various and discordant than this [i.e. Said’s view] allows’103. Said’s coupling of Ireland and Australia as ‘white colonies’ is less than convincing however. In the former there was an indigenous ‘white’ population, while in the latter, a native or aboriginal one – the colonising population of which happened to be formed of a considerable number from the former (who were often sent as convicts). The point is that they are both too different to effect any useful comparison, despite some interesting but ultimately irrelevant historical links. Said’s claim that ‘[m]ost historians of empire speak of the “age of empire” as formally beginning around 1878, with “the scramble for Africa”’104 is not wholly inaccurate. He has already himself highlighted 1870 as being the beginning of the period of colonial expansion into the Orient, and this research has also pointed to Britain’s turn to imperialism at around 1871. Said, however, is wholly wrong in his contention that the ‘scramble for Africa’ happened around 1878: as we saw in Part II it began (and ended) in the 1880s. Finally, Said’s contention that empire was simply a matter of land (including ways of ‘how it is to be surveyed and measured’105) is simply wrong. The statement that ‘[t]he actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the ﬁ nal analysis is all about’106 is simply too naïve. Empire, as we have already seen, was always about more than just one factor taken in isolation; yes, there was an increase in the number of annexations of territory, particularly between 1871 and 1914, but this, as we have seen, was often actuated by a fear of allowing another power to grab the land. If we were to take one overarching factor, particularly in the empires that Edward W. Said is examining, then the control of trade routes must outweigh the importance of the mere possession of any tract of land, no matter how large.

Edward W. Said: other commentators Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing points out many of Edward W. Said’s errors, particularly those that relate to Orientalist scholarship. Said’s contention that the Compte de Gobineau was a key ﬁ gure in ‘the ofﬁ cial genealogy of Orientalism’ does not seem, according to Irwin, to have been backed up by any actual reading of his texts (Irwin incidentally also suspects Schwab, on whose commentary Said also relies, of not having read de Gobineau either)107. Bernard Lewis is one of the main targets singled

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 132. Ibn Warraq discussing David Fitzpatrick’s article ‘Ireland and the Empire’ in Defending the West, pp. 270-271. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 58. Ibid., pp. xii-xiii. Ibid., p. 78. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 170. 175 out in Orientalism, but Said concentrates on Lewis’s later essays and fails to engage with his early major works, he also fails to notice how much Massignon has infl uenced the earlier works of Lewis (which seems odd given Said’s obvious admiration of the man). What Lewis did do, however, was to place great emphasis on Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, which is something Said has also stressed. Said also, quite unaccountably, leaves out the contributions of German scholars of Orientalism, perhaps because, as Ibn Warraq contends, their inclusion would not only undermine but actually destroy the central thesis of Orientalism: that all Orientalists produced knowledge that generated power, and that this formed a collusion with the imperialists who founded the great empires. Germany may well have produced some of the greatest of all scholars of the Orient but her overseas empire can hardly have been characterised as a great one. Orientalism was, in short, a subset of Western scholarship. According to Robert Irwin the French word Orientaliste was used in the eighteenth century to denote someone who was preoccupied with Le- vantine matters (i.e. not Chinese or Indian), and only in the early nineteenth century came to refer to ‘the study of any and all Asian languages and culture’108. Irwin cites A. J. Arberry’s British Orientalists (published in 1943) as dealing with scholars who ‘travelled in or wrote about Arabia, Persia, India, Indonesia and the Far East’109. Edward W. Said, according to Irwin, used the word ‘Orientalist’ in his 1978 work to refer to those who ‘travelled, studied or wrote about the Arab world and even here he [Said] excluded consideration of North Africa west of Egypt’110. Irwin sees Orientalism as having a lot in common with a good novel: ‘[i]t is exciting, it is packed with lots of sinister villains, as well as an outnumbered band of goodies, and the picture that it presents of the world is richly imagined, but essentially fi ctional’111. Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West is a less effective critique of Said’s work because, as we have seen, its somewhat less than balanced tone does it a major disservice. Warraq refers variously to ‘Said’s impenetrable prose’, and a ‘[p]retentious language that often conceals some banal observation’112. He attacks ‘Said’s pompous way of saying the obvious’113. Said’s work may lack some of the insouciant humour of, say, Robert Irwin’s, but his writing is actually a model of concision. Some of Said’s ideas may be misguided, but surely no fault can by found with the way he expresses them. Ibn Warraq is, of course, entitled to his opinions, but as with his attacks on Michel Foucault, he fails to give any examples of this so-called ‘impenetrable prose’. He does, however, spot Said’s error of calling Ignaz Goldziher a German (Goldziher was Hungarian)114, but the quibbling over Said’s reference to Egypt as a British colony (Pakistan too) are too trifl ing to be of really much concern115. While it is true that Egypt was never more than a British protectorate, it could be argued that it functioned, to all intents and purposes after 1882, as a British colony. As we have seen earlier, Shanghai’s colonial status is equally anomalous: the International Settlement was not a colony in the strictest sense of the word either, but for simplicity’s sake it is invariably referred to as such. Whereas Robert Irwin sees Orientalism as something like a good novel, Culture and Imperial- ism is described as ‘primarily a work of literary criticism’116. Said’s application of literary theory to the British Empire excited ridicule, particularly his contention that colonial plantations must be signifi cant in Jane Austen’s Mansfi eld Park because they are barely mentioned. Ibn Warraq would agree with Ir- win in seeing this as a ‘most egregious misreading of a literary work’ (though it is not at all clear until some pages later that it is Culture and Imperialism Warraq is actually referring to). Warraq quotes Susan Fraiman and Gabrielle White as showing Said to be ‘way off the mark’ because while there are several

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 309. Ibn Warraq, Defending the West, p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., pp. 23-24. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 307. 176 references to Sir Thomas’s Antigua plantation in Mansfi eld Park there is only one single explicit reference to the slave trade. It is hard to see from this how Jane Austen could possibly have been seen as con- doning slavery as a practice. Gabrielle White in particular thinks that Said’s misreading may be due to the fact that he was ‘insensitive to the satire present in Austen’, as Warraq so gleefully points out: ‘Said was not known for his sense of humor’117. One of Ibn Warraq’s most glaring inaccuracies occurs, however, in the section where he is attacking the so-called ‘continental charlatans’. Warraq suggests that one of the ‘distinguishing characteristics of the West’ is the separation of spiritual and temporal authority, which he sees as deriving from ‘one or more of the three golden threads [i.e. rationalism, universalism, and self-criticism]’118. This is a lovely idea, unfortunately there never was a separation of spiritual and temporal authority in the West, at least not in the way that Warraq would have us believe. France did separate its church and state back in 1907, but to take two of the three powers so often cited in Said’s Orientalism (the United States and the United Kingdom), neither a country that puts ‘In God we trust’ on its banknotes (as does the former), nor one that has an hereditary head of state as it head of church (as is the case in the latter), could be said to have a very clear separation of church and state. Yet Warraq seems convinced that there has been a separation of church and state in the West, one that is based on ’[t]he political principle embodied in the apothegm “reason not revelation”’119. Perhaps a reading of recent history might lead some to think that religion plays a less than central role in people’s lives, at least in Europe (where it is not generally the practice in government to begin cabinet meetings with a prayer – as is the case with the second President Bush’s administration), but Warraq dates this so- called separation as having happened shortly after the death of Christ, basing his assumption on a misreading of St Matthew (from which he quotes: ‘“Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21)’120). Queen Elizabeth II of England still holds the title ‘Defender of the Faith’, admittedly she is supposed to be defending the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Faith, a title granted to King Henry VIII in 1521 for his stance against the troublesome canker Protestantism (to which, of course, he later succumbed). The King of Spain used to be styled ‘His Most Catholic Majesty’, while the Kings of France were known as ‘The Most Christian Kings’. In 1685 France revoked the religious tolerance granted to Protestants under the Edict of Nantes; Spain’s fi fteenth-century Inquisition was a notorious bloodbath based on the strictest religious intolerance; and even the United Kingdom was riven by religious strife until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with the deposition of the legal (but Roman Catholic) King James II (who was replaced by his Protestant daughter Queen Mary, who reigned with her Dutch husband King William III (the Prince of Orange)). The United Kingdom only allowed Catholic Emancipation to occur as late as 1829, and to this day any member of its reigning house who marries a Roman Catholic must fi rst renounce their claim to the throne. So, far from enjoying a separation of church and state, the West has had a list of state-sponsored religious intolerance that is long and shameful. Ibn Warraq is of course right to applaud ‘the freedom of thought, intellectual curiosity, rationality, and leaps of imagination that produced the theories of Kepler and Tycho Brahe, Copernicus and Gal- ileo, Newton and Einstein, Darwin and Crick, produced the works of Chaucer and Dante, Shakespeare and Racine, Goethe and Samuel Johnson; the paintings of Giotto and Cimabue, Raphael and Michelan- gelo; the architecture of Alberti and Palladio, Wren and Hawksmoor; the music of Bach and Palestrina, Haydn and Mozart, Wagner and Verdi’121: also a long list, though what the members of it have in common with one another is very far from clear. We must not forget that quite a number of these individuals only achieved their immortality in spite of religious intolerance, rather than in some idealised world of free expression.

White, quoted in Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West, p. 394. Ibn Warraq, Defending the West, p. 57. Ibid., p. 291. Ibid., p. 291. Ibid., p. 295. 177 It might be appropriate to give the last word on this subject to Michel Foucault himself, where he states that ‘Christianity is the only religion which has organized itself as a Church’122. We saw earlier in Part III, with Foucault’s point about the investigation (which he saw as ‘…sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques’123), that it was a procedure that had developed alongside the reorganisation of the Church and the increase in power of the princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which is when it began to permeate the jurisprudence of ecclesiastical and lay courts, which in turn led it to forming an integral part of the Western system of justice. But Foucault is more interested in exploring the role certain individuals ‘can, by their religious quality, serve others not as princes, magistrates, prophets, fortune-tellers, benefactors, educationalists, and so on, but as pastors’124, he is not so much interested in the new code of ethics that Christianity brought into being, one that was ‘fundamentally different from that of the ancient world’125. Foucault was more interested in how this word ‘designates a very special form of power’126, and the fact that less emphasis is usually placed on the new power relations it proposed and spread throughout the ancient world. It was a power which aimed at assuring individuals’ salvation in the next world; it did not just command, it was prepared to sacrifi ce itself for the life, and salvation, of its fl ock (thereby differing from royal power, which usually demanded the sacrifi ce of others, namely its subjects). The Church, and Christianity, as a form of power did not look after just the community as a whole, but also each individual in particular. Finally, it was also a form of power that could not ‘…be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it’127. The Christian faith involved itself at every level of its professor’s being. It directed people not just how to act, but how to think. And for those who had dared to think twice it was backed up by very formidable state apparatuses, such as the Spanish Inquisition. Foucault of course admits that ecclesiastical institutionalisation began to lose its vitality in the eighteenth century, but he still saw its function as having spread and multiplied outside of these institutions. As a form of power, the pastoral was opposed to the political because it aimed at salvation; it was opposed to sovereignty because it was oblative; and it was opposed to the legal because it was individualising. Pastoral power was, in short, co-extensive and continuous with life, and it was linked to the very production of truth.

Michel Foucault, Afterword: The Subject and Power (from Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow), p. 214. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 225. Michel Foucault, Afterword: The Subject and Power (from Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow), p. 214. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 214. 178 6 THE ‘DOUBLE HETEROTOPIA’ OF KOWLOON WALLED CITY

This chapter unites some of the themes of Part III. Firstly, it is an example of the application of a Fou- cauldian theory, i.e. the heterotopia, to an actual space – the now demolished Walled City of Kowloon in Hong Kong. Secondly, by backing up the contention that the Walled City was a ‘double heterotopia’ (in that it was a heterotopia within Hong Kong, which in turn acted as a heterotopia for Communist China) use will be made of Michel Foucault’s work it as a better example of applying it than simply brandishing it vaguely as a way of backing up a political or polemical stance. David Grahame Shane’s Recom- binant Urbanism does this admirably, in a measured and scholarly manner. As we have already seen at the end of Part II, in order to gain a better perspective on Shanghai this research has been looking at Hong Kong and Singapore. The comparison between Shanghai’s alleyway house, which acts as a benign panopticon, and Sin- Figure 24. Kowloon Walled City, aerial view (source: City of Darkness: gapore’s more ﬂ exible but Life in Kowloon Walled City, pp.10-11) ultimately less interesting (i.e. socially) shophouse has been fruitful. Hong Kong, too, has proved a useful testing ground for Foucauldian theories, but before going into what made the Kowloon Walled City such a good example of a heterotopia it may be useful to look at what Fou- cault meant by the term.

Heterotopia As this chapter deals with an issue that is too interesting to be left out, but does not directly relate to Shanghai, it will consist of a cursory overview rather than the sort of detailed study that has characterised the other chapters in this thesis. Briefl y, Michel Foucault was invited by a group of architects to make a study of space in 1966, at which time he mentioned in a lecture something he called ‘heterotopias’, which he defi ned as ‘those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others’1. Foucault directly opposed heterotopias to utopias, because whereas the utopia was a site with no real place, the heterotopia is a place that does exist. He saw heterotopias as constituting ‘…a sort of counter arrangement, of effectively realized utopia…’; he saw them as spaces that were ‘…absolutely other with respect to all the arrangements that they refl ect.’2. He also outlined six different types of them in this lecture: one, they can assume a wide variety of forms but are not universal; two, they can change their function over time; three, they can

Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’ from The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thoughts, Paul Rabinow, ed., p. 252. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Neil Leach, ed., p. 352 (italics in original). 179 juxtapose different and incompatible spaces in a single real place; four, they are linked to slices of time; fi ve, they always presuppose a system of opening and closing; and six, they are a space of illusion more real that the surrounding reality3. The heterotopia is not particularly representative of Foucault’s oeuvre, most commentators barely acknowledge its existence; conversely, most architects seem to notice nothing else. As we have seen, Foucault placed the heterotopia in opposition to the utopia, the latter having a long tradition in Western literature. Starting with Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516, where this idealised ‘no place’ was not so much a representation of how the world could be, but was intended to be a satirical refl ection of the wickedness of contemporary Europe. All the same, utopias did afford consolation, they inhabited a fantastic, untroubled region in which they unfolded their beautiful cities, with their vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, and were surrounded by a country where life was easy. As a genre it was popular: Francis Bacon’s unfi nished New Atlantis, J.V. Andreae’s Christiano- polis, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, Samuel Gott’s New Jerusalem, and of course Jonathan Swift’s biting satire Gulliver’s Travels all make use of the utopia. At around the beginning of the twentieth century it once again enjoyed a vogue, with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and Samuel Butler’s classic Erehwon (which is, of course, ‘no where’ spelled backwards). The utopia did not begin with Thomas More, however, his work can be seen as following in the tradition of The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian description of paradise, or the description of the Elysian Fields in Homer’s Odyssey, not to mention the numerous travellers’ tales infl uenced by Pliny’s Natural History and Lucian’s True History. The utopia may have been an idealised place, but the road to it was dangerous. Travellers often arrived only after having suffered some kind of trauma, like a shipwreck or, for their twentieth-century counterparts, an aeroplane crash: for example, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – though this latter is more in the category of a dystopia, a peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon. Aldous Huxley made this twentieth-century development of the utopia genre, the dystopia, his own with Brave New World, Ape and Essence, and Island, dystopias all, though George Orwell’s 1984 is probably the best known, certainly the most chilling. The dystopia seemed to echo the pessimistic mood of the twentieth century (something that also permeated the work of Michel Foucault), but even as a twentieth-century phenomenon the dystopia could also be seen as having their roots fi rmly in the past, Gulliver’s Travels is arguably one (dating from 1726), while Joseph Hall is credited with inventing the genre as far back as 1600 with his Mundus Alter et Idem. A dystopia is a place where things have gone horribly wrong, oftentimes they are places that have actually managed to achieve their utopian aspirations only to fi nd that it was not, after all, the ideal it had seemed. Alex Garland’s The Beach is a recent example of this still-popular genre, where (like Hilton’s Lost Horizon) a group of Westerners fi nd themselves in an isolated paradise in the East, not Shangri-La this time (the lamasery high in Hilton’s Himalayas), but a tropical island off the coast of Thailand, hard to get to, and once there things start to go terribly wrong. The fl ight to the East is invariably beguiling for a Westerner, but it is often fraught with danger, let us not forget that Manuel Castells has warned that ‘all Utopias lead to Terror if there is a serious attempt at implementing them’4.

Kowloon Walled City5

Ibid., pp. 353-356. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 63. For the information contained in this section on the history of Kowloon Walled City, as well as its destruction, reference has been made to Greg Girard and Ian Lambot’s City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, particularly Peter Popham’s ‘Introduction’, pp. 9-59, Julia Wilkinson’s ‘A Chinese Magistrate’s Fort’, pp. 60-119, and Charles Godard’s ‘The Clearance’, pp. 208-212. 180 As we have already seen, Hong Kong was for the fi rst century of its existence the poor relation to its colonial cousins of Shanghai and Singapore. The colony really only came into its own after 1949 when Shanghai vanished behind the ‘bamboo curtain’ and it had its position further enhanced when Singapore found itself expelled from the Malay Federation in 1965. Hong Kong has been, since 1997, a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, but it had been a British crown colony for more than a century and a half. Nestling deep within this colonial enclave was a bizarre anomaly: the Walled City of Kowloon. Consisting of 2.6 hectares (6.5 acres) the City was made up of 12- to 14-storey apartment buildings and was home to more than 30,000 people, making it arguably the closest thing to a self-regulating, self- suffi cient, self-determining modern city that has even been built. For a long time it was synonymous with vice and violence. It started out as a normal Chinese town, laid out in accordance with the precepts of feng shui (the basics of which we will see in Part IV). When the British acquired their 99-year lease on the New Territories in 1898 the Walled City found itself isolated as a tiny Chinese-administered enclave at the heart of a now vastly extended British colony. The British thought they would soon be able to extend their infl uence over the enclave, as they had done over the rest of the Kowloon Peninsula, but it suited the Chinese to insist on their rights to the Walled City, even if they could not access it, because it would be an annoyance to the British. The diplomatic stalemate that ensued only ended in 1984 with the Thatcher-Deng agreement on Hong Kong’s future (the entire colony was to be handed back to China – both the crown colony part, which had been Britain’s absolutely and in perpetuity, and the New Territories, whose lease was due to expire in 1997 – together they were to remain a Special Ad- ministrative Region of China for fi fty years). Crime fl ourished in the Walled City, with triad gangs running brothels, opium ‘divans’, and gambling dens. But there was normal economic activity as well, the Walled City was home to some of Hong Kong’s most prosperous factories, Figure 25. Plan of Kowloon Walled City and for the tens of thousands of people who called (source: City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon it home, they were able to live unmolested by Walled City, pp.214-215) any government, capitalist or communist (many of the newcomers had fl ed China in the wake of the communist victory of 1949). There were no streets in this City, only dark, dingy alleyways. It was sometimes impossible to stand upright because of the water pipes and electric wiring, and what light fi ltered through was a sort of murky green. The Hong Kong Government announced on 14 January 1987 that it was going to clear the City, which was promptly surveyed. Inhabitants who had legitimate claims to homes and/or businesses were compensated. Perhaps the most surprising result of this survey was the discovery that 33,000 people lived here (remember it only had an area of 6.5 hectares). The authorities closed down the City in July 1992 and it was demolished in April the following year. Now a park, only the yamen (administrative offi ce) has been left standing.

David Grahame Shane’s ‘Recombinant Urbanism’ Urban heterotopias, according to David Grahame Shane, are specialised patches, acting as test beds of change. Grahame Shane cites Fritjof Capra’s usage of the term ‘autopoesis’, taken from 1970’s systems theory, as the capacity of a system to repair itself or regenerate its form. Information ﬂ ow is crucial to autopoesis, and to the maintenance of any system’s structural identity over time. This information ﬂ ow is fed back into a system by looping mechanisms so that balance can be maintained. David Grahame Shane stresses what he calls ‘the altered situation of the postmodern city and the role of heterotopias in accommodating accelerated change brought about by faster communication

181 and transportation systems’6 and he examines the role a heterotopia plays in stabilising a city. Grahame Shane sees heterotopias as spatial pockets or patches that bottle up change, thereby allowing urban actors to conduct ‘concrete utopian experiments without endangering the established disequilibrium of the larger system’7. If the experiment is successful, then actors can export the new model, copying it (or altering it) so that it becomes a new norm over time. This is how what were once ‘surprising and surreal juxtapositions’ can, and do, become integrated into social practices in the host city8. Fundamental to David Grahame Shane’s understanding of the urbanisation process are three basic components: the armature, the enclave, and the heterotopia, the three of which he sees as being the basic components of any city. Components which are constantly ‘combined and recombined in different cultures, places, and periods’9. Heterotopias, according to Grahame Shane:

[H]ouse all exceptions to the dominant city model. A heterotopia is a place that mixes the stasis of the enclave with the fl ow of an armature, and in which the balance between these two systems is constantly changing. Its function is to help maintain the city’s stability as a self-organizing system. In a linear, logical, scientifi c urban system it helps maintain the dynamic overall balance between the binary poles that defi ne that a system (e.g., production and consumption) by handling exceptions; in nonlinear systems, it facilitates dynamic imbalance and rapid shifts between paradigms. In service of these functions, the form of the heterotopia itself is wildly diverse and constantly in fl ux.10

The heterotopia is ‘an exceptional space, a miniature city or subcity that forms an important part of the larger city’11. For Grahame Shane, the main source of confusion about heterotopias is their role in facilitating and monitoring change, with much of the confusion stemming from the fact that they are such complex enclaves. These places ‘provide shifting sites of refl ection and distance within the system that increase the city’s capacity to change or adapt over time’12. They are essential, as places of exclusion, for the consistent (and logical) organising of human settlement within a given order; dominant urban actors therefore also make use of the heterotopias because by them they are able to keep their preferred order as pure and consistent as possible. Grahame Shane is quick to point out that ‘[a] lthough the forms of these spaces have changed over time, the systemic reasons for their existence have not. All social systems declare certain objects, things, relationships, and people taboo. Taboo objects, things, relationships, and people that cannot actually be eliminated from a society, either because they are necessary or ineradicable, must be segregated’13. Much of the confusion about heterotopias comes from the fact that, as we have just seen, they are complex enclaves, but complex or not, they are enclaves that can be found anywhere in any city. Michel Foucault identifi ed particular places where processes of change and hybridization are facilitated in a city or society: he gave the examples of the hospital, the school, and the prison, where actors’ utopian aspirations could operate as rules and goals so that as competent professionals they could seek to cure the ill, educate the ignorant, and reform the illegal activities of criminals. For Foucault, all heterotopias have two aspects, a compensatory side, where codes and disciplines are enforced, and an illusory one, where traces of the actors’ utopian goals can be found; in heterotopias of crisis the compensatory and illusory sides mixed without diffi culty, creating a blended, hybrid logic that is,

David Grahame Shane, Recombinant Urbanism, p. 14. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 231. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., pp. 231-232. 182 according to Grahame Shane, foreign to modernity14. David Grahame Shane reminds us that Foucault originally borrowed the term heterotopia from medicine, where it means a cell (or group of cells) living non-malignantly within a host cell or tissue; it is an exceptional arrangement and is considered abnormal. Thus, where a heterotopia exists, something completely ‘Other’ resides within the body of the host, but remember it does so in a benign relationship; the two systems tolerate each others’ differences. The co-existence that is possible within a heterotopia comes about because it contains within itself multiple compartments that can hold contradictory and complementary spaces (the ‘single real place made up of several spaces’), and it is this heterogeneity that differentiates the heterotopia from a normal enclave (with a single-centre system), and enables it mark a centred place as well as to handle (or sort) disparate fl ows. Heterotopias also, in an autopoetic way, contain feedback mechanisms that monitor and adjust the ever-shifting balance between the disparate tendencies of centring and sorting. These feedback mechanisms can be understood in terms of actors who monitor their situation in order to be able to interact with other actors, in sometimes quite complex, and even indirect ways. David Grahame Shane also sees cities as a variety of spaces or enclaves set into the landscape and acting as self-centring devices, which are interconnected by an ecology of armatures (linear organising devices like transportation or communication networks), with heterotopias acting as a type of hybrid space embedded within the larger system, and playing a key role in stabilising the city model and catalysing transitions from one type of model to another. These armatures, enclaves and heterotopias constantly combine and recombine in different cultures, places, and periods. Grahame Shane argues that the heterotopic system is crucial to modernity because its goal is to rationalise society using architectural means. In order to facilitate this process, urban actors build miniature cities, with multiple cells and codes that differ from those of the host city in ways that allow internal controls and interactions that would be forbidden outside. As we have seen, Kowloon Walled City was an exceptionally dense development, even by Hong Kong standards, yet in some ways it made Hong Kong possible, its heterotopic functions handling certain diffi cult needs (for example, large numbers of immigrants, or the allowing of activities that were forbidden elsewhere in the colony, such as gambling or opium-smoking). All of this helped make the normal development of Hong Kong possible. This is the reason it is referred to as a ‘double heterotopia’ in this study. Kowloon Walled City acted as a conduit, or space of difference, for the colony of Hong Kong, while Hong Kong itself acted as a conduit, or space of difference, for mainland China, especially under the communists. The Walled City was ‘a complex and multilayered structure, containing many heterotopic sites in strange locations and combinations within itself’15, however, it was not destined to survive. But then heterotopias are not meant to survive. Kowloon Walled City did survive for a time by depending on, and being compressed by, the laws of the surrounding colonial enclave. As soon as these circumstances changed the walls came down. The compressed heterotopia, the city within the city, became a redundant symbol of a past regime and was demolished. To lament the passing of a heterotopia (an especially architectural point of view perhaps – and one that has been highlighted by Ackbar Abbas’s ‘glamour’ after the fact) is to miss the point. Heterotopias come into being at particular times and in particular places to fulfi l certain functions or series of functions, once the conditions they are in opposition to alter then they lose their reason for being: that is quite simply what happened to Kowloon Walled City.

Ibid., pp. 245-246. Ibid., p. 243. 183 Conclusion to Part III

Part III is in many ways the most important section in this thesis. Michel Foucault’s analysis of space and power relations, particularly how they are inscribed in the built environment, was used to explore and understand the public spaces of Shanghai, particularly the alleyway house. Space was of central concern to Foucault, while his analysis of power relations challenged the tenets of Marxism (which tended to focus on specifi c classes as holders of power). Foucault’s notion of a micro-physics of power saw it as being exercised on the body not as a property but as a strategy – something we saw illustrated by Arie Graafl and’s analysis of Louis XIV’s use of the ballet in early-modern France, a time when domination was achieved through manoeuvres and tactics, via a network of relations which were constantly in tension, and was something that was activated rather than possessed. In other words, power is exercised, it is not a possession. Michel Foucault saw China as being devoted to the ordering of space, and it was to China that this research took his work in order to investigate the alleyway house. The use of space in this typology, which is unique to Shanghai, took as its point of departure the Foucauldian notion of the Panopticon. In Jeremy Bentham’s famous prison plan visibility was a trap, it reversed the principle of the dungeon by rendering the prisoner visible. In the Shanghai alleyway house there is visibility in the hierarchical arrangement of the public space as people move through the graduated privacy from public street to private house. As a result everybody is able to benefi t from this visibility. This is a clear rejection of the pessimistic notion of the panoptic society, and the carceral archipelago. This research sees the benign panopticon of the Shanghai alleyway house as something that has given the city its rich and vibrant street life; these are the living links that underpin the notion of consanguinity, and it is these links that we should be seeking to recapture in the city today, not merely attempting to gentrify the shells of empty houses. Part III also saw the use made of Foucault’s work by other academics, notably Edward W. Said’s in his book Orientalism. Said saw some good things having resulted from Western hegemony over that part of the world he so singularly defi ned as the Orient (such as the Renaissance-like revivals in local culture that resulted from an interest in them by colonial elites), but Said generally thought that imperialistic infl uence was debilitating and dangerous. Orientalism’s sequel, Culture and Imperialism, continued in a similar vein, but, as we saw in the critiques by Robert Irwin and Ibn Warraq, Said clearly overvalued the role of the intellectual, seeming to think that the problems of the Middle East could be solved by critical reading skills. Said also misunderstood the Foucauldian notion of discourse, leading him to make his most damaging statement: ‘It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’. By way of balance, we saw the apposite use being made by David Grahame Shane of Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia in his analysis of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City.

184 PART IV CHINA AND CULTURE

Shanghai, this electric and lurid city more exciting than any other in the world… As always, the spectacle outside the theatre far exceeded anything shown on its screen. J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

Part IV sees us return to China in an effort to examine the cultural construction of perception. We will be looking at the historical trajectory of China’s culture in Chapter 1, with particular attention being paid to the Chinese practice of feng shui. This historical analysis also includes a brief look at Western perceptions of China, especially how these turned from the quaint chinoiserie of the eighteenth century into the ‘Yellow Peril’ of the nineteenth. Chapter 2 deals with the issue of language, and how it enables us to communicate, provided, as we saw in Part III’s introduction to Michel Foucault, we use it correctly. The fi nal chapter looks at recent portrayals of Shanghai in fi lm and literature, taking as its point of departure Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans as this novel seems to unite so many of the themes that have been recurring throughout this entire investigation, beginning, of course, with the idea of the investigation itself. This novel is set largely in the 1930s and sees its hero, a celebrated detective, returning to his childhood home in search of his lost parents. This last chapter also takes a look at some fi lm portrayals of the city, beginning with The White Countess, which deals with a dance-hall hostess, and is also set in the 1930s, as well as Shanghai Triad, which will include a note on M. Christine Boyer’s analysis of it. All of these works raise in one way or another the issue of nostalgia, something that seems to recur again and again in portrayals of Shanghai, and is something that we must ever be on guard against. First we shall take a look at the Chinese mentalité1. We have already seen the West’s perception of Chinese strangeness, so beautifully exemplifi ed by Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia. This perceived strangeness is the result of what anthropologists call an aspect of territorial or communitarian rigidity, also known as pseudo-speciation. Richard Sennett tells us that this is where a tribe acts as though it is the only assemblage of human beings who are really human2. In preferring the term mentalité over mind-set use will be made of what Michel Foucault called the ‘framework of thought of any given period’, or the historical outline of the speculative interests, beliefs, or broad theoretical options of a time. This is what, in any given period, delimits a fi eld of knowledge, defi ning the mode of being of the objects that appear in that fi eld. This is also what provides man’s everyday perception with such theoretical powers and defi nes the conditions under which he can sustain a discourse about things that are recognised to be true3.

I am indebted to Patrick Healy for suggesting this term to me as it so much more effectively captures the nuance of what I wish to communicate than the more usual English ‘mind-set’; I wish to point out, however, that despite this study’s examination of China’s long history, and its social structure, I am not intending the term to be a reference to the use made by the Annales School (which was established in Strasburg in 1929 and included such intellectuals as Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Maurice Halbwachs, André Siegfried, Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Georges Duby). Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 308. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 158. 185 1 THE CHINESE MENTALITÉ

Confucianism is making a comeback in China. Attacked under the ‘Four Olds’ during the Cultural Revolution, the sage’s thinking has once again begun to fi nd popularity in a China changing so fast that anything that resonates with old-fashioned values has become increasingly welcome. The fact that Confucius’s philosophy is one of practical governance has also not been lost on the Chinese authorities. Since becoming China’s leader in 2002, President Hu Jintao has promoted a succession of offi cial slogans such as ‘Harmonious Society’ and ‘Xiaokang Shehui’ (‘a moderately well-off society’)1, which have distinctly Confucian undertones, which we shall see in a moment. A melding of Confucianism with Communism is increasingly being seen as a good way for the Party to go, particularly as Confucianism, unlike Communism, is home-grown. Confucian study programmes are springing up throughout the Chinese education system, including even kindergarten classes where children are made to recite the classics, philosophy departments in universities are offering Confucian programmes, and there are even Confucian- themed executive education programmes aimed at business people2. It might seem strange for a communist party to be interested in what is perceived by many as being a religion, but the whole point about Confucianism is that it is not a religion, it was a secular doctrine aimed at national comity, and as such contrasts vividly with Buddhism, late-Daoism, and the other, often syncretic, faiths that have long been practiced in China. This chapter takes a look at some of the recent developments in China, which we have also been looking at in Part I, from the point of view of Chinese philosophy, particularly the application of what is seen by many in the West as a quaint superstition, feng shui. The ramifi cations this belief system has had on China’s built environment has a lot more in common with the practical doctrines of Confucius than the esoterica of either Buddhism or Daoism3. China is a new world power, physically it is the world’s third largest country, it is also the world’s most populous. It dominates the Pacifi c coastline of continental Asia, and shares over 14,000 kilometres of land frontier with over a dozen countries, including fellow giants Russia and India. Chinese civilisation is ancient, it is generally regarded to be the world’s longest continuous civilisation, yet if we compare it to that of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia we can see that it is one that remained relatively primitive until relatively late. Though Chinese inventiveness is the stuff of legend4, metallurgy only began in China a full 1,000 years later than in Mesopotamia; and as for social organisation, the earliest Chinese state is unlikely to have existed before about 2000 BCE, by which time many Mesopotamian city-states were ancient and several Egyptian dynasties had fallen. The development of Chinese civilisation remarkably parallels that of Europe, with the fi rst period of strength and unity under China’s Qin and Han dynasties occurring at more or less the same time as the domination of Europe by Rome. In fact it is probably this that seems so extraordinary to us in the West today, who tend to see the Roman Empire as unutterably distant. To think that the same polity, more or less, with the same borders, again more or less, has existed in China since the time of the Roman Empire is really rather remarkable. As Neil Leach says, if we were to compare this sustained continuity to Europe it would be as if the Roman Empire were actually still in place, with Latin a major international language in common everyday use5. Despite opening up in recent decades, China still remains little known or understood by outsiders. Relatively few foreigners, even the ones living there, learn its language or make more than a cur-

‘Confucius makes a comeback’, The Economist (May 19-25, 2007). Ibid. For a more in-depth analysis of Chinese philosophy, namely Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, please refer to Appendix 5. For a list of Chinese inventions please refer to Appendix 3. Neil Leach, China, p. 73. 186 sory study of its culture and history. Foreign trade and tourism may have dramatically increased since the 1990s, but this is only very slowly leading to a change in foreigners’ perceptions of China. Barri- ers of ignorance and misconception, long in place on both sides of the East-West divide, are not easily overcome. One example of this is the dangers foreigners face when trying to do business in China. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics seems sometimes to mean a somewhat slippery understanding of what constitutes a business agreement, with what Ted C. Fishman sees as ‘their [the Chinese] often blatant disregard for legality’6. Fishman sees the Chinese as having grown up in an era when ‘extrale- gality was the only option’, and likens China’s budding private sector as facing the same sorts of restrictions that American bootleggers had to contend with during Prohibition in the United States in the 1920s7. And then there is the issue of piracy, which we have touched on briefl y in Part I, Fishman draws our attention to the almost surreal lengths that the brand name pirates will go to, even manufacturing Louis Vuitton (eye)glasses, which are then eagerly snapped up by shoppers in the street markets of Shanghai and Beijing, only to fi nd out later that Louis Vuitton does not make any such product8. Piracy is of course vigorously suppressed by the authorities, but to the average Chinese it is not regarded as such a terribly serious offence, in China there is an old saying: ‘to steal a book is an elegant offence’. Foreigners too, of course, are to blame; if there was no market for these goods then the Chinese would stop making them. But, as Fishman points out, in a country where the humiliation of colonisation is still bitterly remembered, turning the tables by pilfering the property of foreigners does not seem to cause too much remorse. Michel Foucault thinks that what is signifi cant about history is that it does not consider an event without defi ning the series to which it belongs. It specifi es the analytical method used and seeks out the regularity of phenomena and the probable limits of their occurrence, and it does this ‘without enquiring into variations, infl exions and the slope of the curve, without desiring to know the conditions on which these depend’9. Foucault sees history as continually enlarging the fi eld of events, constantly discovering new layers (superfi cial as well as profound), and incessantly isolating new ensembles of events, whether they be ‘numerous, dense and interchangeable’ or ‘rare and decisive’10. Gary Gutting sees Foucault’s archaeological methodology as aiming at a history without an individual subject (in much the same way as the modernist avant-garde had aimed at writing without the author)11. He sees Foucault as rejecting the Whiggish interpretation of history, as we have already seen in Part III, and the treating of history as a narrative, told from the standpoint of one or more person’s experiences, which gives it a seeming continuity and the goal-directedness of consciousness, that is why the cultural phenomena that have infl uenced China’s historical trajectory to the present day are being examined here, not as a way of isolating crucial junctures in the country’s history, in the traditional manner, though these are undeniably important, but more as a way of trying to understand the people of China today, and why their built environment is the way it is. Manuel Castells sees major problems as remaining to be solved in China, he is not at all certain that the country will be able to continue to be ‘a little bit global’ and ‘a little bit capitalist’12. Observers of the new China often seem to make an implicit assumption between development and democracy, thereby seeing either the gradual erosion of Communist power or even a sudden toppling of it as somehow inevitable. Castells does not think that the available information supports this view. China is experiencing a fundamental transformation as it attempts to link itself to the global market, Manuel Castells sees the power of the Communist Party as relying on ‘a delicate balance of power- sharing and wealth distribution between national, provincial, and local elites. This central/provincial/

Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 63. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 232. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 230. Ibid., p. 230. Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction, p. 34. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 323. 187 local arrangement of the Chinese state in the process of primitive accumulation may well be the key mechanism in ensuring an orderly transition from statism to capitalism’13. He identifi es the most immediate problem as being the massive rural exodus provoked by the modernisation and privatisation of agriculture, which has affected an estimated 300 million peasants14. Some of them move to the cities, but even those who do, many of them fall into the category we have seen earlier as a ‘fl oating population’. Castells sees this mass of uprooted migrants as not being able to be assimilated into the notion of a civil society. As yet unorganized and lacking in cultural and political resources, these inhabitants of what this research earlier referred to as the ‘analogue archipelago’ Castells correctly identifi es as being ‘an extraordinarily volatile element whose potential rage could destabilize the whole process of transition to a market economy, should they come into contact with messianic leaders or with splintering factions of the Communist party’15 (as happened during the mid-nineteenth-century’s Taiping Rebellion). These dispossessed inhabitants of the analogue archipelago are only powerless so long as they have no access to the tolls of what Castells calls the Information Age. He sees the battles for power in this coming age as being cultural ones, ones that are primarily fought in and by the media. But he is also careful to stress that the media are not the power-brokers (‘power-holders’ is his term). Power, as the capacity to impose behaviour, lies, as Castells tells us with an uncanny echoing of Michel Foucault:

[I]n the networks of information exchange and symbol manipulation, which relate social actors, institutions, and cultural movements, through icons, spokespersons, and intellectual ampliﬁ ers. In the long run, it does not really matter who is in power because the distribution of political roles becomes widespread and rotating. There are no more stable power elites. There are however, elites from power; that is, elites formed during their usually brief power tenure, in which they take advantage of their privileged political position to gain a more permanent access to material resources and social connections. Culture as the source of power, and power as the source of capital, underlie the new social hierarchy of the Information Age16.

Chinese history Jane Jacobs has also mentioned Mesopotamia in connection with China, pointing out that both of these cultures had ‘early and long leads over European cultures’17. Both of them, however, eventually succumbed to long declines, with insidiously growing poverty and backwardness relative to Europe. While Jacobs is quick to point out that neither experienced the extremes of a Dark Ages their early leads were certainly not sustained in the long run. Their failures remind us that strong and successful cultures can and do fail. And that this failure is the result, not of a conquering force from outside, as was so often the case when indigenous cultures came to be colonised, but resulted from a stagnation from within, what Jacobs sees as an ‘internal rot in the form of fatal cultural turnings, not recognized as wrong turnings while they occur or soon enough afterward to be correctable’18. According to Jacobs, Chinese cities throughout the long history of the Chinese Empire, had no feedback. And as we have seen in the work of David Grahame Shane, feedback is of vital importance for an urban organism to survive and prosper. Long before the Chinese Empire was solidifi ed, all the bases of China’s artistic and material culture had been developed. Under unifi cation China never equalled its earlier fantastic capabilities for development or fulfi lled the promise that these had implied. Jacobs sees China as having been ‘[s] o immemorially stagnant… that by this century [the twentieth] some 80 percent of its population was

Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 337. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 326. Ibid., p. 326. Ibid., p. 379 (italics in original). Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. 188 rural’19. China consists of 1.3 billion people, made up of 56 diverse ethnic groups, 92 percent of whom are known as Han20. A 500,000-year-old skull was discovered in the Zhoukoudian area on the outskirts of Beijing, known as the Peking Man, this makes the origins of the Chinese people very ancient in- deed21. The earliest identifi ed inhabitants of China were known as the Huaxia, and they prospered and multiplied to become the largest ethnic group on earth. It was China’s sophisticated agriculture that gave them this early lead, and is what John Darwin has identifi ed as a continuous process of agricultural colonisation that has carried Chinese culture across the northern plains as well as through the Yangtze valley to the south22. It was this southward expansion that actually ‘made’ China, adding a hugely productive agricultural region to the country’s domain. The wet-cultivation of rice, which could produce two or three harvests per year, substantially boosted food supplies (though wheat and millet remained staples in the north, as they do to this day). And it was the sub-tropical south which also stimulated domestic trade. The expansion southwards encouraged the emergence of a commercial economy between 900 CE and 1300 CE where different geographical regions were linked by a network of waterways, which led to an increase in specialisation (because necessities could be brought in from afar), and an elaborate credit system to facilitate it, leading to the introduction of paper money23. This infrastructure made China wealthy, but it also ensured the necessity of active government involvement for the building and maintenance of the waterways, which in this way were not unlike the railways of the Victorian era, also a network which opened up a territory for trade. (In fact it was China’s waterway network that was instrumental in keeping railways out of the country until well into the twentieth century.) The China of this era is sometimes seen as having been the victim of its own success. The effi ciency of its pre-industrial economy discouraged any radical shift in production techniques, and local shortages that would usually drive innovation were mitigated by resources from other regions that could be brought in. This situation, as we have seen earlier, is known as a high-level equilibrium trap, and is one where a society may enjoy centuries of economic success, ultimately, however, with no need to do so, the society simply never improves or develops24. China’s remarkable cultural cohesion was not simply the result of commercial or infrastructural innovation, it was something that had been developed much earlier, and was the result of a body of literature designed to inculcate citizenship and loyalty in its people. One of the most important fi gures in its canon was Confucius. It was the entrenchment of the moral and philosophical outlook derived from Confucius’s texts and perpetuated by a scholar elite that sealed China’s identity for the next two-and- a-half millennia. China developed a bureaucracy where candidates were selected on merit according to how they performed in public examinations. During the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) the grading system was refi ned with successful candidates being awarded degrees such as Tong zi (Bachelor), Xiu chai (Good Scholar), Ju ren (Recommended Scholar) and Jin Si (Advanced Scholar). This examination system reached its peak during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 CE) and was only abolished in 1912 with the foundation of the new Republic25. John Darwin sees the adoption of literati ideals by the provincial gentry (also known as the scholar gentry) as a vital stage in China’s transition from a semi-feudal society (where power was wielded by landholders) into an agrarian empire26. This imperial system was able to rely on the loyalty of local elites, whose own prestige was closely bound up with the prestige of the imperial centre, which

Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 177. Li Xiaoxiang, Origins of Chinese People and Customs, p. 1. Ibid., p. 11. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 45. Evelyn Lip, ‘The Examination System (Kao Shi)’, Notes on Things Chinese, pp. 46-47. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 43. 189 in turn facilitated a system of long-distance rule that proved remarkably successful and enduring. It might be useful to add that the fact the Chinese also made use of a character-based script probably enabled the dissemination of their canon among the literati more easily than any alphabet-based system could have done. Characters, even today (at least for the Chinese dialects that are written – but almost all now are) can be read and understood nationally, even if reading them aloud would result in mutual incomprehension. The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE)27 re-established Peking (Beijing) as the imperial capital in 1420. Once the Grand Canal had assured food supplies for the city (which came from the Yangtze valley), the new dynasty turned its attention to the Confucian texts, making it into a state orthodoxy and fostering its scholarship. The Ming were the real founders of this government system, which lasted until 1912. These concerns all tied neatly together because of the Ming emperors’ embracing of an agrarian ideology, where land was seen as the true wealth, and which ﬁ tted in neatly with Confucian beliefs. The Qing Dynasty which followed continued to uphold Confucianism as state orthodoxy, probably out of a somewhat more cynical self-interest, as they were foreign invaders, perceived by the Han Chinese as barbarian outsiders from the uncouth north. The Qing were Manchurian and had changed their name in order to sound more Chinese. As Manchus they did not bind their women’s feet (only the Han did that), but they did imposed the queue (the trademark pigtail) on their Chinese subjects.

Western perceptions of China John Darwin sees the Qing Dynasty as a sort of Manchu raj, propping up its alien imperial rule by the championing of a Confucian culture. The period 1680 to 1750 is signifi cant for Darwin because this is when the Manchus were consolidating their position just as China was about to be forced to start opening up to the West. The Mings had opened China to trade in the late sixteenth century, though of a severely limited order, and this had happened to coincide with an increase in European missionary activity in Asia. The Jesuits held a virtual monopoly over sources of information about China for centuries, and tended to portray the country as an orderly and benefi cent regime run by scholar- administrators. This was the era of chinoiserie, when China was held up as a sort of utopian mirror, the better to refl ect the disgraceful state of affairs in Europe at the time. Interestingly, Europe’s fascination with China, no matter how ill-informed or ignorant, had no counterpart in China at the time. China’s high-level equilibrium trap had given it a sense of complacency where they dismissed as irrelevant anything that might come from outside its borders. A good example of this would be the Renaissance innovation of perspective in painting. The Chinese found this singularly unimpressive, preferring to stick their own methods, which showed a multiplicity of viewpoints, on the sensible grounds that it better refl ected their way of life. Colin Mackerras states that it was the Jesuits who had compiled the most information and insights about China28 (at least until their activities were curtailed globally by the events of 1774). We have already had occasion to mention one of their priests earlier, Matteo Ricci, one of the most famous commentators on China before the modern era. Ricci worked as a missionary in China for approximately thirty years at the end of the Ming dynasty. His plan to Christianise the country was to begin at the top. He immersed himself in Chinese culture and his diaries are full of positive impressions of the Chinese, notably their fi lial piety and peaceability. Another Jesuit who was an infl uential commentator on China was J.B. du Halde, the editor of Volumes IX to XXVI of Lettres edifi antes et curieuses (1709-43), which was the main source for du Halde’s The General History of China, generally regarded as the most important and comprehensive product of Jesuit scholarship on China. Published in French in 1736, it was subsequently translated into English and other European languages and was used as a source by, among others,

For a full list of Chinese dynasties please refer to Appendix 2. Colin Mackerras, Sinophiles and Sinophobes: Western Views of China, pp. 24-32. 190 Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume, and Goldsmith. Interestingly, du Halde never visited China. Perhaps the most important commentator on China in the eighteenth century was Voltaire, whose infl uence can have had no small effect on the positive light in which China was perceived during this era. What seems to have impressed Voltaire the most was the secular nature of Confucianism, and the fact that the clergy were not allowed to take part in government. This perception of China as a sort of benign despotism began to sour as the eighteenth century wore on, George Anson’s account of a visit to Guangdong in 1743 was a big infl uence on this. Anson’s visit took place during the Qianlong Emperor’s reign (1735-96), which, though it was seen as a golden age of political stability, peace, and prosperity, only served to compound the country’s problems. Between the 1750s and 1820s, a period when the Western powers were beginning to carve out for themselves their global empires, China stagnated. The Confucian tradition remained particularly strong, facing no signifi cant intellectual challenge in a country where religion played a far less signifi cant role in society that in Europe. Daoism had some intellectual infl uence, and its mystical beliefs attracted a popular following, but it had no public status and was regarded with suspicion by the Confucian bureaucracy. Buddhism was followed mainly in outlying parts of the empire, such as Tibet and Mongolia, and while the emperors were careful to show it respect, it was of no great signifi cance as a movement. In fact, priests and monks, both Buddhist and Daoist, were seen as disruptive and troublesome. And, as we shall see later in Part IV with ‘Matteo Ricci’s error’, far from earning respect, the drunken monk had long been a stock character in popular opera. The scholar-elite could have had very little time for such vulgar nuisances. That is not to say that scholarly debate was absent from China, a literati elite exists to write after all. The entire imperial administration depended on reports and inquiries, all carefully fi led away for future reference. Scholar-gentlemen wrote learned papers for the edifi cation of their fellows, while some members of the Confucian elite even engaged in pamphleteering (from hotbeds of anti-Manchu dissent such as the Yangtze delta region, a suitably safe distance from Beijing). However, China did not have a tradition like that of Europe where the public intellectual could pronounce on the issues of the day, there were no ‘“free spaces” on the political chessboard’ as John Darwin has so colourfully put it, no places where a dissident intellectual could hope to fi nd refuge29. There was no tradition of the public forum in China, no agora where differences could be aired with a view to settling them in everyone’s best interest. Just one more aspect of the stagnation that China incurred as a result of fi nding itself in a high- level equilibrium trap. Western views of China remained negative throughout the nineteenth century. The Western powers had gained enormous confi dence thanks to industrial innovations and were spreading their power and infl uence throughout the world. China, on the other hand, had passed its peak and seemed to be in terminal decline. The country was seen as a heathen kingdom of drug-addicted peasants and Oriental despotism, it did not matter that China’s drug problems had been severely exacerbated by the Western powers’ importation of opium in the fi rst place (the British had fought two wars with China to force them to open up to the trade). In fact it is hard to know who did the most damage to China in the nineteenth century, the drug traders with their desire for a fast buck, or the Christian missionaries with their proselytising zeal. Either way, the image of China was never positive, Sax Rohmer’s sinister arch- criminal Dr Fu Manchu probably best sums up the image of China in the West at that time: inscrutable, unscrupulous, and dangerous. One other unfortunate event which is often missed by commentators on the China of the nineteenth century is the devastating effect the shift in the course of the Yellow River had in 1855. This was an environmental disaster on a massive scale, and was probably instrumental in fuelling the disastrous Taiping Rebellion between 1850 and 1864. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 was another humiliating episode for China. The prestige of the Qing Dynasty was coming under increasing attack from outside as well, as the great powers continued to chip away at the country’s borders, with the

John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, pp. 200-201. 191 added humiliation for the so-called Manchu Dynasty of seeing Russia and Japan make ever more substantial inroads into their erstwhile homeland of Manchuria in the north. Yet China managed to escape partition, even though this, as we have seen in Part I, was more the result of a stalemate between the great powers than any home-grown effort on the part of the Chinese. So long as the great powers got their trading rights, and could operate unmolested out of the treaty ports, they seemed happy enough. Oddly it was the railways that eventually precipitated the fi nal collapse of a defunct Qing Dynasty in 1911. The government in Beijing, in an effort to shore up its dissolving authority, and bolster its fi nances, had proposed to take over the new railways, taking them out of the hands of the provincial authorities, and depriving them of valuable income. And it was this that fi nally triggered the revolt that brought the dynasty down.

Feng shui Now we come to some aspects of Chinese thinking that may seem to us in the West to smack of superstition, yet they nonetheless have philosophical implications (or at least underpinnings). Take practices such as tai chi chuan, acupuncture, or feng shui. The Chinese have always had different ways of doing things, after all Borges, apart from his encyclopaedia, has pointed out that ‘[w]alling in an orchard or a garden is ordinary, but not walling in an empire’30. We shall be dealing with the actual meaning of the names for these activities in the next chapter, as well as a number of other key concepts that are diffi cult to transliterate into English, what we shall be looking at in this section is the application of what can be likened to a pseudo-science. This term is not meant in any disparaging way, it simply means that feng shui has a somewhat rigorous, almost scientifi c methodology in its application and yet remains at heart something so ineffable that we in the West have diffi culty grasping it (at least outside the fashionable realm of interior decoration). In its way it could perhaps be compared to the Western practice of psycho- analysis, another fi eld where a lot is taken on faith and yet its practitioners fl atter themselves that their methods are scientifi c. We have already seen in Part I the importance of city shape to the Chinese, particularly the square shape for centres of civil or spiritual importance, Beijing has such a shape. Cities engaged in activities perceived to be of lesser signifi cance to the Chinese, such as trade, invariably had the more usual round shape, as was the case in Shanghai. The siting of a city is also determined by any number of factors, Shanghai, having no cultural signifi cance, was left to its own devices, a settlement establishing itself on the Huangpo River near to the point where it joins the Yangtze River, just before debouching into the East China Sea. Beijing, on the other hand, was laid out in strict accordance with the precepts of feng shui (as was Kowloon Walled City, as we have seen). The practice of feng shui originated in China sometime in the tenth century BCE. It aims to position buildings and/or furniture in harmony with their environment for the benefi t of their users. It is also very important for the correct orientation of tombstones (we have already seen the importance of such orientation for Christian churches and graves for the West in the Middle Ages). Good orientation means the buildings’ users can benefi t from qi. Qi is a very diffi cult concept to render into English as it can mean ‘matter’, ‘energy’, or ‘breath’. Perhaps ‘vital breath’ is the best term to capture its nuance and importance. People have qi, so too do places, even the heavens, in the most practical way, have qi – the Chinese word for ‘the weather’ is tian qi (crudely translated, this could be rendered as ‘sky energy’). And while on the subject of crude translations, the invariable description of feng shui as meaning ‘wind-water’ is simply incorrect, why this is so will be explained in the next chapter when describing the ‘snowball effect’ in the Chinese language, suffi ce to say that feng does mean ‘wind’ and shui ‘water’, however together they mean ‘geomancy’, with the whole of the term exceeding the sum of its parts. Unlike in Western science where the ‘environment’ as a concept is often broken down and analysed as separate categories, according to Brenda S.A. Yeoh, feng shui unifi es ‘the geological, at-

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Wall and the Books’, Labyrinths, p. 221. 192 mospheric, aesthetic, and psychological qualities of the environment in one theory and code of practice which is seen as integral to the lives of the people’31. Yeoh states that Chinese cities were conceived as ‘cosmo-magical symbols’32 of the universe, a view which stems from Oswald Spengler’s basic conception of space in Chinese culture as a being path which meanders through the world, where the individual is conducted to his god or ancestral tomb by nature via a devious series of doors, bridges, hills and walls (a way of thinking that clearly resonates with Daoist notions).33 Yeoh also notes that inherent in feng shui was the notion that human intervention in the landscape was fraught with risk and could generate repercussions for society34. Feng shui takes a holistic approach to man and his environment and as such refl ects the general Chinese attitude which tends to see all elements in the world as one great chain of being (as is the case with Daoist belief). Some other Chinese practices that refl ect this way of thinking are traditional medicine, which treats the entire body regardless of the symptoms of illness. This approach takes account of physical, psychological, and physiological factors and considers the body as a system of delicately balanced yin and yang elements which must be in harmony with one another to ensure a person’s proper health. Some of the techniques of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) include acupuncture, which consists of inserting needles along the body’s meridian points to stimulate the circulation of qi. Another technique, perhaps not so well-known as acupuncture in the West, is moxibustion, where cigar-like moxa sticks are held over the body’s acupressure points. Practices such as these, which were not understood by colonial authorities in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai, did not fare well when subjected to the Western medical gaze. Colonial authorities were quick to declare such practices quackery and suppress them. Western medicine was a sanitary science, it regarded diseases as the product of germs which could to be conquered by using scientifi c means, Traditional Chinese Medicine’s focusing on the correcting of imbalances was one which aimed at strengthening the body’s resistance rather than attacking a pathogenic invader. Colonial authorities, supremely conscious of the superiority of their own medical practices, had little interest in what they clearly regarded as an inferior calling, classing it as folklore or even mere superstition. Other aspects of this holistic Chinese approach to the body and health can be seen in the daily practice of activities such as qi gong and tai chi chuan. The former is an exercise to control breathing, which regulates the activity of the cerebral cortex and can reduces stress and allow the body to function more effi ciently. The latter, formerly a martial art, now aims at building up the body’s inner strength by controlled breathing and movement. These activities can be seen practiced by Chinese, old and young, everywhere in Shanghai (and also, to a lesser extent in Hong Kong and Singapore), in fact Shanghai’s old colonial public spaces, such as Fuxing Park and the Bund, are thronged with people engaging in these exercises, particularly in the early morning.

The Chinese house Unlike in the West, where building types differ according to their function (for example, houses have very different forms from churches), in China there is no such differentiation, temples tend to look like houses and vice versa. Neither is there any difference in layout (apart from size) between the humblest peasant’s cottage and an emperor’s palace. They are all laid out according to the same basic precepts. Of course regional and geographical factors play a role but the basic building form remains remarkably consistent across a territory that is as large as the United States, and has remained so for millennia. This

Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 292. Ibid., p. 281. Cited in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment, p. 291. Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 291. 193 is what Ronald G. Knapp would call the ‘“architecture of Chineseness” that links many realms’35. The form of the Chinese house is fl exible enough to enable the family that lives in it to enlarge, or reduce, according to circumstances. This it is able to do thanks to the unique system of interlocking wooden framework the Chinese have devised. Used for both architecture and furniture, this system is held together by a mortise-and-tenon joinery system which does not use adhesives or fasteners36. This system was in place seven thousand years ago in the Neolithic Hemudu society (in Zhejiang Province). It means that houses can be extended in any direction to meet changing requirements. The Chinese house basically describes a rectangle, within which can be found the most subtle and complicated patterns of spatial relationships expressing age, gender, and generational status, as well as places for child rearing and the care of the elderly. At the heart of the Chinese home lies the courtyard, and in the houses of the rich, there may even be more than one. Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt has identifi ed more than Figure 26. Siheyuan (source: House Home Family: Living twenty varieties of the basic courtyard- and Being Chinese, p.42) style house, with shapes being infl uenced by regional variations. In central Shanxi, for example, they tend to be rectangular while those in south-eastern Shanxi have two- or even three-storey buildings surrounding them. In Ningxia, the courtyards of the Hui are some of the few that are not oriented south, while in Jilin they have heatable platforms on three sides, something necessary for the cold Manchurian winters37. Ronald G. Knapp notes that courtyards tend to be comparatively expansive in north and north-eastern China, but are usually quite condensed in the south38. The Chinese term for a courtyard is tianjing (skywell), a typically robust Chinese description, and one that becomes even more appropriate in dwellings with more than one storey, as was the case in Shanghai, where there was such a premium on space. The most typical expression of the Chinese courtyard home can be found in the north of the country. Known as siheyuan, it consisted of an open-air quadrangle surrounded by low buildings, and its origins go back to the eleventh century BCE. The back walls lack windows or doors, and these homes were invariably laid out along the cardinal points with the main halls generally facing south. Each siheyuan had at least one courtyard at its centre, which would cover approximately 40 percent of the total area of the dwelling, while some had additional courtyards to the front and/or rear. Visitors and residents would move through these courtyards in a sequence of what Nelson Wu calls ‘graduated privacy’, with casual visitors invited only as far as the entry vestibule, while the fi rst-level courtyard and adjacent halls were privileged spaces for relatives and family friends. Deeper within the dwelling

Ronald G. Knapp, ‘China’s Houses, Homes and Families’, from House Home Family: Living and Being Chinese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 2. Kai-yin Lo, ‘Traditional Chinese Architecture and Furniture’, from House Home Family: Living and Be- ing Chinese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 193. Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, ‘The House: An Introduction’, from House Home Family: Living and Being Chinese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 27. Ronald G. Knapp, ‘In Search of the Elusive Chinese House’, from House Home Family: Living and Be- ing Chinese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 47. 194 was the realm of privacy for the women of the traditional family39. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties these siheyuan were jammed closely together in cities along narrow lanes, in Beijing these were called hutong, and they in turn infl uenced the late fl owering of the Shanghai alleyway house. One fi nal note before leaving the topic of feng shui is to warn against taking too romantic a view of it. Yes, as a practice it seems to resonate well with twenty-fi rst-century concerns for environmental awareness, it has also gained an increased currency in building practice in the West, but what must be borne in mind is the fact that for all its sensitivity to its surroundings feng shui has not prevented the Chinese from doing sometimes irreparable damage to their country, and this was even before the onset of Western-style industrialisation.

Ibid., p. 27. 195 2 A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

When Confucius was asked what was the fi rst thing he would do if he was ever asked to lead a state, he answered: ‘Rectify the language’1. Gore Vidal sees a decadent society as one which allows its language to grow decadent; one where words are no longer used to illuminate but to disguise and mislead. Words, and how they are used, are vitally important. As we saw at the beginning of Part III, language makes communication possible, but only on condition that it is used properly. If one wants to communicate, one has no other option other than to subscribe to the meanings already assigned in a given language. Words have specifi c meanings, and if one wants to use them to communicate a specifi c nuance then one must use a specifi c word; indeed one can use no other. Word order too is important: as the old adage has it, there is all the difference between a ‘chestnut horse’ and a ‘horse chestnut’; which is why David Harvey’s term ‘time-space compression’ is probably preferable to Marshall Berman’s ‘space- time feeling’, as the latter seems to suggest science fi ction rather than earthy fact. Colonial authorities understood all too well the importance of words, they knew the implications that resulted from an act of naming, which is something we shall see in a moment when we look at how different languages refl ect the different environments that have brought them into being. Particular attention will be paid to the Chinese language, taking certain key terms as examples. The Chinese scope for subtlety of expression and nuance will also be compared to the more precise, and concise, Western languages, particularly Latin, which is the root of so many of them. First of all, however, it might be helpful to return briefl y to the work of Michel Foucault, for whom the peculiar property possessed by a language, as opposed to any other system of signs, was of vital importance. In his work on language, Michel Foucault drew a comparison between the Chinese character- based script and the alphabetic system, where he sees the latter as being ‘a form of duplication, since it represents not the signifi ed but the phonetic elements by which it is signifi ed’2. What he calls the ideogram, on the other hand, ‘directly represents the signifi ed, independently from a phonetic system which is another mode of representation’3. In The Order of Things Foucault cites Claude Duret as pointing out that the Hebrews, Canaans, Samaritans, Chaldeans, Syrians, Egyptians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Arabs, Saracens, Turks, Moors, Persians, and Tartars all wrote from right to left, which was seen as following ‘the course and daily movement of the fi rst heaven, which is most perfect, according to the opinion of the great Aristotle, tending towards unity’4. The Greeks, Georgians, Maronites, Serbians, Jacobites, Copts, Poznanians, as well as of course the Romans and all their European descendants, write from left to right, following ‘the course and movement of the second heaven, home of the seven planets’5. While the Indians, Chinese, and Japanese all write from top to bottom (or at least they used to), which Claude Duret saw as being in conformity with the ‘order of nature, which has given men heads at the tops of their bodies and feet at the bottom’6. This is all very interesting, but what is actually clever about it is the fact that what Michel Foucault points out as being important is not so much the direction the text is written in as the order in which the words are placed: ‘what renders foreign languages opaque to one another, and so diffi cult to translate, is not so much the differences between the words as the incompatibility of their sequences’7. Foucault then goes on to differentiate between what he colourfully refers to as the ‘singing vowels speaking our passions; [and] the rough consonants our needs’, pointing out that it is ‘still possible

Confucius quoted in Gore Vidal’s Imperial America, p. 52. Michel Foucault, ‘Language to Infi nity’, from Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected essays and interviews, pp. 55-56. Ibid., p. 56. Claude Duret, quoted in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, p. 37. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 83. 196 to distinguish the rocky tongues of the North – a forest of gutturals, of hunger and cold – from the Southern tongues that are all vowels, born of early morning encounters between shepherds when “the fi rst fi res of love were bursting from the pure crystal of the springs”’8. How much more could Foucault have read into all of this if only he had been familiar with the infl ected tongues of the East (as opposed to the non-infl ected Indo-European languages). In Chinese, meaning is altered simply by changing the tone used to enunciate the word: Mandarin Chinese has four such tones; Cantonese, seven. Perhaps Michel Foucault’s most profound point in this analysis of language is the fact that with the alphabetic system ‘the history of men is entirely changed’9; it is no longer ideas that are transcribed in space but sounds; from which are extracted ‘the common elements in order to form a small number of unique signs whose combination will enable them to form all possible syllables and words’10. Symbolic writing, on the other hand, by attempting to spatialise representations themselves, obeys what Foucault calls ‘the confused law of similitudes, and causes language to slip out of the forms of refl ective thought’ ; alphabetical writing, ‘by abandoning the attempt to draw the representation, transposes into its analysis of sounds the rules that are valid for reason itself’11. Foucault’s intention was to determine under which conditions language could become the object of a given period’s knowledge, and between which limits this epistemological domain could actually develop. This is one of the key reasons why the Chinese language was of such central importance in this research. Foucault was himself aware of the possibilities of comparing what he calls ‘the combinative structure of Chinese’12 to the Western languages, with their declensions and conjugations. Michel Foucault sees that ‘[b]y means of the ephemeral and profound sound it produces, the spoken word accedes to sovereignty’13. He sees language, like any living organism, manifesting the functions that keep it alive: ‘the whole architecture of its grammar’, which renders visible ‘the fundamental will that keeps a whole people alive and gives it the power to speak a language belonging solely to itself’14. He also thinks that when a language mutates from below, as the result of the usage of ordinary people, and no longer from above, i.e. from a learned elite, or from the victorious armies of an invading aristocracy, it changes from an Humboldian ergon to an energeia or ceaseless activity15. This is probably why Medieval church authorities were so opposed to allowing the Bible to be translated into the vernacular; they thought, perhaps correctly, that its message would become diluted if rendered into the common tongue; certainly it would become debased. Michel Foucault was, of course, primarily interested in examining the classical order of language, which he saw as having drawn to a close. As he says: ‘It has lost its transparency and its major function in the domain of knowledge’16. The immediate and spontaneous unfolding of representations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries meant that it was a time when representations received their primary signs, patterned and regrouped their common features, and established relations of identity or attribution. This was a time when language was ‘a form of knowing and knowing was automatically discourse’17. Language, according to Foucault:

[O]ccupied a fundamental situation in relation to all knowledge: it was only by the medium of language that the things of the world could be known. Not because it was a part of the world, ontologically interwoven with it (as in the Renaissance), but because it was the ﬁ rst sketch of an

Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., p. 295. Ibid., pp. 295-296. 197 order in representations of the world; because it was the initial, inevitable way of representing representations. It was in language that all generality was formed. Classical knowledge was profoundly nominalist.18

Foucault sees language as having begun to ‘fold in upon itself’ from the nineteenth century onwards, a time when it began to ‘acquire its own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of its own’19. This was the time when language became:

[O]ne object of knowledge among others, on the same level as living beings, wealth and value, and the history of events and men. It may possess its own concepts, but the analyses that bear upon it have their roots at the same level as those that deal with other empirical forms of knowledge. The preeminence that enabled general grammar to be logic while at the same time intersecting with it has now been lost. To know language is no longer to come as close as possible to knowledge itself; it is merely to apply the methods of understanding in general to a particular domain of objectivity.20

Language and naming ‘He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school and not to travel.’21 So says Francis Bacon, a fi gure considered to be important enough by Michel Foucault to recommend to his students. Anyone who travels to China, or anywhere for that matter, will benefi t from trying to learn at least a little of the language. There are at least seven different systems for transliterating Mandarin Chinese into Roman characters. English now uses a system known as pinyin (which has replaced the older Wade-Giles system). Pinyin is actually the offi cial system adopted for transliteration by the government of China as well as by the International Organization for Standardization. Under pinyin China’s capital city is rendered ‘Beijing’, replacing the older Wade-Giles ‘Peking’. It is important to understand that the Chinese have not changed the name of their capital city (at least not since the period between 1928 and 1949 when it called Peiping (which means ‘northern peace’) and a time when Nanjing was the capital), they have simply changed the way in which the Chinese characters are transliterated into English. Beijing, as we have seen, simply means ‘northern capital’ (as Nanjing means ‘southern capital’), and the seeming name change comes from the fact that pinyin is now used for English renderings of Chinese names (this also explains why the city is still referred to as ‘Pekin’ or ‘Peking’ in other European languages, such as French, German, Dutch, etc.). The Chinese authorities are encouraging the learning of English as a way to help them compete in the international market, just as a half century ago the country’s engineers and organisers learned Russian. According to Ted C. Fishman there are nearly as many people learning English as a second language in China as there are people who speak it as a fi rst language in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain combined22. Competence in English is seen as good infrastructure and English speakers are hoped to provide a key to scientifi c and technical advancement. China’s rivalry with India, which we saw in Part I, has also made them all too aware of the advantages of speaking a language such as English, particularly in the lucrative computer software and service centre industries. Marshall Berman points out that the main transmitter of modernisation in the nineteenth century was England, while in the twentieth it may have been the United States, the power maps may have changed, but the importance of the English language has not diminished as a result, if anything it has increased. Yet more evidence, if any were needed, that Manuel Castells’s new information technology has produced qualitative social

Ibid., p. 296. Ibid., p. 296. Ibid., p. 296. Francis Bacon, Of Empire, p. 26. Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 276. 198 and economic changes in society. Along with the development of pinyin, the Chinese authorities have modernised the Chinese language itself. As has already been mentioned, Chinese script is now written from left to right, not top to bottom or right to left as it variously was. Chinese characters have also been simplifi ed, reducing the number of strokes, etc., which has, oddly enough, resulted in a strange sort of dislocation between the mainland Chinese and the overseas Chinese communities. A cursory glance through the street signage of Amsterdam’s Chinatown shows that they still tend use the old-fashioned characters. Hong Kong and Taiwan, too, adhere to the old ways, leaving Hong Kong with the slightly anomalous situation of being a hyper-modern metropolis whose citizens can only read and write a quaint and old-fashioned Chinese. Singapore has adopted the new Chinese standard and promotes the teaching of Mandarin (known as putonghua) as a way of encouraging business and cultural links with the country many Singaporeans still see as their spiritual heartland, but also as a way of fostering ties between the many different intra- national Chinese groups, such as Hokkien, Hakka, Haklo, Cantonese, Teochew, etc., who have made Singapore their home. One other innovation in the writing of Chinese is that for the fi rst time ever some basic punctuation has been adopted: for example, commas, full stops, etc. China was only ever semi-colonial, this was something that was discussed at length in Parts I and II of this thesis, but one of the most important aspects of this is the fact that the Chinese did not have to adopt, as did the Indians (and the Irish) a foreign language into their daily lives. Leo Ou-fan Lee points out that this means that China’s long and deeply entrenched tradition of writing Chinese remained unchallenged by any foreign language throughout its history23. Even during the era of the unequal treaties Chinese writers continued to write poetry and fi ction in their own language, a language that was becoming increasingly enriched from its absorption of foreign infl uences. The reader will remember that the word ‘modern’ was fi rst transliterated into Chinese in Shanghai during this era. Other concepts, such as the Western notion of love, have also found their way into the Chinese language: the word for a spouse is airen (literally ‘love person’) and refl ects a startling new notion for the Chinese, namely that someone could actually marry for love, and not simply because their parents had found them a suitable match. The effects that the imposition of a foreign language can have on a native culture are not going to be lamented here – Foucault’s invading aristocracy pretty much sums up Ireland in the twelfth century, the beginning of a slow and often bloody process that led to that country’s almost complete conversion to an English-speaking nation by the twentieth century – because as we have seen with India, it is sometimes advantageous to be able to speak English. The English, as colonial masters, were peculiarly adept at imposing their language on the territories they conquered. Edward W. Said saw Ireland under the British as being ‘subjected to innumerable metamorphoses through repeated settling projects and, in culmination, its virtual incorporation in 1801 through the Act of Union’24. This is true. Ireland occupies an interesting position vis-à-vis colonialism, because whereas most commentators see Ireland as a colonised country, its elite very often fi lled positions in the upper echelons of the colonial power structures abroad. These people may not have had quite the numerical presence of the Scots, but they were every bit as loyal as servants of the British Empire. Ireland was, after 1801, a fully fl edged part of the United Kingdom, and remained so until the twenty-six counties became a Free State in 1922 (although still united with England under the crown until being declared a Republic in 1948). Edward W. Said’s point draws our attention to the important role the English language had in subjugating Ireland during the nineteenth century, and he cites the Ordnance Survey, begun in 1824, the goal of which was to anglicise Irish place names. The main aim of the exercise was to redraw land boundaries and permit the proper valuation of property, but its effect was to further subjugate the Irish population. This survey was carried out by an almost entirely English

Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, p. 310. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 226. 199 staff, and Said cites one of Brian Friel’s most powerful plays, Translations (1980) for the manner in which it dealt with what Said calls ‘the shattering effect of the Ordnance Survey on the indigenous inhabitants’25. Said is correct when he states that ‘[o]ne of the fi rst tasks of the culture of resistance was to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land’26. John Darwin would no doubt agree. Darwin states that the changing of names refl ects a shift in perception, status and control; it is a way of symbolising the end of an old (and usually colonial) order and the reassertion of the indigenous one27. As soon as Ireland became independent again it set about renaming all the places the English had changed: Queenstown became Cobh; Kingstown Dun Laoghaire, Portlaoise Maryborough, etc. Sometimes this was a readjustment the native population could not get used to (elderly residents often referred to towns by their ‘English’ names long after the changeover). Within a colonial city, such as Singapore, the names the streets are known by had important implications for colonial power relations. Brenda S.A. Yeoh saw the colonial authorities as attempting to render these relations more legible by enforcing their own system of street and place names. Yeoh sees this legibility as being crucial for the surveillance functions of the state, functions that would include population censuses, policing, and public health initiatives. A well-organised system of street names rendered Singapore’s Asian population less amorphous, leaving them more open to observation under the ‘gaze’ of the colonial authorities. What is perhaps most interesting in Yeoh’s analysis is the fact that the Chinese often simply ignored the offi cial nomenclature imposed from above, preferring to use their own system of references for place names. Singapore’s streets and public spaces were named, in the tradition of the British Empire, after people of local and/or imperial signifi cance, and as such refl ected the mental image of the dominant culture. The naming process was dominated by municipal and government offi cers, and, occasionally, infl uential property owners, it tended to be relatively impervious to the views of those who actually lived on the street28. Street nomenclature was the means by which the colonial authorities could project their perceptions of what the different areas of the city represented. Yeoh has discovered a remarkable degree of disjunction between the names imposed by the authorities and those used by ‘the Asian plebeian classes in their daily routines’29. The names for streets that the Chinese tended to use incorporated a wide variety of symbols with signifi cance to their daily lives. Some of these also provide clues to less visible dimensions of this life as they signifi ed territorial boundaries between the different groups within the Chinese communities. The Chinese penchant for practical names was also refl ected in Singapore, with street names denoting particular activities. Chinese street names tended to be simple descriptions or contained within them geographical directions. Often a simple reference to the number of buildings on the street suffi ced, or to their physical form (i.e. hilly, curved, etc.). In contrast to the municipal street names, which invariably referred to people of importance, Chinese street names seldom performed a commemorative function. As J. E. Spencer says, ‘although Chinese names indicate both domestic cultural and geographical infl uences, they almost never indicate cultural infl uence from other parts of the world’30. Yeoh’s analysis shows that while the colonial authorities ‘had the power of selecting what were considered appropriate names and formally assigning them to the streets of the city, the Asian communities comprised the social milieu which retained the power over whether these names would be

Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 226. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. xiii. Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 221. Ibid., p. 222. J. E. Spencer, quoted in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment, p. 232. 200 adopted’31. China has not undertaken any great project of renaming towns and cities to shake off any of their semi-colonial associations, they have nothing in common with the desire of inhabitants of Ceylon to be known as Sri Lankans, or the Siamese as Thai. Any changes to English versions of place names in China are simply the result of changing the transliteration system from the Wade-Giles to pinyin, hence Chongqing and Nanjing have replaced the more old-fashioned Chungking and Nanking. Shanghai, by happy accident, remains unaffected. Some street names in the city have been changed, however, but then some small changes may well have been expected. What is most apparent in Chinese place names is their robust geographical directness, we have already seen how Shanghai means ‘the place where the sea begins’ (or, more usually, ‘on the sea’), and Beijing means ‘northern capital’. Other place names reﬂ ect other geographical features and act as markers localising the place that they are referring to. For example, Shandong and Hunan mean ‘east of the mountain’ and ‘south of the lake’ respectively. It is this simple directness in the use of Chinese characters that we will now turn our attention by looking at some key Chinese concepts.

Some Chinese terms Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari see language as stabilising around a parish, a diocese, a capital, forming what they call a bulb. Language, according to them, ‘evolves by means of stems and underground ﬂ ows, along ﬂ uvial valleys or railway lines; it is displaced by oil spots’32. While according to Marcel Proust:

Names, no doubt, are whimsical draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches so unlike the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when we have before our eyes, in place of the imagined, the visible world (which, for that matter, is not the real world, our senses being little more endowed than our imagination with the art of portraiture – so little, indeed, that the ﬁ nal approximately lifelike pictures which we manage to obtain of reality are at least as different from the visible world as that was from the imagined).33

We will now turn our attention to some key Chinese names. Names that seem to refl ect China’s richly nuanced mode of expression. Being used to the Western alphabetical system of organising a dictionary makes looking up a word in a Chinese one rather diffi cult. One has to know which part of the character, also known as an ideograph (or what Foucault referred to as an ‘ideogram’) is the radical. Radicals are characters that represent basic concepts in Chinese, such as rice, the sun, to see, etc., and there are over 200 of these, of which 92 are about the most common. Combined with other characters or ideographs, these radicals set the tone, as it were, of a word’s meaning. These meanings then tend to be clustered in a combinatory way: for example, the character ren, for person, can be combined with ai (love) to make airen, which, as we have already seen, means spouse34. Once one has identifi ed the radical, one then needs to be able to count the number of stokes contained in the character as a whole (and there are eight different types of stroke, with as many as 36 strokes in any given character – and that is in simplifi ed Chinese); then by a process of cross-referencing one can run through the shortlist of characters contained at the beginning of every standard Chinese dictionary, and fi nd the list of the ones that contain the correct radical element as well as the requisite number of strokes; from this one can then go to the page indicated in the dictionary

Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi- ronment, p. 235. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Rhizome’ from On the Line, p. 13. Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (Volume II of Remembrance of Things Past), p. 141. For a full list of Chinese terms used throughout this thesis, both in pinyin (Roman letters) and putonghua (Chinese characters) and with their English transliterations, please refer to Appendix 4. 201 to fi nd what one is looking for. While this is all undeniably trickier than looking up things in a dictionary of a Western language, once a certain level of competence has been attained in Chinese, especially an ability to recognise the radicals (as well as count the number of strokes) then the logic in a Chinese dictionary seems surprisingly elegant. It is this same logic that is contained within the seemingly odd list of elements listed in Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia. This is the way in which the Chinese organise their world: they cluster things. Even if Borges presumably simply made up his list, its oddness can now be explained by the fact that words can be linked to one another in a Chinese dictionary simply because they contain the same radical; and this clustering can make for some odd bedfellows: the God the police worship is the same as the one venerated by the illegal triads, because they both happen to be organisations; while the God worshipped by scaffolders is the same as for opera troupes because the wayang (travelling opera troupe) had to make use of the same techniques as scaffolders in the construction of their stages. The logic, once it becomes apparent, is compelling, and may well have a sounder basis than the Western system of clustering things as disparate as aardvarks, aeroplanes, and ataxia together simply because they all happen to begin with the letter ‘a’. In 1582 Matteo Ricci fi rst saw Chinese ideographs in Macau and was struck by their potential for use as a universal language system35 (something Leibniz was also to think of a century or so later). Chinese people who can read are able to understand one another’s writing even if their dialects are different, something that can never be the case with an alphabet-based system. Ricci also thought that Chinese characters could transcend the differences inherent in pronunciation, sadly here he was wrong; while it is true that Chinese characters are national, and can be comprehended for their meanings in the different Chinese dialects, the different ways of reading these characters aloud renders them mutually incomprehensible. However, the very fact that anyone who can read a Chinese character can apprehend its meaning regardless of which dialect they speak is remarkable and as far removed from the Western alphabetic system as to seem almost miraculous. Jonathan D. Spence maintains that a Chinese sentence can be presented as a series of sharply detailed images, and cites Matteo Ricci’s observation that ‘[Chinese] words have no articles, no cases, no number, no gender, no tense, no mood; they just solve their problems with certain adverbial forms which can be explained very easily’36. This is substantially true. Chinese sentences often begin with time and place, to let the listener know the when and where of what is being talked about. The observant reader will remember that this thesis has done the same by referring to Chapter 1 of Part I as ‘Shanghai Now’. Chinese speakers also often have to clarify whether they are talking about a male or a female, and about the number of people they are talking about, as the Chinese language cannot differentiate between ‘he’ and ‘she’, as can be done in the West (at least not usually in the spoken language), and words are also unable to be rendered plural. Success in the civil service exams was the surest route to fame and fortune in Imperial China. Matteo Ricci arrived during the waning years of the Ming dynasty but rapidly saw that by helping the sons of China’s elite do well in these exams he would then be able to use this to his advantage in his attempts to convert them to Christianity (which was, after all, his main goal). He had clearly learned from his earlier mistake of trying to take a shortcut with his missionary work by dressing up as a Buddhist monk. Ricci’s mnemonic skills were impressive, even for an age when a good memory was taken for granted in Europe (even among the poor and uneducated – in a society where the majority was illiterate, culture was still largely a matter of oral transmission, something that would have honed mnemonic skills). Matteo Ricci’s efforts at conversion in China were not successful, but his work has proved a valuable link between that country and the West, as he transliterated many scientifi c terms and concepts into Chinese for the fi rst time. He also made some interesting observations on the Chinese language as

Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, p. 21. Ibid., p. 137. 202 well – we have just seen his theory that it could be used as the basis for a universal tongue, but he also made more specifi c analyses, such as his reading of the Chinese ideograph for goodness, hao, which he divided into the left part of the character, nu, meaning ‘woman’, and the right, zi, meaning ‘child’37. Together they form the image of a mother and a child; and what could present a more perfect picture of goodness and happiness than that? Ricci was of course trying to forge a link between China and Christian iconography, in this case the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus, but his analysis is nonetheless elegant, and when pointed out to Chinese speakers today they are invariably surprised by it, but quick to agree with the analysis, even if it was something that had never occurred to them before. Some other terms that bear closer scrutiny are kai, which can mean ‘to open’, ‘to turn on’, ‘to boil’, ‘to drive’, ‘to bloom’, etc., a positively Borgesian list of uses based on the notion underpinning them all in the Chinese mind, namely that they are things that bring forth or let happen, and as such are somewhat reminiscent of Greek terms like techne, praxis, poeisis, etc., particularly for the sheer scope of nuance that they allow. Another interesting verb is zuo, which can mean ‘to take’, ‘to travel on’ (but not ride on, so for example it can be used for a travelling by train or aeroplane but not for riding a bicycle or a horse); this character is based on an ideograph of two people sitting on some kind of conveyance or vehicle. Then there is the verb ‘to think’, the title of this thesis, which can be transliterated into Chinese in any number of ways, all depending on what it is one is trying to communicate: xiang denotes intention or choice (e.g. I think I will go to China); juede is used to express feelings or emotions (I think I will like it there); renwei is an opinion, and as such is based on refl ection (I think I ought to go); while xiangdui is a resultative construction after having thought (I think going to China will be useful for my career); fi nally, yiwei shows what one has been thinking (I thought I had better go there). There is one term that might be useful to clarify for its English connotations, or lack of them, and that is the designation ‘gentleman’. Confucius uses this term in The Analects, differentiating betwwen shih and chun tzu , (i.e. a ‘Gentleman’, occupying the lowest rank of offi cialdom, and a ‘gentleman’, a man of moral excellence or a man in authority). This latter term can also be contrasted with hsiao jen (the ‘small man’ or the one who is ruled). What should be pointed out here is that the usage of the term gentleman (whether small ‘g’ or large) has become hopelessly debased in English, becoming all but meaningless. It has become nothing more than the catch-call of television game-show hosts, the original meaning of the word, and the one intended in the more old-fashioned translations of the Confucian canon, was a man not of the common throng, i.e. one who was noble (as opposed to common). ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ in this sense means gentlefolk, which is also where the term ‘gentry’ comes from. The British Empire was always a place where class distinctions were carefully graded, and while this may have faded somewhat in recent decades (along with the empire) so too have gone the rich resonance of the term ‘gentleman’. Chinese characters are constructed with an almost puzzle-like logic, meaning that they can be further combined to make new meanings. This is known as the ‘snowball effect’ and is unique to the language. We have already come across the term feng shui, which has been pointed out as meaning ‘geomancy’. The character feng meaning ‘wind’ and shui ‘water’, but feng shui no more means ‘wind-water’ than shan shui means ‘mountain-water’ (shan shui is the Chinese term for landscape). Simply because feng shui is composed of the two characters that happen to signify, individually, mountain and water, many books on this increasingly popular topic inaccurately refer to these terms as if they were still two separate entities. This tendency has probably come about as a result of ignorance of the snowball effect. Some other examples of this effect are: yuan (far) and jin (near), combined to give the meaning yuan jin (distance); qu (to go) and lai (to come), together which mean qu lai (movement); and, rather fi ttingly, given the brief summary of Chinese philosophy we have just seen, you (to have) and wu (without), which together mean you wu (existence). There is one other snowball term we have seen in our investigations into Shanghai and that is

Ibid., p. 262. 203 the area known as Xintiandi: xin meaning ‘new’, which is straightforward enough, while tian di is the snowball: tian, meaning heaven or sky, and di, meaning earth, together make up the word ‘world’ or ‘universe’, which can also signify ‘everything’, hence Xintiandi simply means ‘New World’. Now it might be useful to take a closer look at the construction of Chinese characters, which are also variously known as ideographs, ideograms, or sinograms. Basically they consist of little pictures illustrating sometimes in an almost literal manner. Take the character jia, which denotes ‘house’, ‘home’, and ‘family’ – note that these three notions are not separable in the way that they are in the West, this can be exemplifi ed by the use of the term in the Zhang Yimou fi lm Shanghai Triad where the Tang family is referred to as ‘Tang jia’. Jia’s nine strokes actually represent a pig underneath a roof; the top three strokes representing the roof, while the rest of the character consists of the depiction of a pig. This is considered a particularly apt symbol for Chinese family life, as a family is often defi ned as ‘a related group of people who “eat out of one pot”’38. This can be understood literally, as in a daily meal (pork is a staple of the Chinese diet), or fi guratively by signifying the sharing of income (formerly earned by the raising of pigs). This means that the family was not only a group that consumed pork, but was an economic unit in producing this commodity. This understanding of the family unit as the basic economic component in society resonates with what Michel Foucault tells us about the Greek state as being made up of households39. He states that the Greek notion of oeconomy, to be found in Aristotle, designated ‘the typical management of the family, of its goods and wealth, the management or direction of slaves, of the wife, and of children, and possibly the management, if you like, of clients’40. Foucault was referring to this in the context of his examination of the concept of the pastorate, where he felt that the term ‘oeconomy’ (speaking in French) was the ‘word best suited to translate oikonomia psuchon’, he also noted that it was translated as regimen animarum in Latin (the government or regimen (regime) of souls)’41. By breaking down the management of the Greek household Foucault saw it as consisting of the persons who composed it (including slaves), he then examined what constituted its fewest possible elements, isolating ‘the fi rst and fewest possible parts of a family’, which he lists as being: master and slave, husband and wife, and father and children42. There is an interesting similarity here between these three signifi cant relationships in Greek society and the fi ve human relationships that Confucius has outlined in the Lun Yu (The Anelects): parent and child; husband and wife; friends; old and young; ruler and subject. The Chinese have a saying: ‘no discord, no concord’, which indicates that they, like any other society, reach consensus through a frank airing of views. The main difference from the Western tradition is that the Chinese have no public arena for doing this. There are no agorae in China; Beijing has never had an equivalent of the Roman Forum. The Chinese are far less interested in allowing any given individual unfettered freedom of expression, seeing the common good as being above any individual’s concerns. This is not to say that they do not have public spaces, of course they do, but their understanding of the word public is different. The Chinese word gong must be understood as resonating with different traditional mores than what we understand in the West. Gong is the usual transliteration of the Western concept of ‘public’ into Chinese; combined with other characters it can result in words such as gongkai (open, public, overt), gongyuan (a public park), gongyong (public use), and even, oddly, gongji (a roost- er – perhaps the fertilising of hens used to be regarded as a public function in China?). See-Chen Chang and Arlen Min Ye tell us that the notion of the ‘public’ had been, to a large extent, absent in Chinese urban society43. They state that until the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth

Nancy Jervis, ‘The Meaning of Jia: An Introduction’ from House Home Family: Living and Being Chi- nese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 223. Michel Foucault, Lecture Number Eight (1 March 1978) from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., p. 217, endnote 2. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 192-193. Ibid., p. 217, endnote 2. See-Chen Chang & Arlen Min Ye, ‘Modern Urbanism and the Public Realm: City planning in early- 204 centuries, elements in Chinese urban settlements that were perceived as belonging to the public realm were almost always identifi ed with the notion of the State as opposed to the private weal; it took the enormous upheavals of the early twentieth century to introduce the notion of a res publica into Chinese urban life. As we have already seen, traditional concepts of the city in China followed the principles of cosmological symbolism, where the elements, such as walls and gates, were laid out in accordance with symbolic requirements, which also determined city shape for the more important settlements. Chang and Ye see the notion of a public (as an intrinsic part of civic society) as being an important part of pre- modern Chinese city building or urban life44, they claim, probably correctly, that the establishment of the notion of the ‘public’ was a necessary step in the modernisation of China. The Chinese term for public, gong, suffers from being an amalgam of two characters which renders its meaning somewhat negative, gong is not ‘public’ in the positive sense we understand it in the West, but denotes ‘non-private’. Negative defi nitions are never entirely satisfactory, and this one surely refl ects something so profoundly different in the Chinese mentalité about the understanding of what constitutes public space that its ramifi cations are only now beginning to be felt in the cities that are trying to compete as nodes in the global network. In fact, it could probably be stated that even the application of the word gong to describe the new public spaces being laid out in cities like Shanghai and Beijing is not an appropriate use of the term. It might be better to refer to them as chang, that is ‘open space’. Chang denotes a site or a fi eld and is the word used in airport (feiji chang), a tennis court (wang qiuchang), and a stadium (tiyu chang) (at least a stadium that is open-air). This is what designers are providing in these cities: open-air spaces, not public ones (in the sense of the Western traditional of the agora). These spaces are like the plaza in front of New York’s Seagram Building (as highlighted by Jane Jacobs earlier): a place of transition, not a place to linger, certainly not a place to await any brush with the unexpected. This is probably the single most important point that illustrates the lack of public feeling in the open-air spaces of China.

Western language One fi nal note that should be made before closing this chapter on language is to compare the subtle nuance of Chinese to the precision of English, or French (or Dutch or German for that matter). All of these non-infl ected Indo-European languages are descended from Latin. Michel Foucault has built linguistic nominalism into his conception of the archaeological method, which, according to David Couzens Hoy, has created diffi culties45. Richard Rorty, Hubert Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow are cited by Hoy as seeing the mistake of Foucault’s archaeology as its tendency to treat language as ‘autonomous and as constitutive of reality’46. This research is not intending to explore semantics, certainly not at this late stage of its analysis, it is simply enough to point out that words, and the order in which they are used, do refl ect reality. We have seen the seemingly odd clustering effect of the Chinese system of nomenclature, and the graphic yet nuanced nature of their character-based script; these refl ect specifi c realities, constructed by specifi c people in specifi c places. Gary Gutting thinks that the modern period (i.e. after Immanuel Kant) was one in which ‘the transparent, purely representative character of language is lost and language becomes once again just one part of the world’47. Language is no longer some sort of golden key to understanding the world. Gutting sees Foucault’s formalisation and hermeneutical interpretation as the complementary efforts in overcoming the obstacles language can pose to knowledge48. And, according to Georges Canguilhem,

twentieth-century Guangzhou, China’ (conference paper delivers at the ISUU 4, in TU Delft, September 2007). Ibid. David Couzens Hoy, ‘Introduction’ from Foucault: A Critical Reader, David Couzens Hoy, ed., p. 2. Ibid., p. 4. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Gary Gutting, ed., p. 17. Ibid., p. 17. 205 ‘[l]anguage is no longer, as it was in the Renaissance, the signature or mark of things. It becomes the instrument for manipulating, mobilizing, juxtaposing, and comparing things; the organ allowing them to be composed in a universal tableau of identities and differences; a means not for revealing order, but for dispensing it’49. Robert Irwin tells us that the word Renaissance tends to conjure up images of new inventions, the exploration of uncharted territory, the breaking away from old artistic convention, etc., yet he makes the important point that the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe was a period of close textual study of old manuscripts; the Renaissance (as a rebirth) was essentially the rediscovery of the literature of antiquity as well as its humanist culture50. All of this ties in to Michel Foucault’s notion of the metamorphosis of ancient concepts such as askesis into medieval ones like asceticism, denoting, for all the superfi cial differences between them (as methods of the care of the self), a certain degree of cultural continuity that underpins them. One of the striking paradoxes in the history of Western culture is the fact that the invention of the printing press had such an initially archaicizing effect. According to Robert Irwin, neglected medieval texts were suddenly able to enjoy a much wider circulation than they had ever achieved when fi rst written51. One of the reasons for this is the fact that as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Latin was still very much a living language. Not only was it the language of scholarly discourse, but it was also used by poets and playwrights; children even used it in their playground games52. Many important texts, even as late as the seventeenth century, were fi rst published in Latin: Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum of 1620, William Harvey’s De motu cordis of 1628, and Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica which appeared in 1687. Not only was English considered an unsuitable vehicle for the discussion of serious scholarly matters (as was also the case with the other European languages), but even grammars and dictionaries of English were routinely produced in Latin and their authors found themselves in the rather odd position of struggling to make an English grammar fi t a Latin model. Robert Irwin cites Thomas Smith’s De Recta et Emendata Linguae Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus (1568), Alexander Gil’s Logonomia Anglica (1619), and John Wallis’s Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1653) to illustrate this point. This is probably not unrelated to the Church’s opposition to the translating of the Bible into the vernacular (note that even though the Bible was of course written in Hebrew and Greek, the liturgy of the Mass was in Latin). To an uneducated congregation, the glory and grandeur of that ancient language must have seemed a mysterious and wonderful thing; truly a fi tting vehicle for the celebration of the most sacred of divine mysteries. Can it be an accident that at the supreme moment of the Roman Catholic Mass, when the host is elevated (and the miracle of transubstantiation is taking place), the priest solemnly intones the immortal phrase: ‘Hoc est corpus meum’53, to an illiterate congregation, who might want to make their own use of these noble works outside of the church when wanting to indicate something magical, should try to repeat it and thereby invoke its power? (Though the phrase ‘hocus pocus’ does seem to lack somewhat the majesty of the original.) Latin has an economy and elegance of expression not easily matched by its linguistic descendants. It has a concision, and a clarity, that is quite remarkable. As a result Latin is still used today in academic writing and legal work, succinct expressions such as quod erat demonstrandum and res ipsa locator express themselves more precisely that any attempt to render them into English could ever hope to do, hence it is hardly any wonder that works of philosophy and science were, until relatively recently, still published in that tongue. It is also interesting that popular works originally written in the vernacular, such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Cervantes’s Don Quixote, only enjoyed a wider readership after

Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Death of Man, or the Exhaustion of the Cogito?’ from The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Gary Gutting, ed., pp. 79-80. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 54. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 83. Trans: This is my body. 206 they had been translated into Latin. This was of course the period when scholars knew that they could only be assured a wider readership if they published in Latin (as opposed to Dutch or German), in fact they may well never reach an audience unless they did so. John Milton thought long and hard before deciding to forego Latin for his magniﬁ cent Paradise Lost (and those of us more comfortable in English may be grateful to him for doing so). Latin has also set the tone for subsequent Western linguistic expression; tempered by Greek, it has allowed us to communicate ideas of great subtlety but with precision. So successful has it been that we, as Westerners, have been able to impose our way of looking at the world on the rest of it. However, we must never underestimate the ability a language indigenous to an area has for capturing nuance that may not even be visible to a mind formed elsewhere. This is why this thesis has gone to such lengths to highlight certain key Chinese terms, such as jia and gong, in order to ascertain what is wrong with Shanghai’s new public spaces.

207 3 CULTURE AND PERCEPTION: SHANGHAI IN FILM AND LITERATURE

This fi nal chapter examines representations of Shanghai in fi lm and literature, paying particular attention to the novel When We Were Orphans by Anglo-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Set largely in the Shanghai of the 1930s, this book examines many of the themes that seem to feature in recent representations of the city, particularly nostalgia. Nostalgia is something we shall also be seeing in Zhang Yimou’s fi lm Shanghai Triad, which M. Christine Boyer analyses in the book Shanghai Refl ections. Edited by Mario Gandalsonas, this book also contains an essay by Ackbar Abbas and explores the relationship between preservation and development in the process of modernisation, questioning the use of nostalgia as one of the forms through which the relationship between the past and the present acquires presence in the physical and cultural context of Shanghai. Some other fi lms which also touch on these themes are The White Countess, whose screenplay was also written by Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as the recent adaptations of Eileen Chang’s novella Lust, Caution. The most recent fi lm adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil has also moved its story from Hong Kong to Shanghai, presumably to cash in on Shanghai’s burgeoning cachet among international cinema-goers.

Shanghai in fi lm Shanghai is aiming for global greatness, seeing it included as one of the glamorous destinations in an action fi lm like Mission: Impossible III places it alongside Berlin and Rome as the scene for fast-paced adventure, but actually the city here is nothing more than a backdrop; we catch the occasional glimpse of the skyscrapers of Pudong, and we are shown a map of the Suzhou River in a sequence where Tom Cruise, as Ethan Hawke, is running to intercept a villain. The map may show the Suzhou River but Cruise’s character is actually seen running through Zhou Zuang, a city two-hours’ drive from Shanghai. While this may seem a trifl ing point, and people who go to see something called Mission: Impossible do not necessarily expect a high degree of verisimilitude, including the skyscrapers of Shanghai in a fi lm such as this means they can now be seen as having made it to the big time, Shanghai, as a global city, is now worthy of inclusion in an international blockbuster; however it is enough merely to be included – juxtaposing it with images of Zhuang Zhou, a city with an entirely different character, undermines any attempt at a realistic portrayal of the city, something that would surely not be accepted if it were New York or London. Mario Gandalsonas has presciently pointed out the futility of the attempts of China’s Cultural Revolution to erase the country’s past, he sees this as underpinning the relationship between preservation and development in a city like Shanghai as it modernises. Perhaps the Revolution’s failure stemmed from the fact that in China, unlike, for example, the United States, there is so much more history to deal with? Gandalsonas see Ackbar Abbas’s questioning of ‘where do we invest?’ or ‘how do we rule?’ as masking the even deeper question of ‘what will we remember?’1. He also points out that memories are selective in Shanghai, but this is hardly unique to Shanghai: memories are selective everywhere. However, it is what Gandalsonas calls Shanghai’s ‘multifarious past and complex colonial history’ that is presenting a unique set of problems today, especially with regard to the question of urban preservation. The preservation of the past in Shanghai, as a sort of symbolic capital, has, according to Gandalsonas, allowed the establishment of cultural differences that were previously blurred by colonisation, as a result, the question of nostalgia has become one of the forms through which this relationship between the past and the present is acquiring a presence within the physical and cultural context of the city today. Ackbar Abbas sees preservation in Shanghai as being motivated by something quite different from cultural heritage, which given the city’s quasi-colonial past, has always been somewhat

Mario Gandalsonas, Shanghai Refl ections, p. 32. 208 ambiguous. Abbas sees it as being motivated by anticipations of the role the new Shanghai will play in the world, and, as such, he sees it as rivalling its old self rather than harbouring any tender feelings for it2. Preservation has a place alongside development, what Abbas likens to the city as a ‘remake, a shot-by-shot reworking of a classic, with a different cast, addressed to a different audience. Not “Back to the Future,” but “Forward to the Past.”’3. Abbas is right to dismiss the preservationists who take the moral high ground because they ‘often do so by eliding the ambiguities of history’4. Abbas also calls the glamorous architecture of the 1920s and ’30s ‘a shallow kind of cosmopolitanism’, ‘a question of style imported from elsewhere’5. As he says, ‘[t]he more complex the history, the more intricate the issue of urban preservation becomes, and few modern cities have had a more complex history than Shanghai’6. The city was ‘a dream of Europe even more glamorous than what Europe itself had to offer’7. This makes the fi lm analogy, the notion of the city’s heritage as a classic being remade shot-by-shot, even more appropriate. As the city was an artifi cial construct in the fi rst place, something with no real grounding, then it is so much easier to maintain and reanimate it by cultural trickery, much like a cinema special effect. Ironically, some of Shanghai’s most famous colonial-era icons have only been preserved for this capitalist era thanks to the practical nature of communist rule. While the Maoists may have seen the monumental Western-style architecture of the Bund, and elsewhere, as remnants of imperialism they did not destroy them because for one thing the city had too few resources to embark on such a major project of restructuring, and for another, because the buildings were actually solid, well-built edifi ces they could be put to good new use. What does not lend itself to such practical reuse, nor indeed to the sort of artifi cial recreation of a ‘shot-by-shot remake’, is the very entity that this research is most interested in: the alleyway house. This was far too widespread, and far too basic a phenomenon, to lend itself to anything like a recreating of the colonial-era glamour of Tudor-style villas in the French Concession. This was the real Shanghai, the everyday city of the Chinese, and as such requires a different philosophy for its appropriate preservation. As Ackbar Abbas himself insists, ‘“[h]istorical continuity”, then, is not a solution to the problems of the present; it is more a symptom of how the present appropriates the past for its own purpose’8. Ackbar Abbas points out that preservation has entirely different implications for Hong Kong and Shanghai. These two cities are notorious for their accelerated rate of urban development, yet while Abbas sees Shanghai as engaging in a state-planned ‘reappearance’ as a City of Culture, Hong Kong’s ad hoc preservation is linked to anxiety over the city’s ‘disappearance’. Abbas is not interested in the disappearance that results from the deliberate wiping out of the possibility of postcolonial identity, what he thinks signifi cant is how this wiping out is done. It can be wiped out by conferring identities on the postcolonial, for example, the native, the marginal, the cosmopolitan, etc.; and, as he astutely points out, ‘[n]ot all identities are worth preserving’9. Abbas then quotes the old adage that ‘disappearance is not only a threat – it is also an opportunity’10. Let us hope that this disappearance does not throw up some insoluble opportunities. Abbas highlights the preservation of the former Supreme Court building in Hong Kong’s Central District as a rare concession to history, but he sees it as a case of history as nostalgia, and points out, correctly, that what we get here is ‘history as decoration’; in other words,

Ackbar Abbas, ‘Play It Again Shanghai: Urban Preservation in the Global Era’ from Shanghai Refl ections, Mario Gandalsonas, ed., p. 38. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 49. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 14. Ibid., p. 14. 209 nostalgia. Nostalgia, as Abbas so eloquently puts it, ‘is not the return of past memory: it is the return of memory to the past’11. It is also nostalgia that permeates so many of the fi lms set in Shanghai, from The White Count- ess, where the plight of White Russians, rendered stateless after the Bolshevik Revolution, is shown. We see them eking out an existence after fl eeing to the only city in the world that did not require a visa to enter. We see nostalgia in The Painted Veil, where W. Somerset Maugham’s trademark plot of marital infi delity has moved its location from the Hong Kong of the book to Shanghai for the fi lm adaptation (the fourth such adaptation). Perhaps this was done because Hong Kong has now become too accessible for those in the West who want to see a fi lm set in China; Shanghai, at least, is still the Orient as it once was, the Orient, dare we say it, veiled in mystery. And then we have Ang Lee’s fi lm version of the Eileen Chang story Lust, Caution, showing en era not often seen, that of Shanghai (and Hong Kong) in the 1940s, when both cities were under Japa- nese occupation. Full of period detail, like the Chinese having to salute the Japanese guards, and West- erners in Shanghai having to wear armbands indicating their nationality, but the fi lm also contains some anachronisms, like the continued use of the rickshaw, which was banned by the Japanese on the grounds that they were demeaning (ironic, of course, as it had been invented in Japan). Eileen Chang has long been a popular writer with the Chinese, perhaps this is why it took a Chinese (or at lease a Taiwanese) director to adapt her story. Chang’s relative lack of appeal to a Western readership might stem from her portrayal of a peculiarly Chinese world, an upper-class one it may be, but it is a very alien one nonetheless, and one in which most Westerners probably do not feel comfortable (servants in Chang’s stories tend to get slapped a lot). Ang Lee’s portrayal of the fi lm’s sex scenes, which at fi rst glance may seem gratuitous, are in fact brilliantly daring as they underscore not only the lustful nature of the relationship between Wang Chia-chih and Mr Yee, the man she seeks to trap (and kill), but it develops into a power relationship so complex, so profound, and, ultimately, so beautiful that she ends up sacrifi cing everything to save him. (No doubt this would have been a relationship that might have piqued Michel Foucault’s curiosity, however there is no space to explore such an enticing idea here.) The fact that Mr Yee is, as the cliché has it, old enough to be her father, is also explained obliquely by the subtle references earlier in the fi lm to Chia-chih’s thwarted relationship with her own father, a man we see only in photographs. The most poignant moment in the fi lm comes when, surrounded by Japanese soldiers and their geisha in a Japanese-style inn, Chia-chih sings The Wandering Songstress to her lover. A classic Chinese love song, the pathos and poignancy of which is further enhanced by the evidence of the surrounding Japanese occupation. Interestingly, this is also the song that Bijou sings in Shanghai Triad to communicate to her lover Song. Mistress of the Tang triad boss, Bijou uses this song as a secret signal to her lover, one of the boss’s paeans. The characters in Shanghai Triad tend to refer to the song by its nickname Moonlight, which has other resonances in Chinese culture, which we will see in a moment, but the song itself remains simply a more lushly orchestrated version of this popular classic. Most of these fi lms make use of the real Shanghai as a location to conjure up a world that no longer exists, yet is this geographical verisimilitude any more real than fi lms that were actually made in the era? Take Thank You, Mr Moto, a fi lm that has all the usual ingredients: the seedy nightclub (including the fi gure who was to become de rigueur in subsequent portrayals of this era: the nightclub singer), it also has illegal gambling dens, smuggling (albeit of jewels not drugs), Russian doormen, guns, gangsters. Yet apart from some stock footage of the Bund, this fi lm consists entirely of scenes fi lmed in the Hollywood studios of Twentieth-Century Fox. Yet in temporal terms it achieves a degree of verisimilitude that can never be matched by any current fi lm. So which of them is more real? Is any of them? Or are they all merely a sort of shadow play? What is interesting is that even as long ago as the 1930s the same old tropes had begun to crop up, that and the fact that it was the skyline of the Bund that enabled a director to immediately situate their story: as a set piece, Shanghai needed no other introduction.

Ibid., p. 83. 210 It is the Bund that is shown in the opening credits of The Painted Veil, and it is the Bund that is used as the opening scene for Shanghai Triad, after the boy Shuisheng has arrived by boat to be met by his gangster uncle. M. Christine Boyer points out that as the boy’s head moves from right to left his eyes sweep the port, but he does this from a stationary point of view, we as an audience are denied the more usual panoramic or aerial shot of the cityscape that usually sets the scene, what we get here is a painted backdrop seen across a river. When his uncle arrives to collect him, Shuisheng then spends the next few minutes gazing out from under the tarpaulin in the back of his uncle’s lorry as it moves through the city. Again we see only the boy’s eyes as he stares at the off-screen city, his face coloured by its lights. Boyer sees these opening scenes as signalling to the viewer the fact that this fi lm is going to be about the refl ected image. Her highly detailed analysis of the fi lm’s scenes highlights the dexterity with which the device of refl ection is used, and not just refl ection, even in a scene ablaze with light (as in the exterior of the triad boss’s house, or in the house’s corridors swathed in golden tones), the light emanates from interiors and not from the city itself. As Boyer accurately points out, direct views of the city are blocked out. This she sees as a signal to the fi lm’s viewer that ‘…something has to be renegotiated: whether it is the relationship of the present to the past, or of the East and the West’12. Boyer states that ‘[w]hatever it is about the past that fascinates the gaze, it cannot be approached directly’13. According to Boyer, Zhang Yimou has taken the glamorous nightlife of 1930’s Shanghai and fl attened it. Far from being a seductive, dazzling swirl of fascinating and ever-changing images, the scenes are mere tableaux. No shot of Shanghai is intended to directly lure or entrap the gaze, the nostalgic longing for modern Shanghai is retrospective. By presenting modern Shanghai as an image or object to be looked at, Boyer sees the spectator caught in a trap, and it is Zhang Yimou’s efforts to defl ect this trap that makes him invert this gaze14. M. Christine Boyer began her analysis of this fi lm with the very same question that began this thesis’s own work on Shanghai: ‘Can Shanghai regain its status as one of the great metropolises of the world with a new cosmopolitan spirit open to the West?’15. Boyer’s insightful analysis of Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad sees the director as placing his struggle between freedom of expression and authoritarian control at the heart of China’s dilemma in the twenty-fi rst century16. Zhang Yimou found that historic-themed fi lms tended to be censored less, so he blended the problems of 1990’s China with his version of 1930’s Shanghai. Boyer’s contention that Zhang Yimou’s portrayal is ‘all about the gaze, that knowing the past can only be understood as a kind of mirroring’17 is very important for any attempt to understand what is going in older parts of the city today, particularly the redevelopment mentality that underpins overtly nostalgic gentrifi cation projects such as Xintiandi.

Shanghai in literature Ackbar Abbas laments the fact that Hong Kong’s writing, whether it is Jan Morris’s magniﬁ cent history of the colony or the sizzling novels of James Clavell (Taipan, Noble House) and Richard Mason (The World of Suzie Wong), all fail to address the ordinary everyday life of the city. Shanghai at least has the novels of Wang Anyi, which, as we saw in Part I, do take what Abbas sees as a risk in addressing the everyday. Of course the would-be bestseller tends to prefer portraying the lives of the rich and glamorous (not to mention devious); more serious novelists tends to eschew these sorts of tropes, preferring to concentrate on a ruthless laying bare of the human condition, sometimes at its most basic. Their portrayals analyse lives stripped of any extraneous distractions (like money or culture). One of the

M. Christine Boyer, ‘Approaching the Memory of Shanghai: The Case of Zhang Yimou and “Shanghai Triad” (1995)’ from Shanghai Refl ections, Mario Gandalsonas, ed., p. 69. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 76. 211 twentieth century’s most celebrated novels deals precisely with the everyday, the events of 16 June 1904 are graphically portrayed in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where the wandering Jewish advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom becomes a fl âneur in Ireland’s capital city. While Abbas allows that some of the writing that Hong Kong has produced has been good, he sees ‘the great Hong Kong novel’ as yet to be written18. He is probably right. Leo Ou-fan Lee sees the fact that China was victimised but never fully colonised by the Western powers as resulting in a hybrid of colonial and Chinese elements in Shanghai’s literature. He likens this to Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘mimicry’, where ‘colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite . . . a desire that, through the repetition of partial presence . . . articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial, and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority’19. Lee sees the situation in a place like Shanghai, where the colonialism ‘was not a total system governing the entire nation’, as being even more complicated than any outlined by Bhabha. Lee thinks it possible to descry a species of Bhabha’s ‘mimic men’ among the compradorial and commercial elite who had close personal and business relations with the Westerners. Because of their desire for total Westernisation these people could have made willing colonial subjects even as they still remained Chinese citizens20. Lee makes the interesting point that the world of fi nancial capitalism that these people inhabited is ‘qualitatively different from the fi eld of cultural production and consumption in literature’, and it is one ‘in which such a “colonized” species is not well represented’. Lee thinks that this is the case because, despite being familiar with foreign literature, Chinese writers were not obliged to use it in their own writing21. One Chinese writer who was at home in both Chinese and English was Eileen Chang. Lee tells us that Chang always portrayed herself as a Shanghai ‘petty urbanite’ (xiao shimin), and that during the fi rst half of her life, aside from a two-year stint in Tianjin and a three-year stay in Hong Kong, Chang lived in Shanghai. The everyday world of Chang’s literature occurs in one of two settings: the typical alleyway house, or the Western-style house or apartment (the latter being generally quite rundown). Lee cites the novel Bansheng yuan (Destined for Half a Lifetime) in which one of its heroines lives in an alleyway house, where, according to Lee, the atmosphere is ‘warm and familiar’22. By contrast, Western- style houses or apartment buildings are often the site of estrangement or disturbance. In Xinjing (Sutra of the Heart) a daughter’s obsession with her father is portrayed against a backdrop of a Western-style apartment building, complete with roof garden, rooms accessed by glass doors, and a lift. According to Lee, these details accentuate the characters’ psychological tensions, (of course Chang was famously kept a virtual prisoner by her father in their Western-style home in Shanghai when she was young). It also might be because Chang never lived for any length of time in an alleyway house that her view of them tends to be somewhat rosy. The tone Chang adopts – her literary style – was very much infl uenced by her reading of English authors such as W. Somerset Maugham, P.G. Wodehouse, and Aldous Huxley, which may also explain the elegant yet somewhat world-weary nature of her astonishingly assured style (she was a very young writer when she had her fi rst success). Shanghai in the 1940s was a city that still celebrated its writers, and Chang managed to pursue her craft by pulling off a dangerous balancing act, she managed to write just enough to accurately portray the life of the city without ever falling foul of the Japanese authorities who had occupied it (in December 1941). It must be noted however that Chang wrote exclusively in Chinese until the 1950s (apart from a prize-winning essay in English as a schoolgirl), her Chinese stories are all now available in translation and make for interesting if not wholly delightful reading. Love in a Fallen City was the fourth story Chang set in Hong Kong, and was written shortly after her return to Shanghai from there in 1942. Leo Ou-fan Lee sees a ‘self-refl exive linkage’ in her

Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 145. Homi K. Bhabha quoted in Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern, p. 309. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, p. 310. Ibid., p. 310. Ibid., p. 272. 212 exoticisation of Hong Kong, which, like a mirror, refl ects back her own city. Lee points out Chang’s almost uncanny prescience in linking these two cities, because for Chang, Hong Kong will always be hopelessly colonial, whereas Shanghai, despite all its foreignness, is still Chinese23. One interesting link to M. Christine Boyer’s analysis of Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad is the fact that the mirror, along with moonlight (as in the nickname for the song The Wandering Songstress), also feature prominently in Chang’s work. Karen S. Kingsbury sees Chang’s stories as ‘a succession of echoes, or the infi nite series produced by a three-way mirror, recalling and restoring an ancient, anterior sense of selfhood in the midst of modernist, wartime rupture and dislocation’24. Kingsbury quotes the line ‘Moonlight in front of my bed’, which is the fi rst line from a celebrated poem by Li Po, and one that would have been familiar to every schoolchild in China25. It might be nice to leave the last word on this topic to Eileen Chang herself who described the China in her books as the ‘China as Westerners imagine it: exquisite, illogical, very entertaining’26.

The importance of dress One important factor in the cultural construction of perception is that of appearance and dress. We have already mentioned Matteo Ricci’s mistake of adopting the costume of a Buddhist monk when he wanted to take a shortcut to respect and veneration in late-Ming China. Ricci made a terrible blunder when he assumed that monks in China were afforded the same respect as priests in Europe. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In the China of that time, the Confucian scholar-gentry were venerated, not the monks, monks were invariably regarded as dirty, drunken mendicants, despised rather than respected. Quickly realising his mistake, Ricci reverted to the more traditional Jesuit garb. ‘Ricci’s error’ was not the sort of mistake any self-respecting British colonial ofﬁ cial would ever have made. Again we can turn to W. Somerset Maugham, and another classic short story, ‘The Outstation’, where the local Resident, Warburton, is seen dressing for dinner every night. There he sits, alone in his splendid isolation, eating a six-course dinner, attended by three staff, in full evening dress (we are told that he makes one concession to the climate: that of wearing a white dinner-jacket). Surrounded by the tropical jungle, Warburton dines as formally as if he were in his Pall Mall club. He wears, apart from the white dinner-jacket, a boiled shirt, a high collar, silk socks and patent-leather shoes; his dining-room table is elaborately laid, gay with orchids and brightly shining silver, and even his napkin is folded into an elaborate shape27. The story revolves around the arrival of an assistant, Cooper, a white man, but one born in Barbados, which makes him a ‘colonial’. Warburton is of course a monstrous snob, that is the whole point of the story, but snob or not there is never any question that he is anything other than an able and popular administrator. Cooper, unlike his boss, takes no such pains over his work, or his private life, with the result that he comes to a sticky end (stabbed in his sleep by a servant he had mistreated). The point Somerset Maugham wants to make is that colonial ofﬁ cials such as these, and while Warburton may be an exaggeration he is still a believable character, saw themselves as needing to put on a proper show for the ‘natives’. One clear way of doing this was to dress in a manner they thought properly accorded with the dignity of their station. British colonialists seem to have always had a horror of ‘going native’, especially in the trop- ics. There may well have been a racial dimension to some of this (something that Edward W. Said has unfortunately made so much of), but it probably stemmed more from a British pride in their way of doing things rather than any disparagement of how others organised their lives. As Oscar Wilde said (and he should know), the British have always been disinclined to accept human nature. This unbend-

Ibid., p. 328. Karen S. Kingsbury, ‘Introduction’, Love in a Fallen City (by Eileen Chang), p. xvii. Ibid., p321 (endnote from ‘Red Rose, White Rose’, p. 255). Eileen Chang, ‘Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier’, Love in a Fallen City, p. 8. W. Somerset Maugham, ‘The Outstation’, The Round Dozen, p. 103. 213 ing adherence to their own traditions in the face of conditions that appear to render them almost absurd is at once their undoing (in the case of Warburton’s protégée) and their greatest strength. And it is this absurd rigidity that is sometimes regarded with admiration by the people they colonised, certainly it was often emulated, and in turn highlighted to great comic effect by the novels of E.M. Forster, W. Somerset Maugham, et al. Commentators like Edward W. Said, David Harvey, Marshall Berman, et al., often make use of writers to make their points, invariably preferring the great artists like Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, or Rudyard Kipling. But sometimes lesser artists can have useful things to say. An observant novelist can often reveal more about a period than the most diligent historian when it comes to what life was actually like. And all those incidental little details of daily life that get mentioned in passing can give such insight into life as it was lived at the time of writing. W. Somerset Maugham’s descriptions of colonial life in British Malaya have an unrivalled ability to bring that vanished world to life. This he does through his well-drawn characters, and accurately observed settings. Sometimes it can pay to lower the bar a little.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘When We Were Orphans’ Set largely in the Shanghai of the 1930s, this evocative and haunting novel explores themes of loss and longing. It also brushes up against the classic literary genre of the era, the murder mystery, which it does in a fond and gently mocking way. Oddly, there is a subtle link between the work of Kazuo Ishiguro and Jorge Luis Borges in the latter’s The Garden of Forking Paths where the author uses the phrase ‘the remains of the day’, which is, of course, the title of Ishiguro’s most celebrated novel. Sara Mills, in discussing Michel Foucault’s analysis of the function of an author, discusses Ishig- uro’s work as being a good example of this function. She sees Ishiguro’s wide range of books as being very varied in style and subject matter: The Remains of the Day is what she calls a conservative book, whereas The Unconsoled is stylistically very experimental. She points out, correctly, that as a result it would be diffi cult to ‘pin him down to a particular way of writing or focus’28, yet, because we know that these texts have all been written by the same man we tend to lump them together, even asserting that there is a relationship between them. Mills sees these books as being so different from one another that she thinks they describe Foucault’s notion of the ‘author-function’, (which he discussed in ‘The order of discourse’ and ‘What is an author?’). Mills states that ‘it is we as readers who are using the notion of the author to unite these very diverse texts’. This is an excellent illustration of what Foucault was getting at because it was this precise organisational aspect of the author-function that seems to have most interested him. The 1930s was an era when the business of detecting, like that of smoking, was to be carried out with elegance: pace Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Mr Moto, et al. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Christopher Banks is no exception. An English gentleman, possessed of a small private income which enables him to pursue his chosen career in a disinterested way. After an early childhood spent in Shanghai’s Inter- national Concession he is sent ‘home’ to England (a country he has never set foot in). He has been sent home because, fi rst his father, then his mother, have disappeared. Under the guardianship of an elderly aunt, he is sent to a minor public school, St Dunstan’s, where he decides to become a detective; not the grubby gumshoe of American fi ction, more the gentleman sleuth in the Sherlock Holmes or Lord Peter Wimsey mould. We have already seen in Part III where Michel Foucault identifi ed the spectacle that had surrounded the criminal as having been transposed to another class by the emergence of the crime literature of the nineteenth century. This was a period when the crime novel fl ourished because people had been robbed of their old pride in crimes; as Foucault says, ‘the great murders had become the quiet game of the well behaved’. With no more popular heroes or great executions, the wickedly intelligent criminal

Sara Mills, Michel Foucault, p. 60. 214 appeared, and with him the even more cunning detective. As we also saw in Part III, Michel Foucault states (in Discipline and Punish):

It is this last stage of the crime novel, the high-society stage, that had its fi nest fl owering in the 1920s and ’30s. Richard Sennett is also interested in the rise of this literary genre in the nineteenth century, seeing it as a link to the changes inherent in the way people interacted in public, at least in cities like London and Paris, where the individual was no longer approachable by a stranger, and where clothing also acted as a sort of shield to mask the individual’s identity, therefore forcing every man and woman into being a detective if they wanted to make sense of the street30. Sennett also quite presciently highlights the differences in the mode of detecting between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the likes of Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, or William Makepeace Thackery. Sennett points out that the ‘science of reading character from appearances in these [latter] “serious writers” was everywhere tinged with the portrayal of anxiety in the acts of reading; it was not delightful, as Conan Doyle made it seem’31. Detec- tives we had all become, but whereas in daily life, if our detecting of our fellow citizens went awry it could lead to ‘blunders, insults, or the loss of favor’32, in the murder mystery the detectives had to be reassuringly infallible, not to mention entertaining. One of the earliest writers of detective fi ction was the very serious author and poet, Edgar Al- lan Poe. Jorge Luis Borges saw Poe’s tales of fantastic horror as being ‘perfect’ and notes that even though Poe actually invented the detective story, and wrote fantastic tales of the supernatural, he never combined the two. G.K. Chesterton, however, did, his Father Brown stories always manage to explain, in reason’s name, a fact that was seemingly inexplicable33. Edgar Allan Poe not only single-handedly invented the detective genre, but he also established some of its most enduring features: the irascibly brilliant detective in Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin; the affable but less than razor-witted side-kick, in the case of The Murders in the Rue Morgue the unnamed narrator who recounts the tale – another classic trope of the genre (Dr Watson, Captain Hastings, et al.); and in that same seminal story we get another classic situation: the locked-room puzzle. In Poe’s story an elderly mother and her daughter are brutally attacked in their Paris apartment, the only access to which is by a door, which is locked from the inside. M. Dupin solves this puzzle by determining that an escaped orang-utan had managed to climb in through on open window, startling the inhabitants, whose screams then so unnerve the poor beast that he lashed out, inadvertently killing them before making good his escape through said open window, which then closed by its own weight afterwards, leaving the apartment seemingly locked from the inside. A cunning plot, unfortunately what Poe failed to realise, most likely because he was an American and not French, was that his solution was de- monstrably false. As W. Somerset Maugham suavely points out (and Maugham would know, as he was born in France), no Frenchwoman of ‘a certain age’ would ever have left a window open to the noxious night airs34. However, Somerset Maugham’s debunking aside, the locked-room puzzle went on to prove an immensely popular sub-genre in detective fi ction.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 286. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 168. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 169. Andre Maurois, ‘Preface’, Labyrinths (by Jorge Luis Borges), p. 10. W. Somerset Maugham, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story’, The Vagrant Mood, pp. 93-94. 215 Despite the fact that detective fi ction was largely simultaneously invented in France, England, and the United States in the nineteenth century, it actually enjoyed a much earlier fl owering elsewhere: surprisingly in China, during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE). Judge Dee was one of the great ancient Chinese detectives. Dutch diplomat and Asian scholar Robert van Gulik (whose work is important enough to merit a mention by Foucault in The History of Sexuality) rediscovered the character, who had been based on Ti Jen-chieh, a well-known statesmen, who had lived from 630 to 700 CE. While serving as a magistrate in the provinces, Ti had acquired a certain fame for having solved a number of diffi cult cases. Van Gulik wrote a series of detective stories featuring a character called Judge Dee, and these enjoyed a vogue in the second half of the twentieth century. Not much read now, van Gulik’s innovation (in Chinese terms) was to rework these ancient stories so that the murderer would not be revealed until the end of the story; the Chinese it seems, at least during the Tang era, took pleasure in knowing who the perpetrator had been and then followed with interest the steps that were taken to apprehend him (a plot device that has been used to great effect in Donna Tartt’s more recent The Secret History). Kazuo Ishiguro’s Shanghai is geographically accurate, (which is more than can be said for a number of other novels set there recently, for example, The Painter of Shanghai). The only time there seems to be some confusion is when Ishiguro leads his main character into the warren towards the end of the book – and this is clearly deliberate. The main themes Ishiguro explores are loss and longing, Christopher Bank’s parents went missing when he was a child so he returns to Shanghai as an adult to try and fi nd them – which he does, but not in a way he might have liked. What Banks, his female friend Sarah Hemmings, and his ward Jennifer all have in common is the fact that they are all the orphans of the book’s title. Banks’s attempts to reconstruct his childhood become increasingly unreliable, his detecting skills, normally so sharp and successful are rendered ineffectual when it comes to investigating his own past. He begins to realise that he may have remembered some things incorrectly, not only details of past conversations, but the context in which they took place. The clearest details of his childhood are the pranks perpetrated by his Japanese neighbour, Akira. The fear these two small boys felt as they fretted over what would happen if they were caught doing their mischief seems to have seared these events most reliably into Banks’s memory. Other events become increasingly hazy as the story unfolds. Perhaps this story would have been even more effective if it had been written in French, because then the author would have been able to make use of the tense we saw Gerard de Nerval make such effective use of in Sylvie: the past imperfect. The trade in opium, a legal one in Shanghai at the time of the book’s opening scenes, is also one of the leitmotifs of the story. In fact, both of Banks’s parents’ disappearances seem to have opium at the back of them, but this turns out to be, in the great detective tradition, a red herring. Ishiguro also manages to make an interesting point about what can only be called the cult of celebrity with the character of Sarah Hemmings, whose defenders in the book were even forced to admit ‘…that she was a “terrible snob of a new sort”; that she did not consider a person worthy of respect unless he or she possessed a celebrated name’35. Then, as now, many people followed with avid interest the lives of those who found themselves for one reason or another in the public eye. Sarah’s fascination with a series of famously talented men, including at one point Banks himself, shows it for the shallow and, in Sarah’s case, ultimately damaging pursuit it can be. The brief résumé of Banks’s career as a detective seems to round up the usual suspects: the titled, the wealthy, the brutally murdered, but his delightfully disingenuous vanity makes for a refresh- ing contrast with the usual bombast of the likes of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. And it seems that the celebrity surrounding the policeman who investigated his parents’ disappearances: ‘…the legendary Inspector Kung – whose handsome features and dandily worn hat we both knew well from newspaper photographs’36, may have played no small role in Banks’s choice of career. The choice of Shanghai as a backdrop was interesting. The city at this time was teetering on

Ibid., p.19. Ibid., p.110. 216 the brink of ruin, a place whose days were numbered, because between 1937, when the Japanese took over the Chinese-administered parts of the city (leaving the foreign concession as ‘the lonely island’ we saw in Part II), and 1941, when they took over the rest of the city, it gives a certain urgency to the narrative, an urgency which only highlights the contrasting fecklessness of the colonial inhabitants who fritter away their time in nightclubs and gambling dens. This tone becomes increasingly breathless and confused when Banks is wandering through the labyrinth of the warren: the alleyway houses of Chapei, now being reduced to empty shells thanks to Japanese bombardment. Banks ends up in this part of the city unwittingly, in fact he does not even realise that he has passed beyond the safety of the foreign concessions (and into the war zone) until it is too late. Pursuing the chimera of his parents’ hiding place he pushes ever deeper into the warren, and danger. Here the author’s meticulously observed geography becomes nebulous, but it gives Banks, and the reader, a chance to take stock of the warren, a place where foreigners rarely come, unless they are missionaries, or communists. Banks fi nds it hard to believe that human beings can live like this, it looks to him like an ants’ nest. The houses, intended for the poorest inhabitants of the city, have tiny rooms, and sit back to back, row after row. Looking carefully from his vantage point on top of an abandoned police station, Banks is able to make out the many laneways, the ‘[l]ittle alleys just wide enough to allow the people to get into their homes. At the back, the houses have no windows at all. The rear rooms are black holes, backing on to the houses behind’37, a good description reminiscent of the siheyuen- based alleyway house, with their blank northern walls. After being rescued from the nightmare of the warren Christopher Banks fi nds himself once again in ‘civilised’ Shanghai. The business of his parents’ disappearance is explained in a suitably detective-like denouement by his ‘Uncle’ Philip. As incidents, these two events were unrelated, and both had more to do with sex than drugs. Banks’s father had run away with his mistress, while his mother was kidnapped into the harem of a Chinese warlord. The notion of a spirited upper-class Englishwomen being forced into this sort of bondage strikes an almost comically lurid note at the end of the book, (at least it would if it were not so sad). Added to this is the shocking revelation that gentle ‘Uncle’ Philip was the one who had orchestrated this shameful state of affairs (out of his thwarted desire for her). The irony of all of this is that the money that has enabled Banks to live the life of a gentleman has been provided by this Chinese warlord, yet another unsettling discovery that turns the hero’s world upside down. Banks, and his ward Jennifer, do achieve a sort of peace at the end of the novel, they eventually track down his mother, who is living out her old age in a convent in Hong Kong. Having been rescued after the war she was moved there, but sadly her mind is gone. Once Banks sees that she is well cared for, and seems contented enough, he too can rest. An old man now, he has fi nally achieved his life’s ambition, however it is a distinctly bittersweet achievement. Hong Kong features in the novel as a distant echo of the Shanghai he once knew, fi rst as a child, and then again as an adult at the height of his powers. Jennifer’s suggestion of a trip to Shanghai at the end of the book, while diffi cult at that time, would not have been impossible, is turned down. They both decide to leave things as they are, perhaps wisely. Banks’s last trip to the city had been full of unpleasant surprises, no matter how cathartic. At least here in Hong Kong he has achieved a sort of closure. The Shanghai of When We Were Orphans is portrayed in an overwhelmingly negative light, this is probably because Kazuo Ishiguro knew that he was portraying a society experiencing its death throes. A way of life was ending, one whose decadence and fecklessness had led it to this sorry pass. Chris- topher Banks, the celebrated detective, did fi nd what he was looking for, but like so many who do, he must have wondered if it might not have better had he not done so. The most important lesson that can be drawn from a novel like When We Were Orphans is the danger inherent in nostalgia. The past is the past, it forms us into the people we are today, but it does not necessarily benefi t us to go back and rake it over, indeed it may well be damaging, as Christopher Banks found to his cost. If there is one lesson that can learned from this novel, it is the same as we have also seen with M. Christine Boyer’s analysis of

Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans, p. 235. 217 the ﬁ lm Shanghai Triad, and again and again throughout this thesis, particularly in redevelopment projects like Xintiandi, that is: beware of nostalgia.

218 Conclusion to Part IV

Part IV dealt with China and culture, beginning with a brief overview of the history of China in an attempt to understand what was termed the Chinese mentalité. China’s early development led it into a high-level equilibrium trap, which was further strengthened by the country’s remarkable cultural cohesion. Western perceptions of China turned from the chinoiserie of the eighteenth century to the ‘Yellow Peril’ of the nineteenth. One interesting point discovered from this reading of China’s long history is that there has never been a tradition of public dissent here, as in the West. The Chinese tradition is to reach consensus through the frank exchange of views, yet they have no public arena for doing this. The Chinese also tend to see the common good as being above any individual’s concerns, and while they do have public spaces, their understanding of the word public, as gong, is not the same as in the West. The term chang, or open space, would probably be a better choice for describing the new public spaces in China’s cities. Part IV also showed the scope the Chinese language has for subtlety and nuance, especially when compared to Western languages, and it was this study of Chinese that gave the insight into the apparent illogicality of Jorge Luis Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia, rendering it as just another example of the Chinese practice of clustering meaning that is to be found in any Chinese dictionary today. We also saw how Chinese buildings are invariably laid out in accordance with the precepts of feng shui, and how the courtyard house typology, the siheyuan, was fl exible enough to enable families to expand or reduce in size. The hierarchical system of ‘graduated privacy’ that developed in this typology was what enabled the dense mesh of Beijing’s hutong to come into being and eventually experienced its subtlest fl owering in the alleyway houses of Shanghai. The last chapter of this thesis examined Shanghai’s portrayal in fi lm and literature, with M. Christine Boyer analysis of Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad highlighting the use being made of nostalgia. Boyer’s commentary began with the question we referred to at the beginning of this thesis: namely ‘Can Shanghai regain its status as one of the great metropolises of the world with a new cosmopolitan spirit open to the West?’ Boyer sees Zhang Yimou’s fi lm as being ‘all about the gaze, that knowing the past can only be understood as a kind of mirroring’, and she thinks that it is important because it attempts to understand what is going on in the older parts of the city; something that has important ramifi cations for gentrifi cation projects such as Xintiandi, which also make use of nostalgia. We also saw Ackbar Abbas lament the fact that Hong Kong’s writing tends to ignore the everyday. Eileen Chang, a writer usually more associated with Shanghai than Hong Kong, did make use of the everyday in her stories, where portrayals of alleyway-house life were warm, while Western-style homes tended to be tense, refl ecting her own personal experience. Attention was also drawn to the importance of dress in the cultural construction of perception, pointing out Matteo Ricci’s error in dressing like a monk to try and gain Chinese acceptance at the end of the Ming era; not the sort of mistake a British colonial offi cial would make, something beautifully illustrated by W. Somerset Maugham’s short story ‘The Outstation’. Finally, Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans was examined, which also contained a warning against nostalgia.

219 CONCLUSION

What is not harmful to the city cannot harm the citizen. In every fancied case of harm, apply the rule: ‘If the city is not harmed, I am not harmed either.’ But if the city should indeed be harmed, never rage at the culprit: rather, ﬁ nd out at what point his vision failed him. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Five, 22.

Jane Jacobs tells us that writing, printing, and the Internet can give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture1. Cultures can be lost, not just by invasion, which is obvious, but by the fact that the way we do things at a given moment is constantly undergoing evolution. Cultures, in other words, are constructed. Manuel Castells sees the real issue, however, as in how they are constructed, and from what, and by whom, and for what. Castells sees the construction of identities as using materials from history, geography, biology, productive and reproductive institutions, as well as from collective memory and personal fantasies, and even from power apparatuses and religious revelation. According to Castells, ‘individuals, social groups, and societies process all these materials, and rearrange their meaning, according to social determinations and cultural projects that are rooted in their social structure, and in their space/time framework’2. This attempt to glimpse the Chinese mentalité has been, I feel, a useful exercise in that it helped me come to terms with what is happening in the city of Shanghai today. We in the West are going to have to do more than merely glimpse what is happening in China if we are going to better understand what will undoubtedly be one of the world’s most important countries in the twenty-fi rst century. So, to go back to the question I posed at the very beginning of this thesis: can Shanghai become a global city? The answer is no, at least in the short term. We have seen what Shanghai needs to do if it wants to take its place in the front rank of global cities (in the way that Hong Kong and Singapore have done). In my exploration of what has been happening in Shanghai, especially to its public spaces (old and new), I began with a hunch that Michel Foucault’s theories of power relations, and how they are inscribed in the built environment, was going to be useful. It was. The theory that the alleyway house is a benign panopticon is, I think, clear, it also reinforces my contention that we should be wary of the nostalgic habit of keeping empty shells of buildings in places like Xintiandi simply because they happen to be pretty. We should really be trying to salvage the way of life that once inhabited them. Cities are, after all, not merely about buildings and streets, they are about people, and their networks of interaction. Any study of a city must take account of the warm life of its inhabitants and not allow itself to be blinded by the glittering geometries of stone. As for my examination of Shanghai’s new public spaces, and what has gone wrong with them, the answer came from my study of the Chinese language itself. Initially this was undertaken as a way of enabling me to ask for directions, or instruct a taxi driver, I soon found out, however, that the insight it gave me into the people of China, and their culture, was invaluable. Others, of course, have also learned Chinese, but they often do so within the confi nes of their own academic disciplines: linguistics, literature, history, etc. To learn Chinese in order to study the urban environment of a city like Shanghai opened up hitherto unforeseen possibilities. The theory that the Western term ‘public’ would be better off transliterated as chang instead of gong, especially for describing the new public spaces of Shanghai, is perhaps the most important point I can make in this entire thesis. The windswept plazas of high modernism, whether in the East or the West, are not places to linger, they are certainly not places to await a brush with the unexpected. While under the infl uence of postmodernism, for all its witty references to a classical past, public space has degenerated into a sort of open-air shopping mall, and sadly it is this model that has been followed so

Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, p. 5. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 7. 220 assiduously in recent years in China’s cities. In the East there is a consensus mentality, the use of public space reﬂ ects this desire for social cohesion; the public arena is not one for the airing of public differences, as it used to be in the West, it is a place for the elegant expression of the ideals of communal living, and as such continues to reﬂ ect the writings of Confucius and his followers. As Michel Foucault seems to have been so enamoured of the writings of Francis Bacon, I think it only appropriate to end with something that Bacon himself wrote: ‘To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgement wholly by their rules is the humour of a scholar’3. I hope I will be forgiven for doing what Bacon has so elegantly warned against, however, I will say in my defence that Bacon also pointed out that, ‘Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not’4. Something that should be borne in mind by any scholar, East or West.

Francis Bacon, Of Empire, p. 85. Ibid., p. 86. 221 Appendix 1: Russia and Japan as Part of the ‘West’

The defi nition of ‘the West’ is an important consideration in this thesis, particularly Part III’s examination of Edward W. Said’s positing of an European construction of the Oriental ‘Other’. Said has frequently been attacked for his defi nition of this Orient. A notion such as ‘the West’ is every bit as problematic as that of ‘the Orient’. Suffi ce to say that the West is understood to mean Western Europe (including Scandinavia and Iceland), North America, Russia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. This map corresponds with those countries commonly displayed on the walls of doctors who specialise in tropical medicine as being places with the lowest risk of infection from malaria (also a useful index of a country’s relative development).

Russia When examining the history of most of the twentieth century Russia can safely be omitted from the West. As the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics it was the lynchpin of what was known as the ‘Second World’. Likewise, any examination of world history before 1905 would have to exclude Japan from this group. The rest of the countries that have been outlined correspond roughly to John Darwin’s ‘northern super-block’, the two that have been highlighted as having either arrived later, or falling away for a time, will now briefl y be looked at. According to John Darwin, Russia, from about 1700, and certainly after 1762, was one of the fi ve or six great powers that decided the fate of Europe. It became, after Britain, the second greatest imperial power in Asia, and a coloniser on a massive scale. It embarked on a civilising mission every bit as strong as Britain’s and France’s. Peter the Great, whom we have seen earlier in Jane Jacobs’s work, was keen for Russia to become more Western. After his European tour in 1698 Tsar Peter imposed a ban on beards and personally cut off those of the leading boyars (nobles) who failed to comply; the traditional Russian kaftan was also outlawed, with what Darwin refers to as ‘German dress’ being imposed in its place1. John Darwin sees Russia as not only shaping Europe’s domination (of Eurasia), but also subverting the continent’s would-be supremacy at crucial moments and in crucial ways. Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1905 could be considered one of these moments, with the blow to the prestige that Westerners suffered as a result of the infl ux to White Russians to East Asia, particularly Shanghai, after the Bolshevik Revolution another. However, Darwin has resolutely pointed out that not even the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War could break Russia’s expansion into North-East Asia. Russia, as we have just seen, ceased to be a member of the West after the Communist takeover in 1917, it was certainly perceived as being the enemy of the ‘free-thinking’ Western democracies during the Cold War. But when in November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down the pro-Soviet governments of Eastern Europe all rapidly collapsed, Russia’s buffers against the West vanished virtually overnight. The Treaty of Alma Ata in December 1991 dissolved the Soviet Union into fi fteen new states, and acknowledged the end of what Darwin calls ‘the Soviet raj’ in the Baltic, the Trans-Caucasus, and Central Asia2. Perhaps most damaging of all, the Ukraine voted for full independence. As a political entity the Ukraine had been a sort of combination of Ireland and India for the Russian Empire, what Darwin calls the ‘vital auxiliary of Russian imperial power since the 1650s’ was fi nally gone3. The basic failing of the Soviet system was economic: it simply could not compete with the West. A vast imperial structure, the power in Northern Eurasia, and the West’s sworn enemy – from Vietnam, to Cuba, and with fi fth columnists everywhere – simply ceased to exist. By 1991 its empire lay in ruins. Post-Soviet Russia remains, however, a huge domain, but one, as Darwin rightly points out, with a crippled economy and a spectre of growing American infl uence in Inner Eurasia – prospects that would

John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 124. Ibid., p. 479. Ibid., p. 479. 222 have daunted even Peter the Great. Russia’s re-engagement with the West, however, has meant that it is perhaps once again on the road to recovery.

Japan Japan was imperialism’s odd man out, in that it was an Asian power. It had enjoyed treaty port concessions in China since 1895, and from 1932 increasingly came to dominate as the main foreign power in China. Japan was not the only non-Caucasian imperial power at the outbreak of World War I, there was still the Ottoman Empire, but this was perceived as ‘the sick man of Europe’. Japan, by contrast, was a burgeoning power, and her humiliating defeat of Russia in 1905 marked her as a force to be reckoned with. Niall Ferguson has noted that Japan as a nation actually has a surprising amount in common with Britain: both are formed of archipelagos of islands just off a continent with a well- developed and longer-established civilisation, both have high population densities, and embraced a form of constitutional monarchy after a period of civil war. Japan was Asia’s fi rst nation to industrialise, as Britain was Europe’s. Both rose to economic pre-eminence by the manufacture and sale of cloth. Britain, particularly in the Victorian era, was infamous for its rigid social hierarchy, so too was Meiji Japan. The English had a state religion: the Church of England, the Japanese have their own: Shinto. Both cultures engage in a starry-eyed adoration of their royalty and aristocracy (though Japan’s aristocracy was subsequently banned by the United States’s post-war constitution). Both cultures venerated a romanticised and largely imagined feudal past, with codes of knightly chivalry in the Norma era and the samurai’s code of bushido. Both even have a veneration for tea, going so far as to create a ceremony for its enjoyment (in England the Duchess of Devonshire’s ‘afternoon tea’ became a custom that soon became fashionable, while Japan’s tea ceremony has an almost religious signifi cance). Niall Ferguson presciently identifi es the prejudices of World War II’s propaganda as rendering these similarities hard for Westerners to acknowledge, preferring, as he says, ‘to accentuate the “otherness” of inter-war Japan’4. The continent of Europe used to be divided into East, West, and Central Europe, then in 1945 Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ descended. In the aftermath of World War II lines were drawn defi nitively, and simply, and it was nearly always a case of ‘them’ and ‘us’; communism versus capitalism. This Manichean view has given away to a more pluralist world view today, one in which communism has largely been discredited, albeit on capitalist grounds. Capitalism itself has changed beyond all recognition (yet again), and has even begun to take on Chinese characteristics. It might be useful now to redraw the map of Europe, reinstating the Central portion of it, whence we might be less likely to always be looking out for a great ‘Other’ in order to help us defi ne ourselves. Perhaps then we might be able to see a world of many ‘Others’, of which we were simply another one.

Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 285. 223 Appendix 2: Chinese Dynasties

Note: Dates denote dynasties’ foundations, not their accessions to power.

Wu Di 2550-2140 BCE Xia 2140-1711 Shang 1711-1066 Zhou 1066-256 (Eastern Zhou) 770-256 Spring and Autumn / Warring States 770-221 Qin 306-206 Western Han 206-25 CE Eastern Han 25-106 Three Kingdoms Wei 220-265 Han 221-265 Wu 222-277 Western Jin 265-317 Eastern Jin 317-420 Southern and Northern Song 420-479 Qi 479-502 Liang 502-557 Chen 557-581 Sui 581-618 Tang 618-907 Five Dynasties Liang, Tang, Jin, Han, Zhou 907-960 Song 960-1101 Southern Song 1101-1279 Yuan 1206-1368 Ming 1368-1644 Qing 1616-1912 Republic 1912-1949 People’s Republic 1949-present

224 Appendix 3: Chinese Inventions

Note: The Chinese were among the ﬁ rst in the world to invent the following; they did not, however, invent the rickshaw, which began to be used in Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century either the innovation of an American called Jonathan Scobie or an unnamed French priest (sources vary).

Abacus Acupuncture Bells Brandy Calendars Chess China Compasses Crossbows Decimal system Drilling for oil Fireworks Fishing reel Flame thrower Flush toilet Gunpowder Horse collar Hot-air balloon Iron plough Kites Lacquer Matches Mechanical clock Negative numbers Paper Paper money Parachute Porridge Print making Rudders Relief maps Seismograph Silk Stirrups Suspension bridge Tea Toilet paper Water pumps Wheelbarrow Whisky Umbrella

225 Appendix 4: Chinese Terms

Note: some of these terms were introduced into the Chinese language for the ﬁ rst time in Shanghai. Deﬁ nitions have been taken from the ‘Gudai Hanyu Zidian’ dictionary. These terms have been transliterated into roman letters using the pinyin system unless otherwise indicated. I am grateful for the assis- tance of Darren Ying and Robert Cortlever in helping with the preparation of this glossary.

Buye cheng

Sleepless city

Chang

Open space; open air; citizens (i.e. not offi cial); fl at, open area; farmers’ market; a process (beginning to end); defunct (as occurring in a phrase in Chinese: to be disappointed at the end of a process); process of watching a fi lm; examination place (archaic)

Chun tzu (Wade-Giles)

Gentleman, a man of moral excellence

Dahai

Paciﬁ c Ocean (lit. great ocean)

Dajie

Main road, avenue

Dao

Way

Virtue

Earth

Di fang

Place, a place for people to gather; its function deﬁ nes the use for the place

Dong

East

226 Dongfang Bali

Paris of the East

Fanhua

Wealth

Feiji chang

Airport

Feng

Wind

Feng shui

Geomancy

Fuyu

Prosperity

Gong

Public (lit. anti-private: the bottom part of the character means ‘private’, while the top denotes ‘anti’); publicly owned; common; justice; equality; generous; it can also be used as a noun for a mode of address (e.g. like calling someone ‘sir’ – a high-level ofﬁ cer, a father, grandfather, etc.); all the people at a particular time, in an historical time; respect towards a person; the car assigned to a high ofﬁ cial

Gong yuan

Public park

Guang xi

Network of relationships

Gumin

Stock-crazed speculator(s)

Hai

Sea, ocean

Hao

Good, nice, beautiful

227 He

Harmony

Hsiao jen (Wade-Giles)

Small man

Jia

House, home, family (the character jia depicts a pig under a roof and in putonghua jiu is a homonym for ‘a long time’, hence something that lasts – like a family connection); region ruled by a clan (e.g. guo jia – archaic); school of thought, bai jia (the hundred schools). As a concept it is not unlike the Greek oikos: a basic economic unit of society consisting of the house, home, family; a hearth, a household, including children, slaves, etc.

Jie

Street

Jue de

To think (as in to feel); to feel; to be sensitive; the things one felt; emotions

Kai

To turn on, to drive, to boil (water); to open a door, a box, etc.; to occupy a place (after having won a battle); to open up a country; open (an abstract concept in poetry); to expand; to explore virgin territory; to establish; to set up (a system, a school, an ofﬁ ce, etc.); departing

Deference

Road

Modeng

Modern

Ren

Love, benevolence

Ren wei

To think (as in to reason); thoughts one has towards a person or matter; judgment; opinion; claim

228 Shan

Mountain

Shan shui

Landscape

Shang

Above (e.g. Shanghai: above or on the sea), at the beginning of (e.g. shang ke: at the start of class)

Shanghai

Shanghai (lit. above or on the sea)

Shikumen

A type of alleyway house in Shanghai (lit. stone archway or stone gateway)

Shimao

Fashion

Shui

Water

Siheyuan

Courtyard house

Tian

Sky, heaven

Tiandi

The world, the universe, everything (lit. heaven and earth)

Tong xiang

Same place of origin (tong: same, as in tong xue, classmate)

Wenming

Civilisation

West

229 Xia

Below, at the end of (e.g. xia ke: at the end of class)

Xin

New

Xintiandi

An area in Shanghai (lit. new world)

Xiang

To think (as in to intend); thinking; to miss somebody; to anticipate; to intend; intention; choice (context dependant, e.g. choosing a restaurant or a travel destination, etc.); imagination; to imagine

Xiang dui

Thinking as a resultative construction (to think and come up with a thought)

Yang fang

Foreign mansion(s)

Zhong guo

China, (lit. middle country)

Zuo

To ride in (e.g. a car or a train) but not to ride on (as with a bicycle or a horse); to sit (on the ground); the place you sit; to commit a crime (archaic); to prove; to explain

230 Appendix 5: Chinese Philosophy and Religion

This is a rather daunting task: the attempt to summarise two-and-a-half millennia of Chinese philosophy. No pretence is being made that what is about to be presented will have any great profundity, it is intended merely to give an overview of the basic tenets of the different philosophical and religions movements that exist in China in order to provide some background understanding to the Chinese mentalité. Beginning with Confucianism we will look at Confucius’s The Analects as well as the work of Mencius and Xunzi; with Daoism the works of Laozi and Zhuangzi will be examined; and this brief summary will end with a note on Buddhism before moving onto what can be called other philosophies (for want of a better term), that is to say other ways of thinking that have infl uenced the way in which Chinese people live. Particular attention will be paid to the pseudo-science of feng shui because of its very real effects on China’s built environment. While this may seem to be too bold an endeavour – the attempt to sum up such a wealth of experience and profundity of thought in a mere few pages – it can perhaps be justifi ed by quoting the old Chinese saying: ‘Everything we have heard can be said in three words’1. As Hyun Höchsmann points out, in the West those words would probably be Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, but in China these would be four: Dao, De, Ren, and He – Way, Virtue, Love, and Harmony2. Studies of philosophy in China tend to follow one of two approaches: the historical or the comparative. The historical concentrates on a philological analysis of original texts, while the comparative attempts to identify the core concepts underlying them. The history of philosophy in China is generally divided into three main periods: the fi rst is known as the classical, and dated from the sixth to the second century BCE, the second period, from the fi rst to the tenth century CE, and saw the introduction and increased ascendancy of Buddhism, while the third period, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, saw a renaissance in Confucianism, which is more commonly known as Neo- Confucianism. The classical period produced forceful and original conceptions of morality, with the major schools being Confucianism and Daoism. Confucius was interested in cultivating ethical conduct based on benevolence and righteousness. His sayings were gathered together into a book called Lun Yu (The Analects) and it was the work of Mencius and Xunzi, much like the apostles who followed Jesus, who helped to consolidate Confucius’s position as China’s greatest sage. Mencius constructed a system of ethics based on the basic idea that human nature was good, while Xunzi did something similar but basing his work on the notion that man was essentially evil. Daoism is older than Confucianism, but only just, it was launched by a text of Laozi called the Dao De Jing (The Way and Its Power). The later philosopher Zhuangzi expanded Laozi’s notion of the dao, where he embraced freedom and spontaneity in his call to live in harmony with all beings. There were other schools in this classical period, as well as other thinkers: Mozi, the Legalists, the Logicians, and the Yin Yang school, etc., however, Confucianism and Daoism are two of the three most infl uential of China’s philosophies/religions (Buddhism is the third) and it will diffi cult enough to try and convey their basic tenets without the distraction of examining other movements of less moment. Buddhism, as we have just seen, was the third of China’s three most important philosophies/ religions. It was introduced from India about the fi rst century CE and marked the beginning of China’s second philosophical period. Buddhism infl uenced the whole of society. By the fi fth century it had become fi rmly established in the north of the country and by the seventh it had become the third main philosophical and religious tradition. Buddhism and Daoism had an oddly symbiotic relationship, with Buddhism’s more overt religiousity sparking off a more colourful phase of Daoist worship (with the erection of three-dimensional tableaux in Daoist temples depicting scenes from Hell, etc.); while Daoism’s slippery thinking is in turn an infl uence on Buddhism, leading to the Chan or Zen School of

Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, Preface (no page number). Ibid., Preface (no page number). 231 Buddhism. The third philosophical period, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, saw the emergence of Neo-Confucianism, a formidable synthesis of the insights of the Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, and Buddhist traditions. Philosophers in China attempted to understand the ultimate structure of reality with the aim of bringing harmony to all spheres of human activity, which is understood to take place against a backdrop of constantly changing life. These movements have been referred to as philosophies/religions because they unite what in the West we would see as two separate modes of thinking. In China, philosophies tend to take on a religious overtone, whereas religions tend to be more philosophical, certainly than those of the West, which are based, usually, on faith. China’s sages were more interested in questions of ethics than in divine revelation; they were more interested in the practical considerations of how to live life rather than trying to store up benefi ts for an afterlife. In The Analects, Book XI.12 one of Confucius’s disciples asks, ‘May I ask about death?’ and Confucius answers: ‘You do not understand even life. How can you understand death?’ And in contrast to Jesus Christ’s admonition to ‘turn the other cheek’, we see in The Analects, Book XIV.54 where another disciple (or maybe the same one) asks, ‘Repay an injury with a good turn. What do you think of this saying?’ and Confucius answers, ‘What, then, do you repay a good turn with? You repay an injury with straightness, but you repay a good turn with a good turn’. This came fi ve centuries before Jesus Christ, yet if someone were to be unaware of the provenance of either admonition (or their dates) they could well be forgiven for thinking that Confucius had been making a subtle refi nement of Christ’s perhaps too idealistic teaching. China’s philosophers might not have been interested in questions of divine revelation, but neither were they interested in speculation for speculation’s sake (although Zuangzi and some of the later Zen Buddhists cannot be fully exonerated from having engaged in this elegant and relatively harmless pastime). These sages saw philosophy as having a practical application, with political and social relevance. Their activities can be most succinctly summer-up by saying they were primarily interested in using philosophy to determine how best to live and how best to govern.

Confucianism Confucius (also known as K’ung-tzu, K’ung-fu-tzu, Kong-zi, Kong-fu-zi, etc.) was born in 551 BCE in the feudal state of Lu (which now forms part of the north-central coastal province of Shantung), China. His name has achieved the same sort of status for the Chinese as Shakespeare has for the English or Goethe for the Germans. He died in 479 BCE leaving behind a school of philosophy that has inﬂ uenced Chinese society right up to the present day. According to Paul Strathern, the sixth century BCE was arguably the most signiﬁ cant in human evolution. It witnessed the establishment of Confucianism, and Taoism, as well as the actual birth of Buddha, not to mention the inception of Greek philosophy in the West3. According to The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, Confucius had a strong sense of vocation, voluntarily submitting to the mandate of heaven (t’ien-ming)4. Confucius set about salvaging the ideals of the ancients from their long decline. He reformulated and systematically reordered their thoughts and ideas, gathering them into a body of work known as The Analects (Lun Yu). Confucius sought to guide people in how to live ethically, and through the sheer range and clarity of his ideas he was able to unite diverse ways of thought and connect the customs of a vast and complex civilisation into a set of moral principles acceptable to all5. In the Western Han (206-225 CE), Confucianism became state orthodoxy and remained so until the twentieth century. His ideas shaped the moral values and practices, as well as providing the foundation for political thought, in China and East Asia.

Paul Strathern, The Essential Confucius, p. 3. Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, pp. 191-193 (note the Encyclopedia uses the older Wade-Giles system of Chinese transliteration, the word ‘heaven’ is more usually transliterated as tian in the newer pinyin system; it also spells Confucius as K’ung-tzu). Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, p. 5. 232 Inevitably, his teachings have become somewhat distorted over time, but The Analects has occupied the same position in the Chinese canon as has the Bible in the West, and it is still regarded as the most reliable source of his teachings. In this book Confucius outlines the fi ve human relationships: parent and child; husband and wife; friends; old and young; ruler and subject. Each is guided by li (proper deference which maintains social order) and ren (benevolence which creates kindness and charity). With its emphasis on fi lial piety, and reverence for ancestors, Confucianism highlights the Chinese individual’s proper place as being within a social matrix of inter-relationships with mutual obligations. However, Confucius’s emphasis on the cultivation of the personal life clearly indicates that he regarded the individual as also being of central importance. Unlike religious teachers, Confucius held out no hope of reward either in this world or the next. As far as any notion of the afterlife is concerned, his attitude was, as we have just seen, at best agnostic. He adopted a sceptical attitude toward the spirit world, one which resonates with the Western notion of entia non sunt multiplicanda praetor necessitatem6. Since one can neither be assured of a reward nor guaranteed success, morality must be pursued for its own sake. This is perhaps the most important tenet of Confucius’s teachings. The ideal moral character for Confucius is described as the chun tzu (gentleman), a type that is discussed in more than eighty chapters in The Analects7. Confucius differentiates ‘Gentleman’ (shih, the lowest rank of offi cialdom) from ‘gentleman’ (chun tzu, a man of moral excellence, or a man in authority)8. Chun tzu is contrasted with hsiao jen (small man, or those who are ruled)9. Chun tzu and hsiao jen are essentially moral terms, with the former denoting a man with a cultivated moral character and the latter the opposite. Confucius’s work was regarded as something every educated Chinese was expected to be thoroughly acquainted with, much like the Bible or Shakespeare in the English-speaking world. Apt quotations could be made from this canon if it was necessary to convey a meaning in a subtle or oblique way, particularly useful for use in diplomatic exchanges. One could also use them to criticise a ruler without giving overt offence; the wise ruler would hopefully understand the criticism and reform his ways, (a link to Michel Foucault’s highlighting of parrhesia earlier on). Mencius (Mengzi) was born in 371 BCE near the state of Lu (also Confucius’s birthplace) and died in 289 BCE. Little is known about him other than what can be gathered from the book named after him, which remained one of the Four Books read by every educated Chinese until the twentieth century. There are certain traditions about Mencius mentioned in the Han shih wai chuan of the second century BCE and the Lieh nu chuan from just over a century later (the era known as the Western Han10). Mencius’s main achievement lies in consolidating the Confucian philosophical perspective, but whereas Confucius has been compared to jade (which is truly precious), Mencius is likened to a mirror which glitters11. Mencius maintained that the Mandate of Heaven was equivalent to natural law because both were based on the belief that there existed objective laws in nature which determined what was right. Mencius identifi ed the Mandate of Heaven with the judgement of the people, thereby making the people of a country more important than its ruler12. Xunzi, the other Confucian interpreter, was one of the most eminent scholars of his day and his ideas continued to exert considerable infl uence throughout the entire Han period (206 BCE - 220 CE). However, it is Mencius who is considered the more direct line of transmission for Confucian thought13. Neo-Confucian philosophy is syncretic, that is it brings together philosophical ideas of different

Trans: No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary, also known as Occam’s razor. Note: The Analects also uses the older Wade-Giles system of transliteration. Confucius, The Anelects, p. 12, footnote 3. Ibid., p. 14. Mencius, D.C. Lau, trans., p. 177. Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, p. 26. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 42. 233 schools and develops them into its own coherent system. It fl owered during the Song (960-1279 CE) and Ming (1368-1644 CE) Dynasties. Neo-Confucian philosophers created an original and penetrating interpretation of philosophical analysis, they revived classical learning and amalgamated Mohism, Daoism, and Buddhism into a comprehensive Confucian framework. This remarkable synthesis is seen as the work of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), who developed Neo-Confucianism into its fi nal form and whose writings and commentaries on the classic texts exerted a huge infl uence14. Philosophical writing in China is remarkably free of the sort of technical vocabulary or jargon that so often mars comparable writing in the West. The diffi culty lies in transliterating some of these subtly nuanced Chinese notions into accurate English, or any other Western language, something that we will be taking a look at in the next chapter (which deals with language).

Daoism Dao (also spelled Tao) literally translates into English as the ‘Way’, and according to The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion it may also denote ‘Teaching’15. It can also mean a road or a path, and applied to human actions it is the way in which one does something16. The idea of the dao was fi rst formulated by Laozi in his Dao De Jing and was developed by Zhuangzi. Daoism searches for a way of understanding reality and derives a knowledge of life from the way things are. The dao is the way in which the universe, and everything in it, develops. According to the dao all things form one great continuum, one huge chain of being. The dao conceives of reality as constantly in fl ux, undergoing an eternal process of transformation17. The dao has long resonated in Western philosophy, most notably recently in Heidegger’s work where it can be seen to relate to notion of the Weg 18, and it was the Jesuits (who fi rst translated the Dao De Jing) who imbued the dao with religious signifi cance. While the dao is understood as the origin of all things, and as such somewhat analogous with the idea of a creator or God, the concept of the dao of Heaven has no connotation with a personal God; according to Hyun Höchsmann, ‘Heaven stands for an objective source of universal morality, the standpoint of just and fair perspective rather than a personal deity who can be placated with sacrifi ces and prayers and dispenses justice or oversees the salvation of individual souls’19. All Daoists strive to become one with the dao, this cannot be achieved by trying to understand it intellectually; the Daoist adept becomes one with the dao by realising within himself its unity, simplicity, and emptiness. Daoism has developed a number of practices to facilitate this and both the Zhuangzi and the Dao De Jing contain guidelines for producing a state of meditative absorption. Breathing exercises are important in this, either as a preliminary practice or as a means of enhanc- ing the meditative process (which also ties into the common Chinese practice of tai chi chuan). The Dao De Jing is Daoism’s most important text. It is a collection of aphorisms on various subjects unifi ed under the theme of ‘the way and its power’. Consisting of eighty-one short stanzas, each expressing a philosophical refl ection, it often draws upon well-known proverbs in order to make a fresh point. Generally understood to have been written by Laozi (whose name literally translates as Old Master, he was also known as Lao-tzu, Lao Tan, or Li Erh), who was about fi fty years older than Con- fucius, it is he who is considered the father of Daoism. The biography of Laozi in the Historical Records (Shih-chi), dating from the second and fi rst centuries BCE, mentions that he was born in Hu-hsien in the state of Ch’u (now Hunan Province)20.

Ibid., p. 140 and pp. 149-153. Encyclopaedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, pp. 356-357. Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, p. 55. Ibid., p. 55. For further discussions on the links between Heidegger and Daoism kindly see Heidegger and Asian Thought, Graham Parkes, ed., pp. 47-144. Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, p. 56. Encyclopaedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, pp. 198-199 (note: the Encyclopaedia spells his name using the Wade-Giles system: Lao-tzu). 234 Since it was fi rst translated into English in 1788 (alternately as The Way and Its Power, The Book of Tao or The Book of the Way), it has been the most frequently translated text of China’s canon21. Laozi’s main concern was not metaphysics but in representing the dao as a moral concept. When combined with de (virtue), the dao represents the essential ordering principles behind nature, society, and the individual. Hyun Höchsmann sees a close parallel between the notion of de and Greek areté since both refer to the excellence of a thing in fulfi lling its function22. The dao of a particular thing is that which makes it what it is. Laozi declares that the dao is by defi nition indefi nable; its ethics are concerned with how to live well. As we have seen with Confucianism, the promise of the eternal life held up by so many religions in the West has never interested the Chinese, what good that can be gained by living in the dao is not blessedness or serenity but the ability to do good in the world.

Once Chuang Chou [Zhungzi] dreamt he was a butterfl y, a butterfl y fl itting and fl uttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfl y, or a butterfl y dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfl y there must be some distinction! This is called the Trans- formation of Things.23

This is perhaps the most famous excerpt from all of Chinese philosophy, it is certainly one of the most charming. Versions of the story differ, some have the butterfl y falling asleep and dreaming it is Chuang Chou; this version has been quoted as it was felt that the Burton Watson translation is a reliable source. Chuang Chou (369-286 BCE) is better known as Zhuangzi (but he is also known as Chuang Tzu). He was one of, if not the, most original philosophers in all of China, and the book of his sayings, simply called Zhuangzi, has to be one of the most entertaining as well as one of the most profound books in world literature. After the rigours of the Confucian thinkers, Hyun Höchsmann likens reading Zhuangzi as comparable to the emergence of the Romantic movement after the Enlightenment24. Zhuangzi takes Laozi’s depictions of the dao and renders them more vivid by using daring language and startling images. He rarely resorts to argument to persuade, instead he juxtaposes allegories and analogies, and he dazzles with subtle paradoxes. Truth for Zhuangzi is not something that can be established by winning an argument or reaching a consensus, truth is something that may be apprehended by considering things from the standpoint of their actual use, and regarding them from the point of their correlation to other things. (How remarkably this seems to resonate with Michel Foucault’s notions of discourse.) To insist on the truth of an individual perspective is to be like a frog in a well, a creature that can only judge the sky as seen from the opening at the top of the well25. Zhuangzi’s celebrated passage about the butterfl y invites us to ponder on the bewildering possibility that the whole of existence might be nothing more than a dream, a theme that has long featured in the West, although often in a more overtly fanciful form than in the East, with anything from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to the recent fi lm trilogy The Matrix. Burton Watson thinks the central theme of Zhuangzi can be summed up in one word: freedom. Nearly all the philosophers of China addressed themselves to the problem of how man was to live in a world of chaos, suffering, and absurdity; and they tended to suggest practical solutions for doing so. Zhuangzi took a very different approach, he sought for man to free himself from the world. Confucian- ism and Daoism are sometimes seen as being opposed to one another, with the former advocating the cultivation of the virtues of benevolence and righteousness and the latter urging us to follow the way or

Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, p. 58. Ibid., p. 59. ‘Discussion on Making All Things Equal’ (Section 2), Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, Burton Watson, trans., p. 45. Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, p. 71. Ibid., p. 74. 235 dao of nature. But perhaps it is better to do as Watson suggests and think of them not as rival systems which demand a choice between them, but as complementary doctrines; ethical and political systems for the conduct of public and family life. As Hyun Höchsmann reminds us, the idea of completion or full development of the moral nature of man forms the common core of Laozi, Confucius, Zhuangzi, and Mencius26.

Buddhism Buddhism was introduced into China from India as early as the fi rst century CE and it became the third major philosophical and religious movement during the Sui and Tang dynasties (589-907 CE). Buddhist missionaries proselytised in China, and Chinese pilgrims went to India to collected sacred texts: a vast literature known as the Tripitaka, translated from the Sanskrit27. The historical fi gure most often associated with Buddhism is a Prince of the royal family of Shakya, a small kingdom in present- day Nepal. He was born in 563 BCE and his name was Siddhartha Gautama, hence is known as the Gautama Buddha. He is also known as Shakyamuni Buddha, which means the Buddha of the Silent Sage of the Shakyas. He was not the only one to attain buddhahood, neither was he the fi rst28. The term buddha means ‘awakened one’ and denotes a person who has achieved enlightenment, which releases one from the cycle of existence (samsara) to attain complete liberation (nirvana)29. There are two types of buddha: the pratyeka-buddha, a completely enlightened one who does not teach; and the samyak- sambuddha, who does30. Buddhism sees life as suffering and seeks to free us from this suffering by nullifying our desires, for it is our desires which anchor us to the world. The world is, of course, transitory and fl eeting, and it is our desires, because we crave them so badly, which cause us so much suffering. The immortality of the soul has been a topic of considerable concern in the West, with the possibility of bliss in the afterlife being held up as a sort of prize for good conduct in this one (or eternal damnation for those who fall prey to the wiles of the Evil One). Buddhism’s notion of rebirth is distinct from this in the belief that the soul will be reborn in this world. This rebirth is not some afterlife detached from this one, neither is it the case that some individual soul gets carried forward, it is the character of what had been the original or latest person that gets carried forward, and as such this is different from the Indian idea of the transmigration of souls. In Hinduism the concern is with the universal soul (brahman), which is the highest knowledge the individual soul (atman) can attain to. The crucial difference here, and one that makes Buddhism so remarkable, is that the goal is not eternal life but an eventual liberation from the cycles of birth and rebirth. Buddhism in China brought a new understanding to what constituted a moral life, and during the tenth-century Song Dynasty, a time when other schools of thought were languishing, Buddhism stimulated China’s philosophically inclined scholars31. Buddhist doctrines were often explained in terms of Daoist ideas, which led, as we have seen, to Daoism being infl uenced by it; but this infl uence has mainly been on religious rather than philosophical Daoism32. The fundamental difference between religious Daoism and Buddhism is that the former sees preservation of life as the desired goal, while the latter seeks enlightenment by letting go of attachment to it. To put it simply: Daoism can be seen as an

Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, p. 91. Ibid., p. 121. In the early Hinayana texts six preceding buddhas are mentioned: Vipashyin (Pali, Vipassi), Shikin (Sikhi), Vishvabhu (Vessabhu), Krakuchchanda (Kakusandha), Conagamana, and Kashyapa (Kassapa). The stories of these legendary buddhas are contained in the Buddhavamsa, a work from the Khuddakanikaya. For further reference see the Encyclopaedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, pp. 46-48 and pp. 50-55. Encyclopaedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, p. 46. Ibid., p. 46. Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, p. 124. Ibid., p. 125. 236 affi rmation of life while Buddhism is a renunciation of it33. Buddhist literature is divided into the devotional and the philosophical, and there were four major developments in its evolution: Jing Du (Pure Land), Tian Tai (Heavenly Gate), Hua Yen (Flower Splendour or Hundred Flower), and Chan (Zen, derived from the Sanskrit dhyana, meditation)34. The Northern School of Chan (also known as Zen) believed in enlightenment as a gradual process while the Southern School stressed instantaneous enlightenment35. Chan arose out of a melding of Daoism and Buddhism, particularly the penchant for startling the mind in order to jolt it out of its sense of security in the reality of the world, and it is seen as the most signifi cant school of Buddhism to emerge from China. Chan aims at spontaneity and natural expression, but this can only be achieved after years of intensive study and austere discipline. The Chan movement coincided with the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), a period of unprecedented freedom of expression in literature and the arts in China. The landscape paintings of the later Song Dynasty (960-1101 CE) also express this Chan spirit, with the mountains, trees, and rivers all seemingly fl oating in an emptiness that is lovingly portrayed. In their attempt to capture the essence of these ephemeral things, the painter has to work swiftly and spontaneously, and, like Chan philosophy, in order to do so requires years of strenuous training.

Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 133. 237 Bibliography

Note: Chinese names are written in the traditional manner (i.e. surname ﬁ rst), and *denotes a title not available in English.

Books 1. Abbas, Ackbar, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, (Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 2002) 2. Aurelius, Marcus, Meditations, (London: Penguin Books, 2004) 3. Bacon, Francis, Of Empire, (New York: Penguin Books, 2006) 4. Ballard, J.G., Empire of the Sun, (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1984) 5. Belsey, Catherine, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 6. Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (New York, Penguin Books, 1988) 7. Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Classics, 2004) 8. Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths, (London: Penguin Classics, 2000) 9. Borges, Jorge Luis, The Book of Imaginary Beasts, (London: Vintage, 2002) 10. Brendon, Piers, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997, (London: Vintage Books, 2008) 11. Butler, Christopher, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press, 2002) 12. Byrne Bracken, G., Hong Kong: A Walking Tour, (Singapore: Times Editions, 2003) 13. Carr, Caleb, Killing Time, (New York: Warner Books, 2000) 14. Castells, Manuel, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume I, The Rise of the Network Society, (Malden MA, Blackwell Publishing, 2000) 15. Castells, Manuel, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II, The Pow- er of Identity, (Malden MA, Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 16. Castells, Manuel, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume III, End of Millennium, (Malden MA, Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 17. Center for Strategic and International Studies & the Institute for International Economics, China: The Balance Sheet, (New York, PublicAffairs, 2006) 18. Chang, Eileen, Love in a Fallen City, trans. by Karen S. Kingsbury, (New York: New York Review Books, 2007) 19. Chang, Eileen, Lust, Caution, trans. by Julia Lovell, (New York: Anchor Books, 2007) 20. China Economic Review, China by Numbers 2007, (Hong Kong: China Economic Review Publishing, 2006) 21. Christie, Agatha, They Came to Baghdad, (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993) 22. Chuang Tzu, Basic Writings, trans. by Burton Watson, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) 23. Colonna, Francesco, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream), trans. by Joscelyn Godwin, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005) 24. Darwin, John, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405, (London: Allen Lane, 2007) 25. Dawson, Raymond, The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chi- nese Civilisation, (London: Oxford University Press, 1967) 26. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, On the Line, trans. by John Johnston, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 27. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi, (London: Continuum, 2004) 28. Denison, Edward and Guang Yu Ren, Building Shanghai: The Story of China’s Gateway, (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2006)

238 29. Dong, Stella, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, (New York: HarperCollins, 2000) 30. Dong, Stella, Shanghai: Gateway to the Celestial Empire, (Hong Kong: FormAsia, 2003) 31. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow, Paul, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983) 32. Dumm, Thomas L., Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom, (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta- Mira Press, 2000) 33. Elden, Stuart, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial His- tory, (London: Continuum, 2001) 34. Endacott, G.B., A History of Hong Kong, (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1964) 35. Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, (London: Penguin Books, 2004) 36. Ferguson, Niall, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred, (London: Allen Lane, 2006) 37. Fishman, Ted C., China, Inc., (New York: Scribner, 2005) 38. Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. by Richard Howard, (New York: Vintage Books, 1988) 39. Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 40. Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, no transla- tor cited, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 41. Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) 42. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Smith, (New York: Vintage, 1995) 43. Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, (?: Éditions Gallimard, 1975) 44. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hur- ley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 45. Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir, (?: Éditions Gallimard, 1976) 46. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, trans. by Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 47. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Volume III: The Care of the Self, trans. by Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1988) 48. Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980) 49. Foucault, Michel, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Paul Rabinow, (New York: The New Press, 1994) 50. Foucault, Michel, Power, ed. by James D. Faubion, (New York: The New Press, 2000) 51. Foucault, Michel, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology (Volume Two, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984), ed. by James D. Faubion, (London: Penguin Books, 1994) 52. Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. by Colin Gordon, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 53. Foucault, Michel & Chomsky, Noam, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, (New York: The New Press, 2006) 54. Foucault, Michel, Fearless Speech, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001) 55. Foucault, Michel, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973-74, ed. by Jacques Legrange, trans, by Graham Burchell, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 56. Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977- 78, ed. by Michel Senellart, trans. by Graham Burchell, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 57. Fulcher, James, Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 58. Gandalsonas, Mario, ed., Shanghai Reﬂ ections (Princeton Papers on Architecture), (New

239 Jersey: Princeton University School of Architecture, 2002) 59. Girard, Greg and Lambot, Ian, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, (UK: Water- mark Publications, 1993) 60. Graafl and, Arie, The Socius of Architecture: Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2000) 61. Graafl and, Arie, Versailles and the Mechanics of Power: The Subjugation of Circe: An Es- say, (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003) 62. Grahame Shane, David, Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Ur- ban Design, and City Theory, (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2005) 63. Gutting, Gary, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 64. Gutting, Gary, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientifi c Reason, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 65. Gutting, Gary, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, (Cambridge University Press, 2006) 66. Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) 67. Harvey, David, The New Imperialism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 68. Haw, Stephen G., China: A Traveller’s History, (London: Cassell, 2002) 69. Hay, John, ed., Boundaries in China, (London: Reaktion Books, 1994) 70. Hilton, James, Lost Horizon, (New York: Pocket Books, 1960) 71. Höchsmann, Hyun, On Philosophy in China, (Singapore: Wadsworth, 2004) 72. Howe, Stephen, Empire: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 73. Hoy, David Couzens, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 74. Huang, Chun-chieh and Henderson, John B., eds., Notions of Time in Chinese Historical Thinking, (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2006) 75. Huang, Tsung-yi Michelle, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004) 76. Hui, Wei, Shanghai Baby, (New York: Washington Square Press, 2002) 77. Huxley, Aldous, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932) 78. Irwin, Robert, For Lust of Knowing, (London: Penguin Books, 2006) 79. Ishiguro, Kazuo, When We Were Orphans, (London: faber and faber, 2000) 80. Jacobs, Jane, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, (New York: Vintage Books, 1985) 81. Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1993) 82. Jacobs, Jane, Dark Age Ahead, (New York: Vintage Books, 2005) 83. Jencks, Charles, Post-modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, (London: Academy Editions, 1987) 84. Knapp, Ronald G. and Lo Kai-yin, eds., House Home Family: Living and Being Chinese, (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2005) 85. Lao Zi, The Book of Lao Zi: A Taoist Classic, trans. by Ren Jiyu, (Beijing: Foreign Languag- es Press, 1995) 86. Leach, Neil, China, (Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers, 2004) 87. Leach, Neil, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, (London: Routledge, 1997) 88. Lee Kip Lin, The Singapore House 1819-1942, (Singapore: Times Editions, 1988) 89. Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, (Singapore: Times Edi- tions, 1998) 90. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, (Singapore: Times Editions, 2000) 91. Lee, Leo Ou-fan, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930- 1945, (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999)

240 92. Lenin, V.I., Selected Works, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968) 93. Li Xiaoxiang, Origins of Chinese People and Customs, (Singapore: Asiapac, 2001) 94. Lip, Evelyn, Notes on Things Chinese, (Singapore: Graham Brash, 2001) 95. Lim, Irene, Secret Societies in Singapore, (Singapore: Singapore History Museum, National Heritage Board, 1999) 96. Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002) 97. Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince, (London: Penguin Books, 2004) 98. Mackerras, Colin, ed., Sinophiles and Sinophobes, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 99. Marsden, William, ed., The Travels of Marco Polo, (New York: The Modern Library, 2001) 100. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto, (London: Penguin Books, 2002) 101. May, Todd, The Philosophy of Foucault, (Chesham, Bucks: Acumen, 2006) 102. Mayhew, Bradley, Shanghai, (Victoria, Audtralia: Lonely Planet, 2004) 103. Mencius, trans. by D.C. Lau, (London: Penguin Classics, 2003) 104. Menzies, Gavin, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, (London: Bantam Books, 2003) 105. Mills, Sara, Michel Foucault, (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2003) 106. More, Thomas, Utopia, (London: Penguin Books, 1965) 107. Morris, Jan, Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire, (London: Penguin Books, 1997) 108. Moss, Peter, ed., Chinese Proverbs: Essence of Ancient Wisdom, trans. by Agnes Chen Wei- lan, (Hong Kong: FormAsia Books Ltd., 2006) 109. Novelli, Luigi, Shanghai Architecture Guide, (Shanghai: Haiwen Audio-Video Publishers, 2005) 110. Parkes, Graham, ed., Heidegger and Asian Thought, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1992) 111. Parkes, Graham, ed., Neitzsche and Asian Thought, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) 112. Pan, Lynn, and others, eds., Odyssey Illustrated Guide to Shanghai, (Hong Kong: Odyssey, 1992) 113. Pan, Lynn, Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise, (Singapore: Cultured Lotus, 2000) 114. Poe, Edgar Allan, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Stories, (London: Orion Books, 2002) 115. Powell, Robert, Singapore: Architecture of a Global City, (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 2000) 116. Powell, Robert, The Asian House: Contemporary Houses of Southeast Asia, (Singapore: Se- lect Books, 1993) 117. Rabinow, Paul, ed., The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thoughts, (London: Penguin Books, 1991) 118. Reijndorp, Arnold and Hajer, Maarten, In Search of New Public Domain, (NAi Publishers) 119. Richards, Ivor, T.R. Hamzah & Yeang: Ecology of the Sky, (Victoria, Australia: Images Pub- lishing, 2001) 120. Rossbach, Sarah, Feng Shui: Ancient Wisdom on Arranging a Harmonious Living Environ- ment, (London: Rider, 1984) 121. Rowe, Peter G., East Asia Modern, (London: Reaktion Books, 2005) 122. Said, Edward W., Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 123. Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 124. Sassen, Saskia, ed., Globalization and its Discontents, (New York: The New Press, 1998) 125. Sassen, Saskia, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, (New Jersey: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 2001) 126. Sassen, Saskia, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities, (New York: Routledge, 2002) 127. Schirokauer, Conrad, A Brief History of Chinese Civilization, (New York: Wadsworth/Thom- son Learning, 1991) 128. Schuhmacher, Stephan & Woerner, Gert, eds., The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and

241 Religion, (Boston: Shambhala, 1994) 129. Seng Kuan & Rowe, Peter G., eds., Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism for Modern Chi- na, (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2004) 130. Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992) 131. Sennett, Richard, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, (London: Penguin Books, 1994) 132. Shaughnessy, Edward L., ed., China (Reference Classics), (London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2005) 133. Slessor, Catherine, Eco-Tech: Sustainable Architecture and High Technology, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997) 134. Smith, David, The Dragon and the Elephant, (London: Profi le Books, 2007) 135. Smith, Richard J., Chinese Maps, (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996) 136. Somerset Maugham, W., On a Chinese Screen, (London: Vintage, 2000) 137. Spence, Jonathan D., The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) 138. Strathern, Paul, The Essential Confucius, (London: Virgin Books Ltd, 2002) 139. Sudjic, Deyan, The Edifi ce Complex, (London: Penguin Books, 2005) 140. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. by Samuel B. Griffi th, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) 141. Tan Kok Meng, Asian Architects, (Singapore: Select Books, 2001) 142. Urban Redevelopment Authority, Chinatown Historic District, (Singapore: Urban Redevel- opment Authority,1995) 143. Urban Redevelopment Authority, Kampong Glam Historic District, (Singapore: Urban Re- development Authority,1995) 144. Urban Redevelopment Authority, Little India Historic District, (Singapore: Urban Redevel- opment Authority,1995) 145. van Gulik, Robert, The Chinese Gold Murders, (New York: Perennial, 2004) 146. Vidal, Gore, United States: Essays 1952-1992, (London, Abacus, 1995) 147. Vidal, Gore, Palimpsest: A Memoir, (New York, Random House, 1995) 148. Vidal, Gore, Imperial America: Refl ections on the United States of Amnesia, (New York, Na- tion Books, 2004) 149. Wu Liang, Old Shanghai, (?: Jiangsu meishu chubanshe, 2005)* 150. Xu Jie, ed., Building China; Top Forty Contemporary Architects[sic] Firms in China, (?: Liaoning kexue jishu chubanshe, ?)* 151. Yatsko, Pamela, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, (Singapore: John Wiley and Sons (Asia), 2001) 152. Yeoh, Brenda S.A., Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Built Environment, (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003) 153. Young, Robert J.C., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2003) 154. Young, Robert J.C., Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) 155. Zhang Wei, ed., Old Shanghai Maps, (Shanghai: Shanghai huabao chubanche, 2001)* 156. ?, Lao Shanghai Shikumen, (Shanghai: Tongji University, ?)*

242 Essays and short stories 1. Foucault, Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, pp. 350-355, Rethinking Architecture: Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. by Neil Leach, (London: Routledge, 1997) 2. Somerset Maugham, W., ‘The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story’, pp. 176-101, The Vagrant Mood, (London, Mandarin Paperbacks, 1998) 3. Somerset Maugham, W., ‘The Door of Opportunity’, pp. 495-533, Collected Short Stories Volume 2, (London, Mandarin Paperbacks, 1997) 4. Somerset Maugham, W., ‘The Outstation’ pp. 100-146, The Round Dozen, (London: World Books, no publication date) 5. Somerset Maugham, W., ‘The Short Story’, pp. 130-172, Points of View, (London, Manda- rin Paperbacks, 1996) 6. Vidal, Gore, ‘Maugham’s Half & Half’, pp. 228-250, United States: Essays 1952-1992, (London, Abacus, 1995)

Journal articles 1. --, ‘Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’, (Petronas), Architectural Review, (January 2005) 2. --, ‘America’s fear of China’, The Economist, (May 19-25, 2007) 3. --, ‘Confucius makes a comeback’, The Economist, (May 19-25, 2007) 4. Arkaraprasertkul, Non, ‘Politicisation and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism’, Footprint Issue #2, Spring 2008, www.footprintjournal.org (accessed 6 July 2008) 5. Bowerman, Gary, ‘Albert Speer in Conversation’, That’s Shanghai, (April 2007) 6. Bracken, Gregory, ‘The Past is Never Past: Making Sense of Chinese Time’, IIAS Newslet- ter #46 (winter 2008) 7. Chen, Darryl, ‘View from Shanghai’, Architectural Review, (February 2003) 8. Elman, Benjamin A., ‘Early modern Classicism and Late Imperial China’, IIAS Newsletter #43 (spring 2007) 9. Finch, Paul, ‘View: Well Tempered in Singapore’, Architectural Review, (August 2006) 10. Kolesnikov-Jessop, Sonia, ‘Asia Raises the Gavel’, Newsweek, (May 26-June 2, 2008) 11. Richards, Ivor, ‘National Library, Singapore’, Architectural Review, (July 2005) 12. Turnbull, Richard, ‘View from Shanghai’, Architectural Review, (December 2004) 13. Vellinga, Marcel, ‘Living Heritage: Vernacular Architecture in China’, IIAS Newsletter #43 (spring 2007)

Other sources 1. Bracken, Gregory, ‘The Interface of Empire’, International Forum on Urbanism, Tsinghua University, Beijing, October, 2006 2. Chang, See-Chen and Arlen Min Ye, ‘Modern Urbanism and the Public Realm: City planning in early-twentieth-century Guangzhou, China’, ISUU4 (4th International Seminar on Urbanism and Urbanisation), Technical University of Delft, the Netherlands, 2007. www. urbanism.tudelft.nl (accessed 23 August 2008) 3. Chen, Yawei, ‘Regeneration and Sustainable Development in China’s Transformation’, ENHR International Conference, Sustainable Urban Areas, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2007: Workshop 19, The Sustainable City. www.enhr2007rotterdam.nl (accessed 21 July 2008) 4. Chiu, Rebecca L.H., ‘China’s Rapid Urbanisation: Is Compact Shanghai Sustainable? A Preliminary Study’, ENHR International Conference, Sustainable Urban Areas, Rotter- dam, the Netherlands, 2007: Workshop 19, The Sustainable City www.enhr2007rotterdam. nl (accessed 21 July 2008 – paper not available on website) 5. Moya Pellitero, Ana, The Image of the Urban Landscape: The re-discovery of the city through different spaces of perception, (Doctoral Thesis, TU Eindhoven, 2007)

243 Discography 1. ‘The Wrong Empire’, Volume 4 (1689-1836), A History of Britain (Simon Schama), BBC Worldwide Ltd. (2002) 2. Le Roi Danse, Arti Film/K2 Films (2003) 3. Lust, Caution, Buena Vista Home Entertainment (no release date) 4. Mission: Impossible III, Paramount Pictures (2006) 5. Shanghai Triad, Sony Pictures Classics (1994) 6. The Painted Veil, Warner China Film HG Corporation (2007) 7. The White Countess, Sony Pictures Classics (2006) 8. Think Fast, Mr Moto, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (1937)

244 CURRICULUM VITÆ

Date and place of birth • 11 July 1968, Dublin, Ireland.

Secondary education • Newbridge College, Newbridge, Co. Kildare, Ireland (1980-86).

Tertiary education • M.Sc.Arch. (specialisation in urbanism) – TU Delft, The Netherlands (2004). • B.Sc.Arch. – Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (1992). • Dip.Arch. – Bolton Street, CoT, Dublin, (1992).

Special qualiﬁ cations • M.Sc.Arch., cum laude. • B.Sc.Arch. and Dip.Arch., distinction in thesis.

Relevant work experience • Architect, Bangkok (1993-97). • Chief design architect, Singapore (1997-2002). • Author of illustrated architectural guidebooks to Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. • Author of articles and conference papers on Asian urbanism. • Co-editor (with Dr Heidi Sohn) of the spring 2008 issue of Footprint: ‘Mapping Urban Com- plexity in an Asian Context’.

Ph.D. research • Architecture Theory Department, TU Delft, The Netherlands. • Prof. Dr. Arie Graaﬂ and, promoter.

245 Published by: Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, Julianalaan 134, 2628 BL, Delft, The Netherlands.

Printed in the Netherlands, May 2009

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