NEW APPROACHES to OLD SHANGHAI Jeffrey N

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxii:2 (Autumn, 2001), 263–279.

NEW APPROACHES TO OLD SHANGHAI Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom New Approaches to Old Shanghai

Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Life in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai. By Lu Hanchao (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999) 456 pp. $50.00

Writers have long been fascinated by “Old Shanghai”—a common term used to distinguish the subdivided treaty port that once stood by the muddy Huangpu River from the uniªed metropolis (sometimes called “New Shanghai”) found there today. During the 1920s and 1930s, for example, a local-history boom of considerable magnitude took place in the metropolis. Some of the books produced then by Shanghailanders (a term for Western residents with ties to Britain or America), other foreigners (such as Kotenev, a Russian emigré historian), and Shanghairen (as Chi- nese denizens of the city are known) continue to be useful to scholars.1 During those same decades, Old Shanghai—which, in its heyday, was called everything from “The Pearl of the Orient” to the “The Whore of Asia”—received considerable attention from novelists and screenwriters. Numerous other works on Old Shanghai were published during the treaty-port century, which began in 1843 (when the ªrst accords giving foreigners special privileges in certain Chinese coastal cities went into effect) and ended in 1943 (when the World War II Allies abandoned their claims to such privileges). These included books by journalists (Chinese and Western alike), essays by travel writers (a large num-

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is Associate Professor of History, Indiana University. He is the author of Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford, 1991); co- editor, with Lynn Hunt and Marilyn B. Young, of Human Rights and Revolution (Lanham, Md., 2000).

1 Local histories from the time include F. L. Hawks Pott, A Short History of Shanghai (Shang- hai, 1928); Anatol M. Kotenev, Shanghai: Its Mixed Court and Council (Shanghai, 1925); Shanghai shi ziliao congkan, Shanghai gonggong zujie shigao [A history of the Shanghai’s Inter- national Settlement] (Shanghai, 1980)—originally two Chinese-language historical works from the 1930s.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 264 | JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM ber of them Japanese visitors), and even an installment of a Euro- pean comic book series.2 There is no mystery about Old Shanghai’s early appeal to many different types of early twentieth-century writers. By the 1920s, the city had become a major center of international trade. Its harbor, the sixth busiest in the world, handled more ships than even Canton, the city to the south that had been the leading Chi- nese port city for several centuries. Old Shanghai was also a prime destination for tourists, both domestic and foreign, and home to China’s leading ªnancial and publishing institutions, as well as to radical labor and student organizations. Located halfway up the China coast, just upstream from the Yangzi Delta, Old Shanghai in the 1920s had just undergone, and was continuing to undergo, dramatic demographic, geographical, and architectural transformations. Its population increased tenfold between 1843 and 1943, reaching 3 million by World War I, thanks to the arrival of a small contingent of foreign settlers and a much larger one of Chinese immigrants. Its physical size increased exponentially as well. Swamplands and village ªelds turned into city streets, making Old Shanghai into China’s biggest and most populated urban area. What prior to 1843 had been a typical Chi- nese walled city became by the 1930s a metropolis with a distinc- tive look and feel. Its waterfront architecture could easily have been mistaken for that of Chicago or London, though the houses and ofªces nearby combined Chinese and foreign structural and decorative elements that would never have been found in the United States or Europe. The most striking aspect of Old Shanghai’s pre–World War II allure for authors is that it has gone on so long. It has long survived the dissolution of the treaty-port system that once allowed foreign

2 For novels, see, for example, André Malraux, La Condition humaine (Paris, 1933); Mao Dun, Midnight (Peking, 1933). The American ªlms ranged from Shanghai Express (1932), fea- turing Marlene Dietrich, to Stowaway (1936), a Shirley Temple vehicle. Scores of Chinese cinematic productions earned Old Shanghai yet another nickname, “Hollywood of the East.” The comic book is Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin and the Blue Lotus (a work from the 1930s still in print) (Boston, 1984). Two of most comprehensive multilingual bibliographies of works on Old Shanghai from various periods are provided in Takahashi Kösuke and Furuya Tadao (eds.), Shanhai shi (Tokyo, 1995); Christian Henriot and Zheng Zu’an, Atlas de Shang- hai: espaces et represésentations de 1849 à nos jours (Paris, 1999). The notes that follow contain some references to works in Chinese (and Japanese), but most of the publications listed are in English or other Western languages.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 NEW APPROACHES TO OLD SHANGHAI | 265 nationals special rights within the city’s two enclaves—the self- governing International Settlement and the more straightfor- wardly colonial French Concession. Even today, books and essays about Shanghai often focus more on the treaty port than either the vastly changed contemporary city or the bustling Chinese market town of the era preceding the Opium War (1839–1842), which forcibly opened several cities to foreign settlement.3 One sign of Old Shanghai’s ongoing attraction is the plethora of scholarly works on the treaty port that appeared between 1980 and the mid-1990s—a period when Shanghai studies grew from a minor subªeld of Sinology (nearly all of its participants living near the Huangpu) to a major international academic cottage industry. As late as the mid-1970s, a typical year would see no more than a handful of academic books and essays on Old Shanghai published outside of China. By the mid-1990s, the number of such works appearing in a twelve-month period routinely numbered in double digits.4 The appearance of Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights, was in keeping with the ongoing trend. Although several studies other than Lu’s that came out as the century turned made important contributions, no other recent work so effectively brings to the fore, via both what it does and what it does not do, pressing issues in the interdisciplinary analysis of the history of urban sites.5

3 For basic background on the period before the Opium War, see Linda C. Johnson, Shang- hai: From Market Town to Treaty Port (Stanford, 1995). For an introduction to differences between Old and New Shanghai, see Christopher Howe (ed.), Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis (Cambridge, 1981). For a brief overview of the political and social structure of Old Shanghai, see the introductory pages of Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Yeh Wenhsin (eds.), Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley, 1992). 4 In 1995 alone, symposia on Old Shanghai (containing articles by Chinese and Western scholars based in Britain, France, Germany, Australia, and the United States) appeared in the English-language Journal of Asian Studies, LIV (1995), 3–123 and China Quarterly, 142 (June 1995), 423–486. The same year also saw the appearance of the already cited Johnson, Shang- hai: From Market Town and several other academic books on Old Shanghai: Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley, 1995); Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Re- gional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, 1995); Harumi Goto-Shibata, Japan and Britain in Shanghai, 1925–31 (New York, 1995). Important individual articles on Shanghai appeared in several leading journals, a case in point being Yeh, “Corporate Space, Communal Time: Everyday Life in Shanghai’s Bank of China,” American Historical Review, C (1995), 97–122. 5 Many signiªcant books on Old Shanghai were published in China around the turn of the century; one that stands out, in interdisciplinary terms, is Wang Hui and Yu Kwok-leung (eds.), Shanghai: Chengshi, shehui yu wenhua [Shanghai: City, Society and Culture] (Hong Kong, 1998). Important books published in Western languages between 1997 and 2000 that

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 266 | JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM The book’s considerable strengths, as well as its weaknesses, become evident within the context of the long-term trends in Shang- hai studies. One of Lu’s goals was to ºesh out the history of a great metropolis by describing particular quotidian aspects of the lives of its lower and middling sorts—which he accomplishes brilliantly— but he had other larger aims as well. In this book, Lu pushes for the adoption of a new agenda for the study of modern Chinese urban life. He argues that Shanghai specialists have been led astray by their continuing concern with placing local developments in an international context. Early works devoted too much attention to the positive and negative effects of the foreign presence, whereas many studies of the 1980s and 1990s that were presented as taking a more “China-centered” approach to Old Shanghai ended up, according to Lu, forcing the city’s past to conform to imported models of cultural development.6

studies of shanghai: the 1950s through 1970s The literature on Old Shanghai produced before 1949, when the People’s Repub- lic of China (prc) was founded, is a worthy subject for analysis on its own terms. It will be enough, however, to contrast publishing trends of the 1950s through 1970s, on the one hand, and those of the 1980s through the 1990s, on the other, focusing mainly on trends relating to books that deal exclusively with Old Shanghai.7

focus largely, or exclusively, on Old Shanghai include Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Pros- titution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley, 1997); Henriot, Belles de Shanghai: Prostitution et sexualité en Chine aux xix–xx siècle (Paris, 1997); Patricia Stranahan, Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival, 1927–1937 (Lanham, Md., 1998); Henriot and Zheng, Atlas de Shanghai; Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism (New York, 1999); Zhang Yingjin (ed.), Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford, 1999); Sherman Cochran (ed.), Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945 (Ithaca, 1999); Leo Oufan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Bernard Wasserstein, Secret War in Shanghai (New York, 1999); Bickers and Henriot (eds.), New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Com- munities in East Asia (Manchester, 2000); Stephen A. Smith, A Road Is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–1927 (Honolulu, 2000). 6 The term “China-centered,” as used by Lu, derives from Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York, 1984), which remains an indispensable introduction to Sinological trends of the 1950s through the early 1980s (in the United States). 7 Bringing articles and unpublished dissertations into the discussion would be too compli- cated, as would taking account of all books treating Shanghai and other places. The chronology below would not have such clear-cut starting and ending dates, but for heuristic purposes, keeping the story simple makes sense. Three English language books published between 1949 and 1979 that do not ªt my argument are Rhoads Murphey, Shanghai: Key to Modern China (Cam-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 NEW APPROACHES TO OLD SHANGHAI | 267 With few exceptions, the books published in this period fall into one of two categories—one of romantic works about the Shanghailanders, often by people who had once been members of that group and lived by the Huangpu, and a larger one of works by people living in New Shanghai who were afªliated with institutions that had close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (ccp).8 Not surprisingly, books in these two categories differ from each other markedly on such basic issues as the inºuence of imperialism on China’s modern history. What must be stressed, however, is that Shanghailanders and Shanghairen writing about Old Shanghai prior to the 1980s shared intense concern with the issue of foreign privilege. Prior to World War II, many Shanghailanders (with some important exceptions) had been ardent defenders of the treaty-port system, which allowed them to be judged, while in China, by laws of their homelands or of their own making. Most Shanghairen (as well as Chinese residents of other cities) tended to view this system as abhorrent. As time passed, this polarity became

bridge, Mass., 1953); Joseph Chen, The May 4th Movement in Shanghai (Leiden, 1971); Andrea McElderry, Shanghai Old-Style Banks (Ann Arbor, 1976). Important Western-language scholarly articles from the period include Mark Elvin, “The Administration of Shanghai, 1905– 1914,” in idem and G. William Skinner (eds.), The Chinese City between Two Worlds (Stanford, 1974), 239–262; Susan Mann-Jones, “The Ningbo Pang and Financial Power in Shanghai,” in ibid., 73–96; Marie-Claire Bèrgere, “Shanghai ou ‘l’autre Chine,’ 1919–1949,” Annales, 5 (September/October 1979), 1039–1068. Many of the doctoral dissertations of the 1970s on Old Shanghai became books in the 1980s. A noteworthy exception is Edward Hammond, “Organized Labor in Shanghai, 1927–1937,” unpub. Ph.D. diss. (University of California, Berkeley, 1978). Three major books that combined discussion of Old Shanghai with discussion of other places are John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Open- ing of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953); Jean Chesneaux (trans. H. M. Wright), The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919–1927 (Stanford, 1968); Mary B. Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). 8 Works in the ªrst category include George Spunt, A Place in Time (New York, 1968); John Pal, Shanghai Saga (London, 1968); J. V. Davidson-Hudson, Yellow Creek: The Story of Shanghai (London, 1962). A useful overview of studies belonging to the second category is by Tan Chenchang, “Shanghai shi yanjiu sishinian (1949–1989)” [Forty years of historical research on Shanghai (1949–1989)], which appears in his collection of essays, Jindai Shanghai tansuo lu [A record of explorations of modern Shanghai] (Shanghai, 1994), 180–197. For dis- cussions of work on speciªc topics done by ccp historians in this period, see also Elizabeth J. Perry, “Scholarship on the Shanghai Labor Movement,” in idem and Wasserstrom (eds.), Shanghai Social Movements, a special double-issue of Chinese Studies in History, XXVII (1993/ 94), 1–12; Stranahan, “Editor’s Introduction,” The Communist Party in Shanghai, special issue of Chinese Studies in History, XXVIII (1994/95), 3–22; idem, “Bibliographic Essay” in Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford, 1991), 381–390.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 268 | JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM more pronounced. In fact, nearly all of the historical works devoted to Old Shanghai produced from the 1950s to the 1970s dealt heavily with the foreign presence, either positively or negatively. Rarely did authors consider the treaty-port system and its accom- panying features—such as the ability of Shanghailanders in the Settlement to be governed by a locally elected municipal council—neutrally.9 The simplest way for Shanghailanders to justify their own past as privileged residents of the treaty port was to claim that foreign rule had been good for the metropolis and, indeed, for China gen- erally. Their vision of the foreign presence as essentially benign was taken up by certain Western academics of the era. These scholars sometimes put more emphasis than did the Shanghai- landers on the contribution to local development made by native merchants and ofªcials, working in tandem with foreigners in a process dubbed “Synarchy” (conveying a sense of collaborative rule by Western and Chinese elites).10 Shanghairen who wrote between 1949 and 1979 had good cause to approach the treaty-port system from an opposite, but complementary, perspective. It was impossible for these authors to de-emphasize the activities of privileged Western (and Japanese) groups or to treat these activities as anything but vile. A central tenet of the ccp’s ideology was that the “unequal treaties” of the 1800s that had allowed foreigners to exert control over Chinese land had done enormous damage. Thus, for Shanghairen, the most important stories about Old Shanghai were not tales of synarchy and collaboration but rather of bold Chinese efforts to rid the city and the nation of imperialist institutions. Again, certain foreign academics—such as Chesneaux, the French Marxist, whose monu- mental 1950s history of Chinese labor movements concentrated largely on Old Shanghai—followed suit.11 One outcome of this common concern with the treaty-port system’s morality (or lack thereof ) was that any variety within the literature produced between 1949 and 1979 typically derived not

9 Citations to pre–World War II critiques and defenses of foreign privilege by Shanghailanders and Shanghairen can be found in Wasserstrom, “Questioning the Modernity of the Model Settlement: Citizenship and Exclusion in Old Shanghai,” in Merle Goldman and Perry (eds.), Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming, 2002). 10 The most famous work about Synarchy is Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy. 11 Chesneaux, Chinese Labor Movement.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 NEW APPROACHES TO OLD SHANGHAI | 269 from disagreement about the importance of Sino–foreign interactions but from the starkly contrasting ways in which the reports of these interactions were framed and interpreted. Did the arrival of Westerners transform Old Shanghai into a “Paradise for Adven- turers” (as some Shanghailanders liked to put it) or a “seething volcano” of hatred and oppression (as a Chinese journalist once claimed)? Should the foreign settlers be viewed as saviors who turned a “wilderness of marshes” into a glittering showplace of cosmopolitan modernity (the Shanghailander claim)? Or were they “bloodsuckers” happy to exploit the toil and suffering of Shanghairen to create a city in which (to quote another treaty- port era Chinese journalist) “forty-eight story skyscrapers” stood atop “twenty-four layers of hell”? At one extreme were works that followed the narrative line of Pal, Shanghai Saga. Like many of his fellow Shanghailanders, Pal looked back on his time in Old Shanghai through rose-colored glasses. For example, he made no mention of the inability, until the 1920s, of even the wealthiest Shanghairen living in the Inter- national Settlement to vote in local elections or stand for ofªce, thereby to help determine how their taxes should be spent. In- stead, Pal recalled how foreigners in the two enclaves made and spent money.12 Shanghai Saga and works like it paid little attention to the experiences of either the residents of the Chinese Municipality (which was not, for their purposes, part of “Shanghai”) or the many Shanghairen who lived in foreign-run districts. These over- sights are important. The Chinese Municipality not only bordered the two foreign-run enclaves in every direction except east (where the river served as a border) but also dwarfed the Settlement and Concession in size and population. Moreover, most of the people living in each foreign-run enclave were recent migrants from China’s rural hinterlands. When reading works like Pal’s, however, it is as easy to forget this fact as it is to forget that much more money was made through industrial production (Shanghai was a major textile center) than through the activities that took place at race tracks and cabarets. Another group that received scant attention in these works was the small but steadily growing Chinese bourgeoisie of the

12 Pal, Shanghai Saga; much that I say here would apply equally well to Davidson-Houston, Yellow Creek.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 270 | JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM early 1900s, many of whom clustered in Old Shanghai. The fascination that Shanghailander authors had with their own activities left little room for interest in even the members of other foreign groups. Shanghailander authors frequently reduced the city’s Japa- nese and White Russian communities—each of which in the 1930s were larger than the French, British, and American ones combined—to minor characters.13 Pal and his ilk were content, for the most part, to describe and mourn the loss of a special place that, in their imaginations and memories, was no more than a displaced piece of the West. Old Shanghai, they claimed, had been a “cosmopolitan melting pot,” founded on “tolerance” (to use two of Pal’s phrases). They took guidebook phrases like “Paris of the East” and “New York of the West” seriously. On the other end, the Chinese language books that appeared between 1949 and 1979 presented Old Shanghai as the site of gross injustices and brave acts of protest. Their authors tended to study anti-imperialist mass movements and to praise ccp activists for or- ganizing workers and students to ªght foreign oppression and domestic misrule. Their concern with local exploitation and resistance often centered on particular struggles (the general strikes of 1925, for example) or the lives of leaders of, or martyrs to, the ccp cause. General surveys of Shanghai history were also shaped by the basic themes of viliªcation (imperialism) and celebration (revolution). Speciªc events, and even physical landmarks, could assume great symbolic signiªcance in illustrating issues of domina- tion and struggle. Much was made of the recreation ground known as the “Public Garden,” near the Huangpu River, from which all Chinese (other than servants attending foreigners) were long excluded. The ªght to open the park became a metonym for the national struggle against colonialism. Much was also made of the places in Shanghai where radical groups—including the ccp itself—were founded. Despite their contrasting approaches, the two categories of historical works shared more than just a fascination with the foreign presence. Neither showed any interest in the quotidian experiences of ordinary Shanghairen. The former Shanghailanders

13 On these and other often-ignored foreign communities, see Bickers and Henriot, New Frontiers; for Japanese residents, see also Joshua A. Fogel, “‘Shanghai-Japan’: The Japanese Residents’ Association of Shanghai,” Journal of Asian Studies, LIX (2000), 927–950.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 NEW APPROACHES TO OLD SHANGHAI | 271 ignored the lower and middling Chinese inhabitants of Old Shanghai, and the early prc books took note of them only when they took to the streets, went on strike, encountered underground Communist organizers, and so forth. The two strains were also similar in their use of relatively limited source materials. Many of the former Shanghailanders could not even read Chinese. They tended to rely heavily on the local English language press, as well as on their own memories and the memoirs of their compatriots. Sometimes they would supplement their research with forays into diplomatic papers available in Lon- don or Washington, but they rarely went any further. ccp historians were often more eclectic and resourceful, delv- ing into police archives and reading the local Chinese, as well as Western, language press. Many also collected oral histories or so- licited accounts from eyewitnesses. But, ultimately, their material was limited, too. Prior to the 1980s, many Shanghai-based historians consulted documents associated only with certain kinds of people, deªned in terms of class and political orientation. Further- more, they could become so obsessed about particular events that a single turbulent year (such as 1925) might attract more discussion than a relatively quiet decade (such as the 1870s).

shanghai studies: the 1980s through 1990s A series of interrelated developments altered dramatically the size and scope of the literature on the history of China’s largest city in the closing decades of the twentieth century. First, the Chinese archives opened. Before the 1980s, not only were foreigners forbidden ac- cess to important collections, such as those of the Shanghai Muni- cipal Archive; most Shanghairen were as well. In addition, this period saw a marked increase in international exchange programs that brought Shanghai specialists from various countries together in workshops and conferences. Since the late 1980s, a typical Shang- hai symposium has included participants from two or more conti- nents, and Shanghairen now regularly pass through foreign locales where Western scholars working on Old Shanghai are based. Another change that occurred in the 1980s was a shift of interest among the Anglophone social historians who were studying China. In the 1970s, nearly all of them had been concerned with the rural aspects of the Chinese Revolution, but by the 1980s, an increasing number began to explore its urban dimensions. The ex-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 272 | JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM periences and political actions of city dwellers became worthy subjects of study in their own right. Urban developments were viewed as critical components in the rise of the Nationalist Party and the ccp to power. Now the authors writing about Old Shang- hai in English ceased to be mainly Shanghailanders fascinated by economic elites. They were scholars able to read sources in Chi- nese (and typically also Japanese), who were interested in plumb- ing the archives located in Shanghai, Paris, London, and other relevant cities and who, in many cases, were convinced of the ne- cessity of doing history from the bottom up.14 At the same time, China started to encourage more varied work in local urban history. Within Shanghai, histories of the treaty-port era that looked at issues other than the dynamics of oppression and resistance and the role of the ccp were receiving increased support. Shanghai-based specialists began to do historical work on local sites and local events that had played no clear part in the Chinese Revolution, and some became interested in describing forms of diversity not directly related to class, such as divisions among Shanghairen related to gender, native-place origin, or oc- cupation. In addition, especially in the 1990s, there was a growing interest, both inside and outside China, in ªnding out whether Old Shanghai’s economic development might provide a clue to understanding New Shanghai’s emergence internationally in trade and ªnance. Moreover, alongside Shanghai’s economic re-engage- ment with the capitalist world came notice, within cultural circles, of the treaty port’s role as a publishing and ªlmmaking capital. Thanks to all of these developments, Chinese- and English- language publishing booms began in the 1980s and reached a new pinnacle during the mid-1990s. As the last century ended, these interrelated booms gave no sign that they had crested. Moreover, the last two decades of the 1900s saw the appearance of many im- pressive works on Old Shanghai written in languages other than English and Chinese. In French, for example, were major studies

14 A good introduction to this new work is Wakeman and Yeh, Shanghai Sojourners. In addition to other works already cited, some major works in English from this period were Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, 1993); Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, 1986); idem, Creating Chi- nese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850–1980 (New Haven, 1993). One important work from the 1980s that did not take a bottom-up approach is Parks Coble, The Shanghai Capital- ists and the Nationalist Government, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 NEW APPROACHES TO OLD SHANGHAI | 273 by Bergère, Henriot, and Roux. Important works were published in Japanese as well, including an elegantly produced multi- authored survey of Shanghai’s history that may well be the best basic introduction to the city’s past in any language—Takahashi and Furuya, Shanghai shi.15 The quantitative difference between the number of books in all genres published from the early 1950s through late 1970s and those published from that point to the end of the century is dramatic. But even more striking is the increasingly diffuse nature of those studies. A particularly important trend in recent decades (especially given the interests of this journal) has been the shift away from the issue of foreign inºuence, as either a civilizing or oppres- sive force. Groundbreaking new work on diplomacy and the im- portation to Shanghai of Western ideas and methods associated with urban planning and the press has appeared, as has new work on the old topic of anti-imperialist movements.16 Instead of describing, celebrating, or decrying the foreign presence, however, most authors have worked to create a more China-centered history of Old Shanghai. They have mapped the vertical and hori- zontal linkages and the disparities of power separating members of different social groups. They have followed many of the methodological cues and built on many of the interpretive insights of historians concerned with non-Chinese urban settings. Hence, while striving to be more “China-centered,” some of the most recent publications in Shanghai studies have also become more comparative. They have moved away from approaching Shanghai as a unique case or one that is analogous only to other Chinese coastal

15 Along with other French works cited earlier, see Bèrgere, Noël Castelino, Henriot, and Pu-yin Ho, “Essai de prosopographie des élites Shanghaiennes a l’époque republicaine, 1911– 1949,” Annales, 4 (July/August 1985), 901–930; Roux, Grèves et politique à Shanghai. Les désillusions (1927–1932) (Paris, 1993). Important work has been done in Germany as well as in Japan and France and in Anglophone countries, but much of the best of it has been published in English: for example, the works of the Heidelberg-based Catherine Vance Yeh, “Creating a Shanghai Identity—Late Qing Courtesan Handbooks and the Formation of the New Citi- zen,” in Tao Tao Liu and David Faure (eds.), Unity and Diversity: Local Cultures and Identities in China (Hong Kong, 1996), 107–125; Rudolph G. Wagner, “The Role of the Foreign Com- munity in the Chinese Public Sphere,” China Quarterly, 142 (June 1995), 423–443; and a forthcoming book by Barbara Mittler about the Shen Bao newspaper. 16 Along with previously cited works, such as those of Bickers, important studies of the 1980s and 1990s that focused on Sino–foreign interactions included Kerrie L. MacPherson, A Wilderness of Marshes: The Origins of Public Health in Shanghai, 1843–1893 (Hong Kong, 1987); Nicholas Clifford, Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s (Hanover, 1991).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 274 | JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM cities. In certain ways, Lu’s book ªts this proªle; in others, it bucks the current trends.17

ordinary lives, traditions, and modernities Beyond the Neon Lights begins with a nod toward the historiographical developments just described. On his ªrst page, Lu comments that, in recent decades, an “extraordinary amount of scholarly attention” has been paid to Old Shanghai “both in the West and in China.” He stresses the “variety as well as academic depth of the literature on Shanghai that has appeared since the early 1980s,” and he dem- onstrates a good grasp of the breadth of the recent writing on Old Shanghai. Scholars based in the West, Lu writes, have “touched upon a wide range of topics in the political, economical, social, and cultural realms.” They have looked at everything from “the indigenous growth of pre–treaty-port Shanghai to the presence of the West in the city,” traced the path from “traditional merchant organizations to modern entrepreneurship,” examined “public health and higher education,” and explored everything from the “divisions among intellectuals to the taxonomy of prostitution” (1). Lu describes as a “blessing” the fact that this ºourishing of foreign studies of Old Shanghai has been matched by the “efºorescence of research” in local history done “in the city itself” as part of a nationwide effort to revive “the Chinese tradition of local history,” associated with the creation of gazetteers on speciªc places. Luckily, Lu claims, the work done in Shanghai on the treaty-port era “reached beyond the limits of conventional gazet- teer compilation,” in topical scope and in the kind of materials published (1). Books of sources, ranging from reminiscences to photographic histories, were produced. So too were many “research monographs and treatises” of “good quality” (2). Notwithstanding these general comments on positive developments in Shanghai studies, Lu is disturbed by a lacuna concern- ing the “customs, habits, and traditions” that rural migrants brought with them from the countryside into Old Shanghai, and how these were altered, but not lost, during their encounters with

17 For a good sense of how recent trends have affected the study of other Chinese cities, see Joseph W. Esherick (ed.), Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950 (Honolulu, 2000).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 NEW APPROACHES TO OLD SHANGHAI | 275 the “new, modern, and Western aspects of urban life.” Missing from the “rich and colorful gallery of portraits of Shanghai,” he says, are portrayals of the “daily life of ordinary people”—the xiaoshimin (literally, little urbanites, a category that includes shop- keepers, teachers, and clerks) and the urban poor (2). One goal of Beyond the Neon Lights is to provide a better sense of their homes, their meals, their private pursuits, and so on. In the main body of his book, Lu takes up topics as broad as the social geography of neighborhoods and as narrow as the snacks sold on the streets, adding signiªcantly to the extant “gallery of portraits” of Old Shanghai. He is able to convey a sense of how time was passed in places far removed from the glittering halls of luxury that have too often served as metonyms for the city as a whole. Lu even gives an account of the sounds—from cock crows to the calls of night soil collectors to neighborhood gossip—that ªlled the air during typical mornings and evenings. Through care- fully chosen commentaries by journalists and other social observ- ers—as well as folksongs, photographs, and drawings—Lu brings a lost metropolis back to life. Lu enlivens his narrative with local sayings (to look for a niche in the urban milieu is to search for “a place to stick an awl”). He provides descriptions and grounds them in statistics (for example, Shanghai had more than a quarter of a million white-collar workers by the late 1930s). The greatest value (and charm) of the book lies in the speciªcity that Lu brings to his various subjects. He draws upon his own background, ex- tensive archival research, and return trips to his native city, during which he worked with scholars at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences to interview local residents about how they survived before 1949. Lu makes a strong case that knowledge about Old Shanghai depends largely on familiarity with the texture of everyday life there. However, Beyond the Neon Lights also seeks to advance the idea that contributors to Shanghai studies have often mishandled issues of change and continuity. They have not moved far enough away from seeing the treaty-port period through the distorting prism of Western ideas about modernity. According to Lu, Shanghai studies suffer from two maladies. The ªrst is the lingering effect of a reiªed bifurcation between tradition and modernity. It obscures the vibrant form of “traditionalism” that is rooted in quotidian existence. The Shanghairen of the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 276 | JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM treaty-port era created, and then bequeathed to their contemporary successors, a powerful cultural repertoire of ideas and strate- gies for coping with city life. This repertoire was constructed out of practices and beliefs that migrants brought from the countryside and modiªed to suit their new more urban and more cosmopolitan surroundings, and it has proved surprisingly resilient through changing times, withstanding imperialism and communism alike. Lu thinks that the repertoire deserves more attention and respect than scholars have accorded it. The other methodological and historiographical problem that Lu addresses is the tendency of those struggling to write a more China-centered history of Shanghai to squeeze local realities into imported tubes. While trying to correct for distortions generated by overemphasizing the foreign presence, Lu claims, scholars became too enamored of misleading foreign categories. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Shanghai specialists tried too hard to place developments in the city within the framework of the “civil society” and “public sphere” paradigms developed in the West to ex- plain certain aspects of European and North American urban cultures. These two arguments of Lu’s are much less persuasive than his more basic claim that we shortchange our understanding of the past when we fail to consider the rhythms of daily life. His discussion of traditionalism, though valid to some degree, seems to un- derstate the importance of regional and class differences in Shanghai. After the trouble that Lu takes to depict the varied backgrounds of Old Shanghai’s migrants and to reconstruct the complex hierarchy of niches into which they ultimately placed their awls, does it make sense to fall back on a single Shanghai- style pragmatism supposedly able to negotiate the dualities of traditional/novel and foreign/native—not to mention male/female and young/old? Lu would have us believe that a concerted out- look of this kind is at the heart of New Shanghai’s re-emergence as a thriving urban center. The good deal of truth in what Lu has to say glosses over how great the gulfs have been, and once again are, between Shanghai’s haves and have nots—and between different subsets of each group. Ironically, for a bottom-up study, he writes little about la- boring per se, even though many Shanghairen spent long hours sitting at looms, unloading cargo from ships, ministering to the pa-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 NEW APPROACHES TO OLD SHANGHAI | 277 trons of brothels, and so forth. Nor is he as informative as he could be about how different the meaning of leisure must have been for those who worked these endless shifts. Furthermore, Beyond the Neon Lights makes it too easy to forget the complex social distinc- tions in Old Shanghai; even near the bottom and around the mid- dle, there were disparities and degrees of deprivation. Particularly problematic is the short shrift given to the myriad ways that class and region of origin—which often went hand-in- hand, as Honig and Perry stress—inºected the Shanghai experi- ence. Though it has become something of a cheap shot merely to add an “s” whenever one feels uncomfortable with a broad level of generalization, a thesis that made room for a variety of traditionalisms—as well as of xiaoshimin and urban poor—would have been welcome. As Glosser noted in a perceptive review of Beyond the Neon Lights, Lu sometimes seems to have read but not taken to heart the observations of scholars like Honig and Perry. In the end, Lu’s urban villagers seem too much of a piece, too ho- mogeneous a group. Although he moves away from Old Shang- hai’s bright lights, he tends to neglect the dark side of a society that was not oriented just toward consumption but also toward production.18 The problem with Lu’s discussion of “civil society” and “public sphere” is not that it fails to take work by others seriously enough but that it takes particular works too seriously. He treats as representative of the ªeld of Old Shanghai studies a relatively small, though admittedly inºuential, subset of recent writings. He makes a good point that a fascination with ªnding analogs between Chinese and Western urban centers sometimes leads China specialists into blind alleys, but his assumption that that comparison has to involve a particular Western pattern is mistaken. Scholars can move, and have moved, between different urban settings in far more subtle ways, ªnding speciªc points where histories overlap and diverge. To eschew comparison altogether, as Lu professes to do (though comparative remarks about slums, for example, manage to enter his text), risks the problem at the other extreme of Western centrism—an overstatement of Old Shang- hai’s uniqueness. Much in Lu’s presentation of life there resonates

18 Susan L. Glosser, review, Journal of Asian Studies, LIX (2000), 1005–1006. See also Perry, Shanghai on Strike; Honig, Sisters and Strangers; idem, Creating Chinese Ethnicity.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 278 | JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM with depictions of rapidly growing and industrializing cities located far from the Huangpu. Lu’s account would have been enriched by more consider- ation, at least in passing, of what precisely made Old Shanghai’s urban villagers similar to, and different from, those who poured into some of these other metropolises. Victorian London, nine- teenth-century Paris, and early twentieth-century New York all had their informal (if not ofªcially recognized) enclaves of privilege and poverty. All had neighborhoods with “urban villagers” not so unlike Shanghairen—recent migrants from the countryside trying to create new lifestyles by mixing and matching rural traditions and novel practices. Furthermore, Lu might have noted the many colonial cities throughout the world where the stresses and strains caused by periods of rapid growth are not unlike those ex- perienced by early twentieth-century Shanghairen. Far short of making his book a full-blown study in comparative urban history, Lu could have done much more to explore similarities and differences on a wider scale. Without such examinations, however, it is difªcult to know what to make of Lu’s broadest arguments about how Old Shanghai’s traditions helped to facilitate the city’s new global status. We are left having to accept on faith the notion that the Shanghairen are in a class by themselves. A related question is, Why did Lu deªne “everyday Shang- hai” to include only Chinese residents? Would it not have been valuable to examine, for example, the plight of the lower and middling sorts of Shanghairen vis-à-vis that of the have nots (or barely haves) within the foreign community? The slum dwellers were not exclusively Chinese. In the early 1900s, many White Russian refugees lived in slums as well. Even British Shanghailanders had their xiaoshimin (minor clerks in trading houses, for example), whose day-to-day existence was far more difªcult than that of the more well-to-do Westerners. Again, Lu might have been well served by thinking comparatively about different types of nonelite resident. A ªnal methodological misgiving relates to Lu’s deªnition of the “everyday” as separate from the political. Some of the best work in Chinese urban history in recent years—including Strand’s Rickshaw Beijing—refuse to differentiate cleanly between these two worlds. They present acts of resistance as infused with beliefs and practices adapted for political use from ordinary life—some-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219501750442404 by guest on 27 September 2021 NEW APPROACHES TO OLD SHANGHAI | 279 times to good effect. Moreover, Old Shanghai, at least in the 1920s and 1930s, hosted so many anti-imperialist boycotts, mass marches, patriotic rallies, market strikes, and the like that the idea of an “everyday” reality devoid of political mobilization is untena- ble. Sensitivity to this issue would have enriched Lu’s analysis; the links between quotidian and protest patterns has been of great concern to many scholars working on other urban settings.19

These remarks on the kind of contribution that Lu might have made should not obscure his considerable accomplishment. Nor is it necessarily a discredit that this book may inspire comparative questions that nonspecialists will have to answer for themselves. After all, Sinologists picking up books on Paris and London long had to do so. Only rarely have such works been so ªlled with the fascinating stuff of ordinary urban lives. 19 David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley, 1989). Studies of Shanghai labor that draw upon quotidian experiences include Honig, Sisters and Strangers; Perry, Shanghai on Strike. A similar approach is taken toward campus activism in Wasserstrom, Student Protests. Scholars interested in other parts of the world who notice links between daily life and matters of protest include Edward P. Thompson and a host of specialists in French history—Michelle Perrott, Charles Tilly, and Natalie Davis, to name but three. Each of these authors has been inºuential in one or more of the works about China just cited.

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