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Reviewed by:
  • Global Shanghai, 1850–2010
  • Joyman Lee
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. Global Shanghai, 1850–2010. Abingdon, Oxon (UK): Routledge, 2009. xvi, 170 pp. ISBN 0-415-21328-8, $39.95 (paper).

This is an informative and exciting study of Shanghai’s transformation from a relatively small Chinese city in 1850 through its reemergence as a global metropolis in the post-opening up reform period. Global Shanghai is addressed largely to a popular audience, but it is also an experimental cultural history that attempts to bring to life Shanghai of the various periods by providing detailed, evocative, and fact-heavy snapshots of the city in each of these different periods. Structurally, the book is divided into seven chapters covering the one hundred sixty year period ending with the 2010 Expo, spaced by quarter-century intervals. Global Shanghai is not based on archival research but rather draws heavily on the author’s own experience as a scholar of Shanghai, as well as an impressive range of contemporary travel accounts, literary publications, newspaper sources, and promotional literature for the city’s tourism industry.

Global Shanghai does not attempt to provide a central narrative explaining Shanghai’s story; as Wasserstrom notes, Shanghai studies is already a ‘booming cottage industry’ (p. 141) both in China and the West, and the bibliographical section at the end points to a wide range of secondary works in English and French as well as in Japanese and Chinese. Rather, the author focuses on bringing the city’s past to life through a thick description of specially selected events as well as what contemporaries wrote. He is especially good at emphasizing that Shanghai was neither completely a Chinese nor Western city; the very dispute as to whether the city was born in 1291, when Chinese documents first mentioned the city, or 1843, when Westerners first settled there, highlights this duality in the modern city’s origins. To Wasserstrom, the myth that surrounds Shanghai is largely an “illusion” (p. 9), and in searching for the roots behind the most popular images of Shanghai today, he offers “questions without answers” (p. 11) and [End Page 480] allows the reader to judge on the basis of the rich array of information that he supplies.

The early chapters on 1850, 1875, and 1900 chronicle the gradual emergence of the city from the birth of the North China Herald, the mouthpiece of the city’s “Shanghailander”, or expatriate community through its emergence as a Western-dominated city by 1900 in the wake of the intense anti-foreign sentiments in the rest of China during the Boxer Rebellion. Wasserstrom is at his best on the 1920s, where he gives us detailed insights into the cultural tensions and ambiguities underlying the global metropolis at its peak using the May 30th movement of strikes in Japanese-run textile mills as his focus. By 1950, the city had already fallen to the Communists; some elements of the old Shanghai of vice still survived, but the Communists were determined to prove their doubters wrong by transforming Shanghai rather than being transformed by it. The city undertook another sharp change by 2000 when Shanghai had reemerged as a rival to Hong Kong and an industrial center, although as a metropolis it is also increasingly a profoundly “disorienting” (p. 115) place existing in complex tension with the nation’s arguably more important capital city, Beijing.

One of the strongest areas of the book is the range of testimonies that Wasserstrom draws on; he is equally at ease with the confident “Shanghailander”-dominated city of the Jubilee celebrations as with the deep political and cultural conflicts in the 1920s that brought Shanghai to the forefront of the Chinese political scene. That said, one is still left with the impression that the stories of the Chinese poor deserve more attention, and it would be interesting, for example, if Wasserstrom could include more information from Chinese newspapers and voices from below the municipal archives for the twentieth century and local gentry writing for the earlier period. Similarly, at the same time that Wasserstrom fleshes out the intricate historical moments in the city’s past, one is left with a more ambivalent sense of how that...

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