Histoire de Shanghai (review)

This history of China's major port city is a comprehensive and richly researched account by a leading French scholar. The time period covered encompasses the arrival of foreigners in the city, its formation as a treaty port, and developments right up to the time of publication. The book is divided into four major parts, which are subdivided into major themes. The first part, in examining the meeting between the Chinese and arriving foreign merchants, explains the process that ensued as one of adaptation of foreign contributions to Chinese national culture and traditions. Bergère is well known for her work on the rise and contributions of the Chinese bourgeoisie. In this section, she lays out its roots, the alliance between the compradores and merchants, and the birth of Chinese capitalism.

In part 2, Bergère focuses on the golden age of Chinese capitalism (1915-1927), one of three such periods identified in this work. Shanghai society developed with modern transportation, communications, and banking, showing that Chinese society was not paralyzed by Western innovations, but made practical use of these contributions. Local society experienced geographical and social mobility, the latter helped by traditional institutions with modern agendas. Still, the regime's failure to protect Chinese sovereignty led to community leaders joining scholars and merchants in ways that transcended old patterns. Fed by new educational institutions, foreign study, and reform programs, political consciousness was raised mainly through popular mass movements. Better organization and the program of Sun Yat-sen followed, culminating in the Revolution of 1911. Still, Shanghai's residual bureaucratic and rural ties became obvious once again as its conservative social elite and revolutionary leaders resigned themselves to support Yuan Shi-kai and the counterrevolutionary forces.

Shanghai's new entrepreneurs or bourgeoisie were open to modern ideas and innovations but also remained tied to their regional groups and traditional values. They created a hybrid system that placed tradition at the service of economic objectives in a Confucian-style modernization. The early 1920s were favorable to the explosion of foreign commerce. Still, with the eclipse of the state, the bourgeoisie's lack of supportive, institutionalized authority would eventually render them powerless after 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek found ways to use them to centralize and buttress his new regime. Without an institutionalized voice with independent reform strategies and proposals, civil society could not develop and strengthen. Instead, the vibrant economy became a key basis of state power under Chiang's system of state capitalism, the bureaucracy stripping away independent initiative and influence.

Bergère explains the dynamics of a mass mobilization that joined merchants and workers at the side of the radical intelligentsia and students, and how the anti-imperialist inspiration of the 1920s became national salvation in the 1930s. Chiang saw the national salvation movement as manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), failing to appreciate the genuine national reaction to Japanese aggression. He turned to cultural reaction to condemn Western values and reaffirm Confucianism through his conservative New Life Movement, giving its program teeth through his Blue Shirts organization. Also, the process by which Chiang came to rely on secret societies for money and support is detailed, as is the life of Shanghai's chief Green Gang leader, Du Yuesheng. Du's rise—for a time he was both ruler and protector of Shanghai society, enjoying respectability and institutionalized power—was stopped only by the outbreak of war in 1937. Chiang's attempt to use the gang and still control it was a treacherous endeavor and eventually served to undermine his public role as the artisan of national revolution.

In part 3, Bergère ascribes the direct cause of the Sino-Japanese conflict to Chiang's decision to extend the hostilities in the north to Shanghai where he believed local forces and conditions were more favorable and where the foreign presence and international element might benefit Nanking. But, to the contrary, these plans failed, his forces were defeated, the capital abandoned...