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9 Building a New Society The Demise of Cabarets under the CCP, 1949–1954 The Dancers’ Uprising of January 31, 1948 demonstrated the collective power of cabaret workers and highlighted the difficulties surrounding the Nationalist government’s crusade to ban cabarets in Shanghai. Nevertheless, they did not give up the goal and continued to act on the principle of ridding the city of its notorious vice industries, including nightclubs. This campaign proved fruitless . The Nationalist government faced a much larger crisis in the growing power of the Chinese Communist movement. After the Red Army marched into the city in May 1949, the Communists took control of city government. During the 1950s, the Communists succeeded not only in shutting down the cabaret industry, but in abolishing many other pleasure industries as well, including opium, gambling, and prostitution.1 This final chapter relates how in the aftermath of the Dancers’ Uprising and the failed drive by the Nationalists to stamp out the industry during the late 1940s, the CCP, learning from the mistakes of its predecessor, went about methodically closing it down once and for all. It also discusses the principal reasons for doing so, and in the process evaluates the claim that the cabaret industry of Shanghai, had over the previous decades, sunk from a high-class form of entertainment into a sea of decadence and decay. REGULATION NIGHTMARES: DANCE ACADEMIES AND DANCE CAPTAINS Most of the cabarets that operated in the city did so without a license, which caused one of the main problems pertaining to regulating the industry, and made them far more difficult to monitor and control. Many were simply restaurants and cafés with dance floors, while others disguised themselves as “dance academies,” which offered training in the dancing arts with male and female “teachers,” who substituted for dance hostesses. During late 1940s, city residents constantly pressured the government and police to govern these establishments, which in the eyes of many were noisy and unruly, corrupting Shanghai.indb 263 2010/5/11 11:49:19 AM 264 · Shanghai’s Dancing World urban youth. For example, in January of 1946, city residents Li Zhishi and Zhang Shenwei sent a letter to Chief of Police Xuan Tiewu deploring dance academies and so called “dance professors” (tiaowu jiaoshou). According to them, these men masqueraded as professors and took on male and female students for high tuition fees. They coaxed young female students to go to cabarets, and then took them to inns for where they seduced them. Dance academies were debasing the morals of the city and its people. Since the government shut down massage parlors, their women had all begun to enter dance academies to serve as “teachers.” Li and Zhang also point to another phenomenon taking place in the context of urban reforms: the flow of prostitution from illegal sites into legitimate ones. Foreign inhabitants also lodged public complaints about dance academies, which carried on loudly until early morning and brought drunken sailors and other disorderly people into residential neighborhoods. Police took note of these concerns and filed them, but did not make an overall effort to close the “schools” down. Meanwhile, in another rectification of names campaign, they forced them to once again change their names, this time to “social dance art practice spaces” ( jiaoji wuyi zhuanxi suo).2 Throughout the late 1940s and into the 1950s, “underground cabarets” (dixia wuting) continued to operate in Shanghai, making it hard for the government to control this industry. The eradication of the institution of the “dance captain” (wunü daban), an even more important anti-vice campaign taking place during the late 1940s, influenced the decision of both the GMD and CCP governments to shut down cabarets. By the 1940s, this profession had become common among licensed nightclubs in Shanghai, which charged them, usually men, with managing groups of hostesses there. Their services included introducing hostesses to patrons, and protecting them from disorderly elements. In 1946, the Shanghai police launched a vigorous campaign to outlaw dance captains. The press vilified these men as pimps, procuring hostesses for sexual favors with patrons and taking cuts, as well as abusing their own power by forcing hostesses to have sexual relations with them.3 In response to police, government, and society ’s pressure, the SCG responded in their customary fashion by proposing to limit the number of dance captains according to the grades of cabarets. Meanwhile , the SCG requested that police send one security officer ( jicha) to each hall to monitor these men...

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