Is global Shanghai "good to think"? Thoughts on comparative history and post-socialist cities

Journal of World History

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 199-234

  Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMPARATIVE STUDY; GLOBALIZATION; SOCIAL HISTORY; SOCIALISM;

ASIA; BUDAPEST; CENTRAL EUROPE; CHINA; EURASIA; EUROPE; FAR EAST; HUNGARY; SHANGHAI;

EID: 34250765639     PISSN: 10456007     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (117)

1. Thomas F. Millard, China: Where It Is Today and Why (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), pp. 249-250;
2. Jack F. Williams, "Cities of East Asia," in Cities of the World: World Regional Urban Development, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley D. Brunn and Jack F. Williams (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 454, 458;
3. and David Byrne, Understanding the Urban (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 92.
4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1963), see especially p. 89.
5. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, pp. 85-88, for comparative method in general, and pp. 99-102, for Rousseau.
6. The other major sections in Brunn and Williams, Cities of the World, include "Cities of Europe" (which is subdivided into "Western Europe" and "Eastern Europe"), "Cities of Latin America," "Cites of Southeast Asia," etc.
7. For a full list of gamma-class cities, defined in this way, see J. V. Beaverstock, P. J. Taylor, and R. G. Smith, "A Roster of World Cities," Cities 16, no. 6 (1999): 445-458.
8. For an introduction to the voluminous English language literature on Shanghai (with some comments on works in other languages), see Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "New Approaches to Old Shanghai: A Review Essay," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 2 (Autumn 2001): 263-279.
9. Two of the most comprehensive multilingual bibliographies on Shanghai can be found in Christian Henriot and Zheng Zu'an, Altas de Shanghai: Espaces et represéntations de 1849 à nos jours (Paris, 1999),
10. and Takahashi Kosuke and Furuye Tadao, eds., Shanhai shi (Tokyo, 1995). And one of the best overviews of Chinese language scholarship on Shanghai is Tan Chenchang, "Shanghai shi yanjiu sishinian (1949-1989)" [Forty years of historical research on Shanghai (1949-1989)],
11. in idem, Jindai Shanghai tansuo lu [A record of explorations of modern Shanghai] (Shanghai, 1994), pp. 180-197.
12. Urbanist Wu Fulong has been the most prolific and in many ways most interesting Shanghai specialist working on the city's recent past to try to place the metropolis into comparative perspective. Though my approach diverges from his at various points and I eschew the main definitional category, that of contemporary Shanghai as a "transitional city," that he employs, I have found and continue to find his work both useful and stimulating. See, for example, Fulong Wu, "Transitional Cities," Environment and Planning 35, no. 8 (2003): 1331-1338;
13. and idem, "Globalization, Place Promotion, and Urban Development in Shanghai," Journal of Urban Affairs 25, no. 1 (2003): 55-78.
14. Marie-Claire Bèrgere, "Shanghai ou 'l'autre Chine,' 1919-1949," Annales 5 (September/October 1979): 1039-1068.
15. Three publications from the 1990s that deal largely or exclusively with Shanghai and devote considerable attention to comparison, but generally stay within an East Asian framework, are Y. M. Yeung and Sung Yun-wing, eds., Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization under China's Open Policy(Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1996), which has many discussions of Hong Kong-Shanghai similarities and dissimilarities;
16. Yang Dongping, Chengshi jifend: Beijing he Shanghai de wenhua jingshen [City Monsoon: The Cultural Spirit of Beijing and Shanghai] (Beijing: Dongfang Press, 1994];
17. and Shanghai-Yokohama Research Group, eds., Shanghai he Hengbin: jin dai Yazhou liang ge kai fang chengshi [Shanghai and Yokohama: Two Open Cities of Modern Asia] (Shanghai: Huadong Shifan daxue, 1997).
18. Exceptions to the pattern just described include Leo Ou-fan Lee's nod to New York-Shanghai comparisons in Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 10-11. This case is typical of the tendency of such exceptions to take the form of passing comments (that may, of course, as in this instance, be insightful) as opposed to sustained analyses that fully describe and justify a comparison.
19. Rudolf Wagner's noteworthy publications on Old Shanghai include "The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere," China Quarterly 142 (June 1995): 423-443.
20. Millard was an American journalist who helped reshape the English-language press in Shanghai in the second decade of the twentieth century by founding both a daily newspaper, the China Press (in 1911), and a weekly, Millard's Review of the Far East, which later changed its name to the China Weekly Review.
21. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Locating Old Shanghai: Having Fits about Where It Fits," in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000), pp. 192-210;
22. see also idem, "Comparing 'Incomparable' Cities: Postmodern L.A. and Old Shanghai," Contention: Debates in Society, Culture, and Science 15 (Spring 1996): 69-90.
23. In works dealing with the Maoist era, there is a tendency to stress the uniqueness of specific things about the city (its labor movement, the part it played in China's industrial development, etc.), as opposed to the metropolis being distinctive in every way. See, for important discussions of this period, various contributions to Christopher Howe, ed., Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
24. The chapter that goes furthest in arguing for a continued general uniqueness for Shanghai in the 1960s and 1970s is Parris Chang, "Shanghai and Chinese Politics: Before and After the Cultural Revolution," pp. 66-90.
25. See, in particular, his concluding reference to Shanghai "occupying a peculiar and unique place in the China's political landscape since the 1960s" (p. 89).
26. On Shanghai's distinctive role in labor activism in this era, see Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997);
27. and Elizabeth J. Perry, "Shanghai's Strike Wave of 1957," China Quarterly (September 1995).
28. See, for example, the way discussion of Shanghai figures in Ramesh Kumar Biswas, ed., Metropolis Now! Urban Cultures in Global Cities (Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 2000), pp. 15-25;
29. and Byrne, Understanding the Urban, pp. 13-14 and passim.
30. For some preliminary comments on this theme, see Wasserstrom, "Comparing 'Incomparable' Cities." For a good introduction to the main issues addressed and approaches taken in the literature on "world" and "global" cities, see Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor, eds., World Cities in a World-System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
31. and Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, eds., Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
32. Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (London: Secker and Warburg, 1965);
33. Jones is quoted in Ian McLachlan, "The Fall of Shanghai," which serves as an introduction to a book of photographs by Samuel Tata, Shanghai 1949: The End of an Era (New York: New Amsterdam, 1989), p. 18;
34. and Zhang Zhongli et al., Dongnan Yanhai chengshi, yu Zhongguo jindaihua [Southeastern port cities and China's modernization] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1996), p. 38.
35. Lindsay, quoted in Alfred Schninz, Cities in China (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1989), p. 169.
36. One of the earliest English-language local histories, J. W. MacLellan, The Story of Shanghai: From the Opening of the Port to Foreign Trade (Shanghai: North China Herald, 1889), pp. 2-3, describes the port becoming "of some importance as a place of trade near the close of the eleventh century." Like many later works, in Chinese and English alike, this one stresses the advantageous nature of its location. "The position of Shanghai," it reads (p. 3), "made it an admirable entrepôt for the commerce of the northern, southern and central provinces of the Empire. It was the seaport of the rich Kiangnan [Jiangnan Region], and the principal emporium for the trade on the Yangtze and with Eastern Asia."
37. The lecture was published as "The Foreign Settlement of Shanghai: A Brief History," Oriental Affairs (June 1939): 338-341.
38. Samuel Mossman, China: A Brief Account of the Country, Its Inhabitants, and Their Institutions (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1867), p. 161. There were other treaty-port enclaves with locally elected governing bodies, some of which occasionally were multinational in make-up. Most of these, however, such as that in the Italian Concession of Tianjin (one of the first to have a municipal council that included Chinese representatives), still had a direct tie to a single distant country.
39. For excellent recent discussions of these foreign communities, see Robert Bickers, Britain in China (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999);
40. and idem
41. and Christian Henriot, eds., New Frontiers: Imperialism's New Communities in East Asia, 1842-1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
42. On these forms of diversity, see Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Yeh Wen-hsin, eds., Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992).
43. China Reconstructs, ed., Fifteen Cities in China (Beijing: China Reconstructs, 1980), p. 18.
44. All About Shanghai: A Standard Guidebook (Shanghai: University Press, 1934-1935; repr., Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 44;
45. its original title was slightly different, All About Shanghai and Environs: A Standard Guidebook. That is also one of the innumerable texts that refer to Shanghai as the "most cosmopolitan" city on earth, while the phrase "world's most happening city" was used by Time Magazine's Asian edition, which ran a cover story on Shanghai on 27 September 2004.
46. Rhoads Murphey, Shanghai: Key to Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 1-2.
47. On these various visions of Old Shanghai as comparable to foreign or mythic sites, see Wasserstrom, "Locating Old Shanghai" and "Comparing 'Incomparable' Cities," and also the excerpts from novels, memoirs, and the like in Barbara Baker, ed., Shanghai: Electric and Lurid City (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998).
48. For the claim that Harold Acton likened Shanghai to a "Liverpool in the tropics," see another book in the same "Literary Anthologies of Asia" series, Chris Elder, ed., China's Treaty Ports: Half Love and Half Hate (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 192.
49. And for comparisons to Alexandria and Babylon, see Michael B. Miller, Shanghai on the Métro: Spies, Intrigue, and the French between the Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 239.
50. North China Herald, 16 June 1870, p. 438; here Venice is referred to as a "prototype" for Shanghai.
51. Using Google to surf the web in October 2001 in search of uses of the term "Paris of the East" led to an amazingly wide range of cities. One of those most commonly called a "Paris of the East" is Bucharest, but the term has been used by some to describe Beirut, Cairo, and even Lahore, as well as Budapest.
52. The phrase "New York on steroids" showed up at least twice in the fall of 2004 in North American newspaper articles - see the National Post (Canada), 17 July 20004,
53. and USA Today, 28 October 2004.
54. Around the same time, the New York Times simply called Shanghai a "city on steroids" (28 November 2004);
55. for a reference to its architecture looking like Western skyscrapers on "amphetamines," see the International Herald Tribune, 19 November 2002.
56. For more on this theme, see the chapter "Faster than a Speeding Bullet Train," in my China's Brave New World - And Other Tales for Global Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 173-185.
57. Pamela Yatsko discusses this vision of New Shanghai as Old Shanghai reborn at some length, alternately critiquing and falling under the sway of the imagery; see her New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China's Legendary City (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001), a work whose footnotes refer to many other recent works that explore continuities with the past.
58. Important works published since her work appeared include various essays by Wu Fulong, including "Globalization, Place Promotion, and Urban Development";
59. Jos Gamble, Shanghai in Transition: Changing Perspectives and Social Contours of a Chinese Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2003);
60. and Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, eds., Shanghai: Architecture & Urbanism for Modern China (New York: Prestel, 2004).
61. See also Mario Gandelsonas, ed., Shanghai Reflections (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), especially the chapter by Ackbar Abbas, "Play It Again Shanghai: Urban Preservation in the Global Era," pp. 38-55.
62. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Vintage, 1992).
63. An important recent development directly relevant to this trend, which took place too late for me to integrate full discussion of it into this article, is the publication of John Friedmann, China's Urban Transition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
64. This slim but wide-ranging volume, which has a great deal to say about Shanghai and the nature of contemporary urban life, is by one of the most influential theorists in the "world city" and "global city" literature; one of his most important works on the subject is an oft-cited essay, "The World City Hypothesis," Development and Change 17, no. 1 (1986): 69-83.
65. Ruth Glass, Clichés of Urban Doom and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 72. She writes insightfully that, in urban studies, an "impression is created" via categorization schemes that "like has been grouped with like," even when questions often remain as to just how similar some members of the same presumed "species" imagined as a coherent whole are.
66. Sample works of this sort with chapters on Shanghai include Frank Broeze, ed., Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th-20th Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989);
67. and Mattei Dogan and John D. Kasarda, eds., The Metropolis Era, vol. 2, Mega-Cities (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1988).
68. The former has a Shanghai chapter by Robert Eng, "The Transformation of a Semi-Colonial Port City: Shanghai, 1843-1941" (pp. 129-151);
69. the latter has one by Rhoads Murphey, "Shanghai" (pp. 157-183).
70. Philip Kasinitz, Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Times (New York: NYU Press, 1995).
71. Byrne, Understanding the Urban.
72. Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History (New York: Modern Library, 2005), esp. p. 145.
73. William T. Rowe, "Introduction: City and Region in the Lower Yangzi," in Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China, ed. Linda Cooke Johnson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 14-15;
74. Shahid Yasuf and Weiping Wu, The Dynamics of Urban Growth in Three Chinese Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 140;
75. and Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai, p. 85.
76. In addition to Eng, "Transformation of a Semi-Colonial Port City,"
77. and Murphey, "Shanghai,"
78. see Tridib Banerjee, "Transitional Urbanism Reconsidered: Post-Colonial Development of Calcutta and Shanghai," in Urban Anthropology in China, ed. Greg Guldin and Aidan Southall (New York: Brill, 1993), pp. 76-100.
79. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).
80. Another admirable work that brings together the history of three disparate cities is Blair Ruble, Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I am grateful to Larry Wolff for directing my attention to this study. There are many similarities between Ruble's route to comparison and that which I pursue here, though he focuses more directly on city politics.
81. Davis, City of Quartz.
82. More complete citations for the works just quoted are as follows: Judit Bodnár, Fin de Millénaire Budapest: Metamorphoses of Urban Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 1;
83. Ramesh Kumar Biswas, "Shanghai: Time, Tides," in Biswas, Metropolis Now! pp. 11-25;
84. Anton Gill, Berlin to Bucharest: Travels in Eastern Europe (London: Grafton, 1990), p. 156;
85. Yatsko, New Shanghai, p. 11;
86. Steve Fallon et al., Hungary: The Lonely Planet Guide, 2nd ed. (Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet Books, 1997), pp. 91-92;
87. and Shanghai Municipal Tourism Administration, compilers, Focus on Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong China Tourism Press, 1995), p. 7.
88. Those who have continued to pursue this comparison include Yanqi Tong and Maria Csanadi. See, for example, the former's Transitions from State Socialism: Economic and Political Change in Hungary and China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997);
89. and the latter's Party-States and Their Legacies in Post-Communist Transformation (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elger, 1997). I am grateful to Csanadi for sharing several unpublished papers with me (which influenced my thinking in this essay) and introducing me to some of Budapest's sites firsthand on one of my visits to that city.
90. New Straits Times Press (Malaysia), 5 November 1997, found on Lexis-Nexis, 14 November 2001.
91. The average amount of time it took to earn the cost of a Big Mac, in the fifty-five cities assessed for the 1997 report, was 37 minutes of work, with Chicago, Houston, and Tokyo scoring best at 9 minutes, Nairobi worst (193) and then Caracas after that (117). Shanghai (75) and Budapest (91) come pretty close together and also placed similarly, as of the late 1990s, when it came to a chart calculating wage and salary levels (though there Budapest does slightly better than Shanghai rather than vice versa). See Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Prices and Earnings around the Globe: 1997 Edition (Zurich: UBS, 1997), pp. 7 and 10. In the report completed three years later, Shanghai and Budapest once again appeared near to each other in several charts, and came right after one another (with Shanghai on top) in a list of wage and salary levels;
92. see Prices and Earnings around the Globe: 2000 Edition (Zurich: UBS, 2000), especially pp. 7 and 8.
93. At the conference, I decided not to present the paper I had written in advance but to present a newly drafted one stressing similarities between the PRC and former Soviet bloc states; this was subsequently revised and published as "Chinese Bridges to Post-Socialist Europe" in Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds., Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest: CEU, 2000), pp. 357-382.
94. For this aspect of Shanghai, see various contributions to Rowe and Kuan's Shanghai: Architecture & Urbanism.
95. Bodnár, Budapest, p. 131 (for a photo of the Pole Center McDonald's) and p. 145 on Munk's involvement; my discussion of Budapest throughout this article relies heavily on Bodnŕ's book.
96. On Budapest as a "melting pot," see Ilona Sarmany-Parsons, "Aesthetic Aspects of Change in Urban Space in Prague and Budapest during the Transition," in Social Change and Urban Restructuring in Central Europe, ed. György Enyedi (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1998), pp. 209-231, esp. p. 213.
97. For gateway imagery, see György Enyedi, "Hungarian Cities and Regions at the Turn of the Millennium," Hungarian Quarterly 42, no. 161 (Spring 2001): 3-16.
98. A recent reference to the "rise of Budapest from a fishing village with a castle in 1800 into a major European city a century later" can be found in Howard Lupovitch, "Culture and Urban Life in a New Key," H-Urban (February 2000), accessed 15 November 2001.
99. For population figures and a concise introduction to Budapest history generally, see the editors' "Introduction: Budapest and New York Compared," in Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation: 1870-1930, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994), pp. 1-28.
100. The one essential book on early twentieth-century Budapest available in English is John Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of the City and Its Culture (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988).
101. I have also learned much from Peter Haneck, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
102. Sir Cecil Beaton, The Wandering Years, Diaries 1922-1939 (1961), excerpted in Peter Leek, ed., Budapest (Hungary): Knopf Guide (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 102;
103. and for von Sternberg's comments on Shanghai nightlife, see either his Fun in a Chinese Laundry or the excerpts from it reproduced in Baker, Shanghai, pp. 144-145.
104. Gill, Berlin to Bucharest, p. 156.
105. See, for example, the wide-ranging discussion of Shanghai-Beijing contrasts in the Winter 1996-1997 issue of Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, guest edited by Li Cheng.
106. For many quotations on social problems that Shanghai specialists will feet could have been written about the city they study, see Bodnár, Budapest, and Enyedi, Social Change and Urban Restructuring in Central Europe. Consider, for example, the Shanghai parallels to this statement in the editor's introduction: "The introduction of the market economy has made the distribution of goods more unequal [in central European cities]; thus one of the characteristic aspects of the transitions has been increasing social and spatial polarization .... [It is true that] social differences also existed in the egalitarian society of state socialism. These differences, however, were associated with social position and not with property" (p. 27). And the same work has comments on the Roma that have parallels with discussion of Shanghai's "floating population"; see pp. 97-98.
107. Bodnár, Budapest, pp. 107-108, has a good discussion of the way traditional prejudices can be expanded to incorporate negative images of new migrants.
108. This has relevance for Shanghai, where long-term stigmatization of Subeiren (people from the Subei region of the Lower Yangzi), so powerfully discussed by Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992),
109. has merged with general denigration of newcomers from the countryside as cogently analyzed by Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
110. On Shanghai's futuristic qualities, see Wasserstrom, "Faster than a Speeding Bullet Train."
111. Bodnár, Budapest, pp. 157-182, quotations from p. 157.
112. For a good general discussion of social problems in contemporary Shanghai, see Gamble, Shanghai in Transition.
113. Szelenyi, "Cities under Socialism - and After," in Cities after Socialism: Urban and Regional Change in Post-Socialist Societies, ed. Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe, and Ivan Szelenyi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996);
114. see also Szelenyi, Urban Inequalities under State Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
115. It is important to stress, though, that, as other presentations at the recent Irvine conference made clear, there are other "reglobalizing" cities with which specifically post-socialist ones might usefully be compared - Istanbul being a particularly promising case in point.
116. David Harvey, "The Art of Rent: Globalization and the Commodification of Culture," in his Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 394-411.
117. Bodnár, Budapest, p. 187.