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paperback $29.95
Stanford University Press
Paddyfield.com
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More reviews by Kerry Brown
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Shanghai, China's Gateway to Modernity by Marie-Claire Bergere
MARIE-CLAIRE BERGERE knows Shanghai well. She mentions a visit in 1957, in which she first encountered the city which is the subject of her narrative history,SHANGHAI, CHINA'S GATEWAY TO MODERNITY. Even to have been allowed a visit to China in the 1950s, when the country was slowly closing off to the rest of the world, was a privilege accorded only to a chosen few. But as she records later, at the same time as she was gazing intrigued from her sparsely populated hotel (inhabited, as far as she could see, only by an ancient British couple) savage campaigns were being conducted in the work units and universities of this, the city the Communists who had come to power less than a decade before least trusted.
In the beginning, Bergere refers to the existence of the considerable fishing town that existed long before the location at the head of the Yangtze river attracted the interest of the newly-arrived westerners, in particular the British and the French, who wrung from the Qing Court concessions for an International and French Legation in the decade after the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century. Shanghai was to occupy the crossroads between the newly industrialised mindset of the Europeans and Americans who came to the city to make their fortune, and an emerging entrepreneurial class from within China itself, many of them from outside the city, but attracted by its opportunities. Bergere goes to some lengths to explain that this was a two-way process, with foreigners and Chinese giving and receiving, creating a unique hybrid. For almost a century, despite the immense impact of events like the Taiping Rebellion from 1850 onwards, the Boxer Rising in 1900, and the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Shanghai remained the most open, and the most vibrant, place in China. The Legations were overwhelmingly populated by Chinese, but the existence of international finance, trade and shipping companies meant that by 1900, it accounted for 50% of China's foreign trade.
Politics, however unwelcome, were never far away from this story, and in 1912, under Sun Yatsen's brief period as Chinese President, and the establishment of the KMT (Nationalist Party), and then the meeting of the first congress of the Communist Party in 1921, Shanghai was to see the birth of the two great political forces that would shape China's destiny to the present day. The tale of the communists, with their brief cooperation with the Nationalists of Chiang Kai Shek before bloody repression in April 1927 has been covered well elsewhere. But in relating it to the very specific circumstances of Shanghai, Bergere gives it a new angle. By the end of the 1920s, Shanghai was dominated by secret societies, intrigue, and undercurrents, which were to explode as the Sino Japanese War unfolded from 1937 onwards. Her account of the rise of the head of the Green Gang, Du Yuesheng, an illiterate peasant from outside the city, who, through his control of the opium trade, was able to dominate the economic and political life of the city till the Japanese took control of it is fascinating. A picture of him in black and white in the book shows a man with an untroubled, almost innocent face. But those that crossed him were to meet brutal annihilation.
Du was small beer compared to the Japanese, whose control of the city in the 1940s was to finally result in the end of the Legations as semi autonomous areas, and the virtual disappearance of those foreigners who had made their livelihoods there. By 1945, Shanghai was a city that had been exhausted by one conflict, only to be consumed by the final Civil War till 1949. She records the reckless, arrogant behaviour of the Nationalist leaders on their return to the city, and their failure to control the economic wellbeing of the place, or its key business leaders. By 1949, the Communists sent Chen Yi, one of the great generals, to restore order, and for the first few years, the city continued to embrace private business people as part of Mao Zedong's "United Front" Strategy proclaimed from Beijing. With the onset of the Great Leap Forward, however, the levers of control grew greater, and the impositions on the city harsher. Never quite trusted, a radical leadership in the Cultural Revolution, led by Jiang Qing, was able to wreak havoc, even though the city avoided some of the murderous bloodshed that befell places like Wuhan or Guangzhou. The legacy of extreme leftism meant that even after the Dengist reforms opened up the economy from 1978, Shanghai was left to moulder a little longer. Made a Special Economic Zone in 1990, she devotes only a few pages to its explosion since then, detailing the construction on farmland of Pudong, and the continuation of how this city combines state control with private entrepreneurial energy.
This is a translation from the French, and in the early parts of the book, certainly reads like it, with some cumbersome sentences which must have read well in the original, but grate in English. That is more than compensated for however by the familiarity Bergere has, and the affection with, the minutiae of Shanghai geography, and social and cultural life and its history. Her account ends in 2002, and perhaps mercifully contains no mention of Expo, the great new project which is now reshaping Shanghai. This would be a good book for those many million tourists heading off to attend this event in Shanghai this year to have with them. It shows something under the skin of this often baffling and hard to understand city, and, in reducing it to the tale of some of the most remarkable individuals and events that have been here, gets well away from the usual cliches that appear in some of the other renditions of Shanghai's biography.
Kerry Brown
16/02/2010
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