26 Amazing Books About Shanghai

Shanghai has a historically rich past and have risen to be one of China's contemporary-forward citie's. Many films and books have centered around this city, and here are a few of the best

CANDY

MIAN MIAN  (2000)

Candy is a hip, harrowing tale of risk and desire, the story of a young Chinese woman forging a life for herself in a world seemingly devoid of guidelines. Hong, who narrates the novel, and whose life in many ways parallels the author's own, drops out of high school and runs away at age 17 to the frontier city of Shenzen. As Hong navigates the temptations of the city, she quickly falls in love with a young musician and together they dive into a cruel netherworld of alcohol, drugs, and excess, a life that fails to satisfy Hong's craving for an authentic self, and for a love that will define her. This startling and subversive novel is a blast of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll that opens up to us a modern China we've never seen before.

CHINA AIRBORNE 

JAMES FALLOWS (2012)

In China Airborne, James Fallows explains China’s burgeoning aviation industry, and why it is a crucial test case for China’s hopes for modernization and innovation in other industries. He makes clear how it stands to catalyze the nation’s hyper-growth and hyper- urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America’s transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi’an, home to more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China’s pursuit of aerospace supremacy.

CHINA CUCKOO

MARK KITTO  (2009) 

A charming true story of a witty and eccentric Sinophile Englishman and his Chinese tree-change. In booming Shanghai in the 1990s, Mark Kitto hits the big time. As a publisher, he creates the most successful English language magazines in China. But on the verge of signing a groundbreaking deal, the Communist Party takes over his business. Rejecting the corporate world and the glamour of Shanghai, Mark persuades his urbane Chinese wife to retreat to Moganshan, a beautiful and isolated mountain village once favoured by foreigners in the early 1900s as a summer retreat.

CHINESE CHARACTERS: PROFILES OF FAST CHANGING LIFES AT A FAST CHANGING LAND 

JEFFREY WASSERSTROM AND ANGILEE SHAH (2012)

These are the exciting and saddening, humorous and confusing stories of utterly ordinary people who are living through China's extraordinary transformations. The immense variety in the lives of these Chinese characters dispels any lingering sense that China has a monolithic population or is just a place where dissidents fight Communist Party loyalists and laborers create goods for millionaires.

DISAPPEARING SHANGHAI

HOWARD FRENCH AND QIU XIAOLONG (2012)

This book is a photographic exploration of life in the old and rapidly disappearing quarters of Shanghai, with accompanying poems and essays by the author of fiction and poetry, Qiu Xiaolong. The photographs, all taken in a documentary style over a period of five years, represent an intimate and invaluable visual natural history of a way of life in the workers quarters and other central districts of the city that held sway throughout the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century, before yielding to the ambitious ongoing efforts at urban reconstruction.

DREAMS OF JOY

LISA SEE (2012)

In her most powerful novel yet, acclaimed author Lisa See returns to the story of sisters Pearl and May from Shanghai Girls, and Pearl’s strong-willed nineteen-year-old daughter, Joy. Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father—the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the Communist regime. Devastated by Joy’s flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joy’s and Pearl’s separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in China’s history threatens their very lives.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN 

JG BALLARD (1984)

Shanghai, 1941—a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war...and the dawn of a blighted world. Ballard’s enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.

FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE

TASH AW (2013)

Five Star Billionaire is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic novel that offers rare insight into the booming world of Shanghai, a city of elusive identities and ever-changing skylines, of grand ambitions and outsize dreams. Bursting with energy, contradictions, and the promise of possibility, Tash Aw’s remarkable new book is both poignant and comic, exotic and familiar, cutting-edge and classic, suspenseful and yet beautifully unhurried.

LIFE AND DEATH IN SHANGHAI

NIEN CHANG (1987)

Gripping account of a woman caught up in the maelstrom of China's Cultural Revolution begins quietly. Cheng finds herself a target of the revolution: Red Guards looted her home and imprison her, and she is falsely accused of espionage. Despite harsh privation, even torture she refused to confess and was kept in solitary confinement for over six years, suffering deteriorating health and mounting anxiety about the fate of her only child, Meiping. When the political climate softened, and she was released, Cheng learned that her fears were justified: Meiping had been beaten to death when she refused to denounce her mother. The candor and intimacy of this affecting memoir make it addictive reading. Its intelligence, passion and insight assure its place among the distinguished voices of our age proclaiming the ascendancy of the human spirit over tyranny. 

MAN'S FATE 

ANDRE MAIRAUX (1933)

As explosive and immediate today as when it was originally published in 1933, Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine), an account of a crucial episode in the early days of the Chinese Revolution, foreshadows the contemporary world and brings to life the profound meaning of the revolutionary impulse for the individuals involved. As a study of conspiracy and conspirators, of men caught in the desperate clash of ideologies, betrayal, expediency, and free will, Andre Malraux's novel remains unequaled.

MIDDLE KINGDOM UNDERGROUND

H.A.L. PUBLISHING (2011)

The second collection from H.A.L., Middle Kingdom Underground — short stories from the people’s republic of china, brings together stories of avarice, lust, and suspect substances from authors international and domestic.

OLD SHANGHAI: GANGSTERS IN PARADISE

LYNN PAN (2011)

The history of Shanghai is brought to life in this work by Lynn Pan. The tumultuous events of the first half of the 20th century in China are told in this account through a number of interlocking portraits. Through their eyes, thoughts and actions, we gain a look into the unfolding of history.

OPENING UP: YOUTH SEX CULTURE AND MARKET REFORM IN SHANGHAI

JAMES FARRER (2002)

From teen dating to public displays of affection, from the "fishing girls" and "big moneys" that wander discos in search of romance to the changing shape of sex in the Chinese city, this is a book like no other. James Farrer immerses himself in the vibrant nightlife of Shanghai, draws on individual and group interviews with Chinese youth, as well as recent changes in popular media, and considers how sexual culture has changed in China since its shift to a more market-based economy.

PLANET SHANGHAI 

JUSTIN GUARIGLIA (2008)

Shanghai the legendary Pearl of the East, architectural powerhouse, and home to the World Expo 2010 continues to fascinate people from around the globe. Photographer Justin Guariglia, whose work has appeared in National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines, frequently trains his lens on the old town and waterfront which have retained their cultural character amid mega-booming development. Shanghai's open-air lifestyle, bustling markets, and curious fashion sense are all seen here, granting us a multifaceted and intimate portrait of day-to-day life in one of the great cities of the world. And with the forthcoming Olympic Games drawing ever more attention to China, there has never been a better time to discover the astonishing city that is Shanghai.

SHANGHAI DANCING

BRIAN CASTRO (2003)

After 40 years in Australia, Antonio Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls "Shanghai Dancing," Antonio seeks to understand the source of his condition in his family's wanderings. Reversing his parents' own migration, Antonio heads back to their native Shanghai, where his world begins to fragment as his ancestry starts to flood into his present, and emissaries of glittering pre-war China, evangelical Liverpool and seventeenth-century Portugal merge into contemporary backdrops across Asia, Europe and Australia. 

SHANGHAI GIRLS

LISA SEE (2009)

In 1937 Shanghai—the Paris of Asia—twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Both are beautiful, modern, and carefree—until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth. To repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from Los Angeles to find Chinese brides. As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, from the Chinese countryside to the shores of America. Though inseparable best friends, the sisters also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries. Along the way they make terrible sacrifices, face impossible choices, and confront a devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel hold fast to who they are—Shanghai girls

SHANGHAI STYLE: ART AND DESIGN BETWEEN THE WARS 

LYNN PANN (2008)

From the 1920s to the 1940s, no place was more modern than Shanghai: a veritable playground amid a sea of Asian and European influences; an urban population clamoring for all that was new and Western, but whose aesthetic sensibilities remained profoundly Chinese. In this rich social and cultural history of Shanghai’s art and culture, Lynn Pan guides the reader through the myriad world inhabited by commercial and underground artists and designers, performers, architects, decorators, patrons, as well as politicians, generals, and crime bosses. What emerges is a singular portrait of a city and its art—its life blood, in an era that continues to capture the imagination of art lovers and cultural critics today.

STRANGERS ALWAYS

RENA KRASNO (2000)  

This is a story of coming of age in chaotic times during the war in the Pacific, from the unique perspective of a young woman in the Jewish community of Shanghai. We learn how events were perceived by people entrapped by war who endeavored to seek the truth through smuggled info., jammed radio broadcasts, & reading between the lines of Japanese censorship. The heroic efforts of people in the Jewish community in Shanghai to help refugees from the Holocaust are perhaps the most inspiring part of the narrative. Many details of the history of that community are brought to light for the first time. Black & white photos.

THE CONCUBINE OF SHANGHAI 

HONG YING  (2013)

China, 1907. Sixteen-year-old orphan Cassia is sold by her aunt to a brothel. There, she works as a lowly maid for Madame Emerald until a powerful and dangerous client plucks her from obscurity. Master Chang is the boss of the fearsome Shanghai Triad and he always gets what he wants. Despite her unbound feet and breasts, Cassia swiftly becomes Chang's favourite mistress. He showers her with luxuries as he embarks on her sexual awakening. But Chang's world is violent and precarious, and those such as Cassia who depend on him are bound to his fate . . .

THE DIAMOND AGE

NEAL STEPHENSON (2000)

Decades into our future, a stone's throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians.  He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer  Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth's own daughter, the Primer's purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself.  It performs its function superbly.  Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands.

THE GREAT WALK OF CHINA 

GRAHAM EARNSHAW (2010)

What kind of people would you meet if you decided to walk across the world's most populous country? The Great Walk of China is a journey into China's heartland, away from its surging coastal cities. Through surprisingly frank conversations with the people he meets along the way, the Chinese-speaking author paints a portrait of a nation struggling to come to terms with its newfound identity and its place in the world.

THE SHANGHAI CIRCLE 

TONY HENDERSON (2014) 

In 1936, the rise of communism in China and the threat of an invasion by Japan, means taipan, Charles Guest, assisted by his daughter, Davina, must steer the family trading house through tumultuous times.

TRICKLE-DOWN CENSORSHIP

JFK MILLER (2016)

For six years, from 2005 to 2011, Australian JFK Miller worked in Shanghai for English-language publications censored by state publishers under the aegis of the Chinese Communist Party. In this wry memoir, he offers a view of that regime, as he saw it, as an outsider from the bottom up.

WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS 

KAZUO ISHIGURO (2001)

British writer Kazuo Ishiguro won the 1989 Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day, which sold over a million copies in English alone and was the basis of a film starring Anthony Hopkins. Now When We Were Orphans, his extraordinary fifth novel, has been called “his fullest achievement yet” (The New York Times Book Review) and placed him again on the Booker shortlist. A complex, intelligent, subtle and restrained psychological novel built along the lines of a detective story, it confirms Ishiguro as one of the most important writers in English today. London’s Sunday Times said: “You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction.”

WHITE SHANGHAI 

ELVIRA BARYAKINA (2012) 

Some called the city the 'Splendor of the East'; others the 'Whore of Asia'. A melting pot of different nations, fused by war and commerce, this was the Shanghai of the 1920s. The Great Powers are greedily exploiting China for its cheap labor and reaping the cruel rewards of the opium trade. However, as a flotilla of ships carrying the remnants of the defeated White Army enters Shanghai, the uneasy balance of this frenetic international marketplace comes under threat.

YEARS OF RED DUST  

QIU XIAOLONG (2010)

Published originally in the pages of Le Monde, this collection of linked short stories by Qiu Xiaolong has already been a major bestseller in France (Cite de la Poussiere Rouge) and Germany (Das Tor zur Roten Gasse), where it and the author was the subject of a major television documentary. The stories in Years of Red Dust trace the changes in modern China over fifty years—from the early days of the Communist revolution in 1949 to the modernization movement of the late nineties—all from the perspective of one small street in Shanghai, Red Dust Lane. From the early optimism at the end of the Chinese Civil War, through the brutality and upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, to the death of Mao, the pro-democracy movement and the riots in Tiananmen Square—history, on both an epic and personal scale, unfolds through the bulletins posted and the lives lived in this one lane, this one corner of Shanghai.

All written book descriptions come from Amazon.com