CityReads│Is Shanghai the Other China?

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Is Shanghai the Other China?

Within an empire dominated by a long rural and bureaucratic tradition, Shanghai became the model of modernity founded upon western contributions but adapted to the national Chinese culture.

Marie-Claire Bergère, 2009.Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity, Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. 

Source: http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6599

Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity was originally published in French under the title Histoire de Shanghai, Librairie Arthème Fayard in 2002. Chinese and English translations of Histoire de Shanghai, were published in 2005 and 2009, respectively. A new edition of Chinese translation was published in 2014 with a new preface by Marie-Claire Bergère to discuss how Shanghai has changed since the turn of the twenty-first century. 

Histoire de Shanghai, 2002

Marie-Claire Bergère first came to Shanghai in 1957, after she had attended the National Festival celebrations in Tian’anmen Square. She admitted that Shanghai was not a love at first sight for her. But Shanghai was engulfed by the storms of history. What she observed made her mesmerize about this city. Thus began her lifelong study of Shanghai history. She wrote books about the history of the Chinese bourgeoisie and the founding father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen.

The English title of Bergère's book both affirms the city's historical mission and recalls Rhoads Murphey's Shanghai , Key to Modern China (1953), which portrayed Shanghai as fertile soil for the transplantation of modern Western commercial, financial and industrial institutions (to learn more, please refer to CityReads│Why did Shanghai become the key to modern China?).

The primate status of Shanghai in modern China can be told from the numbers: in the last day of the empire, Shanghai had already placed itself at the head of the modernization movement: it handled over half of the country’s external trade and was home to the Chinese or East Asian headquarters of the principal banks and foreign businesses. About one-third of the modern factories created by Chinese capital between 1895 and 1911 in the treaty ports were based in Shanghai.

Histoire de Shanghai is a synthetic work, based on the best scholarship in multiple languages, It took the reader through the city’s multifaceted modern past, including the city’s transformation from a unified Chinese urban centre (prior to 1843), to a subdivided treaty port (with three separate districts, two of them foreign-run, each governed in a distinctive way), to a socialist and now arguably post-socialist metropolis still run by a Communist Party. 

The book is structured by four chronological parts that register the political tectonics behind the flows and ebbs of Shanghai development: 1) the late Qing treaty-port years (1842-1911); 2) the pre-war Republic (1912-37); 3) war and revolution (1937-52); and 4) the People's Republic. Parts I and II contain 10 of the 14 chapters, reproducing the focus of the bulk of Bergère's formidable earlier publications (which enrich the current book with their insightful detail). The parts covering 1939 to the present are shorter, and consist of two chapters each. Within this chronological structuring, Bergère's chapter titles suggest a clear plotline of birth, near-death and redemption, marking out in turn "The Birth of Shanghai Capitalism (1860-1911)", "The Golden Age of Shanghai Capitalism (1912-1937)", "Backward into Revolution", "Shanghai in Disgrace Under the Maoist Regime", and "The Rebirth of Shanghai (1990-2000)". 

Scene from the city wall in 1905. The city wall of Shanghai was demolished in 1912.

Bergère emphasizes Shanghai's role in the production of Chinese modernity: "The originality of the town ... lay not in the implantation of a colonial modernity ... but rather in the welcome that its local society had given to that implantation, adopting and adapting it, and turning it into a modernity that was Chinese". Bergère appropriately notes that Shanghai was not "a wretched fishing village just waiting for foreign intervention" . Bergère affirms Chinese as well as Western agency and mutual commercial cooperation. The modernity of the Chinese bourgeoisie was owned not to its break with tradition but to its ability to get tradition to serve unprecedented ends.

A Shanghai family with western influence

In the beginning of her book, Shanghai: from market town to treaty port, 1074-1858, Linda Cooke Johnson summarizes three theoretical interpretations of the modern history of Shanghai: The other China, Imperialism and the Sprout of Capitalism. The impact of the West was primarily responsible for propelling China into early modernization, and its reverse interpretation, that the West failed in this mission, and Shanghai became part of the “other China”. This, of course, is a reference to the standard and highly respected works on Shanghai by John King Fairbank, Rhoads Murphey, and Marie Claire Bergère, among others. Linda Cooke Johnson’s own research on the history of Shanghai between 1074 and 1858 argues that Shanghai’s development is the consequence of an autochthonous evolution that preceded the arrival of the Westerns by several centuries.

Bergère responds to this line of argument by saying that Chinese nationalism and culturalist history are well satisfied with this new interpretation. However, the role that foreigners played in the rise of Shanghai is no easier to obscure than that the Chinese played. There were about 15,000 westerners in 1910, compared to 250 in 1855, but they represented barely 1% of the 1.3 million inhabitants who then made up Shanghai. Nevertheless, their presence acted as a catalyst upon a number of social and institutional upheavals that were to make Shanghai the first modern Chinese city.

Bergère continually reminds us of the important differences between the Concession and the Settlement, and makes excellent use of archival documents, memoirs, and travel writings in French that other scholars of the city have often overlooked. The international and the French concessions manifested rivalry and solidarity, with the one drawing upon British liberalism, the other upon the French Jacobin tradition: one the one hand an oligarchy of merchants keen to defend their community interests, on the other a bureaucratic autocracy proclaiming to serve the republican ideal.

For instance, in the French concession, the construction of public roads and wharves was planned as early as 1862. While the international settlement was busy creating public parks that continued to exclude the Chinese until 1928, the French municipality was beginning to line the concession’s streets with the plane trees that would lend such a leafy charm to its residential quarters.

The installation of running water presents another example of the conceptual difference between Anglo-American “public utilities” and public services in the French manner. Instead of a private company drawing up private contracts with potential users that were solvent, in the French concession the municipality purchased water from the British company and then distributed it through public fountains, free of charge, to the entire population, Chinese residents included.

From 1914 onwards, two notables who were invited to join the council as consultative members represented the Chinese community on the French concession’s Municipal Council, although the importance of the presence of Chinese councilors was more symbolic than real. This initiative was taken a full twelve years before Chinese were allowed to sit on the council of the international settlement.

International settlement brought the capitalist mode of market, capital operation, modern technology and enterprise management to Shanghai. French concession provided an example of authoritarian style of municipal administration, urban construction, religion protection and public interest. Thus, it is the interaction, cooperation, and rivalry between the two groups that turned Shanghai into the capital of “another China”, one that was cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial, distinguishing it from internal, rural, and bureaucratic China. Within an empire dominated by a long rural and bureaucratic tradition, Shanghai thus became the model of modernity founded upon western contributions but adapted to the national Chinese culture.

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