MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Andrea Janku’s review of Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements, by Xiong Yuezhi. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/janku/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk A. Denton, MCLC
Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements
By Xiong Yuezhi
Translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun
Reviewed by Andrea Janku
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2024)
![](https://u.osu.edu/mclc/files/2024/08/coverimage-199x300.jpg)
Xiong Yuezhi, Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogenous Cultural Entanglements Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Xvi + 425 pp. ISSN: 1874-8023; ISBN 978-90-04-51110-1 (hardback); ISBN 978-90-04-52289-3 (e-book)
Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements (异质文化交织下的上海都市生活, 2008) is the first in the Urban Life in Shanghai series, which comprises no less than twenty-five monographs covering a range of aspects of the history of Shanghai urban life and was published between 2008 and 2011. Led and coordinated by professor Xiong Yuezhi (熊月之), former vice president of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and director of its Institute of Historical Research, this almost encyclopaedic collection is the product of a major municipal research endeavour bringing together top academics from research institutes and universities across Shanghai. Xiong is the author of the first volume of the series, here under review in its translated version. Xiong’s monograph is also the first of the series to be translated into English by co-translators Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun, for the Brill Humanities in China Library, co-edited by Zhang Longxi and Axel Schneider. The Urban Life in Shanghai project was launched in 2001, building on almost two decades of research on the history of modern Shanghai that began with the political and economic changes and concomitant cultural and intellectual departures of the 1980s. Until then, Shanghai embodied all the dark sides of Western capitalist imperialism and China’s weakness in the face of it. From then on, Shanghai’s history could be seen in a far more nuanced and even positive light. While initial interest in Chinese scholarship focused on Shanghai’s economic modernity—Rhoads Murphey’s study on Shanghai as the “key to modern China”[2] remains an important reference—this more recent project is part of a trend in the scholarship toward a focus on culture and everyday life in the modern city. In addition, the present study explicitly aims at moving beyond this focus on modern urban culture to include the rural and “backward” that also continued to exist in the modern city, adding to its contradictions and diversity.[3] This mundane urban life unfolds in what Xiong portrays as a uniquely fertile environment created by the coexistence of the Chinese and the foreign, the local and the global, the rural and the urban, the rich and the poor in the International and French concessions and the old Chinese town. Taken as a whole, in the eyes of the author, the “heterogeneous cultural entanglements” characterizing this city, together with space for dissent (not Xiong’s wording) created by the fault lines along its multiple administrative boundaries, elevates Shanghai to an exceptional city, unparalleled in its diversity—administrative, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, etc. This claim goes beyond Marie-Claire Bergère’s conceptualization of Shanghai as “the other China.”[4] In her 1979 study of Shanghai as Republican China’s center of modern industry she highlights how the stigma of colonialism had marked Shanghai’s history after the Communist victory in 1949 and obscured the city’s national significance (despite its continuing centrality in practice). Then, Shanghai’s distinctiveness and otherness constituted a problem. Not anymore.
With the new economic policies initiated during the Deng era, Shanghai was again allowed to be proud of its role as China’s biggest and most cosmopolitan city, economic powerhouse, and “gateway” to the West.[5] In the age of Reform and Opening, what used to be a liability has been turned into an advantage. Within this kind of utilitarian framing, a first wave of new research on the city’s history culminated in a conference convened by Zhang Zhongli 張仲禮 (1920-2015) in 1988. This resulted in his collectively authored Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu (1990), with more than half of its 1000-plus pages devoted to Shanghai’s economic modernization. Xiong Yuezhi, who at the time was a young researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, was part of the team. He had just published his first book on democratic thought in modern China (1986), based on research done while studying with Chen Xulu 陳旭麓 (1918-1988) at East China Normal University, and would make his name with the publication of his award-winning book on “the dissemination of Western learning to the East” in 1994.[6] Since then, research on Shanghai’s history has developed into a veritable industry, and not only in China. Xiong brought some of the key contributors to this expanding area of research together in an international conference on Shanghai’s urban development in 1996, including scholars from Japan, Europe and the US, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.[7] These were the years when the concepts of civil society and the public sphere were widely debated and some of that debate found its way into the conference contributions. Thus, the resulting publication, although still foregrounding administrative organization, economic development, and commercial culture, covered a broader range of issues, including the new periodical press and public spaces, such as Xiong’s own piece on the Zhang Garden, the biggest public space in late-Qing Shanghai, which played a key role in the city’s cultural and political life.[8] This publication might be considered almost experimental, compared to the multivolume histories of Shanghai that soon followed.[9]
Shanghai’s Urban Life and Its Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements focuses on the modern era (近代, i.e. 1842-1949) and the (colonial) encounter between China and the West. It covers a broad array of themes and events chosen to illustrate the diversity of Shanghai’s cultural space as well as the strategies of conflict resolution and collaboration that helped produce a thriving city. The formation of this ”special cultural space” following the creation of the foreign concessions after the First Opium War is the general theme of the book outlined in the first chapter (the book’s contents, at nearly 400-pages [in English translation], comprise a Preface plus eleven chapters of varying length, ranging from seventeen to almost seventy pages, each containing multiple, separately-titled subsections). This space was made possible through the shift “from segregation to integration”—spatially speaking—that came with the gradual expansion of the concession areas, a process by which Chinese and Westerners who initially lived separate from each other in distinct geographical spaces moved to sharing the same space. Waves of Chinese refugees (most famously from the Small Swords uprising in the 1850s followed by the Taiping occupation of Suzhou), wealthy and poor, who found a safe haven in the concessions, played an important role in this integration. Xiong’s description of this key feature of Shanghai’s historical trajectory as an incessant broadening of the scope of coexistence (共处, translated as “integration”) of Chinese and Westerners, or foreigners more generally, in fact sets Shanghai up as the ultimate “contact zone.” The claim is that this coexistence even extended into the Chinese parts of the city, to the extent that “[w]e might consider all of Shanghai to have been racially integrated” (25). There is no doubt that Shanghai is an excellent example of a space of colonial encounters, as “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.”[10] In Xiong’s account, the harmonious sides of the experience are emphasized more, and he is careful to show how the Western presence in Shanghai’s concessions was distinct from colonial rule elsewhere. The following chapters provide a wealth of evidence for the continuing prevalence of social, racial, linguistic, and political segregation, conflict, and inequality, alongside examples of mutual understanding and cooperation. The story very appropriately ends with an account of the internment camps set up by the Japanese occupation forces in 1941, now segregating the Western “enemy aliens” from the rest of the population, quasi-reversing the previous racial balance of power. This episode in Shanghai’s history also clearly marks the beginning of the end of this unprecedented period of cross-fertilization and cultural flourishing.
In the chapters in-between, the reader is taken on a tour through treaty-port Shanghai that offers a wealth of information and stories drawing on rich archives and secondary research. The focus is clearly on the ways in which the Western presence as a showcase of modernity shaped life in Shanghai. The sliding scale of racial hierarchies that characterized life in (colonial) Shanghai is reflected in the overview of the different groups of foreigners resident in Shanghai, starting with the British and Americans, French, Russians, Germans, Jews, and Japanese, and ending with “Indians and other Asians” (chapter 2). A number of individuals, featuring successful real estate speculators and transnational businessmen who made a fortune in Shanghai, are selected as quasi-representative of the experience of the first group. It is interesting to see how the Smiths, Hardoons, Sassoons, and Hanburys of this world are juxtaposed to the “Red-headed asan”—the Shanghai term for the Sikh policemen in the service of the British that reflects the dominant racial hierarchies and cultural complexities of the city. Also covered in this final group are the less well-known Vietnamese policemen in the French concession and the Koreans (whose story seems to belong to a different category altogether), who came to Shanghai to pursue diplomatic, commercial, and scholarly interests after Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 when Shanghai became a refuge for those active in the resistance movement. Shanghai’s role as a safe haven was of course also an important factor for attracting Russians after 1917 and Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. In the section discussing Shanghai’s Jewish population, Elias Sassoon and Silas Hardoon make another interesting appearance as representatives of the Baghdadi Jewish community who featured prominently in the first phase of Jewish immigration to Shanghai. It is their standing as wealthy businessmen that awards them a place in the first group of British and American “expatriates.” Heterogeneous ethnic, racial, social, and political entanglements indeed.
Chapter 3, “Coexistence and Entanglements,” provides an account of the different cultures and institutions that characterized life in the foreign concessions, including sartorial customs and architecture, the organization of the working week and leisure activities, and the fixtures of everyday modernity, from electric lights and telegraphs to clocks, sewing machines, and pianos. It covers the complexities of the coexistence of different judicial systems, the city’s religious and monetary diversity, and the exoticness of the new public gardens. Moving on to “Walls and Fences” (chapter 4), the reader learns about foreign Shanghai’s exclusive club culture and its classist and racist structures, leading on to the many manifestations of racial discrimination, which is then counterbalanced with the stories of people, mostly but not exclusively missionaries, who were sympathetic to the Chinese, made genuine efforts to learn about Chinese culture, and—crucially—brought new knowledge, which they discussed, translated, and published in close collaboration with Chinese scholars. Chapter 5 covers marvellous Western novelties, from gas lamps and tap water to medicine and food and is generously illustrated with translations from primary sources. The narrative journey continues to the flourishing of language schools in Shanghai, not only the famous ones linked to the Jiangnan Arsenal and later St John’s University, but also the countless smaller language schools that mushroomed in the city, catering to those who hoped to make a living from Shanghai’s foreign trade. Again, the chapter is rich in detail and gives a vivid picture not only of the “English fever” that produced a kind of colonial elite to staff the Maritime Customs, the Post Office, and the Telegraph Bureau, but also of the role of pidgin English, and even pidgin Chinese, which, the author suggests, must have existed alongside the English version, but was obscured due to the unequal cultural positions of English and Chinese (200). Chapter 7 covers areas of cooperation, such as infrastructure projects, policing and taxation, military defence, and education (specifically the establishment of the Chinese Girls’ School in 1898, [235]). It also treats diplomatic negotiations whose impact went well beyond the borders of Shanghai, such as the Mutual Protection Act that shielded the southeastern provinces from the ravages of the Boxer War in 1900. Chapter 8 then explores a series of conflicts, such as the 1874 riots that broke out over the funeral practices of the Ningbo Guild located in the International Concession, a controversy over the representation of the alleged Western treatment of the dead in the Dianshizhai Pictorial (點石齋畫報), and another riot over wheelbarrow licence fees. In each case, the events and negotiations and interventions that led to the resolution of the conflicts are meticulously reconstructed and discussed.
Each of these last two chapters dedicates a significant amount of space to a discussion of a single major event or issue; I highlight them here because they raise questions about interpretation that I would like to come back to: the Shanghai Jubilee celebrations in 1893 discussed as an example of Sino-Foreign cooperation (ch.7, 238-263), on the one hand, and the debates about the notorious sign banning “dogs and Chinese” from visiting the Public Garden on the Bund, on the other hand (ch.8, 307-330). With regard to the former, the framing stands in an interesting contrast to Bryna Goodman’s analysis of the same event that traces manifestations of colonial and racial hierarchies. In Xiong’s account, the Chinese players involved in the celebrations come across almost as equals: “Chinese and Westerners came together to celebrate their city” (239). If so, did they happily let themselves be deceived into thinking of Shanghai as their city, in the same way as the “Shanghailanders” allowed themselves to live in the illusion of living in an “independent republic”?[11] Maybe this makes sense from the perspective of those merchants from Guangdong and Ningbo who made a fortune working for Western firms: “To be a comprador at the time was to be envied, not despised” (258). This observation finds an apt parallel in one Shanghailander’s 1894 letter to the daily paper Xinwenbao (新聞報) expressing frustration about being seen as an outsider by Chinese people, signed “The Chinese Call Me Foreigner” (259). Can we take this at face value? Regarding the alleged “Dogs and Chinese not Admitted” sign in the Public Garden on the Bund, Xiong’s documentation of how the conflict evolved clearly shows how the political climate shifted in the early years of the twentieth century. It also clearly shows that the reason it became a publicly debated issue at all in the 1880s was not discrimination against Chinese generally, but the exclusion of ethnic Chinese people of specific socio-economic backgrounds who clearly felt that they belonged: a group of highly privileged and influential businessmen and compradores, Western-educated, many having spent time in the US, one even a US citizen. It might not have occurred to members of the Chinese elite who were not part of this group to visit the Public Garden, not even after it was opened to Chinese visitors from 1890, not to mention Chinese commoners (319). This does not mean that they would not have experienced the rules as discriminatory, but they would not have perceived that space as part of their world. What is more interesting is Xiong’s discussion of the internalization of a colonial mindset, in the sense that the discriminatory practice was seen as justified and widely accepted considering “Chinese filthiness and uncivilised behaviour” (i.e., a recognition and acceptance of something that was lacking and needed to be fixed before equality with the West could be achieved). It was journalists and professors who made statements along these lines (326f), including western-educated Yang Changji 楊昌濟 (1871-1920), father of Yang Kaihui 楊開慧 (1901-1930), who married Mao Zedong in 1920. Xiong refers to this internalized sense of cultural inferiority as “moral introspection” that was forgotten about after the outward struggle against racial discrimination ended with the opening of the Public Garden to all Chinese visitors in 1928 (330).
Chapter 9 uses the tectonic metaphor of fault lines resulting from the extraterritorial status of Shanghai’s concession areas, “disrupting the political unity of the country” and creating a space where “dissidents could operate with impunity” (331). In less than twenty pages, it covers the stories of political dissidents who found a safe space in the city: from Wang Tao 王濤, who got into trouble for his attempts to endear himself to the Taiping rebels before working together with missionaries and becoming a pioneer journalist, to Kang Youwei 康有為 and other reformers, who managed to escape to Hong Kong via Shanghai after the coup d’état in 1898 with the help of the British; from the much discussed Subao (蘇報) case in the early years of the revolutionary twentieth century to the “fake Sun Yatsen”—an imposter masquerading as Sun Yatsen giving speeches in Zhang Garden who is credited with having changed the editorial direction of Subao, turning it into the revolutionary paper that made it famous (339); and finally, post-revolution, Shanghai as a refuge for Qing loyalists.
Chapter 10, entitled “The Metropolis in the Countryside and the Countryside in the Metropolis,” illustrates Shanghai’s cosmopolitan globalism and parochial localism, poverty and wealth, tradition and modernity, Western entertainment and Chinese religious festivals and more, moving the emphasis back to highlighting the hybridity and diversity of the unique place where all these different elements converge to shape a city like no other. Ultimately, the chapter drifts again toward the dominance of Western modernity, evoking Murphey’s analysis of the history of Shanghai as a tale of two cities, where a sophisticated Western urban civilization coexisted alongside a rural agricultural Chinese civilization. Maybe the Japanese occupation that abruptly ended this period, bringing humiliation and suffering not only to the Chinese, but also to the majority of the Western residents of the city (chapter 11), helped to highlight the positive memory of the pre-war era and even to an extent a nostalgia for treaty port Shanghai.
Beyond entanglement, what is the message? Zhang Zhongli concludes the introduction to his Urban Studies of Modern Shanghai with a summary outline of what he sees as key theoretical problems: the relationships between tradition and modernity, the foreign concessions and the Chinese city, Shanghai and foreign countries, the motivations of the colonialists and the actual effects of their presence, and between Shanghai and the Chinese interior. Every one of these dichotomies defies easy and straightforward explanations. Although the ambiguities are clear, the opportunities that the Western presence provided are emphasized and modernity is the preferred modus.[12] Xiong continues along these lines but, without making it explicit, he shifts the analysis more toward the political. This is put in a nutshell in a short postface that points out the unintended side-effects of the Western presence shaping modern Shanghai. He calls them: (1) the “demonstration effect” of the cultural enclave, a showcase of Western “material civilization, municipal administration and parliamentary systems,” where Chinese residents could experience Western ways in their daily interactions, where the “desire to participate in politics” and an understanding of civic responsibilities developed (396); (2) the “fault line effect” of the existence of three sources of sovereignty, opening space for dissident views and activities, from the reformers of the late 1890s to the revolutionaries making radical speeches in Zhang Garden, from the founding of the Communist Party to leftwing activism in the 1920s; (3) the “solitary island effect,” which is related to the previous side-effect but emphasizes the shelter from the ravages of war and the relative stability Shanghai provided for its economic development; and (4) the “dissemination effect” of serving as a hub of communication across China and between China and the world. Here we have a Chinese researcher arguing that the self-governing “model settlement” did not in fact impose anything on China but provided an example of the fixtures of Western modernity for the Chinese to emulate and benefit from. The inequalities and injustices of Western imperialism are called out, too, but softened by pointing to Shanghai’s special status as what is sometimes called a “semi-colony.” Overall, the message is a strong advocacy for cultural openness, acceptance of difference, and co-development.
Modern history in China is a minefield. Whoever is writing, wherever one treads, one must do so carefully. Maybe it is in the multiple crevices of everyday life—where people struggle to make a living, suffer abuse and exploitation, take advantages of opportunities, and celebrate their little victories—that the contradictions and ambiguities of any particular historical situation are experienced in a myriad of different ways. Although most of this human experience is lost to history, this study offers countless leads that would be interesting to follow up on. It also raises the question of the positionality of the researcher. What would the same history have looked like if written by a migrant worker from the countryside, the descendant of an old Shanghai street peddler, or a distant relative of a British missionary or colonial administrator? Or a Western academic doing an exercise in decolonial history?
Two final comments: The translated preface caused some confusion. The original Chinese version of the book has two prefaces. Xiong’s preface in the translated volume is in fact the preface to the whole series (叢書). The original Chinese version has a second, slightly shorter preface to this particular volume. When in the translated preface, Xiong refers to the various unnamed authors responsible for the different volumes, or when he explains that while the emphasis of the work is on the “modern” period (近代), the “contemporary” period (當代) is also touched on (xiv),[13] he is referring to the twenty-five volumes of the Urban life in Shanghai series. The translated volume does not explain this context, which is why some of the statements in its introduction are irritating.
With regard to issues of translation—and maybe different academic styles or cultures—it is noteworthy that there are a significant number of instances where the translators felt they had to cut the text short. In many cases, this is explained by saying that the original Chinese text provided further examples of the same kind of thing, lengthy quotes from sources, or long lists of names of streets, apartment buildings, or Chinese businesses involved in a protest (to give a few examples). I would have been curious about the section on mixed marriages and the Eurasian school referenced in chapter 4 (122, n41 apologizes for this omission, but does not explain why this choice was made, apart from referring to the length of the text), or the final section of chapter 9 about the Zhang Garden as a space for political speech making (which is more than thirty pages long in the Chinese original). Publisher’s demands notwithstanding, one wonders how these choices were made and if the author was consulted.
This book is a treasure trove, but it can be frustrating to read at the same time, as I hope has become clear in this review. It may be most useful for readers interested in the comparative history of port cities and coloniality who are not able to read research written in Chinese. It unfolds a wealth of knowledge and observations that offer insights and raise further questions, mostly questions of interpretation and meaning. Given the substantial work that has been done by researchers coming from different ethnic, cultural, and political backgrounds, it would be exciting to see this all come together in an open, critical, and constructive collaboration in an endeavour to get rid of all ideological constraints toward a history that recovers the human experience without whitewashing the injustices and inequalities of the imperial encounter—the political environment allowing. If it is true, as Wen-hsin Yeh observes, that “[t]he ‘lightness’ of the present . . . opened up . . . a space for a multiplicity of lesser accounts,”[14] then maybe finding new meaning in the complex entanglements of the past is a task for a new generation of scholars.
Andrea Janku
SOAS University of London
NOTES:
[1] Gascoyne-Cecil, William. Changing China, 1911, 103. Xiong cites Gascoigne-Cecil in the introduction to the original Chinese version of his book.
[2] Murphey, Shanghai: Key to Modern China, 1953 (a Chinese translation was published in 1986).
[3] This aim is only foregrounded in chapter 10, however. Here (349), Xiong briefly refers to Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Modern Shanghai (1999) and Yu Zhi’s Modeng Shanghai (2003), which are not listed in the bibliography.
[4] Bergère, ‘Shanghaï ou « l’autre Chine », 1979.
[5] Bergère, Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity, 2010.
[6] Xiong, Xixue dongjian, 1994.
[7] Zhang, ed., Zhongguo jindai chengshi yanjiu, 1998.
[8] Xiong, “Zhangyuan,” 1998.
[9] Before the urban life series, a 15-volume “general history” of Shanghai appeared in 1999 (Shanghai tongshi, 上海通史, Shanghai renmin chubanshe). More recently a new and even more comprehensive Shanghai tongshi in 30 volumes was published, also edited by Xiong Yuezhi (Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2017-2021.
[10] Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6.
[11] Goodman, “Improvisations on a Semi-colonial Theme,” 893.
[12] Zhang, Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu, 28-34.
[13] Three titles in the series extend into the part of modern history that is conventionally referred to as xiandai 現代 in Chinese, not in fact dangdai 當代. These are on the grain supply system from 1953 to 1956, on migration covering the first decade of the People’s Republic (to 1958), and on social life in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution respectively.
[14] Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 216.
WORKS CITED:
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Bergère, Marie-Claire. Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010 (French ed. 2002).
Gascoyne Cecil, William. Changing China. London: James Nisbet, 1911 (1910).
Goodman, Bryna. “Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to Read a Celebration of Transnational Urban Community.” The Journal of Asian Studies 59.4 (Nov. 2000): 889-926.
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Modern Shanghai: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China,1930-1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Murphey, Rhoads. Shanghai: Key to Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
Pratt, Marie-Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008.
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—–. Yizhi wenhua jiaozhi xia de Shanghai dushi shenghuo 异质文化交织下的上海都市生活 (Shanghai urban life and its heterogeneous cultural entanglements). Shanghai: Shanghai cishu, 2008 (Shanghai chengshi shehui shenghuoshi congshu 上海城市社会生活史丛书).
—–. “Zhangyuan: wan-Qing Shanghai yige gonggong kongjian yanjiu” 张元:晚清上海一个公共空间研究 (The Zhang Garden: studies on a late Qing public space). In Zhang Zhongli, ed. Zhongguo jindai chengshi: qiye, shehui, kongjian 中国近代城市: 企业,社会, 空间 (Modern Chinese cities: industry, society, space). Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan, 1998, 336-59.
Yeh, Wen-hsin. Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843-1949. Berkley: University of California Press, 2007.
Yu Zhi 余之. Modeng Shanghai 摩登上海 (Modern Shanghai). Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2003.
Zhang Zhongli 张仲礼. Jindai Shanghai chengshi yanjiu 近代上海城市研究 (Urban studies of modern Shanghai). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1990.
—–, ed. Zhongguo jindai chengshi: qiye, shehui, kongjian 中国近代城市:企业,社会, 空间 (Modern Chinese cities: industry, society, space). Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan, 1998.