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

By Xiong Yuezhi
Translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun

Reviewed by Andrea Janku
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2024)

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. Continue reading Shanghai Urban Life review →