Wasserstrom: Is Global Shanghai Good to Think"? 203 Chinese or at most east asian frame 8 There have of course been writ- ers who have drawn analogies between Shanghai and distant cites, but they have usually been either nonacademics (authors of travelogues memoirs, guidebooks, and novels)or scholars concerned with urban studies in general as opposed to Shanghai per se (groups about which more will be said below ). Academic Shanghai specialists, in sum, ha rarely explored the potential of thinking the city that fascinates them; hen they have done so, they have typically stayed within ciro scribed boundaries, and my aim here is to ask whether this is should be it proble 9 One reason Shanghai specialists have tended to eschew ambitious comparative moves is that it often seems hard enough just to describe the city in a realistic and compelling manner. There are, however, also other reasons. There is a sense, in many quarters, that the metropolis just cannot be likened to other places without doing a disservice to the distinctiveness of its history or its present condition. At a New York University conference on Shanghai held in the spring of 2001, Rudolf Wagner, a German scholar who has done some of the very best work to date on the city's nineteenth-century history, even called for a moratorium on any effort to compare Shanghai to other cities. lo Wag ner's claim was that, because all of the efforts to compare Shanghai to another city or even to call it a particular kind of metropolis have proved to be flawed, we should stop looking for the right analogy or category and focus on assessing the city on its own terms. You lose 8 Marie-Claire Bergere, "Shanghai ou 'l'autre Chine, 1919-1949, "Annales 5(Sep tember/ October 1979): 1039-1068. Three publications from the igos that deal largely or exclusively with Shanghai and devote considerable attention to comparison, but generally stay within an East Asian framework, are Y. M. Yeung and Sung Yun-wing, eds, Shanghai Transformation and Modernization under China's Open Policy(Hong Kong: Chinese Univer- sity Press, I996), which has many discussions of Hong Kong-Shanghai similarities and dis- similarities; Yang Dongping, Chengshi jifend: Beijing he Shanghai de wenhua jingshen [City Monsoon: The Cultural Spirit of Beijing and Shanghai(Beijing: Dongfang Press, 1994I and Shanghai-Yokohama Research Group, eds, Shanghai he Hengbin: jin dai Yazhou liang ge kai fang chengshi [Shanghai and Yokohama: Two Open Cities of Modern Asial( Shanghai Huadong Shifan daxue, I997) 9 Exceptions to the pattern just described include Leo Ou-fan Lee's nod to New York-Shanghai comparisons in Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945( Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. I0-II. This case is typical of the tendency of such exceptions to take the form of passing comments (that may, of course, as in this instance, be insightful) as opposed to sustained analyses that fully describe and justify a comparison 10 Rudolf Wagner's noteworthy publications on Old Shanghai include "The Role of the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere, "China Quarterly 142(une 1995) 423-443
204 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 sight of the things that matter about Shanghai, this line of thinking suggests, as soon as you compare it. Some would modify this, while still holding the line against far-flung comparisons. according to this vari- ant of Wagner's argument, Shanghai can be contrasted with Beijing and compared to relatively nearby places, either other lower Yangzi Delta cities (Suzhou, Hangzhou, etc. ) other East Asian one-time treaty ports(Yokohama, Canton, and Tianjin), or a pair of former colonial territories(Hong Kong and Singapore) While there is a strong case to be made for Wagner's argument and the modification of it just described, this article argues that this is a good time for Shanghai specialists to enter the admittedly treacherous waters of far- flung comparison. And it will suggest a specific strategy for doing just this by proposing that we think of Shanghai as a reglob alizing post-socialist city that has interesting things in common with urban centers such as Budapest that were once part of the Soviet bloc-despite obvious differences relating to specific characteristics (such as, in the case of Budapest, size and political status). It is cer- tainly attractive to revel in Shanghai being a place like no other, as Millard did in I928 and many others did before that and have done since. Still, this article claims, general discussions of the global city experience can be enriched and our vision of contemporary shanghai made sharper by using the comparative frame proposed here n making the case for Shanghai being very good to think, this essay will pay special attention to the most recent stage in the city's history, as the terms "reglobalizing"and"post-socialist"indicate. It will focus more specifically on an era that began about twenty years ago and followed in the wake of three other main stages. First came long period, lasting from roughly the thirteenth century through the Opium War(1839-1842) that saw the city emerge as a trading center of first local and then regional import and eventually limited interna- tional signifcance, thanks to serving as a transshipment point for goods circulating between China's hinterland and Southeast Asia. Next came a roughly century-long treaty-port period, lasting from th arly I84os through the I940S, during which Shanghai underwent an intensive form of forced internationalization Then came several decades of socialist transformation(Igo through the early IgBos II Millard was an American journalist who helped reshape the English-language press in Shanghai in the second decade of the twentieth century by founding both a daily news paper, the China Press(in 1911), and a weekly, Millards Review of the Far East, which later changed its name to the China Weekly Review
Wasserstrom: Is Global Shanghai Good to Think"? 205 during which the city was by no means completely cut off from inter- national currents, but became much more firmly enmeshed within the national political and economic order than when it was a treaty port Why focus on the very recent past here? One reason is simply that I have written elsewhere about the issue of comparison and the treaty port era(1843-1943)incarnation of the metropolis(what is com- monly now referred to as"Old Shanghai"in contrast to the"New Shanghai"that emerged in 1949 or around Iggo, depending on how one defines the latter phrase). 2 Another is that for both the earliest period in the history of shanghai as a city and for the maoist period (1949-1976), it is less challenging to assert that it can and should compared to other places. The city certainly had its distinctive fea- tures in those eras, but it has often been assumed that at those points it was fairly similar in many ways to other Chinese urban centers. 3 Two final reasons for my choice of concentrating on the recent past are pragmatic: there has been an increasing tendency of late for urban ists who are not China specialists and are concerned with globaliza- tion to incorporate discussion of contemporary Shanghai into texts promulgating novel paradigms and assessments of the state of the metropolis, and this city's stop-and-go internationalization seems to offer an interesting counterpoint to much of the general literature on global cities, with its tendency to emphasize steady progression from enmeshment in local to national to international networks 14 2 Jeffrey n. Wasserstrom, "Locating Old Shanghai: Having Fits about Where It Fits in Remaking the Chinese City: Modemity and National Identity, 1900-1950, ed. Joseph W Esherick(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000), pp. 192-210; see also idem, Comparing "'Incomparable'Cities: Postmodern L.A. and Old Shanghai, "Contention Debates in Society, Culture, and Science I5(Spring 1996): 69-9o 13 In works dealing with the Maoist era, there is a tendency to stress the uniqueness of specific things about the city(its labor movement, the part it played in China's industrial development, etc. ) as opposed to the metropolis being distinctive in every way. See, for important discussions of this period, various contributions to Christopher Howe, ed Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis( Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1981). The chapter that goes furthest in arguing for a continued general uniqueness for Shanghai in the Ig6os and 197os is Parris Chang, Shanghai and Chinese Politics: Before and After the Cultural Revolution, " pp. 66-9o. See, in particular, his con cluding reference to Shanghai"occupying a peculiar and unique place in the China s polit- ical landscape since the 1g6os"(p. 89). On Shanghai's distinctive role in labor activism in this era, see Elizabeth ]. Perry and Li Xun, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural revo- lution(Boulder, Colo. Westview Press, 1997); and Elizabeth J. Perry, "Shanghais Strike Wave of 1957, "China Quarterly( September 1995) 14 See, for example, the way discussion of Shanghai figures in Ramesh Kumar Biswas, ed, Metropolis Now! Urban Cultures in Global Cities(Vienna: Springer- Verlag, 2000), pp 15-25; and Byrne, Understanding the Urban, pp. 13-14 and passim
20 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 Shanghai specialists can choose to ignore the theoretical discus- sions that are going on about global cities and the use of New Shang- hai as an illustrative case within some of this literature. But the dis- cussions will go on and the city will be used as an example of various things whatever scholars primarily interested in Shanghai do, so it might be more useful and appropriate for at least some of us to engage more directly with the new urban theory in a respectful yet also criti- cal fashion. Engagement of this sort seems promising for two reasons First, in-depth knowledge of Shanghai can be used to challenge, mod ify, or suggest alternatives to some influential moves in the rapidly growing literature on the twenty-frst-century metropolis, particular the assumption alluded to above (and returned to below) that global cities move along a steady trajectory toward ever greater internation- alization. 15 Second, though all of the new models for thinking about cities require some revision to fit the Shanghai case, many of them have things to offer China specialists in terms of insights into issues such as current patterns of urban development. This is true whether or not one is particularly interested in quantifiable factors such as the accessibility of "advanced producer services "that are central to the alpha-beta-gamma world city scheme alluded to above As it happens, though I am more interested below in qualitative issues than the types of quantitative ones(such as the number of head- quarters of transnational corporations in a metropolis) that some global city theorists emphasize, I find the category of gamma-class urban centers useful. One attraction it has for me is that it draws attention to similarities between Shanghai and some other urban cen- ters Beaverstock et al. place in it (such as budapest, Warsaw, and Istanbul) which could, like the metropolis by the Huangpu, be aptly characterized as reglobalizing cities More details on my alternate path to that gamma-frame category well as further explanation of my particular interest in analogies between Shanghai and reglobalizing cities that underwent a period of socialism( defined here simply as an era when the state set most wages and owned most property) and have more recently experienced rapid privatization of the economy, will have to wait, though, since first 15 For some minary comments on this theme, see Wasserstrom, "Comparing Incomparable' Cities "For a good introduction to the main issues addressed and approaches taken in the literature on“ world”and"“ global” cities, see Paul L. Knox and Peter Taylor, eds, World Cities in a World-System( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I995); and Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, eds, Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?(Oxford: Blackwell, 2ooo
Wasserstrom: Is Global Shanghai Good to Think"? 207 more needs to be said about the pros and cons of comparing cities. I begin with making the case for avoiding comparison at least in the case of Shanghai, then take up the case for it, and then propose some specific steps to take from here. In the first of these sections, I will move between Shanghai's various incarnations, referring at times to Old Shangh older city of pre-treaty-port times(Ur-Shanghai?), and the post-1949 but pre-Reform era(197 socialist metropolis. In the last sections, I will focus more tightly on the igOs and even more so the igos and first years of the current century. THE CASE AGAINST COMPARISON There a unique city had been formed by traders in opium and tea; then-as there always has to be some place where the world sweeps its dirt and refuse--this settlement, known as shanghai, had become enormous as it was singled out for this questionable distinction. Perhaps another formation like that, made fertile by mankind's miasmata, may once again appear, but it is not likely osef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese laundry(1g65 Shanghai was] the kind of city that probably never existed before and certainly never will again R. Jones, quoted in Shanghai 1949(published in I98g) Shanghai is not like London or paris.... She is not like New York.... She is not even like Jakarta.. Shanghai's development path has been unique. Shanghai is just anghai -Zhang Zhongli (Igg6)16 Comp paring cities is always tricky, since every metropolitan center has at least one or two features that make it not quite like any other place on earth h. There are cities that have distinctive histories, unusual 16 Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry(London: Secker and Warburg 1965); Jones is quoted in lan McLachlan, "The Fall of Shanghai, "which serves as an intro duction to a book of photographs by samuel Tata, Shanghai 1949: The End of an Era(New York: New Amsterdam, 1989), p. I8; and Zhang Zhongli et al. Dongnan Yanhai chengshi, yu Zhongguo jindaihua SOutheastern port cities and Chinas modernization( Shanghai Shanghai renmin chubanshe, I996), P. 38