"THIS Shanghai, the polyglot, the industrial, is an anomaly. It stands out like a stain upon the surface of China. It represents China even less than Manhattan represents the U.S. It is unassimilated and strange. In its hectic streets, once you have become accustomed to their exoticism, you are not conscious of the vast, traditionalized interior that China really is."
- Fortune, Jan. 1935
Shanghai owes its "birth" to two important events. First are the battles of the Opium War, the ones that gave birth to Hong Kong, making the two cities siblings after a fact. The Treaty of Nanjing of 1942 provided not only for the ceding of Hong Kong Island to the British Crown, but also for the opening of treaty ports along the coast. Shanghai, a mere forty-six miles from the coast along the Huangpu river, and near the mouth of the Yangtze, was an ideal place.
When the British came to Shanghai, there was a settlement already in place, a walled city dating from the 16th century although not small of little signifigance. The British, Americans, and French were given land concessions where they were allowed to trade freely, maintain extraterritoriality for their subjects, and keep their own standing police and military forces. Through trade, Shanghai began to prosper.
It might have proceeded along the normal development track for a trading post, perhaps doubling or tripling in size over fifty years, were it not for dramatic events unfolding in the South of the country. In the 1850s, under Hong Xiuquan, a messianic leader claiming to be Jesus Christ's younger brother, the Taiping Rebellion swept out of Canton, rapidly gaining followers among the poor and dispossessed. The Qing armies were ineffectual and easily defeated, and as the rebels won important victories early on, capturing Nanjing in 1853, a wave of refugees pushed ahead of them. Many of them fled to Shanghai, where they huddled under the protection of the foreign guns anchored in the river.
Those same guns repelled an attempted Taiping invasion in 1860, and when the rebellion was finally quelled in 1864, the population of the city had almost overnight jumped from about seventy-five thousand permanent residents to over three hundred. From there the city began to grow fat first on tea, silk, oil, tobacco, and opium. The fortunes of men like Victor Sassoon were made in opium and real estate. Afterwards, the city glutted itself on heavy industry and banking. In 1912, the events of the 1850s were repeated, as the Qing Dynasty fell, and the country was sectioned into the domains of various warlords. This time it was not only people that came to Shanghai, but great floods of silver seeking a safe haven. By 1924, the population was over three million.
It was at this point that the dominant themes of the twentieth century made themselves felt. In 1921, the Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai. In 1925, the father of the Chinese state, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, died, after making a pact with the Soviets in an attempt to build a united front to defeat the warlords and reunify the country. Leading the Chinese Nationalist Army allied with the Communists and their Soviet patrons, General Chiang Kai-shek spearheaded a campaign against the warlords in Beijing (the so-called Northern Expedition), which culminated in the establishment of a new capital at Nanjing in 1928.
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Out with the old and in with the new - photo by Tandy Sean Arnold
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In 1927, after conquering most of South-East China, Chiang reversed Dr. Sun's position of cooperation with the communists, turning on them. As he approached Shanghai in 1927, Communists fomented city-wide strikes in response to his victories. At Chiang's orders, thugs from the criminal Shanghai Green Gang struck the Communists, killing over five thousand, decapitating the urban leadership of the party, and sending the Communist cause underground and out to a rural base in Jiangxi. Ironically, this left a power vacuum which was quickly filled by a young, able leader, Mao Zedong, who in defiance of the orthodox Marxist-Leninist line saw unlimited potential in the peasantry.
From that point, the GMD controlled all of Shanghai save the foreign concessions, and the city continued to prosper. Any images of beautiful paradise should be quickly abandoned, however. Shanghai was a city of massive contrasts as wealthy, and even poor, whites held themselves above the local population, much of which lived in squalor. Drugs, prostitution, and gambling were everywhere, as, due to his connections with the Nanjing government and exploitation of lax policing in the foreign concessions (particularly the French Concession), men like Du Yuesheng, head of the aforementioned Green Gang, controlled vast empires of vice and corruption.
There were many Japanese industrial interests in the city, and so it was unavoidable that it should fall afoul of Japan's armies. Japan first attacked the city in 1932 in response to an unofficial boycott of Japanese goods. In 1937 they attacked again, this time taking posession of the the Chinese-controlled areas. On December 7th, 1941, the foreign concessions were officially declared under the control of the Emperor.
In 1943, the US and Britain renounced their claims on Shanghai, with France following suit in 1946. China had for the first time gained control of the entire city. In May of 1949 Shanghai fell to the People's Liberation Army and entered the present chapter of its history.
At first celebrated for its historical significance to the Party, Shanghai shuddered under ideological attack in the 1960s and through the Cultural Revolution. Where it was first portrayed as the cradle and source of revolutionary destiny, it became cast as a hive of scum and villainy, a cancerous cultural influence on the body of the PRC.
At least part of the motivation for these attacks came from a peculiar source: Mao Zedong's fourth wife, Jiang Qing. In the 1920s and 1930s, Jiang, under the name of Lan Ping, was a mostly unsuccessful actress in Shanghai -- which at the time possessed a vibrant film and theatre industry. After her rise to power at Mao's side, Jiang vented her rage against her enemies from her previous life. In fact, she did not stop at that, but seemed determined to destroy their legacy as well, overseeing the remaking of all Chinese art, much of which came from Shanghai, along orthodox Maoist lines.
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With the rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping and the re-opening of China to the outside world, Shanghai sluggishly began to move once more. Initially, however, not much was accomplished, and it wasn't until the declaration of Shanghai as a Special Economic Zone, and later of the area of Pudong across the river as a Special Development Zone, that the city truly took off through foreign investment. Currently in the midst of what might be the biggest urban renewal ever, as 1920s slums are daily knocked down to make way for more and more towers, Shanghai is at the forefront of the new.
Shanghai is a city unlike any other in China. As does Hong Kong, it has a different history, and its greatness has a root in foreign influence. Unlike Hong Kong, it has long been a part of China, and much of the country's modern history has passed through here. Today there is once again an incomprehensible amount of foreign investment, but for the first time it is being made on Chinese terms, and not those of outside powers. Shanghai is now unashamedly a Chinese city, but unlike Beijing, it is not built on top of an old one. Whether this peculiar separate history that it shares with Hong Kong is the cause of the its prosperity isn't clear, but if there is a city that could surpass the former British colony in the decade to come, it is Shanghai.
Shanghai: Jewish Centre of East Asia
Shanghai's first Jewish settlers came in 1848, from Baghdad and Bombay. Most successful were the Sassoons and Hardoons, who built many of the city's landmarks and great business empires.
The second wave of emigration consisted of thousands of Russian jews fleeing Bolshevik victory. They came from Vladivostok through northern China and on down to Shanghai. The about 1,700-strong Baghdadi and Ashkenazi jewish communities boomed in 1920s, along with rest of the city. Russian emigres, many educated and poor, numbered 4,500 at their peak in 1930s. Most were small merchants, cafe owners, and musicians.
The third wave occurred during WWII, as Jews escaping Europe fled to Shanghai, the only place in the world that did not require a visa to enter. Some 20,000 came from 1938 on. After Japanese troops occupied the foreign concessions, they interned all Jews from allied countries, ghettoised all the "stateless" from Germany, Austria, Poland, and ignored those from neutral countries (such as Iraq or Russia). By the end of WWII there were roughly 24,000 Jews in Shanghai. The founding of PRC and Communist control of shanghai brought an end to just over a hundred years of Jewish settlement, as most left, to Israel, Australia, the US, and Hong Kong.
by Robin Elliott
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