Books
Sunday, 30 November 2008 04:11
Written by JFK Miller

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Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments
by Prof. Jeffrey Wassertrom

Happy birthday, Shanghai. But which birthday? In Western minds, Shanghai clocked up 165 years a few weeks ago on November 17, the date in 1843 when the city was opened to foreign trade and settlement. But the date officially endorsed by the CCP is 1291, the year Shanghai’s name first appeared in official documents. The difference is not insubstantial – over half a millennium – nor is it insignificant. As Jeff Wasserstrom points out in his new book, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments, by placing Shanghai’s point of origin in 1843 it “encourages us to think of the foreign presence as a natural, indeed decisive, part of the local past.” It’s no wonder then the University of California history professor also observes that even the “seemingly simple act of picking a birthday for Shanghai is fraught with meaning.”

Let us rivet our colors to the SWFC: Professor Wasserstrom has written the most enthralling history of modern Shanghai there is. Global Shanghai does not claim to be a definitive history (it focuses on seven pivotal years set a quarter of a century apart – 1850, 1875, 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, 2000 – hence the "fragments" of the title), nor does it claim to provide definitive answers to the intriguing questions it raises. Instead, the University of California history professor seeks to frame those questions into a meaningful historical context. The result is a meticulously researched, cornucopic splendiferous wonder. Yes, we did say history book.

Wasserstrom debunks more than a few myths as he traverses 160 years of modern Shanghai history. The greatest of these is what he calls "The Shanghai Illusion" – namely that the city has been represented and misrepresented in so many ways in literature, film and such, that it has become "virtually unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers."  Wasserstrom himself admits to succumbing to the 'illusion,' only to find that the city he visited for the first time in August 1986 was depressingly drab, not the 'anything goes' sort of place he read about in old guidebooks.

Another shattered myth is that nearly everything about life in Shanghai suddenly changed after liberation in 1949. Western-style clothing did not immediately disappear from department stores; there were still a great many families with ayis; rickshaws operated until 1955 before being banned as 'retrograde and degrading.'

The book ends prospectively in 2010, the year of Shanghai's World Expo, an event which Wasserstrom describes together with this year's Beijing Olympics as the country's "one-two punch designed to knock out old conceptions of China." Will it? Wasserstrom thinks so, and Global Shanghai itself succeeds marvelously in knocking out the idea that academic works can't both educate and enthrall.

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