JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 tural and economic capital of its respective national community, because of which they were in continual contact and conflict in a manner that often muddied the nationalistically determined boundaries between them. I explore how, beginning with Tel Aviv s establishment in Igog, Zionist leaders deployed a narrative of progress and modernity versus tradition and stagnation to effect a discursive, and ultimately a phys- ical, erasure of the Palestinian Arab population of the region surrounding both towns I argue that such paradigms, and the ideologies that support them, are fundamental components of globalization, whether in the era of"high imperialism"when Jaffa and Tel Aviv's conflict began, or today. Next I move to the contemporary period and explore the intersection of globalization, tourism, and the liberalized market. I con- clude by discussing how a"spatialization"of the contemporary Jaffa is crucial to understanding the continuing conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs both within the borders of 1967 Israel and across the Green Line as well Comparative History and Post-Socialist Citie ts on Is Global Shanghai“ Good to Think”? Though 199 EFFREY N. WASSERSTROM Shanghai is routinely described as"unique "yet also routinely likened to other places It thus alternately invites and defies categorization. After introducing general method- ological concerns and providing basic information about the main historical stages through which Shanghai has passed, this article focuses on the period of rapid devel opment and re-engagement with the world that began in the early igOs, arguing that a particularly productive way to think about today's Shanghai is as a "reglobali associ cialis st "urban center-a category that also, for example, includes Budape zing BOOK REVIEWS William H. McNeill et al., eds. Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History REVIEWED BY HERBERT F. ZIEGLER 235 Peter A. Coclanis, ed. The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation Practice, and personnel REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH MANCKE 237 Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, eds Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America REVIEWED BY MARCIA SCHMIDT BLAINE 24 David M. Deal and Laura Hostetler, trans. The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese"Miao Album REVIEWED BY SHANA J BROWN 243 Paul Spickard, ed. Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern world REVIE WED BY TONY BALLANTYNE 247
and Post-Socialist Cities xk"2 Is global Shanghai"Good to Thir Thoughts on Comparative Hi JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM University of California, Irvine Shanghai is many-sided. unique among the cities of the rld .. almost indescribable -Thomas F Millard, China: Where It Is Today and Why(1928) and Beijing. It is not uncommon to hear visitors to China ai No two cites in China could be more unalike than Shanghai sing praises about Shanghai and speak grimly of Beijing For all its congestion, shabbiness, and pollution, Shanghai remains China s most interesting and vibrant city Jack F. Williams,“ Cities of East Asia,”in Cities of the World(1993) sk I am grateful to Zhang Xudong and elizabeth Perry for inviting me to take part in the NYU conference for which a very preliminary draft of this essay was written, to merle Goldman for giving me the opportunity to present a later version at Harvard's New En land China Seminar, to Geremie Barme for serving as a discussant for that session, and to the History Department of the University of California, Irvine, for inviting me to present a dramatically reworked version of the essay as part of its 2005"History and Theory Con ference, "the focus of which was global cities. I am also appreciative of the conducive work environment I was afforded at Indiana University's Institute for Advanced Study, where was an internal fellow while early work on this paper was done, and of the willingness of the following non-China specialists to listen to my ideas about comparative issues and tell Maria Bucur, Judit Bodnar, and, above all, Tom Gieryl nadi Larry Wolff, Sven Beckert me what they thought of them: David Harvey, Maria Cs Joumal of World History, Vol. I8, No. 2 C 200 by University of Hawai'i Press I99
20 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 Quantitative factors [such as number of major corporate head quarters and percentage of local people working in high-level service fields like finance] are generally used in defining world city status... Beaverstock et al. (Iggo) have prepared a "roster of world cities"in terms of level of advanced producer services, namely, accountancy, advertising, banking/finance and law. They combine their data into scoring systems in which London, Paris, New York and Tokyo score twelve, ith Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los angeles, Milan and Singapore scoring ten. These are Alpha world cities Beta world cities scoring more than six but less than ten Include san francisco Sydney,.. and Moscow. Gammas scoring less than seven but more than three include amster- dam, Melbourne, Boston, Warsaw, Atlanta, Kuala Lumpur and shanghai David byrne, Understanding the Urban (2001) he title of this essay alludes to a famous discussion of animal sym- bolism by Claude Levi- Strauss in his oft-cited book Totemism Whereas some earlier theorists had argued in a functionalist vein that types of animals are often used to stand for human groups because these beasts are"good to eat, " Levi-Strauss insisted that it is the fact that species are " good to think"that matters more 2 Drawing on Rousseau's earlier claim that rational thought depends on the ability to establish contrasts and homologies(to find various ways that enti- ties are different from and similar to one another ), levi- Strauss argued that totemic systems should not be seen as curious manifestations of the workings of the savage mind. Instead they were symbolic con structs that followed the same principles as modern categorization schemas What makes animals "good to think "in this view is that people can do more than simply describe them and revel in their unique qual- ities. We can also single out features that make them similar and dis I Thomas F Millard, China: Where It Is Today and Why(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), pp. 249-250; Jack F. Williams, " Cities of East Asia, "in Cities of the World: World Regional Urban Development, 2nd ed, ed. Stanley D. Brunn and Jack E. Wil liams(New York: Harper Collins, I993), pp. 454, 458; and David Byrne, Understanding the Urban(New York: Palgrave, 2001), p.92 2 Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. rodney Needham( Boston: Beacon, 1963) especially p 8 3 Levi-Strauss, Totemism, pp. 85-88, for comparative method in general, and pp 99-102, for Rousseau
Wasserstrom: Is Global Shanghai Good to Think"? 201 similar to one another and group them together in various ways While remaining aware(at one level) of the things that make each species unique and individual members of species different from one another, we can integrate them into or use them as the basis for sys tems of correspondence, then carry these correspondences over into the human world Building on Levi-Strauss, we can think of three different stances that might be taken toward any city's value as something to think with. A metropolis that is bad for thinking would be e one that cou only be describe ed; it might be good for writing(e. g, useful as a setting for a novel)or for representing visually(e. g, used as the backdrop for a film) but not for theorizing. The first epigraph to this essay draws attention to the tendency of many to claim that this is or at least has been the case with Shanghai A metropolis that is a bit better to think with would be one that could be compared to and contrasted with nearby or obviously linked urban centers, such as those located in the same country or region. The second epigraph to this essay is relevant here. It draws attention to Shanghai's differences from Beijing, a common theme in the liter ature on the city. It is worth noting, though, that this quotation comes from a chapter on"East Asian"cities in a general textbook on urban geography. Including Shanghai in such a chapter assumes that, for all its unique qualities, it belongs in a regionally defined category 4 A metropolis that is best of all to think with would be one that like an animal in a totemic system, can be used to create categories of sameness and difference that bring together more disparate entities The third epigraph to this essay is an example of a work that accepts the e idea that shanghai and many other cities are thinkable in thi robust sense. The category "gamma-class world cities, "in which Bea- verstock et al. place not only Shanghai and Amsterdam but several other urban centers(including Budapest and Houston), is based seemingly far-fetched but in the minds of the authors meaningful jux- tapositions of metropolises located far t tr her. 5 W now Amsterdam is part of a small country located in western Europe Budapest is part of a small country in central Europe, and Houston and Shanghai are in large countries on opposite sides of the Pacific. Still 4 The other major sections in Brunn and Williams, Cities of the World, include"Citi of Europe”( which is subdivided into“ Western Europe”and“ Eastern Europe"),“ Cities Latin America. ""Cites of Southeast Asia, etc 5 For a full list of gamma-class cities, defined in this way, seeJ. V Beaverstock, P J. Tay- lor, and R. G. Smith, "A Roster of World Cities, "Cities 16, no 6(1999):445-458
202 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 a vision of them all as gamma-class world cities encourages us to over- look obvious dissimilarities, just as occurs in a totemic system when members of a human lineage known for their speedy runners are likened to hawks My goal in this essay will be to assess the strengths and limitations of these different sorts of visions of Shanghai's thinkability. are we est off considering Shanghai completely sui generis, or can we view it as part of a class of cities? And if it belongs in a genus, must that genus be defined in geographically limited terms? Or might it instead be one to which far-flung urban centers belong? What is the payo off of placing Shanghai into a comparative frame, or perhaps a series of comparative frames? Is this great enough to justify the distortion that comes with squeezing a distinctive metropolis into a category These questions intrigue me in part because Shanghai has long proved a wonderful place to write(as the outpouring of academic stud- ies, novels, and popular histories attests)and to show(the numerous pictorial histories and plethora of films made in China and Hollywood demonstrate this), but not necessarily to think. 6 Influential scholarly works focusing on the city have, with a few important exceptions (those by wu fulong, for instance), been most concerned with high- lighting Shanghai,s distinctive features. And the exceptions, such as Marie-Claire Bergere's powerful evocation of Old Shanghai as the heart of"l'autre Chine"(a Chinese coastal zone of entrepreneurial outward-looking port cities), have generally limited discussion to a 6 For an introduction to the voluminous English language literature on Shanghai (with some comments on works in other languages), see Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "New Approaches to Old Shanghai: A Review Essay, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no 2(Autumn 2001 ): 263-279. Two of the most comprehensive multilingual bibliographies on Shanghai can be found in Christian Henriot and Zheng Zu'an, altas de shanghai Espaces et representations de 1849 a nos jours(Paris, Iggo), and Takahashi Kosuke and Furuye Tadao, eds, Shanhai shi (Tokyo, 1995). And one of the best overviews of Chinese language scholarship on Shanghai is Tan Chenchang, "Shanghai shi yanjiu sishinian (1949-198g"I Forty years of historical research on Shanghai (1949-1989), in idem, Jindai Shanghai tansuo lu Ia record of explorations of modern Shanghai( Shanghai, I994) pp. I80-197 7 Urbanist Wu Fulong has been the most prolific and in many ways most interes Shanghai specialist working on the city s recent past to try to place the metropolis into comparative perspective. Though my approach diverges from his at various points and I eschew the main definitional category that of contemporary Shanghai as a"transitional city, " that he employs, I have found and continue to find his work both useful and stimu- lating. See, for example, Fulong Wu, "Transitional Cities, "Environment and Planning 35 no8(2003):1331-1338; and idem, "Globalization, Place Promotion, and Urban Devel opment in Shanghai, Joumal of Urban Affairs 25, no. I(2003):55-78
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
