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