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