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