Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: Shanghai’s Latest Global Turn
[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, more recently, of China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times, published this month by Indiana University Press.]
How should the remarkable tale of Shanghai’s resurgence be told? As Jeff Wasserstrom explains, an increasingly popular approach is to treat it as a sequel — a tale of a city finally getting back on the cosmopolitan capitalist track that it had followed during the treaty-port century (1843-1943), before being derailed by Japanese invasions and Maoism.
This Shanghai-is-back-as-an-East-meets-West metropolis storyline first gained prominence in the 1990s, as skyscrapers shot up in Pudong (East Shanghai) across the river from the grand neo-classical buildings of the Bund built three-quarters of a century earlier.
But it was during coverage of turn-of-the-millennium developments that the narrative gained momentum.
In 2000, it was trotted out when the city’s first Starbucks opened. In 2002, when an international touring company brought Les Miz to the sparkling new Grand Theater, the first Broadway show to reach an urban center whose residents circa 1930 considered theirs a New York-like metropolis.
And again in 2004, first when an Armani store opened on the Bund, and then when China’s first Grand Prix was held in Shanghai’s new state-of-the-art Formula One stadium. The Grand Prix stories were particularly interesting to place into a long-term perspective.
Seven decades before the Asian edition of Time Magazine played up the arrival of Formula One racing in a cover story on New Shanghai’s becoming the world’s “most happening” city, Fortune Magazine had run a special feature on Old Shanghai that also used a race track — one for horses — to symbolize the port’s ability to bring Occidental and Oriental features together....
One big difference is that Old Shanghai was subdivided into Chinese-run districts and foreign-run enclaves, but New Shanghai is a unified metropolis....
A second difference is a subtle, but telling shift in the way Shanghai is now compared to major Western cities. During the treaty-port century, when it was likened to Paris or New York, the implication was that it was the Chinese city with the best shot at someday catching up with those ultra-modern places....
The final difference is that Shanghai’s current internationalization is as much an East-meets-East as an Orient-meets-Occident phenomenon. Consider Japan’s role....
Read entire article at Globalist.com
How should the remarkable tale of Shanghai’s resurgence be told? As Jeff Wasserstrom explains, an increasingly popular approach is to treat it as a sequel — a tale of a city finally getting back on the cosmopolitan capitalist track that it had followed during the treaty-port century (1843-1943), before being derailed by Japanese invasions and Maoism.
This Shanghai-is-back-as-an-East-meets-West metropolis storyline first gained prominence in the 1990s, as skyscrapers shot up in Pudong (East Shanghai) across the river from the grand neo-classical buildings of the Bund built three-quarters of a century earlier.
But it was during coverage of turn-of-the-millennium developments that the narrative gained momentum.
In 2000, it was trotted out when the city’s first Starbucks opened. In 2002, when an international touring company brought Les Miz to the sparkling new Grand Theater, the first Broadway show to reach an urban center whose residents circa 1930 considered theirs a New York-like metropolis.
And again in 2004, first when an Armani store opened on the Bund, and then when China’s first Grand Prix was held in Shanghai’s new state-of-the-art Formula One stadium. The Grand Prix stories were particularly interesting to place into a long-term perspective.
Seven decades before the Asian edition of Time Magazine played up the arrival of Formula One racing in a cover story on New Shanghai’s becoming the world’s “most happening” city, Fortune Magazine had run a special feature on Old Shanghai that also used a race track — one for horses — to symbolize the port’s ability to bring Occidental and Oriental features together....
One big difference is that Old Shanghai was subdivided into Chinese-run districts and foreign-run enclaves, but New Shanghai is a unified metropolis....
A second difference is a subtle, but telling shift in the way Shanghai is now compared to major Western cities. During the treaty-port century, when it was likened to Paris or New York, the implication was that it was the Chinese city with the best shot at someday catching up with those ultra-modern places....
The final difference is that Shanghai’s current internationalization is as much an East-meets-East as an Orient-meets-Occident phenomenon. Consider Japan’s role....