Synopsis
How did ordinary people live through the extraordinary changes that have swept across modern China? How did peasants transform themselves into urbanites? How did the citizens of Shanghai cope with the epic upheavals―revolution, war, and again revolution―that shook their lives? Even after decades of scholarship devoted to modern Chinese history, our understanding of the daily lives of the common people of China remains sketchy and incomplete. In this carefully researched study, Hanchao Lu weaves rich documentary data with ethnographic surveys and interviews to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life in China's largest and most complex city in the first half of this century.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Hanchao Lu is Professor of History at Georgia Institute of Technology.
From the Back Cover
"From Hanchao Lu's clear and lively descriptions of Shanghai in the early twentieth century, we learn about the patterns of alleyways, design of row houses, rules for subletting, shapes of door-knockers, springs in rickshaw cushions, calls of hawkers, sidewalk haircuts, factory work, how nightsoil pots were emptied and cleaned, and the responsibility of neighbors to keep their noses in one another's affairs. We understand, in short, the base from which everything else about Shanghai at the time should be understood. A delightful and edifying book."―Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing
From the Inside Flap
"From Hanchao Lu's clear and lively descriptions of Shanghai in the early twentieth century, we learn about the patterns of alleyways, design of row houses, rules for subletting, shapes of door-knockers, springs in rickshaw cushions, calls of hawkers, sidewalk haircuts, factory work, how nightsoil pots were emptied and cleaned, and the responsibility of neighbors to keep their noses in one another's affairs. We understand, in short, the base from which everything else about Shanghai at the time should be understood. A delightful and edifying book."—Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century
By Hanchao LuUniversity of California Press
Copyright 1999 Hanchao LuAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520215648
Chapter 1
Going to Shanghai
The writer Aldous Huxley (18941963), who traveled the world extensively, exclaimed in 1926 that none of the cities he had ever seen so overwhelmingly impressed him with its teeming humanity as Shanghai. "In no city, West and East," Huxley wrote, "have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank, richly clotted life. Old Shanghai is Bergson's elan vital in the raw, so to speak, and with the lid off. It is Life itself."1 This spirited life Huxley observed in the Chinese section of the city was just part, perhaps the less vigorous part, of modern Shanghai, a city that in the span of a century grew from a muddy town on the Huangpu River to a booming metropolis of 5 million people. The city drew its inhabitants from all over the country (indeed, all over the world) and from of all walks of life; most were peasants who flocked to the city in pursuit of the dream of a better life.
Like many phenomena in modern China, modern Shanghai's birth was attended by the West. This was not merely in the sense that the modern city grew out of the treaty port classification imposed by the West, but that its origins lay in a somewhat bizarre system, in which a settlement deliberately designated for the British ended by being inhabited overwhelmingly by Chinese, who lived side by side with foreigners of all stripes. It was precisely this unexpected and unintended mixture that eventually turned Shanghai into the single most cosmopolitan city of China.
From Segregation to Mixed Residence
The Birth of a City
Shanghai has been the largest metropolis in twentieth-century China, and one of the five or six biggest cities in the world. Its actual area, however, was small in the middle of this century: the city proper (i.e., urban districts,
excluding rural counties under the Shanghai municipality) was 31.8 square miles (82.4 square kilometers), and the main part of the city, the former foreign concessions where modern Shanghai arose, was barely 13 square miles (33 square kilometers). The core of the city virtually coincided with the 1848 boundaries of the former British Settlement, an area of about 470 acres (.7 square mile).2 In Shanghai's heyday in the Republican period, if one walked from Nanking Road or the Bundthe prosperous commercial heart of downtown Shanghaiin any direction for a distance of about 5 miles, one would find oneself in the midst of fields of cotton and rice. If one departed from the Bund by ferry and crossed the Huangpu Rivera trip of less than ten minutes one would land in an almost untouched, traditional bucolic setting.3
Thanks to the more than two decades of rigorous research on the commercialization of Ming-Qing China, especially in Jiangnan and the lower Yangzi delta region, nowadays few scholars would still say that pre-treaty-port Shanghai was but a fishing village.4 Early in the nineteenth century, the walled town of Shanghai was ranked as a so-called third-class county seat. This placed it under the provincial capital of Nanjing and the prefectural capital of Songjiang, but still accorded it some prominence for its commercial prosperity, based primarily on a booming cotton trade in the Qing period.
However, the northern outskirts of the city, where the future International Settlement and the French Concession were to be located, was truly rural in November 1845 when Gong Mujiu, the Shanghai Daotai, or circuit intendant, assigned the first piece of land there to the British: the landscape was dominated by cotton and rice fields, uncultivated fields of reeds, and winding footpaths for towing boats along the waterways.5 What was to become the famous Bund was then just one of the footpaths near the waterfront at the confluence of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek. The walled county town, in spite of its prosperity before the mid-nineteenth century, formed only a small portion of modern Shanghai, about one-twentieth of Shanghai proper in the Republican period. In that sense, the modern city of Shanghai did spring from obscure rural origins.
In population, too, Shanghai grew from an insignificant beginning. The population of all of Shanghai county reportedly reached 540,000 in the mid-nineteenth century, about half of whom lived in the walled county seat and its immediate outskirts and the rest in villages and small towns scattered throughout the county. The northern suburbs of the town, where the International Settlement later appeared, had merely five hundred in-
habitants. The population there was so sparse and considered so insignificant that contemporary surveys of Shanghai simply ignored it.6
However, half a century later, the population in this part of the city had skyrocketed to half a million residents. Another half century later, the population of Shanghai reached more than 5.45 million. In other words, Shanghai experienced a tenfold growth of population in a span of a century. Equally significant was the tremendous concentration of the population: the overwhelming majority were not dispersed throughout old Shanghai county, but densely packed into what had previously been the northern suburb of the county seat. This was one of the world's most densely populated places: average population per square kilometer was 43,570 in 1930, 50,032 in 1935, and 76,880 in 194042.7
By the mid-nineteenth century, Shanghai had exceeded Guangzhou in population and become China's leading treaty port.8 The rapid growth of Shanghai could be measured by economic data such as shipping volume in and out of the port of Shanghai. In 1844, the first year after the port was open, a total of 44 foreign ships (together carrying 8,584 tons) entered Shanghai; in 1849 a total of 133 ships (52,574 tons) entered; and in 1863 a total of 3,400 foreign ships (964,309 tons) entered, and a total of 3,547 foreign ships (996,890 tons) departed. The staples of this busy trade were (among imports) opium and (among exports) tea and silk.9
The dynamic of development in modern Shanghai fundamentally diverged from that in traditional Chinese cities. Scholars in China view the development and prosperity of modern Shanghai as a result of Western imperialism and the exploitation of the hinterland by the treaty port.10 In the final analysis, such a view is not substantially different from the Western interpretation of Shanghai as a proud product of Western sophistication or as a city literally built on the notorious opium trade.11 Putting moral concerns aside, views on both sides of the Pacific share the common ground that the city was nurtured by the commercial vigor and entrepreneurship brought by the West. Although Shanghai had been a busy commercial center prior to its opening to the West, the new dynamic brought by the Westerners meant that traditional commerce, such as the cotton trade, was largely irrelevant to the modern development of Shanghai.
The composition of the people of modern Shanghai also differs from that of the old city. Researchers have shown that pre-treaty-port Shanghai was by no means a city inhabited only by local people. For instance, the role in the city's commercial life played by so-called guest merchants (keshang )who came from a variety of places ranging from the southern
provinces of Guangdong and Fujian to Anhui in the Yangzi River valley and the provinces of north Chinawas vitally important.12 Still, the population of Shanghai, like that of other county seats, was overwhelmingly local. In contrast, the great majority of the inhabitants of modern Shanghai came from elsewhere. From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, immigrants consistently made up about 80 percent of the city's population.13
So here we have a city that was new in three basic senses: it sprang from pastoral farmlands, but quickly overshadowed the old walled county town; its population consisted overwhelmingly of newly arrived immigrants; and it was spiritually stimulated and driven by Western commercial values and vigor, something that was novel to China. All of these changes began with a system of residential segregation.
The Foreign Settlements
The foreign concessions, the focus of growth in modern Shanghai, were originally designed in 1845 to be settlements reserved exclusively for Westerners. Except for a handful of farmers already living there at the time the settlement was created, Chinese were banned from purchasing and renting land within the boundaries of the settlement, either for residential or commercial purposes. The segregation was terminated in 1854 and thereafter could not be restored. Except for a few years during the Pacific War, the foreign population in Shanghai had never exceeded 3 percent of the city's total population.14 The residents of Shanghai's foreign settlements (namely, the International Settlement and the French Concession) were overwhelmingly Chinese. Shanghai, in spite of its heavy foreign accent, remained predominately a Chinese city.
There was virtually no justification in treaties for the legal status of Shanghai's foreign settlement. The only document that can be considered as possibly providing a legal basis is an agreement known as the Land Regulations, signed in 1845 by Gong Mujiu, the Shanghai Daotai, and George Balfour (180994), the first British consul in Shanghai. The agreement allowed British subjects to rent property in a designated area in the northern suburb, outside the walled Chinese city. This area, later to become the core of the International Settlement, covered an area from the Bund in the east to Boundary Road (today's Henan Road) in the west, and from Lijiachang (at the confluence of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek) in the north to Yangjingbang Creek (today's Yan'andong Road) in
the south, a total area of about 830 Chinese mu (138 acres). According to the Chinese notion that "all the lands under heaven belong to the emperor" (putian zhi xia, mofei wangtu ), foreigners were in theory not allowed to purchase land within the area but were permitted to permanently rent real property there. This is an early example of how the Chinese saved face while granting privileges to foreigners.15
The French Concession was bounded by the walled Chinese city in the south and the newly created British Settlement in the northas a result of a lengthy negotiation in 1849 between the French consul Louis Montigny (180568) and the Shanghai Daotai, Lin Gui.16 The American Settlement in Hongkou, located on the north side of Suzhou Creek about five miles northeast of the Chinese city, was more a fait accompli presented by a concentration of property purchased (or permanently rented) by the American Church Mission than an officially designated area for the Americans. As Hosea Ballou Morse (18551934) put it, "The American Settlement was not created, but 'just growed.' "17 In 1848, Bishop William J. Boone (181164) got oral agreement from the Daotai Wu Jianzhang that Hongkou was to be an "American Settlement." The official boundary was settled in June 1863 by the American consul George Frederick Seward (18401910) and Shanghai Daotai Huang Fang. Three months later, on September 21, the British and American Settlements were formally amalgamated. The resulting concession was known (especially after 1899) as the International Settlement. Thus, by the end of the 1840s, three major powers all had settlements in Shanghai.
The land regulations prohibited Chinese from renting property within the International Settlement and the French Concession. Chinese inhabitants of the area were to be gradually evacuated, and eventually the area was to become completely segregated. By the end of the 1840s, even a casual visitor could observe that the Chinese who lived within the settlement "generally left of their free will and were liberally remunerated for their property by foreigners." These natives "were moving gradually backwards [i.e., westward] into the country, with their families, efforts, and all that appertained unto them" including their family tombs.18
This system of segregation was not entirely imposed by the West. Rather, at the beginning, it was a mechanism that the Qing authorities adopted to limit foreign influence and minimize disputes between local people and the "barbarians." According to the Bogue (Humen) Treaty, which was signed October 8, 1843, as a supplement to the Treaty of Nanjing, local Chinese authorities in concert with the British consul in the five
Map 1.
The growth of Shanghai, 18461914.
treaty ports of China were to designate a limited zone within which foreigners could travel, as well as an area where British subjects could reside.19 This was considered a victory by the Qing, as can be seen from the correspondence between Qiying (17901858), the imperial commissioner who negotiated and signed the treaty, and Emperor Daoguang (1782 1850). Qiying reported to the emperor that, by signing the supplemental treaty, he had successfully arranged that in the treaty ports "the boundaries of an area should be designated which foreigners are not allowed to exceed" (yiding jiezhi, buxu yuyue ). The Chinese version of the Bogue Treaty actually carried this wording, but the tone was not clearly reflected in the English version.20 The Qing rulers, by confining the "barbarians" to an officially designated special zone, apparently hoped to resurrect the old Canton system, that is, a system that strictly confined foreigners to a segregated zone in the treaty ports.21
Locally, in his first announcement of the opening of Shanghai to foreign trade dated November 14, 1843, George Balfour, the British consul in Shanghai, informed the British subjects in the city that "arrangements are in process for selecting a suitable site for dwelling and store-house for settling by assay."22 In order to ensure that things went smoothly, the Daotai or one of his officers always went in person to Chinese landowners to negotiate the sale of land to the foreigners. This proved a difficult task. Frequently, the owners simply refused to "rent." In one case, an old lady "went so far in her opposition to all proposed bargains, that, after pouring on the head of the party a torrent of colloquial Billingsgate, she actually . . . spat in the Taotai's face and declared that she would never sell her patrimony to foreign devils!"23 Such things would not have happened to a huiguan (guilds) merchant who came from another part of the country. Also, it was never a problem for Chinese "guest merchants" to establish guild houses in the walled city. For the British, however, this was the foremost difficulty that they encountered in Shanghai. At the beginning, Balfour could not even find a house for the consulate.24 The intention of the Chinese officials was clear: to keep the foreigners out of the city. The British finally decided to located themselves in the northern suburbs and asked the Daotai to designate an area there as a segregated British settlement. This dovetailed with the mandarin's intentions.
For a decade after 1845 this segregation continued without much difficulty. In 1848, with the permission of the Manchu Daotai Lin Gui, the British Settlement was expanded westward to Nichengbang (lit., Muddy Town Creek; later filled in and transformed into Tibet Road) and northward
to the southern bank of Suzhou Creek. This rural area was soon inhabited by an increasing number of foreigners, as the following statistics on the foreign population in Shanghai show:25
|
The total population in the settlements in 1852 was about 500. This means that foreigners were gradually coming to outnumber the local Chinese residents.26
This was the dawn of what was to become a great city, although few at that time would have predicted greatness for Shanghai.27 For the Western adventurers in Shanghai, life was enjoyable and placid. By 1850, a public park, a race course, and amateur theater clubs were founded in the foreign community. On summer evenings, Westerners driving ox carts relaxed in the breeze on the broad waterfront of the Bund, the business center of the settlement and site of much new construction.28 A new term, "bunders," was coined to refer to these Westerners, and the Bund was often poetically associated with, in the words of an insider, "its gossip, its cool evening breezes, its ever-changing outlook, its pleasant promenades, its reminiscences of valued friendships, its pensive regrets."29 The availability of a variety of wild game (mainly birds) in the region and the peaceful nature of the local people made hunting a real pleasure for the Europeans.30 Shanghai was, as a British botanist who traveled extensively in China at that time exclaimed, "one vast beautiful garden, by far the richest which I have seen in China."31 This pastoral, even romantic, life was perhaps typical of what Western sojourners enjoyed in Asia. Similar lifestyles could be found in the early colonial history of other Asian cities such as Calcutta and Yokohama.
But the foreigners in Shanghai would soon face an unexpected event that would dramatically bring to an end the tranquillity of their life and, much more important historically, change the course of the development of the city.
The End of Residential Segregation
On the morning of September 7, 1853, an uprising organized by the Small Swords, a Fujian-based secret society headed by the Cantonese vagrant Liu Lichuan (1820ca. 1855), killed the Shanghai county magistrate at the site
of an ongoing annual ceremony at the city's Confucian temple.32 The rebels then took the county seat and declared the establishment of the "State of Great Ming" (Da Ming Guo). This event was the beginning of seventeen months of warfare in Shanghai and its vicinity. Two days after their success in Shanghai, the rebels marched to attack other county towns near Shanghai. In ten days, Baoshan, Nanhui, Chuansha, and Qingpu were under the control of the Small Swords. Jiading, a county seat twenty-five miles northwest of Shanghai, was occupied by the rebels prior to the Shanghai war. In the turmoil of the fighting, thousands of refugees, mostly from the county town of Shanghai but also from other occupied towns, poured into the foreign settlements, which were within walking distance of the war-torn city.33 The population of the combined British and American Settlements jumped from 500 in 1853 to more than 20,000 in 1855.
These refugees encountered two different attitudes in the settlements. Foreign merchants saw them as an opportunity to make a fortune: the quickest way to get rich was to build dwellings for the refugees. Rows of simply constructed, single-story wooden houses appeared literally overnight along the Bund, in the northwest part of the British Settlement, as well as on the banks of Yangjingbang, the creek that separated the British and French settlements.34 Many of the refugees were well-off merchants and landlords who could afford the prices that the foreigners asked.35
Another group of Westerners, however, was more concerned about the comfort and safety of the foreign community. This group was represented by the British consul, Sir Rutherford Alcock (180997), who in January 1855, after consulting the Shanghai Daotai, ordered "the removal of objectionable natives and demolition of objectionable tenements." Alcock's order left thousands of Chinese homeless in the bitter cold of winter.36 This action sparked some antiforeign sentiment among the Chinese, but from the viewpoint of the British authorities, such a move seemed necessary if the idea of segregation from the Chinese was to be preserved. Shortly after the rebellion, the British Settlement, according to one observation, had been transformed from "a purely foreign reservation" into a "native Alsatia, the southern portion being blocked with abominably overcrowded and filthy hovels, fraught with the danger of fire and pestilence, rife with brothels, opium shops, and gambling dens."37
The debate over whether to continue accepting Chinese refugees was therefore a burning topic in the foreign community. The foreign settlement was at a crossroad. But no one could have predicted the impact that the ultimate decision would have on the fate of the city. Thus, when an out-
spoken British merchant approached Alcock to express his views, he was quite unaware that his words would result in a milestone for the city:
No doubt your anticipations of future evil have a certain foundation, and, indeed, may be correct enough, though something may be urged on the other side as to the advantages of having the Chinese mingled with us, and departing from the old Canton system of isolation; but, upon the whole, I agree with you. The day will probably come when those who then may be here will see abundant cause to regret what is now being done, in letting and subletting to Chinese. But in what way am I and my brother landholders and speculators concerned in this ? You, as H.M.'s Consul, are bound to look to national and permanent intereststhat is your business; but it is my business to make a fortune with the least possible loss of time, by letting my land to Chinese, and building for them at thirty or forty percent interest, if that is the best thing I can do with my money. In two or three years at farthest, I hope to realize a fortune and get away; and what can it matter to me if all Shanghae [Shanghai] disappear afterward in fire or flood? You must not expect men in my situation to condemn themselves to years of prolonged exile in an unhealthy climate for the benefit of posterity. We are money-making, practical men. Our business is to make money, as much and as fast as we can; and for this end, all modes and means are good which the law permits.38
The view expressed here was no doubt representative of the majority of foreign merchants in Shanghai. Alcock was "quite convinced" by this lecture and the warning that he "was losing time in any efforts to stem the tide of land-jobbing and house-building for Chinese tenants"; thus he ended his struggle to keep the Chinese out of the settlement.39 It is doubtful that even if the British authorities had continued to forbid renting houses to Chinese tenants, they would have been able to stem the tide of refugees flooding the foreign settlement. As Alcock admitted, to insist on a purely foreign settlement in Shanghai under these circumstances was "too evidently hopeless."40 The official abandonment of segregation by the British consul, who was the most influential if not the most authoritative leader in Shanghai's foreign community, cleared the road for creating a mixed settlement of Chinese and foreign residents. In this regard, the combination of the Small Sword Uprising and Alcock's decision was a turning point in the development of Shanghai.
This decision was soon legalized, at least from the viewpoint of the Western powers. In July 1854, Alcock, together with the American consul, Robert C. Murphy, and the French consul, B. Edan, signed a new set of Land Regulations. Although this document was never approved or signed
by the Chinese authorities, it was nevertheless proclaimed as a revision of the 1845 Land Regulations, and on July 11 it was passed in a public meeting of foreign residents in the settlement. After that, the Land Regulations served as the fundamental law, or "constitution," for Shanghai's foreign settlement until the settlement was abolished in 1943.41
A number of important institutions set up by this law dominated the fate of Shanghai for almost a century. In September 1869, the Land Regulations were revised and approved by the European envoys in Beijing to create the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC, which replaced the former Executive Committee of the settlement),42 which would govern the International Settlement until 1943. The 1869 Land Regulations also served as the legal basis of the merger of the British Settlement and American Settlement, although for practical reasons (such as policing) the latter already had been under the administration of the British Settlement since September 1861. Officially, the French insisted on having a separate concession in Shanghai. The French Concession was therefore governed by a separate municipal council headed by the French consul-general and was not subject to the Land Regulations. In reality, however, much of the administration of the French Concession duplicated the regulations and practices of the International Settlement.
The new regulations also deleted the segregation provision of the 1845 regulations, although officially Chinese were still not allowed to acquire land in their own name within the Settlement. At this stage the Chinese government was still unwilling to see mixed residence in Shanghai. According to a proclamation issued by Daotai Lan Weiwen in 1855, "No Chinese subject can acquire land, or rent, or erect buildings, within the Foreign Settlement, without first having obtained an authority under official seal from the local Authority, sanctioned by the Consuls of the three Treaty Powers."43 When the foreign consuls wrote a letter asking the Daotai to take care of health and moral conditions in the settlement, the Daotai responded with a complaint rather than a solution: "According to the original land regulations, native domicile was interdicted within the settlement; now, however, tenements were built by foreigners to accommodate natives, regardless even of the risk incurred in harbouring people of bad character indiscriminately, and of the difficulties this unregulated state of affairs would entail in criminal cases."44
Despite the opposition of the Daotai, by the late 1850s there was no doubt that the concessions were no longer a reserved area for foreign residents, but rather were a special district mostly populated by Chinese but governed by Europeans. The suppression of the Small Sword rebellion in
1855 did not end population mobility into the foreign settlement. The Taiping Rebellion, which was most violent and destructive in Jiangnan, continued to drive refugees to Shanghai. In 186062, the Taipings several times attempted to seize Shanghai; this created even more panic among the people of the region, and, consequently, refugees continued to pour into Shanghai's foreign concessions for protection. By 1865, the population of the British-American settlement had increased to 92,884. At the same time, almost 50,000 Chinese moved into the French Concession. By the end of the Taiping Rebellion, well over 110,000 Chinese had moved into the foreign settlements.45
From the "Five Lakes and Four Seas"
The opening of Shanghai in the mid-nineteenth century, first to "barbaric" foreigners and then to a great variety of Chinese refugees from outside the Shanghai area, represented the continuation of a local tradition of easy acceptance of outsiders. Traditional Chinese writers, including the compilers of local gazetteers (fangzhi ), often described the people of Jiangnan as rouruo (soft and weak).46 The tradition of ready acceptance of outsiders was seen as part of this "soft and weak" nature. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Shanghai was a hot spot in Sino-foreign relations, the Qing court frequently cautioned officials to beware of the "soft and weak" nature of the Shanghai folk when dealing with "barbarian affairs" (yiwu ).47 Lin Yutang (18951976) once contrasted the "simple thinking and hard living" northern Chinese and the "progressive and quick-tempered" southerners with the people of Jiangnan, who were, Lin claimed, "inured to ease and culture and sophistication, mentally developed but physically retrograde, loving their poetry and their comforts, sleek undergrown men and slim neurasthenic women, fed on birds'-nest soup and lotus seeds, shrewd in business, gifted in belles-lettres, and cowardly in war, ready to roll on the ground and cry for mamma before the lifted fist descends."48 Such views added up to a stereotype, of course, and in any case might have applied more to the upper classes than to working people, but, like many stereotypes, there was some truth to these words.
There was also a more charitable interpretation of the "soft and weak" nature of the people of Shanghai that emphasized their virtues of openness, amiability, tolerance, flexibility, and so on.49 The commercial boom of Shanghai in the Qing period was initially led by the "guest merchants," who came from nearby places as well as from remote provinces to conduct business in Shanghai. The influence of these merchants, particularly those
of Guangdong and Fujian, was strong prior to the treaty-port era. Apparently, prosperity created by the "guest merchants" eventually led to a proclivity to value commerce and easily accept outsiders and outside influences. Such a tendency was, even by the modest standards of the time, viewed as a departure from orthodoxy and, therefore, was condemned as evil.50 But it was precisely because of this heterodoxy that Shanghai rose above the horizon of a vast conservatism and became a great, modern city.
Foreign Adventurers
This tradition of openness was even more characteristic of Shanghai during the treaty-port era. By the late nineteenth century, Shanghai was an exceptional place where the natives welcomed sojourners, while elsewhere in the country the normal pattern was the reverse. As an indicator of its openness, a variety of Chinese dialects could be heard in the streets and neighborhoods of the city; everyone lived side by side, seemingly without fear of discrimination. Indeed, Shanghai seemed most receptive to those who spoke a Western language, because people who spoke a foreign tongue could, as a late-nineteenth-century poem put it, "do as they please."51
At the beginning of the treaty-port period some Westerners had apparently bought into the stereotype of the "soft" Shanghainese. A British Royal Navy commander who traveled extensively along the China coast and lived there for five years immediately after 1842 wrote:
The English merchant at Canton is almost a prisoner in his house; he has only a few streets open to him for the required recreation, even for the benefit of exercise, and then with the probability of insult. Experience has taught him that even his own house may be a very unsafe refuge from a furious and ignorant mob; any excitement, from whatever cause it originates, is sure to vent itself on the unfortunate foreigners, and, perhaps, bring the building about his ears with very small chance of redress. On the other hand[,] at Shanghae [Shanghai], he is surrounded by a peaceable and hospitable community, where crime is a matter of such rare occurrence, that His Excellency Kun Mukiu*
[Gong Mujiu], the civil governor, said in my presence that, during his government of so large a population, which had lasted, I believe, nine years, one execution only had taken place. . . . Besides the absence of crime in Shanghae, the city is always open to the foreigner equally with the native; and I have had several years' experience to ground my statement on, that insults or annoyance, of every kind, are less frequent to strangers than in any part of the world.52
Although the rise of modern Shanghai must be explained from a multifaceted analysisincluding the favorable geographical location of the city,
sitting as it does at the middle of the nation's lengthy coastline facing the Pacific to the east and the Yangzi Valley to the westthe "soft" nature of the Shanghainese no doubt played an important role. To put this softness into a broader and perhaps philosophical perspective, one may relate it to the value of liberalism. A Chinese author who tried to analyze the nature of the people of Shanghai from a historical perspective argued that the "strongest psychological character of Shanghai civilization was tolerance and coexistence based on individual freedom."53
Be that as it may, unquestionably liberalism contributed to the cosmopolitanism of the city. In few Asian cities could foreigners feel as at home as in modern Shanghai. By the twentieth century, "Shanghai became a legend. No world cruise was complete without a stop in the city. Its name evoked mystery, adventure and license of every form."54 Going to Shanghai was a classic adventure for Westerners and a solution for many who had problems in their homeland. Shanghai was thus a city of dreams and a city of escape. In the Republican period, its foreign population included people from more than twenty European nations, a sizable community of Japanese, Indians, Vietnamese, and Koreans, and citizens from Middle Eastern and South American nationsas well as the nationless.55
The largest foreign contingents were, of course, the British, the Americans, and the French, whose respective concessions formed the heart of the city. The European-style office buildings on the Bund and the sumptuous and secluded residences on the west side of the city were constant reminders of the foreigners' status as masters of the city. By the twentieth century, despite the decline of the British Empire, old Shanghai residents still put the British ahead of other Western nationals, and even ahead of all other Anglophones: witness the word order in the term "British-American people" (YingMeiren).56 Despite whatever privilege the sentiment might have accorded the British, all foreigners in Shanghai had reason to feel at home. "To be a Shanghailanderwhether British or American, whether stateless Jew or Russian refugeehad always seemed an honoured privilege. Shanghai was a city of homes, not a city of transients. Young people might in the first instance be posted by a trading house to work there for a few years, but often as the moment of transfer approached, they begged to stay. People of every nationality settled there, married, raised children."57 The following missionary report tells of a vivid street scene in the downtown area in :1909:
Shanghai, with its mixture of races, with its national antipathies and jealousies, is indeed one of the most attractive but strangest towns in
the whole world. Every race meets there; and as one wanders down the Nanking Road, one never tires of watching the nationalities which throng that thoroughfare. There walks a tall bearded Russian, a fat German, jostling perhaps a tiny Japanese officer, whose whole air shows that he regards himself as a member of the conquering race that has checkmated the vast power of Europe; there are sleek Chinese in Western carriages, and there are thin Americans in Eastern rickshas; the motorcycle rushes past, nearly colliding with a closely curtained chair bearing a Chinese lady of rank, or a splendid Indian in a yellow silk coat is struck in the face by the hat of a Frenchman, who finds the pavements of Shanghai too narrow for his sweeping salute; one hears guttural German alternating with Cockney slang; Parisian toilettes are seen next to half-naked coolies; a couple of sailors on a tandem cycle almost upset two Japanese beauties as they shuffle along with their toes turned in; a grey-gowned Buddhist priest elbows a bearded Roman missionary; a Russian shop where patriotism rather than love of gain induces the owners to conceal the nature of their wares by employing the Russian alphabet overhead, stands opposite a Japanese shop which, in not too perfect English, assures the wide world that their heads can be cut cheaply.58
In later years, the cultural shock suggested in this report became attenuated, but the cosmopolitanism of the city lasted well into the 1940s.59
Not all Westerners played the role of "master" of the city. About 25,000 to 50,000 White Russian migrs arrived in Shanghai in the Republican period.60 Although most of them were poorRussians were the only Westerners to include a sizable number of prostitutes and beggarsthe businesses they opened along Avenue Joffre (now Huaihaizhong Road) in the French Concession helped create an elegant European atmosphere on the street.61 The concentration of Japanese in North Sichuan Road in Hongkou caused the area to be known as Little Tokyo. The city's traffic was largely directed by Sikh policemen, nicknamed "Turbaned Number Three" or "Number Three Redhead" (hongtou asan ), whose presence in the streets became a feature of the city.62 The success of Jewish merchants in Shanghai is an often-told story. Real estate magnates such as the Sassoons and Silas Hardoon (18471931) contributed to the "get-rich quick" reputation of Shanghai, and their grand office buildings and extravagant homes were proud landmarks of the city. Partly because no visa or papers of any sort were required to enter the city, during World War II Shanghai hosted about 20,000 Jewish refugees who had escaped the Nazis and made the arduous journey across the hemisphere. Most of them lived in the alleyway-house (lilong , or lane) neighborhoods in Hongkou in the north-
east section of the city. Half a century later, although practically all of the Jews had gone elsewhere (particularly to the United States), most of their former homes remained little changed and became sentimental relics for those who returned to visit.63
Despite Shanghai's wide-open cosmopolitanism, some foreigners may well have had reason to feel that they were "strangers always," as the title of Rena Krasno's memoirs of Jewish life in wartime Shanghai suggests. Yet loneliness, or perhaps homesickness, never prevented foreigners from coming to Shanghai and making a living, if not a fortune. In the early 1930s a Shanghai writer listed the reasons foreigners of various nationalities came to the city:
Shanghai's foreigners pack together in the city for the same reason our Chinese do: they could not make a living in their home country and came to Shanghai in search of a livelihood. Japanese prostitutes come to Shanghai to make a living by selling sex.64 The White Russians, who are anti-Red, came to Shanghai to make a living by begging. The overbearing British toughs came to Shanghai to make a living by running the police department. The bored Spanish came to Shanghai to make a living by playing tennis [huiliqiu ]. The nationless Jews came to Shanghai to make a living in real estate. The merchants of American trust companies came to Shanghai to make a living by selling gasoline. The French, who love a life of ease, came to Shanghai to make a living by selling cosmetics. The oppressed Indian and Vietnamese came to Shanghai to make a living by working as policemen, and so on and so forththere are just too many such cases to give a complete account of the subject.65
By the thirties, many foreigners considered the city their permanent home (see Fig. 1). As a Britisher indicated on the eve of the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1937, "It is time the old idea that foreigners come to Shanghai for a few years and then go away with a fortune was abandoned. This is a place of permanent residence for most of us."66 The Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1937, and their occupation of the whole city after the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, cast a shadow over the Western presence in the city. But it was really not until the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 that the century-long golden age of the Westerners came to a close.67
Chinese Immigrants
Despite the seeming ubiquity and importance of foreigners in Shanghai, the growth of the modern city lay not in its attraction for foreigners but,
Map 2.
Shanghai in the Republican era.
Fig. 1.
This bird's-eye view of where Suzhou (Soochow) Creek joins Huangpu River was photographed in 1937.
The right (i.e., southern) side of the creek is the core of the International Settlement,
with Garden Park (across from the British Consulate) at the northern end of the Bund.
Nanking Road is just one block out of the scene, to the right.
The 350-foot-long Garden Bridge was Shanghai's first iron and concrete bridge, built in 19067;
it is one of the symbols of modern Shanghai. Across the bridge to the north is the New Broadway Mansions,
built in 1934. The area behind the mansion is Hongkou, where residential neighborhoods featured
alleyway houses mixed with consulates, warehouses, and bars in the Broadway area.
The second bridge in the picture is the Zhapu Road Bridge, built in 1927.
The area across this bridge to the north consisted mainly of lilong neighborhoods.
Courtesy of Shanghai Municipal Archive.
essentially, in its attraction for the Chinese. Ever since the end of the system of residential segregation, the overwhelming majority of the people of Shanghai had been Chinese immigrants. In the span of three-quarters of a century (from 1855, when the segregation ended, to 1930, when the city entered its heyday), the population in the core of the city, the International Settlement, had increased about fiftyfold, and about 97 percent were Chinese.68 By 1937 and the end of the Republican period, the city's total population had increased at least tenfold, or possibly twentyfold in the city proper.69
The administrative area of Shanghai did not significantly expand in the century prior to 1949; rather, such rapid population growth was the result of immigration. Modern Shanghai attracted and absorbed immigrants from everywhere in the nation. From the late nineteenth century to the late 1920s, non-Shanghai natives consistently made up about 85 percent of the city's population.70 During the Nanjing decade (192737), the percentage of non-Shanghai natives dropped slightly, possibly because after a few generations of migration some people born in Shanghai considered themselves Shanghainese and reported their native place as Shanghai. But the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, followed by the Civil War (194649), brought new tides of immigrants to the city. By the end of the Sino-Japanese War, nonnatives still accounted for 80 percent of the population; in January 1950, the percentage of nonnatives had increased back to 85 percent.71
Most of these immigrants came from the provinces of the lower Yangzi delta (in particular, Jiangsu and Zhejiang) and from Guangdong in southern China. In the early 1930s, the five provinces from which Shanghai drew most of its immigrants were Jiangsu (53 percent, including 20 percent of local Shanghai origin), Zhejiang (34 percent), Guangdong (5 percent), Anhui (3 percent), and Shandong (1 percent).72 This pattern continued up to 1950.73 To apply a Chinese expression, modern Shanghainese came from the "Five Lakes and Four Seas" (wuhu sihai ), that is, everywhere in the nation.74
Immigrants came to the city for their own individual reasons and purposes, and included everyone from multimillionaires who came to pursue an extravagant yet secluded lifestyle that could hardly be found in other Chinese cities, to the absolutely destitute who roamed the city's streets in search of bare survival; from political dissidents who fled to the "safety zone" of the foreign concessions, to criminals who came to join the nation's largest underground; from modern women (or flappers) who found in this city the freedom they sought, to innocent rural girls who were inveigled by labor contractors to come work in the city but who ended up being sold to brothels. Yet virtually all who came to Shanghai had a simple, shared goal: to find a better life.
In the winter of 1928, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs conducted a survey of homeless people in seven public shelters. The 1,471 vagrants surveyed were all recent immigrants to the city, and they hailed from all eighteen provinces of China proper and from Manchuria. These people listed more than forty previous occupations, but the largest group (310) were jobless. There were 138 demobilized soldiers who were sup-
posed to return to their home villages, but who decided to stay on in Shanghai although they had no job. In response to the question "Why did you come to Shanghai?" 586 replied, "To look for a job." Another 354 said they came to Shanghai to look for relatives or friends. For most of these people, the purpose of visiting a relative or friend was to connect with someone who could help them find a job. Thus, virtually 64 percent of the respondents were motivated by the job opportunities to be found here.75
This survey was echoed by a 198990 survey of residents in seven neighborhoods who were immigrants in the Republican period. About 70 percent of the male interviewees gave "to look for a job" as the main reason for coming to Shanghai. In this they were successful. The percentage of employment among these immigrants increased from 46.6 before coming to Shanghai to 75.3 after arrival. The survey also found immigrants to Shanghai had a great variety of occupational backgrounds. More than half (56.4 percent)by far the largest grouphad been farmers; almost all found a job in the city, mostly in manufacturing and commerce. The remainder of those surveyed had come from diverse occupational backgrounds. This is consistent with another aspect of their background: half of the immigrants (50 percent) had come directly from the countryside, 21 percent from small rural towns, 15.3 percent from county seats, 11 percent from medium-size cities, and about 2.7 percent from large cities.76 Shanghai's immediate "radiation zone" for attracting immigrants included its suburban rural areas and the more distant lower Yangzi delta counties. People in the nearby countryside looked upon Shanghai as a place to get ahead. "Where is the market for agricultural and handicraft products? Shanghai. Where is the place for people to seek an occupation? Shanghai." The gazetteer of Chuansha, a rural county adjacent to Shanghai, exclaimed: "Overpopulation? Move to Shanghai! Unemployment? Look for opportunities in Shanghai!"77 It is probably the case that most rural immigrants came to Shanghai looking for factory work, for in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shanghai grew to be the nation's largest industrial center.78
The recruitment of workers from nearby villages for Shanghai's industries started as early as in the 1870s. Shanghai's earliest workshops were the Western-run shipyards in the Hongkou area (along the northeast banks of the Huangpu River).79 The shipyards at first hired skilled Cantonese workers. By the late 1870s, as the industry grew, workers from Nanjing, Ningbo, and local villages gradually outnumbered the Guangdong workers, for the obvious reason that local residents were closer and easier (and cheaper) to recruit. But, unlike the Guangdong workers, who
were experienced artisans, workers from jiangnan were mostly peasants and hence started their careers in industry as apprentices.80
A veteran worker in the machinery industry, Qian Rendao (born 1881), recalled that his grandfather was a local farmer who only had two or three mu of land planted in vegetables. Since it was difficult to support a family on such a small farm, the grandfather went to the International Settlement in search of a job and became a porter in the Hongkou dock area. Apparently he still kept his vegetable farm; thus his son (Rendao's father) as a child worked as a vegetable peddler to earn extra money to support the family. But the family had already become urban oriented. When Rendao's father grew up, he became an apprentice in the Chinese-owned Fachang Machine Factory. After serving out his apprenticeship, he entered the British-owned Xiangsheng Shipyard (Boyd and Co.) with the help of his wife's brother, Song Milong. Song also had been a vegetable farmer in his youth. He used to sell vegetables to the Fachang Machine Factory, which is how he got to know the people there; through this connection he later found a job in the factory as an apprentice. After his apprenticeship, he transferred to the Xiangsheng Shipyard in 1880 and worked as a coppersmith. His skill and performance got him quick promotions. He became a section chief a few years later and served in this position until 1905. Having an uncle like Song Milong in the factory, Rendao entered the Xiangsheng Shipyard as an apprentice at age eighteen and became a second-generation coppersmith.81 Stories such as this were by no means uncommon. In 196062, when veteran workers in the machine industry were interviewed by a group of historians, the interviewees recalled that their experiences were similar to those of the Qian and the Song families.82
The same pattern of securing labor from nearby villages obtained in the textile industry, the largest industry in modern Shanghai.83 A 1920 investigation into the life of textile workers in Shanghai found that all had been farmers from nearby areas.84 The experiences of these workers reveal in a number of ways the process by which peasants sought an urban life in this still-fledgling stage of China's industrialization. Even after moving to Shanghai, many of this group continued to maintain land and houses in home villages where their families had lived for generations; some even still lived in the village while working in a factory.85
The 1920 survey found that workers known as kemin (guest people)who hailed from the three counties of Nantong, Chongming, and Haimen, all near the mouth of the Yangzi Riverdid not become factory workers immediately upon arrival in Shanghai. Instead, they worked as tenants or farm hands in villages near Shanghai; in other words, they replaced the la-
bor of local peasants who had gone to work in the city's factories. Land in Shanghai was much more fertile than the saline-alkali soil in their native places, so to farm land near Shanghai was already a move upward for these peasants. Their ultimate goal, however, was not to farm but to work in a factory. After settling in villages near the city, many of them managed to get acquainted with people in cotton mills and eventually found jobs there (Fig. 2).86 This pattern of urban-rural transformation continued into the 1930s. As the sociologist H. D. Lamson reported in 1931, villages near Yangshupu, just northeast of Shanghai, served as stepping stones into the city for those from more distant regions. "Families move into our villages from such places as Tsung Ming [Chongming] Island," Lamson wrote, "remain some time, and perhaps eventually some or all of them move into the city itself."87
Compared to peasants from outside the region, local farmers were sometimes less enthusiastic about new industries invading their homeland and upsetting their peaceful rural life. When Nie Zhongfu established the Hengfeng Cotton Mill and Sheng Xuanhuai established the Sanxin Cotton Millboth were among Shanghai's earliest modern textile millsnearby farmers saw the plants as strange creatures and called cotton looms "the deity's vehicles"; few wanted to work in the factories.88 When the Jiangnan Shipyard, one of China's earliest and largest modern enterprises (in 1894 it alone employed about 4 percent of all of China's industrial workers), opened in Gaochangmiao in suburban Shanghai in 1865, rumors spread among local peasants that the factory recruited workers to be "thrown into the chimney" and that workers would be "smashed by the machines." For a while the situation was so unfavorable that the shipyard had to recruit apprentices from the local orphanage. The peasants also had another reason to resent the factory. Veteran worker Qian Haigen recalled that his grandfather was a farmer of Gaochangmiao whose land was taken over by the Jiangnan Shipyard to build the factory. Qian refused to work for the new factory and instead made a living by selling green onions. He even established a family rule that none of his offspring or their descendants should work for the shipyard. However, facing the much stronger trend of industrialization, neither the rumors nor the old farmer's resentment could count for much. Barely two decades later, the Jiangnan Shipyard had become a highly desirable place to work. The Qian family, after the grandfather died, ignored his behest and entered the shipyard.89
The job opportunities in the city included much more than just employment in the mills. In a suburban village of Pengpu, women commonly worked in textile mills and men earned a living as peddlers in the city.90
Fig. 2.
The artist and writer Feng Zikai (18981975), a native of Zhejiang but a lifetime resident of Shanghai,
was known for his unique style of plain ink drawings on subjects of everyday life,
an approach similar to that of Norman Rockwell. This drawing dates to about 1932:
a farmer and a boy watch a passing train. The caption reads,
"[This train] is heading for Shanghai." In an implicit but sprightly way, the cartoon expresses rural
people's general longing for Shanghai. From Feng Zikai, Feng Zikai wenji.
Peasant women from Fengxian county, which was close to the southern boundary of the city, made matchboxes for Shanghai's factories. Also making matchboxes were peasants in other nearby villages, as well as in Pudong (east of the Huangpu River).91 The 1922 gazetteer of Fahua, a tiny town southwest of Shanghai, reported that, in addition to its farmers becoming mill workers, the men also worked in Shanghai as gardeners, road construction workers, cart drivers, and unskilled workers of all sorts, while the women earned a living by making lace trimmings, hair nets, paper yuanbao (joss money to be burned for the dead). They also worked as do-
mestic servants, a popular occupation among peasant women (Fig. 3).92 As early as the Guangxu period (18751908), women from Shanghai's neighboring counties, such as Qingpu, were described as "going after the job [of domestic servant] like a flock of ducks." Some even abandoned their families to live in the city.93 The popularity of domestic service never faded. The number of servants in the city increased in parallel with the general population: Shanghai in 1930 had about 50,000 servants; by 1950 the size of this army had almost doubled.94
A Dual Identity
A popular saying in Shanghai had it that "having explored up to the edge of the world, one could not find a better place than the two sides of the Huangpu River."95 Other local sayings expressed the same sentiment, declaring, for instance, "what a great fortune for a person to live in this colorful and dazzling world [of Shanghai]" (ren zhule huahua shijie, dayou fuqi la ) and "Shanghai is a mountain of gold and silver" (Shanghai jinyinshah ).96 For most people the very word "Shanghai" provoked excitement, stimulated the imagination, and raised hopes. "So this is Shanghai!" was a usual exclamation of newcomers, both foreigners and the Chinese.97 After being absent from the city for eight years and having lived in many places in the hinterland during the Sino-Japanese War, Wang Xiaolai (18861967), one of Shanghai's leading entrepreneurs (he originally came from a village in Zhejiang), returned to Shanghai on September 8, 1945. He wrote of his feelings as the airplane was about to land: "I see about 40 percent of the red-tiled houses in Huxi [west Shanghai] are newly built. Nanshi and Zhabei [the Chinese districts] have declined and show little vigor, but the former foreign concessions look like before. The happy lot of Shanghainese is indeed great. To compare Shanghai with the hinterland is to compare paradise and hell."98
Almost as a rule, a new immigrant to the city would soon be proud of being not just a city person but a "Shanghai person," or Shanghairen. Along with the rise of Shanghai as China's number one city, Shanghairen were popularly associated with sophistication, astuteness, and a certain degree of Westernization. The writer Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) wrote in 1943, "The Shanghainese are not only traditional Chinese but are tempered by the high pressure of modern life. . . . Everybody says that Shanghainese are bad, but they are bad with a sense of propriety. Shanghainese are good at flattering, good at currying favor with the powerful, and good at fishing in troubled waters. However, because they know the art of conducting oneself in society, they play along without overdoing it."99
Fig. 3.
In an alleyway, a newly arrived country woman carries her children and belongings in two rattan baskets.
Immigrants like this often ended up living in a squatters' area but made a living in the city's
better-off alleyway-house neighborhoods, working as domestic servants, street hawkers, tinkers,
itinerant artisans, or the like. From R. Barz, Shanghai: Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai.
While the people of Shanghai were proud to call themselves Shanghairen, they were not always ready to totally identify themselves with the city. Since the people of Shanghai were mostly immigrants, ties to one's native place were acknowledged as a social norm. The statement "I want to be buried in my hometown" was, for example, commonly included in wills, and virtually all children, not necessarily only those who were filial, carried out this wish. One of the major functions or services of the city's numerous "native-place associations" (tongxianghui ) was to send the dead to their hometown for burial. Consequently, for many Shanghainese it was routine to go back to their home village or town to visit the family tomba practice known as "sweeping the graveyard" (saomu ), which usually involved a ritual ceremony for the dead and cleaning of the family graveyard. Leave for this purpose was sometimes part of employees' benefits. For instance, up to 1924 all employees of Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company had a month's leave with full pay solely for the purpose of "sweeping the graveyard."100
One's hometown or village was not only a place to be buried but also a place that modern Shanghainese, as well as others, regarded as a home to which one could return. This tie to one's native place was frequently utilized to solve social problems. For instance, one of the conventional methods adopted by the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs to deal with unemployment was to send the unemployed back to their home villages at the government's expense (ziqian huanxiang ).101 At the nongovernmental level, laid-off employees commonly received travel expenses (chuanzi ), based on the assumption that people who lost their job would return home. Sending people back to their native places was also a mechanism for dealing with wartime crises in the thirties and forties, and in fact was the principal solution adopted by government and charities for the crush of wartime refugees in late 1937 and early 1938.102 The Communists not only inherited this mechanism but used the power of the state to make it more effective. Mobilizing the people of Shanghai to go back to their hometowns or villages (dongyuan huixiang ) was frequently integrated into the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s.103
While the authorities used native-place ties for their own purposes, the poor looked upon strong ties with their hometown or village as a necessity. Rickshaw pullers, port coolies, unskilled casual laborers of all sorts, the unemployed, and vagabonds tended to return to their home villages if life in the city became too difficult or their city job could provide only part of their livelihood. Some of the urban poor still had land or were tenant farmers in their home village.104 The sociologist Lamson observed during his in-
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vestigation of working-class families in the Yangshupu area in 192931, "Sometimes people are unsuccessful in business ventures or become unemployed and move back to the rural regions."105
Better-off people and those who had firmly settled in the city also had their reasons to value native-place ties. Businesspeople found that networking based on native-place origins was one of the most convenient and reliable ways to conduct business in this sojourners' city. Table 1 shows some samples of the overlap between native place (xiangbang ) and trade (yebang ) in the city. The phenomenon of certain trades being dominated by people of certain native origins had its roots in the pre-treaty-port era. Traditional trade organizations such as guilds were formed either according to the merchants' native place and named after it (such as the GuangZhao gongsuo, or the Canton guild), or according to the product or service provided and named after that (such as the douye gongsuo , or the bean guild). Thirty native-place trade organizations could be found in Shanghai prior to 1842. These institutions did not fall into desuetude after the coming of the West, but instead flourished along with the rise of modern Shanghai. By 1911, at least 108 such organizations were operating in the city.106 The
overlap of trade and native place was such common knowledge in the city that an average resident might be able to give a list of the overlap in a casual conversation, reporting, for example, that the Cantonese were known for trading in tobacco, opium, and foreign groceries, Anhui merchants in tea and silk, merchants from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanxi in banking and finance, and so on. At a time when industries were developing in the city, local origins divided not only business owners but their employees as well. Examples of such divisions were everywhere (although they were not necessarily rigid): silk weaving, printing, and dyeing were mostly done by people from Shenxian, Dongyang, Xinchang, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Huzhou (all countries in Zhejiang province), and Changzhou; flour milling and oil pressing were done by people from Wuxi, Haimen, Ningbo, Shaoxing, and Hubei; shipping was the business of people from Guangdong, Tianjin, and Ningbo; and the ranks of the police force were filled with natives of Hebei and Shandong.107
In industries, business owners tended to recruit employees from their native places. Mu Ouchu, an America-educated entrepreneur whose investment in textiles represented an early Chinese effort to promote modern industry, began to recruit workers from his native province of Hunan for his Shanghai cotton mills in 1919.108 A recruiting poster read: "Since Hunan has frequently suffered from war, the life of people there, especially of women, is difficult. So, a portion of the hiring quota in my factory in Shanghai is reserved for Hunan women in order to promote the idea that women can earn a livelihood by themselves, to train skilled textile workers, and to prepare for the growth of the textile industry in Hunan in the future."109
Recruitment policies such as this became almost a standard. Liu Hongsheng, one of the best-known entrepreneurs of twentieth-century China, had his enterprises recruit workers from his home county of Dinghai in Zhejiang for more than a decade, beginning in 1936. Liu himself decided on this policy.110 A less well known capitalist, Wang Daban, who started as a shop assistant in Ningbo and later came to own five factories in Shanghai and Ningbo, also favored hiring people from his native Ningbo. When Wang established a new printing and dyeing factory in Shanghai in 1935, the first bunch of workers were all from his hometown; the Ningbo bang (Ningbo group) formed the backbone of Wang's enterprises.111
Native-place ties were perhaps even more central in the Fufeng Flour Mill, the first Chinese-owned modern mechanized flour mill. Its owners, the Sun family of Anhui, came to Shanghai to establish a mill in 1898. By 1937, the factory they had established was known in the trade as "number
one in the Far East." But the management of this enterprise was rather provincial. For half a century, chief executives and management personnel were, with only one exception, all members of the Sun clan from Anhui. About 90 percent of the employees were of Anhui origin, and many had been directly recruited from Sun's hometown, Shouzhou, and its vicinity. These employees were not only "peasants of yesterday"; they were to some extent still regarded as peasants by the Suns: while they worked in the Suns' mill, many of them kept their families back in their native village as tenant farmers of the Sun family.112
Native-place ties between employers and employees provided a natural linkage between the two and made for easier management: the owners felt comfortable and safe having tongxiang (fellow villagers or townsmen) wield the hammers in the workshops while the employees were grateful to their boss for giving them a job. But native-place ties in business and work were not simply a matter of practicality; they were also a matter of emotion. They reflected the dual identity of the people of Shanghai, who, while they happily saw themselves as Shanghainese, also liked to maintain every possible tie with their native place. This is not unlike an ethnic group in the United States that tries to preserve some degree of its culture. As most of the people of Shanghai were immigrants, only about 10 percent of the entries in a typical Who's Who of Shanghai would be identified as natives of the city. Although all people in such publications were supposed to be Shanghairensince they were listed as "Shanghai celebrities" and the publications customarily bore titles such as The Celebrities of Shanghai's Enterprises and Commerce (Shanghai gongshang mingren lu), Pictorial Biographies of Shanghai's Celebrities (Shanghai mingren xiangzhuan), and so ona native place was always put before the person's name. Thus, one reads of "Yuhang (native place) Zhang Taiyan," "Wuxing (native place) Chen Qimei," "Foshan (native place) Wu Yanren," and so on.113 These people were Shanghainese because they lived in the city, had careers there, and perhaps would stay in the city all their lives. But at the same time they identified themselves by their native origins, just as contemporary Americans are sometimes distinguished as "Irish American," "Jewish American," "Chinese American," and so on.
Among all the factors that immigrants identify with or assimilate from a new culture, language is perhaps the most essential and profound. The historian Xiong Yuezhi points out that the first criterion for distinguishing a "Shanghai person" was the fact that the person spoke the Shanghai dialect. Without speaking the standard Shanghai dialect (that is, the dialect as spoken in the city proper), he asserts, one could hardly be recognized by
one's peers as Shanghainese.114 This statement is more applicable to contemporary Shanghai, where the strictly imposed urban household registration system has produced at least two generations of Shanghai-born people who speak the pure Shanghai dialect, while reducing immigration to an insignificant level, than to pre-1949 Shanghai, when immigrants poured into the city, bringing with them all sorts of local tongues. Moreover, the Shanghai dialect itself has undergone some changes directly caused by the impact of dialects spoken by the immigrants.
The Shanghai dialect was originally a branch of the Songjiang dialect. At late as the third quarter of the nineteenth century it was still the language commonly spoken in the city. The phonetics of the Shanghai dialect recorded by the Sinologist Joseph Edkins (18231905) in the midnineteenth century, for instance, were those of the Songjiang dialect with a slight Pudong accent. In other words, in the first few decades of the treatyport era, the Shanghai dialect essentially retained its original form.115 To this day this dialect is still spoken by people in the vicinity of Shanghai, especially in the counties of Shanghai, Fengxian, Nanhui, and Songjiang.
The modern Shanghai dialect, the one spoken in twentieth-century Shanghai proper, diverged from its source by absorbing influences from the Suzhou and Ningbo dialects. Obviously, this was because immigrants from these areas were numerous in the late nineteenth century. The Shanghai dialect is perhaps the youngest in China: it was gradually formed at the turn of the century, and in the early Republican period it became distinguishable as the dialect of Shanghai proper. In 1916, when the philologist Gilbert Mcintosh published his book on the Shanghai dialect, he had to include many new expressions and idioms, which suggests that the dialect was absorbing new blood.116 In the Republican period, the original Shanghai dialect, the one with a Songjiang or Pudong accent, gradually came to be regarded as the language of the country folk (xiangxiaren ), and the new dialect prevailed as what might be called urban speech. Indeed, the Shanghai dialect had a very limited "speech zone," literally only the city proper. It was the dialect spoken in the foreign concessions and their immediate vicinity, that is, an area of about 60 square miles. To the east, across the Huangpu River, the accent was slightly different, but different enough so that a Shanghainese from the west side of the river felt he was in the country.117
It is ironic that the Pudong, or Songjiang, accent, the original Shanghai dialect, came to be regarded as countrified speech, while in this city of immigrants, accents of all sorts were generally seen as normal. People who spoke the Shanghai dialect with an accent were sometimes nicknamed, ac-
cording to their native origin and age, as "Little Shaoxing," "Old Guangdong," "Little Suzhou," "Old Ningbo," and so on, but this was customarily regarded as a cordial form of address, and there was little or no sense of discrimination or prejudice involved.118 Like many immigrants in the United States who speak a foreign tongue at home, it was common for people in Shanghai to speak the dialect of their native place as well as the Shanghai dialect.119
Dragons and Fishes Jumbled Together
By the 1930s, Shanghai was a city of 3 million strangers, each of whom, it may be presumed, had his or her own reasons for living in this metropolis. For the privilegedthe wealthy, the politically powerful, the intellectually outstandingthe city was a foundation for their elite status. For the poor, the city was a fragile life buoy. And for those in between, the city was the substance out of which the dream for a better life might be spun. While every city is a mixture of types and classes, and Shanghai may have had its share of the universal social stratifications, it also was unique.
So far I have reckoned the diversity of the people of Shanghai horizontally, by observing the various races and nationalities of the foreigners who lived in the city as well as the variety of native-place origins among the Chinese residents. Now let us turn to a vertical reckoning in order to uncover the social and economic strata of modern Shanghai.
The Elites
Shanghai's commercial prosperity and security (assured by the foreign powers) made the city a real paradise for wealthy Chinese. From the early twentieth century on, bureaucrats, warlords, politicians, landowners, literati, and magnates of all sorts came to the city seeking a life of comfort and luxury.
During and after the Taiping Rebellion, many of those who fled to Shanghai were wealthy landlords, merchants, and literati from Jiangnan. These well-to-do immigrants were generally of two types. One took advantage of the favorable commercial environment of the city by investing in various types of businesses and, generally, got richer. It was from this type that the compradors and China's modern entrepreneurs sprang, as discussed below. The other type consisted of those who lived in Shanghai chiefly for the comforts and freedom that it afforded. In time, retreating to Shanghai became popular among the rich and the celebrities of China. The epithet "Mr. Hermit" (yugong ) was applied to those whose goal seemed to
be a comfortable exile in the city, free of responsibilities and concerns. Needless to say, not every Mr. Hermit was a real recluse, and it was not unusual for politicians to retreat to Shanghai as a strategy for restoring their prestige or staging a comeback.120
In any case, these celebrities left a legacy to the city in the form of the grand houses and gardens they built. The late Qing reformist Kang Youwei (18581927), for instance, spent his later years in Shanghai. From 1914 until his death, Kang had three spacious homes in Shanghai. The site of one of his residences in the International Settlement was big enough, after he had moved out, to build first a Buddhist temple and, later, a pharmaceutical factory (which is still there today). Another of Kang's residences was demolished in 1930 and replaced by a residential compound of twenty-nine three-story alleyway-houses (with a garage on the first floor) that, in 1988, housed 222 households, or 828 residents.121 The bureaucratic bigwig Sheng Xuanhuai (18441916) also lived in Shanghai after the 1911 revolution: his luxurious Western-style residence is now the consulate general of Japan.122 Even many busy politicians who never had time to be a "Mr. Hermit" maintained villas in Shanghai. Li Hongzhang (18231901), for instance, had a villa for his concubine, Dingxiang. The villa is preserved to this day as a resort known for its combination of charming traditional Chinese garden and chic European architecture.123 High-ranking politicians of the Nationalist regime almost without exception kept a residence in Shanghai. The quiet tree-lined avenues on the west side of the city were dotted with the residences of many major political figures in the Nanjing government.124 Shanghai proved to be a better place to settle complicated and subtle political issues than the capital city of Nanjing. It was said that after 1927 the capital was the stage where political drama was performed, while Shanghai was the backstage.125 The relationship between Nanjing and Shanghai was rather like that, in contemporary China, between Beijing and the summer resort of Beidaihe, which has been the favorite site for secret gatherings (and sometimes formal meetings) of top Communist leaders.
Not only was Shanghai the place where big political deals were arranged; it was also where big business deals were made. And, at least in the nineteenth century, big business deals were rarely cut without the intervention of middlemen known as compradors. These men served as agents for foreign firms. They were generally quick-witted, spoke a foreign tonguemost often pidgin Englishand had some knowledge of foreign customs and business norms. Without them, foreign companies would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to do business in China. In the middle of the nineteenth century, few Chinese spoke a Western language,
and few Westerners spoke Chinese. Furthermore, Western businesspeople had at best an imperfect knowledge of the Chinese market and Chinese ways of doing business. Finally, many Chinese merchants simply would not deal directly with foreigners. Compradors were thus crucial to conducting business, and consequently they were well compensated: their high salaries and commissions (which were usually much higher than the salary) soon made them China's foremost nouveau riche in the second half of the nineteenth century.126
Compradors in Shanghai were almost exclusively immigrants from Guangdong and a few Jiangnan cities such as Ningbo and Suzhou. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Russell and Company (American, founded 1846) employed ten compradors in Shanghai, Jardine Matheson and Company (British, founded 1843) employed fifteen, and Dent, Beale and Company (British, founded in 1843), six: none of these compradors was a native of Shanghai.127 Compradors of foreign banks were mostly Ningbo and Suzhou natives. These men were usually from well-to-do families that had moved to Shanghai late in the nineteenth century. They learned English in their youth and entered a foreign firm, sometimes first as a clerk and then, later, as a comprador. Compradors of foreign banks often had experience in a traditional Chinese bank (qianzhuang ) before entering a foreign bank. The position of comprador was often passed down from generation to generation, and thus by the turn of this century socalled comprador clans (maiban shijia ) had emerged.128
Most compradors simultaneously had their own businesses in addition to working for a foreign firm. Thus after the 1920s, when the role of the comprador declined, these people managed to remain the richest class in Chinese society. The Communists labeled them the "comprador-capitalist" class and made them a chief target of the revolution. Indeed, many successful capitalists in the city, especially the biggest industrialists, had been compradors. This is reflected in the membership of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce (Shanghai zongshanghui ), which was founded in 1902 and became the city's most influential business organization in the early twentieth century.129 In 192526, 45 percent of the chamber's board of directors and 22 percent of its members had a dual identity: as both comprador and business owner.130
No matter what kind of trade or business the entrepreneurs of Shanghai followed, the majority of them were not local people but immigrants. In 1923, 86 percent of the members of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce were from Zhejiang. Of the thirty-five members who served on its board of directors in 1924, only four were natives of Shanghai.131 Of
69 Chinese banks, or qianzhuang, in 1921, only 7 were run by Shanghai natives; by 1933, out of 72 qianzhuang in Shanghai, only 3 were run by natives.132 In 1944, of the 177 real estate companies in the city, only 35 (one-fifth) were run by natives.133
Shanghai was the capital of modern Chinese industry, and in the early twentieth century the capitalists of Shanghai were, as Parks Coble has pointed out, "the most powerful native economic group in China."134 Prior to 1927, more than one-fifth of the nation's industrial enterprises (exclusive of mines) were located in Shanghai; more than a quarter of the country's industrial capital was concentrated there. In 193233, half of China's 2,435 modern factories (defined as mechanized and employing at least 30 workers) were in Shanghai.135 Thus any serious study of the Chinese bourgeoisie must begin with Shanghai. As Bergre has indicated, this is not just because the Shanghai bourgeoisie "are the easiest to find out about; it is also because, of all the [Chinese] entrepreneurs, they were both the most active and the most numerous. Furthermore, most of the entrepreneurs, in their ordinary activities, always appear to function as a group at an essentially local or regional level. To disregard their geographical anchorage would [lead] to the empty categorizations characteristic of a familiar kind of Marxist analysis."136 One may add that the Shanghai bourgeoisie was not really "Shanghai," or local. The diverse native-place origins of Shanghai's capitalists and the reach of their activities beyond the boundaries of the city (the former often contributed to the latter) greatly increased the significance of this class at the national level.
Turning our scan from businesspeople to educated modern professionals, we find another elite, which included doctors of Western medicine, executive managers, accountants, attorneys, engineers, and other higher professionals who were either employed in the modern sector (industry, banking, transportation, and communications) or were self-employed. Although these people constituted less than 1 percent of the population of Shanghai, Shanghai had more of them than any other Chinese city.137 Many professionals were also investors of sorts; thus they were not merely white-collar workers but capitalists as well. All had received a higher education, often in mission schools and universities; some were so-called returned students, who had been educated overseas. Professionals appeared in public in Western attire, socialized with foreigners, and (some at least) spoke fluent English. They lived in quiet and comfortable areas in west Shanghai, typically in what were called garden alleyway-houses (huayuan lilong ) or in detached houses (yangfang ). The western part of Bubbling
Well Road (today's Nanjingxi Road), Zhaofeng Road (today's Yuyuan Road), and the so-called extra-Settlement roads (yuejie zhulu , lit., "roads that exceed the boundaries")areas that were immediately west of the foreign concessionswere known for their concentration of elegant homes.138 Many of the residents had private cars (or rickshaws), kept servants, and were avid club-goers. In the eyes of their fellow countrymen, the west-end residents were a different kind of Chinese: a "superior Chinese" (gaodeng Huaren ).
Another elite included writers, actors, painters, musicians, movie stars, and so onwhat might be called the cultural elite. This group gave birth to and nurtured the so-called Haipai (Shanghai school) culture, which became locked in battle with the Jingpai (Beijing school) tradition. The division between the two started in the late nineteenth century over differences in painting styles, but later spread to other cultural dimensions such as theater and literature. Eventually, the contest (at least in the eyes of the Haipai) became one between a vibrant, liberal culture centered in Shanghai and a conservative, traditional culture symbolized by Beijing.
In the Tongzhi period (18621874), among the immigrants to Shanghai from the Jiangnan region were professional and amateur painters, many of whom were traditional "men of letters" (wenren ). Instead of following the regular, orthodox track of pursuing a career in the imperial government, these people chose to live in the foreign concessions and make a living by selling their artistic works. Inasmuch as polite society had always considered the purpose of painting to be self-cultivation, the commercedriven paintings done in Shanghai were regarded as vulgar.139 Later, this same tendency toward commercialism was also found in theaters. "Peking opera" as played in Shanghai was known as the southern style or simply the Shanghai style; it had a reputation of emphasizingfor the purpose of attracting a large audiencelavish and sensational effects (such as costume and stage sets) over skillful performance.140
By the Republican period, the word "Haipai" also came to be associated with literature. The so-called Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction can be regarded as the first "Shanghai-style" literature. This writing took entertainment to be the purpose of fiction; plots were dominated by sensational and often tragic love stories, although a sober-minded reader might still find social and moral value in these stories.141 In the early Republican period, the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school dominated the literary world of Shanghai: about half the literary magazines published in China in the second decade of the twentieth century were published in Shanghai,
and most of them were works of this school. In the three decades between 1908 and 1938, 180 newspapers and magazines of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies type were published in Shanghai; the year 1914 alone saw 21 new newspapers and magazines of this type founded in Shanghai.142
But this was just one type of publication. Modern Shanghai was China's publishing center. From the late nineteenth century to 1956, when private ownership was transferred to state or collective ownership, about six hundred presses (not including newspaper and magazine publishers) opened in the city, most of them during the Republican period. The concentration of bookstores in Fuzhou Road and Henan Road in the International Settlement made these "cultural streets" famous nationwide.143 No city in Republican China enjoyed more freedom of the press and cultural prosperity than Shanghai.
The city therefore attracted, or produced, China's most predominant intellectuals. Hu Shi, the hero of the New Cultural Movement, recalled that it was his early education (from 1904 to 1910) in Shanghai that made him an enthusiastic follower of Charles Darwin (180982) and Thomas Huxley (182595) and a pioneer advocate of the vernacular language.144 A galaxy of twentieth-century China's outstanding writers, such as Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Yu Dafu, Xia Yan, and revolutionary intellectuals, such as Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai, all lived in Shanghai for a substantial period of time and published there. None of them was a native of Shanghai. All sojourned in the city; its dazzling life inspired and stimulated them to create works fated to become classics of an era.
Financially, these intellectuals occupied the lower rungs of the elite group. In wealth, they simply could not be compared with the city's capitalist bigwigs. But their incomes allowed them to live comfortable lives. A productive writer of popular fiction in the second decade of the twentieth century, for instance, could earn as much as $300 per month. The writer Bao Tianxiao got $120 a month in 1907 by writing three hours in the morning for a fiction magazine and spending afternoon and evening hours writing for a newspaper.145 Working as an editor of the Commercial Press, Mao Dun earned a monthly salary of $100 in 1921; Yu Dafu's wife recalls that in the late 1920s, every month she collected $100200 in royalties for her husband.146 By comparison, a skilled worker's monthly salary in 1926 was $3040; that was sufficient to support a family of five.147 Still, given Shanghai's congested living conditions, the income of a writer typically allowed him or her to rent a house in an average alleyway-house neighborhood, next door to, say, a skilled worker or a shop clerk. But the differences were still there. Many a writer (including such luminaries as Lu Xun, Mao
Dun, and Yu Dafu) was able to rent a whole alleyway-house, while his neighbors shared a house with other tenants.
These well-off and popular writers were the top of the heap that included many young intellectuals who had come to Shanghai to make a living as freelance writers. Economically, these junior writers may or may not have been part of the elite. In any case, their income from selling their works was not necessarily greater than that of an average mechanic or shopkeeper. Many struggling writers rented a little "pavilion room" (tingzijian ) in the city's common alleyway-house neighborhoods (discussed in detail in chapter 4) and lived among the populace while maintaining the mentality of an elite. Indeed, these intellectuals in Republican Shanghai bore some similarities to the French writers and poets who worked during the time of the rise of French industry after the Napoleonic Wars, as well as to American writers of the 1920s who escaped to Europe in search of a better environment for self-expression. Cowley's description of American writers in Paris in the twenties could also apply to intellectuals who sojourned in Shanghai in roughly the same period (the 1920s and the 1930s): "Some of them became revolutionists; others took refuge in pure art; but most of them demanded a real world of present satisfactions, in which they could cherish aristocratic ideals while living among carpenters and grisettes."148
The Petty Urbanites
"Petty urbanite," or xiaoshimin (translated in this book as "little urbanite"), was a blanket term popularly known and liberally used to refer, often with condescension, to city or town people who were of the middle or lower-middle social ranks. Like most conventional labels for a social class or group, xiaoshimin was never precisely defined. It was less clear who should be included in the category than who should be excluded. The elite at the top and the urban poor at the bottom would never be referred to as xiaoshimin. It was the people who stood in between who were called "petty urbanites."
The liberal use of the term contributed to its vagueness. Although people who used the wordwhich was almost everyonecertainly knew what it meant, nowhere in Chinese sources is the term adequately analyzed and carefully defined. In the West, Chinese petty urbanites have been discussed mostly in connection with the readership of twentieth-century Chinese fiction and periodicals. Perry Link, who is the first scholar in the West to have taken up the issue of xiaoshimin in academic research, applies an annotation from a Chinese dictionary to explain that xiaoshimin refers
to "the middle class or the petty bourgeoisie." Links points out that "the term is taken to include small merchants, various kinds of clerks and secretaries, high school students, housewives, and other modestly educated, marginally well off urbanites." These people were the major audience of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies novels of the second and third decades of the twentieth century.149 According to Frederic Wakeman and Wen-shin Yeh, in the Republican era the petty urbanites "constituted a huge new urban audience for periodicals like Shenghuo (Life)." These people were "literate clerks and apprentices in trade, manufacturing, the professions, the public and private service sectors, as well as among elementary and normal school teachers."150
While the term "middle class" often does not convey the precise character of a social group and sometimes is even misleading (because of, among other things, our contemporary stereotypical notion of this category), the xiaoshimin of Shanghai in some ways resembled the Kleinburger of early modern Germany. Like the xiaoshimin, the Kleinburger were "socially and economically as distinct from capitalist bourgeoisie as they were from the propertyless proletariat." They were predominantly craftspeople but also shopkeepers, petty traders, and minor officeholders, men with a "narrow, particularistic outlook on life." These words precisely describe the mentality of the Chinese xiaoshimin (as we shall see in later chapters). The historian Christopher Friedrichs has selected "lower middle class" as the best available translation of "Kleinburger."151
It seems to me that the approaches to defining xiaoshimin have paid attention only to occupational or vocational criteria; none has focused on what made these people a community. In fact, the expression itself has a connotation associated with community. From a purely terminological point of view, the word "xiaoshimin" consists of two parts: xiao (little) and shimin (urbanite). Here, "urbanite" stresses one's residential orientation (i.e., city people, not country people), and "little" stresses one's social standing (i.e., a small potato, not a big shot). Combining these two parts of the expression, the term xiaoshimin has strong implications for one's community background. When people used the term "xiaoshimin" to describe an individual, it was often with the idea of "a person from a common neighborhood." In premodern times, there was a similar term to describe townspeople, that is, shijing zhibei (a fellow from the marketplace). Thus the image of "petty urbanite" carries implications for social rank based on community, and it is the residential community that is being emphasized. When people used the term, the first thing that came to mind was usually
a type of person whose outlook was limited by the community in which he or she lived.152
In modern Shanghai, the xiaoshimin were identified with a type of residence known as the shikumen house. Emerging in the late nineteenth century, shikumen houses were first a type of dwelling for well-to-do families. Later, the structure of the shikumen underwent a number of simplifications, mainly a downsizing of the house and a reduction of its cost. By the early twentieth century this type of house had become the single most common form of residence in the city, and those who lived in these houses were mostly middle- and lower-middle-income people. In other words, the shikumen were the homes of Shanghai's petty urbanites. The expression "the petty urbanites of the shikumen neighborhood" was common in the city.153
One of the major constituents of Shanghai's petty urbanites, as well as one of the primary residents of the shikumen neighborhoods, was so-called zhiyuan , a broad social category chiefly composed of office workers, clerks, all types of white-collar workers, and shop assistants. According to one definition, zhiyuan were "service personnel who work in economic, cultural, and political offices or institutions."154 Table 2 lists various types of zhiyuan in Shanghai in the 1930s. By the late 1930s, there were about 250,000 to 300,000 people in this category in the city.155 Zhiyuan and their family members numbered no fewer than 1.5 million persons, or about 40 percent of the city's population in the middle thirties (when Shanghai had 3.5 million people).156
Another major group of petty urbanites was factory workers. In discussing industrial workers in modern China, scholars both inside and outside China have often resorted to broad generalizations and even stereotyping. Inside China, this was largely because official ideology needed to forge an image, however distorted, of a unified proletariat as the leading class of the revolution. Outside China, scholars simply lacked information that would have made possible a nuanced picture. This latter weakness has been significantly remedied by recent research on Chinese labor, which sees industrial workers as a highly stratified social group divided by local origins, type of work, and gender.157 But it is also important to examine the residential patterns of factory workers. Where workers lived and what type of house they lived in was not only a measure of their economic status but also, like the role played by the workplace, a vital influence on their outlook.
Surveys conducted in the early 1930s found that Shanghai's factory workers lived in three major types of houses: alleyway or shikumen
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
houses, old-style one-story houses (pingfang ), and straw shacks. Of 76,218 houses inhabited by workers, 37 percent were alleyway houses, that is, the typical type of house in Shanghai's petty urbanite neighborhoods. These houses were found virtually everywhere in the city; they were the homes of about half of Shanghai's factory workers and their families.158
The surveys found that the distinction between so-called workers' zones and nonworkers' zones was by no means rigid; families of industrial workers were frequently found in areas quite distant from factories, intermixed with white-collar households.159 In other words, a considerable part of Shanghai's industrial workers lived side by side with people of many other social types. Factory workers in these neighborhoods were mostly skilled or semiskilled men (and some women) who had a relatively stable or long-term (in contradistinction to casual) job in an industrial enterprise. These workers and their families who lived in shikumen houses were quite distinct from their "class brothers" who lived at the bottom of society: casual workers, day laborers, and unskilled coolies of all sorts. The latter group was driven by poverty to the squatters' areas on the outskirts of the city proper and were despised by the contented petty urbanites in shikumenlet alone the aloof elites in the city's wealthy neighborhoodsas rustic coolies or simply country bumpkins.160
The Urban Poor
It is understandable that most people in Shanghai tended to see shack dwellers as hayseeds. The urban poor were overwhelmingly former peasants. They may have migrated to the city but they were not quite urbanized, if one defines urbanization as primarily involving having a stable job and place of residence in the city. These people lacked any of the three basic conditions that allowed a newcomer to find a fairly desirable and relatively stable job: skill, money, and a good social network.
First, most peasant immigrants were illiterate and unskilled. Their opportunities were further blocked by the fact that they could not afford the lump sum payment or nonrefundable "deposit" (which was virtually a payment) required by many trades in Shanghai for obtaining a starting position or an apprenticeship. The amount of the deposit varied by trade (or individual enterprise); commonly, it was equivalent to two months' salary in the trade in question.161 The poor simply could not afford such a large payment; hence they could not take the first step toward a permanent job. Finally, poor rural immigrants usually did not have connections in the city that would have helped them find a good job. The best networking connection they might have was a relative, a fellow villager, or an acquaintance who had come to Shanghai earlier. But these earlier arrivals themselves were, more often than not, at the bottom rung of society and could hardly offer much assistance. At best, if connections ever worked, they only helped the newcomer find a place in the ranks of Shanghai's poverty-stricken multitudes.162
On one hand, the growth of Shanghai's modern industries during and after World War I, and the urban development that paralleled it, resulted in countless job opportunities, as well as all the amenities and accoutrements of modern urban life; this proved to be a powerful attraction. On the other hand, in the countryside economic and social deterioration, wars, banditry, and natural disasters that frequently marked the Republican period created an army of uneasy peasants who imagined the city to be a refuge. Thus, the city and an army ready to surrender to its attractions met in early-twentieth-century Shanghai. The result was an onslaught of rural poor who stuck to the city for sheer survival.
The most sizable groups of the urban poor in Republican-era Shanghai were rickshaw pullers, dockworkers, street beggars, and countless casual workersand the unemployed. In the mid-1920s, there were about 62,000 rickshaw pullers, 22,000 wheelbarrow and handcart operators and carriage
drivers (mafu , or "grooms"), and 35,500 dockworkers in Shanghai. In the late 1920s, there were about 50,00060,000 dockworkers; in the mid 1930s, 20,00025,000 street beggars; and in the late 1930s and early 1940s, 100,000 rickshaw pullers.163 These figures do not include the army of casual factory workers and the unemployed. By the end of the Republican period, close to 1 million people like these lived in the city's shantytowns.
Although, as noted above, not all factory workers were necessarily among the urban poor, many of them were. While some skilled and semiskilled workers obtained stable positions in factories, lived in average lower-middle-class alleyway-house neighborhoods, and therefore ascended to the ranks of the petty urbanites, casual workers (linshigong ) descended to the bottom of society. Available statistics do not give us the number of casual workers in Shanghai in any given year, since the category "factory worker" in all statistics does not distinguish casuals from long-term workers (changgong ). According to official statistics, Shanghai in 1920 had 181,485 factory workers; the number increased to 223,681 in 1928 and reached 394,654 by January 1950.164 Although these statistics give us no hint of the relative proportion of long-term and temporary workers, hiring of casual workers was increasingly common in Shanghai's factories through the Republican period. It is therefore safe to say that a sizable portion of the city's factory workers were casual or day workers who were poorly paid and under constant threat of unemployment.
By the end of the Republican period, these temporary laborers, vagabonds, the unemployed and underemployed, and the like, plus their families, made up nearly one-fifth of Shanghai's 5 million people.165 Like the disadvantaged in any society, they were despised and discriminated against by the city's general public; but they could not be ignored.
The importance of these people in the life of the city lies not only in their large number but also in their backgrounds. The poor moved to the city for virtually the same reason that most of the city's better-off people did: to find a better life. Thus the overwhelmingly rural backgrounds of the urban poor reflected a profound social phenomenon in twentieth-century China: for millions of peasants, an urban life, no matter how arduous and difficult, meant a better life. The world of rickshaws, with its everyday presence in the city, provides a powerful and illuminating example of such pursuit.
Continues...
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