Over the past three decades, on average one English-language monograph on the history of Shanghai has been published every two years, excluding popular readings and memoirs. Given the rigour of the anonymous peer review system and generally tight funding for publications, this has been nothing short of a miracle. Like all other miracles, it has led to a raft of questions and concerns, which, in this instance, boil down to some unease, if not outright apprehension, over the uniquely prominent position of Shanghai studies. Thirty years ago historian Joseph W. Esherick convened a conference, “Beyond Shanghai: Imagining the City in Republican China,” at the University of California San Diego, aiming to “to capture the full diversity of Chinese urbanism” by expanding the examination of the China’s modern transformation to cities beyond Shanghai. Nonetheless, the lopsided attention to Shanghai has continued in the 21st century. For instance, in 2006 alone, three scholarly monographs on the history of Shanghai were published by major university presses in the United States. It thus appears that many younger-generation doctoral students have not been deterred from choosing Shanghai as the locus of their research. In fact, Shanghai’s rapid development in recent years has spurred still more research on the city and its recent history.
Shanghai Mundane is a welcome addition to the booming industry of Shanghai studies, in no small part because of its focus on the city’s experience in the PRC period. The book thus contributes to the field’s current trend of more deeply scrutinizing Shanghai in the post-1949 era. The book is divided into three parts, each comprising two chapters. The first part discusses the “socialist reform of capitalist industry and commerce” campaign of 1954–1956, examines the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy of “utilization, restriction, and transformation” of private businesses (chapter one), and delineates how Shanghai’s capitalists adapted to life under communism in the early years the PRC (chapter two).
The second part explores Shanghai’s once-ubiquitous alleyway neighbourhoods, and recounts how old ways of life continued into the Mao era (chapter three), but then, in the post-Mao economic reform, began to gradually disappear under a flood of large-scale urban redevelopment projects. As Lei Ping points out, the challenges facing alleyway neighbourhoods have not been limited to physical erasure, but also include the threat of the disappearance of the core culture and customs associated with these alleyways, which is particularly visible in the existential crisis of the Shanghai dialect in the face of the domination of Mandarin and English (chapter four).
The third part discusses the cultural impact of urban renewal in Shanghai since the late 20th century as reflected in the material aspirations of Shanghai’s middle class, primarily the pursuit of property ownership (chapter five), and how young people have been gripped by a wistfulness for Shanghai’s Republican-era culture and the city’s Western-inflected metropolitanism. This Lei Ping terms an “imagined nostalgia,” and one which, as she points out, has been manufactured in several remoulded alleyway neighbourhoods for commercial purposes (chapter six).
A distinctive feature of the book is the author’s bold use of literature, photography, film and multimedia works as source materials to depict the lives of Shanghainese over a period of more than 70 years under Communist rule. Chapter two is centred on Zhou Erfu’s novel Shanghai de zaochen (Morning in Shanghai, 1958) and the film Bu ye cheng (City Without Night, 1957) directed by Tang Xiaodan. Chapter four makes good use of photographic works by Lu Yuanmin, Hu Yang, Xi Zi and Graham Fink (although the photographic works of Guo Bo, which captured Shanghai’s residential life, are not included). Chapter five draws on the writer Liu Liu’s novel Woju (Dwelling Narrowness, 2007) and its 35-episode television series adaptation (2009) and on the TV drama series Huanle song (Ode to Joy, first aired in 2016). From the perspective of what might be called orthodox historiography, this method of wielding materials may seem somewhat frivolous, but as an interdisciplinary research approach – especially when dealing with contemporary subjects – it has its merits.
Another strength of Lei Ping’s book is that it covers the entire period of the PRC – from the relatively moderate 17 years of the early PRC and the radical years of the Cultural Revolution to the post-Mao reform, all the way up to 2022, when the author had nearly completed the manuscript. Thus, with this single volume in hand, readers can gain insight into a portion of the social history of the nation’s largest city against the backdrop of more than seven decades of turbulent, complex and crisis-ridden history.
Also valuable is the book’s focus on ordinary daily life rather than on the city’s glamorous facade. In terms of social strata, most of the book’s protagonists, from the capitalists who were targets of Communist revolution in the 1950s to the current “Shanghai drifters” who work as white-collar employees in Chinese and foreign enterprises, are middle- or upper-middle-class urban residents. Their daily lives take place on a plane far above that of the countless poor and disadvantaged residents in the city, as well as the migrant workers who currently reside in the city long-term without legal resident status (hukou). Up to the early 1980s, Shanghai, the city with the highest living standards in the People’s Republic, set workers monthly wages at a range of 30–40 RMB (about US$12–16) and only households with a per capita monthly income below 12 RMB (about US$5) were qualified to apply for union or civil assistance. Given the impecuniousness of working-class Shanghainese, we may say that the “bourgeois sentiments” discussed in the book were mostly confined to the relatively privileged and were, after all, not so “mundane.”
Overall, this is a fine interdisciplinary work that deserves a wide readership among China scholars, as well as what night be called the educated general public who are interested in Chinese cities, everyday life and global modernity.
