In the past two decades, scholarly interest in the daily life of urban China has increased. This book by James Farrer and Andrew David Field is a nice addition to the new trend. It focuses on nightlife from Republican times to the post-Mao era in Shanghai. Based on historical material and the authors’ field investigations, the stories presented in Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City are vivid and detailed, displaying a colorful picture of nightlife in China's largest city.

Farrer and Field believe that a city, “like a person,” should have “a biography” (p. 7). To some extent, as they indicate in their title, they have written a “biography,” or “nocturnal” history, of global Shanghai that tells us how, from the Nationalists to the Communists, Shanghainese conducted their nightlife; how such a life has changed throughout political and economic transformations; and how Shanghai became a multicultural megacity “increasingly diversified by class, age, sex, nationality, and specific taste cultures” (p. 115). Except for the Mao era, since the 1920s Shanghai has been “a global nightlife city,” hosting worldwide cultures and “transmitting them to other parts of China” (p. 11). The sociality of nightlife created forms of “subcultural capital,” including fashion, dance, and performance. Nightlife provided gathering places where people shared common interests in arts and enjoyments, met friends, and built social circles.

Farrer and Field generalize the nightlife of modern Shanghai into three stages. The first stage was the 1920s–30s, when Shanghai became internationally known “as a sinful city of [the] Jazz Age,” where many dance halls enjoyed a good business under the semi-colonial environment, especially within the foreign settlements. The second stage was during the War of Resistance and then the Revolutionary era (until the death of Mao). The Japanese occupation that started in 1937 brought this nightlife to “new heights of decadence” (p. 7). In the late 1940s, the Nationalist government made an effort to restrict the dance halls but did not have much success. However, after the Chinese Community Party took over Shanghai, it ended the dance-hall industry by the mid-1950s. The third phase started in the 1980s, when the “nocturnal metropolis” reemerged and hundreds of commercial dance places spread in Shanghai. Like the emergence of the market economy generally, the specific revival of dance halls generated a debate over “socialist nightlife” versus “capitalist nightlife” (p. 8). During this time, the increase in bars, discos, and dance clubs attracted a large of number of people, who embraced new forms of nightlife that had been introduced from all over the world, indicating Shanghai's nature as a global city, similar to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Taipei.

Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of nightlife. We can see how dance halls developed, how the culture of social dancing transformed, and how the changing makeup of classes of people settling in Shanghai changed how nightlife spaces were used. By examining such spaces as bars, ballrooms, and nightclubs, Farrer and Field explore “cosmopolitan nightlife,” which can be seen as the culture and lifestyle of “the transnational, ethnically mixed, and culturally hybrid nature” (p. 10), where people from different social and cultural backgrounds gather. Such a cosmopolitan nightlife culture actually went in tandem with the rise of global cities, which have “transnational flows of money, people, and goods as well as the concentration of cross-border administrative and financial functions” (p. 11).

Shanghai Nightscapes also illuminates how the drinking subculture contributes to the multicultural aspect of the city. It reveals bars as spaces for social interactions among not only patrons but also musicians, who combined transnational and local elements together. In contrasting all this with saloons in American cities, Farrer and Field believe that the American saloon “was linked to the flows of working-class migration from Europe,” while the Shanghai bar “was linked to droves of migrants from other countries riding the waves of global capital into the city” (p. 89).

From this study, we also find that nightlife could involve “sexual scenes and sexual fields” and pursue “sexual adventures” similar to those of other metropolitan places around the world (pp. 11, 14). The authors also explore the complex interactions among neighborhood, city, state, society, economy, and culture.

Overall, Shanghai Nightscapes takes an interdisciplinary approach on the basis of sociology and history, and is a fun and compelling book to read. My only reservations are that it is basically descriptive, and that it lacks scholarly engagement with the current arguments and theories about public space, everyday life, and urban communities. It is understandable that Farrer and Field, wanting to appeal to a large audience, would write in such an accessible way, but I wish that the work could balance readability and scholarly discussion in a more skillful way. I still recommend this new work to anyone interested in understanding daily life, especially nightlife, in urban China.