Attention to the physical transformation of urban China across the last few decades often fixates on feats of construction: ever more ambitious infrastructure, lofty skyscrapers, and opulent entertainments. Shanghai, the country's premier megacity, usually sets the pace, and will soon add the eighteenth track to its metro, a 2,000-foot tower crowning its skyline, and a Disneyland triple the size of Hong Kong's (itself a grand project only a decade old). In Shanghai Gone, Qin Shao redirects us to consider instead the equally impressive process of destruction that precedes and propels the city's continuing reconfiguration.

While the scale of demolition is itself breathtaking, Shao chooses to focus on five finely drawn case studies, each centered on a strong character resisting an interlocked alliance of state power and private real estate interests intent on displacing residents and redeveloping their neighborhoods, which of course delivers hefty profits. Shao's sympathies are clearly with her subjects; they are the disregarded human monuments of a disappearing Shanghai, and her chapters read best as sensitive ethnographies that show us the world through their eyes. They are by nature all a bit unusual—few have the fortitude to face years of lawsuits and intimidation, and even their families sometimes come to doubt their prospects or even their sanity. Among others, we meet Zhou Youlan, a former kindergarten teacher turned day-trading professional petitioner; the He family, hoping to recover their handsome, twice-lost shikumen home, who find the businessmen behind the ritzy Xintiandi development more difficult to dislodge than Cultural Revolution radicals; the pseudonymous Mr. C, a subtle operator who bests the city to win substantial compensation and two new and desirable apartments; and Shi Lin, a former squatter and union cadre whose conviction that redevelopment and relocation presents a magic formula for riches (time plus land, he explains, equals money) leads him to a new career as a specialist in pressing land disputes on behalf of other residents.

Shi's simple equation perhaps works for local governments and private developers; much of the engrossing detail in this book delves into the extra operations required for regular residents to pursue the same outcome. In the unequal contests traced here, holding on or holding out tests not just endurance but creativity. Defiance develops through different channels. Some sue. Others persistently work the petition system to press for redress from higher authorities, planning their lives around weekly visits to local Shanghai offices or semiannual, secretive trips to Beijing, dodging the local minders who try to haul them home before they can lodge a complaint at the capital. For the most dogged participants, the system that stonewalls them also provides a perverse support, as they make friends and share tactics among themselves. Still others choreograph an elaborate theatre of protest, deploying the symbols of revolution against the government forces trying to dislodge them—what Shao calls “waving the red flag”—which includes everything from flying actual banners to singing the Internationale; one elderly woman memorably greets government personnel arriving to evict her neighbor by banging a makeshift gong and loudly chanting “the Japanese devils have entered the village.” Of course, many combine or shift tactics, and special circumstances create distinct opportunities: to defend their homes, the residents of Lincoln Lane discover a usable past and pitch a case for historic preservation, but also write the mayor of Springfield, Illinois, for help on the basis of a shared affinity with the American president for whom their settlement was supposedly named.

Collectively, Shao's cases add up to a passionate critique of China's urban development, spoken through the mouths of its own citizens. While the accounts emphasize the trauma and injustice of losing one's home, Shao also sees in the experience the possibilities of a grim kind of schooling in both rules and rights; urban redevelopment amounts to the “largest seminar of Chinese society where a deeply flawed system has taught its people to maneuver within the system” (p. 190). Many, it seems, merely internalize the market-driven logic of their adversaries and try to make what profit they can.

This is an accessible and engaging book. The deliberate and reasonable focus on those resisting allows us to see the world through their eyes, though with the result that various interlocutors with different interests (a suspect expert in historical preservation, or officials from multiple city bureaucracies, for example) take on a uniform cast as the malevolent opposition. For the generalist, Shao draws international comparisons, and even frames each chapter with a quotation from Bleak House. The ephemeral nature of the world presented here is reflected in the sources, many online, some of which are no longer available. Shao should be commended for her excellent contribution; even if demolished, this Shanghai will remain preserved in her work.