“One of the best accounts of the reality of gentrification and urban development in China . . . grounded with solid historical, ethnographic and legal evidence” (Urban Studies). In recent decades, the centuries-old city of Shanghai has been demolished and rebuilt into a gleaming megacity. With its world famous skyscrapers, it now ranks with New York and London as a hub of global finance. But that transformation has come at a grave human cost. In Shanghai Gone, Qin Shao applies the concept of domicide—the eradication of a home against the will of its dwellers—to the sweeping destruction of neighborhoods, families, and life patterns that made way for the new Shanghai. Shao gives voice to the holdouts and protesters who resisted domicide and demanded justice. She follows, among others, a reticent kindergarten teacher turned diehard petitioner; a descendant of gangsters and squatters who has become an amateur lawyer for evictees; and a Chinese Muslim who has struggled to recover his ancestral home in Xintiandi, an infamous site of gentrification dominated by a well-connected Hong Kong real estate tycoon. Highlighting the wrenching changes spawned by China’s reform era, Shao vividly portrays the corrupt and rapacious pursuit of growth and profit, the personal wreckage it has left behind, and the enduring human spirit it has unleashed.

The unlikely refuge of Shanghai, the only city in the world that did not require a visa, was buffeted by the struggle between European imperialism, Japanese aggression, and Chinese nationalism. Ernest G. Heppner's compelling testimony is a brilliant account of this little-known haven. Although Heppner was a member of a privileged middle-class Jewish family, he suffered from the constant anti-Semitic undercurrent in his surroundings. The devastation of "Crystal Night" in November 1938, however, introduced a new level of Nazi horror and ended his comfortable world overnight. Heppner and his mother used the family's resources to escape to Shanghai. Heppner was taken aback by experiences on the ocean liner that transported the refugees to Shanghai: he was embarrassed and confounded when Egyptian Jews offered worn clothing to the Jewish passengers, he resented the edicts against Jewish passengers disembarking in any ports on the way, and he was unprepared for the poverty and cultural dislocation of the great city of Shanghai. Nevertheless, Heppner was self-reliant, energetic, and clever, and his story of finding niches for his skills that enabled him to survive in a precarious fashion is a tribute to human endurance. In 1945, after the liberation of China, Heppner found a responsible position with the American forces there. He and his wife, whom he had met and married in the ghetto, arrived in the United States in 1947 with only eleven dollars but boundless hope and energy. Heppner's account of the Shanghai ghetto is as vivid to him now as it was then. His admiration for his new country and his later success in business do not, however, obscure for him the shameful failure of the Allies to furnish a refuge for Jews before, during, and after the war.

As China's largest city best known for its pre-eminent achievements in the early part of the twentieth century, Shanghai grew modestly in comparison with southern China after the adoption of China's open policy in 1978. With the 1990 announcement of Pudong as an area for special development, Shanghai has raced ahead, seemingly on its way to an economic and cultural resurgence that is likely to accelerate development and modernization in the Yangzi Delta and China at large. This volume focuses on the physical and socioeconomic transformation of Shanghai across a wide range of topics. Drawing on the experience and expertise of researchers primarily in Hong Kong, this study is a major contribution to the subject of economic development and social change in China. It seeks to understand, analyze and interpret how Shanghai has transformed itself in recent years.

This book represents "snapshots" of Shanghai with speculations on their meaning as China opens to the West and undergoes yet another shift towards modernity.

This new book is based on the text from two previous books I wrote about this city, Discover Shanghai (2010), and Shanghai and the Yangzi Delta (2004), both issued by the same publisher in Singapore. This current project started in October 2017. It was originally intended to be simply a reprint or reissue of the previous volumes without any changes, but instead evolved into a more than year-long complete update and revision of the text that lasted throughout all of 2018 and on into the Spring Festival of 2019. The new text has been completely updated and revised, and is now fully bilingual with both phonetic pinyin and Chinese characters provided for Chinese names of significant people, places, and events.The text begins with an introductory historical narrative in chronological order.After that the contents are presented in alphabetical order from A to Z, as they were in Discover Shanghai (2010), hence the subtitle, "A Historical Dictionary of China's Most Important City." The Appendix includes a list of Shanghai's mayors and a historical street index which can be used to match the present-day street names with the names they had before 1949. There all new photos that have never been published before. However, the text has become so long that most of the photos will need to be in a separate Volume II.This Vol. I contains an appendix containing a collection of historic maps of Shanghai.

This volume provides a historical narrative, historiographical reviews, and scholarly analyses by leading scholars throughout the world on the hitherto understudied topic of Shanghai Jewish refugees. Few among the general public know that during the Second World War, approximately 16,000 to 20,000 Jews fled the Nazis, found unexpected refuge in Shanghai, and established a vibrant community there. Though most of them left Shanghai soon after the conclusion of the war in 1945, years of sojourning among the Chinese and surviving under the Japanese occupation generated unique memories about the Second World War, lasting goodwill between the Chinese and Jews, and contested interpretations of this complex past. The volume makes two major contributions to the studies of Shanghai Jewish refugees. First, it reviews the present state of the historiography on this subject and critically assesses the ways in which the history is being researched and commemorated in China. Second, it compiles scholarship produced by renowned scholars, who aim to rescue the history from isolated perspectives and look into the interaction between Jews, Chinese, and Japanese.

Charts the changing landscape of Shanghai as it embraces modernity

In the early twentieth century, Chinese traditional architecture and the French-derived methods of the École des Beaux-Arts converged in the United States when Chinese students were given scholarships to train as architects at American universities whose design curricula were dominated by Beaux-Arts methods. Upon their return home in the 1920s and 1930s, these graduates began to practice architecture and create China’s first architectural schools, often transferring a version of what they had learned in the U.S. to Chinese situations. The resulting complex series of design-related transplantations had major implications for China between 1911 and 1949, as it simultaneously underwent cataclysmic social, economic, and political changes. After 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic, China experienced a radically different wave of influence from the Beaux-Arts through advisors from the Soviet Union who, first under Stalin and later Khrushchev, brought Beaux-Arts ideals in the guise of socialist progress. In the early twenty-first century, China is still feeling the effects of these events. Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts examines the coalescing of the two major architectural systems, placing significant shifts in architectural theory and practice in China within relevant, contemporary, cultural, and educational contexts. Fifteen major scholars from around the world analyze and synthesize these crucial events to shed light on the dramatic architectural and urban changes occurring in China today—many of which have global ramifications. This stimulating and generously illustrated work is divided into three sections, framed by an introduction and a postscript. The first focuses on the convergence of Chinese architecture and the École des Beaux-Arts, outlining the salient aspects of each and suggesting how and why the two "met" in the U.S. The second section centers on the question of how Chinese architects were influenced by the Beaux-Arts and how Chinese architecture was changed as a result. The third takes an even closer look at the Beaux-Arts influence, addressing how innovative practices, new schools of architecture, and buildings whose designs were linked to Beaux-Arts assumptions led to distinctive new paradigms that were rooted in a changing China. By virtue of its scope, scale, and scholarship, this volume promises to become a classic in the fields of Chinese and Western architectural history. Contributors: Tony Atkin, Peter J. Carroll, Yung Ho Chang,Jeffrey W. Cody, Kerry Sizheng Fan, Fu Chao-Ching, Gu Daqing, Seng Kuan,Delin Lai, Xing Ruan, Joseph Rykwert, Nancy S. Steinhardt, David VanZanten, Rudolf Wagner, Zhang Jie, Zhao Chen.