Shanghai review explores city's Communist-capitalist paradox

New book traces Shanghai from foreign enclave to economic powerhouse

Dillon’s book, reviewed in the Journal on July 17, centers on what Platt describes as a fundamental contradiction: Shanghai is the city where the Chinese Communist Party held its first national congress in 1921, yet it also became China’s most dynamic capitalist city. Platt illustrates the paradox by noting that a museum devoted to that first congress now sits in Shanghai’s Xintiandi district, surrounded by Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Lululemon boutiques.

Dillon, whose interest in the city dates to his 1972 undergraduate thesis on the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai, writes for the general reader, Platt said. The book explores how Shanghai endured and thrived under communist rule after 1949.

Shanghai’s unique character, Dillon writes, was forged during the 100 years between the First Opium War and World War II, when the city was governed and controlled by foreign powers while powered by local labor. A 1930s journalist quoted by Dillon called it “a complete political ulcer on the face of China.”

When Shanghai returned to Chinese control after World War II, it had become an almost alien entity within the country, with its own cosmopolitan culture and instinct for business, Dillon said. The Communist Party, upon taking power in 1949, faced the question of whether a city “was too big, had too high an opinion of itself, and had too long a history as a center of Chinese capitalism” to be trusted, according to the author.

Platt noted that Dillon hints — without providing sources — that some radical communists with a “puritanical and anti-urban bias” may have hoped to dismantle Shanghai after 1949. The most radical change that occurred, Dillon wrote, was turning the old British racecourse into a park and public square.

The tension between outward-looking Shanghai and the central government in Beijing played out most vividly during the Maoist campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, Platt said. Dillon recounts how the Cultural Revolution unfolded in Shanghai, including the ideological struggle between the city and the capital. Capitalist Shanghai survived the Mao years and roared back to prominence beginning with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s, Dillon wrote.

Platt critiqued Dillon’s handling of the Mao-era violence. In describing the Anti-Rightist Campaign — during which multitudes of accused “rightists” were removed from their jobs, sent to labor reforms, imprisoned and, in many cases, executed or hounded to suicide — Dillon wrote that the movement “obliged Shanghai intellectuals to examine their own political attitudes” and that “some lost their jobs as a result,” Platt reported. Similarly, in describing the Korean War-era campaign against counterrevolutionaries, Platt said Dillon’s account suggests the campaign was a well-intentioned effort to root out subversives that eventually got out of hand but still led to a “great improvement in public order.”

The book would have benefited from stronger editing, Platt wrote, noting that repetitions abound. He cited as an example that the reader is told seven times that Jiang Zemin was promoted to general secretary of the CCP after successfully managing the 1989 democracy protests in Shanghai without bloodshed.

Platt also noted that readers looking for a cultural history of Shanghai will need to look elsewhere; the book deals primarily with institutions, policies, leaders, factions and organizations rather than the seedy, extravagant life of Jazz Age Shanghai. Some ground-level history does appear, Platt said, in two sections discussing the work of Xue Baoqi, a 1960s photographer whose black-and-white images provide glimpses of ordinary people before and during the Cultural Revolution.

Despite his criticisms, Platt called the book compelling, particularly for readers who share Dillon’s interest in politics. “Shanghai is in no sense typical of China,” Dillon writes, but the city embodies aspects of China’s economic development and global engagement that are central to the state’s conception of itself, Platt said.

Platt, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.”