Debating the Socialist Legacy and Capitalist Globalization in China

X. Zhong, B. Wang, X. Zhong, B. Wang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137020765
• eBook ISBN: 9781137020789
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first English collection of translated essays, by Chinese literary scholars, writers, and critics, this volume focuses on the legacy of socialist culture and post-socialist phenomena within the context of capitalist globalization. By rethinking socialism, literature, and culture in relation to the intellectual and cultural trends since the start of the reform and by debating the rise of the 'new left' culture, this book seeks to offer critical voices while evoking the themes of the socialist past to bear on the 21st-century Chinese intellectual and cultural scenes.

Part I

RETHINKING SOCIALISM,
LITERATURE, AND CULTURE

1

SHANGHAI AS A SOCIALIST CITY AND SPATIAL REPRODUCTION^*

LUO Gang and LI Yun

Translated by Adrian Thieret

In 2003, various large media companies in Shanghai organized a series of events to commemorate the 160th anniversary of the opening of Shanghai as a trading port. The two newspapers East Morning Paper (Dongfang zaobao) and Shenjiang Service Guide (Shenjiang fuwu daobao) each published a special “160th” edition to celebrate this great “city festival.” Driven by the media, all of Shanghai rejoiced in a “city celebration” of unimagined grandeur. East Morning Paper in its special edition described Shanghai “of the last 160 years” as a developed and elite “metropolis,” and the Shenjiang Service Guide in its supplement depicted Shanghai as “a fashionable and livable city.” Both papers freely applied such terms as the “Far-East Wall Street” and “Paris of the East” in their commemoration, essentially portraying the city as petty bourgeois by nature and full of “romantic” stories. While each paper highlighted different aspects of Shanghai, they shared the same desire to see Shanghai as a major international metropolis. Their portraits of Shanghai, in other words, arose from the same source: a lingering “Shanghai dream.”

Clearly, these media hypes of the last 160 years of Shanghai history manifest a revisionist interpretation and narrative of history. The Shanghai in the commemorative special editions is not the historical Shanghai; rather, it is a Shanghai that people today would like it to have been. The past glory of Shanghai is eagerly made a forebearer for today’s economic rise; the traces of old culture are turned into symbols to be consumed in the new round of competition. In 160 years the face of Shanghai has completely changed, and even though Shanghai today is amazing and magnificent, its past has also been retouched for a greater and new appeal. Consequently, all kinds of images of old Shanghai have arisen like new shoots of bamboo after a spring rain. People with and without firsthand experience all create in their imaginations their own Shanghai dream.

Interestingly, one year after the 160th anniversary came the 55th anniversary of the liberation of Shanghai (1949). Yet this event, which also ought to be forever remembered, was mentioned on the last page of the May 28, 2004, Wenhui Daily (Wenhui bao). The one-day delay was telling and illustrated by the article’s title, “55 Years Ago Yesterday” (55 nian qian de zuotian) as opposed to the usual “55 Years Ago Today” (55 nian qian de jintian). The huge contrast between the media handling of these two anniversaries, though perplexing, reveals a secret in the narrative of the contemporary “Shanghai craze”: pre-1949 Shanghai and post-1992 Shanghai reverberate off each other, together creating a glamorous international image of Shanghai. Yet to complete this global narrative is to obscure the four decades of Shanghai history from the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.

The publication of Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern (English original published in 1999) seemed rather timely: although it is a scholarly work, after being translated into Chinese it played the role of a cultural guide (wenhua zhinan) for the pre-1949 Shanghai. Just as the title indicates, Lee’s book is full of hints of the “modern,” depicting a remapped Shanghai from 1930 to 1945. Sometimes splicing together a montage, sometimes jumping back and forth, the book cuts the various images of the city into large swaths: the Bund, shopping malls, cafés, dance halls, magazines like The Oriental Magazine (Dongfang zazhi), Companion Pictorial (Liangyou huabao), pictorial calendars, movie theaters, and more. It indulges in the most colorful and the art-for-art’s-sake groups of literati in the “Peach Blossom Spring on the Sea” that was supposed to be Shanghai. It is nostalgic, but the “old” of Shanghai it yearns for also cleverly corresponds to the “new” of Shanghai since the 1990s: characterized by the attitude that is one of carefree pleasure and the image of a Paris of the East comprising artists, writers, and playboys. All the scenes of Shanghai “under the neon lights” pay heed only to the modern aspects of the city. The world outside the neon lights, the hardship-ridden world of lower-class Shanghai that other scholars like Lu Hanchao have researched, is entirely absent.¹ In this narrative trajectory—from the “first great city of the far East” in the past to the “Pearl of the East” of today—it is inevitable that much of Shanghai’s history is also forgotten:

Shanghai under Japanese occupation was already on the wane, but it was not until after the Sino-Japanese War was over in 1945, when the chaos caused by inflation and civil war had reduced the city’s economy to shambles, did Shanghai’s urban glory come to an end. The triumph of the rural-based Communist Revolution further reduced the city to insignificance. For the next three decades in the new People’s Republic, Shanghai was dominated and dwarfed by the new national capital, Beijing, to which it had also to contribute more than 80 percent of its annual revenue. Moreover, despite its growing population, Shanghai was never allowed to transform its physical surroundings: The city remained largely the same as in the 1940s, and its buildings and streets inevitably decayed as a result of neglect and disrepair.²

Could it really be that “for the next three decades in the new People’s Republic” Shanghai did not change at all? Clearly, there is no historical basis for this claim. After 1949, the working class in theory became the leader of the country, and its position in mainstream ideology inevitably affected the new plans for urban development under socialism. To borrow a phrase of Henri Lefebvre, a different kind of “production of space” was taking place, in that “a society that is transforming itself into socialism cannot accept (even during the transitional period) space as it is produced by capitalism. To do so means accepting the existing political and social structures; it leads only to a dead end.”³ Indeed, the history of socialist construction left a deep imprint on Shanghai’s urban space: the city came to represent the vital new efforts made to change the capitalist urban structure into a socialist urban space. Along with such changes were the new understanding and experience of the urban everyday life, new attitudes toward and new definition of the meaning of everyday life. Studies have been conducted in which scholars came up with a chronology of the postliberation changes in the shanty areas (penghu qu), and based on the statistics, these scholars discuss the influence of socialist urban planning and housing policies on the lives of people living in the poor districts. Studies like these offer a fairly thorough analysis and interpretation of the changes in Shanghai’s urban space after 1949. Their interpretations of the mechanisms of change in the urban space and their research into the history of change in the shanty areas address the complex interrelationships between political objectives, urban society, and other social structures. Such studies also investigate how the city’s current spatial structure managed to persist throughout the socialist period, relatively independent of political and economic systems, and how this space also helped mold the relationship between people and newly constructed socialist urban space. By and large, through clarification of the relationship between urban space and society, these studies help provide a new academic perspective for understanding the myriad contradictory realities in the history of socialism.⁴

Sharing a similar concern regarding the spatial issues of Shanghai as a socialist city, the present chapter differs from the perspective of urban sociology described above. It attempts to treat the city as a “text” and read this “urban text” through the lens of various cultural texts. Employing the methodology of cultural studies and through analyzing novels, journalistic literature, movies, plays, and other related texts in conjunction with specific spatial and historical changes in the city, we hope to connect various “spatial indicators” (kongjian de biaozheng) along with the actual city to trace the complex process in which a range of cultural forms were mobilized to help imagine and construct the socialist urban space. Additionally, we would also like to examine the “repressed” aspects of this process, to reveal and delineate Shanghai’s ambiguous position within the construction of the socialist state. We analyze the economic, political, and ideological forces of socialism behind the city’s new urban planning in the 1950s and 1960s, and the extent to which the spatial changes contrasted, contradicted, and juxtaposed with the space of the former colonial metropolis. Only through such investigation, we argue, can we reflect more deeply on the reality of Shanghai today.

THE SEIZURE AND REFORM OF URBAN SPACE

When Shanghai was liberated in 1949, because of its complex political situation, economic importance, multifarious historical changes, and diversity of cultural experiences, the city’s unprecedented political unity meant just the beginning of a struggle for a new urban space. The new “will of the city” was going to be expressed through a remaking of its urban space. The question is, what would characterize the image of Shanghai as a socialist city? How different was it going to be from the city’s preliberation image? How did the change take shape? How would it be expressed and form a narrative?

The book Tenth Anniversary of Shanghai’s Liberation offers a glimpse of this moment in history.⁵ Its first article, “Climbing to New Heights of Victory,” leads to a collection of articles written by people from all walks of life, including Ba Jin and Hu Wanchun (well-known writers), Le Yi (critic), Tong Zhiling and Huang Zongying (artists), and Liu Hongsheng (“national capitalist”).

In the first article, we read the following account: one American, a “renowned black scholar and one of the witnesses of the history of our new age,” stood on the former Bailaohui Dasha (“Broadway Mansion,” which was renamed “Shanghai Mansion” in 1951) looking at the Waibaidu Bridge on Suzhou River, and let out a sigh, saying that “the change is so great.” This “witness” was W. E. B. Dubois, and just a few days earlier he had celebrated his ninetieth birthday with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in Beijing. The article further states,

In 1936 [Dubois] came to Shanghai and stayed several days at the Bund. Twenty-three years later, when we ascended to the top of the Shanghai Mansion and gazed down upon the cityscape, he pointed to the green area south of Waibaidu Bridge and asked repeatedly, “is that really the Bund?” It no longer had the armies and navies of imperialist countries, nor hooligans and prostitutes. These changes are comparatively easy to imagine. However, that it would become so clean, so captivating, so enchanting a view, would have been rather difficult for him to imagine. Dubois could not believe that what he saw was the Bund that he had visited in the past. After receiving multiple confirmations of the fact, he said: “the change is too great.” The wind was strong, so we urged him to come inside and rest. But the historian stood there not wanting to move, as if he had entered an epic historical moment and could not bear to leave.⁶

This foreign friend on his first visit to the liberated Shanghai looked upon the former imperialist fortress (diguo zhuyi baolei) with disbelief and astonishment. Perhaps Dubois had, just prior to this moment, been staying in a comfortable hotel suite and using antique silverware and furniture, seeing seasoned hotel staff talk in low voice and walk in silence. He may still have had the vague illusion of the city he had once known. It was as if the fallen city had still possessed all that the new government criticized: triumphs of capitalism, conceits of imperialism, and derivatives of world civilization (shijie wenming). Yet in the blink of an eye Shanghai presented itself in a completely new way: clean, orderly, and brimming with vitality—this must have been difficult to believe. Landmarks of the old city were hardly affected by the shadows of the past. Instead, they were powerfully merged into becoming part of the new city’s landmarks.⁷

The Shanghai Mansion is a 21-story landmark building from which one can overlook Suzhou River and Waibaidu Bridge. The building’s classical yet modern artistic style once represented the new urban culture of 1930s Shanghai. As Leo Ou-fan Lee describes, “By the 1930s . . . whereas British neoclassical buildings still dominated the skyline on the Bund, new constructions in a more modern style had also appeared which exemplified the new American industrial power.”⁸ At the time, the building not only conformed to the popular trend of Western or European/American buildings in Shanghai, its spatial form also presaged a new zeitgeist and new type of urban life. However, after the liberation (1949) and all the subsequent changes, what position did this building occupy adjacent to the Bund in the new historical environment? According to Ba Jin, the Bund itself had changed greatly: “One day two years ago, a foreign visito...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Why Does Socialist Culture Matter Today?
• Part I Rethinking Socialism, Literature, and Culture
• Part II Critical Reflection on Literature and Culture since the Reform
• Part III Debating the Rise of New Left Culture and Subaltern Literature in the Reform Era
• Part IV Peoples Literature and Culture: From Past to Future
• Notes on Contributors
• Index