Shanghai, Past and Present: A Concise Socio-Economic History, 1842-2012 - Hardcover

Horesh, Niv

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1845196317 ISBN 13: 9781845196318

Verlag: Liverpool University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

This book sets out to explain how Shanghai emerged from relative obscurity in 1842 to become one of the world's best-known finance and industry hubs. As China's largest city, Shanghai today plays a central economic role, much as it did in the 1920s. The author provides a concise diachronic survey of the economic history of modern Shanghai, setting out how the city's urban infrastructure, municipal institutions, consumer culture and industry have shaped, and have been shaped by, this economic power house. The work is aimed at a broad readership of all who are interested in Asian history, and tackles a range of themes including: the city's millionaires, then and now; racial tensions and quotidian liaisons between Europeans and Asians before World War II; and the gambling and prostitution industry. The post-war era is portrayed in comparative discussions on Shanghai under Mao Zedong, and during the reform era. These discussions bring the narrative up to date to cover important events such as the designation of the Pudong precinct as the city's new engine of growth in 1991. The city's illustrious pre-war past is compared with its present ambitions to become Asia's leading financial centre. The book employs insights from studies frameworks of new institutional economics as well as from the development trajectory of other world cities by way of better understanding Shanghai's historic distinctness, its relative weaknesses and contemporary strengths.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Niv Horesh is Senior Fellow at the University of Nottingham's China Policy Institute (UK) and Associate Professor in China Studies at the University of Western Sydney (Australia). Horesh has worked in the past as a Business Development Manager in China, and as a civil servant in Israel and Australia.

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Shanghai, Past and Present

A Concise Socio-Economic History, 1842–2012

By Niv Horesh

Sussex Academic Press

Copyright © 2014 Niv Horesh
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84519-631-8

Contents

Preface, 
1 Introduction: The Shanghai Experience, 1842–2009, 
2 Mystique, Answers and Unanswered Questions, 
3 The Early Rise of a Treaty-Port, 1840s–1860s, 
4 Re-Examining Public Debt in Republican China, 1912–1937, 
5 Past Glory, Present Hopes, 
6 Epilogue: No Longer in the Shadow of Hong Kong, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Shanghai Exerience, 1842–2009

To many transient observers Shanghai seemed "incomparable" before World War II. Once foreigners had been allowed to settle in a so-called mudflat opposite the walled "Native City" in 1842, Shanghai developed by leaps and bounds. Immune to Chinese sovereignty, and months away from London by sea, the city acquired a reputation for laissez-faire and the mystique of hybridity and vice.

Consider this rather passionate description from a Western tourist guidebook to the city published in 1935:

Cosmopolitan Shanghai, city of amazing paradoxes and fantastic contrasts; Shanghai the beautiful, bawdy, and gaudy, contradiction of manners and morals; a vast brilliantly-hued cycloramic, panoramic mural of the best and the worst of Orient and Occident. Shanghai, with its modern skyscrapers, the highest buildings in the world outside of the Americas, and its straw huts shoulder high. Modern department stores that pulse with London, Paris, and New York; native emporiums with lacquered ducks and salt eggs, and precious silks and jades, and lingerie and silver, with amazing bursts of advertising colour and more amazing bursts from advertising musicians, compensating with gusto for lack of harmony and rhythm. Modern motors throbbing with the power of eighty horses march abreast with tattered one-man power rickshaws; velveted limousines with silk-clad Chinese multi-millionaires surrounded by Chinese and Russian bodyguards bristling with automatics for protection against the constant menace of kidnapping (foreigners are not molested); Chinese gentlemen in trousers; Chinese gentlemen in satin skirts. Shanghai the bizarre, cinematographic presentation of humanity, its vices and virtues; the City of Blazing Night; cabarets; Russian and Chinese and Japanese complaisant "dance hostesses"; city of missions and hospitals and brothels. Men of title and internationally notorious fugitives tip cocktails in jovial camaraderie.

This introductory chapter is aimed, nevertheless, at easing non-specialist readers into the warp and weft of Shanghai's modern history by insisting on a less sensationalist comparison of the city's economy in the pre-war era (1842–1937) with its post-war reform thrust following the 1990 designation of Pudong precinct as China's primary financial centre. It will seek to explore why Shanghai was a magnet for so many Chinese entrepreneurs and intellectuals before World War II, as the passage above might indicate; it will then explore whether the reformed makeup of Shanghai in the 21st century can bring about fresh urban dynamism, that might help shake off the post-war legacy of state dirigisme and create a truly global innovation hub. Building on the latest literature in urban development, management and economic history, this chapter will focus on four elements that are conventionally seen as vital to sustaining innovation: well-functioning capital markets, respect for property rights, free information flow and a quality education system. Inevitably, it will leave other important areas of exploration to future research, because these are only associated with the contemporary Chinese economy, e.g. research clustering or fiscal federalism.

The bigger conceptual framework of the comparison drawn here is practical in nature because the historical conditions of the pre-war period cannot be perfectly reproduced. Shanghai of the 21st-century cannot be the same as the one of the early 20th century. Therefore, the question to be pursued is not whether it is desirable to reproduce the same "urban dynamism" that defined the pre-war era but what can be learnt about contemporary Shanghai when we place it in historical perspective.

Shanghai's Position in the Chinese Pre-War Economy

Assessment of pre-war Shanghai's contribution to the economic modernization of China has been an ongoing academic pursuit but the jury is still out. The rapidly changing political and social circumstances in the People's Republic of China (PRC) often call for a review of past performance in view of present achievements and failures. In the field of Shanghai Studies, such major scholarly reviews can be traced every two decades or so.

For example, in 1981 Marie-Claire Bergère, soon to become the doyenne of Shanghai Development Studies in the West, critiqued Rhoads Murphey whose work had embodied conventional wisdom in the field in the 1950s. In his Shanghai: Key to Modern China (1953), Murphey cast pre-war Shanghai as an all-important bridgehead of Western innovation in East Asia against the backdrop of the Communist takeover of the Mainland. By 1977, however, Murphey had come to view pre-war Shanghai's role within the Mainland as a 'fly on an elephant's back'. In other words, Murphey recast pre-war Shanghai as a small enclave of modernity that was ultimately insignificant to the lives of most ordinary Chinese.

Bergère, on the other hand, identified valuable sprouts of civil society, innovation and free enterprise in "golden-age" Shanghai (1920s), when Chinese state power was in decline, but pointed to the resurgence of dirigisme and the stifling of free-markets in the 1930s, after the Nationalists (Kuomintang – KMT) had come to power. She suggested that the 1920s saw the birth of a bolder breed of Chinese businessmen, steeped in the internal dynamics of China's rural hinterland, but equally conversant with market conditions around the world.

Chinese intellectuals influenced by radical Western ideology flocked to Shanghai in their thousands in the 1920s. As part of this ferment, the city came to host the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, and was to play a role in the KMT's rise to power nationally in 1927. But ironically, the two rival parties were averse to the free-wheeling nature of the city in the 1920s precisely because both were autocratic.

KMT founder Sun Yat-sen had dreamt of "reforming" Shanghai's wayward character; of subjecting the city's foreign-run precincts straddling Puxi (west of the Huangpu river) to Chinese government control. To that end, he envisioned what was still a boggy and sparsely-populated Pudong district (East of the Huangpu river) as the seat of a new Chinese municipality with strong central powers. After Sun's death, and following its unification of China in 1928, the KMT appointed Wu Tiecheng to accomplish this mission. Wu, who had been educated in Japan, launched grand architectural projects in the 1930s but, overall, because of rampant corruption in their ranks, KMT municipal authorities failed to demonstrate that they were able to manage the Chinese precincts as efficiently as the foreign concession areas.

The success of foreign-run Shanghai cannot be understood accurately enough without considering the plight of the surrounding Chinese pre-war economy as a whole. In the 1980s, economists such as Rawski and Brandt tended to revise conventional Western views of China's pre-war economy as stagnant, tradition-bound and politically-repressed. Rawski and Brandt argued that net annual GDP growth was at approximately 1% between 1842 and 1937, and that Shanghai's modern economy had had a pronounced positive spill-over effect in the hinterland.

Nonetheless, more recent work by younger scholars contends with one of the two main arguments underpinning this revisionist view, providing a more balanced picture. It calls into question the notion that China's pre-war economy enjoyed a higher degree of financial integration than previously thought. Debin Ma, in particular, alludes to the fact that much of Rawski's upbeat assessment of China's overall economic performance hinges on the misapplication of Shanghai's urban growth dynamic and cosmopolitan flair to the rest of the country. The exuberance, entrepreneurship and dynamism of the Shanghanese economy did spill over to the outlying provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang but were virtually absent elsewhere in this vast country.

Scholars today seem to agree that pre-war Shanghai, with its semi -colonial setting and its advantageous location as a gateway to the fertile Yangtze Delta, served as an important catalyst for the modernization of the Chinese economy as from 1842. Yet more work is needed to explain operative differences between expatriate-run firms in Shanghai and Chinese businesses in other cities where semi-colonial privileges did not clearly obtain. Needless to say, variegated climates, production relations, geography and factor endowment all significantly account for the dichotomy between Shanghai and China's vast and predominantly rural hinterland. What seems to be lacking in much of the pertinent literature, however, is the epistemology of economic development.

As a rule of thumb, it would probably make sense to stylize semi-colonial treaty-ports like Tianjin or riverside Guangzhou as an extension of Shanghai's pre-war vibrant economy despite obvious differences in climate and factor endowment with the Yangtze Delta. As a large British-administered concession area and foreign financial institutions, Hankou was perhaps integrated into the very same economic system despite being situated much further inland. But nominal and fairly remote treaty-ports like Mengzi (Yunnan), or Chongqing (Sichuan) may provide instructive contrasts to the fast industrializing Yangtze Delta economy. In other words, the demarcation between the Chinese "hinterland" and "treaty-port" economies should be understood not purely in terms of rural backwardness vs. urban sophistication, or in terms of distance from the coast, but also as the degree to which local peasants produced agricultural commodities for world markets (the Yangtze Delta being a case in point), and the degree to which factor agents had recourse to treaty-port finance and extra-territorial protection.

Settlement size also explains why Shanghai was more vital than other treaty-ports that the European powers had carved up along the China coast. By the 1930s, no less than 150,000 expatriates resided in the city side by side with some four million Chinese, bringing with them a plethora of cultures and ideas. They made up about half of the foreign community in China. Notably, the Chinese community itself was highly heterogeneous, with over half relocating from other parts of the country in search of menial employment or opportunity.

Europeans (including White-Russian refugees) made up about a third of the foreign population; the rest were predominantly Japanese. In all, foreigners accounted for about 4% of the city's total population. Today, unofficial estimates put the number of foreigners residing in Shanghai at about 150,000 out of a total of 15 million – the overwhelming majority being overseas Chinese (1%). Proportionately, then, pre-war Shanghai could be said to have been four times more cosmopolitan than early 21 century Shanghai.

The distinct pre-war population makeup was administered by an equally unique tripartite municipal structure: the Chinese precincts ('Native City') strove to catch up with the efficiently-run Anglo-American (or 'International') concession area, while the more "straightforwardly colonialist" French concession area vied with the other two to attract Chinese investment.

Governed by a semi-elected and highly autonomous body called the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), the International concession area was more cosmopolitan in nature albeit devoid of meaningful Chinese representation at the helm. Britons accounted for the majority of SMC executives; it also employed American administrators, Sikh policemen, White Russian stewards and had Jews, Germans and Japanese represented on the board. Members of the Municipalité de la Concession Française de Changhai were, on the other hand, handpicked by Paris. This administrative multiplicity supported the free flow of information, and exchange of ideas including radical left-wing ideologies imported from Europe by fringe expatriates.

Newspapers appeared in a host of languages: English, French, German, Yiddish, Russian and Japanese. Magazines appeared in a dozens of other European languages. It is also important to recognize the limits of free speech in pre-war Shanghai. The foreign-run SMC partly resisted warlord pressure to crack down on dissenting Chinese publications. Nonetheless, on some occasions the SMC preferred to appease the warlord government in Beijing by bringing Chinese dissidents before the Mixed Court on sedition charges.

This vibrant milieu was enough to attract scores of university teachers and intellectuals to the city during the early-Republican era (1912–1927); they escaped the repression, incompetence and arbitrary violence of warlord-ravaged China for the relative freedom of Shanghai, notwithstanding its association with European imperialism and expatriate snobbery. Chinese intellectuals working from Shanghai came to be known as the haipai ('Worldly School'), which contrasted with the traditionalists or jingpai ('Capital School'). Whilst jingpai education clung to Confucian classics, haipai education encouraged the acquisition of vocational and English-language skills. With only 1.5% of China's population at any one time, Shanghai accounted for no less than 41 of the 205 institutions of higher education in China in 1949. It boasted some of the country's best universities, such as Fudan and Jiaotong, as well as prestigious colleges run by missionaries such as Aurora and St John's.

The exchange of ideas and intellectual ferment were facilitated by the most modern infrastructure. Shanghai was the first city on the Mainland to develop extensive telecommunications services. In 1871, for example, the Great Northern Telegraph Company of Denmark laid an underwater telegraph cable from Hong Kong to Shanghai, giving the country its first submerged international communications system. In 1907, a local telephone service was introduced and a long-distance service followed in 1923. By 1949, Shanghai had some 85,000 phone lines installed for about 55,000 subscribers. Although subscription was small compared with cities like London, it made up a third of all telephone lines in China at the time.

Similarly, the city's financial sector was one of the most competitive in Asia with domestic institution gradually matching foreign ones in size and efficiency. By 1934, no less then 33 foreign banks operated in the city, whilst in colonial Hong Kong there were only 17 at the time. Moreover, in the pre-war years, Shanghai's securities markets far outweighed Hong Kong's.

In fact, as Wong Siu-lun has observed, Shanghai was "head and shoulder" above Hong Kong as a metropolis in many other respects during the pre-war era. The tripartite municipal setting in Shanghai yielded quite a different streak of entrepreneurship than the one prevalent in the full-fledged Crown Colony. In Hong Kong, exclusion of Chinese from civil service fostered grass-roots idealization of small-business ownership (dang laoban), resulting in a two-tier economy with desultory family-based firms and subcontracting networks running side by side with British multinationals. In Shanghai, on the other hand, the Nationalist takeover of Chinese precincts in 1927 meant that Chinese businesses became increasingly enmeshed with government bureaucracy to the extent that corporatism and salaried employment were the grass-roots ideal. As a result Chinese-run firms could eventually rival the size and scope of multinationals with state backing.

Arguably, the heavy hand of KMT government, its arbitrary tax extraction and co-optation of successful Chinese businesses, explains why, despite Shanghai's preeminence as China's financial center in the pre-war era, the city's stock market remained largely confined to the foreign concession areas. There, independent shareholder rights were much more clearly framed than in the city's Chinese precincts. Yet consular regulators were suspicious of Chinese-owned businesses wishing to incorporate under foreign company law and issue stock. Consequently, the stock market was dominated by foreign-run municipal utilities, trading companies and banks like HSBC. It attracted ethnic Chinese investment en masse, but listed very few Chinese industrial ventures. The parallel Chinese-run securities market was, on the other hand, dominated by KMT-issued bonds, effectively crowding out private equity.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Liverpool University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1845196317
• ISBN 13: 9781845196318
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 120
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar