Shanghai

The Chinese court of course resisted this hugely destructive form of free trade and sought to ban the importation of opium into the country. This led directly to a series of wars between China and the western powers; wars which, with the huge imbalance of technology then existing, meant that China was doomed to an inevitable set of defeats. Subsequently, China was forced to sign various unequal trade treaties and open its markets for the trade in opium. It was also forced to accept massive war reparation payments which made it become heavily indebted on world financial markets.

Shanghai was nominated as an open centre for international trade and colonies of western powers soon grew there.

Cosmopolitan Shanghai

Shanghai, in the following years and before the invasion of the Japanese, became a very cosmopolitan city, in much the same way as Hong Kong has continued to be today. Westerners, Japanese and Chinese mingled and influenced each other in a number of ways. OF course, the Chinese tended to get the worst of the deal and the housing and working conditions many of them were forced to accept were proverbially bad. However, access to modern banking methods, on the other hand, enabled Shanghainese entrepreneurs to adapt local banking practices with modern ideas to create a flourishing native Chinese banking industry.

The opening of modern China and the Open Door Policy adopted on Chinese terms by Zhu Rongji has highlighted the role of Shanghai and the other coastal cities in promoting China's rapid industrial and economic development. Shanghai has indeed been at the forefront of this: indeed, at one stage, a majority of the world's cranes were in operation there! The Shanghainese, meanwhile, have recreated their taste for ostentation and love of wealth.

A forthcoming article will look at China's modern development in a little more detail.

References and Further Reading

A very well-known novel set in modern Shanghai is Wei Hui's international best-seller Shanghai Baby. My review of this (and other books) is available online at http://www.bookideas.com.

Anyone interested in the development of banking and its impact on society is recommended to Zhaojin Ji's A History of Modern Shanghai Banking (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2003).

An excellent and very readable account of modern Shanghai (and the many problems of development) is Pamela Yatsko's New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China's Legendary City (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001).

John Walsh, Mahidol University, November 2003

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