Some of the most interesting pages of this book describe expatriate rebels, often journalists and frequently Americans. These people enjoyed being in China, but loathed the arrogance and privilege of many of the other foreign residents, particularly the British.
One such was Agnes Smedley who arrived in 1930 as China correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. With her vocal espousal of "free love" (she had already entered into one "revolutionary marriage" with a Bengali nationalist in Berlin), she arrived in the world of Shanghai like a comet from a particularly remote corner of the heavens.
A communist sympathizer, she was soon causing havoc with her doctrines among the wives of Long March veterans in Mao Tse-tung's stronghold of Yenan. Later she had an affair with the Russian-born German, Richard Sorge, who was to organize the Sorge spy ring, for the benefit of the Soviet Union, in Tokyo during World War II.
Needless to say, the future Madame Mao, Chiang Ching, makes her appearance in what Dong calls this "most cruel and mercenary of cities." But Shanghai wins many and varied accolades in this book, veering from "the most pleasure-mad, rapacious, corrupt, strife-ridden, licentious, squalid and decadent city in the world" to being "Asia's greatest metropolis, a brash sprawling juggernaut of a city that dominated the rest of the country with its power, sophistication, and, most of all, money." Elsewhere the author describes truly atrocious factory conditions in Shanghai. Match factories employing children, for example, used a kind of phosphorus that caused painful skin inflammation when handled. It had been banned in Europe, but was still used in Shanghai because it was cheap.
Politics are covered too, from the terrible "Shanghai massacre" of striking labor unionists in 1927, via the Japanese invasion 10 years later, to the eventual emergence of "Red Shanghai" in 1949.
This is likely to be a successful book. It's fluent and very readable. There's probably no new information in it, but swathes of the extraordinary tale of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s are covered, and the author dutifully lists her sources -- all the books of note on the period, presumably, plus a few more -- in a chapter by chapter Bibliography. The lack of notes relating specific material to specific sources is a weakness, but this is a work aimed at an intelligent popular readership rather than at scholars, and in such a book it is an omission that doesn't really matter.
A more serious omission is a good range of pictures. There are some, but they're all black and white; the famous color posters of the inter-war years, for instance, are not represented. Disaster and death are on show, but the opulence of old Shanghai, so well described, isn't anywhere effectively illustrated.
Publication Notes:
The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City
By Stella Dong 318 pages
Available at FNAC
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