A lively account of China's encounter with the modern world through the history of its most dynamic and cosmopolitan city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Occupied by the Japanese in 1937 and then disfavored by the Communists, Shanghai regained its place as China's Big Apple with the resurgence of entrepreneurial activity and foregn investment in the 1980s.
"Marie-Claire Bergère expertly weaves together a great mass of disparate material that has been published on China's most dynamic city. In the process, she leavens her authoritative rendering of social and economic history with some coverage of cultural history, and her evocation of Shanghai's paradoxical position in the reform era is compelling."
