Shanghai Cosmopolis: Negotiating the Branded City

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores city branding and the contested domains of cosmopolitanism in Shanghai in the early 21st century. It argues that the state-led refashioning of Shanghai as China's global gateway city has been a process less concerned with articulating an ethical stance of hospitality than with re-affirming the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and attracting inward foreign investment. Shanghai cosmopolitanism becomes associated with a certain style—fashionable, civilised, and international—and anything seen as contrary to this may be repudiated as an affront to the city's cosmopolitan image. An analysis of Kevin Kai Huang's 2008 film Park Shanghai explores the experience of the cosmopolitan subject within the modern city, suggesting that the promotion of Shanghai as a touristic playground may engender feelings of rootlessness and defamiliarisation. The 2013 protests surrounding the development of the Yongkang Lu bar strip are examined as a contestation of such defamiliarisation. As a performative call to renegotiate the terms of hospitality offered by the cosmopolitan city, the protests appropriated the symbolic language of the hegemonic cosmopolitan brand. Such sites of contestation reveal the everyday lived strategies, and vernacular responses to the dominant branding of the city, that may constitute a new Shanghai cosmopolitanism.