Shanghai Municipal Archives Research Articles

Isabella Jackson. Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City.

In Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City, Isabella Jackson provides a comprehensive and careful history of the Shanghai Municipal Council, the government of the Shanghai International Settlement from 1863 to 1943. Created by British gunboat diplomacy in the First Opium War, this colonial concession operated as an autonomous local government elected by the taxpayers who owned property there. These businessmen stamped this concession government with their laissez faire economic philosophy. Their night watchman state featured low taxes, focused on infrastructure and policing, and kept regulations and assistance to the poor to a minimum. The one element of this local government that was not minimal was its prison, reportedly the largest in the world with more than 6,500 prisoners (120). Jackson briefly connects her analysis of this colonial outpost to debates over colonialism and globalization, but her main interest lies not in theorizing, but in offering a detailed institutional history of this local government. She examines each dimension of this municipal government, with chapters devoted to taxes, personnel, police, public health, and welfare. The analysis is based on a rich array of primary sources from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, newspapers, and memoirs in both English and Chinese. Jackson places this history in the larger context of the British Empire, tracing the connections to the other treaty ports in China, Hong Kong, India, and London.

The China United Assurance Society and the Making of Chinese Life Insurance, 1912–1949

This article traces the history of the first Chinese life insurance company: the China United Assurance Society. China United was founded in Shanghai in 1912 as a purely Chinese-owned enterprise and became the first Chinese life insurer to survive past its eighth year. By 1935, it boasted insurance in force of over 20 million yuan. In adapting life insurance to Republican China, China United had to contend with a number of extraordinary challenges. It had to train a corps of Chinese technical experts in a country without a single accredited actuary. It had to cultivate demand for a product that was poorly understood and often distrusted. At the same time, the Society was forced to find a way to manage a nationwide sales network that could market insurance products to a country that hitherto had little knowledge of life insurance. In doing so, it was threatened by interethnic strife sparked by racist practices of the foreign manager. Finally, China United had to overcome increasingly fierce competition, high lapse rates, and excess mortality that combined to drive underwriting profits negative. The Society was able to survive as a going concern only through its investing prowess in Chinese capital markets. Using previously unmined sources from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, this article charts China United’s turbulent process of indigenization, and explores its lasting legacies in the contemporary Chinese life insurance industry.

Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City by Isabella Jackson

Reviewed by: Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City by Isabella Jackson Cécile Armand Isabella Jackson. Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 274 pp. $99.99 (cloth). Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City offers a detailed study of the major colonial institution in one of the most important cities in Republican China: the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), which governed the International Settlement in Shanghai from the mid-1840s until the relinquishment of the settlement in May 1943. As a treaty port open to foreign residents and companies, Shanghai became not only a major industrial and financial hub in China but also a center for political and cultural life, playing a significant role in the birth of Chinese nationalism. At a time of economic development and political and social unrest (the May Thirtieth movement of 1925, recurrent strikes and boycotts, the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945), the SMC's primary mission was to maintain a stable environment that was conducive to business. As the population of the International Settlement grew from 100,000 in 1880 to 1,000,000 in 1930, the SMC expanded its areas of intervention and increasingly shaped everyday life in the International Settlement. Jackson's main argument is that the SMC exemplified the specifically transnational nature of colonialism in China. It was transnational in the sense that it involved nonstate actors who cooperated on the ground beyond national interests. The SMC was a transnational institution both politically and socially. Politically, it remained distant from imperial oversight. In contrast to the French Municipal Council that ruled the French Concession, the SMC was not subject to consular authority. The SMC, financially self-sufficient and able to maintain its own defense force, was proud of its political autonomy. In sum, the SMC acted much like the government of an independent city-state through its policy of territorial expansion and its governmental powers of taxing and policing the International Settlement. Socially, the SMC was a transnational body of people, including 25 different nationalities. Transnationalism, however, did not mean equality, as the SMC maintained a strict racial hierarchy between foreigners and Chinese, and even among foreigners (Russians, Sikhs). Transnational colonialism, Jackson argues, does not bear the positive assumption of cosmopolitanism. Although Chinese representation on the SMC increased after 1927, the British continued to dominate. Observing the peculiar neglect of the SMC in the history of colonialism in China, Jackson helps to fill this historiographical void by drawing on "the vast holdings of the Shanghai municipal archives" (and secondarily, those of the Foreign Office in Britain) and putting forward "the concept of transnational colonialism to explain the nature of colonialism in China" (2). This concept, Jackson argues, is not only more appropriate to the Shanghai case but is further applicable to other colonial contexts. Contributing to the [End Page E-25] recent scholarship on transnationalism, her argument has broad implications for the history of colonialism and nationalism in China and beyond. She offers a convincing alternative to such controversial concepts as hypo-, hyper-, semi-, and quasi-colonialism and the even more vague notion of "colonial modernity," all of which fail to capture the full complexity of colonialism in China. In contrast, she provides a more nuanced and embodied view of colonialism in Shanghai. As a social historian, her work is strongly grounded in primary materials and historical facts. She demonstrates a genuine concern for human actors, unveiling their daily work and the SMC's concrete impact on the residents' everyday lives. The book interweaves three key themes that serve as recurrent motifs throughout the book: similarities to and differences from British formal colonies, transnational influences and limits of transnationalism due to racial tensions, the challenges facing the SMC in the form of financial (tight budget), geographical (settlement boundaries), and legal (land regulations, bylaws) limitations. The book consists of five chapters—each one dealing with a particular area of municipal intervention—arranged according to their relative importance: finances, councilors and staff, police and conflict, public health and hygiene, and industrial, welfare, and social reforms. While the argument does not follow a chronological order, Jackson does...

Lessons in ambivalence: The Shanghai Municipal Council’s opium policies, 1906–1917

BackgroundShanghai was considered to be a “capital of opium” in modern China, hence the history of opium in the city has received significant attention. In the Shanghai International Settlement, where Chinese and foreigners lived as neighbours, drugs were considered by the administration as both “trouble maker”, and important financial resource. This paper explores how the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), the most senior governing body in the settlement, used its position to maximize political and economic profit from the trade and consumption of opium. MethodsThe paper is based on documentary analysis of records of the SMC board meetings and other related material stored at Shanghai Municipal Archives. Interpretive approaches were used to analyze the shifting SMC strategies on opium consumption, the competing power relations and the way they were negotiated between actors with a stake in the region, including semi-colonialism and world systems analysis. ResultsWith the dual purpose of preventing damage and enhancing municipal management, the SMC introduced a licensing system permitting the consumption and trade of drugs. However, the anti-opium policies of the late Qing government and the Anglo-Chinese 10 Year Agreement meant SMC had to shut down opium “houses” (opium dens) and “shops” (for the sale of opium to be consumed off the premises). ConclusionsOver almost a decade, the SMC shifted emphasis from political regulation of a social, recreational practice to maximizing financial benefit. In the process, SMC made full use of the opportunities it gained from a period of ambivalent Chinese and British power relations and local community rule.

The modern abattoir as a machine for killing: the municipal abattoir of the Shanghai International Settlement, 1933

The public abattoir emerged as an institution across the industrialized world in the mid-nineteenth century to centralize and control animal killing and meat processing, activities that had traditionally taken place in private slaughterhouses. The modern idea of the abattoir, however, is more than a place where animals are killed for human consumption. Designed to optimize a disassembling process that efficiently took apart the livestock into small pieces, the modern abattoir is one of the earliest building types where the production line was incorporated into the spatial layout. Modern abattoirs also separated livestock from people, and production from consumption, into special places removed from public view.This paper is concerned with the production of a public abattoir in 1930s colonial Shanghai. The Shanghai Municipal Abattoir, completed in 1933, was deliberately designed as a ‘machine for killing’, which applied production-line principles to the efficient slaughter of animals. The result of this functionalism was an extraordinary series of multi-storey concrete structures, dictated by the bloody business of slaughtering animals and processing their carcasses, set behind an art deco façade. In this paper we seek to tell the story of the production of a building that has previously been little researched, with most of the archival material in Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) and the limited published material available only in Mandarin.

Archival exhibitions: cross-border cultural exchange and collaboration

As an effective means of cultural communication and a medium for collaboration and exchange, archival exhibitions have proved a growing phenomenon unique to this industry. Instead of remaining a cultural event, the archival exhibition now serves to promote cross-cultural, cross-border and cross-industry collaboration. Exhibitions connect us to the past and the future, celebrate common values, share experiences, improve the national and urban image and showcase the magnificence of cultural diversity. Shanghai Municipal Archives has been making successful and meaningful attempts in this regard. For example the ‘Chinese Communists in the Eyes of Foreign Journalists’ exhibition demonstrated the significance of sharing archival resources internationally and also made possible our collaboration with the libraries and archival departments of prestigious educational institutions in Europe and America; ‘Rabindranath Tagore in China’ and ‘India-China-India’ revealed overwhelmingly the power of archival cultural com...

Comfort Women: A Focus on Recent Findings from Korea and China

Until recently, the most important investigation on the issues of the “comfort women” was carried out by the Japanese government in the early 1990s. In the meantime, data from the Government-General of Korea (1910-1945) were never comprehensively investigated. As for the comfort women-related data from occupied China, even access to these has been difficult. To overcome this situation, a group of researchers that included us, recently formed a research team and began investigating data at the National Archives of Korea, the Shanghai Municipal Archives and Nanjing Municipal Archives, in China. This paper analyzes the significance of the new findings we made at these archives. Compared to the documents found by the Japanese investigation in the 1990s, our findings, in China in particular, give much more detailed information about the wartime recruitment and operation of “comfort women” and the military comfort stations.

A Protestant Church in Communist China: Moore Memorial Church Shanghai, 1949–1989 by John Craig William Keating (review)

JOHN CRAIG WILLIAM KEATING, A Protestant Church in Communist China: Moore Memorial Church Shanghai, 1949–1989. Studies in Missionaries and Christianity in China. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2012. xii, 305 pp. US$85 (hb). ISBN 978-1-61146-090-2 This book aims to fill a gap in the study of Christianity in China through a case study of a single church that was the largest Protestant church before 1949 (p. 228). Prominently situated across from People’s Square in Shanghai and topped by a huge neon cross, Moore Memorial church (MMC or Mu’en tang 沐恩堂) has been a central site for Chinese Protestantism in the missionary, Mao, and reform eras. Before 1949, MMC missionaries testified against British forces that had killed Chinese, upending claims that all Protestant missionaries supported colonial domination against rising Chinese nationalism. After 1949, the church was a launching pad for Chinese pastors who assumed national leadership in the official ‘‘patriotic’’ religious association for Protestants, the Chinese Protestant Three Self Patriotic Movement association (TSPM, or 中國基督教三自愛國運動協會). The book draws on missionary papers written before 1949, official Chinese government documents (including some from the Shanghai Municipal Archives), and Chinese church records, or whatever survived the Cultural Revolution. The author also conducted more than forty interviews in Chinese and in English with surviving church members, leaders, and others associated with the congregation in China and in the United States. Each chapter also references a surprisingly wide array of books and research articles. Chapter 1 introduces the main themes of the book. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the history of Protestant Christianity before 1949 and then in 1950 and 1951, when the church ran its own affairs. Chapter 4 examines the key part played by Jiang Changchuan 江長川, an MMC pastor from 1936 to 1941, whom Keating helpfully labels a ‘‘shrewd operator’’ (p. 245) for sending private messages of concern to foreign missionaries at the same time that he was publicly attacking them for foreign imperialism (pp. 95–96). Chapters 5 and 6 cover the church in duress from 1958 to the end of the Mao period in the late 1970s. Chapter 7 discusses the reopening of official churches from 1979 to 1989, and chapter 8 summarizes the book’s findings. One overall finding is that neither severe critics of the official church as a regime ‘‘puppet’’ nor its supporters have gotten the church-state story right (p. 226). After such a tantalizing judgment, however, Keating ultimately finds that MMC people made compromises but were ‘‘genuine’’ Christians (p. 228). While this conclusion is not especially unusual, the book is still helpful for adding new fuel to ongoing debates in church-state relations and offering many details that made reading it a pleasure. Scholars have proposed a range of explanations for the growth of Protestant Christianity, because numbers have exploded more than seven-fold in thirty years, by the most conservative, Party-state estimates (a careful 2011 Pew survey puts the increase at nearly twentyfold in thirty years, to 58 million Protestants in official and unregistered ‘‘house’’ churches). The TSPM claims that the indigenous and united character of the church is responsible for this rapid growth, which Keating dismisses because many official churches retain Western styles of worship, and 228 BOOK REVIEWS services are often divided by denomination within a single church. MMC itself holds ‘‘amalgamated’’ (p. 191) worship services and congregants prefer the Western hymns, rather than Chinese ones (pp. 185–186). Keating also rejects the idea that Protestants who attended illegal gatherings in the 1970s later filled official churches in the 1980s (p. 191), because he imagines that, if this were the case, then in the 1980s illegal gatherings should have ceased while official churches should be full. He ignores the possibility that Chinese who became Christians during the 1970s when no public worship was allowed came to enjoy the ‘‘safety’’ of reopened official churches. New Christians then took their places in unregistered gatherings. Instead, he prefers the explanation that the relaxation of the socio-political climate has allowed Protestant numbers (along with those of other religious groups) to rise, but this does not explain why Chinese should choose Protestant Christianity over many other religious alternatives. Another fascinating dimension...

Accelerated Transition

When the Chinese Communist Party seized power in 1949 it began a process of transforming China’s economy and society. Despite the Party initially advancing a programme of gradual change under ‘New Democracy’, the early 1950s can best be characterised as a period of accelerated transition. This paper uses the case study of the elimination of British business in Shanghai to show how radicalisation in the political sphere catalysed economic change. Drawing on recently disclosed documents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives and materials from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the paper demonstrates how policy-making and implementation evolved in practice. The elimination of foreign commercial enterprises was deemed a priority, but because they were closely tied into the Chinese economy the processes involved in their removal presented issues that were too difficult to resolve along simplistic ideological lines. While it may seem contradictory to argue that this period was characterised both by accelerated change and by enduring legacies of the old order, this paper demonstrates that behind a façade of cohesive action lay cadres struggling to manage a complex situation. The ccp’s own weaknesses determined their courses of action and the methods they deployed informed the way revolutionary transformation evolved.

Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai by Paul P. Mariani (review)

PAUL P. MARIANI, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. xiii, 282 pp. US$39.95, £29.95, J36.00 (hbk). ISBN 978-0-674-0613-8 For six years after the Communist takeover of the city, Catholics in Shanghai actively resisted government control. This book, based on extensive research in both Chinese and Western archives, tells the tragic story of that resistance and considers its implications for the church in China today. The book is structured as a detailed narrative history of the events that took place in the Shanghai Church between 1949 and 1956. The first chapter deals with the immediate aftermath of the Communist takeover of the city and sets up the two main themes of the book. The first theme is that from the start the aim of the Communist Party was to destroy the Catholic Church. This aim was not publicly declared, since the Party was actively promoting the idea of a United Front, but Mariani argues that it was inherent in both Marxist atheism and in the Party’s history of opposition to imperialism. The new government took control of Church institutions and began to promote its open goal of a ‘‘patriotic’’ Church without institutional links overseas. Ordinary Catholics responded to these threats with increasing devotion and this brings us to the second major theme of the book: the key role of organized Catholic youth in resistance to the state. In the face of state repression, leading clergy focused on students and young people whom they organized into Marian sodalities (promoted primarily by the Jesuits) and the Legion of Mary 聖母軍 (promoted by the Vatican’s internuncio Antonio Riberi, whose first name Mariani anglicizes as Anthony). Within these organizations they also recruited ‘‘special militants,’’ young people known only to the priest who was their spiritual director; they promised ‘‘to accept prison or death, to postpone marriage for the time being, to have a spiritual plan of life, and to accept all missions that would aid the church’’ (p. 64). The rest of the book describes the unfolding of these themes as the government’s campaign against the church progressed. In 1951 members of the Legion of Mary across China came under huge pressure to register with the government and to renounce the organization. In Shanghai, unlike other parts of China, the majority refused to comply. Eventually the organization was disbanded, but many of its key members entered ongoing ‘‘catechism groups’’ instead. This was also the period that saw the beginnings of the institutions of the Underground Church, with a few young people joining secret religious orders. Repression continued, with the next climax coming in 1955, when large crowds of ordinary Catholics gathered in churches and protested the arrests of foreign and Chinese priests, while at the same time Rao Shushi 饒淑石, the first party secretary of East China, came under attack in the Gao Gang 高崗 affair. Rao was accused, among other things, of weakness in failing to deal with the Shanghai Catholic Church. The result was a massive crackdown: the bishop of Shanghai, Ignatius Kung (Gong Pinmei 龔品梅) was arrested along with twenty-three members of his clergy and three hundred Chinese Catholics. Soon, leading Catholics began to crack under great pressure in prison, with the most notable being the Jesuit mission superior Fernand Lacratelle, who made lengthy confessions that accused Bishop Kung of being an imperialist, named his supporters, and revealed the structures of the militant Catholic youth organizations. Tape recordings of these confessions were also crucial in breaking BOOK REVIEWS 69 the morale of others who had resisted. The final two chapters of the book follow more rapidly through the events of the succeeding years with the establishment of what Mariani terms a ‘‘puppet’’ church, the show-trial of Bishop Kung in 1960, and the complex and difficult situation that continues to exist between the underground and government-registered churches in Shanghai today. The research for this book is excellent. Mariani makes careful use of the abundant Catholic materials as well as Chinese newspapers and the Shanghai Municipal Archives. The effect is to build up a convincing picture of events in Shanghai, but the reader should...

Bicycle trade organizations in modern Shanghai

ABSTRACT:Trade associations were widely established as new industrial and commercial organizations in modern China, particularly during the Republican era. They were characterized by enormous spatial, temporal and industrial differences, and generalizing, one-sided studies are very unlikely to lead to a truthful, precise historical understanding of these associations. Case-studies that are more fully multidimensional are urgently needed to supplement our understanding. The national bicycle industry was representative of emerging industries in modern China. This article focuses on bicycle industry-related trade associations in modern Shanghai. Files housed in the Shanghai Municipal Archives are analysed to offer a concrete dissection of an individual case-study that will illuminate broader questions in trade association historical research.

Location Is (Not) Everything: Re-Assessing Shanghai’s Rise, 1840s -1860s

While Shanghai’s pre-war history (1842-1937) is thought to be already ‘quite well understood’ thanks to an inordinately large number of studies, other Chinese urban centres received less attention. Consequently, a number of Western scholars have recently shifted their gaze elsewhere in search of other Chinese articulations of modernity. Yet a thorough examination of the history of other Chinese cities cannot replace a continual robust engagement with Shanghai. This is not least because the vast array of materials available at the Shanghai Municipal Archives and Zikawei Library has been systematically catalogued only over the last few years. They are indispensable to understanding the city’s rise to prominence and its preponderant position within China’s economic modernisation process.
 
 Mainly drawing on rare early editions of the North-China Herald held at the Zikawei Library, this article highlights one aspect of Shanghai’s early treaty-port development; it reprises the conventional wisdom positing that, because of its perceived advantageous location, Shanghai had been almost deterministically poised to become China’s gateway to the outside world following the First Opium War (1839-1842). Instead, it argues that location was significant but not sufficient of itself in delivering Shanghai’s economic take-off.

Gutenberg in Shanghai. Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937. By Christopher A. Reed. [Vancouver, Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. xvii, 391 pp. ISBN 1206-9523.

Gutenberg in Shanghai is a book about the industrial revolution in China's print culture and the ensuing rise of print capitalism ‘with Chinese characteristics.’ It offers a coherent and unique account of the introduction, adaptation and eventual imitation of modern, i.e. Western, print technology in China, with the aim of establishing the material basis on which to study the transition of China's ancient literary culture into the industrial age. It reconstructs the history of print technology from the first cast type matrices to the adaptation of the electrotype process, from photo-lithography to the colour-offset press, from the platen press to the rotary printing press, and tells the stories of three of the most dominant lithograph and letterpress publishers of the late Qing and the early Republican period respectively. This is a worthwhile undertaking, exploring an aspect of modern publishing in China, which hitherto has not received the attention it deserves. The study is based on missionary writings, personal reminiscences, collections of source materials, documents on the early book printers' trade organizations from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, and oral history materials (interviews conducted during the 1950s with former printing workshops apprentices). The bibliography also lists a couple of interviews, but unfortunately it is not clear how relevant they are to the story told in the book.The introduction of lithography into Shanghai by Jesuit missionaries in 1876 plays a pivotal role in this account. Lithography, especially photolithography coming a few years later, was a technology particularly suited to Chinese needs and cheaper than traditional wood-block printing.

Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service. By Frederic Wakeman Jr. [Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003. xvii +650 pp. $75.00. ISBN 0-520-23407-3.

In a brief afterword, Frederic Wakeman asks himself why he devoted “so much effort to fathoming such a morally monstruous” figure as Dai Li, the chief of Chiang Kai-shek's secret service and he confessed that he was motivated by “a real fascination” for “cobra-like Dai Li” (p. 367). A biographer needs a minimal empathy with his hero. In the present case, however, it was an unwilling empathy for which the author felt that he had to justify himself. How to dissociate understanding and exonerating? Trying to avoid any revisionism, Wakeman opted for an implicit compromise: understanding and condemnation.This book illuminates the dread world of secret police, spy and counterespionage organizations in Nationalist China. Wakeman has turned every stone and used every kind of source: Chinese, American and Old Shanghai municipal archives, memoirs of agents and observers, contemporary newspapers and magazines, as well as all available secondary literature, including some novels. Notes take up 152 pages, representing about 40% of the text's 365 pages. An exhaustive bibliography takes 38 more pages and readers will find the detailed and well-organized glossary-index very useful in navigating an enormous number of personal names and administrative and political labels.