Books like Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937 — picked by fans

Though Foucault’s book appeared at almost the same moment as Ignatieff’s, Foucault painted a far darker image of early penitentiaries. He cast them not as places of reform but as instruments of disciplinary control, rendering inmates docile and amenable to the monastic repression and routine of schools and factories.

Foucault’s book taught me decades ago that history is crafted, not discovered, and that skilled chroniclers can weave very different plotlines from similar facts.

I liked this book despite its phlegmatic style and the politics of its author. I liked it because it spoke across a political divide to identify something seemingly quite simple—that is, the friend/enemy divide—yet once unpacked, it became enormously profound and complex.

In identifying something any concept of the political cannot ignore, it cuts across orthodox political divides and political cultures. Indeed, the very first line on the very first page of the first volume of Mao Zedong’s Selected Works begins with this same question of enemies and friends. I liked Schmitt’s book because it opened up a very different way of thinking about Maoist politics.     

There is something of a maverick lurking in the shadows of this enormously erudite and linguistically brilliant scholar who is widely respected within the China studies field. In writing this particular book, Schoenhals scoured endless Chinese book and junk markets, picking out diaries, files, and details that few before him had thought important enough to gather and examine carefully.

As a result, Schoenhals work breaks new ground without really trying, or without making a theoretical fuss about it. As the father of ‘garbology’ in Chinese studies, he has attracted some criticism, but, as the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding, and few would doubt that in Schoenhals’s book, the proof is offered in remarkable empirical detail. 

It might seem hard to believe, but scholars of contemporary Chinese studies know quite a bit about Chinese history and Confucian thought but little of the history and thought of Marxism-Leninism. I begin my research from a very different perspective.

I had always thought, perversely as it turned out, that anyone working on a subject related to Chinese communism and its policing methods needed a solid grounding not just in Chinese history and thought but also in Marxism-Leninism. Admittedly, much of the post-Stalin discussion of Marxist law has been stolid, uninteresting, and repetitive, but Pashukanis breaks that mold.

His ideas on the withering away of law as capitalism is eviscerated during socialism breathes new life into Marxist debates about the transition stage, thereby offering new insights into the mass line of Mao.

Having interviewed hundreds of Chinese Canadians, I knew that many of Canada’s earliest Chinese migrants met and gave money to Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, though most were less enthusiastic about Chiang Kai-shek. This book presented a complicated narrative of US-Chinese relations from the perspective of the Soong sisters, who straddled the boundaries of west and east and lived in a world where most Chinese were excluded because of their race. Similar to many of the bachelors in my book, the sisters were also influenced by KMT politics and religion. Both the Soong sisters and the bachelors knew that religion trumped race and that Christian identities and faith helped them open doors to dominant society that remained closed to most Chinese of the era. 

At the center of the novel Night in Shanghai is Black American musician Thomas Greene, who arrives in Shanghai from segregated Baltimore to find wealth, position, and love—only to have his life changed forever by the outbreak of World War II. Author Nicole Mones was a businesswoman in China in the 1970s; her China experience, coupled with meticulous research, makes this a pitch-perfect portrait of the city and its denizens. A talented storyteller, she describes the little-known Black American experience of Shanghai, taking the reader from go-go Shanghai to wartime, weaving in actual events, characters, and depictions of the nightspots and jazz clubs of my parents’ Shanghai.

Emily Hahn, prolific author and New Yorker correspondent whose sojourns in Shanghai (1935-39), Chungking (1939-40), and Hong Kong (1941-43) coincided with the Japanese invasions of these cities, fictionalizes the life of Canadian Lorraine Murray, turned high-class prostitute in Shanghai after living as a foreign geisha in Japan. Hahn was fascinated by sex workers and hung out with them (Hahn and Murray were roommates), but the novel later morphs into the autobiographical as the beautiful Hahn ingratiates herself with Japanese military officials until she’s forced into a Hong Kong internment camp for several years. Hahn is more reporter than novelist, but her flair for detail and eyewitness authenticity brings Shanghai to life in a way the historical novelist cannot. Especially hilarious is Jill’s hotel scene with the British john who thought he was getting a freebie.

In 1929, Bernardine Szold Fritz, age 33, accepted a proposal of marriage that brought her to Shanghai. From the very beginning, I was intrigued. Why would a single Jewish woman hop a train to China to be with a fourth husband, a man she met briefly in Paris? While the marriage is a disappointment, Art Deco Shanghai is not. 

Like other Jewish women before her, she started a salon in her home and an International Arts Theater that saw the likes of Hollywood luminaries and famous names in the arts and politics. I was mesmerized by how Bernardine’s commitment to intellectual pursuits defied the fragile political situation that existed in Shanghai through the civil wars and the time period leading up to World War II. She brought creativity and joy to a city that would soon change forever.

Written in the 1940s, this book takes readers to Hong Kong as the Japanese occupation replaced the British colony. It’s mostly a love story in which the intensity of war reflects the passion of emotions and the restraint on actions. 

But like all of Eileen Chang’s works, it’s also beautifully written. Though the fall of Hong Kong is at the heart of the novella, I’ve always found the city less important in the story than the domestic settings. When the Bai family talks, I’m in the room, sitting in a wingback chair, sipping green tea, and listening.

Also formerly a public radio reporter based in Shanghai, Scott Tong takes us inside his own extended family, scattered across China. Personal stories of the relatives he found reveal not just their troubled histories but also the unvarnished stories of their varying ability to adapt to the opportunities of a modernizing China.