Coping with Socialism: The Shanghai Way under Mao

In the first years of the People’s Republic, Shanghai was viewed as China’s most Westernized, capitalistic, and “decadent” city; or, in Communist terminology, the “bridgehead of imperialist aggression against China.”  The city therefore bore the brunt of political campaigns perhaps more than other cities in China after the 1949 revolution.  Yet in the socialist new Shanghai, more of old Shanghai survived than could be seen on the surface, and there was much more maneuvering, strategizing, and wisdom among the people in coping with the authorities than has typically been thought.  For the most part, Shanghainese were not necessarily submissively compliant or obedient to autocratic rule, nor did they engage in bullheaded, militant confrontations with the regime, but pursued something in between.  That is, people coped with the communist state by getting on in the system while taking the maximum from it for their own purposes, and in some ways forced the Chinese state to be more flexible and compromising than we usually think.  This paper looks at what might be called the “Shanghai way” of coping with authoritarianism through the lens of everyday life and suggests that, despite three decades of mass campaigns and the Cultural Revolution, Shanghai’s old cosmopolitism survived the Mao era, returning vibrantly in the post-Mao era.