Power, Politics, and the Making of Shanghai

Abstract

How and why contemporary Shanghai has taken the form it has over the last thirty years and its role in the ‘‘New’’ Shanghai through the underlying top—down governance and planning process? Answering this question, rather than taking solely the historical path in documenting the process of development, this article represents an attempt to make sense of the process of development through the underlying forces that shaped and reshaped the physical forms of the city. Particularly, this article looks at distinctive spatial forms and social and political formations associated with Shanghai before, under, and after the Mao Zedong. By weaving planning history with critical analysis of Chinese sociopolitics, this article chronologically traces the formative history of Shanghai’s unique urbanism, building on existing literature and provides a wide coverage of the episodic accounts of Shanghai’s planning history. When the role of individuals in the making of Shanghai becomes obvious especially after the reform in the early 1980s, this article pays attention to their roles in the development of Shanghai and the ‘‘power and politics’’ they represented, which fostered the resurrection of the city.