Among the best photographers working in Shanghai at the moment is Xi Zi. He also leaves a lot of helpful and corrective comments on this site when I get streets and location wrong! So excellently The Disappearance of Dongjiadu, a slide show of Xi Zi’s photos and a conversation with the photographer is being held at the Rockbund Art Museum down by the Bund this Friday.
For those who’ve never been there Dongjiadu is the area of the South Bund (beyond the old Quai de France) by the old city. It’s perhaps best known for the Catholic Cathedral down there.It’s certainly an area that’s taken a pounding from the bulldozers in recent years and while, in the former Settlement and Frenchtown areas we’ve lost plenty, some of the structures lost around Dongjiadu are Chinese in their origin and date back over 300 years. Anyone who thinks that the destruction of Shanghai has only been about treaty port western inspired architecture may want to think upon what’s happened to Dongjiadu. Essentially Dongjiadu has ceased to exist as a formerly Chinese part of old Shanghai.
And so the importance of Xi Zi’s photography….
Slide show of PhotographyWorksby Xi Zi and Conversation with thePhotographer: Disappearance of Dongjiadu
Time: Friday Apr. 15th 7 P.M.
Address: Rockbund Art Museum, 169 Yuan Ming Yuan Road, 1st floor
The Slide show features the independent photographer Xi Zi’s documentary on the transformation of the Dongjiadu community from the beginning to the end. The photographer will be there to take comments and answer questions. Director Zhou Hongbo of the documentary film Lotus Ferry will be there as well.
Earnshaw Books and Derek Sandhaus have done an amazing job bringing us a new translation and interpretation of Backhouse’s scurrilous and filthy memoir Decadence Mandchoue – I’ll write more on the book soon when time allows. However, if in Peking this week you really need to get along to the launch of the book and get the inside story on all this – Decadence Mandchoue is perhaps quite the maddest book on China ever written by a foreigner…and well worth reading (well, the sane are generally a bit of a bore).
Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse (1873-1944), Baronet, arrived in Peking in 1898 and quickly became the city’s most respected translator, working for both the British Foreign Service and London Times correspondent George Morrison. Considered a brilliant linguist and Chinese scholar in his day, his diaries have been the subject of great controversy due to their illicit and salacious depictions of imperial life.  Backhouse’s reputation was posthumously tarnished when it was alleged that much of his work was based upon forged documents. Join us to hear Derek Sandhaus shed light on Backhouse’s fascinating writings and life.
Recently I was one of several folk in Shanghai roped in by Indiana University prof Scott Kennedy to try and locate the previous address of the great Mongolist and Sinologist (and later a man to be horrendously persecuted by that bastard Joe McCarthy) Owen Lattimore. We didn’t have much to go on and his home address was too tricky along with a reference to Shanghai’s ‘American Compound’ which appears to be a generic descriptive rather than an actual place (unless anyone reading this knows different?) – still we did point the interested party in the direction of his former haunts when he worked for Arnhold and Company in the city. It was a pleasure as the person Scott was accompanying to China on a trip was the Managing Editor of the Indianapolis Business Journal Greg Andrews, fully Greg Lattimore Andrews (and if it was me I’d definitely leave the ‘Lattimore’ in all the time) who’s great uncle was the ‘great’ Owen Lattimore.
Anyway, Scott wrote it all up on his blog called The China Track and you can see their tour of Lattimore’s old Shanghai haunts here and the building they decided to adopt as the spiritual home of Owen in Shanghai.
Of course if anyone has anything to add to Scott’s findings I’m sure he, and Greg, would love to hear from you (as would I).
Now calm down – it could be good, it could be bad, it could be indifferent but it seems a big time movie is planned on old Jewish Shanghai. Apparently it’s a Sino-US creation top be called The Melanie Violin. Refugees, World War Two, US$30-45mn, from a novel by He Ning (apparently a Chinese-American writer who I’m afraid I’ve never heard of and Google doesn’t seem to have heard of either so maybe, God Forbid!, Xinhua‘s got it wrong?) and a Jewish violinist falling in love with a Shanghainese girl – aahh, cross-cultural relationships!! very nice, a bit more 2011 than 1943 though. Xinhua has very brief details here. Xinhua boldly asserts that, ‘Today, there are still some Jewish descendants living in Shanghai.’ If they mean there are some Jews in Shanghai then fair enough obviously; if they mean there are people living in Shanghai now who lived in the old Ghetto then that’s a little more of a claim – if there are any do get in touch!!
Still, Auschwitz survivor and Schindler’ s list producer Branko Lustig is apparently involved so who knows…could be a winner.
BTW: in case you’re not sure where it was – here’s Shanghai with the ghetto area highlighted.
An RAS China event in Shanghai that may be of interest to readers of this blog should you be in that part of the world:
RAS LECTURE
Tuesday 12th April, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
Tavern, Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road,Shanghai
兴国宾馆 上海市兴国路78å·
Shanghai Nightlife and the Modern Chinese Woman
Andrew David Field, PhD
This talk aims to trace changes in the roles and status of women in the nightlife of Shanghai over the past century. In the late 19th century, the city boasted a rich courtesan culture and Chinese courtesans emerged as the first public female figures in urban life. They were also the first women to embrace the Western cultures of urban modernity.
By the 1920s, new opportunities arose for women in the city in the wake of political and social developments associated with the May Fourth Era. Not coincidentally, Chinese society began to embrace the “Jazz Age†and men and women stepped out for a night of dancing in the city’s cabarets.
During the ‘20s and ‘30s, the wunu or dance hostesses who worked in these ballrooms drew on the culture pioneered by the courtesans of earlier decades but also on cultures of Hollywood films and the American taxi-dance halls and became icons of femininity for a New China.
The Revolution of 1949 and the Mao years saw an end to these developments and social dancing went deep underground, but that era also elevated the status and power of women in many areas ranging from marriage to the workplace.
By the 1980s, with the dawn of the “opening and reforms†era, people in Shanghai were dancing out in the open again, but this time with men and women dancing on a more equal footing. Then in the 1990s, the city opened up once again to international commerce, trade, and culture, and a new era of nightclubs and fancy bars emerged.
Today, women play ambiguous roles as customers, entertainers, and hostesses in the city’s nightclubs, and the legacy of the 19th century can still be seen in the city’s club cultures. Accompanied by plenty of visual images, this lecture will trace these developments as we examine the shifting roles and identities of women in Shanghai’s nightscape.
Andrew Field is an independent scholar of Chinese history and culture living and working in Shanghai.
Entrance: RMB 30 (RAS members) and RMB 80 (non-members) those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Lecture. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
I’m very happy that a new series of books I’ve been developing for Zed Books in London will launch this week with the publication of Kerry Brown’s study of the recent developments in village democracy (or lack of) in China – Ballot Box China. The idea of Zed Asian Arguments, of which I’m the series editor, is that they are shorter books (around 60,000 words) that raise issues from the region from the bottom up. We’ve had enough top down analyses to last us a lifetime and precious few bottom up analyses. The idea of my series is to look at how major developments, in this case village democracy in China, is perceived and affects local communities. As Kerry had spent a lot of time as an observer of elections across China and talked with participants and candidates I asked him to write the book. We’ve heard enough from academics and journalists about what the government thinks, I thought it was time to try and work out what the would-be electorate thinks.
And so we’re finally going to get to launch the first book in the series – more are coming covering issues as diverse as local environmental activism in China, the realities of urbanisation in China, China’s soft power efforts, what ordinary North Koreans think and the position of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand. I’m afraid I can’t be in London for the launch but hopefully some of you can get along.
You are invited to the launch of
Ballot Box China
By Kerry Brown
‘Chinese Grassroots Democracy and What It Means for China’s Future’
Tuesday April 12th 2011
5.30 to 6.30pm
Chatham House
10 St James’s Square
London
SW1Y 4LE
RSVP: sshah@chathamhouse.org.uk
Speakers will include author Kerry Brown, head of the Asia Programme, Chatham House.
Event chaired by Jonathan Fenby, head of China research, Trusted Sources.
The speakers will explain how, in the last 20 years, China has undertaken one of the world’s largest experiments in grassroots democracy. Across over half a million villages in China almost one million elections have taken place since 1988, with over three million officials elected. Chinese farmers still account for half of the Chinese population and a quarter of its economic output. With villages remaining restive, what does this mean for the future of the country as a whole – and what clues do these elections give to China’s own possible democratic future?
‘A sober, readable and much-needed corrective to the idea, promoted with great enthusiasm and increasing success by the ruling communist party, that western notions of democracy are alien to China’s political traditions and culture. But Ballot Box China is not starry-eyed either, placing the issue of democracy firmly in the context of China’s own internal debate about political reform.’
Richard McGregor, author of The Party: The Secret Life of China’s Communist Leaders.
‘This remarkably clear-eyed primer examines the state of democracy in China from the ground up, in all its complexity. From pen-portraits of local activists to insiders’ analyses, Ballet Box China offers one of the best explanations of how the world’s newest superpower is governed.’
Louisa Lim, NPR Beijing Correspondent
For more information, go to www.zedbooks.co.uk/ballot_box_china
This old house has somehow survived the destruction all around – on a square block at Liaoyang Road (formerly Liaoyong Road) and Huimin Road (Baikal Road) in Hongkou (Hongkew). No idea why this one didn’t come down with the rest of the block but apparently, so the gate guard tells me, it’s due to go in the very near future. Migrant workers live inside at the moment and the upstairs has become uninhabitable due to the usual ‘slum by intent’ strategy or removing roof tiles and breaking windows to allow in the elements. Therefore the timbers are now pretty rotten apparently. A real shame as the roof level rooms must have been great once due to the high beams.
Of course inside the place is being steadily stripped, trashed and gutted. Shame as it was once a nice house and there was no need for it to fall into such disrepair. But high rises and office blocks are planned and the Bright Young Things don’t want wine bars in converted houses in this part of town so….
