Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity

Thanks to Sue Anne Tay’s Shanghai Street Stories blog for bringing this book to my attention, Qin Shao’s Shanghai Gone. The blurb (below) is a little overstated in terms of Shanghai “gleaming” and rivalling London and New York as a financial centre but it still raises important issues, not least the human tragedies behind the Xintiandi nonsense that set back the preservation and heritage debate several decades in Shanghai but being lauded by many who should know better….

Shanghai has been demolished and rebuilt into a gleaming megacity in recent decades, now ranking with New York and London as a hub of global finance. But that transformation has come at a grave human cost. This compelling book is the first to apply the concept of domicide—the eradication of a home against the will of its dwellers—to the sweeping destruction of neighborhoods, families, and life patterns to make way for the new Shanghai. Here we find the holdouts and protesters, men and women who have stubbornly resisted domicide and demanded justice. Qin Shao follows, among others, a reticent kindergarten teacher turned diehard petitioner; a descendant of gangsters and squatters who has become an amateur lawyer for evictees; and a Chinese Muslim who has struggled to recover his ancestral home in Xintiandi, an infamous site of gentrification dominated by a well-connected Hong Kong real estate tycoon. Highlighting the wrenching changes spawned by China’s reform era, Shao vividly portrays the relentless pursuit of growth and profit by the combined forces of corrupt power and money, the personal wreckage it has left behind, and the enduring human spirit it has unleashed.