Shanghai: Just after Japan's surrender, August 1945

Chungking troops in town. Cheering crowds line up and hail their heroes. The harbor wakes up. When planes are circling overhead steamers hoot, firecrackers greet the roaring engines, and everybody runs to see the newcomers. The Japanese have lost. They know it and they take it nicely. Their guards stand silent at their posts and cooperate in keeping order.

Around them is China victorious and only over the Japanese Embassy flutters “the rising sun.” Gradually the Japanese soldiers and civilians disappear from the street picture. Their shops are closed. They fade out. Their embassy goes down. They will go away: Japan for the Japanese! American boys, British boys, Shanghai girls, do your duty! They do. Every nightclub is full. Life begins at sunset and never ends. Who cares about the curfew. The war is won. May peace be preserved! Two world wars is enough in any century.

Shanghai: The Communist liberation, May 25, 1949

Communist partisans went wild with enthusiasm. The Great World in the French concession, the city's largest amusement resort, hosted a mammoth picture of Mao Tse-tung, which obviously had been weeks in the making. The red flag appeared over buildings and flew outside stores which twenty-two years earlier had quite as enthusiastically flown the Kuomintang flag. Sympathizers who found themselves without Communist emblems hastily manufactured them by tearing the blue sky and white sun quarter from the red field of the Nationalist flag. Madly jubilant and easily moved students danced the yang-ko in the streets, welcoming Mao's men with all the fervor another generation had welcomed Chiang's. It was like a Hollywood remake with Marxian inflections.