Shanghai is often seen as the exemplar of Chinese cosmopolitan modernity, including gender and sexual progressiveness under Western influence. This chapter argues that Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism is also rooted in migration, activism, and state policies. The early reforms of patrilineage coincided with influxes of migrants and refugees, who constituted the majority of Shanghai’s urban population. As the hotspot for China’s industrialization, women’s economic empowerment and social activism occurred almost simultaneously. The semi-colonial status of Shanghai before 1949 that protected groups such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in extra-territorialities also made possible the survival of sexual minorities. These historical and social conditions created an urban environment that has made negotiations of the most intimate aspects of human life both possible and difficult. Shanghai as the pioneer of gender equality and sexual modernity in China must be viewed through those intimate negotiations, in which people transform the definitions of freedom, belonging, and modernity.

“Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese” situates the sojourning communities in their respective cities. This chapter highlights the precarious but important position Chinese in Manila and Filipinos in Shanghai found themselves in, contrasting their lives with those of privileged colonizers, like the British, French, and Japanese in Shanghai; sub-imperial agents, like Sikh and Vietnamese police across the British and French Empires; and Asian settler colonists, like Japanese and Chinese migrants in Hawai’i. The first section explores Filipino contributions to the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, comparing their willingness to defend the city with Chinese participation in Philippine revolutionary moments. The second section follows the steamships that linked the two cities and sojourning communities to explore how Chinese people supported one another and navigated exclusionist policies to establish themselves in Manila. Both sections dive into the demographics of the communities, examining how skewed gender ratios and mixed marriages impacted families and individuals. This chapter pioneers the bilateral model that centers Chinese and Filipino actors in the history of Asia that ensuing chapters adopt.

Agnes Smedley was an American writer, journalist, activist, and spy who traveled North America, Europe, and Asia in pursuit of her anti-imperialist and communist agendas. She came to anticolonial transnationalism through her personal and often intimate ties to India’s diasporic revolutionaries in the US (1912–1919) and Germany (1920–1929), as well as Chinese communists and Soviet spies in Shanghai (1929–1937). The chapter traces Smedley’s global crossings as a prism for exploring the power of intimacy in the making (and unmaking) of transnational solidarities, while also considering the gendered experiences of revolutionary women like her who were critical to shaping transnational anticolonialism. The chapter argues that Smedley’s most revolutionary acts were often intimate and private ones, including interracial marriage and romantic ties to leading luminaries of transnational anticolonialism during the interwar period.

Chapter 3 undertakes a comparative study of three deodorization projects in Shanghai, conducted respectively by Western colonial administrations from the 1850s to the 1890s, reform-minded Chinese gentry of the late Qing and early Republic, and the Communists in the 1950s, with a focus on the trope of stagnant water. Despite their disparate, if not antithetic, motives and rhetoric, these projects forged a continuous Chinese olfactory revolution through a common commitment to the progressive ideology of deodorization. I scrutinize how the threads of olfactory modernity tied in with a series of spatializing projects during the urbanization of Shanghai, and how these undertakings brought about an uneven redistribution of sensescapes alongside capital and symbolic capital. I argue that the outcome of battling against contamination was not purity, but a stratified reorganization of purified and contaminated spaces.

This chapter deals with Shanghai – once East Asia’s biggest Jewish community. It emphasizes the diversity of the Jewish community, which emerged with the arrival of Baghdadi Jews in the mid-nineteenth century, was invigorated by the arrival of Russian Jews in the early twentieth century and then more than tripled with the influx of refugees from Central and Eastern Europe on the eve of the Pacific War. The chapter tracks the origins of the Jewish settlement in the city, examines the reasons for its rise and decline and explores the emergence of a new community of Jewish professionals and ex-pats during the last three decades.

This chapter analyses the multifaceted impact of the arrival of thousands of refugees in Macau, showing how relief activities depended on the pragmatic interplay and cooperation of different state and non-state actors. Focusing on Chinese refugees from Shanghai and Guangdong province, and on Portuguese Eurasian refugees from Shanghai and Guangzhou, the chapter details how an unprecedented refugee influx constituted both a crisis and an opportunity for the territory’s administration, local population and the refugees themselves. These wartime refugee waves led to the emergence of a peculiar wartime cosmopolitanism in Macau, which sprang from new flows of people, capital and ideas from major treaty-port metropolises.

The transformation of the film industry was tightly bound up with the plan of the Chinese Communist Party for creating the new nation and its socialist culture and the “revolutionization” of film stars was an essential part of it. This chapter focuses on the story of one individual, the actress Li Ming, who started out as a military arts soldier in the New Fourth Army, to illustrate the everyday politics at the Shanghai Film Studio in the 1950s. Li Ming suffered an identity crisis as both actress and party cadre, witnessed the complicated relationship between the new nation and film stars, and experienced the impact of the “organization” on her new individual career. From a perspective of “the party’s own,” her story provides us with an intriguing way to understand the revolutionary cultural agenda, examine the degree to which the power of the Party permeated the grassroots, and comprehend the everyday politics in the socialist transformation of the urban culture.

This chapter mainly discusses the process of Shanghai evacuating a large number of urban population from the city in the early days of the founding of the people’s Republic of China by sending “refugees” and “victims” home, mobilizing farmers to return home for production, and calling on urban residents to migrate and reclaim wasteland, and changing their identity into farmers through land reform, joining co-operatives or establishing collective farms.The Communist Party of China reduces the urban population and consumption through these methods, aiming to realize the strategy of industrialization as soon as possible and build a strong socialist country.

Ishiguro’s fiction is pervasively concerned with questions of home and homelessness, and with the kinds of displacement, un-belonging, and cultural otherness that are characteristic of the immigrant condition and that can be traced to Ishiguro’s own experience of being relocated, at the age of five, from Nagasaki, Japan to England. There is an irony in how Ishiguro’s characters are often constantly on the move as their movement is juxtaposed against their internal stasis. Yet, the motif of travel helps reflect the ungrounded or displaced condition of the immigrant. This chapter focuses on two novels that directly and explicitly address the question of migration from one country (and one continent) to another – A Pale View of Hills concerns the trauma of moving from Japan to England; When We Were Orphans centres around an intercontinental move, from pre-communist Shanghai to pre-war Britain – in order to consider the importance of immigration and the condition of being nationally and ethnically ungrounded in Ishiguro’s work. The chapter will also consider Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun, to consider immigration alongside attendant issues of race and labour.

East Asia had incorporated Western music well before dodecaphony was introduced. Its foray into atonality and dodecaphony is unsurprising. Japan, as the first country to fully embrace Westernisation, played a major role. Developments of dodecaphony in China and Korea were connected to Japan through an active network of ideas, print media, and movement of people in the region. Despite their shared resources, however, wars and politics determined whether or not (and when) composers in different East Asian countries had the liberty to explore dodecaphony. China was close to developing dodecaphonic compositions before being stopped after the founding of Communist China in 1949. The post-Mao introduction of dodecaphony, led by Luo Zhongrong, was a late ‘arrival’. Japanese composers’ initial enthusiasm for dodecaphony did not gain in significance. Yoritsune Matsudaira and Joji Yuasa were representative. In Korea, led by Isang Yun and Sukhi Kang, serialism was employed thoughtfully by several generations of composers throughout their creative output.

This chapter defines serialism in terms of dodecaphonic technique, beginning with a discussion of the role of analysis in relationship to performance. Whilst Webern’s Variations op. 27 have been the subject of exhaustive analysis by other commentators, the present discussion takes a somewhat different approach, considering the interpretive insights gained by a study of sketch material. The composer’s drafts are examined in relation to the published score for their potential to enrich the performer’s perceptions. The second part of the chapter traces the movement to integral serialism in the post-war period, and the challenges of ‘pointillist’ scores with their profusion of agogic and dynamic marks, which leave seemingly little scope for interpretation in the traditional sense. The contributions of Boulez and Stockhausen to the piano repertoire are considered, and a discussion of the role of the interpreter in indeterminate scores of the period occupies the final section of the chapter.