The quest for family revolution in late Qing and early Republican China 1895–1923

Abstract

and the war to suppress it. As Jiangnan became the battlefield for the Taiping Army and the Qing Army, and the International Settlement in Shanghai became the only “safety island” in Jiangnan, gentry and merchants of the whole Jiangnan region flocked into Shanghai, bringing huge capital, abundant cheap labor, and an enormous buyer’s market. The International Settlement and French Concession thus underwent an almost magical change, quickly replacing the old county seat of Shanghai as the city center. The author therefore believes that there were two major “historical reasons” for the rise of Shanghai: one was the opening of Shanghai as a Treaty Port to the world, and the other was the civil war brought by the Taiping Rebellion. Chapter Six focuses on the two irreversible historical changes in the Jiangnan region caused by the Taiping Rebellion. First, the significant flows of the region’s local populations into Shanghai in the form of large-scale immigration. In line with this were the serious economic and social problems caused by the immigrants. Second, the traditional central cities in Jiangnan – Suzhou and Hangzhou – declined because of the war damage, while Shanghai quickly became prosperous and replaced them as the central city. Chapter Seven zooms out to study the modernization of major cities along the whole Yangtze River from a perspective of urban gangs from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. The author examines the gangs in the upper, middle, and lower reaches of the river, centered in Chongqing, Wuhan and Shanghai, respectively, so as to point out that the rise and expansion of urban gangs was related to both the increase of the marginalized population and the disorder affecting urban social controls that went along with the modernization of major cities in the Yangtze River Valley. The appendix of this book includes three lectures and three interviews, which supplement and extend the main text. In one of the interviews, the author proposes that the study of Shanghai must take three views: a regional view, a national view, and a global one. This book is his attempt to examine Shanghai with a regional view. It mainly adopts a macroscopic approach, makes a convincing interpretation of the historic changes in Shanghai and Jiangnan in the modern age, and challenges the existing boundary between the history of Shanghai and the history of Jiangnan. Zhou Wu’s book has outlined a framework for us. Subsequently, further in-depth and detailed research will come through the joint efforts of the academic community.