The Chinese have long had a broad view of themselves. The country’s basic instincts are nationalistic. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a global perspective. But while China opens itself to the world, an intriguing counter-movement has been taking place: people have steadily become more psychically attached to where they live. Whereas major cities once seemed vast and forbidding, nowadays they’re a source of personal identity. One reason for this shift to localism is that many Chinese have grown cynical about a national political ideology that seems more incoherent than ever. Civic pride, a phenomenon that had no place in Maoist China, is filling that void.
The shelves of Shanghai bookstores are now filled with works of local history. Some feature collections of photographs that lovingly detail the fashions and lifestyles of the treaty-port era (1843-1943), during which the city was divided into foreign-run and Chinese-run districts. Before the 1990s the stories of particular urban centers were folded neatly into larger national narratives–and local Shanghai histories insisted that the only significance of the treaty-port era was the humiliation manifest in the city’s “semicolonial” status. Now many Chinese-language works approach the past as intrinsically fascinating or important; they no longer reduce it to one piece in a grand patriotic puzzle.
Over the last few years I’ve also noticed many new books that examine the political, cultural and economic distinctions of Chinese cities. Several authors labor to delineate the supposed differences between Beijing residents (stereotyped as stodgy or honest, politically astute or politically obsessed, depending on one’s perspective) and Shanghai people (stereotyped as hedonistic or fashionable, money-grubbing or entrepreneurial).
The rivalry between Shanghai and Beijing is noticeable even during moments of nationalist fervor. In 1999 I was in China just before and after NATO bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. When I arrived in Shanghai on May 10, after observing rowdy protests in Beijing the day before, I remarked to several locals that I felt much less hostility toward Americans in their city than in the capital. They invariably interpreted this as an invitation to expound upon the overall superiority of Shanghai. Beijing people are too dogmatic and jingoistic, they told me, whereas Shanghai people are more pragmatic.
And just as pride can give local inflections to nationalist protests, it can do the same for transnational fads. Take Starbucks, for example. Controversy broke out in China’s capital when a Starbucks opened inside the Forbidden City in Beijing. But Shanghai people were only too happy to have one built near the site of the Communist Party’s founding Congress.
Am I making too much of the fact that there are now scores of places to get a good cappuccino? Maybe. But a visit to the new Shanghai History Museum suggests otherwise. One of its main tableaux portrays a cafe scene circa 1930. Until recently such a portrait of treaty-port-era lifestyles had no place in local museums, since their exhibits of the past were fixed on the evils of imperialism. But the rise of localism can be seen even more clearly in what isn’t there: throughout the museum, there is no mention of the Communist Party.
