Shanghai Tai Chi
The Art of Being Ruled in Mao's China

A captivating social and political history of Shanghai under high socialism. Lu explores the lived experience of Mao's China.

Hanchao Lu (Author)

9781009180986, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 May 2023

354 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.66 kg

Shanghai Tai Chi offers a masterful portrait of daily urban life under socialism in a rich social and political history of one of the world's most complex cities. Hanchao Lu explores the lives of people from all areas of society - from capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals to women and youth. Utilizing the metaphor of Tai Chi, he reveals how people in Shanghai experienced and adapted to a new Maoist political culture from 1949. Exploring the multifaceted complexity of everyday life and material culture in Mao's China, Lu addresses the survival of old bourgeois lifestyles under the new proletarian dictatorship, the achievements of intellectuals in an age of anti-intellectualism, the pleasure that urban youth derived from reading taboo literature, the emergence of women's liberation and the politics of greening and horticulture. This captivating, epitomizing, and vivid history transports readers to history as lived on Shanghai's streets and back alleyways.

List of Figures
List of Maps
List of Tables
Notes on the Text
Introduction
Part I. The Condemned: 1. The upper crust
2. The stinking number nine
Part II. The Liberated: 3. The power of Balzac
4. Alleyway women's detachments
Part III. Under the French Parasol Trees: 5. Everyday flora
6. In the eyes of foreign onlookers
7. The essential does not change
Conclusion
Appendix: List of Informants
Character List
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Asian history [HBJF]