Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity

by Qin Shao

Shanghai has been demolished and rebuilt into a gleaming megacity in recent decades, now ranking with New York and London as a hub of global finance. But that transformation has come at a grave human cost. This compelling book is the first to apply the concept of domicide--the eradication of a home against the will of its dwellers--to the sweeping destruction of neighborhoods, families, and life patterns to make way for the new Shanghai. Here we find the holdouts and protesters, men and women who have stubbornly resisted domicide and demanded justice. Qin Shao follows, among others, a reticent kindergarten teacher turned diehard petitioner; a descendant of gangsters and squatters who has become an amateur lawyer for evictees; and a Chinese Muslim who has struggled to recover his ancestral home in Xintiandi, an infamous site of gentrification dominated by a well-connected Hong Kong real estate tycoon. Highlighting the wrenching changes spawned by China's reform era, Shao vividly portrays the relentless pursuit of growth and profit by the combined forces of corrupt power and money, the personal wreckage it has left behind, and the enduring human spirit it has unleashed.To see the author's blog post on Asia Society, please click here.--William Alford, Harvard University "E-International Relations"

Genres: China

326 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2012

About the author

A native of Shanghai, Qin Shao (邵勤) was among many whose formal education was interrupted by the onset of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. After grammar school, Shao was sent to the countryside for six years as a peasant (including a brief stint as a “barefoot doctor” and village teacher). Largely self-taught through books surreptitiously supplied to her in the countryside by an elder sister, she went on to attend college and then graduate school. In 1983, Shao joined the faculty at the East China Normal University in Shanghai. Teaching herself English in her spare time, she entered the Ph.D program in East Asian History at Michigan State University in 1990 and received her doctorate in 1994. Shao has been a professor of history at The College of New Jersey since.

Shao has published extensively on ancient Chinese statecraft, China’s early urbanization effort, and the post-Mao reform in leading international journals. Her research has been awarded many fellowships, including those from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University; the International Research Center on Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History (re:work), Humboldt University, Berlin; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C; the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation; the American Council of Learned Societies; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In spring 2013, Qin Shao is a research fellow at re:work at Humboldt University, where she studies “Social Displacement and Change of Work and Life Course in Post-Mao China.”

Reviews

[Servabo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The importance of both the physical and symbolic home to human life can hardly be overstated. Home is thus a vital subject in almost every major field of the humanities and social sciences. Human history generally and social change particularly are often examined through issues of housing and home. Most fiction revolves around the physical and emotional home, family dynamics, and the struggle of the self. The search for the location in which the self is 'at home' is one fo the primary projects of 20th century fiction in English and, in that sense, all fiction is homesickness. Numerous poems and songs, East and West, ancient and contemporary, are about home. Philosophy, too, is said to be really 'homesickness'; metamorphic ally, it is the urge to be at home everywhere.

[David]

Utterly eye - opening book exposing the amazing human stories of suffering and hope behind the transformation of Shanghai. This thorough piece of ethnographic research is gripping, and disturbing, to read. It makes the case for regarding domicide - destruction of home against the will of residents - as a major issue of social justice.

[Mills College Library]

307.1216 S5289 2013