Shanghai's Glory Has Never Been the Petty Bourgeoisie
Recently, screenwriter Gu Er’s struggle with Wong Kar-wai’s *Blossoms Shanghai* production team has caused a stir online. It has given people a glimpse of the actual living and working conditions of film and television cultural workers and screenwriters, and of how the petty bourgeoisie actually operates. Beneath the petty-bourgeois façade of freedom, art, and humanistic values lie naked exploitation, dependence, sexual harassment, and feudalism. The Shanghai culture celebrated by the television drama *Blossoms Shanghai*—“style, flair, respect for contracts, trustworthiness, and keeping quiet”—looks, once the show’s filter is stripped away, to be precisely the opposite of what goes on in an actual Shanghai production crew.
In recent years, Shanghai’s “glory” seems to have come to be represented entirely by petty-bourgeois things: culture, art, flair, prestige, high technology, and so on. Some members of the petty bourgeoisie have even begun to feel “nostalgic” for their era of classical liberalism, for old Shanghai before liberation: the “connections, standing, and personal favors” of the Green Gang gangster “Mr. Du,” the glittering foreign concessions, and the foreign firms’ taipans. This Mr. Du was an opium trafficker, and his displays of standing included murdering trade union leaders in person. If Shanghai was merely a free-trade port for dealing opium, with no order or only an underworld order, it was no different from Hong Kong.
The petty bourgeoisie never lived a single day with human dignity in old Shanghai. Their nostalgia for it is utterly ridiculous; all they have inherited is social Darwinism, competitive status-seeking, and a fawning attachment to the rich and powerful. The only light in old Shanghai was the working class, but it was suppressed by action squads bringing together the underworld and the authorities, just like the Nazi action squads in Europe. It was much the same as the Qing army joining forces with British and French troops to attack the Small Swords Society.
Shanghai’s glory lies in the Small Swords Society uprising, *New Youth*, Lu Xun, the May Thirtieth Movement, the First National Congress of the Communist Party, the workers’ pickets, the Commercial Press, and the Longhua Martyrs’ Cemetery. It lies in the history of struggle by workers, peasants, students, and left-wing intellectuals. As the inscription on the Monument to the People’s Heroes puts it, it lies in the people’s heroes who, going back to 1840, sacrificed their lives in successive struggles against enemies at home and abroad, for national independence and the people’s freedom and happiness. Just as the glory of Paris lies in the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, rather than petty-bourgeois art or the Palace of Versailles.
Women’s high status in Shanghai, and the fact that men cook, stem from the development of textiles and other industries there after the founding of the People’s Republic, which brought high rates of employment for women. This was a working-class victory for equal rights, a dividend of the revolution. The same reason explains why son preference is less pronounced in Northeast China.
The peaceful, comfortable lives of Shanghai’s white-collar petty bourgeoisie rest on the entire history of China’s left-wing revolution, on the whole Yangtze River Delta, the Yangtze waterway, and China’s entire industrial system—in other words, on a billion people in the lower strata of the working class.