Brief History of Shanghai
Before the formation of Shanghai city, Shanghai was part of Songjiang county (松江縣), governed by Suzhou prefecture (蘇州府). From the time of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), Shanghai gradually became a busy seaport, outgrowing its political jurisdictions (for instance, Songjiang (淞江) today is one of 18 districts within Shanghai).
A city wall was built in AD 1553, which is generally regarded as the beginning of the city of Shanghai. Before the 19th century, Shanghai was not a major city, so in contrast to other major Chinese cities today, there are fewer ancient Chinese landmarks to be found in Shanghai. However, the few cultural landmarks in Shanghai are very ancient and typically date to the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, because present-day Shanghai is within the historic cultural center of the Wu Kingdom (222-280).
During the Qianlong era of the Qing Dynasty, Shanghai became an important port regionally for the Yangtze and Huangpu rivers and a sea port for the nearby Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, although overseas commerce was still forbidden at that time. Wujiaochang (五角场), now in Yangpu District, and the areas nearby already formed the foundation of the city centre. In the later years of the Qianlong era, Shiliupu (十六铺), now in Huangpu District, was already the largest port in East Asia.
The importance of Shanghai grew radically in the 19th century, as the city's strategic position at the mouth of the Yangtze River made it an ideal location for trade with the West. During the First Opium War in the early-19th century, British forces temporarily held Shanghai. The war ended with the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which saw the treaty ports, Shanghai included, opened for international trade. The Treaty of the Bogue signed in 1843, and the Sino-American Treaty of Wangsia signed in 1844 together saw foreign nations achieve extraterritoriality on Chinese soil, which officially lasted until 1943 but was functionally defunct by the late 1930s.
The Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850, and in 1853 Shanghai was occupied by a triad offshoot of the rebels, called the Small Swords Society. The fighting destroyed the countryside but left the foreigners' settlements untouched, and Chinese arrived seeking refuge. Although previously Chinese were forbidden to live in foreign settlements, 1854 saw new regulations drawn up making land available to Chinese. Land prices rose substantially.
1854 also saw the first annual meeting of the Shanghai Municipal Council, created in order to manage the foreign settlements. In 1863, the British settlement, located along the western bank of the Huangpu river to the south of Suzhou creek (Huangpu district), and American settlement, located on the western bank of the Huangpu river and to the north of Suzhou creek (Hankou district) joined in order to form the International Settlement. The French opted out of the Shanghai Municipal Council, and instead maintained its own French Concession, located to the west of the International Settlement. This period saw a large influx of migrants from Europe and North America, who called themselves "Shanghighlanders".
The Sino-Japanese War fought 1894-95 over control of Korea concluded with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which saw Japan emerge as an additional foreign power in Shanghai. Japan built the first factories in Shanghai, which were soon copied by other foreign powers to effect the emergence of Shanghai industry.
Jiujiang Road, Shanghai, 1920s Enlarge Jiujiang Road, Shanghai, 1920s Shanghai was then the biggest financial city in the Far East, and was well-known for its decadence, and nightlife rivalling the excesses of Weimar era Berlin. Under the Republic of China, Shanghai was made a special city in 1927, and a municipality in May 1930. The Japanese Navy bombed Shanghai on January 28, 1932, nominally in an effort to crush down Chinese student protests of the Manchurian Incident and the subsequent Japanese occupation. The Chinese fought back in what was known as the January 28 Incident. The two sides fought to a standstill and a ceasefire was brokered in May. In the Second Sino-Japanese War, the city fell after the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, and was occupied until Japan's surrender in 1945.
During World War II, Shanghai was a centre for refugees from Europe. It was the only city in the world that was open unconditionally to the Jews at the time. However, under pressure from their Nazi allies, the Japanese ghettoised the Jewish refugees in late 1941 in what came to be known as the Shanghai ghetto, and hunger and infectious diseases such as amoebic dysentery became rife.
On May 27, 1949, Shanghai came under communist control and was one of the only two former Republic of China (ROC) municipalities not merged into neighbouring provinces over the next decade (the other being Beijing). It underwent a series of changes in the boundaries of its subdivisions, especially in the next decade.
After the communist takeover in 1949, most foreign firms moved their offices from Shanghai to Hong Kong. During the 1950s and 1960s, Shanghai became an industrial center and center for revolutionary leftism. Yet, even during the most tumultuous times of the Cultural Revolution, Shanghai was able to maintain high economic productivity and relative social stability. In most of the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Shanghai has been the largest contributor of tax revenue to the central government compared with other Chinese provinces and municipalities. This came at the cost of severely crippling Shanghai's infrastructure and capital development. Its importance to China's fiscal well-being also denied it economic liberalizations that were started in the far southern provinces such as Guangdong during the mid-1980s. At that time Guangdong province paid nearly no taxes to the central government, and thus was perceived as fiscally expendable for experimental economic reforms. Shanghai was not permitted to initiate economic reforms until 1991.
Political power in Shanghai has traditionally been seen as a stepping stone to higher positions within the PRC central government. In the 1990s, there was what was often described as the politically right-of-center "Shanghai clique," which included the president of the PRC Jiang Zemin and the premier of the PRC Zhu Rongji. Starting in 1992, the central government under Jiang Zemin, a former Mayor of Shanghai, began reducing the tax burden on Shanghai and encouraging both foreign and domestic investment in order to promote it as the economic hub of East Asia and to encourage its role as gateway of investment to the Chinese interior. Since then it has experienced continuous economic growth of between 9–15% annually, arguably at the expense of growth in Hong Kong, leading China's overall development.
Source: Wikipedia, licensed under GFDL.
