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What narratives can be fashioned by the historian from visual documents, and how might this relate to the narrative intention of those who created them? This paper explores the handful of surviving photographs recording the career of a British member of the Shanghai Municipal Police between 1929 and 1943. War and internment destroyed most of the visual records that former coalminer Frank Peasgood had collected during his police service, saving only those that had accompanied letters he had sent home to his family. The narrative he created with these can be clearly presented, and is discussed in the first part of the paper. Clearly, only visual documents could so powerfully demonstrate the transformation undergone by a man coming from his background, and provide the tools for showing that transformation. The photographs are then revisited and a further, complicating, layer of narrative is added, one which puts the policeman back into his place as a colonial subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

War was a major aspect of Shanghai history in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, because of the particular political and territorial divisions that segmented the city, war struck only in Chinese-administered areas. In this paper, I examine the fate of the Zhabei district, a booming industrious area that came under fire on three successive occasions. Whereas Zhabei could be construed as a success story-a rag-to-riches, swamp-to-urbanity trajectory-the three instances of military conflict had an increasingly devastating impact, from shaking, to stifling, to finally erase Zhabei from the urban landscape. This area of Shanghai experienced the first large-scale modern warfare in an urban setting. The 1927 skirmish established the pattern in which the civilian population came to be exposed to extreme forms of violence, was turned overnight into a refugee population, and lost all its goods and properties to bombing and fires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1937, bitter and brutal fighting raged for three months in and around the city, with intense bombardment from ships and planes. Within weeks, hundred of thousands of residents were thrown on to the streets and made homeless. This paper is concerned with the massive and sudden transformation of Shanghai residents into refugees and the consequences on the resources and management of the city. In the first part, I argue that 1937 created an entirely new situation no authority was prepared to meet because of the scope of the population exodus and to the actual blockade of the city. The second part is devoted to the refugee population, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. It examines who the refugees were—those who found refuge in camps—and why they did not reflect the normal structure of the local population. The last part is concerned with the challenges refugee camps had to face in maintaining a huge destitute population with limited resources in war-torn overcrowded urban space. War caused tremendous suffering among the civilian population, especially children, despite the fairly successful organisation of support by the authorities and private organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although since reforms rural-urban geographic mobility is no longer as much impeded by the hukou system, new institutional mechanisms have emerged that likewise impede the equal participation of rural migrant workers in the urban labour market. Given the daunting challenges implied in rural-urban migration flows, the burgeoning of labour fairs, job advertisements in the media, and intermediate service centres offer migrants some respite. Migrant women in particular can participate in the domestic service labour sector through the 'housemaid agencies', which often appear as ineffective, but may also offer significant possibilities for migrant women to find a job in China's cities. In this paper the author examines the activities and functions of these housemaid agencies and the role they play in shaping the employment opportunities of migrant women. Most of the information is based on fieldwork achieved between 1998 and 2001 in Beijing and Shanghai. The aim is to assess the extent of these agencies' benefits to migrant women's work opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone (PFTZ) is the first free trade zone of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It seeks to reform the national economy and open it up to foreign investment. This article argues that the suite of legal instruments that establish the PFTZ -- the Framework Plan, the Negative List, the Decision, and the Management Method -- are legally uncertain and that their legal uncertainty could cause disputes between PFTZ investors and the PRC. To address the problem of legal uncertainty, the article proposes, first, the adoption of a rational connection to the PFTZ as the test for jurisdiction of the PFTZ Court and the PFTZ Court of Arbitration; secondly, the enactment of the Negative List and the Decision as laws in order to clarify their legal status; and, thirdly, a reform of the PFTZ dispute settlement mechanism under the Management Method into an arbitral system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nationalist government struggled to control the content and exhibition of motion pictures in Shanghai in the 1920s. Officials of the Shanghai Municipal Council in the foreign-controlled International Settlement, empowered by the right of extraterritoriality, stymied Chinese efforts to control foreign - predominantly American - motion pictures shown in the enclave. The struggle over political control was exacerbated by increasing nationalist sentiment and belief that foreign motion pictures contained distorted and unflattering images of China and its people. Demonstrations targeted Hollywood films including those by Douglas Fairbanks and Harold Lloyd. Ultimately, neither strenuous Chinese efforts nor stubborn foreign resistance could resolve the matter satisfactorily, but the dispute became moot with Japan's seizure of Shanghai in 1937. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 1946, an American navy sailor killed a Chinese ricksha puller named Zang Dayaozi in a pointless dispute over an allegedly unpaid fare. The American military shielded the assailant from justice, with the frustrated acquiescence of the Nationalist authorities. This seemingly minor event illustrates that the century-old patterns of personal abuse and legal privilege did not completely evaporate when the 'unequal treaty' system ended in 1943. In the context of the Chinese Civil War, the event takes on political significance as well. Critics of the Guomindang government used the episode to illustrate the destructive impact of American interventionism and the callous disregard of the Nanjing government for its own people. Communist propagandists linked Zang's death with the more famous rape of a Chinese college student involving two American Marines in Beiping. The episode further illustrates that American service personnel stationed abroad play multiple roles, interacting with the locals in particular 'contact zones' but also serving as the personification of American foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late Qing and early Republic, Chinese reformers, such as Liang Qichao, argued that because all women were "consumers" and not "producers," they had weakened the state by posing a financial burden to the family and a collective impediment to economic development. This article examines the diverse responses inspired by this construction of womanhood as they appeared in the burgeoning female press of the period. Deploying this new medium of communication, the women and men who endeavored to define nügong, female labor, embedded in their representations of "women's work" contrary interpretations of what it meant to be a productive citizen, an industrious member of the middle class, and an educated woman who labored in public or private. Thus, nügong discourse not only considered new characterizations of female labor in the context of a society and an economy in transition, but it also acted as a site for negotiating competing and intersecting conceptions of nationalism, class, and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]