The city the world built on China's coast — a marshy county town pried open after the Opium War and carved into foreign-run concessions, which exploded into the glittering, unequal 'Paris of the East,' became the birthplace of Chinese modernity and of the Chinese Communist Party, had its treaty-port order shut down after revolution, and was then unleashed again to become the showcase of China's return to wealth and power.
Shanghai is the great Chinese city whose modern form was most visibly shaped by foreign-run concessions, and that fact still defines it. For a century, foreign powers ran its richest quarters as a city within the city, where a Western passport could place a person above local courts. The grandest banks on the waterfront answered to London and Paris rather than Beijing, and dazzling wealth, jazz clubs, and gangsters sat beside brutal poverty. It was called the 'Paris of the East' and, less kindly, the 'whore of the Orient.' Chinese memory files the foreign concessions under the 'century of national humiliation.' Yet the same city was the cradle of modern China: its presses, film studios, and the Chinese Communist Party all made Shanghai central to modern China. Revolution shut the foreign city down in 1949. Half a century later, the farmland across the river became a forest of skyscrapers, and Shanghai answered the West as China's financial showcase.