The promise of PRC history

Among the most promising developments in the study of contemporary China has been the booming migration of historians across the 1949 divide to pioneer the new and dynamic field of the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Only a few years ago post-1949 China was regarded as the exclusive terrain of social scientists (political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and psychologists). Now, lured by an array of previously inaccessible primary sources, a growing number of historians have embarked on the study of the PRC. To date, the main focus of their research has been on grassroots society in the pre-Great Leap Forward period, but we can anticipate both temporal and sectoral expansion as the field matures. An outstanding example of work being produced by historians of the PRC with the aid of heretofore-untapped archival and other sources is Zhang Jishun’s A City Displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s. The core chapters of Professor Zhang’s book are case studies of (1) the transformation of Shanghai neighborhoods, (2) the role of the urban underclass in the PRC’s first general election, (3) the conversion of newspapers from private to public media, (4) the accommodation of educated elites to the new political order, and (5) the influence of cinema on the formation of a mass urban culture. While the Shanghai Municipal Archives provide the bulk of Professor Zhang’s primary sources, she supplements these official materials with interviews, newspaper accounts, visual media, and other sources. The result is a more personal and human view of the effects of the Communist revolution on China’s largest and most cosmopolitan city than previous scholarship had afforded. Understood from the vantage point of Shanghai residents who lived through the initial years of the PRC, including workers and shanty-town dwellers as well as journalists and intellectuals, Professor Zhang’s illuminating account demonstrates that 1949 marked not only a moment of rupture and new beginnings but also a continuation of many earlier practices. Moreover, different members of Shanghai society – even two brothers with virtually identical family and educational backgrounds such as Huang Jiade and Huang Jiayin – could interpret and respond to revolutionary initiatives in surprisingly different ways.