New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China's Legendary City. By Pamela Yatsko. [New York: John Wiley, 2001. viii+298pp. Hard cover ISBN 0-471-84352-0; paperback ISBN 0-471-47915-2.]

Extract

As an admitted Shanghai chauvinist, I look forward to reading books dealing with the city where I studied more than two decades ago, particularly ones such as this which promise a rather comprehensive overview of the Shanghai scene at the turn of the millennium. Pamela Yatsko served as Far Eastern Economic Review bureau chief there in the mid-to-late 1990s, and obviously knows the city and its people well. She shared, as I did, their frustration throughout the 1980s as they watched cities such as Hong Kong become world economic powers (spearheaded by Shanghainese refugees), and backwaters such as Shenzhen, which barely existed until the 1980s, attract global attention for their explosive growth. And she cannot avoid being struck by the rapidity with which Shanghai rebuilt itself once Beijing gave the green light after Deng Xiaoping's 1992 visit.