In 1937, when the war between China and Japan reached Shanghai, the city's Western administrators declared neutrality, and the International Settlement and French Concession were spared from Japanese occupation. But behind the facade of prosperity the city was the scene of political intrigue, violence and assassination. In 1941 the whole of Shanghai was annexed by Japan, and the Chinese and Europeans had to find their own ways of surviving until liberation.

Revealing information that has been suppressed in the Chinese Communist Party's official history, Wen-hsin Yeh presents an insightful new view of the Party's origins. She moves away from an emphasis on Mao and traces Chinese Communism's roots to the country's culturally conservative agrarian heartland. And for the first time, her book shows the transformation of May Fourth radical youth into pioneering Communist intellectuals from a social and cultural history perspective.

Yeh's study provides a unique description of the spatial dimensions of China's transition into modernity and vividly...