Favoured by the exceptional economic circumstances of the First World War and the immediate post-war years, Chinese entrepreneurs made their mark by modernising and establishing themselves as a business bourgeoisie. Focusing upon Shanghai, this study explores the astonishing growth of Western-style industry, commerce and banking during the Republic's first decade. Marie-Claire Bergere analyses how the bourgeoisie gradually constituted itself as a specific and coherent social class, with its own ideology and type of political action, built upon family solidarities and regional links; and she...

Shanghai today is a thriving, bustling metropolis. But does its avid pursuit of the modern trappings of success truly indicate that it will once again become the shining example of China's commercial and cosmopolitan culture? While history continues to unfold, eminent China scholar Marie-Claire Bergere takes readers back to when Shanghai first opened to the world in 1842 to narrate the city's tumultuous and unique course to the present. Shanghai: China's Gateway to Modernity is the first comprehensive history of Shanghai in any Western language. Divided into four parts, Bergere details...