China's largest metropolis, Shanghai, has undergone a decade of far-reaching economic and social transformation. This book presents an evocative and richly nuanced series of ethnographic perspectives of the city's shifting sociological landscape in this period of transition. When the Communist Party took control of Shanghai in 1949, the city was one of the world's most cosmopolitan, modern cities. In the ensuing decades, Shanghai's economy, infrastructure and links with the rest of the world all atrophied. Lack of change in the city's physical structure was paralleled by a similar fixity and...