Gentrifying heritage: how historic preservation drives gentrification in urban Shanghai

Abstract

In Shanghai, one can not only see, but live in the remnants of the city’s semi-colonial legacy. These are the remaining lane houses known as lilong that are scattered throughout the city. Urbanites living in foreign settlements built them and resided there between the late nineteenth century to the mid 1940s. Confiscated by the Communist government upon its takeover in 1949, these buildings were redistributed to socialist workers and later on heavily altered to accommodate the massive influx of migrants during the first two decades of the opening up and reform era. The lilong houses are an important part of the memories of local Shanghainese residents. In this paper, I look primarily at the original residents’ savviness in capitalising on heritage as a source of income and thereby using it as a defence against economic precariousness. I argue that the high level of flexibility of the notion of heritage enables a form of gentrification that differs from classic gentrification whereby middle-class residents push the working class out of a neighbourhood. The original working-class residents who understand the value system of the middle class are those profiting thanks to their ability to ‘sell’ the old lilong buildings as historically important and ultimately as middle-class heritage. This process, however, eventually produces a middle-class enclave similar to that of a classic gentrified neighbourhood. The remnants of the past such as those found in these traditional-looking neighbourhoods facilitate original residents’ navigation of the abrupt social changes wrought by the market-driven urban Chinese economy of the past three decades.

Keywords:

• Shanghai
• gentrification
• urbanisation
• social change
• urban space

Acknowledgements

In addition to two anonymous reviewers of this special issue, this paper greatly benefited from the careful reading of John Crespi, Chiara De Cesari, Rozita Dimova, Michael Herzfeld, Alex Nelson, and Leo Pang. Multiple versions and drafts of this paper have greatly benefitted from constructive comments I received at the Land Ownership and Conflict in a Global Context: Transfer, Adaptation and Translation of Normative Systems: An International Workshop at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt; the International Lecture Series at the Department of Cultural Heritage and Museology, Fudan University; Culture, Power and Practice Lecture Series at Melbourne University School of Social and Political Sciences; the Anthropology Departmental Seminar at the University of Sydney; the Center for Chinese Studies Lecture Series at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK); Hong Kong Anthropological Society Lecture Series at the Hong Kong Museum of History; and the International Lecture Series at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University. I also want to thank the following colleagues for their feedback: Bradley Butterfield, Jin Chen, Jocelyn Chey, Ien Eng, Sunil Dubey, Matthew Gutmann, Ron Horvath, Weijie Hu, Hsuan-Ying Huang, Paul James, Paul Jones, Arthur Kleinman, Xiangning Li, Sha Liu, Cameron Logan, Duanfang Lu, Helen McKee, Donald McNiel, Janice Reid, Juan Francisco Salazar, Krishna K. Shrestha, Leslie Sklair, Luigi Tomba, Ming Tong, Qin Shao, Jan Wampler, Emily Whewell, Jieyi Yang, and Xiaomei Zhao. The research leading to this paper received funding support from the Global Perspectives on Society and Global Postdoctoral Fellowships from New York University Shanghai, the Cora A. Du Bois Charitable Trust Anthropology Research Fellowship, the Fudan University Fellowship, the China Scholarship Council (CSC) Research Scholarship, and the Harvard Asia Center Dissertation Research Grant for Chinese Studies.

Notes

1. Some call the lilongs ‘nongtang’ referring not to the architecture but to the public domain of the lanes on which these houses are located.

2. This may seem precarious to many readers. A thorough explanation of what the rules are about renting the apartments and what happens when renters make large investments like Old Tiger, if he were evicted and what happens to his investment are available in a chapter called ‘The abrupt rise (and fall) of creative entrepreneurs: socio-economic change, the visitor economy and social conflict in a traditional neighbourhood of Shanghai’ (Arkaraprasertkul 2016a).

3. The British established the first treaty ports in China at the conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842. In addition to Shanghai, these treaty ports included ‘Canton’ (Guangzhou in Mandarin), Ningbo, Fuzhou, and ‘Amoy’ (Xiamen in Mandarin).

4. It is worthwhile noting that, according to my conversations with local residents, the lack of appreciation of the historical significance of foreign-looking buildings in China may be due to their being seen as signs of China’s weakness in the face of the colonial powers during the late Qing dynasty.

5. For how this commercial district came to exemplify contemporary Shanghai and its social injustice, see Shao (2013).

6. An alternative translation is shenshihua, or literally the process of becoming a gentry, which has gradually become a widely used term in various genres of academic literature. In this paper, I stick to zhongcan jieji hua for the reason that it is the most common term in the fields of human geography and anthropology focusing on China.