Of Shanghai and Chinese cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Starting with the 2005 Chinese Heritage Centre exhibition `Chinese More or Less' (for which I wrote the storyboard) – specifically with that part of the exhibition that profiles diasporic Chinese exemplars of different ways of combining cosmopolitanism with Chineseness – this paper attempts to respond to questions raised by Anthony Reid, viz: whether my moving from diaspora to Shanghai comes of `Shanghai (re)joining the diasporic sense of Chinese modernity and post-modernity'; whether `the diaspora no longer seems quite so distinctive once China is again an open and cosmopolitan place'; and whether I am still a `Chinese Overseas' when I live in Shanghai.

Keywords:

• Shanghai
• cosmopolitanism
• Chineseness
• identity
• bilingualism

Notes

¹Larkin, Collected Poems, 104.

²Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai 1850-2010.

³Pan, Shanghai Style: Art and Design Between the Wars.

⁴Zhou Zuoren, Tan long ji, 157–8.

⁵Pei, First Person Singular & the Museum on the Mountain.

⁶Cannell, I M Pei: Mandarin of Modernism.

⁷I. M. Pei, ‘Finding Roots’.

⁸Ibid.

⁹Zao and Marquet, Autoportrait, 24.

¹⁰I. M. Pei, ‘Finding Roots’.

¹¹‘Ang Lee and James Schamas’, The Guardian.