The collective subjectivity of Chinese intellectuals and their café culture in republican Shanghai¹

1. I am grateful for the insightful and generous comments of the two anonymous reviewers of Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies, and my thanks also go to my two very helpful research assistants Kwok Sze‐wing and Wong Qiong. Mistakes and unwise analysis are, of course, mine.

Abstract

Using a brief comment by Lu Xun regarding the thriving café culture in 1920s’ Shanghai as a point of departure, this paper investigates how the male intellectuals of the time constructed, affiliated with, and practiced the café culture in the 1920s and 1930s. The paper first provides a historical overview of Shanghai’s café scene, and it investigates the general relationship between coffee and colonialism. The main body of the paper explores how Shanghai’s café culture in the Republican period was constructed in connection with male subjectivity. The paper demonstrates that the café as a gathering site was attractive to the young and educated male urbanites because it provided them a strong sense of community, based on the mutually conditioning homosocial bonding and heterosexual impulses, where they could socialize among themselves and flirt with the waitresses. It was the maleness of the café that allowed the place to embrace the seemingly opposed discourses of consumerism and revolution – the two major components of China’s cultural modernity. The paper ends with Michel de Certeua’s analysis of the ‘habitable,’ and it demonstrates that the Shanghai café is habitable to male intellectuals because it both promises and rejects the consummation of the libido, in the same way as it promises and rejects modernity.

Keywords:

• Shanghai
• intellectuals
• modernity
• cafe
• masculinity
• Lu Xun

Notes

1. I am grateful for the insightful and generous comments of the two anonymous reviewers of Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies, and my thanks also go to my two very helpful research assistants Kwok Sze‐wing and Wong Qiong. Mistakes and unwise analysis are, of course, mine.

2. The existing Gongfei is a new one modeled after the original Gongfei, which was already demolished. According to the research of a local historian Wang Fengqing, the original Gongfei was located in 1093, North Sichuan Road, in which the Shanghai Fashion Commercial Building (Shanghai shizhuang shangxia) now stands (Wu 2004). On the other hand, according to both the 1927 and 1931 issues of China’s Commercial Listings, the address of Gongfei kafeidian was 998, North Sichuan Road crossing Doule’an Road (Commercial Press 1927, 1931) (see also Haiyin 1999: 57). Doule’an Road is today’s Duolun Road. According to the listings, the cafe mainly sold candies. Some said that Gongfei was owned by Jews, other said Norwegians. Gongfei seemed to be in the same area of the Shanghai Kafei Lu Xun fiercely criticized in his 1928 article, and in fact both of them were located on the second floor. But I could not find any links between the two shops.

3. I am not able to find any documentation explaining the name of the café, particularly the meaning of the word ‘gong’ (public), which seems to reverberate Sun Yat Sen’s republicanism. Gongfei was clearly the official listed name of the café (see earlier note), and its foreign owner might somehow be influenced by, or took advantage of, the dominating republican milieu to name the café accordingly.

4. The title of the article is ‘Coffee’ (Kafei), November 4, 1927.

5. See also an advertisement in Shenbao, August 11, 1928.

6. These names are compiled from many different sources. As much of the information came from memories and different literary sources, the names and the addresses might not be completely accurate, and this is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all cafés in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, some of the names change from one source to another; I put down only the most creditable ones. Sources include Cao (1996: 250–252); Z. Chen (2004); Dong (2003: 228–229); Lee (1999: 20–22); Xu and Feng (1995a, 1995b, 1996); Zhang (1933a). Some articles that featured in Shenbao’s ‘Coffee Seats’ column also contain much relevant information.

7. Unlike grapes, coffee plants do not grow on the European soil, and in order to satisfy the rapidly increasing European demands, coffee was widely planted in the newly colonized temperate areas, a crop decision that created both tremendous labor exploitation and environmental problems. The economy of Brazil, for example, relied heavily on the exportation of coffee, the production of which caused rapid deforestation and irreparable damage to the natural environment (Brannstrom 2000).

8. For more on the history of coffee, see Weinberg and Bealer (2001) and Pendergrast (1999: 7–20).

9. Tobacco was also grown in China, but China was evidently more the market than plantation site for major tobacco companies like BAT (Courtwright 2001: 118–20).

10. For teahouse as a performative space, see Goldstein (2003).

11. Regarding the relationship between homosocial bonds and heterosexual desires, see Sedgwick (1985).

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13. The café in early twentieth‐century Japan was the forerunner of the expensive Ginza bar, where elegant and alluring female company came with the price of one’s coffee. See Seidensticker (1983: 201); referenced in Lee (1999: 21). Shanghai’s café culture also had a strong connection with that in Japan. See also Ruogu (Zhang Ruogu) (1927).

14. Progressive film critics also criticized certain left‐wing films that featured romance that corrupted the revolutionary spirit (Pang 2002: 92–94).

15. These writers often assume a voyeuristic position to describe the performances of the lovers (Mao 2003, Liang 2004).

16. We are seeing a new café culture developing in Shanghai around certain uptown areas, like the Shaoxing Road, which features small foreigner‐owned coffee shops, but the foods and drinks are extremely expensive, and the cafés are gathering sites mostly of expatriates and tourists.

17. This condemnatory tone dominates the entire book of Shanghai Jiuba, although the editors claim in the introduction that they want to investigate Shanghai’s bars and cafés as public sphere. The book seems to portray the failure of the editors’ good intentions (Bao et al. 2001: 2–5).