Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity. By QinShao. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. xviii, 307 pp. $79.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper); $28.99 (e-book)

Abstract

Attention to the physical transformation of urban China across the last decades often fixates on feats of construction: ever more ambitious infrastructure, lofty skyscrapers, and opulent entertainments. Shanghai, the country’s premier megacity, usually sets the pace, and will soon add the eighteenth track to its metro, a 2,000 foot tower crowning its skyline, and a Disneyland triple the size of Hong Kong’s (itself a grand project only a decade old). In Shanghai Gone, Qin Shao redirects us to consider instead the equally impressive process of destruction that precedes and propels the city’s continuing reconfiguration.