Family strife between mothers and their newly empowered daughters-in-law was eased by the son’s ability to provide for all. And the sons increasingly viewed prosperity not only as a personal goal and familial obligation, but also as a patriotic duty. On Yeh’s telling, a new class of merchants and clerks, centered in large banks and shining department stores like Wing On and Sincere on the famed Nanjing Road, were not so much exploited by Western capitalism as exploiting the opportunities for Chinese wealth and personal development that it offered. Their increasing emphasis on material advance, she argues, separates Chinese capitalism and communism from older imperial Confucian values far more than from each other—and helps explain China’s unlikely mix of an authoritarian state with hyper-development today.

Auto and rickshaw traffic
converge on a Shanghi street.

Tragically, as world depression and world war spread in the 1930s, the entreaties in Zou’s mailbox from the disillusioned young sons of Shanghai turned harder and more desperate. Disgusted by the failure of the Nationalist Party to confront the advancing Japanese, the patriotism of Zou and his readers also toughened. They began looking to the Chinese state, whose officials had long ago become interdependent with China’s wealthy merchants, to replace Shanghai’s floundering capitalists as patriarchs. A few of the young men joined communist cells.

But it was the Chinese peasantry who gave Mao his army and victory. Among the newly educated class in Shanghai, Yeh says, many were later forced to hide their mercantile past or persecuted during the Anti-Rightist campaign and Cultural Revolution. “These were the people who were really intellectually radical. These were the people who changed the workplace culture. But after 1949 they were not necessarily among the survivors,” she says. “And that’s probably the story of all revolutions. The idealists don’t survive.”

—Kerry Tremain

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