Nostalgia for the Future: The Resurgence of an Alienated Culture in China

hanghai has been a city in rising since the early 1990s and the sweeping changes in the urban landscape are most visible. In the early 1980s, the twenty-four story Park Hotel that had towered over Shanghai for half a century remained the highest building in the city and there were only four other buildings in the entire city that reached the height of twenty stories. By 1999, Shanghai had 1,350 buildings that were higher than twenty stories, nearly all of which were built in the 1990s.' The reshaping of the landscape of Shanghai was such that in the late 1990s, on average every three months, the authorities had to print a new version of the city map.2 The rise of Shanghai has been quite remarkably stimulated by the revival of the city's cultural tradition, which was established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but halted in 1949. Beijing's endorsement of Shanghai's growth has permitted more objective views on old Shanghai and its culture. Consequently, it allowed the resurgence of at least part of the city's old commercial spirit and cosmopolitanism. Under this circumstance, nostalgia about pre-1949 Shanghai was tolerated and to some extent even encouraged and promoted. This article looks into the nostalgia in presentday Shanghai, including an emerging coffee culture that symbolizes the