Working as Rickshaw Pullers in modern Shanghai, 1920s–1940s

This article focuses on Shanghai’s rickshaw pullers from the 1920s–1940s, treating them as a key labor group within the modern city. It analyses why rural migrants entered the trade, how they organised labor and social networks, and how urban modernisation reshaped their working conditions, income, and social identity. Drawing on archival and primary printed sources, this article examines the rise and fall of the rickshaw industry, focusing on how regulatory constraints, motorisation, health risks, and barriers to collective organisation shaped rickshaw pullers’ livelihoods and social integration. The study further examines the roles and limitations of hometown associations, trade unions, and foreign-led relief/mutual aid organisations in alleviating poverty and providing social support, while also highlighting the importance of family networks. This reveals the tensions between traditional social networks and the logic of modern institutionalised organisations. This paper demonstrates that rickshaw pullers occupied a transitional space between urban and rural; their labor practices embodied strategies for coping with the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation, whilst also reflecting the coexistence of integration and exclusion of the working poor within modern institutions. This challenges the simplistic assumption that ‘modernisation supplants traditional skills and values.’