Upper Corners: The Home Life of the Old Rich in Shanghai under Socialism

• In Event: Cities in 1950s China: Socialist Visions, Soviet Models, and Urban Communities

Abstract

This essay looks at the home life of what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially categorized as the “national capitalists” and their like, “capitalist agents,” in socialist Shanghai before the Cultural Revolution. Contrary to the usual image of these people being total victims of the revolution, this study shows that as far as material comfort is concerned, the old rich still lived a vastly privileged and infinitely better life than most Chinese at the time despite the constant political campaigns that targeted capitalism. In the city’s affluent residential neighborhoods often dubbed as the “upper corners,” former capitalists under the protection of the CCP’s united front policy tenaciously preserved politically condemned lifestyles, making their homes bourgeois oases in the midst of a proletarian desert. In the end, upholding such lifestyles amounted to a form of resistance, regardless of how passive and vulnerable it might have been. Recognizing such a deviating urban life in Mao’s dictatorial age would give us a better understanding of the resilience and elasticity of the Chinese state and society and help explain the remarkable return and boom of middle-class life in post-Mao China.

Author

• Hanchao Lu, Georgia Institute of Technology