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Marie-Claire Bergère Shanghai: China's Gateway to Modernity, translated by Janet Lloyd, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2009, 520 pages.
2008 was unquestionably Beijing's year, in terms of both spectacle and publishing. That was when, of course, the city hosted China's first Olympics, an extravaganza that began with a big-budget Open- ing Ceremony that focused largely on historical themes but was held in one of the state-of-the-art new stadiums that have helped make parts of the capital look futuristic. There was a comparable temporal eclecticism, a mixing of historical and present-minded themes, in the wide range of Bei- jing books published that year, many of which were aimed at reaching that elusive intellectually curious Western reader who is interested in knowing more about China. Some focused purely on the city's Olympic present and threw in for good measure comments on where the metropolis might be headed. Others, however, looked back to earlier times, connecting previous incarnations of China's capital (as the home to emperors, then warlords, then Mao) to its contemporary situation as a place that is home to both grandiose historic structures, such as the Forbidden City, and space-age pieces of architecture, such as the controversial CCTV building designed by Rem Koolhaas and the Bird's Nest Stadium (above which fireworks ex- ploded and in which drummers drummed on 08/08/08). The intensive in- ternational media coverage of the Games, combined with this Beijing-fo- cused book boom, did a great deal to alter global images of the metropolis, which had previously been associated almost exclusively with political venues (such as Tiananmen Square) and historic sites (in most cases tied to the dynastic past).
So far, at least, even though Shanghai has hosted a sequel to the Games (the World Expo was touted in the Chinese press as an economic and tech- nological "Olympics"), 2010 has not turned out to be that city's year in the same sense or at least to the same degree. It is true that the Expo, which opened on May Day and closed at the end of October, turned out to be, as planned, the biggest event of its kind in history, having a larger footprint and attracting more visitors (over 70 million) than even the most ambi- tious nineteenth-century World's Fair (such...