Book Review

Asia

More than a quarter century ago, a generation of scholarship on the Western experience in modern China, focusing mainly on missionary work and diplomatic affairs, gave way to a more China-centered approach to the nation's recent history. Since then, the study of the foreign encounter with China, with a few notable exceptions, has been largely marginalized. Marcia Reynders Ristaino's work on the diaspora communities of Shanghai is a welcome divergence from this scholarly trend.

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Unlike previous studies of Westerners in China, which have centered on the privileged and the powerful, this study treats two disadvantaged and dislocated groups: Jews and Slavs. At one point in the Republican period, they together numbered more than 50,000 people in Shanghai, while the most prominent foreigners in the city, the British, at the peak of their influence amounted to only about 10,000 (p. xiii). Nationality, economic status, religion, language, custom, and culture not only divided these groups from each other but also split each of them internally. Among the Jews, Sephardim, mainly from Baghdad, immigrated to Shanghai via India as early as in the middle of the nineteenth century and quickly established themselves among the wealthy of the city. The majority of the Jews in Shanghai, however, came later, as victims of the Nazi Holocaust. After Pearl Harbor, with the Japanese now controlling Shanghai, their ultimate asylum, at least for the duration of the war, was the officially designated ghetto of Hongkou. The Slavic refugees in Shanghai consisted mainly of so-called White Russians who had escaped the Bolshevik Revolution. This group also included Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, and Russian Jews, who had started to immigrate to China in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. These extremely diverse peoples shared one thing in common: all sought refuge in the world's only city that did not require an entrance document. Their shared fate in Shanghai ended with the victory of the Chinese Communist revolution in 1949.

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