Where to Go Next

Where to go next — a reader’s guide to the serious literature, by angle.

This book sits inside one compound, on one lane, for sixteen months. That is its method and its limit. A single ethnography cannot tell you what Shanghai is, and this one has not tried to; it has tried to tell you what one hundred and ninety-eight houses were, closely enough that the reading might transfer.

What follows is the shelf I would hand a reader who finished this book and wanted more. It is not a complete bibliography of Shanghai studies — that would run to thousands of items and help nobody. It is a working guide, organised by the question you are actually asking, with a line on each entry saying what it is for.

Three notes on how to use it.

Start with the question, not the discipline. The categories below are angles of approach, not academic departments. If you want to know why the buildings look like that, the architecture shelf is where you go, whether the author is a historian or a planner.

Everything here has a link. Where a work is open access or the publisher hosts a stable page, the link goes there. Where the work is behind a paywall, the link goes to its DOI or publisher record, so at minimum you can find it in a library catalogue. A guide that lists titles without telling you how to reach them is doing half a job.

This list has a date on it. It was compiled in 2026. Fields move; some of these will be superseded. Treat it as a reading taken on a day, in the same spirit as the Citations chapter.

Foundational Histories

Start here if you want the whole arc before entering one lane.

• Marie-Claire Bergère, Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford University Press, 2009). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503624511 — The best single-volume narrative history, treaty port through the socialist decades. If you read one book from this list, read this one.
• Michael Dillon, Shanghai: The Story of China’s Most Dynamic City (Yale University Press, 2026). https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300270631/shanghai/ — The newest general history, weighted toward the post-1949 and Party-political story. The one to reach for if you want the city as it is currently understood.
• Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 1999). https://www.ucpress.edu/books/beyond-the-neon-lights — Reconstructs the ordinary Shanghai of alleyway houses, rice shops and night-soil carriers rather than the neon Bund. The indispensable companion to this book.
• Hanchao Lu, Shanghai Tai Chi: The Art of Being Ruled in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009180979 — How households actually manoeuvred under Maoist rule. The missing middle chapter for any lane whose residents were allocated their rooms in the 1950s and 60s.
• Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (University of California Press, 1995). https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520915459 — Shanghai’s neighbourhoods were organised by native-place ties long before class or work unit. That is the substrate a lilong ethnography stands on.
• Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (University of California Press, 2007). https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520249714.001.0001 — How a Shanghainese moral economy formed around banks, publishers and clerks. The vocabulary for why property and respectability are braided so tightly here.
• Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford University Press, 1993). https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804766531 — The working class as internally divided by native place, gender and craft. A corrective to any flat reading of ‘the residents’ of a working-class lane.
• Frederic Wakeman Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (University of California Press, 1995). https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520918658 — How the Nationalist state tried and failed to govern the city’s streets. Background to any argument about who actually controls neighbourhood space.
• Christian Henriot, Shanghai, 1927–1937: Municipal Power, Locality, and Modernization, trans. Noël Castelino (University of California Press, 1993). https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520070967/shanghai-1927-1937 — The standard study of Chinese municipal government, and the origin of arguments about local elites and modernisation from above.
• Christian Henriot, Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai (Stanford University Press, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804798747 — Follows corpses, coffins and cemeteries from 1865 to 1965, exposing the city’s infrastructure of care and neglect across every regime change a lane household lived through.
• Isabella Jackson, Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City (Cambridge University Press, 2017). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108303934 — Replaces the tired ‘colonial Shanghai’ shorthand with a precise account of the Municipal Council as transnational colonial governance. The current state of the art on the International Settlement.
• Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (Columbia University Press, 2003). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/empire-made-me/9780231131322 — One Municipal Police constable’s life, which makes the semi-colonial order concrete. The most readable book on this list.
• Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai, 1850–2010: A History in Fragments (Routledge, 2009). https://www.routledge.com/Global-Shanghai-1850-2010-A-History-in-Fragments/Wasserstrom/p/book/9780415213288 — Seven snapshot years, a quarter-century apart. The shortest credible way to watch a city rebuild its global self-image again and again.
• Xiangming Chen, ed., Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816654888/shanghai-rising/ — The reform-era city as a governance and real-estate machine; fills the gap between the Republican histories and present-day fieldwork.
• Lei Ping, Shanghai Mundane: Survival and Revival of Bourgeois Sentiments under Chinese Socialism (Lexington Books, 2025). https://doi.org/10.5040/9798881894931 — Argues for a Shanghai middle-class sensibility that survived from Mao to Xi. A direct interlocutor for any ethnography that finds bourgeois taste alive in a nominally proletarianised lane.

Architecture and the Lilong

What the building actually is, how it got that way, and what has been done to it.

• Chunlan Zhao, ‘From shikumen to new-style: a rereading of lilong housing in modern Shanghai’, The Journal of Architecture 9, no. 1 (2004): 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360236042000197853 — The foundational typological article: what separates shikumen from new-style lanes, and why the hybrid emerged when it did.
• Gregory Bracken, The Shanghai Alleyway House: A Vanishing Urban Vernacular (Routledge, 2013). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203068021 — The only book-length English treatment of the alleyway house as building type, construction system and social world. The reference for getting the building right.
• Samuel Y. Liang, Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners’ City, 1853–98 (Routledge, 2010). https://www.routledge.com/Mapping-Modernity-in-Shanghai-Space-Gender-and-Visual-Culture-in-the-Sojourners-City-1853-98/Liang/p/book/9780415631167 — The form’s prehistory: courtesan houses, sojourner lodgings, the earliest speculative terraces.
• Cole Roskam, Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843–1937 (University of Washington Press, 2019). https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295744780/improvised-city/ — Reads buildings as instruments of contested sovereignty rather than as styles. The strongest recent architectural history of the treaty-port city.
• Xuefei Ren, Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China (University of Chicago Press, 2011). https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo11110182.html — The political economy that puts starchitect towers and heritage-branded lanes into the same market, from fieldwork with architects, developers and officials.
• Jiayu Ding and Xiaohua Zhong, ‘Shanghai lilong: From everyday life to conceived space’, in Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization, ed. Marie Gibert-Flutre and Heide Imai (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 139–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1b0fvwq.9 — Puts the lilong beside Bangkok, Hanoi, Taipei and Hong Kong. The fastest way to see what is and is not specific to Shanghai.
• Yuqi Zhai and Ming Tong, ‘The transformation of the lilong form: a morphological study on changing boundaries’, URBAN DESIGN International 29, no. 3 (2024): 153–70. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41289-022-00197-7 — How gates, walls and thresholds have been redrawn over time. The technical complement to ethnographic accounts of public and private.
• Yuqi Zhai, ‘Resident-Centered Narrative Mapping for Micro-Morphological Analysis: Case of a Marginalized Lilong Compound in Downtown Shanghai’, Land 14, no. 3 (2025): 609. https://doi.org/10.3390/land14030609 — Maps a lane outward from its residents’ own narratives. Methodologically the closest recent work to an ethnographic morphology, and open access.
• Zeyin Chen et al., ‘Urban morphological transformation under historical accumulation: a spatio-temporal analysis of the Siwenli Lilong neighborhood’, Frontiers of Urban and Rural Planning 3, no. 1 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44243-025-00062-5 — One named lilong traced from 1948 to 2021. The most recent longitudinal case study, and a good empirical check on general claims about lane decay.

Housing, Land, and the Political Economy of Property

Why the district government, not the developer, is usually the protagonist.

• You-tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (Oxford University Press, 2010). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199568048.001.0001 — How local states convert land control into fiscal and political power. The foundational account, and the reason Chapter 1’s puzzle is a puzzle at all.
• Fulong Wu, Creating Chinese Urbanism: Urban Revolution and Governance Changes (UCL Press, 2022). https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800083332 — Open access. Argues Chinese urbanism from the vantage of the concrete residential neighbourhood, which makes it the closest structural counterpart to a neighbourhood ethnography.
• Fulong Wu and Fangzhu Zhang, Governing Urban Development in China (Routledge, 2024). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003355175 — Open access. The current synthesis of state-centred governance and land financialisation, and the best place to see where the field stands after the property downturn.
• Luigi Tomba, The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China (Cornell University Press, 2014). https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801455209 — How grassroots administration produces consent rather than merely control. Indispensable for reading the juweihui as a political actor rather than a clerical one.
• Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Cornell University Press, 2010). https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801475627/in-search-of-paradise/ — How homeownership manufactured a middle class and its self-segregation. The mirror image of this book: where the people who leave the lane are going.
• Meg E. Rithmire, Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism: The Politics of Property Rights under Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2015). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/land-bargains-and-chinese-capitalism/66C10F3180057CD851C21880C852EB09 — Property-rights arrangements vary sharply by city. The strongest argument against treating Shanghai as a generic Chinese case.
• Shitong Qiao, Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of Law and Social Norms (Cambridge University Press, 2017). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316810095 — Housing that is illegal yet functioning, and how informal tenure sustains itself outside the formal system. Directly relevant to subdivided and sublet lane rooms.
• Fulong Wu et al., ‘Assetization: The Chinese Path to Housing Financialization’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110, no. 5 (2020): 1483–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1715195 — Names the distinctive Chinese route: the home as household asset rather than securitised mortgage. The economic logic behind residents who will not sell.
• Qianwen Li and Manuel B. Aalbers, ‘The rise of China’s private rental sector: housing policy reforms through the lens of neoliberalism’, Housing Studies 41, no. 7 (2026): 1634–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2025.2568511 — The most current item here: the post-2016 pivot to rental housing and the state’s cultivation of small landlords — precisely the position lane-house owners now occupy.
• Xuefei Ren, Urban China (Polity, 2013). https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=urban-china--9780745653594 — The most accessible single-volume orientation for a serious non-specialist: governance, migrant rights, inequality and the cultural economy in one short book.

Displacement, Demolition, and Resistance

• Qin Shao, Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). https://doi.org/10.5771/9781442211339 — The essential companion volume: Shanghai holdouts and petitioners followed as individuals, including one fighting for an ancestral home inside Xintiandi itself. Domicide is the sharpest available word for what happens at the other end of a neighbourhood’s life.
• Lynette H. Ong, Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197628768.001.0001 — Open access. How the state delegates coercion to brokers and thugs, so the coercion never appears on its own books.
• Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2006). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791086 — Claimants using the centre’s own rhetoric against local officials. The concept most often borrowed by urban demolition scholarship, and the exact register of the chaiqian petitioner.
• Yongshun Cai, Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail (Stanford University Press, 2010). https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804773737 — A cost-benefit account of when protest works, homeowners included. Useful for judging whether a given lane’s holdouts ever had a real chance.
• Xi Chen, Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China (Cambridge University Press, 2012). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/social-protest-and-contentious-authoritarianism-in-china/996F53F6D286C3F0E367C96E9CD5D8A6 — Roughly a thousand government records of collective petitions, read to argue that routinised bargaining stabilises rather than threatens the regime.
• Eva Pils, ‘From authoritarian development to totalist urban reordering: The Daxing forced evictions case’, China Information 34, no. 2 (2020): 270–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X20929590 — The clearest statement of what changed after 2017: from technocratic clearance to image-conscious population governance.
• Carwyn Morris, ‘Spatial Governance in Beijing: Informality, Illegality and the Displacement of the “Low-end Population”’, The China Quarterly 251 (2022): 822–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741022000868 — How ‘illegality’ is manufactured as a displacement instrument. Eviction now travels through building codes rather than bulldozer notices.
• Julia Chuang, Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market (University of California Press, 2020). https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520305458/beneath-the-china-boom — Connects rural dispossession to the urban construction workforce: the two ends of the chain that builds the towers replacing the lanes.
• Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales, Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016). https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=planetary-gentrification--9780745671642 — Decentres Anglo-American gentrification theory and insists on state-led, displacement-heavy Asian variants. The theoretical licence for using the word ‘gentrification’ in a lilong at all.

Heritage, Preservation, and the Culture Industry

The machinery that decided this compound was worth keeping — and what keeping it meant.

• Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (Routledge, 2006). https://www.routledge.com/Uses-of-Heritage/Smith/p/book/9780415318310 — The founding text of critical heritage studies and the source of ‘authorised heritage discourse’. The ground everything below stands on.
• Xuefei Ren, ‘Forward to the Past: Historical Preservation in Globalizing Shanghai’, City & Community 7, no. 1 (2008): 23–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6040.2007.00239.x — The canonical Xintiandi analysis: preservation not as a brake on growth but as its instrument.
• Shenjing He and Fulong Wu, ‘Property-Led Redevelopment in Post-Reform China: A Case Study of Xintiandi Redevelopment Project in Shanghai’, Journal of Urban Affairs 27, no. 1 (2005): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0735-2166.2005.00222.x — The political-economy anatomy of Xintiandi and the growth coalition that made it possible.
• You-Ren Yang and Chih-hui Chang, ‘An Urban Regeneration Regime in China: A Case Study of Urban Redevelopment in Shanghai’s Taipingqiao Area’, Urban Studies 44, no. 9 (2007): 1809–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980701507787 — The ‘rent gap seeking regime’ model, and the sharpest formalisation of why shikumen form was kept and shikumen residents were not.
• Stephen Wei-Hsin Wang, ‘Commercial Gentrification and Entrepreneurial Governance in Shanghai: A Case Study of Taikang Road Creative Cluster’, Urban Policy and Research 29, no. 4 (2011): 363–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/08111146.2011.598226 — Tianzifang as bottom-up commercial gentrification, and how entrepreneurial government arrived afterwards to capture it. The counterpoint to Xintiandi.
• Esther H. K. Yung, Edwin H. W. Chan and Ying Xu, ‘Community-Initiated Adaptive Reuse of Historic Buildings and Sustainable Development in the Inner City of Shanghai’, Journal of Urban Planning and Development 140, no. 3 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)UP.1943-5444.0000174 — The most rigorous study of Tianzifang as bottom-up reuse, and the standard counter-example to top-down redevelopment.
• Albert Wing Tai Wai, ‘Place promotion and iconography in Shanghai’s Xintiandi’, Habitat International 30, no. 2 (2006): 245–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2004.02.002 — How shikumen façades became a marketing iconography. Useful for separating the built fabric from the brand attached to it.
• Plácido González Martínez, ‘Curating the selective memory of gentrification: the Wulixiang Shikumen Museum in Xintiandi, Shanghai’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 27, no. 6 (2021): 537–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2020.1821237 — A museum of alleyway life built on the site of the alleyways it replaced, and a precise reading of what that curation chooses to forget.
• Yujie Zhu and Plácido González Martínez, ‘Heritage, values and gentrification: the redevelopment of historic areas in China’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 28, no. 4 (2022): 476–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2021.2010791 — Compares Xi’an’s Qujiang with Shanghai’s Taipingqiao to show heritage value redefined in favour of middle-class consumers.
• Yujie Zhu and Christina Maags, Heritage Politics in China: The Power of the Past (Routledge, 2020). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429446429 — Heritage as an instrument of governance at home and soft power abroad. The policy architecture any Shanghai conservation decision sits inside.
• Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, eds., Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2204rz8 — Open access. Case studies written deliberately from the position of residents and local experts rather than the state.
• Chiara De Cesari and Rozita Dimova, ‘Heritage, gentrification, participation: remaking urban landscapes in the name of culture and historic preservation’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 9 (2019): 863–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1512515 — Six pages that established heritage-and-gentrification as a single research nexus. The best short framing essay in the field.
• Xiaohua Zhong and Xiangming Chen, ‘Demolition, rehabilitation, and conservation: heritage in Shanghai’s urban regeneration, 1990–2015’, Journal of Architecture and Urbanism 41, no. 2 (2017): 82–91. https://doi.org/10.3846/20297955.2017.1294120 — A three-stage periodisation across twenty-five years. The most efficient way to locate a given lilong’s fate in a policy timeline.
• Manqi Wang, Fangzhu Zhang and Fulong Wu, ‘“Micro-regeneration”: Toward small-scale, heritage-oriented, and participatory redevelopment in China’, Journal of Urban Affairs 46, no. 10 (2024): 1953–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2022.2139711 — The post-demolition policy turn toward small, participatory, heritage-framed intervention. The regime a lilong faces today, rather than the wrecking ball.
• Anne-Marie Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing (Routledge, 2004). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203694329 — The first sustained study of a Chinese city marketing its own past, with a closing chapter on resistance.

Ethnography and Everyday Life

The shelf closest to this book: people studied up close, in cities, at the scale of a household or a lane.

• Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 1999). https://www.ucpress.edu/books/beyond-the-neon-lights/paper — The standard social history of the lilong itself, and the baseline any present-day ethnographer of the lanes has to argue with or from.
• Jie Li, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2014). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/shanghai-homes/9780231167178/ — A microhistory of two alleyway houses across the Republican, Maoist and reform eras, built from objects and gossip rather than institutions. The closest cousin to this book.
• Deborah Pellow, ‘No Place to Live, No Place to Love: Coping in Shanghai’, in Urban Anthropology in China, ed. Aidan Southall and Gregory Guldin (Brill, 1993), 396–424. https://brill.com/view/title/2252 — The early, precise account of how households managed intimacy inside chronic overcrowding. Chapter 3 is written in its shadow.
• Tianshu Pan and Zhijun Liu, ‘Place Matters: An Ethnographic Perspective on Historical Memory, Place Attachment, and Neighborhood Gentrification in Post-Reform Shanghai’, Chinese Sociology & Anthropology 43, no. 4 (2011): 52–73. https://doi.org/10.2753/CSA0009-4625430403 — The nearest published analogue to a lilong ethnography: upper quarter and lower quarter as living categories that residents rework as gentrification proceeds.
• Fang Xu, Silencing Shanghai: Language and Identity in Urban China (Lexington Books, 2021). — Treats Shanghainese speech as the medium of neighbourhood belonging, which matters when the lane is one of the last places the dialect is spoken daily.
• Yunxiang Yan, Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999 (Stanford University Press, 2003). https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/private-life-under-socialism — Reads large political change through the interior of the household. That is the lilong’s analytic scale, applied to a village.
• Yunxiang Yan, The Individualization of Chinese Society (Berg, 2009). https://www.routledge.com/The-Individualization-of-Chinese-Society/Yan/p/book/9781847883780 — Why a resident’s decision to stay or cash out now reads as an individual project rather than a family one.
• Deborah S. Davis and Sara L. Friedman, eds., Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804791854 — How marriage, divorce and property came uncoupled in urban China. Often what is actually at stake in a housing decision; see Chapter 7.
• Deborah S. Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (University of California Press, 2000). https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520216402/the-consumer-revolution-in-urban-china — Useful for dating the moment the lane house stopped being shelter and became taste.
• Li Zhang, Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press, 2020). https://www.ucpress.edu/books/anxious-china/paper — Recent ethnography of middle-class interior life, and a model for writing about feeling without leaving the field site.
• Benoît Vermander, Liz Hingley and Liang Zhang, Shanghai Sacred: The Religious Landscape of a Global City (University of Washington Press, 2018). https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295741680/shanghai-sacred/ — Maps ritual onto actual streets and courtyards, including the small semi-domestic spaces a lane ethnographer walks past daily.
• Amy Zhang, Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2024). https://www.sup.org/books/anthropology/circular-ecologies — Current-generation urban ethnography, showing infrastructure reform negotiated at the scale of the residential compound.

Migration, Hukou, and Labour

The system that decides who is allowed to be a citizen of the city they live in. A third of the compound in this book lived under it.

• Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (University of California Press, 1999). https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520922617 — The foundational study of the floating population as a form of partial citizenship.
• Fei-Ling Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion: China’s Hukou System (Stanford University Press, 2005). https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804767484 — The most comprehensive book-length treatment of household registration as an institution of exclusion.
• Kam Wing Chan, ‘The Chinese Hukou System at 50’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 50, no. 2 (2009): 197–221. https://doi.org/10.2747/1539-7216.50.2.197 — The standard retrospective, and the one citation to reach for if you need a single authoritative account.
• Kam Wing Chan and Will Buckingham, ‘Is China Abolishing the Hukou System?’, The China Quarterly 195 (2008): 582–606. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20192236 — Dismantles the recurring press claim that hukou is being abolished. Read before believing any reform announcement, including recent ones.
• Eli Friedman, The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia University Press, 2022). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-urbanization-of-people/9780231205092/ — Uses schooling to show how cities actively sort who may settle. The current standard work on migrant exclusion.
• Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Duke University Press, 2005). https://www.dukeupress.edu/made-in-china — The founding dormitory-labour ethnography, and the reference point for reading the migrant tenants in subdivided lane rooms.
• Wanning Sun, Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442236783 — On migrants’ expressive life, not only their labour.
• Ping Sun, Julie Yujie Chen and Uma Rani, ‘From Flexible Labour to “Sticky Labour”: A Tracking Study of Workers in the Food-Delivery Platform Economy of China’, Work, Employment and Society 37, no. 2 (2023): 412–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170211021570 — The best English-language account of how platform delivery work binds rather than frees. The riders now outnumber the residents on some lanes at lunchtime.
• 孙萍, 《过渡劳动：平台经济下的外卖骑手》 (华东师范大学出版社, 2024). — Seven years of fieldwork across nineteen cities; the major Chinese-language study of delivery riders, and the one Chinese readers of this book will already know.
• Xuefei Ren, Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution (Princeton University Press, 2020). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691203409/governing-the-urban-in-china-and-india — Explains the territorial, grid-based logic that a resident meets in the form of the juweihui.
• Nick R. Smith, The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv1p6hqwz — The rural counterpart to lane demolition: how planning dissolves a settlement and its social form together.

Shanghai in Literature and Film

The city as its own writers and filmmakers rendered it — including the nostalgia this book argues with.

• Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, trans. Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan (Columbia University Press, 2008). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-song-of-everlasting-sorrow/9780231143431/ — The primary literary text of the longtang. Its opening pages are the canonical description of the alleyways as a form of life. Read them beside Chapter 1.
• Wang Anyi, Fu Ping, trans. Howard Goldblatt (Columbia University Press, 2019). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/fu-ping/9780231193238/ — The same author on migrant and working-class Shanghai; the corrective to reading her only as a nostalgist.
• Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City, trans. Karen S. Kingsbury (NYRB Classics, 2006). — The most reliable English gateway to Zhang Ailing’s 1940s Shanghai interiors, in the translation scholars actually cite.
• Andrew David Field, ed. and trans., Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist (Hong Kong University Press, 2014). https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vj8xc — Primary modernist fiction of 1930s Shanghai in reliable translation: the city before nostalgia got to it.
• Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999). https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674805514 — Connects built space to print and film culture; the book that made ‘Shanghai modernity’ a scholarly object.
• Xudong Zhang, ‘Shanghai Nostalgia: Postrevolutionary Allegories in Wang Anyi’s Literary Production in the 1990s’, positions: east asia cultures critique 8, no. 2 (2000): 349–87. https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-abstract/8/2/349/22038/ — The key account of ‘old Shanghai’ nostalgia as a consumer form, and the standard citation for criticising it.
• Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (University of Chicago Press, 2005). https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo3627090.html — Early Shanghai cinema as a street-level vernacular modernity rather than an elite import.
• Zhang Zhen, ed., The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Duke University Press, 2007). https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-urban-generation — How post-1990 filmmakers registered demolition and displacement. The visual archive running parallel to this book’s fieldwork.
• Yomi Braester, Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (Duke University Press, 2010). https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/1441/Painting-the-City-RedChinese-Cinema-and-the-Urban — Argues that films did not merely depict demolition but helped negotiate it. Directly applicable to heritage-industry rhetoric.
• Andrew David Field, Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919–1954 (Chinese University Press, 2010). https://cup.columbia.edu/book/shanghais-dancing-world/9789629963736/ — Reconstructs the nightlife economy that ‘old Shanghai’ branding gestures at without knowing.

Archives, Databases, and Where to Look Things Up

• Virtual Shanghai Project, directed by Christian Henriot, Institut de Recherches Asiatiques (Aix-Marseille Université–CNRS). https://www.virtualshanghai.net/ — The richest georeferenced corpus of maps and photographs for placing a specific lane in its historical fabric. Several images in this book come from it. Materials may be used for educational and non-commercial purposes without written permission, and the required credit line is exactly: ‘Courtesy of the Virtual Shanghai Project (Institut de Recherches Asiatiques)’. Terms: https://www.virtualshanghai.net/Project/Rules_and_Conditions
• Historical Photographs of China, University of Bristol, directed by Robert Bickers. https://hpcbristol.net/ — Roughly 62,000 digitised images, 1850s–1950s, largely from private hands outside China, with archival references you can cite.
• ENP-China: Elites, Networks and Power in Modern China, Aix-Marseille Université (ERC Advanced Grant). https://www.enpchina.eu/ — Methods and datasets for treating modern Chinese sources as historical data at scale. The current state of the art for Shanghai prosopography.
• Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division — Shanghai. https://www.loc.gov/maps/?fa=location:shanghai — Digitised historical city plans, freely downloadable, including maps of the Chinese city and the foreign concessions.
• Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ — The French-language cartographic and administrative record that most Anglophone accounts miss, including Chollot’s 1900 plan of the French Concession, cited in Chapter 1.
• 全国报刊索引 (National Index to Chinese Newspapers & Periodicals), Shanghai Library. https://www.cnbksy.com/ — Chinese periodicals from 1833 onward, with Republican-era titles as full-page images. Subscription required.
• MCLC Resource Center, Ohio State University. https://u.osu.edu/mclc/ — Free reviews, bibliographies and translations; the fastest way to check how a recent book on Chinese literature and culture was received.
• Shanghai Municipal Archives (上海市档案馆), Zhongshan East No. 2 Road. — Holds the Municipal Government, International Settlement and French Concession record groups. Access is in person, with a passport and a letter of introduction from a recognised institution; the public website is frequently unreachable from outside mainland China, so plan to arrive rather than to browse.

A Note on This Book’s Own Papers

Three of the arguments in this book were first made in journals, and a reader who wants them in their compressed, peer-reviewed form can find them there. I have kept them out of the lists above, because recommending yourself inside your own further-reading guide is a bad habit, but leaving them out entirely would be a different kind of dishonesty — they are where several of these chapters began.

• ‘Towards modern urban housing: redefining Shanghai’s lilong’, Journal of Urbanism 2, no. 1 (2009): 11–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549170902833816 — the architectural argument behind Chapter 1: the lilong as a live low-rise, high-density housing type, not only a heritage object.
• ‘Gentrification and its contentment: An anthropological perspective on housing, heritage and urban social change in Shanghai’, Urban Studies 55, no. 7 (2018): 1561–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098016684313 — the empirical core of Chapter 5.
• ‘Gentrifying heritage: how historic preservation drives gentrification in urban Shanghai’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 9 (2019): 882–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1460732 — heritage designation as an income strategy and a hedge against precarity, which is Chapter 6’s argument in its earlier form.

The full list of the author’s publications is in the Bibliography, and the Citations chapter says what became of them.

What Is Missing

Two gaps are worth naming rather than hiding.

There is still no book-length ethnography of Shanghai’s 2022 lockdown. There are good articles, and there will be books; at the time of writing there is no standard account, and a reader looking for one should not conclude they have missed it.

There is also no monograph yet on the property downturn that began in 2021. The most current substitutes are in the housing section above — the Li and Aalbers article on the rental pivot, and Wu and Zhang’s 2024 synthesis. Anything claiming to explain the crash in book form should be checked for a publication date before it is trusted.