I’ve been on a communism kick. It began with my decision to finally tackle Ezra Vogel’s massive biography of Deng Xiaoping (Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Belknap Press, 2011), which has been staring at me from our bookshelves since my husband and I moved in together, in 2014. I’m listening to Hope Harrison’s brilliant lecture series on the fall of the Berlin Wall through Audible, and I’m midway through The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikötter (Bloomsbury, 2013).
But I was drawn to Jonathan Kaufman’s book The Last Kings of Shanghai because it combined my current interest in the communism movement, and my perpetual interest in Jewish history. As I found upon reading it, the book offered so much more. It is a stunning example of the power of a good journalist to focus on one sliver of a gigantic historical movement as a way to frame the event for a modern reader, and to show how larger survey books, like The Tragedy of Liberation, lack nuance.
The Last Kings of Shanghai follows the Sassoons and the Kadoories, two prominent families who made, and lost, fortunes in China, from their arrival from Iraq (did you know there were many Jewish families living in Iraq in the 1700s? Me neither), through the twenty-first century.
In Part Two, in which Kaufman discusses “liberation,” the 1949 communist takeover of China from Chiang Kai-Shek, Kaufman’s prose is so illustrative that we feel the worry and the wonderment, about whether Shanghai, a progressive foreign enclave that families like the Sassoons and Kadoories called home, would be preserved as a capitalist powerhouse, despite the transformations occurring in the rest of the country. Kaufman doesn’t pretend that foreigners didn’t exacerbate the inequities in the city; for example, he is blunt in his depictions of starving Chinese people begging outside of the gorgeous Art Deco hotels along the Bund. I was able to understand the motivations of the communists, their shock at the wealth and spoils, and how they saw themselves as “liberators” precisely because of the inequities they witnessed. This is a sharp contrast to Dikötter, who ignores this and, in his systematic way, details the atrocities committed by the communists as fueled by nothing but pure, reckless evil. In Kaufman’s telling, the reader can understand both why the foreigners in Shanghai presumed that they would be kept safe, or even more significantly, that they belonged in Shanghai, and why the communists disagreed (to put it mildly).
As always, the best way to understand history is to read multiple perspectives on it. A useful place to begin is with a micro-exploration, such as that offered in The Last Kings of Shanghai.
Published by Penguin Books, 2020