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Between 1949 and 1966, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led municipal government of Shanghai renamed more than one in seven of the city's roads. Renaming was an important marker of revolutionary change in China's largest and most foreign-influenced city. Road renaming in socialist China has been commonly understood to have been extensive. This article argues, however, that the nature and extent of renaming in socialist Shanghai was less dramatic than has been assumed. It demonstrates that renaming was not simply an iconoclastic process, but rather involved the pragmatic weighing of symbolic change against potential disruption. Further, it contends that renaming was driven by a desire to order the city, in line with the CCP's modernist worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shanghai News was the People's Republic of China's (PRC's) first English-language newspaper. The News played an important, but forgotten, role in the development of the PRC's "external propaganda" apparatus, used to fight the ideological Cold War. The News was unusual in that it adopted a commercial business model and juxtaposed vehement anti-imperialist propaganda with advertising for multinational companies from "imperialist-capitalist countries." This article argues that the News was a product of "New Democracy," the central political paradigm of the PRC between 1949 and 1953. New Democracy, a policy of cross-class cooperation in the name of national reconstruction, is often dismissed as cynical tactic deployed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to diminish resistance during the takeover of China. The author argues for taking the real world impacts of New Democracy on life and work in early 1950s Shanghai seriously and cautions against teleological narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Chinese Communist Party seized power in 1949 it began a process of transforming China's economy and society. Despite the Party initially advancing a programme of gradual change under 'New Democracy', the early 1950s can best be characterised as a period of accelerated transition. This paper uses the case study of the elimination of British business in Shanghai to show how radicalisation in the political sphere catalysed economic change. Drawing on recently disclosed documents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives and materials from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the paper demonstrates how policy-making and implementation evolved in practice. The elimination of foreign commercial enterprises was deemed a priority, but because they were closely tied into the Chinese economy the processes involved in their removal presented issues that were too difficult to resolve along simplistic ideological lines. While it may seem contradictory to argue that this period was characterised both by accelerated change and by enduring legacies of the old order, this paper demonstrates that behind a façade of cohesive action lay cadres struggling to manage a complex situation. The CCP's own weaknesses determined their courses of action and the methods they deployed informed the way revolutionary transformation evolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]