History of Shanghai

Shanghai began more than 1,000 years ago as a fishing village.

It was officially designated a market town in 1074 and a market city in 1159.

The main activities at the time were fishing, farming, craftworking, and commerce and shipping.

By 1292 the region and market city had grown to the point where a separate county of Shanghai was designated, and the market city became the county seat.

This permitted the city to assume the important duty of tax collection.

Shanghai continued to grow during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and near the beginning of the 15th century the county had an estimated 64,000 households.

A new channel was cut north to the Yangtze in order to permit better drainage and to keep the outlet to the Yangtze and the East China Sea from filling with silt.

This also provided a much more reliable and shorter channel for river traffic to the Yangtze.

Shanghai grew rapidly during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) when the development and use of cotton as a fabric material became widespread.

By the 18th century the city was a prosperous center of cotton growing and fabric and garment production.

The first of the Opium Wars between Britain and China ended with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 and a supplementary agreement signed in 1843.

As a result, China was forced to open Shanghai to British trade and residence.

Other countries demanded and received similar privileges.

British, French, and American citizens were awarded small territorial zones north of the original walled Chinese city.

While there was some development and expansion, the foreign community numbered only a few hundred until the late 19th century.

In 1895 Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War and, as part of the war reparations, China was forced to allow Westerners and Japanese to invest directly in China.

As a result, the population of Shanghai’s international settlement grew substantially. A period of foreign commercialization and industrialization followed.

In the next half century Shanghai developed a distinctly Western character and experienced a period of important commercial, industrial and political development.

The Chinese Communist Party was founded in the city in 1921, and Communist revolutionaries staged an uprising in Shanghai in 1925.

Although the revolutionaries supported the powerful Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang abruptly ended his alliance with the Communists and violently suppressed a Communist uprising in Shanghai in 1927.

The Japanese invaded China and seized Shanghai in 1937.

They occupied the city until the end of World War II in 1945. Following the war, Shanghai again emerged as China’s major domestic and international trading, banking, and shipping center, but the Chinese civil war interrupted Shanghai’s growth.

In 1949 Communist forces overran and occupied the city.

The new Chinese Communist government viewed Shanghai as a consumer city with strong ties to a capitalist economy, and this conflicted with Communist ideology.

China’s leaders moved quickly to de-emphasize Shanghai’s importance to the country’s overall economy and drained capital away from the city to support other areas of China.

This pattern largely continued until economic reforms of the late 1970s and, in 1984, the designation of Shanghai as an economic development zone with an emphasis on foreign investment.