Shanghai's Cosmopolitan Past Complicates the Communist Party's Victimhood Narrative

The founding of the Chinese Communist Party happened in a French colonial building. That fact alone captures the central problem Shanghai poses for the Communist Party's preferred account of itself and its nation. The site at 76 Xingye Road, once 106 Rue Wantz inside the Shanghai French Concession, is now a memorial museum drawing 1.8 million visitors a year. It sits inside Xintiandi, one of Shanghai's most fashionable commercial districts, steps from a Starbucks and a Shake Shack, surrounded by boutiques and repurposed shikumen townhouses. The contradiction is structural, not incidental: the Party was born in the same colonial geography it has spent decades framing as evidence of China's victimhood.

A City Built by the "Unequal Treaties"

Shanghai's rise to global prominence was inseparable from the treaties the Communist Party now cites as wounds. After the First Opium War, Shanghai became one of five treaty ports forced open to Western trade, with Britain, France, and the United States carving out concessions from land surrounding the old walled city. By the end of the 19th century, Shanghai ranked as the world's third most important banking capital after New York and London and was the undisputed financial center of East Asia. The Bund, the riverfront esplanade that became the visual signature of that era, accumulated 52 European-style buildings in Beaux Arts, neoclassical, Renaissance, and eclectic styles during the 1920s and 1930s, the acknowledged golden age of old Shanghai. Within the concessions, foreigners operated under the legal principle of "extraterritoriality," exempted from Chinese law entirely, while Chinese laborers, typically working as coolies, were demoted to second-class citizens.

That system was brutal and the grievances it generated were real. But Shanghai under those conditions also became the financial engine of Asia, a cosmopolitan mixing point that literary figures from Han Bingqing to Eileen Chang treated as a symbol of surging modernity. The "century of humiliation" framework refers to the period of foreign invasion and subjugation of China from the start of the First Opium War in 1840 to the founding of the PRC, and it captures the exploitation. It is less equipped to account for the productivity, cultural energy, and ambiguity that defined Shanghai specifically during that same period.

What the Shanghai History Museum Reveals

No institution has had to navigate this contradiction more visibly than the Shanghai History Museum, the oldest local history museum in China. Its curators have produced three distinct permanent exhibitions, opening in 1994, 2001, and 2018, each adopting remarkably different approaches to the representation of Shanghai's colonial past, fluctuating to cater to the CCP's contemporary political needs.

In the early 2000s, the gentrification of old colonial buildings evidencing the city's cosmopolitan past reflected the CCP's will to reopen Shanghai to the world, with official ideology and market forces collaborating on the employment of colonial nostalgia to market Shanghai's past and support the city's new role as China's economic capital. By 2018, the balance had shifted. The museum's Modern Shanghai section now opens with a description of the imperialist expansion in China as aggressive and semi-colonialism as an oppressive system that limited the freedom of the Chinese people. The museum's chief curator expressed uncertainty about the idea of merging the history of Shanghai with the national history of revolution promoted by the CCP, noting that the story of the city's development in this period was not much connected with the revolutionary war. The museum's team tried to strike a balance between the vision of colonial Shanghai as a prosperous and cosmopolitan city and the growing need to inscribe Shanghai's development as a nationalist narrative in the history of the Communist revolution. Academic analysis of the museum's approach describes a tension between removing and reframing colonial heritage, with reframing increasingly winning out.

The Bund: Spoils, Repurposed

With the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, many financial institutions were gradually moved to Hong Kong in the 1950s. Hotels and clubs were closed or converted. What remained were the buildings themselves: 52 structures too massive, too central, and too well-constructed to demolish, and too architecturally recognizable to pretend they meant something other than what they did. The Bund today is described as an "architecture gallery" with 52 well-preserved old European-style buildings that have taken on new vitality as chic restaurants, top-end shops, and bars.

This arrangement serves a dual purpose. It generates revenue and signals Shanghai's continued relevance as a global financial address. It also drains the buildings of their specific historical meaning. A former British banking hall converted into a luxury retail space is no longer, functionally, evidence of colonialism; it is real estate. The architecture remains as spectacle. Its institutional history quietly recedes.

The French Concession's Double Life

The former French Concession offers perhaps the most layered example of history being curated in real time. The municipal government has designated large areas as historical-cultural conservation zones, branding the district as the "Hengfu (Hengshan Rd. - Fuxing Rd.) Historical and Cultural Area," with a 2007 conservation plan protecting original street patterns, plane-tree-lined avenues, iconic lilong neighborhoods, and other historically significant buildings. Wukang Road, formerly Route Ferguson, has been renovated into a curated heritage corridor. The Wukang Building at its southern end is a protected historic apartment building in the French Renaissance style, designed by Hungarian-Slovak architect László Hudec and completed in 1924. It draws tourists who photograph it as Shanghai heritage without necessarily examining the foreign power whose presence made it possible.

Many colonial-era buildings have been beautifully preserved and repurposed into trendy shops, cafes, and restaurants, with streets like Wukang Road lined with elegant villas and apartment buildings that reflect Shanghai's cosmopolitan past. The 1930s Art Deco Cathay Theater still stands. Former factory sites have been transformed into vibrant pedestrianized neighborhoods filled with shops, restaurants, and a creative atmosphere. Preserving these spaces serves the city economically and the Party politically: the architecture stays, reinforcing Shanghai's global brand, while the colonial administrative context that produced it becomes available for selective mention or elision depending on the needs of a given narrative moment.

The founding site at Xintiandi illustrates the extreme version of this logic. The site at 76 Xingye Road, formerly 106 Rue Wantz, is located in the historical shikumen buildings in the Shanghai French Concession where the first National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party took place in July 1921. The Party was formed in secret inside a shikumen residential building inside the French Concession precisely because the concession's extraterritoriality offered protection from the Chinese authorities trying to suppress it. The colonial geography the Party condemns was the geography that sheltered it. Now that same shikumen block is a significant red tourism site drawing nearly 1.8 million visitors annually, embedded inside a fashionable commercial district adjacent to a Starbucks and a Shake Shack.

Lujiazui and the Projection of a New Story

Across the Huangpu River from the Bund, the Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone in Pudong represents the CCP's preferred counter-narrative: not victimhood recovered but power projected forward. In 1990, Deng Xiaoping permitted Shanghai to initiate economic reforms, which reintroduced foreign capital to the city and developed the Pudong district, resulting in the birth of Lujiazui. The Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone is the only national-level development zone in China whose name reflects a union of the finance and trade industries. In 2015, the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone officially expanded to the Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, turning the new Lujiazui area into Lujiazui Financial City, providing a platform for foreign financial institutions and talents to engage in active financial transactions.

The skyline Lujiazui has produced, with the Shanghai Tower, the World Financial Center, and the Jin Mao Tower clustered along the Pudong waterfront, is designed to be read from the Bund itself, a deliberate visual argument about the arc of Chinese history. The old colonial bank buildings face across the river toward a skyline built on Chinese terms. That framing is the Party's answer to the dissonance Shanghai creates: not that the exploitation didn't happen, but that it has been surpassed.

History as a Managed Asset

What Shanghai demonstrates, across its neighborhoods and institutions, is that the Party's "Western sins" narrative is not a simple story told consistently. It is a managed asset, adjusted for audience and purpose. The Shanghai History Museum tightens the anti-colonial framing when ideological discipline requires it and loosens it when commercial interests in global investment need servicing. The former French Concession is marketed internationally as a heritage destination while its origins are softened domestically. The Party's founding site sits inside a luxury commercial zone without apparent irony.

The deeper problem for the CCP is that Shanghai's cosmopolitan memory is not abstract: it is written into the streetscape, the architecture, and the institutional history of one of China's most globally visible cities. Every Beaux Arts facade on the Bund, every plane-tree avenue in the former concession, every renovated shikumen alley, and every financial building now housing a foreign bank again in Lujiazui exists as evidence that the relationship between China and the outside world has always been more entangled than a simple victimhood story allows. The Party's identity project requires managing that evidence continuously, because the city itself keeps complicating the script.