Epilogue

Abstract

This book has told a story of a particularly galvanizing and enchanted moment in Shanghai’s rapid transformation, through the encounters with the city among Western visitors. At the same time, it has proposed a sociophenomenological critique that, through the microcase of memory politics in Shanghai, allowed for reaching behind the flaunted projections of the City of the Future. Among visitors, this retromodern and strange space invoked diverse futures past in the appropriation of the city. Shanghai reminded them of the openness of the frontier, of New York in the 1950s, of the gloom of cyberpunk fantasies, or through its massive regenerative nostalgia of the cosmopolitanism of a Western collective memory in the city.

I have fallen out of love, woken from my China Dream.

– Mark Kitto, Prospect, August 8, 2012