The Cosmopolitan Feminine: The Modern Girl and Her Male Other in the New-Sensationalist Fiction

Abstract

In the cultural imaginations of the twentieth-century China, Shanghai was a feminine city. As one of the earliest treaty port cities flourished with colonial presence after the First Opium War (1839–1842), Shanghai rapidly grew into the commercial center of China and Asia due to its strategic location in trading with the West. At the same time, it also became an object of voyeuristic gaze both from the West and within China. In the eyes of the Westerners, Shanghai served as an indisputable example of the positive effects of the (masculine) colonial conquest—of how the infiltration of Western powers transformed a small fishing village into the “Paris of Asia.” In this cultural imagination of colonialists, Shanghai was an erotic, enticing, and available woman, a land of opportunity, the “paradise for adventures,” the “capital of the tycoon,” and the “whore of Asia.” In the eyes of Chinese people, however, Shanghai was turned into a foreign and exotic world driven by a dynamic mixture of commercial culture, sexual ladies, and foreign presence.