Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City with Michael Dillon (Yale UP, 2026)

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Hi, everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the Newbix Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps. So I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author, Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast at oculimundi.com while you listen. Jerry's guests include Zakiya Sewell, who's an English broadcaster and writer on Finding Albion, Yosh Schmidt, who's the head of maps at the Zurich Central Library, Pat Seed, a US historian on Ptolemy's World Map, John Romero, who's a legendary video game producer on The Doom Game Creator, Elif Sharak, a well-known Turkish-British novelist, and Chet Van Duser, a historian who will tell you about Martin Waldseemuller's Carter Marina of 1645 I highly encourage you to subscribe to What's Your Map? It's available on Apple, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms.

Welcome to The New Books Network.

Nicholas Gordon (1:22)

Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of The Asian Review of Books podcast done in partnership with The New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and non-fiction authors working in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region. The Bund's grand facades and the leafy streets of the former French Concession are usually read as monuments to Western enterprise in China. But those buildings were raised by Chinese labor, and the concessions that defined old Shanghai could not have run without the Chinese who served, traded, and lived inside them. In Shanghai, the story of China's most dynamic city, Michael Dillon sets out to tell the city story from the Chinese side.

Michael's New Book follows the city from a small fishing town on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, through the Opium War and the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, the Japanese occupation, and the Communist takeover, to its place today as the most representative city of China's forward-looking economy-driven modernization. Drawing on Chinese language sources, Michael argues that Shanghai's history has been told for too long through Western eyes. Michael joins the show to talk about Shanghai's long rivalry with Beijing, the 1927 Shanghai massacre of the Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping's later admission that leaving Shanghai out of the special economic zones was a mistake. Michael is Vestor of History and Affiliate of King's College London's Lau China Institute and Expert on Modern Chinese History, Politics and Society. He is the author of numerous books, including We Need to Talk About Xi, A History of Modern China, and Biographies of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.

Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Talk about your book, Shanghai, the Story of China's Most Dynamic City. Easy, straightforward first question. Why Shanghai? Why did you want to write about, I guess, China's commercial capital?

Michael Dillon (3:12)

Well, it's been a long-standing interest, really. I started studying Chinese at Leeds University in the UK in the 1960s, which was the time of the Cultural Revolution, and I think we're going to come on to that later on. At the time, Shanghai was going through this great turmoil of what seemed to be a workers' uprising against the Communist Party. In fact, I wrote my final undergraduate dissertation on this event.

There was always in the background an interest in what is going on. When I started going regularly to China in the early 1980s, from the early 1980s onwards, I visited Shanghai on a number of occasions and noticed all the changes. But then my interests divulged, and I went off to do various things on early modern Chinese history.

Then in particular, I moved on to looking at the Muslim communities in China, in the West, in Xinjiang and various other ethnic minorities. Then having done all that, I thought, well, this is all very well, but am I getting China in proper perspective? If I ignore somewhere as big as Shanghai. So in the middle of the 2010s, I suppose it was, I decided I ought to have a serious look at Shanghai, and made a few trips there especially to try and work out how I could write about it, and how I could say something sensible and interesting about its development over the years.

Nicholas Gordon (5:00)

What is Shanghai's history before kind of all the encounters with Western powers that turned it into the kind of cosmopolitan international city that we know today? I mean, what was Shanghai before Europe shows up?