Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China

Betty Wei has provided a balance narrative of how Shanghai emerged from a small and enclosed port to an international city known as the Pearl of the Orient in the 1930s and later came to embraced communism in 1949. Full of anedotes of all kinds, Wei engages the reader to imagine the lives of various social and economic class and provide researched historical facts and statistics that other scholars in the field may find useful.A must read for anyone who is interested in the history of Old Shanghai but short of time.