In this thoroughly researched book, historian Christian Henriot examines the treatment of death in Shanghai's society and politics from its pre-colonial days to the socialist period. He explores why and how people died as well as how the various political regimes that have controlled Shanghai, both Chinese and foreign, dealt with dead bodies. In so doing, he shows how differing regimes attempted to respond to and shape changing cultural attitudes towards death in Shanghai's diverse population. Henriot argues that traditional Chinese attitudes towards death were ultimately changed by the “transformative force of urbanity and modernity” (5). However, he does not seem particularly interested in making arguments about such forces, or how they relate to state-building, and is instead primarily concerned with uncovering as many facts about practices surrounding death as possible through impeccable research.
In the first chapter, Henriot tries to get a handle on “the dynamics of mortality in the city” (9). In a quixotic opening section, he attempts to determine how many people died in Shanghai, ultimately finding himself only able to provide statistical snapshots from the archives. He then addresses questions of the causes of death, reaching the unsurprising conclusion that most people died from diseases of poverty which were not adequately addressed until public health campaigns were enacted by the communists in the 1950s (42).
Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the transformation of traditional funeral practices through the forces of state-building, war, and revolution. Henriot argues that traditional Chinese beliefs about death emphasized the need to be buried in the place where the deceased or their forebears had been born. In a city of sojourners like Shanghai, community organizations like guilds and charities (for the poor) organized transporting the dead to their native-places. This system created problems for Chinese and foreign regimes that increasingly saw bodies waiting for transport as a public health risk. Henriot argues that this problem became even more severe after the onset of war with Japan in 1937, when Shanghai was transformed into a “necropolis.” This led to the development of commercial funeral companies, which established a new infrastructure to process and transport the dead. When the communists came to power, they sealed the decline of the native-place associations and traditional attitudes towards death by enforcing cremation (139–141).
Chapter 4 examines the rise of private cemeteries both inside and outside the city as another alternative to shipping bodies back to native places. Henriot argues that private cemeteries grew in popularity due to the economic need for a cheaper and more practical alternative to shipping bodies back to native places. In a fascinating turn, Chapter 5 examines the racialized practices of foreign cemeteries. Henriot demonstrates that cemeteries in the foreign concessions reproduced colonial racial hierarchies of nationality, race, religion, and wealth (223).
Chapters 6 and 7 reveal how social divides between rich and poor were carried over into death and the treatment of the dead. Chapter 6 examines the charity organizations that dealt with the “invisible deaths” of the poor. Chapter 7 depicts the culture of funerals, and how extravagant funeral processions became a way of demarcating social status. Finally, Chapters 8 and 9 examine the transformation of funeral practices in war and revolution. Chapter 8 argues that cremation transformed from an abhorrent practice followed only by Buddhists to the political rule under the Communists. The final chapter discusses the mechanisms the communists used to gain control over existing infrastructure for dealing with death and the dead. Communists introduced state control over funeral practices, closing cemeteries and coffin repositories while advocating cremation. Henriot argues that these efforts ultimately removed death from the public life of Shanghai.
Henriot's book provides a wealth of information that should be a starting point for future studies of death in modern China. He avoids making explicit theoretical arguments about changing attitudes about death in relation to modernity and urbanization, ultimately claiming that, before 1949, the change in these practices was due more to “social needs” than state action (365). Demonstrating a fealty to his sources, Henriot refuses to make clear arguments about the political meanings and uses of death management for Shanghai's various pre-1949 regimes. Indeed, with the exception of Chapter 5, he surprisingly does not always distinguish clearly between these different regimes. One is left with many unaddressed conceptual questions: How is the management of death related to the rise of modern state-building in China? How does studying death change how we see different political regimes and their relation to existing cultural practices? How does Shanghai's colonial context change how we interpret death management? Can we use death in Shanghai to better understand the nature of colonialism in China? Finally, if communism was so instrumental in transforming the nature of death in Shanghai, then how does that change how we discuss the Chinese revolution? Henriot's book provides many details that raise these and other questions, though he does not seek to provide any answers.
