A transition from fishing town to towering city

Shanghai history dates back to the Sung dynasty (960-1279) when it was a fishing town of little importance near the mouth of the Yangtze river.

Several centuries later, precisely in 1842, it began to rise to become a great city in China.

That year, Shanghai became one of the five "treaty ports" in China opened to foreign trade by the Treaty of Nanking following the Opium War with Britain.

The treaty ports were divided into the International Settlement, which consisted of 13 nations, run mostly by the British and the French Concessions.

Decades later with heavy Western influence, Shanghai soon became China's principal center of trade, finance and manufacturing, with 80 percent of the country's light industry and 25 percent of the heavy industry in the early 20th century.

But, the years were also a period of humiliation for some people in China, as the treaty ports including Shanghai were ruled entirely by Western expatriates who even enjoyed "extra- territoriality" (freedom from prosecution under Chinese law).

As a result of all the international contact, Shanghai became greatly influenced by Western culture and business practices.

The foreign domination on Chinese soil angered large segments of the population, and a resistance movement began to grow in the early 1920s. As a manifestation of that resistance, the Chinese Communist Party was established and it held its first National Congress in secret in a house in the French Concession.

In 1937, Shanghai was occupied by Japanese troops and when the Japanese were defeated in 1945, the Western powers handed Shanghai over to the Nationalist Chinese government.

The foreign domination in Shanghai was over by this time.

However, after foreign domination folded, Shanghainese misery from war was far from over. A civil war broke out between nationalists and communists in China in 1945 and lasted until 1949.

In May 1949, the communists won the battle and the military wing of the People's Liberation Army marched into Shanghai.

As the foreigners left, the businesses that were left behind were take over one by one by the communist government.

In the early 1980s, respected leader Deng Xiao Ping permitted an open door policy in Shanghai and several other major cities in China, which allowed for the rapid resurgence of Shanghai as an international force in business and finance.

Sources: the Encyclopedia Americana and various internet sources

-- A'an Suryana