Andrew Field: Sex, spies and female suppression in Shanghai's old club scene

Andrew Field, a longtime China resident, professor, historian -- and former bartender -- was always drawn to the topic of nightlife. His first book "Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919–1954" will be launched at the Shanghai International Literary Festival on Saturday, March 13.

We caught up with Field to chat about the book, the research and how Shanghai's nightlife back then relates to the nightlife in the city today. 

CNNGo: What initially sparked your interest in Shanghai’s nightlife?

I was interested in how Asian societies construct a modern urban culture for themselves. What makes an Asian city distinctive from a Western one? As a young person, I spent a lot of times in clubs and bars in places like Taipei and Japan. I also spent some time working as a bartender in New York and Japan so I saw the nightlife from the other side.

These questions interested me enough to start researching. Everything converged in Shanghai as the center of urban popular culture.

CNNGo: So, what did you find?

One of the big issues I’m looking at in the book is the place of women and how women cope with modern life. As I started researching, I kept coming across references to woman who worked as hostesses in taxi dance halls, places where male patrons paid to dance with women. They were there to entertain guests, dance with them, drink with them, and converse with them. For thousands of women, that was their ticket out of their socio-economic situation. By the 1930s, the dance halls were employing thousands of women.

CNNGo: Why do you think little has been written about it previously?

There was material written, but it was scattered in fragments. I was the first to pull it together into a coherent story. I just happened to come at it at the right time. It seemed like a topic you could really dig into because there are so many facets.

CNNGo: What made the subject interesting?

Cabarets and dancing were very controversial in Chinese society. The physical closeness and dancing with different partners was very alien to the mainstream Chinese society and Confucian norms. Throughout the 1930s, the national government tried to prevent young people from going to cabarets. In the book, everything leads to chapters eight and nine -- when the cabarets were ultimately rejected by both the Nationalists and Communists.

CNNGo: Why was this industry such a threat? What was it that made it so threatening?

In this industry, women were given social and sexual mobility that they didn’t have previously. It was that mobility that represented a threat to the Chinese government, which has always been very patriarchal.

CNNGo: What was the most interesting aspect of your research?

One of the things that came out was the connection between these places and the underground resistance during the war years when the city was occupied by the Japanese. These were places where Japanese officers would go in their pleasure time and get drunk. Some of the women who’d they talk with were funneling information to the underground resistance networks. China's then-head of Secret Service, Dai Li, was also using these clubs for information-gathering purposes.

CNNGo: What are some of the parallels between that cabaret scene and today’s nightlife?

Foreigners and overseas Chinese tend to provide a lot of the seeds for nurturing new nightlife cultures. After a while though, there’s this process where local society elbows its way in and takes over. There’s always a dynamic of competition between local society and people from overseas that might have started it, but eventually find themselves marginalized. 

In the 1990s, clubbing culture in Shanghai was dominated by foreigners and overseas Chinese. Now, more and more popular clubs have a much more local vibe, a mainland vibe. A lot of the most successful clubs in Shanghai today were started in China -- like Babyface and No. 88. Similarly, by the 1930s, foreigners were completely marginalized and the city’s clubs were taken over by Chinese entrepreneurs.

CNNGo: What’s happening with the city’s nightlife today?

Dancing is disappearing. The big discos have been disappearing. Over the past five years, there’s been this trend where drinking has taken over as a primary social activity -- clubs have tables that you can reserve instead of dance floors and where you can have expensive drinks.

CNNGo: What similarities did you find from that Shanghai and today’s Shanghai?

It’s the continuities that make this book relevant. It’s not the study of a dead culture, but the study of an alive and active culture in China today. You can see the Mao years as a right turn, an anomaly, before the culture went back to the swing of the capitalistic material world that we live in today. I think there are all sorts of connections between then and now. People who know something about China today will be able them to read the book in a different light.