Sunday Feature is a Documentary programme.

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Sunday Feature: Shanghai - World City Redux

Series 1, episode 0

Rana Mitter reveals how Shanghai today is forging its identity as an ultramodern city - by rediscovering its glamorous past. Rana discovers, as China once again modernises, the legacy of British and French colonial administration European imperial is making itself felt once again. He sits in as three 20-something professional Shanghainese women compare notes with an 80-something woman about the relative merits of Shanghai social life today and in the 1930s. He discovers how important aspects of its identity as a world city, such as jazz and speaking English, were quietly cultivated in the early decades of communist rule. And how, since the economic opening, they have emerged back into the light. Talking to novelists and nationalists, historians and ordinary Shanghainese, Rana discovers that to them, the violence that underpinned the British colonial presence no longer seems profoundly hurtful. And he talks to those directly engaged in fusing the old cosmopolitan city back into today's hyper-metropolis