From D.D's to Y.Y. to Park 97 to muse: dance club spaces and the construction of class in Shanghai, 1997-2007.
This article explores the development of an internationalised dance club scene in Shanghai between 1997 and 2007, focusing on four clubs. It examines how clubs have become a conduit for dance and music to enter China, while also exploring how both local and international clubbing practices are negotiated. The roles of owners, managers, DJs, and patrons in constructing the clubbing experience are discussed as well as the tendency for clubs to promote social and sexual interactions between local and overseas Chinese and foreigners. Clubs also provide separate and distinct cultural and social spaces for these groups to create their own social and class identities.**********
As sites of creativity, interaction, contestation and community, dance clubs are fascinating spaces to study the flow of transnational urban cultural forms and their reception and transformation in contemporary China. (1) As socially segmented, culturally distinctive and economically selective environments, they are also excellent spaces to examine how people coming to Shanghai from abroad to live and work accommodate themselves to the city and help build its elite leisure and social culture, thereby participating in the construction of class differentiation in the modern Chinese metropolis in the age of market reforms. Yet with the exception of James Farrer, no scholar working in the English language has published a study of dance clubbing in the People's Republic of China, and even Farrer's work says relatively little about the actual space of the dance club and how it is constructed to promote class identities. (2) This article examines the evolution of dance clubbing in Shanghai from 1997 to 2007. Drawing on a decade of personal experiences in the clubbing scene as well as interviews and discussions with several managers, DJs and patrons of clubs in Shanghai, I trace the development of a transnational clubbing scene in the city during this period. (3) An article of this length can not do justice to the variety and range of night-time leisure establishments that have developed since the 1990s. Nor do I propose to survey all of the activities that take place in clubs. (4)
I concentrate on the construction and operations of four dance-oriented clubs opened at different times within the broader context of the rapid development of the city since the 1990s. (5) These clubs have catered to an upscale market of clubbers ranging from Western expatriates to overseas Chinese to locals. While prices and other factors ensure an elite clientele overall when compared to the average Chinese resident of the city, the variety of social and economic backgrounds of patrons is nevertheless enhanced by certain cultural practices common to China, such as the tendency for wealthier men to invite others of lesser socioeconomic status to clubs and pay for their expenses. In other words, while elite and "foreign" in orientation, these clubs have exposed a broader spectrum of Chinese urban society to the internationalised clubbing culture, introducing them to new varieties of music, dancing, social interactions and sexual mores, and to the concept of "eliteness" in a cosmopolitan setting.
Clubbing in Shanghai began in the early 1990s with the rise of a small number of discos in or around some of the international hotels. Over time this number grew, while bars and pubs catering to Chinese and foreign clientele also grew in number and variety. (6) One of the first clubs to arise was J.J.'s, a disco dance club that could hold up to 2,000 people. Other clubs such as New York New York, Galaxy and Casablanca, also reflect the early years of clubbing in China. These disco clubs provided the foundation for clubbing to develop, but they followed a rather simple model. Early discos were large, cavernous spaces. They were dark and simply decorated. The music played by Chinese and foreign DJs was mainstream American or Chinese pop. They catered to overseas businesspeople, foreign students and locals looking to experience the exciting new world of discos in China. Yet many foreigners and overseas Chinese found these clubs unsatisfying compared with clubs they knew abroad. In an interview, when asked about the early discos such as Casablanca and New York New York, Kenny Tang, a club owner in Shanghai from Hong Kong remarked, "I hated these places, to be honest, I hated them. (7) Tang and his business partners decided to revolutionise the nightlife of Shanghai by creating the city's first foreign-oriented nightclub, D.D's.
D.D's
D.D's was a nightclub that pioneered a new style of clubbing for residents in the mid- to late-1990s. Founded by Tang, a Shanghai-born New Yorker named Luke Chou, another Hong Kong-born Chinese named Chris Lee and two overseas Chinese partners named Freddy and William, this late-night club was popular among Western expatriates, overseas Chinese, returnees and some locals. As described by Tang, the club was founded by word of mouth out of a network of foreign friends he and others had built up over the previous two years through sport and clubbing. (8) "Ok once a week, Sunday I play football at the Luwan district and all those [who played are] Europeans. So after a while, I know all these foreigners. And somehow I kept bumping into them in some other bars, nightclubs ... so that after two years, I have all those friends. And I bet by the time I open a place with something that belongs to them [sic]. They will come. That's why I have been to open D.D's, and like the first night it is 400 some people showing up and coming here."
According to the founders, they named their club after an American restaurant that operated in Shanghai during the late 1930s. In fact, during the wartime era, there were several D.D's restaurants in Shanghai. (9) D.D's definitely lived up to the reputation of its namesake. At the time of its founding in 1995, transnational club culture in Shanghai was in its infancy, relations with government and police were tenuous, and the club had to keep a low profile. The remote location of D.D's in an underground space near the corner of Xingfu and Pingwu Roads in the Xuhui District, and its plush, dark red velvet interior and semi-circular red sofas in the back gave the club the forbidden and romantic aura of a Prohibition Era speakeasy in Chicago or New York. The posh interior gave D.D's a more "elite" status than the university pubs that attracted a more "alternative" student crowd, such as the Hit House in Wujiaochang or Tequila Mamas, a popular club among Chinese and African students in Shaanxi Road, though with the lights on at closing time, the interior of D.D's was not any less gritty than these student-oriented bars.
Tang, Chris Lee and their co-partners Chou, Freddy and William operated D.D's as a member's club. For a 400 RMB fee, one could buy a membership card made of brass, with a membership number carved onto it by hand. On the card was a stencil showing cartoon-like images of 1930s-style gangsters and molls (Caucasian, not Chinese), reinforcing the club's underground speakeasy image and connecting it symbolically not only with Shanghai's Golden Age, but also with the American Jazz Age and Prohibition Era. With the card, one entered free with a guest. Without the card, one had to pay a 100 RMB entrance fee at the door. This entrance policy and the high-priced drinks effectively kept out people who could afford only to go to the less "classy" discos such as Galaxy or Casablanca, or the university bars such as Tequila Mamas or Hit House, which offered drinks for half the price.
The Club opened on China's National Day, 1 October 1995. As described above, its founding partners tapped into their social circles of Chinese and foreign expats, using word-of-mouth to generate a crowd that rapidly built upon itself. For the first year and a half, D.D's usually generated a crowd by midnight, not dispersing until 6 or 7 a.m. By the time I settled in Shanghai to conduct research for my doctoral dissertation in the spring of 1997, D.D's had a reputation as a late-night club. Spawning a late-night club scene that was unprecedented in Shanghai at the time, D.D's came to life only after 2 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night, with 200 to 300 people jam-packed into the relatively small bar, lounge and dance space that was supposed to hold a maximum of 125 people. In 1995, D.D's was one of few dance clubs catering to an international crowd. By 1997, D.D's had become the endpoint of an incipient club circuit, with night-time revellers heading first to other places such as the Paulaner Brauhaus, Judy's Too, Total Disco, LA Cafe, Rick's Cafe, the Long Bar, the Cotton Club or Malone's American Cafe before converging on the late-night dance club.
D.D's pioneered a number of new trends in the city's emerging clubbing scene. First and foremost was a radical change in the city's clubbing model. Prior to D.D's, dance clubs were invariably built along the more conventional dance hall or disco model popular in the West in the 1970s, with cavernous floors, often decorated in an apocalyptic mishmash of lights and metallic fixtures, surrounded by equally spacious lounge areas. D.D's on the other hand offered a variety of public and semi-private spaces such as the sofa-lounge areas, while squeezing its revellers into a relatively small area. According to co-founder Lee, D.D's maximised the principle that "people enjoy being crowded into a tight space". Even with a small number of people, the D.D's crowd pulsed with vitality. Obviously, some people felt more alive when mixing and mingling in a tight group of sweaty bodies than in a dark and cavernous space such as J.J. My own memories of D.D's are of having constantly to push through thick crowds of revellers to get to the dance floor or bar. Circulating through the crowd at 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning, one felt a tremendous sense of energy and vitality, similar to the London club scene described by Malbon, as if one were among the movers and shakers who were carrying Shanghai into the 21st century. (10) With Lee serving as DJ, D.D's also pioneered new forms and styles of music for the Shanghai crowd. Under the influence of Chris Lee and later DJ Shin from Japan, D.D's was also the first club in the city to use up-to-date club music imported on vinyl from Hong Kong, Tokyo, London and New York. By contrast, the music played in the larger discos tended to be a mixture of mainstream American pop, Cantopop and Taiwanpop, the music favoured by Chinese.
D.D's also taught a small but growing crowd of clubbers how to appreciate a variety of genres and styles of club music such as techno, hip-hop, funk and acid jazz. As Shanghai-based writer Mian Mian writes in her semi-autobiographical novel Candy, D.D's was "the first club that played vinyl records and put Shanghai in sync with the international scene and got everybody dancing". (11) DJ Lee favoured house music, playing a combination of contemporary and retro club hits. Personally, I have a strong memory of Jamiroquai's hit songs "Virtual Insanity" and "Cosmic Girl", both released on the album Traveling without Moving in 1997, getting a lot of airplay that year, as well as classic 1970s disco and funk hits such as the Gloria Gaynor anthem "I Will Survive" which seemed to generate an enthusiastic response from both foreigners and locals. When Shin was in the DJ booth, he tended to favour a more Tokyo-based style of minimalist techno. One other DJ who began playing clubs in Shanghai at that time told me that DJ Shin was the first to bring techno and trance music to the city. No other club in town played such a wide variety of music, at least not in 1996-7. The clubbing crowd at D.D's thereby distinguished itself musically from other clubs in the city, giving these people a definitive cultural cachet over those who frequented the larger discos or American-style pubs and bars. Yet D.D's would not last long in the quickly changing environment of Shanghai's international set. As more foreigners and overseas Chinese continued to arrive in the city for business and pleasure, and as local Chinese began to take a stronger interest in international-style nightlife, a number of clubs arose in less out-of-the-way spaces to cater to a growing clubbing crowd. One of the most successful in the late 1990s was Y.Y.
Y.Y.
The opening of Y.Y. in 1997 marked another phase in the clubbing culture of the city, one in which clubbing moved one step closer to the surface level of urban culture. In 1997, Tang left D.D's after a dispute with the other managers and set up a new club of his own called Y.Y. It was also located underground, yet in a more central and accessible part of town on the corner of Shaanxi South and Nanchang Roads, just off Huaihai Road, one of Shanghai's busiest commercial streets. Like D.D's, Y.Y. operated as a member's club, charging a 100 RMB entrance fee and crowding people into a tight, dimly lit subterranean space dominated by a disco and bar. However, unlike D.D's, the principal colour for Y.Y. was neon blue. A Chinese saying, mistakenly attributed to Confucius (it appears in the book of Zhuangzi), appeared on the wall at the basement entrance: "How do you know that I don't know the happiness of fish?" This piece of Chinese graffiti and the full name "Yin Yang" gave the club a more pseudo-mystical, orientalised Chinese aura than D.D's, which was constructed completely as a foreign space. With its elevated DJ booth above the small dance floor, Y.Y. also played progressive house and techno music, as well as older disco tunes from the 1970s. Lee left D.D's in late 1998 and began to play for the crowd at Y.Y. He appears briefly in a passage from Shanghai author Wei Hui's novel Shanghai Baby, in which the protagonist, Nikki, also known as Coco, enters the club. (12)
I saw my favourite DJ on the stand, Christopher Lee from Hong Kong. When he noticed I was there, he made a face at me. They were playing House and Hip-Hop, both totally cool, like a raging blind fire. The more you danced, the happier and more unfettered you felt, until you were vaporized out of existence and your right and left lobes were both quaking--and then you knew you'd reached your peak.
This passage from Wei Hui's novel highlights the escapist function of the club, whose combination of ambience and music brought about an ecstatic state of altered consciousness, as well as the important role played by the DJ as-Shaman in cultivating this other-worldly experience. This was around the time that the club drug Ecstasy, which was brought into China from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, became a staple of the Shanghai clubbing scene. (13) As Wei Hui writes in her novel, the people who frequented Y.Y. were quite similar to the crowd at D.D's--a mixture of overseas Chinese, other Asians, foreigners (laowai) and locals. As Lee later acknowledged in an interview, much of D.D's crowd was slowly moving over to the more centrally located Y.Y.
Both clubs offered opportunities for transnational encounters and experiences of various sorts, from furtive one-night stands to more enduring friendships and long-term relationships. Such experiences could even happen inside the club itself. In Wei Hui's novel Shanghai Baby, the female Shanghainese protagonist Niki has sex with her German lover Mark in the toilet at the top of the stairs leading to Y.Y.'s dance floor. While such encounters were likely rare, it was common to hear stories of foreign and overseas Chinese men "picking up" local Chinese women in these clubs. Knowing that it was good for business, club owner Tang sometimes encouraged such encounters by introducing men and women he knew. Most of these encounters, to the best of the author's knowledge, could not be classified as prostitution, nor did the managers of the club profit from introducing female prostitutes to male customers. Neither D.D's nor Y.Y. tended to attract the diaomazi or "fishing girls" who could be found in other clubs. (14) Nor did these clubs attract as many prostitutes as the discos, whose customer base could also be found elsewhere--namely, the clubs and bars surrounding the large, five-star hotels, favoured by temporary visitors, usually Chinese or foreign businessmen, who were more willing and able to spend money for sex. In fact, the high entrance fees of these underground clubs generally served to keep professional sex workers out of them (there were occasional exceptions to this rule). Women who did enter these clubs often did so in the company and under the patronage of men. Sometimes women went clubbing in small groups, and often their personal relationships with the owners such as Chou and Tang meant that these women could get through the door without paying the stiff entrance fees. In what is internationally recognised as a standard club trick, doing so encouraged more male patronage by allowing more "available" women to enter the club. Without doubt, these clubs were arenas for the negotiation of physical pleasures and the circulation of bodies, connecting the transnational community of laowai and Chinese returnees from overseas (haigui) with the mainly female local and out-of-towner crowd. While local Chinese men did patronise these clubs as well, in the late 1990s they generally possessed neither the economic clout nor the cultural cachet of foreigners and overseas Chinese, and certainly they did not attend the clubs as frequently or habitually as the latter. Some young local and migrants from elsewhere in China (waidi) might have served as "little ducks" (xiao yazi) or male prostitutes for wealthy local and overseas Chinese women, but again, this practice was not as institutionalised in D.D's or Y.Y. as it was in other clubs around town. (15)
Tang and Lee's move to Y.Y. signalled the beginning of the end of D.D's. The management of D.D's did little to convince the crowd to stay. With its out-of-the-way location and lax management, D.D's eventually folded, moving temporarily to a more central location in Changshu Road near the Hilton Hotel before finally closing. D.D's folded just as the popularity of Y.Y. was peaking.
Nevertheless, Y.Y. also lost out to the growing competition and eventually lost its status as a unique late-night clubber's haunt. Some people cite lax management as another reason that Y.Y. lost its popularity. More importantly, with more and more clubs springing up in the city offering different experiences, it became harder to sustain the rationale for such a high entrance fee. It became more difficult for people to convince themselves that waiting in line and paying 100 RMB was worthwhile, and as the crowd dwindled, so did the only real reason for going. In other words, Y.Y. lost its cachet. Since 2000, the basement club of Y.Y., captured so vividly by Wei Hui in Shanghai Baby, has been virtually empty. The cafe on the ground floor of the club is now used as a way station and cooling-off spot for late-night clubbers. Meanwhile, since 2000 a new and more sophisticated clubbing model imported from post-handover Hong Kong emerged in the city, sparking off a new epoch in the city's nightlife.
Park 97
An important theme here is the connection with Hong Kong. The "handover" of Hong Kong from the UK to the PRC in 1997 was certainly a watershed, in that it signalled the end of an era in which Hong Kong had completely overshadowed Mainland cities as an internationalised city. To be sure, Hong Kong today still enjoys an international culture unparalleled in Mainland China, but in the years prior to and immediately following the handover, the exodus of many Hong Kongers out of the city and the influx of a small percentage of them into Shanghai seeking business opportunities set the stage for the transfer of know-how, culture and experience from Hong Kong to Shanghai. One result was Park 97.
Founded in 1997, and named after the year of Hong Kong's return to the motherland, Park 97 has played a distinctive role in the city's clubbing circuit, pioneering new forms of club culture and bringing international talent to Shanghai, such as A-list DJ Paul Oakenfold, to play at special promotional events. Many saw 1997 as heralding the beginning of Hong Kong's demise as Asia's premier global metropolis and its slow but sure replacement by Shanghai as China's leading commercial city. The complexity of the spaces that make up Park 97, the diversity of its patrons and performers and its success as a clubbing institution over the past ten years make it an ideal case study for the development of Shanghai's club scene. Yet Park 97, like D.D's and Y.Y., will also likely be a "rise and fall" story.
A fortuitous introduction to one of the club's co-founders, Tony Zhang (Zhang Haodong), in early 1997 enabled me to gain a privileged vantage point into the dynamics surrounding the founding of this club. Born in 1964 and raised in Shanghai, Zhang migrated with his family to Los Angeles as a teenager, where he earned a university degree before returning to his original hometown to start up some business enterprises. Fluent in Shanghainese, Mandarin and English, he is able to navigate both worlds with equal ease. Although an American citizen, Zhang has made Shanghai his permanent home since the 1990s.
In April 1997, Zhang invited me to meet the members of the 97 Group, a polyglot group of Europeans, Australians and Chinese, who during the previous two decades had been instrumental in developing Hong Kong's Lan Kwai Fong district into that city's hippest nightlife scene. Realising that Shanghai was rapidly changing into an international metropolis ripe for the introduction of new and more sophisticated forms of entertainment, and seeing the potential generated by the impending handover of Hong Kong, the 97 Group pounced on the opportunity to set up a nightclub in Shanghai along similar lines to the clubs and restaurants in Lan Kwai Fong.
Initially, the idea was to set up a club that would resurrect both the image and spirit of Old Shanghai through its decor and design. The government-owned Jinjiang Hotel Group had hired a New York-based architectural firm to renovate the old Park Hotel in Nanjing Road, an Art Deco masterpiece that had suffered decades of neglect, as well as the Peace Hotel on the Bund. The 97 Group hired the same firm to design Park 97 and also enlisted the aid of the Shanghai Film Studio, which had recently built a reconstruction of Old Shanghai featuring Nanjing Road and other sites for use as a set for the Chen Kaige film, Temptress Moon. The original plan was to include a tram inside the club along with rickshaws and other props that would kindle nostalgic visions of Old Shanghai. The success of Judy's Too and D.D's, two clubs geared towards the expat scene that utilised Old Shanghai imagery to enhance their authenticity, supported the notion that nostalgia sold well, at least among the overseas Chinese and foreign expat communities. This was especially true in the case of Judy's Too, which in the late 1990s featured two rickshaws--powerful symbols of colonialism in Asia--in which customers could sit enjoying their drinks.
Eventually, the plan to create a 1930s nostalgia club was abandoned, and in retrospect, wisely so. After rethinking the matter, the 97 Group decided instead to construct a posh, ultra modern club that would lead the city into the 21st century rather than reviving the faded glories of a distant and ideologically problematic colonial past. Opened in 1997, the original Park 97 nightclub was at first mainly a restaurant and lounge space, occupying the first floor of a building located in Fuxing Park very close to the home of the famous Nationalist general, Zhang Xueliang, and not far from the home of Sun Yat-sen, now a public museum. Thus, even though the club was modern and contemporary in its design, its location and the buildings surrounding it still connected it to Shanghai's pre-Liberation era. The design elements of the club included several levels of raised seating both in the main restaurant area and in an elevated area behind the main room, giving it a 1930s nightclub feel and a "see and be seen" aura. A giant mural of a nude Caucasian woman reclining in the style of a Matisse was painted on the far wall of the main room, adding a touch of glamour, decadence and kitsch to the club. The rooms were painted in dark, lush shades of red, purple and brown, and the dim lighting contributed to a contemporary lounge atmosphere. In an adjoining room was a gallery space, painted in a deep shade of red, which was occupied by a local art agency run by a Swiss entrepreneur who collected and sold avant-garde Chinese art. Shanghart had a gallery space in the same building as the club, housing some of most progressive artworks being produced in China. As such, Park 97 embodied a longstanding relationship between nightlife, popular music and avant-garde art that was established in the Western world with the first cabarets in Montmartre, Paris in the late 19th century (though arguably this connection can be found even earlier in the courtesan culture of Shanghai and of Edo Japan). (16)
Park 97 was in effect the first sophisticated lounge club in Shanghai, setting a trend that other clubs would eventually follow. Patrons went to the club to dine at one of several restaurants--including a Japanese fusion restaurant, a Spanish Tapas bar and an Italian restaurant, making Park 97 a sort of microcosm of world cuisine--as well as to converse, drink fancy foreign wines and liquors, listen to music, smoke cigars and appreciate contemporary avant-garde Chinese art. Most customers rarely stayed beyond midnight, preferring to move on to more rollicking dance clubs or else call it a night. In order to promote the club, its managers often organised special events in the gallery, including talks by locally based academics, often on the ever-popular theme of Old Shanghai, as well as fashion shows, balls and other cultural events that catered to the expatriate and overseas Chinese communities. It was also possible for customers to arrange their own events, which of course brought additional business to the club.
During this three-year period, the Park 97 nightclub stood apart from most other expat-oriented clubs in town, such as Malone's American Cafe or the nearby Shanghai Sally's, an expat bar that emphasised dancing and heavy drinking. However, Park 97 could not sustain its position as the premier elite nightclub and lounge space in the city and was compelled by economic, social and cultural forces to join the mainstream of dance club culture. Fortunately for the club owners, they could make that transition without sacrificing either its prime location or its original layout. The rapid evolution of clubbing in Shanghai ensured such a smooth transition. By the year 2000, clubs in Shanghai had become much more sophisticated than they had been in the heyday of D.D's in the mid-1990s.
To recapitulate, in the early 1990s, most dance clubs in Shanghai were cavernous discos with a large dance floor surrounded by places to sit and watch the dancing crowd. Clubs such as New York New York, J.J.s, Galaxy and Total Disco played mainstream American and Cantopop music, familiar tunes usually long since out of date in the West or Hong Kong. The mid-1990s saw the appearance of several underground basement clubs, pioneered by D.D's and Y.Y., whose DJs spun more progressive hip hop and house tunes. Judy's Too and Manhattan in Maoming Road and other similar clubs built upon the hostess bar model, i.e., bars featuring women paid to drink with male customers--to fashion a club culture catering to foreign, overseas and local Chinese revellers as well as local Chinese prostitutes. By the late 1990s, these models had spurred dozens of imitators catering to a more local crowd and were becoming obsolete. A new generation of dance clubs with more sophisticated layouts, design elements, lighting and music was emerging on the scene. These often contained a much smaller dance floor surrounded by a more complex environment of bars, lounges, lofts and other intimate spaces.
Meanwhile, the success of Judy's Too had spurred a rash of other bars and clubs catering to the international crowd, and new clubs such as Pegasus in Huaihai Road, a techno-club also run by Judy Qiu and Guandi, a posh club located next to Park 97 in Fuxing Park, offered late-night clubbers the chance to "see and be seen" in a club environment. The competition of Guandi was especially influential on Park 97, since it was located in the same part of the park and was within easy strolling distance. In the face of the growing competition, Park 97 was faced with a crucial decision: Either join the clubbing crowd, or fall to the wayside. In 2000, another group known as the Lan Kwai Fong Group, also from Hong Kong, entered the management structure of the Park 97 club nexus. According to both Zhang and Lee, who were also involved in setting up the new club, the new management decided to change the commercially unproductive gallery space into a dance club, physically separated from the rest of the building by guarded doors, and requiring an admission fee. They dubbed it the California Club.
The California Club attests to the principle noted earlier that people enjoy clubbing in tight spaces. Rather than converting the entire gallery space into a dance hall, the club's new owners chose to construct a large circular bar in the centre of the club, which squeezed the surrounding space into a few square meters of danceable floor. A DJ booth was constructed above and beyond the bar in the club's interior, occupied by Chris Lee and other DJs who played the latest house and techno music imported from abroad. Surrounding the bar on all sides were high round tables, which clubbers could occupy with their bottles of Chivas or XO, giving them a sense of superiority and a privileged vantage point over the milling crowd. Another dance space was built behind the DJ booth, from which elite clubbers could look out through a glass window on the disco floor. Semi-private rooms adjacent to the floor could also be booked for private parties.
For Park 97, design has been a crucial factor in attracting and maintaining a crowd. The end result was that one could visit Park 97 on any night of the week, and even if the rest of the club was nearly empty, the California Club was always jam-packed full of people. The central location of the bar also ensured that patrons were supplied with a steady round of drinks by a squad of well-trained bartenders, making it one of the most lucrative pieces of nightlife real estate in the city. Chou, one of the original owners of D.D's and a veteran of the clubbing scene in Shanghai told me that the club was earning as much as 100,000 RMB per night, and much more on weekends. Other people in the club industry also claimed that between 2000 and 2005 Park 97 was the most lucrative club in Shanghai.
Park 97 went through additional changes in layout in the early to mid-2000s. In October 2003, the Upstairs lounge was opened on the second floor, decorated in a red colour scheme reminiscent of D.D's. It offers bars, tables and sofas as well as two semi-enclosed private baofang, separated from the main lounge area by curtains. It usually features live music from locally based bands, including calypso, jazz and blues, as well as a DJ who spins popular dance tunes. The design of the club also enables various social and ethnic groups to find a comfortable niche within its complex environment, allowing for a consistently diverse crowd.
In 2005, the club was closed down briefly during the summer and reopened in the fall with a new dance floor and bar area called Lux. Located on the ground floor, where the sushi and tapas bars had been, Lux features an oval bar and a small dance floor, along with an elevated stage for DJs and live music acts. The stairs leading to the Upstairs lounge were opened out so that clubbers going upstairs could look around and see the revellers on the floor of Lux. Meanwhile, the California Club was also renovated, its space was enlarged and a new DJ booth was built further in the back of the club; it now features two dance floors instead of one. Thus, following the renovations of 2005, the Park 97 club contained three separate bars and at least three separate areas (California Club, Lux and Upstairs) for drinking and dancing, each with its own distinct style of music and each attracting a distinct clubbing crowd.
Within the Park 97 club nexus, a broad distinction can be made between the spaces occupied by various types of clubbers. However, it is important to note that these are merely broad tendencies and that several different types of clubbers tend to occupy most if not all of the spaces described below at any given time. While Westerners tend to prefer public drinking along an open bar, overseas and local Chinese tend to prefer the privacy of tables and baofang, where they can enjoy the exclusive company of a small group of friends without being disturbed by social pirates. While Westerners tend to prefer beer or mixed drinks, overseas and local Chinese prefer Chivas, XO, Jack Daniels or other brand name drinks that confer a high status on their bearers.
A Chinese friend was born and raised in Shanghai, but moved to the United States when he was 15 years old and earned a university degree there before returning to China. He once explained to me that most Chinese clubbers feel that it is a waste of money to buy a bottle of beer, since one can easily buy the same beer for a fraction of the price in a convenience store or supermarket. Moreover, when drinking, he and other Chinese clubbers whom I came to know felt that it was more economical to order a bottle of hard liquor than to keep ordering individual drinks. Yet fundamentally, it is important for Chinese clubbers, especially haigui or "sea turtles", to have a high-status bottle resting prominently on the table, which helps to distinguish them from Chinese who do not have the cultural and economic advantages of an overseas education. Also, ordering a bottle of whiskey or champagne enables drinking to be a communal experience, shared by the group and often purchased and distributed by the highest-ranking male within the group--usually either the oldest and/or the most prosperous male, who often serves as a cue facto host. Although some Chinese-American friends will often share the cost of a bottle among the men in the group--women are never asked to contribute--it is not uncommon even for a Chinese man educated in the United States to take on this prestigious role of host, paying for drinks as a way to build up "face".
In the back room of the Upstairs lounge, separated by thick red curtains, are two baofang. They play an important role in the localisation of global club cultures within the matrix of Park 97 and other similar clubbing environments in the city. These semi-private rooms are almost always occupied by groups of Chinese partiers, toasting each other with glasses of a prestige drink poured from a communal pitcher. Between 2003 and 2005 it became popular to mix Chivas with sweet green tea. As one male Chinese clubber confessed to me, this was done as a way of "fooling the girls" (pian pian nuhaizi) into getting drunk, since the sweet drink seemed less alcoholic than it really was (clubbers in the West often use the same tactic with sweet yet strong alcoholic drinks such as the infamous Long Island Ice Tea). Oblivious to people outside, these clubbers enjoy their own private party, conversing, flirting and often playing communal drinking games to break the ice. The rule for such spaces is simple: Unless you know these people or are introduced to them by a friend, you are definitely not welcome there. Here, the differences between Chinese and Western-oriented club cultures become more pronounced. Finger games, some of which date back to Chinese antiquity, are the norm in these rooms whereas these games would definitely be considered uncool in more public spaces such as the California Club downstairs. Within the baofang, the focus is on the social group as a whole. The circular sofas make it easy for everyone to see and interact with each other. While laowai are not unwelcome in these spaces, they are usually compelled to adapt to Chinese drinking and game-playing cultures. That Park 97 is able to encapsulate these diverse forms of clubbing is a key to its longstanding success in the Shanghai clubbing circuit.
As Malbon's study of London clubbing argues, each micro-space inside a club is a negotiated, contested and "territorialised" space. (17) Some clubbers focus on the dance floor, which can be further subdivided into particular micro-spaces and strategic choices, e.g., nearer to the bar or closer to the DJ. Others occupy the bar. Some prefer to stand in crowded spots in order to attract members of the opposite sex, while still others favour the more private, reserved areas where they can show off their high status. Since space is at a premium, negotiation, contest and intimidation are decisive factors in this process of occupation. The stakes are high. Clubs such as Park 97 are places to "see and be seen", places to show off one's status, bearing and position in Shanghai society, whether the object is to attract members of the opposite sex, party with a group of mates or simply to look cool (often all three at once). Whereas Westerners or Africans are easily recognised as different and special by their appearance alone, overseas Chinese or haigui must make more effort to distinguish themselves from locals through their attire, behaviour and most importantly, their spending habits. This helps to explain their tendency to occupy the more privileged zones, such as the baofang, and to consume more ostentatious and expensive drinks.
According to Katya Sawyer, who worked as marketing manager for the Club from 2004 to 2007, between 2004 and 2005, Park 97 enjoyed unparalleled success in Shanghai. (18) In April 2004 the club organised a visit by Paul Oakenfold, then one of the top-rated DJs in the world, to play at a special event. I remember that the Club was packed well beyond normal capacity, with crowds of people clamouring outside to pay the entrance fee. Oakenfold was stationed in the middle restaurant area towards the back. All the tables were removed and special laser lights were set up in the main hall. The music was played in the California Club, while TV screens beamed the party in the main hall into the smaller club. Meanwhile, in the Upstairs Club, a calypso band played to people who preferred a smaller crowd and space to dance. With the success of the Oakenfold party, other clubs began to invite A-list DJs to Shanghai, following Park 97's initiative.
Yet by 2005, Park 97's heyday was on the wane. After the building of the new Lux club within it, Park 97 was no longer as popular as before. Sawyer admitted that Lux created problems for the club. "We built Lux to compensate for the increase of people coming to the city, in the belief that we'd be able to fill it. We did at the beginning by building a competitive venue in our own venue. If Lux was busy, Upstairs was not--too much of same crowd." In its ambition to accommodate more people, Park 97 neglected one of the rules that had served it so well: people like clubbing in a tight, crowded space. The addition of Lux dispersed the crowd and gave the club less appeal as a result. Yet competition was its ultimate downfall. The success of the nightclub industry in the city during the previous year had spurred a number of new clubs to open, and these created competition. One was Bar Rouge, a club opened in 2005 on the eighth floor of Building 18 on the Bund, offering stunning views of the newly built Pudong skyline as well as the old buildings on the Puxi side. The opening of Bar Rouge and its immediate success in drawing a large crowd not only hurt Park 97, but also spurred a rash of clubs and bars on the Bund, including the Glamour Bar below M on the Bund (a popular restaurant) in Building 5, Laris and New Heights in Building 3 and Attica, all built between 2005 and 2006.
Another type of competition came from chain clubs, which began to pop up in the early 2000s. The most striking example is Babyface, a club chain that has opened at least eight clubs in China since its first club opened in Guangzhou. In 2005, Babyface opened in Shanghai in Maoming Road. It quickly developed a reputation among Chinese clubbers as a place where foreigners were not welcome. It also developed a reputation as a "pick-up joint". According to some of my Chinese returnee friends who had frequented Park 97 until then, Babyface was now the place to go to meet young, attractive women. Many of the people who had frequented the California Club for just that purpose moved over to Babyface. With its slick designwork, overpowering music and state-of-the-art lightshow, a large bar in the centre of the club, a small dance floor surrounded by high round tables, and lounge seating at the edges with pricier ones on the second floor, Babyface proved a great success. After most of the clubs in Maoming Road closed under government pressure, Babyface moved to a new location between Huaihai and Jinling Roads, where it is still successful. The new Babyface features a hip-hop club and a separate techno club, but otherwise is nearly identical to the original club in Maoming Road. It is the only club of its kind that is packed even on a Sunday night.
Bar Rouge and other new clubs and bars on the Bund lured away some of the Park 97 crowd, namely the people who frequented the Upstairs lounge--mostly foreigners but also hip local and overseas Chinese--while Babyface drew many people from the California Club. Another club, the Angel VIP Club, located in Wulumugi Road near Yan'an Road opened in 2005. It used a similar model to Babyface, offering one main hall with a powerful sound system, central bar and a small dance floor with private "VIP" rooms on the sides. This club had the additional cachet of being "opened" by a famous Hong Kong movie star. Like Babyface, it also developed a reputation as a "Chinese" club that was not friendly to foreigners. Three reviews of the Angel VIP Club submitted anonymously to Smartshanghai.com, a website started in 2005 that focuses on the city's nightlife, reveal the tensions and rifts that were developing between local and overseas Chinese and foreigners:
user loli, Wednesday, 21 Sept. 2005 VIP room is another CHEAP babyface crowd with the same management. I call it the "new" rich crowd, they are rude, uneducated local crowd with money to burn but No manners, they just sit around and play those really "tea house" games with Girls who look fab but are just trying to look for that "rich" guy. If you are a Chinese Educated person, you wont like it there. Stick to Bar Rouge or Park 97! user writegrace, Saturday, 6 May 2006 vip room is made for the coolest by the coolest. ya, and that means not making every accommodation for expats. patrons may seem rude to some, but they just want their privacy in hanging out amongst themselves and do not want to bother with cocky expats who think it's ok to grab chinese girls left and right and can only afford to hold a beer (or two) in their hands. do the norm and reserve a table with at least 2 bottles, then maybe those fab girls can bear to sit down with you for a few minutes user keesha, Thursday, 29 June 2006 The problem in the new emerging China is that young chinky punks who just found some money to burn are arrogant and rude. They are not highly educated, lack charm and finesse and trying to ape the Westerners. The PLA should have put these guys away.
This online exchange between "loll", "whitegrace" and "keesha" is interesting in that it lays bare many of the tensions and differences that exist in the Shanghai clubbing scene. People like "keesha" resent the boorish manners of some Chinese clubbers who guard their own clubbing territory, while Chinese clubbers like "writegrace" resent the tendency for "cocky" Westerners to easily socialise with Chinese girls in a club without undergoing the normal ritual preparations, i.e., booking a table and preparing a bottle of expensive liquor for the girl to consume. Meanwhile, "loll" focuses on class distinctions among Chinese clubbers, arguing that clubs such as Babyface and Angel VIP cater to the nouveau riche (baofahu) whose sole attraction is their newfound wealth, while other clubs such as Bar Rouge and Park 97 are for "educated" Chinese. In this case, the distinction is one of intellectual and social capital (higher education) versus economic capital (wealth). It is interesting to add that both Bar Rouge and Park 97, as discussed above, are places frequented by foreigners. Thus an abiding sense of differing cultural norms (beer in hand versus bottle on table), education levels and attitudes behind issues of race and sexuality are all reflected in this interchange about the relative merits of different clubbing cultures and spaces within the metropolis of Shanghai.
Muse and Muse II
One of the keys to Park 97's success was a Hong Konger named Thomas Yeung who served as floor manager of the club during its heyday. According to Sawyer, and attested to by many Chinese friends, Yeung had an outstanding ability to make people feel at home, going out of his way to talk and socialise with hundreds of people who frequented the club, many of whom he got to know by name. He also cultivated an elite clientele of wealthy Hong Kongers, Taiwanese and other overseas Chinese, as well as haigui, who regularly booked tables and baofang. His list included Hong Kong film stars, some of whom visited the club during trips to Shanghai, as well as top flight Chinese models.
In 2006, a new club called Muse opened in the New Factories space in Yuyao Road, a somewhat out-of-the-way location on the clubbing circuit. It occupies a 1,500-square metre former factory space. The club's owner is a Shanghainese American, Michael Sun, a wealthy entrepreneur who owned a club in Los Angeles and wished to set one up in Shanghai. He joined with a Taiwanese partner named Michael Chao and Hong Kong film star Carina Lau to create Muse. From the beginning, the owners decided to distinguish their club through its elaborate designwork. Sun hired Neri & Hu, a locally based design company, to design the club. (19) Neri & Hu are a team of American-trained designers who had established themselves in Shanghai and had already gained kudos for designing the interior of the prestigious 3 on the Bund Building. The design of Muse was the product of a painstaking process of negotiation between the designer and the club owner. At first, Sun had a fixed concept for how the club should look, but Neri rejected the idea of a set model in favour of creative experimentation. Early on the design team was fixated on having a main hall and a second upper floor with a large private room looking down on the main room, thus separating the "masses" from the "elite". Eventually it was decided to separate the upper floor entirely and turn it into a private room. The upper room would be dubbed "Carina's bedroom" (after Carina Lau) and would be reserved only for the most exclusive guests. There were also negotiations concerning the main floor. At first, Sun wanted to occupy the entire space with seating, but Neri insisted that Chinese clubbers did not want to be conspicuously seated in the middle of the club, but would prefer seating along the edges of the main room. One of the key decisions that Neri made was to have a long, thin bar in the centre of the main room, and a very small dance floor at one end. Both sides were filled with lounge-style seating. Other features included a cage-like structure housing a private room, known as the "beehive" and men's and women's toilets connected by a largely obscured glass partition. Yet designwork alone could not attract people to the new club. When Muse opened, it faced competition from a number of clubs that had already established themselves as "places to be".
One of the keys to Muse's success was the club's hiring Yeung to serve as General Manager. He joined Muse along with several of his co-workers from Park 97, bringing with them not only years of knowledge in running and managing a Shanghai club, but also a long list of clientele. The "defection" of Yeung and other Park 97 employees to Muse in 2006 hammered one more nail in the coffin lid of a club whose fortunes were already on the wane.
Upon arriving in Shanghai in June 2007 after nearly a year away, I called my Chinese friend Tony to find out what was new in the club scene. (20) "Come to Muse, it's now the hottest club," he said. Tony was one of Yeung's regular customers, and as soon as Yeung moved over to Muse, so did Tony and most of his friends. Tony claimed that Muse had the "hottest" girls and the trendiest people. He booked a table for Friday night and invited me to join him and some of his friends.
Muse is located at the corner of Yuyao and Xikang Roads. (21) At about 10 p.m., I walked up a flight of concrete steps into the building and then headed into the club. I walked around and found Tony at a well-positioned lounge spot near the dance floor, but not too close. He was with a couple of colleagues, including a Caucasian fellow from Manchester. We hung out with some of Tony's Chinese female friends playing Chinese dice. (22)
The music was "funkadelic". The sound system was good and the music was not too loud--you could actually chat with people at that point. However, over the night it got progressively louder, until my eardrums were ready to explode. The music picked up pace and became more techno, with a strong and steady bass beat that reverberated through the floor and shook your bones. When I first arrived, the place was modestly crowded but over the next two hours it filled up to capacity and more. There must have been over a thousand people there at its peak. Shanghai's fashionistas, the glamour girls on the nightlife circuit, were out in droves, many of them tall and skinny, wearing various combinations of black or white and many with bobs that left the neck exposed.
There is a hip-hop club on the second floor. A set of open concrete stairs in the middle of the club leads upstairs. A pair of 40-something African American gentlemen were giving a fine live performance, one on guitar and the other on sax, backed by some recorded tracks. They sang a great rendition of "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder, among other songs. I had seen them perform a couple years back at Park 97. I also saw Yeung managing the floor of the hip-hop club, and Tony mentioned that many clubbers from Park 97 had moved over to Muse.
Though Muse has a very different atmosphere from Park 97, there are some similarities. Both have a ground floor dance area and a second floor live performance venue, which operates on the weekends (on weekdays it is a private section). Another similarity is that there was a noticeable segmentation of Chinese and westerners, with the Chinese preferring the lounge seating of the ground floor and the westerners heading upstairs to the hip-hop club, where casual social mixing was more encouraged by the open setup. Of course there were plenty of Chinese and foreigners on both floors, but it was a noticeable difference. The similarities to Park 97 end there though. The setup of the place reminded me of the Chinese discos such as Babyface and the Angel VIP Club, with one large hall, a long central bar, and no place to escape the noise. Park 97 has a restaurant area that is totally separated from the disco club, plus it has Fuxing Park. It is a much more segmented club space. In Muse, you are stuck with the noise wherever you go, though it is a bit better upstairs. As the music got louder over the evening, the lack of escape zones became more apparent.
The dance floor on the ground floor club was tiny. A Chinese DJ was in the booth, spinning techno tunes. The floor could accommodate at most 20 people--and that was a very tight crowd. Obviously the main purpose of the club was not to dance but to see and be seen, and to sell drinks. Most people at the lounge tables were drinking brand name liquors by the bottle. Every now and then a waiter would walk by with a bucket full of syringes filled with coloured gels and lit up by a sparkler. Otherwise the club was quite dark. A couple of times Chris (the fellow from Manchester) and I got up to dance. The dancing crowd was small. The usual scene: girls dancing defensively in pairs as the guys circled around them hoping to separate them. I got lost in the pounding beat for a few minutes, but as my ears could only take so much I left the club just as it was beginning to peak at 1:30 a.m.
A second visit to Muse in July confirmed the elite status of the club. Outside that night were three Ferraris and two Porsches, conspicuously parked in front of the club's street entrance. This also reminded me of Park 97 in its heyday when brightly coloured BMWs, Porsches and other luxury cars were often parked outside the club. Inside, a special theme party was taking place, featuring young men and women--Chinese and foreign--dressed in "S&M" gear. Tony had booked a table and was playing dice with some friends. The club was as packed and vibrant as it had been in June. However, when I returned on a Tuesday night in August, it was practically empty. I entered around 9 p.m. to interview some of the workers. Gradually the club filled, though not nearly as many as on a weekend night. One of the most interesting comments a bartender made was that as much as two thirds of the people there that night had been hired by the club management to make it look full. I had never come across this practice in Park 97 or other clubs, but this bartender insisted that most clubs in Shanghai employ it.
Ironically, Tony and other Chinese returnee friends claimed that Muse was now on the wane. Apparently the out-of-the-way location had trumped the intricate designwork. Meanwhile Sun had bought the space of a defunct club called Win Win located on the fifth floor of Plaza 66, a building in Nanjing West Road, and had opened a new club called M2 (short for Muse 2). He had wanted to change the design of the club, but Neri had convinced him that the original design worked and that it was the management that was likely to blame for the original club's downfall. Since its opening at the end of July, M2 had become "the place" for trendy clubbers.
I visited the club on a Saturday in September at Tony's invitation. It consists of one large oval hall with a very small dance floor at one end, a long bar on the other side filled as usual with mostly foreigners and tables in the middle occupied by Chinese clubbers. Running up the side behind the bar is a set of stairs leading to a middle tier where a private lounge space overlooks the main hall. At the top of the stairs is another set of lounge areas looking out over the hall. That night we occupied one of the privileged tables at the top. The club was packed by 10:30 p.m. Our group, consisting of several Chinese men, a few foreign men other than myself and half a dozen young Chinese female friends of Tony, played the usual dice and finger games. That night a special promotional event was held to promote the Wyborowa Exquisite brand of vodka, which we were all drinking. The promotion consisted of several male and female dancers clad in revealing clothing, along with a Chinese nude model covered in blue body paint, who stood on the stage near the dance floor. On the top floor, Yeung ran about shaking hands and dealing with the various groups of exclusive patrons. We noticed Carina Lau walk through into a more private area. This was the place to be all right, if you had the money. We ended our party around 3 a.m., and split the cost of the liquor among six men, coming to 800 RMB per person.
Conclusion
Clubbing is an increasingly important form of social interaction and cultural distinction for thousands of Chinese and foreigners living and working in Shanghai, just as it is in many other large metropolises in the developed world. Over the past decade, the clubbing scene in Shanghai has grown and expanded greatly, while investment in individual clubs has also grown significantly. The clubs covered in detail in this essay, D.D's, Y.Y., Park 97 and Muse, were all innovative and influential in their own ways. Each drew upon the energy and success as well as the client base of its predecessor in order to build the momentum of the clubbing scene, while also introducing new elements. D.D's was the first club to build a clientele around an "underground" member's club with a unique collection of vinyl records played by expert DJs trained in the world's large cosmopolitan centres. Y.Y. carried this "underground" music scene into the heart of the city, while Park 97 brought it above ground and constructed the most complex and intricately designed club space in Shanghai since the 1930s. While D.D's and Y.Y. were smaller and more inclusive in nature, offering foreigners and Chinese, overseas and locals a common space to party, Park 97 reflected the growing desire of affluent overseas and local Chinese to express their own sense of class distinction by building private booths, lounge spaces and VIP rooms into both of its floors. Muse carried this principle even further, constructing a private space above the main public club, which itself was divided into a set of hierarchically arranged spaces, some uniquely designed, which could be booked on a rising price scale.
In the mid- to late 1990s, when clubbing was still in its infancy, music served as a leading indicator of distinction. Yet arguably with the rise of illegal downloading, music magazines, pirated CDs and other sources of musical knowledge, it became easier for people in China to gain exposure to music of all sorts. The success of Park 97's Oakenfold party in 2004 is a testament to the popularity and fame of top-flight DJs in Shanghai by that time. Ten years before, it is doubtful that any local Chinese who had not travelled abroad would have been familiar with any DJs in the West. By 2005, as it became more common for clubs in Shanghai to hire A-list DJs or to hire local DJs (including foreigners) to play different genres and styles, music ceased to be a key form of distinction in the clubbing scene. Instead, location and design became the prime factor in sorting out the clubs.
Following the poor decision of Park 97 to add a new facility, Lux, in 2005, Muse is the ultimate example of a club that used expensive and intricate designwork to attract and maintain a core elite clientele. Yet its out-of-the-way location could not compensate for the ample space provided by the former factory warehouse or the creative experimental designwork of Neri & Hu. Instead, the Muse crowd retreated back to the main current of club culture in Shanghai by shifting to a new location in Nanjing Road.
The rapid development, growth and demise of clubs in Shanghai reflects the fast-paced economy and quickly changing consumer culture of the city as it continues to experiment with new, internationalised forms of culture while creating new class identities out of taste differentials. Throughout this essay it is apparent that foreigners and overseas Chinese, particularly Hong Kongers and Shanghainese returnees (sometimes one and the same) have played a key role in developing the city's elite club culture. What is less apparent is the role that local Shanghainese play in this field, and the author can only offer tentative suggestions as to how much the rise of a white collar middle class composed of local employees of multinationals has contributed to the popularity of clubbing in Shanghai. In any case, this essay can scratch only the surface of a phenomenon that involves choices not only in styles of music, but also clothing, food and entertainment. More research on club cultures in Shanghai is needed to connect the clubbing industry to other industries such as fashion, food and wine, architecture and art. It is hoped that this account of the development of Shanghai's clubbing scene will encourage more people to study the leisure culture of this rapidly developing city and to assess the industries and forces behind its development.
This essay stems from my own personal interest in dance clubs in Shanghai. It is the product of numerous drafts and revisions. I would like to thank all of the anonymous reviewers who read through this essay during its development and offered valuable suggestions for revision. I apologise for my stubbornness in not following all of the suggestions they have given me over the years. As a foreigner with a special interest in nightlife culture (this being the subject of my doctoral dissertation, though the focus was on the 1920s-40s) it was relatively easy to gain entrance into most clubs and access people in the clubbing industry. I would like to thank all those who gave their time to answering questions, especially Tony Zhang, Chris Lee, Katya Sawyer and Lyndon Neri, all of whose ideas and observations are included in this essay. I would also like to thank my Chinese friends Tony and Edward, both of whom have proved invaluable guides to clubbing in Shanghai. I owe special gratitude to James Farrer for encouraging me to undertake this study of clubbing in contemporary Shanghai and for helping me to adhere to certain methodological and ethnographic guidelines. I take full blame for any errors in interpretation or methodology that may arise.
(1) Most academic literature on clubbing focuses on the contemporary club scenes in the UK. Examples are Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996); Ben Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy, and Vitality (New York: Routledge, 1999); Paul Chatterton and Robert Hollands, Urban Nightscapes: Youth Cultures, Pleasure Spaces and Corporate Power (London: Routledge, 2003); and Phil Jackson, Inside Clubbing. Sensual Experiments in the Art of Being Human (New York: Berg, 2004). Very few studies of club cultures have been done outside the UK let alone in non-Western societies.
(2) "Dance club" here refers to a commercial establishment that features dancing as a primary activity. These are alternatively known as "discos" and "nightclubs", and tend to feature special areas designated for dancing and hire DJs or live bands. Not included here are the social dance halls (wuting) that were ubiquitous in Shanghai during the 1990s. James Farrer makes a clear distinction between discos and social dance halls in his study of Shanghai nightlife. See James Farrer, "Dancing Through the Market Transition: Disco and Dance Hall Sociability in Shanghai", in The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, ed. Deborah Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 226-49. Farrer focuses on the sensual aspects of dancing as a form of personal expression and sexualised play, both in the social dancehalls patronised by middle-aged Shanghainese and in discos patronised by younger people. While drawing on brief visits to clubs in the early 2000s, most of his fieldwork and research focuses on the 1980s and early 1990s. A chapter on dance as a form of "play" also appears in James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
(3) I spent a total of roughly four years living in Shanghai between 1997 and 2007, and at an average of two nights per week visiting clubs and bars: this works out to a total of around 400 nights of site visits spread out over ten years. During this period I visited a variety of clubs, many of which have come and gone.
(4) For example, while drug use certainly exists in the Shanghai club scene, I have no experience with that aspect and have little to say about it. Nor do I spend any time discussing the ubiquitous phenomenon of the hostess clubs, which is covered by other papers in this volume. The best study thus far of hostess clubs in an East Asian city is Anne Allison, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
(5) For a general academic study of Shanghai's growth and development during this period, see Jos Gamble, Shanghai in Transition: Changing Perspectives and Social Contours of a Chinese Metropolis (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003). For a more journalistic account, see Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China's Legendary City (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2001). It should be noted that while Gamble's study offers no information on the city's club scene, Yatsko has a chapter on "the return of the vices", suggesting that dance clubs are part of a "vice culture" imported into China from the decadent West.
(6) See Farrer, Opening Up, pp. 296-7 for an account of the rise of discos in 1990s Shanghai.
(7) Interview by James Farrer with Kenny Tang, 2000. Courtesy of James Farrer.
(8) I am including this quote from James Farrer's transcript with a few minor corrections for clarity's sake. Please note that the quote was transcribed by a Chinese assistant.
(9) One D.D's Night Club was located at 815 Avenue Joffre (now Huaihai Road). Advertisements may be found in the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury, 18 Oct. 1941.
(10) For his analysis of clubbing as a form of "playful vitality", see Malbon, Clubbing. Dancing, Ecstasy, and Vitality, pp. 134-65.
(11) Mian Mian, Candy (Back Bay Books, 2003), p. 173.
(12) Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby (London: Robinson, 2001), pp. 74-5.
(13) This drug is known in China as yaotouwan or "head shaking pills" for its supposed effect on people. Often one sees local women dancing with each other by rolling their heads rhythmically to the music. See Yatsko, pp. 195-8 for a firsthand account of Ecstasy consumption and clubbing cultures in Shanghai in the late 1990s. Like Yatsko, I also witnessed the effects of Ecstasy usage in clubs such as MGM, Night Owl and Nightflight. Most of these were closed down in 2000-1 during a crackdown by the government on illegal drug usage in nightclubs. However, club drugs are still prevalent in out-of-the-way clubs in the city.
(14) For a description of "fishing girls" see Farrer, Opening Up, pp. 105-6.
(15) For a firsthand account of male Chinese prostitutes in late 1990s Shanghai nightclubs, see Yatsko, pp. 175-7.
(16) Bernard Gendron explores the connections between avant-garde art and popular music within the space of clubbing from the late 19th century to the present. See Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For connections between fin-de-siecle Shanghai courtesan culture, art and intellectual pursuits, see Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). The connection between Japanese art (in the form of ukiyo-e or "floating world" lithographs) and courtesan culture of Edo is well known. For a discussion of Edo's famed Yoshiwara district and the role of ukiyo-e in promoting this district, see Cecilia Segawa Siegle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993) pp. 146-52.
(17) Malbon, Clubbing. Dancing, Ecstasy, and Vitality, pp. 95-7.
(18) Personal interview with Katya Sawyer, Oct. 2007.
(19) Much of this information comes from interviews with staff at Muse and an interview with Lyndon Neri held 29 Aug. 2007.
(20) This is not Tony Zhang, the co-founder of Park 97, but another Tony. In order to preserve anonymity I am not using his last name.
(21) A "thick" description of Muse is worthwhile here to highlight how the layout and designwork contribute to the clubbing experience and segmentation of clubbers within the space. This description is taken from a blog that I set up to record my experiences in China (<shanghaijournal.squarespace.com>).
(22) Five dice are rolled against the other person's five to see who comes up with the winning combination of numbers. You start with three of a kind and work your way up to five or six, bluffing as you go. The loser has a drink.
Andrew Field (shanghaidrew@gmail.com) is a Lecturer in Chinese History at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He has a PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. His main research interests are modern and contemporary Chinese urban culture and society and the influence of globalisation on China.
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| Author: | Field, Andrew |
|---|---|
| Publication: | China: An International Journal |
| Article Type: | Report |
| Geographic Code: | 9CHIN |
| Date: | Mar 1, 2008 |
| Words: | 11733 |
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