The Chinese Colonisation of Shanghai 《中國對上海的殖民統治》英文版

Internal colonialism is defined as the central government’s subjugation by physical and psychological force, which leads to structural political and economic inequalities between regions within a nation state (McMichael, 2012). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has absorbed this ideology and utilised it as a mechanism to exploit the resources of the internally colonised regions (i.e. south eastern provinces: Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Fujian and Guangdong) for the benefits of the colonisers (e.g. Beijing-based senior CCP officials) who are on the top of the hierarchy with excessive power in hands and are widely known as ‘the red nobility’. The CCP’s central government has been using various approaches to manipulate economic policies to enslave and exploit the colonised regions in order to accomplish its economic plunder. 

• Shanghainese citizens are stripped of the rights to vote, which indicates that the ‘Shanghainese government’ cannot represent Shanghainese people. The colonisers from China (the senior CCP officials in Zhongnanhai, Beijing) appoint and send an excessive amount of non-Shanghainese officials to Shanghai and form a so-called ‘Shanghainese government’ which fails to protect Shanghainese citizens’ basic rights. For instance, only 16 out of the total 64 officials who represented Shanghai to attend the 11th National People’s Congress held in 2008 were born in Shanghai.

• Short after the CCP conquered Shanghai, they initiated the socialist transformation movement to loot assets and fortunes from Shanghainese industrialists and businessmen. Subsequently, through the implementation of the national "a board of chess" policy to support the Communist China’s economy, Shanghai paid 7/8 of its annual taxation revenue to the central Government as a tribute.

• Prior to the establishment of the PRC, Shanghainese is the lingua franca used in all walks of life. However, for the sake of the reinforcement and stabilisation of the CCP’s regime and dictatorship, the CCP has been devoting to eliminate cultural diversity and especially Shanghainese culture and language which are distinctive from the Northern culture and Mandarin spoken by the Northern people. Consequently, the CCP has enforced the ‘pro-Mandarin’ policy and banned Shanghainese people from using Shanghainese language. More ridiculously, the central government has been trying to educate people to perceive that speaking local Shanghainese language is a vulgar habit by promoting this idea in schools and on TV and other media. Hong Kong and European countries can well preserve their indigenous cultures and languages and at the meanwhile strive to develop their economies and improve living standards. The ‘pro-Mandarin’ policy is unreasonable and its essence is a tool manipulated by the CCP to eliminate diversity and oppress indigenousness in order to reinforce its power.

• The Chinese government’s ‘one-child family’ policy came into effect in 1979. This inhumane policy has been strictly enforced in Shanghai. It made Shanghai’s fertility rate hit the trough and drop dramatically to 0.7, which means that Shanghai’s population will decrease by 1/3 each generation. Since the 1980’s, Shanghai’s fertility rate has been constantly declining. In 2015, the number of new-borns who were born in Shanghai but whose parents are non-Shanghainese exceeded the number of new-borns whose parents have Shanghainese citizenship. More incredibly, the CCP government demanded Shanghainese citizens to rigorously comply with the ‘one-child family’ policy to offer more space and opportunity to non-Shanghainese people.

• Since Shanghai was occupied by the CCP in 1949, a vast amount of well-educated Shanghainese elites were forced to move to the inland due to the so-called ‘support the inland’ movement. They confronted brutal physical persecution and ruthless personal abuse and insult. They were banned from returning to Shanghai and if they tried to flee but failed, what was there waiting for them was merciless assaults by the guards.

• Post 1949, Shanghai lost its decent reputation as an international metropolis during the ROC era (1912 to 1949). Despite the fact that Shanghai paid incredibly huge amount of taxation revenue to the CCP’s central government, Shanghainese people have been the victim of CCP’s state-controlled media’s exaggerative and distorted slander. Like how Hong Kong people and the ‘occupy central’ movement as well as Taiwanese citizens, government and their democratic politics have been defamed by the CCP’s state-owned media, they also intentionally denigrate Shanghainese people and mislead Chinese people to trigger hatred towards Shanghainese so as to undermine Shanghai’s reputation and oppress Shanghai’s indigenousness.