Rejecting conventional demands, this book examines how ordinary men and women, Chinese as well as foreign, endured the Japanese military assault and occupation of Shanghai during the Chinese War of Resistance (1937-1945). Instead of presenting their stories in terms of heroic resistance versus shameful collaboration with the enemy, the volume reveals how the city’s dwellers mobilized a variety of social networks to circumvent enemy strictures. They employed strategies that kept alive a culture and an economy that were vital to the survival of the brutalized population.