The Racket (No longer on Substack)
The Racket (No longer on Substack)
Inside the chapter: Shanghai
0:00
-1:08:36

Paid episode

The full episode is only available to paid subscribers of The Racket (No longer on Substack)

Inside the chapter: Shanghai

In which we talk about China’s transformation, a bad walking tour of China’s richest city, and a deleted scene
Shanghai fashion as seen from one of the city’s last early 20th century lane houses (Zhang Peng/LightRocket/Getty)

Once again we’re diving behind the scenes of Gangsters of Capitalism in podcast form. Racket researcher Annie Malcolm — herself an anthropologist of China — talks to me about the making of Chapter 16: Shanghai.

In that chapter Smedley Butler goes from the lights of Hollywood to some of the darkest days of the early Chinese Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists, with the bloody involvement of both the Japanese Army and Shanghai’s notorious opium-smuggling Green Gang. We talk about Shanghai’s glitz, our varied experiences in China, a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor, and more.

This episode is a special offering for paid subscribers of The Racket, and a thank you to those of you who make the work I do to put out this newsletter possible. If you aren’t on the list yet, now’s a great time. It’s just $6 a month or $60 a year:

The Racket is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, become a paid subscriber.

This post is for paid subscribers

The Racket (No longer on Substack)
The Racket (No longer on Substack)
Fearless reporting and analysis in audio form by Jonathan M. Katz. For written issues and to support the pod subscribe at theracket.news