Title or Working Title: Cafe Culture’s Emergence in Shanghai
Thesis statement: Within this paper, I plan to research cafe culture within China, specifically Shanghai. I find it incredible, that China, one of the lowest coffee consumption countries in the world, has a city with the most cafes in the world. It’s paradoxical but so fascinating. I want to discover how cafe culture started in Shanghai and how it became so prominent so fast.
I plan to format the paper into three sections. The first section discusses present-day shanghai cafe culture and where it is currently. I then want to go on to discuss its origins and how it became the market it is today and compare it to the historical treatment/context of European Cafe Culture (to serve as my comparison to Shanghai cafe culture). I then would like to conclude with the future of cafe culture in Shanghai and its potential impacts on China/the global market. I want to discuss the communist party’s role, as they affected coffee’s emergence to the everyday citizen due to quality of life improving. I also plan to discuss what characteristics of European cafe culture shanghai has taken or not taken, and how it may have been adapted to suit Chinese society. The paper will be a historical and analytical approach to Shanghai and its cafe culture history.
Material to support your thesis: I plan to use archival research, current newspapers, and scholarly articles. The scholarly articles will help me provide a basis for my second section on the emergence of cafe culture, as the CCP plays a role in that. For the more current research, I plan to use Shanghai news articles and outlets there. There’s a lot of buzz in the city, and many outlets publishing material on the very prominent coffee industry.
Current Sources:
张. (2021). When Coffee Meets Shanghai. China Today.
http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/ctenglish/2018/sl/202103/t20210331_800242018.html This article discusses the current state of Shanghai coffee culture, and I plan to include quotes from it within my first section. It discusses how coffee and cafe’s are impaciging society within Shanghai. For example, the author states “coffee shops have reshaped social space, cultural space, and psychological space, recreating new interpersonal and social relationships.” This quote directly relates to our class and what we have been discussing thus far this semester.
de Waal, J. R. (2013, February 10). Coffee shops, energy companies and the Chinese Communist Party. YouGov.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2012/11/15/coffee-shops-energy-compa nies-and-chinese-communis
This article briefly discusses the relationship between the ccp and coffee in China. I have not been able to find academic journals or article’s yet. This just highlights briefly the material I plan to research and include within my second section of my paper. The second section will discuss the origins of coffee in Shanghai, and find why/how the industry took of as rapidly as it did.
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