In the early 20th century, Shanghai’s taxi networks were more than the sum of their cars on the streets. Rather, they were systems comprised of human, material, and discursive elements, which existed on a spectrum from the invisible to the spectacular. At the one end, webs of informal labor promoted urban interconnectivity and traversed Shanghai’s administrative divides, while at the other, embedded political symbols reshaped how people consumed transportation services. These dimensions of infrastructure played a critical role in the shaping of this global metropolis.
In this study of taxi infrastructure in Republican Shanghai (1911-1949), we retrace the history of the ‘Taxi King’, Zhou Xiangsheng, and the building of his company, Johnson Taxi. Following Zhou’s personal evolution from an illicit taxi operator, to a business owner, to a cross-cultural interlocutor, to a nationalist icon, we demonstrate how entrepreneurs form multiple relations with infrastructure and move fluidly between them. This multipositionality, we argue, provides unique endowments of knowledge, enabling individuals to recombine heterogeneous resources and innovate.