Brian Castro is an award-winning Australian writer who was born in Hong Kong in 1950. His book Shanghai Dancing is a fictionalized autobiography based on his family's history in 1930s Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau.

From Shanghai Dancing by Brian Castro:

It's hard to track my father down. He stayed once at this hotel. ... the Peace, it's called now. As if anyone believes in it. No such person can live State Aspiration day in and out, except perhaps over at the mental ward beyond the tourist line where you can see them smiling back and forth, slippering dances between chain wire, exorcising their pain. Peace, peace. They are the blessed. I know them like my own heart.

But in my father's day it was the Cathay on the Bund. Filthy rich, a humidor of havanas in his breast pocket, he rented the penthouse suite three months at a time so he could watch his ships through opera glasses, noting them in leather-bound book as they ploughed through day and night. Night and day. His tune. Looking across the Soochow, he could check on his company steam yacht, wooden, gaff-rigged for show, his Sikh captain idling on deck polishing brass. This was his territory: an implausible wealth, built on treacle; his coolies waxing the floors of godowns with blood and sweat and polishing the ramps with bales of rice they dragged from end to end; he knew when to go legitimate. And then his son; and then his other son. One generation will always destroy something. You can count on that.

Qiu Xiaolong lives in St. Louis, but was born in Shanghai in 1953. His best-known series of books stars a Chinese detective, Chief Inspector Chen, who solves crimes that are often linked to corruption and official wrongdoing. (Related Story: Shanghai Detective Fiction Reflects a Changing China)

From A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong:

On the cool April breeze, a melody wafted over from the big clock atop Shanghai Customs building. Six thirty. It had played another tune during the Cultural Revolution: "The East is Red." Time flowed away like water.

In the early nineties, under Deng Xiaoping's economic reform, Shanghai had been changing dramatically. Across Zhongshan road, a long vista of magnificent buildings which had once housed the most prestigious Western companies in the early part of the century, and then the communist party institutions after 1950, were now welcoming back those Western companies in an effort to reclaim the Bund's status as China's Wall Street. Bund Park, too, had been changing, though he did not like some of the changes. For example, the postmodern concrete River Pavilion which stood like a monster beside him, slouching against the first gray of the morning, watching. So, too, had Chen changed, from a penniless student to a prominent chief inspector of police.

Mian Mian was born in Shanghai in 1970. A former heroin addict, her books describe the seamy side of China's reforms, with a cast of drifters and addicts. Her book Candy became a underground hit after it was banned in China, where she was described as a "poster child of spiritual pollution."

From How Sensitive We Are by Mian Mian:

Shanghai is a female city. If it's raining at the weekends, the heavier the rain is, the more people will be in the club. And the longer the rain goes on, the better the party will be. Shanghai is a moody city. I like living here, because this place always makes me change my thoughts, and because many interesting people come and go, go and come. They all consider Shanghai to be a crazy place for a holiday, or a place from the future. Moreover, there're always people who want to meet me. It's fun for me that I can always find interesting people from among them. I don't need to go anywhere, yet I meet people from all over the world.