This summer the city is holding the third Shanghai Cartoon Competition and Exhibition, which has attracted thousands of participants just as it did in previous exhibitions.
Shanghai is the birthplace of China's cartoon business.
As far back as the early 1920s, cartoons have played an important part in the city's culture.
There were many expatriate cartoonists working in the city between 1920 and 1949. Two of the most famous were Sapajou and Schiff.
From their platforms - the local English-language daily newspapers - they provided a view of the world of the Shanghai people and of the city's multi-racial and politically complex situation.
Sapajou was a White Russian ex-officer named Sapoinikoff who arrived in the early 1920s.
He was one of thousands of Russian who made their homes in Shanghai, which was then an open city.
In 1942, Sapajou became the cartoonist on a German newspaper. It was the only job he could find as a stateless Russian. More than a thousand White Russians in the city lost their jobs in British, American and Dutch firms that were closed down by the Japanese aggressors.
Sapajou was employed by the now-defunct North-China Daily News, where he won fame as a political cartoonist.
But during the War of Resistance Against Japan, he had to leave the city for the Philippines, where many Russians were waiting in refugee camps for passage to the US.
Sapajou had planned to work for an American newspaper, but died on October 11, 1949, in Manila.
Friedrich Schiff was born in 1908 in Austria and moved to Shanghai in the 1930s. He returned to Austria in 1947 and died there in 1968.
There is also Zhang Leping, who created San Mao (Three Hairs), a homeless orphan tramp.
Zhang depicted the city's inequalities and the sorrows and joys of the underprivileged. The cartoon strips of San Mao have appeared in the city's newspapers since 1947.
Even today, many children regard the boy with three hairs as one of their favorite comic book characters.
Thanks to the contributions of cartoonists in the city before liberation in 1949, the production skills of cartoons developed rapidly, which laid a foundation for future growth.
Shanghai was the first city to establish an animation film studio after liberation.
(Shanghai Star 07/31/2001)
