Abstract:Among all the foreign writers, Pearl S. Buck is the one with the closest relationship with China and even won 1938 Nobel Prize for her China writings. Although she won a world fame for her writing of Chinese peasants as in The Good Earth, most of her China writings are about the cities, the most important of which is Shanghai where her schooling was received, her siblings were buried and her intellectual friends were gathered. Shanghai was directly dealt with or suggested in all of her China writings. Like other scholars interested in China, she took Shanghai as a sample to understand Chinese modernity, but unlike others focusing their attention on the relationship between Shanghai and the West, she studied the relationship between Shanghai and Chinese locality. She did not elaborate on the material appeal of this “Oriental Paris”; instead she revealed the clash between modernity and locality via the intellectuals in Shanghai.