This chapter describes how the new governments of India and China in the early 1950s approached Shanghai and Bombay with great ambivalence. Both cities were tied closely to the capitalist, imperialist past. Central government policies deprived each city of fiscal resources and curtailed their connections with foreign capital and trade. Both cities faced extreme housing scarcities amid migration and the expansion of informal settlements. Both cities also remained central for anchoring support from and control over workers. The Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai introduced spatial practices that could be appropriated by those seeking to make claims against local authorities: processions through streets, mass struggle meetings, and face-to-face meetings between officials and the masses, in the workplace and in neighborhoods. In Bombay, the politics of linguistic identity and native place led to a brief coalition between aggrieved Marathi speakers and leftist labor leaders in the late 1950s that replaced mobilization based on class with the politics of linguistic community. By 1960, they succeeded with the formation of the new state of Maharashtra, with Bombay as its capital.