Despite a handful of returning emigres and a few prominent overseas Chinese returning to their roots, there appears to be just one mainland-based Chinese writer - playwright, columnist and novelist Zhao Chuan - taking part.

Instead, the Shanghai literary scene is represented by the small but industrious clique of Westerners chronicling the city's colonial history and current social change.

Worthy though their efforts may be, this is a sad indictment not so much of the city's literati but of the timidity which sees public events continuing to be organised in the bubble expatriate community.

For all the talk of the mainland's opening up to the world, surprisingly little progress has been made in areas not related to the economy. The illusion of a free and open society is maintained by the authorities allowing broad leeway to events held (mostly) in English for a predominantly foreign audience. Speak among yourselves, by all means, just don't stir up the locals.

But it was not always so.

As with most things in Shanghai, it's hard to escape the shadow of the past; the mainland's most futuristic metropolis is still coming to terms with the ghost of its former glory, and literature plays an important part in that. During the first half of the last century, the city was the booming party capital of East Asia, awash with cash from commerce and trade. But the port was also a hotbed for ideas as idealists and bohemians flocked there from all over - drawn by a sense of adventure - and mainlanders seeking to escape the chaos of the early republic.

Writers' communes and literary journals - some of them bilingual - sprung up as the cross-cultural interplay resulted in a flowering of new thought.

In the late 1920s and '30s, the League of Leftist Writers - nominally headed by Lu Xun , the father of modern Chinese literature - sought to use literature as a political tool, and to inspire radical change through their use of social realism.

Tourists and courting couples today stroll along the pretty red-brick houses on Duolun Road, where the league held meetings and five members of the group were 'martyred' by Kuomintang troops in 1931. A nearby park is dedicated to Lu, a sign of the writer's influence on the Communist Party.

Lu and his posse weren't the only gig in town though - far from it. Another group known as the New Sensationalists took a far dreamier approach to prose, while the Crescent Moon Society set themselves in direct opposition to the Leftists with a call for 'art for art's sake'.

A decade later, the city was where 23-year-old Eileen Chang got her break, hammering away at a typewriter in her digs on Chengde Road (also marked with a plaque today). Over five years starting in 1943 she produced 18 novels, two film scripts and a play. Chang's memories of Shanghai continued to play a major part in her work even after she moved to Hong Kong and later the US - even though she never returned to the mainland before her death in 1995.

Today, the city may be flexing its financial muscles again, but there is little sign of it having reclaimed that strong literary tradition, and barely any hint of a healthy reading culture.

In Beijing, there are laid-back cafes and teahouses perfect for curling up with a good read on a slow afternoon. In Shanghai, it is rare to spy a local with his or her nose fixed between the pages - unless it happens to be a translation of the latest economic treatise from the US - and in the coffee shops the talk is dominated by share prices and the housing market.

But the city's literary influence is still seen in the writings of its emigre offspring. The natural successor to Chang's legacy is one of the main speakers at the event, US immigrant Qiu Xiaolong, whose Inspector Chen series of crime novels set in his native Shanghai has sold over a million copies and been translated into 20 languages.

But it is testament to just how sensitive mainland censors can be, that in the first Chinese translations of Qiu's works the setting was changed from Shanghai to 'H City' and any recognisable landmarks or street names altered. (Ironically, reviewers had no trouble from newspaper censors when they identified the real location in print.)

That publishers and their political overseers aren't confident enough to have Shanghai be the setting for fictional murder mysteries shows how long it may be before the city's current writers will be able to take their rightful place on the literary podium.