SHANGHAI - When one of China's top leaders in charge of the country's
architectural landscape recently berated Chinese cities for their breathless
rush towards modernity, none deserved the reprimand more than Shanghai.
This most forward-looking city in China is in a quandary. Driven by its
overpowering desire to modernize, Shanghai wants to forge a new identity, but
is reminded at every step that its uniqueness is
entirely defined by its historical legacy. So it has chosen brazenly to assert
its new image by steadily obliterating its past - and its character.
Before the communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai was one of Asia's most
international cities, home to wealthy merchants, rich compradors, great
taipans, White Russian emigrants and Jewish refugees from Nazism.
In 1926, English writer Aldous Huxley summed up Shanghai's charm as: "Life
itself ... dense, rank, richly clotted life ... nothing more intensely living
can be imagined."
During Shanghai's belle epoque - in the early years of the 20th
century, the city rose above every other to become China's brightest star - an
economic miracle and a cultural trendsetter. It was a place where the East and
West entwined to create a modern economy and a vibrant culture.
For millions of Chinese, its name was synonymous with trendiness. The Chinese
believed that Shanghai represented the country's future and saw its glittering
modernity infecting the laggard life of post-feudal China with new-century
vigor.
Today, while it aspires to regain its trendsetting role, Shanghai appears
intent on demolishing the vestiges of its cosmopolitan past. During the past 15
years of breakneck economic growth, countless colonial-era neighborhoods have
been annihilated and swathes of historical sites have been razed to make way
for office towers, residential blocks and highways.
The city fathers, though, are proud of Shanghai's tremendous changes and
leaflets handed out in tourist offices relate this in staggering figures. There
are some 1 million construction workers in the city and roughly one-fifth of
the world's cranes work here. Since the city embarked on its redevelopment in
the early 1990s, 2 million of its residents have been relocated.
"Up until the 1980s, nearly 80% of old Shanghai survived," said author and city
historian Peter Hibbard. "Today, more than 50% of it has been demolished."
It was the scale and pace of such development in Shanghai and other cities that
prompted China's Vice Minister of Construction Qiu Baoxing to compare the
"senseless" destruction of the nation's cultural heritage to the damage caused
during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.
At the time, radical Red Guards rampaged through old temples and ancient sites,
burning relics and destroying artifacts. Today, the destruction is caused by
urban developers in a "blind pursuit of the large, the new and the exotic", Qiu
said.
"This is leading to a poor sight," he told an international forum on urban
planning in Beijing last month. "Many cities have a similar construction style.
It is like a thousand cities having the same appearance."
Paying homage to tradition and as the chosen window for China's modernization,
Shanghai strives to be in the forefront of all changes. But playing a
role-model of modernity for every other city in the country, it is rapidly
losing its unique architectural edge and turning into an urban prototype, some
architects warn.
The city suffers from China's overwhelming concerns with appearance, said
renowned French-Hungarian architect Yona Friedman. "And being Shanghai, it is
much quicker than places in any other countries in turning a city into a
familiar prototype overnight," he said in an interview during his recent
exhibition in Shanghai.
Visitors to the city are now whisked from the airport on an expensive highway
system and as they drive through the city's elevated roads they are able to
glimpse only the middle-height of skyscrapers, rows and rows of them.
Shanghai's once bustling street life is now an experience to sample only in few
remaining islets in the city, like the old Chinese city and the former French
Concession. Yet, even city oases like the French quarter, with its leafy
avenues and Western-style mansions, is continuously encroached on and its area
is ever diminishing.
The Bund, the city's waterfront promenade lined with rows of magnificent
colonial edifices, is also eclipsed and distanced from public view by the
elevated walkways of Shanghai's new road system. Ordinary Chinese people who do
choose to take a walk along the Bund's pavements can glimpse a lot but
experience very little.
As a part of the city's redevelopment, Shanghai planners have converted the
former colonial buildings into lavish headquarters of international fashion
houses and big brand-name jewelers. The goods in the windows of shops for
Armani and Cartier are so conspicuously out of reach for many Shanghai
residents that many of them only dare peep though the doors and never enter.
The Bund used to be "the landmark image of Shanghai" before 1949, according to
Peter Hibbard, author of the book The Bund: China Faces West.
With its palatial buildings housing foreign banks and trading companies, the
clock tower, the elite Shanghai Club and Cathay, China's most famous hotel, the
waterfront was the center of foreign social life.
"Now the Bund is a lifestyle showcase but rather dead," Hibbard said.
When author Pan Ling visited Shanghai in the early 1980s, she lamented the
dereliction and decay, and the "grime of years" lying thick on its facades.
"The city has hardly been touched by the destroyer of history's relics, the
dark Angel of Development, but nor has it profited much from careful
preservation," she wrote in her book In Search of Old Shanghai.
Twenty-five years later, heritage protection exists in name but it is only skin
deep. "The old is made to look new and the new is made to look old," said
Hibbard.
A poignant case is the reinvention of the Xintiandi neighborhood, hailed by the
local government as a model for redevelopment. Having erased swathes of old
traditional Shanghai shikumen buildings (stone townhouses with internal
Chinese yards and English-style facades), the city has rebuilt them in the
original style, adding in the process fashionable boutiques, outdoor cafes and
bars.
The only authentic old building remaining on site is the memorial house where
the first founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held in 1921.
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