SHANGHAI, THE
BECOMING THING Believe the hype? By
Anna Greenspan
SHANGHAI - In Shanghai, hype is part of
the landscape. A sign outside No 6 The Bund
promises that the still-boarded-up building will
"enrich Shanghai's heritage". When the concealed
construction is unveiled it will give locals and
visitors the "chance to experience the glamour of
The Bund like the old days of Shanghai".
The project is only the latest addition in
the rejuvenation of Shanghai's premier tourist
attraction. The Bund, a string of
early-20th-century neo-classical structures that
line the western bank of the Huangpu River, was
once home to European banks, businesses and
shipping offices. Today it is being revitalized to
match the opulent
sophistication of its now-mythic origins. Just
within the past year, the old Chartered Bank of
India, Australia and China at Bund 18, and the
former Union Assurance building at "Three on The
Bund" were reopened after multimillion-US-dollar
renovations. Inside, restaurants such as Laris,
Jean Georges and the Whampoa Club offer $150 meals
of foie gras, shark's fin soup, and other Chinese
and Western delicacies. The buildings also house
the flagship stores of Cartier and Armani, a
contemporary art gallery, a luxury spa and
designer bars with rooftop terraces.
What
is most dazzling, however, is the view across the
river. Past the boats sailing toward the Yangtze,
on the east bank of the Huangpu, is the sci-fi
spectacle of Pudong, where a dense cluster of
skyscrapers, giant TV screens, laser beams and the
ubiquitous cranes of half-finished buildings
mirror the monument to Shanghai's colonial past
with a spectacular image of its future.
Shanghai is China's showcase city - its
icon to progress. As the window on to the
country's modernization, Shanghai is the face of
China's development - which is why stories about
the country's rise are nearly always accompanied
by an image of the city's skyline. Shanghai is
where you come if you want to see what more than a
decade of double-digit growth looks like.
As such, Shanghai is less a place than a
process. The city is inherently unstable; the very
name "Shanghai" means "on the sea", and the city
itself is sinking. In the past 10 years
especially, it has undergone relentless mutation.
Today Shanghai is hardly more familiar to locals
than it is to newcomers. Maps become outdated the
moment they are drawn. Skyscrapers rise in months.
Whole communities are regularly relocated and
parklands are continuously being expanded (in
2004, Shanghai achieved a target of 35% green
space, and was officially dubbed one of China's
"national garden cities").
The
Shanghainese accept the noise and disruption of
this massive change as the inevitable consequence
of development. Yet while Shanghai is
unquestionably developing, it is no longer clear
what it is aiming to catch up with. To locals
traveling abroad, even places as dynamic as
Singapore already seem old. One government worker,
after visiting New York, admitted to being shocked
by the paucity of new buildings.
It is
usually assumed that between the "developing" and
"developed" world lie distinct stages of growth.
Shanghai suggests something different: developing
as a continual state of being, urban existence as
perpetual becoming, without destination. It is
this orientation toward the future that allowed
director Michael Winterbottom to make his
science-fiction film Code 46 without using
any special effects. All he had to do was set it
in Shanghai.
Shanghai embodies conspicuous
development by combining its super-modernity with
a deep sense of nostalgia. This is evident in such
projects as Xintiandi (literally "new heaven and
Earth"), a zone in the downtown core that
revitalizes traditional shikumen
architecture (a type of turn-of-the-century stone
tenement housing unique to Shanghai) by
transforming it into trendy restaurants, outdoor
cafes and fashionable boutiques.
This "new
Shanghai" deliberately recalls the city's decadent
heyday of almost a century ago with its opium
dens, jazz bars and gangsters such as Pockmarked
Chen and Big Ears Du. (The period's cinematic
allure will soon hit the big screen again with
Merchant Ivory's upcoming film The White
Countess.)
Until colonial powers began
using it as a commercial hub, Shanghai was little
more than a fishing village. By the turn of the
century, however, it had become a center of
international finance and trade and one of the
world's great modern cities. Shanghai's culture
and population is inherently and explicitly
cosmopolitan. At its height, the city lured not
only businessmen but also refugees.
Most
famously, it was once home to tens of thousands of
Jews. These ranged from rich Sephardic families
such as the Sassoons and Kadoories, whose legacy
includes some of the finest colonial buildings in
the city, to refugees from the Bolshevik
revolution and from Nazism who found shelter in
Shanghai, one of the only ports in the world that
did not require an entry visa. In the old Jewish
ghetto of Hongkou, where Jews were concentrated
during the Japanese occupation, one could find
Jewish newspapers, Yiddish theater, violin
concerts, European coffee shops, dance clubs and
sports activities. Today this area has been slated
for redevelopment and people from the
international Jewish community are working with
Chinese officials to preserve its cultural
heritage and restore it as a living symbol of
Shanghai's cosmopolitan past.
With the
Japanese invasion and subsequent communist
takeover of the city, Shanghai, like the rest of
China, closed its doors to the world. It was not
until 1978 when, at the pivotal 11th Party
Congress meeting of the Central Committee, Deng
Xiaoping introduced his transformative policies of
openness and reform that the country began its
current rise. Deng's strategy, which was based on
experimentation and "learning through facts",
involved the establishment of special economic
zones in cities such as Shenzhen, which could
test, and then illustrate, the merits of market
reform.
Too important to be used as a
laboratory, Shanghai was left out of this initial
period of growth (though Deng later admitted
regretting this decision). For the first decade of
China's reforms the city was hobbled by
restrictive economic policies and an immense tax
burden (in the early 1980s, 70-80% of the entire
national tax revenue came from the municipality of
Shanghai alone). It was not until the early 1990s,
with Deng Xiaoping's tour of the south and the
promotion of Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji (both
former mayors of Shanghai), that the central
government turned its attention to China's largest
commercial center. In the next decade, under the
leadership of what has come to be known as the
"Shanghai clique", the government began reducing
the burden on Shanghai (even after 1992, however,
Shanghai's tax contribution to the central
government remained at about 20-25% of the
national total). It also strongly encouraged both
foreign and domestic investment, promoting the
city as an economic hub. Once unleashed, the
city's economy immediately began growing at
between 9% and 15% annually, a rate it has
maintained for the past 13 years.
The most
dramatic image of this literally spectacular
progress is the "Pudong New Area". Ten years ago,
the area east of the Huangpu was considered barren
and remote. "Better to have a bed in Puxi" (west
of the Huangpu), the old saying goes, "than a
house in Pudong." Today Pudong can be reached
through a network of bridges and tunnels and has
more than 1,000 built or semi-built skyscrapers,
including the gaudy pink-balled Shanghai Oriental
Pearl TV Tower, the ultra-elegant Jinmao Tower and
the 101-story Shanghai World Financial Center, due
to open in 2008.
Pudong is being built
from a blueprint. Its wide, well-planned
boulevards, neat rows of apartment complexes and
complete lack of sedimentation give it a Legoland
feel. To its critics, it is an emblem of a city
that is all show and no substance. Scorned by
free-market economist Milton Friedman as the
"statist monument for a dead pharaoh", Pudong,
like much of Shanghai, was built on the back of
government loans and is a prime example of the
Chinese penchant for top-down growth.
The
seeming disjunction between appearance and reality
affects the entire city. The elaborate
illumination along the banks of the Huangpu, for
example, masks severe electricity shortages in
surrounding areas. Shops, restaurants and houses
for the rich are being built and serviced by a
floating population of 3 million migrant workers -
part of the largest process of urbanization ever
recorded. Yet Shanghai's self-image as an
immigrant city pays scant homage to its present
migrants - from the country's interior - who can
be seen dangling from skyscraper scaffolding or
struggling to negotiate escalators and subway
turnstiles. The Shanghai Star, a local
English-language weekly, reports on this common
criticism by quoting a Hong Kong newspaper:
"Through sheer chutzpah and public relations
guile, Shanghai's super-smooth politicians somehow
dissuade foreign investors, leaders and even
journalists from looking too closely at their fair
city's facade ... Shanghai is arguably a Potemkin
village on a massive scale."
Nowhere is
the hype over "new Shanghai" more heatedly debated
than in the real-estate sector. From 1998 to 2002,
Shanghai tore down 15 million square meters of old
neighborhoods and developed more than 80 million
square meters of new residential land, an amount
equivalent to 20% of the city's total residential
space. Many Shanghai residences have felt the
impact of this growth as a direct rise in living
standards, moving from small single-room flats to
two- or three-bedroom apartments. In addition,
there has been an exponential increase in the
number of luxury serviced apartments and sprawling
suburban villas. Almost all these properties have
doubled or even tripled in value over the past
five years. This surge in prices - close to 15%
last year alone - has been fueled by speculative
buying by foreigners, rich Shanghainese and nearby
entrepreneurs (who have few other places to put
their savings). Recently the government, aware
that even the middle class can no longer afford
property inside the inner ring road, has
introduced a number of policies aimed at curbing
growth and dampening speculation. But although
there has been a downturn in recent months, no one
yet knows how deep it will go and how long it will
last.
A similar skepticism haunts the
luxury-brand market. Drawn by promises of the
largest market in the world, big name brands have
set up lavish headquarters in Shanghai at enormous
expense. Their products, however, are wildly
unaffordable. At the exquisite Shiatzy Chen, for
example, which specializes in "neo-Chinese chic",
jackets start at 5,000 yuan ($620), well over the
average monthly salary of a middle-class
professional. The closest most Shanghainese will
ever get to owning an Armani is by buying one of
the many fake replicas sold in Xiangyang market.
Nevertheless, in Shanghai, hype has become
a commercial reality. By adopting a philosophy of
"build it and they will come", the city has
successfully blurred the distinction between image
and reality. Pudong, for example, has been growing
at a rate of about 20% per year and is now home to
a new international airport, the Lujiazui Finance
and Trade Zone, the Zhangjinag Hi-Tech Park, the
Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone and the Jinqiao
export-processing zone, which is now the site of a
luxury suburban village that rivals the previous
prime expatriate location in the Hongqiao area of
Puxi. Pudong has attracted $38 billion of overseas
investment in total, from more than 150 Fortune
500 companies.
Shanghai is China's window
to the world and the world's gateway into China.
At the height of the SARS (severe acute
respiratory syndrome) epidemic, when there was a
fear that China might have to seal its doors,
rumors were that Shanghai would stay open.
Supposedly, it had been officially decided that it
would be better to cut Shanghai off from the
interior of the country than to de-link it from
the outside world.
Shanghai is the largest
economic and transportation center in China. As
the "dragon's head" of the Yangtze River Delta, it
is the trade and communications hub for Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces - its
highly entrepreneurial neighbors - where the
majority of the world's socks and lighters, among
other essentials, are made. In 2004, Shanghai's
foreign-trade volume exceeded $160 billion, up
42.4% over the previous year. The city currently
has the world's third-biggest port - a ranking it
hopes to upgrade with the recent opening of the
Yangshan Deep Water Port. In 2004, the total value
of imported and exported goods under Shanghai
customs' supervision and control reached $282.6
billion, representing a 40.4% increase over the
previous year and constituting close to 25% of the
nation's total.
Despite these
fundamentals, Shanghai's economy, like modern
economies everywhere, is increasingly built on
hype. Once a manufacturing center, it has moved up
the value chain to concentrate on the development
of finance, service and creative industries,
research institutes, fashion, public relations,
exhibitions, advertising and hospitality. This
shift seems to suit the Shanghainese well. Their
reputation draws upon stereotypically feminine
traits - they are considered fashionable,
materialistic, calculating, seductive and shrewd.
The Shanghainese themselves say they are like
Americans: no one likes them, but everyone wants
to be them. In China, Shanghai offers the closest
thing to the American dream.
On a corner
of People's Square in downtown Puxi, the Shanghai
Urban Planning Exhibition Hall stands as a
high-tech monument to the city's growth. One of
Shanghai's most elegant pieces of architecture,
the five-story museum is filled with neon signs,
plastic models, backlit photos and piped uplifting
music, all designed to portray the city's future
dramatically. The highlight of the museum is a
massive model of what the entire city will look
like in 2020. After a visit to the Urban Planning
Museum it is clear that to live in Shanghai is to
inhabit an unfolding blueprint for urban
development.
Above the doorway to the
museum is a sign, which in the weird lingo of
Shanghai public propaganda reads, "Keep pace with
the times. Blaze new trails in a pioneering
spirit." Beneath these words is a digital readout,
counting down to the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
Billed as an "economic Olympic Games", Shanghai
will spend close to $4 billion on the event.
Preparations involve major infrastructure
projects, including the construction of tunnels,
bridges and a "low-speed maglev" (magnetic
levitation train), the expansion of subway lines
and the relocation of 10,000 households.
Government representatives see the expo as an
opportunity for a "new round of development" and
call it a "high-speed engine" that will "see the
emergence of a brand-new Shanghai".
Everyone is expecting a real spectacle.
Anna Greenspan writes on the
rise of Asia's giants, China and India. She can be
reached at anna_greenspan@hotmail.com.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing
.)
