After forty years of stagnation, the great metropolis of
SHANGHAI is currently undergoing one of the fastest economic
expansions that the world has ever seen. While shops overflow and
the skyline fills with skyscrapers, Shanghai now seems certain,
sometime in the twenty-first century, to recapture its position as
East Asia's leading business city, a status it last held before
World War II. And yet, for all the modernization in terms of
infrastructure, lifestyle and availability of consumer goods,
Shanghai at the turn of the millennium is nonetheless a city
inextricably linked with its colonial past .
Shanghai is still mainly known in the West for its infamous role
as the base of European imperialism in mainland China - its
decadence, illicit pleasures, racism, appalling social
inequalities, and Mafia syndicates. The intervening fifty years
have almost been forgotten, as though the period from when the
Communists arrived and the foreigners moved out was an era in which
nothing happened. To some extent this perception is actually true:
for most of the Communist period into the early 1990s, the central
government in Beijing deliberately ran Shanghai down, siphoning off
its surplus to other parts of the country to the point where the
city came to resemble a living museum, frozen in time since the
1940s, and housing the largest array of Art-Deco
architecture in the world.
Yet the Shanghainese never lost their ability to make waves for
themselves, and, in recent years, China's central government has
come to be dominated by individuals from the Shanghai area, who
look with favour on the rebuilding of their old metropolis. In the
mid 1980s, the decision was made to push Shanghai once again to the
forefront of China's drive for modernization , and an
explosion of economic activity has been unleashed. In this
last decade, city planners have been busy creating a subway
network, colossal highways, flyovers and bridges, shopping malls,
hotel complexes and the beginnings of a "New Bund" - the Special
Economic Zone across the river in Pudong, soon to be crowned with
the world's tallest building . Symbolically, the central
government recently constructed China's main money-printing mint
near here, a move reflected in the high proportion of shiny new
coins and bills in circulation in the city. With by far the most
highly skilled labour force in the country, the long-suppressed
Shanghai ability to combine style and sophistication with a sharp
sense for business is once again riding high.
Not that the old Shanghai is set to disappear overnight.
Although the pace of redevelopment has quickened in the past
several years, the city still, in large parts, resembles a 1920s
vision of the future; a grimy metropolis of monolithic
pseudo-classical facades, threaded with overhead cables and
walkways, bursting with the noise of rattling trolley buses and
choked by vast crowds of purposefully scurrying pedestrians. Unlike
other major Chinese cities, Shanghai has only recently been
subjected to large-scale rebuilding. Most of the urban area was
partitioned between foreign powers until 1949, and their former
embassies, banks and official residences still give large areas of
Shanghai an early-century European flavour that the odd
Soviet-inspired government building cannot overshadow. It is still
possible to make out the boundaries of what used to be the foreign
concessions, with the bewildering tangle of overhanging alleyways
of the old Chinese city at its heart. Only along the Huangpu
waterfront, amid the solid grandeur of the Bund, is there some
sense of space - and here you feel the past more strongly than
ever, its outward forms, shabby and battered, still very much a
working part of the city. Today, strolling the Bund is a requisite
attraction for any visitor to Shanghai, and it's an intriguing
irony that relics of hated foreign imperialism such as the Bund are
now proudly protected by the Shanghainese as city monuments.
Like Hong Kong, its model of economic development, Shanghai does
not brim with obvious attractions to see. Besides the Shanghai
Museum, the Suzhou-reminiscent Yu Yuan Gardens, and the Huangpu
River Cruise, there are few sights with broad appeal - many
travellers leave the city with a sense of letdown. But the beauty
of visiting Shanghai lies not so much in scurrying from attraction
to attraction, but in less obvious pleasures: strolling along the
Bund, exploring the pockets of colonial architecture in the old
French Concession, sampling the rapidly maturing restaurant and
nightlife scene (already in a league with Hong Kong, some feel), or
in wandering the main shopping streets and absorbing the explosive
rebirth of energy of one of the world's great cities.
Inevitably, many of the social ills that the Communists
were supposed to have eliminated after 1949 are making a comeback
as well. Unemployment, drug abuse and prostitution are rife. But
the dynamic contrast that Shanghai presents with the rest of China
is one that even the most China-weary of travellers will hardly
fail to enjoy.