Shanghai Sizzles

Shanghai, a city of unmet expectations. Its global reputation as the slinky hostess of one of the world’s wildest parties is so firmly etched in the modern mind that it evokes in visitors a sense of longing for the past.

My first trip to Shanghai nearly a decade ago was a totally different experience from what I had during my visit early this year. Ten years ago, brown mud was everywhere and the city felt as glum as it looked. The drive from Hongqiao Airport revealed little of the city’s character. The airport felt more like a bus station – you sat on hard wooden benches to wait for your flight. The road into town was a two-lane highway, clogged with horse drawn carts pilled high with kale, as the city stocked up on summer vegetables.

Traffic choked the road, burnt coal fumes choked me, and ugly glass-and-tile buildings choked the skyline. A quarter of the world’s construction cranes stooped over the skyline, pecking away at holes in the ground, creating the world’s first command city. Beautiful turn-of-the-century relics were degraded with gaudy neon signs and KFC outlets. Instead of enjoying the city’s art deco glories and basking in the glow of their time warp, it became a depressing reminder of how low Shanghai had fallen.

In the early ’90s, one could instantly recognize "mainlanders" (as opposed to the Chinese from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan) by their clothes: dowdy dresses and flesh-colored stockings for the women; ill-fitting suits and flashy ties for the men. Today, this no longer holds true. The young in Shanghai now wear all the latest European fashions, and they’re deeply conscious, like the Hong Kong Chinese, of brand names.

I remember staying at the newly built Sheraton Hotel. Sitting by the lobby lounge one late evening, a Filipino band loudly played Stars on 45. I wondered, as if an oracular voice was explaining to me, how the swift and stunning transformation of Shanghai will unfold before my eyes in David Copperfield fashion. (Back then a cup of coffee, brought by a uniformed waiter with a Hunanese accent, cost $10!)

The City Of Superlatives

Every big city is constantly changing, but that hardly begins to describe what’s happening in Shanghai. This city is a time machine with the gas pedal glued to the floor, hurtling into the future. It’s estimated that the city has attracted some US$40 billion in direct foreign investment over the last decade, more than any other city in the world. And despite the Asian financial crisis of 1997, it has managed to maintain a booming growth rate — eight percent in 2001.

Fast forward to 2002: a totally new Shanghai greeted me. There is the newly constructed Pudong International Airport designed by Paul Andreu. It has a soaring blue roof looking out over a tarmac at which Virgin Atlantic and Philippine Airlines draw up to disgorge the advance guard of what will clearly soon by a tide of tourists.

There is the Yan’an Expressway, a six-lane toll road into town that’s now equipped with clover leafs and even regular clumps of contemporary sculpture is seen all around. There is an extensive underground system replete with bilingual signage; a new national theater, a new stock exchange building, urban ring roads, a shiny convention center – with a bizarre globe heaped on its shoulders – and the tallest hotel in the world.

Back on the street, the dynamism is catching; it carried me along like a particle in an electric current. Making my way down a wide, leafy boulevard along the Bund, I noticed that almost everyone was running. Not that anything special was happening. These were simply people in a hurry. Young men darted through the traffic with daredevil speed. In Shanghai there is truly madness in the dash. Not everyone kept the hectic pace. Slim young women in clingy Prada and Gucci (or knockoffs thereof) sauntered, chattering on their cells. Prosperous-looking shopkeepers in gaudy rayon pyjamas squatted on little stools along the sidewalk, smoking and gossiping. A woman wearing a gauze mask swept the street off a bundle of twigs, but she didn’t come up with much, for the Shanghainese keep their city Swiss-clean.

Home to 16 million people, Shanghai could boast a population of well over 20 million in only 15 years’ time. Four million contractual workers are remodelling the face of the city around the clock – and they’re doing it at breakneck speed. It took only 11 months to complete a two-level by-pass and just a single year to conjure up a US$153-million conference center.

In Shanghai, entire neighborhoods and streets are torn down by bulldozers in a matter of days. In the ’90s, over a million people were relocated by the authorities. Five thousand people will be resettled in prefab estates two hours away from the center of town to make room for the Transrapid line. No one was asked, and barely anyone objected. Mei hanfa, you’re powerless, anyway, against the government. Many of the displaced are looking forward to better housing, as life in the traditional stone Shikumen houses is anything but luxurious.

This is not to say that Shanghai is without its problems. Traffic gridlock occurs frequently and is exacerbated during the monsoon season, when the streets sometimes resemble fast-flowing rivers. To alleviate such factors, the authorities have set car registration fees extremely high to deter private vehicle ownership. In addition, the excellent metro network is being expanded.

As Shanghai evolves, its shopping, dining and nightlife epicenters are shifting. Whereas Nanjing Lu has long been the premiere shopping boulevard, there are now some stylish newcomers on the block. Hengshan Lu, a wide avenue shaded by sycamore trees, features many restaurants, cafes and traditional Chinese tea-houses – some offering a bewildering range of offerings. At Izzi’s Bistro, for example, the Tenbridge Shanghai Darts League meets every Tuesday night.

In nearby Huaihai Zhonglu, the Karma restaurant bills itself as the "first fusion restaurant in Shanghai," serving Indian, Sri Lankan and Lebanese food, with live music late at night. Just down the road, Santa Rosso is a sleek, stylish new Italian eating place in a restored three-story villa.

New restaurants and cafes are opening daily, and you can eat your way from one end of a street to the other. Good food and lots of it have always been something the Shanghainese have enjoyed. Today they can indulge in elegant eateries like T8. Xintiandi Plaza, where the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, is now home to a whole slew of trendy bars and restaurants.

For shopping, Shanghai offers everything from the unusual to the truly bizarre. For conventional shops, Nanjing Lu and Huaihai Lu are still favorite boulevards, especially for department stores and clothing boutiques. But my personal favorite, however, is the out-of-the-way Xiang Yang wholesale market. Here, a whole range of quite different clones is on sale – this time faithful replicas of top brand-names such as Rolex watches, or Mont Blanc pens. An example of the latter will cost you around $5, a fraction of the price of the near-indistinguishable Swiss original.

Shanghai’s new breed

A few days after I arrived in the city early this year, I was introduced to Choon Quek, a young and dynamic restaurateur-cum- lifestyle provocateur of the reinvented Shanghai. His name is a buzz word in the art and trendy circle and I was geared to find out more of his city. His principal business is called Simply Life, a Chinois-inspired specialty shop that carries ingenuously designed objets d’art that surely make one’s trek to the Far East even more alluring. His business has been so successful that he has spun it to get into the restaurant business.

Quek’s equally stylish Thai restaurant (Simply Thai) has gained international appeal among the hip locals and expats. "I decided to work on my own business after being immersed in the corporate life for over a decade and when I saw that the opportunities here were unwavering," Quek once quipped.

Many bright Chinese like Quek have uprooted themselves from their origins to grasp the opportunity this city has to offer and to test how far they could go.

Listening to Quek – confident, brainy, astute in business – I thought how well he symbolized Shanghai’s brave new breed of entrepreneurs ready to take their dreams into the next future. "The next five years will even be more interesting," he continued. "I believe Shanghai has the potential to be at level with other cities including Tokyo, New York and London." And indeed China’s largest city is gearing towards this.

Shanghai is growing with the frantic haste of a city of the industrial revolution. It has the same and dizzying mixture of absurd luxury, and squalor. Every week, new deals and projects abound. With a German firm, the city will build the world’s first magnetic levitation train (at a cost of more than a billion dollars) to carry passengers between its new financial district and the new two-billion-dollar airport. In addition to two impressive bridges that already cross the Huangpu, it will build another, one of the world’s longest, to link the city to its deepwater port.

The City Takes A Spin

The physical transformation of Shanghai is nothing short of breathtaking. Much has been made of the radical changes in China over the past decade, of the ancient, traditionally xenophobic nation finally opening to the West. Though Shanghai, unique among the nation’s major metropolises, has always been an open city. In the first place, for China it’s young. There was a sleepy fishing village here as early as the 3rd century, but the town didn’t really amount to much until the 18th century, when it became the center of a thriving cotton industry.

The modern city started to take shape after 1842, when the British won the First Opium War: the European, American and later Japanese business interests that controlled the ports were granted concessions, small enclaves within the city where they could operate freely. During the civil wars that followed, Shanghai became something of a sanctuary for refugees and freethinkers. Many revolutionary ideas were born here, including the most revolutionary one of all. The Chinese Communist Party held its first meeting in a little gray-brick house in the French Concession in 1921.

The French Concession is still one of the city’s well maintained quarters. You could spend a full day in Shanghai trooping through the former residences of revolutionary leaders and their widows. Most of these homes have been nicely restored. Wandering through the tree-lined streets of the French Concession, one cannot help but imagine what lies beneath the walls of the old Tudor homes and bold French colonials, once hosts to splendid parties and now homes to several families living together.

Shanghai has become the focus of China’s economic desires, in part because the Communist Party has used the city as a playpen for future national politicians. Both President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji have risen from Shanghai municipal posts to greater glory in Beijing. Rongji was able to cut through the bureaucratic bungling the city was infamous for. While both men were parachuted into their posts from the outside, their love for the city after leaving it is still felt.

Things haven’t always been so rosy. In 1981, when Deng Xiaoping said "to get rich is glorious," Shanghai stumbled. Instead of racing out of the gates as expected by China’s former financial thoroughbred, nothing much actually happened. This is not as strange as it seems – this being China after all. Beijing was the master choreographer and Shanghai didn’t get invited to the dance. So while Shenzhen and Fujian and other areas flourished as special economic zones in the 1980s, Shanghai became a wallflower, decaying even further.

The city led China’s industrial push, but it had little to show for its efforts. What cash it earned through hard work, Beijing, like a nasty pimp, spent on other areas of the country. All Shanghai was left with was horrible infrastructure, a serious pollution problem and little to show for all its hard work.

In 1989, while the army was massacred students in Tiananmen Square, Zhu Rongji, then mayor of Shanghai, opted for a different solution to the boisterous protests. Instead of tanks, he sent 100,000 workers into the street to mix with the protesters and pacify the crowd. After all, it’s hard to raise a fuss when one person wants to protest and 100 want to quietly sip tea. Instead of blood on the streets, there was calm. The next year Deng urged Shanghai to push ahead on Pudong and the central government announced a package of preferential policies.

As a result, the city now boasts many new cultural institutions. People’s Square off Nanjing and Xikang roads is home to two of Shanghai’s latest landmarks: the Charpentier-designed Grand Theatre, a transluscent crystal palace and the squat Shanghai Museum, home to – as China’s citizens are fond of reminding visitors – 5,000 years of history. Just down the block is the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, a "Mini Me" mimic of Shanghai Grand Theatre. The museum is an interesting collection of sepia photographs and future plans. A sign by one exhibit informs you of the nation’s aspirations: "By year 2020, Shanghai will have become a world-class metropolis… and will emerge as a regional center of shipping, manufacturing, service and technology and a sparkling pearl on the western coast of the Pacific."

Why aim low?

Pudong: East of Pu

There is a very different Shanghai on either side of the muddy brown water of the Huangpu River. The most astonishing of all in the Shanghai development is the Pudong New Area. Once an area of industrial sheds, ship yards and single-story housing, Pudong has been transformed by a torrent of highrises, like an army of robots drawn up along the river, and spreading apparently at random across the sweep of the flat river flood plain. It is more like a volcanic eruption than a conventional urban development.

The development of Pudong, surely the world’s grandiose building project since the Great Wall of China, was Deng Xiaoping’s last major undertaking back in 1992. This special economic zone is a sprawling new city building a financial center planned to rival not only Hong Kong but Wall Street.

Shanghai is caught up in the symbolism of change, and is determined that every visitor knows all about what is going on. I once read a big billboard at the foot of the Pearl Television Tower: "Persist in the development of Pudong without wavering until it is done."

Pudong’s highrises are scattered apparently at random, overlaid on a grid of parallel housing blocks, six-story-high on what must once have been streets, or more accurately lanes. Now they’re kilometers-long ten-lane highways cutting.

Architecture in Pudong is an extraordinary mix of the banal and the surreal. In the riverside pleasure gardens infested with dragonfly swarms, you can find structures that are Ricardo Bofill on one side, with giant precast stone Corinthian columns, and Richard Meier’s Getty’s Center on the other. The television tower itself, built by Shanghai’s own architectural bureau, looks like a refugee from an Expo. In its shadow is a food court, loosely planned around a piazza modelled on the Capitoline Hill.

In this context, the Jin Mao tower has a certain architectural authority: it was designed by SOM’s Chicago office and has a sure grasp of what makes a high-rise distinctive. The silhouette is carefully designed in a series of set backs and decorated with abstractions of traditional Chinese geometry. It makes for an unmistakable landmark.

But in Shanghai, architectural quality is hardly an issue. There is something more fundamental at stake: the remaking of a city. What Pudong doesn’t have yet is people. On the other side of the river, the Bund is thick with life, a blend of Blade Runner and Raymond Chandler. Here in Pudong, the towers erupt at random, frantically attempting to make their presence felt and remain for the most part empty. The offices, fuelled by a wave of overseas investment, have yet to fill up.

The image is of the high-rise towers spreading over the whole area. But this is, after all, a state which in theory at least, still subscribes to the tenets of Marxism and Leninism.

Mao Tse Tung’s image is still to be found on the 100 Yuan note, but more characteristic of the new China is Mao’s appearance on the side of a novelty cigarette lighter on sale at the pavement stalls of Xiang Yang. Flip open the lid, and it plays the old Maoist anthem The East is Red.

The only problem is that, despite gloss and glass, Pudong is still the future. Occupancy rates are shockingly low, with some of the buildings almost 90 percent empty. Rents have plummeted and new starts have slowed to a trickle. Due to the wonders of central planning there’s an enormous property glut.

Pudong was built on the same philosophy as Kevin Costner’s cornfield baseball diamond in Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." More than 90 Fortune 500 companies have located their headquarters – or been strong-armed into by ‘incentives’ – in Pudong, though the area has not reached any sort of critical mass. While most buildings are finished, beneath their shiny exteriors are incomplete interiors, elevators that don’t run and a feeling that it will be a while until things change.