LRB | Vol. 28 No. 23 dated 30 November 2006 | Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra reports from Shanghai
The ruins of Shanghai come as a surprise in a
city so defiantly modern. Demolished low-rise
houses lie in downtown streets next to luxury
condominiums with names such as Rich Gate, the
wreckage reflected in the glass façades of tall
office buildings. In Dongjiadu, Shanghais oldest
quarter, bulldozers were expected within the
fortnight, the old women squatting silently in
the cramped alleys helpless before them.
But you cant get too sentimental about Shanghai,
a place built, like Bombay, in the 19th century
on the back of the opium trade. An axis of
gangsters, politicians and foreign businessmen
ruled the city until the Communist takeover in
1949. Those decades of semi-colonial occupation,
when Shanghai came to be known as the Whore of
Asia, glow with old-fashioned glamour in Chinese
cinema, in Zhang Yimous Shanghai Triad, or Chen
Kaiges Temptress Moon. But the corpses of
thousands of the poor were collected every year
from the pavements of the International Settlement.
Today beggars approach you discreetly on the
Bund, Shanghais embanked riverfront, whose grand
buildings once housed the banks, trading houses
and diplomatic missions of Chinas foreign
overlords. The destitute are more invisible now,
but its easy enough to make out the visitors
from the impoverished countryside, in their faded
blue Mao jackets and dusty shoes, gazing at the
super-malls on Nanjing Lu and the throbbing neon
lights of Pudong. The novelist Wang Anyi, sitting
in the lobby of my hotel in one of the kitsch
towers of Pudong, said: There is no culture
here! Im not sure culture is whats wanted in
this sleek new part of the city, built in less
than a decade on the once desolate mudflats
across the river from the Bund, and designed to
symbolise the wealth and power of a globalising
China. Postmodern skyscrapers dwarf the Bunds
domes and clock towers, which were once a
reassuring sight to taipans and straw-hatted
tourists arriving from Europe. Gleaming new
industrial parks with landscaped gardens
sprawl across the suburbs. Shanghai has regained
its role as the engine of the Chinese economy and
the premier city of Asian capitalism.
full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n23/mish01_.html
