A Tale of Two Cities – Part 2: Shanghai

At first glance, Shanghai and Hong Kong seem to exist in a strange form of interdependence. Each is a key part of the trade and finance network for China. Each collaborates with the other over logistics, currency transactions and business development. At the same time, they compete. First glances often gloss over the complexities.

When I arrived in Shanghai for the first time, in 1998, I was visiting Fudan University, which was, and still is, one of the top five academic institutions in the country. Twenty years later, it is hard to recall what the city was like then. The roads were crowded, gridlock everywhere, and the network of raised motorways was only partially developed. The one airport was Shanghai Hongqiao, old, inadequate, and famous for delays and disappearing flights (aircraft would be taken out of service for no apparent reason). On one occasion I watched as a group of men arrived in a limousine beside my plane, embarked, and it left: the departures indicator suddenly changed and advised there was a four hour delay as a result of the late arrival of the incoming flight: my plane had been ‘hijacked’, commandeered to take a group to … Beijing, perhaps?

Fortunately, everything changed two years later when the modern Shanghai Pudong airport started operations. Not just a 21st Century airport; another bonus was the visitor to Shanghai could catch the Shanghai Maglev Train, which runs from Pudong airport down to Longyang Road station, close to the centre of the city, providing access to several metro lines. It’s a journey to remember, as this ‘demonstration line’ (which has never made a profit) whisks you along in just 7 minutes and 20 seconds over the journey of 18.6 miles. The train can reach 217 mph in 2 minutes, quickly settling to a maximum normal operation speed of around 270 mph shortly after. Outside, buildings become a blur, and every carriage has a speed indicator screen: it can be a little disconcerting!

In those early days visiting Shanghai, the highlights for me were to go down to The Bund, look over at the Oriental Pearl Tower, the massive television and radio broadcasting facility, observation deck and restaurant, and then wander up Nanjing Road, ending at People’s Square and the new Shanghai Museum. Completed in 1996, it was the museum that foretold the future. With typical Chinese efficiency, an area was cleared and a quite stunning building erected: modern, spacious, yet designed around the shape of a ding, the traditional bowl or cauldron standing on three legs, (some of which have been found to date from around 2,000 years BC).

Inside, the Shanghai Museum is still one of the great delights of the city.   Back there once again, I spent time looking at calligraphy (one half of one of the five floors), and paintings (another gallery taking up half a floor). Then it was down to enjoy a drink in the cafe (no, silly me, not a cafe, a teahouse), before going into the museum shop. I have been in that shop many times: it is hard not to start buying, and the only limitation on my shopping is I have to carry what I buy when I travel!

Just three years after the new museum building was completed, the Jin Mao tower was finished, 88 stories high, housing the Grand Hyatt on floors 53 to 87; it has a wonderful Shanghai style restaurant, on level 86, the Club Jin Mao. Like the museum, it heralded China’s ability to merge tradition with the modern, as the tower is designed on the theme of a tiered pagoda. “The 88 floors … are divided into 16 segments, each of which is 1/8 shorter than the 16-story base. The tower is built around an octagon-shaped concrete shear wall core surrounded by 8 exterior composite supercolumns and 8 exterior steel columns.”[i] Now, you did know the number 8 was considered lucky in China didn’t you, said to mean prosperity, success and even joy?

Like the city, in 1998 Fudan University was at the beginning of spectacular growth. Originally founded in 1905, some ninety years later the national Ministry of Education embarked on a ten year plan to turn it into what was described as a world-class comprehensive university. My first visit there was initially somewhat dispiriting. Many of the buildings were old, facilities were second rate. Despite physical appearances, however, the staff I met in the business school were outstanding. The sense of excitement was evident everywhere, as Fudan University had recently become one of a select group of the country’s top universities, following the endorsement by the President, Jiang Zemin, in 1995. Like the city, it is unrecognisable today.

Everything is changing, and the Jin Mao tower is now one of several huge buildings occupying the area across from the Bund. Often referred to as Pudong, it is actually in Lujiazui, a tract of about 12 square miles, and the only designated trade and finance zone among the state/provincial level development zones in the country. Up until 1992, Pudong, a huge area, comprising Shanghai east of the Huangpu River, was mainly underdeveloped farmland, with wharves and warehouses along the river itself. It had a bad reputation as the place seamen would visit for drink and women when on leave. It was in 1993 that Lujiazui, was designated a Special Economic Zone; it is now one of the most important development centers outside of the complex of zones in Guangdong Province. Close to center of Shanghai, the farming past is invisible today, and to look across from the Huangpu side of the river is to see a new Manhattan in the making. The array of massive buildings matches the confidence of the people: Shanghai is marching forward.

Everything about Shanghai is big. Its population is just under 26m, the largest city in the world according to some measures. (Beijing is the second largest, with around 23m; Chongqing is often referred to as bigger, with nearly 29m people, but it is not a city in the normal sense of the term, but rather a municipality comprising several cities). It is the world’s biggest container terminal, with 40m TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) being transferred in 2017. With 70m passengers in 2017, it is the world’s ninth busiest airport, second only to Beijing in China (with 96 m), but frustratingly for the city, still just behind Hong Kong (72m passengers!). When it comes to air cargo, it is the busiest in China, and third in the world (3.7bn tonnes in 2017); but there’s Hong Kong again, in first place with 4.9bn tonnes. The Shanghai metro system is the longest in the world, with 16 lines, 395 stations, and nearly 420 miles of track. Don’t despair, when it comes to trams, Melbourne is the leader, with the Melbourne tramway network consists of 160 miles of track, 24 routes, and 1,763 stops!

Enough figures. You get a good feel for Shanghai walking up the Nanjing Road pedestrian street, rather than visiting any of the beautiful, expensive but characterless shopping centres. Along the precinct there are luxury brand stores, the few Chinese department stores managing to hang on, and then a random mixture of coffee shops, souvenir stalls, a McDonald’s and a KFC (!!), a few Starbucks and a selection of antique shops for tourists.

To capture more of the city, all you have to do is turn off onto one of the side streets and walk away for a couple of blocks. There you can still find noodle shops and old style dumpling restaurants, alongside furniture and hardware stores, banks and luxury western hotels. Still higgledy-piggledy, but even in the side streets the old is being pushed out by the new.

When I arrived this time, it was, as always, a changed experience. Travelling into Pudong, I was struck by contrasts. For the first part of the journey I saw how much of the Pudong area is still flat farmland. Only halfway through did I start to see tower blocks, elevated freeways, and big corporate buildings. Getting closer to the centre, farming areas had gone and I was struck by how modern so much appeared. The freeways have sound barriers whenever they are near homes. Thousands, no it must be millions of trees are being planted to screen the roads from the surrounding areas. The cars and taxis are modern, and down near The Bund they are not just new but expensive. Tesla and Mercedes Benz jostle alongside Rolls Royce and Bentley. The days of smoke belching lorries are clearly gone, and even the buses are indistinguishable from those in a European city. Ferries across the Hangpu River are sleek, although the familiar old barges are still to be seen travelling alongside tourist boats. One tiny delight: there were seagulls along the river, which I much preferred to the kites constantly drifting outside The Excelsior in Hong Kong.

Modern, but very different. There were two newspapers to read at the weekend, China Daily and the international edition of The New York Times. I arrived in town on the weekend of big political events. In Canada, the G7 was meeting; in Qingdao, north of Shanghai, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was in session. In Canada, President Trump continued his willful attack on friends, institutions and framework of law and democracy that had been pieced together over the previous sixty years. He wanted Russia’s President Putin brought back to form a G8 again, arguing Russia’s attach on the Ukraine was long ago (well long enough it is more than likely that Trump didn’t even know or remember it). And in Qingdao, in the midst of trade negotiations and economic planning, President Xi awarded the Friendship Medal, the highest award China can confer on a foreigner … to President Putin!

In the China Daily, the meeting in Qingdao took up several pages of the newspaper (admittedly, it is full of puffery to impress visiting English speakers); on page 13 the main article was about a new launched dredger (it can dredge 6,000 cubic metres of sand or clay an hour). The US first appeared on page 15, in a leader commented on America’s further loss in credibility; President Trump got another mention on page 16, in relation to his apparent wish to invite Kim Jung Un to the White House. From Shanghai, the US and its President is a topic of declining importance. In the New York Times, there was a lovely story explaining how Trump was helping Putin (perhaps he was the reason Putin got his medal), a discussion on Brexit on page 4, the lead article on international issues was on trash in Delhi (a frightening story), but nothing on Xi Jinping meeting Putin: it seems like the re-emergence of a strong alliance between China and Russia scarcely deserves notice. The next day’s China Daily did have Trump at the bottom of the front page, with a brief article on his arrival in Singapore to meet Kim Jong-un: much more of the paper was taken up with the Qingdao meeting. Says it all, really. The world looks very different in Shanghai. By the way, as I was writing, I read China is now building Asia’s biggest cutter-suction dredger to deal with rocks: in this part of the world big dredgers are big news, and manage to trump Trump every time!

My tale of two cities? I found Shanghai to be as crowded and busy as Hong Kong, but there was a real buzz in the city. Like most major cities, there is obvious income disparity, and Shanghai and New York have similar measures on the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality, it is high in both places at around 0.6, but some argue that unregistered people in Shanghai would push their figure even higher). Despite that, new found wealth and disposable income has led to people all over the city to be better dressed, shops busy, and, to my slight discomfort, every Starbucks I saw was full to capacity. That was also true of Costa Coffee, which I think is a UK coffee chain. More to the point, Shanghai’s contribution to China’s overseas trade is growing (while Hong Kong’s is shrinking).

To remind myself as to how much had changed, I went back to Yu Yuan (the Yu Gardens). Twenty years ago, the Garden’s teahouse was a major tourist destination, surrounded by several tourist shops. However, if you wandered into the side alleys you found tiny stalls selling silk and leather goods: at the back of many there would be a not-quite-hidden treasure trove of branded goods, watches and DVDs, all copies. Some were cheap fakes, but others were indistinguishable from the real articles, quite often made in the same factories as part of an illegally elongated production run. Bargaining was interesting: you started at a twentieth of the price suggested, and worked to a compromise: it was a good system, and you soon learnt which were the quality items.

Now Yu Yuan is a cleaned up attraction. The shops and the teahouse have hardly changed, but the illegal stores seemed to have gone, although I noticed a few might be detected if you looked carefully. Both selling and buying fakes is illegal, and police are more in evidence. However, the biggest risk for the unwary is from pickpockets and handbag snatching. Crime still flourishes, but it is the crime of the streets of Barcelona or Rome. Twenty years ago the ornate teahouse in the centre of the inner garden was well worth a visit: today, it is packed with tourists, and now seems rather gaudy, another spot for a selfies on your iPhone.

I don’t want to mislead you: there is a reverence for the past and traditions in this city. You see it in in the various collections in the Shanghai Museum. You see it as you walk along the new pathway beside the river: the grass is still getting established but the rocks are already there, some with characters, and some testimonials to the strange combination of permanence and weathering those stones reflect.

To escape tourists, I went to some of the new modern art museums in Shanghai. The four I visited were all exciting and innovative, but the best was the Power Station of Art which, like London’s Tate and Sydney’s Powerhouse, is situated inside an old riverside power generating plant. Lots to see, and on the top floor the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art had assembled ‘A Beautiful Elsewhere’, with works by leading Chinese artists and others from overseas (including Australian Ron Mueck). The Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art was holding its Animamix Biennale: the whole building was a game experience, with mini-games to be played (and to get out you had to find four hidden numbers!). Challenging, invigorating, thought provoking art at the leading edge. No westerners in sight, but I was brought back to earth that evening, enjoying a snack in the Club Lounge in my luxury hotel. A US guest asked for ‘flat’ water, which caused some drama (flat? hot? what?). He went off to explore the offerings, and returned to update his companion: “just so you know, they have refrigerators here”! And flushing toilets, maybe?

Shanghai is a rich business city. It glows with confidence, even on grey weather days. Early in the morning, people keep fit by running by the river, jogging appears more popular than Tai Chi. I found that telling: people around here are a little more reserved and individualistic, and you don’t have the same sense of warmth you might feel in Hong Kong. People in Shanghai are riding the wave of prosperity, and the traditions of family and community are less obvious.

I guess that is the fate of all cities. As they become more evidently wealthy, they become more alike. The attractions differ, but the sense of the city becomes more universal. Shanghai is on a path to greater dominance, loved by the central government, and, I have to conclude, certain to replace Hong Kong. Charles Dickens’ words seem less apposite here, as it all seems rather one sided: “It was the best of times, it was the epoch of belief, it was the season of Light, it was the spring of hope, we had everything before us, we were all going direct to Heaven” Heaven? The heaven of Mammon.

 

[i] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_Mao_Tower>