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Now that I'm slowly getting a handle on this city, I'm ready to start really writing again. Here is the first of what will hopefully be many Shanghai-oriented articles over the next weeks and months. Tim.
Culture. If there are countries today that could be accused of languishing in a state of cultural deficiency, China is not one of them. Five thousand years of continuous civilization has left a rather solid culture backdrop in front of which the rapid modernization of the country is presently occurring. Or perhaps it is better described as a canopy casting a large shadow over the present. The same could not exactly be said for Shanghai - not at present. In Shanghai, history is just beginning - or so it would seem.
Shanghai is being reconstructed by the minute. If historians around the globe could witness the extent of the dramatic deconstruction and reconstruction occurring, more than a few would surely tear their hair out in anguish. Much has certainly been lost in the process, this rush to modernize at seemingly any cost. As a friend of mine recently noted, the Chinese government is increasingly acting more like the board of directors of a powerful corporation, rather than a political entity. The consequences of this decision, more than anything else, are probably what underlie this upcoming series of articles exploring Shanghai – which is after all one of four cities in China under direct control of the central government.
This big grey entity known as the Communist government lies far beyond my (and most other’s) sphere of immediate influence. If and when the era of Communism does come to an end in China, it will likely a spectacular crash brought about by an unsustainable level greed and corruption that finally does it in. Nobody in China, it seems, has been more seduced by the trappings of the west than the government itself.
If the Shanghai that once was is all but dead – or at least gone forever - the rest of us looking on should not feel it necessarily to a shed a tear over all that has been lost. I have come to believe that the importance of cultural preservation is occasionally overblown in the race to trace history, at least in certain instances. After all, cultural preservation does come at a cost as well, one that can be quite significant for those living in the present. Don’t mistake this for an argument against history.
Walking not 100 metres from my apartment here in Shanghai, one stumbles into a crumbling, decrepit area of town.
It’s an area that leaves an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of the stomach because it is a squalid place, one really not fit for human inhabitation. Unfortunately there is plenty of it - several hundred residents. There is also an impromptu market consisting of street vendors selling their wares, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, plenty laundry hanging out of (often broken) windows and so forth. The buildings are in an embarrassing state of disrepair. One wonders just where all these residents will go when the wrecking ball inevitably swings (and this moment of reckoning can’t be far away, judging by the pace of change across the city), while suspecting the likelihood of the government offering adequate restitution to them is doubtful at best. I have little doubt the area will soon be filled with more skyscrapers.
A friend of a friend here in Shanghai recently moved into a low-rise apartment in such an undeveloped area – though admittedly an area not quite as neglected as the one I just described. In a scene reminiscent of the opening sequence of ‘The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy’ (the book or movie, you choose), just over a month after moving in a notice arrived announcing she had precisely one week to vacate the flat before the entire area was levelled for redevelopment. So she moved to the couch of this friend of mine, and now another few skyscrapers are being built where her flat stood a short time ago.
Even as the housing market in Shanghai comes screeching to an apparent halt (following several years of rocket-like growth), one doubts there is much chance that one developer or the next will pass up the opportunity to scoop up any available piece of prime development land available in Shanghai, anticipating the next upswing (or overlook any opportunities to be involved in the redevelopment of any centrally-located Shanghai property). After all, the pace of growth in Shanghai continues to plough forward at 10% per year, give or take a percentage point or a few. Sooner or later, or these areas are bound to be in demand, once more. Unfortunately, what results from such development projects isn’t always what one might hope for.
A recent chat with a representative of an Australian developer (that shall remain nameless) with numerous local projects was frustratingly revealing. He explained that to succeed in the local market, there was really little choice but reach for the lowest common denominator, at least when carrying out mass-development projects (those not targeted at high-end clients). In practice, this meant matching local standards which involved ignoring local regulations. The houses they built were literally cement walls with a door – no insulation, no nothing. What they were selling were essentially house keys.
In chatting with him, I was reminded of the classic Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid that every business student is introduced to early in their studies - clearly they were operating at the first level around Shanghai, to a large extent. When I asked what role innovation played in his company development projects – as this was the topic of a PhD I was offered a few months back - he could only laugh. Little chance for that.
So if this a result of modernized Shanghai (though hardly the only one), one wonders just how much room there is for culture and history at this point, and how much those living here really care? Well, it does have some allocated space – for example, in a museum located under one of Shanghai’s top tourist attractions, the Pearl Tower in Pudong. This is symbolically equivalent to placing a museum in the middle of an amusement park. Don’t expect to find academic historians trolling through its archives. Of course, there are a handful of other museums as well.
Yet Shanghai is hardly the first example during China’s long history, of the past being spurned in favour of other priorities. Back in 1644, China’s archives were all but purged of any documents pertaining to the glorious voyages undertaken under by a vast armada of Chinese treasure ships, led by Zheng He from 1421 to 1424 during the reign of Emperor Zhu Di. These voyages that lead to the discovery of South America some 70 years ahead of Christopher Columbus, it has been persuasively argued by Gavin Menzies in his book 1421. But after the departure of these ships from China in 1421, China's hierarchy turned its attention inwards. Upon their return, the resulting monumental discoveries were quickly set aside and ignored, the colonies created in the process abandoned, and the ships themselves left to rot. Once it had been decided, decreed, that the voyages had been of no useful value, there was little need to preserve them in the collective memory of the nation. All logs and records of the voyages were destroyed a couple hundred years later.
Perhaps the same could be said, less dramatically, of Shanghai today. Whatever the historical significance of the city, it pales beside the perceived importance of its new role as the shining centrepiece of modern, fast developing, China. History be damned.
