From Mao to God of dollars

The birthplace of Communist Party, the launch pad of China’s new revolution

It must be the ultimate illusion Shanghai unleashes on the unsuspecting foreign hordes. The 21st-century version of quietly packing an opium reefer into your lungs, just like it was in the good old days of the post-Opium War, slipping a stiletto into your back when it is turned, or simply ‘‘shanghaiing’’ you into thinking what is when it isn’t.

So here you are, walking on the Bund, soaking in the atmosphere of the oily, smelly, muddy Huangpu river on one side and the myriad styles of the turn-of-the-century architecture on the other, when you spy a brown stone statue standing in the middle of the embankment.

The only graffiti is in Mandarin, so you walk away thinking it must be Chairman Mao, it couldn’t be anybody else in a town that was the first in China to hold an inaugural meeting of the Communist Party in 1921. Except it isn’t. It’s Chen Yi, Shanghai’s first mayor after the liberation. China’s most open city, carrying out the mother of all reforms in the glare of Western eyes, has helped you slip on a banana peel just when you begin to take her for granted.

This is Shanghai then, preening her magnificent skyline for the dumbstruck visitor, skyscraper blades of glass cavorting with elevated highways and under-the-river tunnels.

Beijing seems like a sarkari town in comparison. And like elsewhere in China, this city’s architecture also gives you a glimpse into its soul. In all of downtown Shanghai, there isn’t one single monument either to the man who began it all, Mao, or to the genius of Deng Xiaoping, who unleashed his people from the bondage of frugality.

Both Deng and Mao continue to be revered for what they did for China, but it’s the God of Greenback dollars who dominates the mind of the people. And there’s no ‘‘shanghaiing’’ away from that.

Changing lifetime in a decade

The story of the new Shanghai is the story of a mere decade. In 1990, Premier Zhu Rongji was the mayor of the city when Beijing decided that Shanghai’s time had come. So, with a wave of the wand, what used to be farmland across the Huangpu river until 1990, 533 sq km of it, was taken over to create the Pudong new development area.

Last year, that real estate powerhouse attracted $37 billion in investment. In 1990, the area’s GDP was $8 million, today it is $1.2 billion. Four bridges were built across the Huangpu in two years, besides 48 km of two elevated roads and the first phase of an international airport that carries 20 million passengers every year. Growth is a whole 2 per cent higher here than the national average.

The pathbreaking pace of change has infected old stereotypes as well. What would have been blasphemy even a few years ago is now calmly stated by Chen Gao Hong, Director of the Communist Party’s Pudong Area Committee. ‘‘During the Opium Wars of 1842, Westerners used gangs to force China to open its doors to the West — however horrendous that may have been, it also had good effect on this area’s economy.’’

What Chen is really saying is that although the British used opium (imported from India) to addict the Chinese into submission and thereby setting into motion parcelling of Shanghai into little foreign enclaves or concessions, contact with the outside world, however traumatic, was never forgotten.

So when Zhu announced the reopening of China 10 years ago, the Shanghainese adapted as naturally as a duck to water.

Fresh ties, old bungalow

April must be the cruellest month, even though the 52nd anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and China passed off peacefully just the other day, much as old anniversaries are wont to do.

Old China hands back home, mixing memory and desire for those bygone years, also remembered that soon after the 1962 war, the Chinese peremptorily threw out the Indian consulate from a bungalow it occupied in Shanghai, forcing New Delhi to close down its mission in this magnificent city.

Ties were reestablished barely a decade ago and although India’s claim for return of its old house is not on top of the wishlist with China (the clarification and confirmation of the disputed Line of Actual Control is), it does figure somewhere on that page.

New Delhi knows that as relations get better, this irritant will also resolve. Still, it would be nice to go home.

Shanghaiied

There’s a newly adapted full-length opera now playing in Shanghai and it’s called, in English, the ‘Scrumptious Chinese Imperial Concubine’.

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