Shanghai-style

It is better not to be in Shanghai during a heat wave. I was there when a heat wave struck, the hottest September day in 48 years: 87 degrees at night and humid as a steam bath. Schools closed, as did many museums which lacked air-conditioning. In one museum, the former home of Zhou Enlai, I was followed from room to room by an attendant with an electric fan. At night, in the old neighbourhoods of Nantao, or what used to be the walled city, families slept in the streets, stretched out half naked on bamboo chairs.

The houses in Nantao were like little brick furnaces-dark, unventilated, with tiny windows. The streets were not much wider than a grown man lying down. There was no electricity and often no running water. The air was filled with the stench of public toilets mixed with that of the Huangpu river and piles of rotting food. Dust from nearby building sites left a sticky black film on one's skin. Not everyone was able to sleep. Even after midnight, people were playing card games, eating snacks, sipping green tea from jam jars, fanning their children.

Shanghai still has many such neighbourhoods. In a few years, there will be almost none. They will be demolished to make way for new high-rise buildings, department stores, banks and elevated highways. Hundreds of thousands of people are being shifted to suburbs, miles from the centre of town, into cheap public housing more likely to have running water, better ventilation and electricity. The new Shanghai is to be a symbol of the new China: rich, big, modern, flashy. But the methods used to bring this about are not new at all. They are based on coercion, sloganeering and exhortation. And the cynicism bred by years of communist propaganda has created a perfect climate for graft and corruption.

In what is perhaps the greatest urban transformation since Baron Haussmann rebuilt Paris in the 19th century, Shanghai is being dismantled and a new city built in its place. Yet most people don't leave their old neighbourhoods gladly. One man defied the Shanghai housing demolition office by refusing to move. He held off intruders for months, armed with a pellet gun. Suburban tower blocks were no fun, I was told, not renau-"hot and noisy." Hot and noisy is the way Shanghainese like it.

I first saw Shanghai in 1986, as a reporter following Queen Elizabeth on her visit to China. Shanghai was still Shanghai then: outwardly the city had hardly changed since the revolution ("Liberation") in 1949. Pre-Liberation Shanghai, known as old Shanghai-the city of gangsters, taipans, sing-song girls, beggars, tycoons, White Russian taxi drivers, Jewish refugees, Japanese spies, Filipino swing bands, communists, Viennese cafes, fancy-dress balls and torture chambers-had disappeared completely. But the physical setting had survived as a grand urban fossil; hardly a stone had been removed, or even renewed. Shanghai had become a dilapidated repository of mock Renaissance buildings, Art Deco skyscrapers, mock Tudor villas and old Chinese shops.

Shanghai had been arrested in time for a reason. Maoism was more conducive to destruction than construction. But Shanghai, a relatively new city, had few monuments to smash. It was left to rot instead. Provincial Chinese had always regarded the city with a mixture of awe and envious disgust. The communists saw it as the supreme symbol of urban vice and wicked capitalism, a foreign parasite on the Chinese body. Shanghai had to be re-educated, transformed from a cosmopolitan entrep??t to an inward-looking Chinese city. So it was starved of funds and cut off from the outside world on whose trade it depended. Without trade the city stagnated, a kind of Calcutta with the buildings of Chicago: an open-air museum with the rank air of a lifeless pool.

But as the official line changed, so did Shanghai. Deng Xiaoping's slogan "To get rich is glorious" was made for Shanghai. Once again the city had to be transformed, this time to serve as the showcase of China's economic revolution. Some people predict that in ten years Shanghai will have overtaken Hong Kong as the commercial hub of China. Others say five. Shanghai has China's largest stock exchange and three commodity exchanges. A new stock exchange building, twice as big as Hong Kong's and three times the size of Tokyo's, will open this year. Banners all over the city proclaim: "We love our motherland! We work to make our country great and rich!"

When I returned to Shanghai, great chunks of the city I had seen in 1986 had already gone. Out of the wreckage of modernisation-piles of smashed window frames, shattered walls and half-built elevated highways-a new city has emerged. It is hard to define its architectural style: high-rise blocks with chunky fa?ades in fake white marble or pink granite with brown-tinted glass, bearing names like Golden Palace, Lucky Apartments or A Trillion Harvests. This is the dominant style of modern east Asia. It is beginning to look more like Singapore, Hong Kong or even Tokyo.

Twenty-eight of the world's top multinationals have offices in Shanghai, where office space can cost up to $9 a square foot a month-a 50 per cent increase over last year. At least two dozen foreign brokerage firms have arrived, as well as 14 financial institutions. Volkswagen is producing 200,000 cars a year. Xerox, Pepsi and Coca-Cola have set up plants in an industrial zone near the city. Mitsubishi and Sony are planning to do so. Yet it can still take six months to get a telephone line installed.

Trying to find some respite from the heat one night, I took a walk along the harbour front. On my right was the old Shanghai, all lit up in fairy lights: the Bund, with its famous row of former foreign banks, clubs and corporations. Here was the neo-Grecian headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank; there the old Cathay hotel, where No?? Coward wrote Private Lives and Victor Sassoon threw fancy-dress balls. Farther along was the former Shanghai Club, a stuffy British establishment closed to Chinese and women. (It is now a seedy hotel.) I had started my walk from the gardens, which once bore the infamous sign barring Chinese and dogs.

On my left, across the Huangpu river, was the new Shanghai, much of it built since 1989: Pudong, an industrial zone with miles of factories, expressways, high-tech parks, workers' housing developments and new corporate headquarters. In the old Shanghai, the Bund was often compared with Manhattan. Today, eager official boosters draw the same parallel with Pudong. Out of this modern mess rises a great phallic monster of monumental ugliness, a bit like an enormous asparagus with a silver ball on top. The Oriental Pearl television tower is advertised in tourist brochures as "the highest edifice in Asia."

A young man sidles up to me and asks me how I like the view. Not wishing to fob him off with a rude reply, I ask him which side of the river he prefers. He waves at the row of neo-Gothic, neo-classical, neo-Renaissance buildings on the Bund. "Built by foreigners," he says. What about Pudong? "Well," he says, "some of that is foreign too." But which does he prefer? His face creases in a proud smile: "The television tower, the highest building in Asia."

This is how people talk in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore: the pride of the newly rich, the zest of the up-and-coming. Shanghai boosters think their city will soon be as rich. The question is whether Chinese politics will change in step with the economy. It is assumed in the west that economic liberalisation is followed inevitably by greater political liberty. In fact, the comparison between China and Singapore pleases the current regime in Beijing, especially when Singaporean leaders proclaim that "Asian values" do not include the western notion of human rights. Singapore is freer than China, to be sure. Singaporeans are free to travel, and the chances of spending your life in jail for demanding more democracy are smaller than in China. But the press is less than free, and although Singaporeans can vote, the government has made it impossible to establish an effective opposition. The state is involved in every aspect of life. So even though Singapore-even Singapore! -might be too liberal to serve as a model for hard-liners in China, reformists, including Deng Xiaoping, want to see China as a Singapore writ large. But Singapore is a small city-state. An authoritarian government, manipulating a quasi-market economy, can run a city-state. In the expanse of China, such a government might be as messy and volatile as the current regime in Beijing.

Other models for the new China might be Taiwan or South Korea. The riches of both have been eyed enviously from Beijing, and both countries, after all, liberalised their politics only recently. Like Chile, South Korea managed perfectly well to combine economic growth with political oppression. But in the long run, South Koreans did not stand for this vaunted combination. Hong Kong has had a free press and, lately, free elections too. Beijing has promised to crack down on both. The only examples of a free press that I saw in Shanghai, as in Singapore, were the foreign newspapers in the hotels.

 

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The first grand western hotel in Shanghai was Astor House, a neo-Renaissance pile built in 1911 opposite the Russian consulate. It used to belong to the Sassoon family and was famous before the war for its ballroom. It is now a dive for young budget travellers. Only the ballroom still shows signs of life: it is the temporary home of the Shanghai stock exchange. Financial services will make Shanghai great again, more than manufacturing, because high rents and labour costs are driving industry elsewhere. The stock exchange has 3,700 trading seats. Two thirds of all stocks in China are traded there. The official brochure boasts that the Shanghai stock exchange "will become the biggest marketplace for trading in Asia." It still has some way to go.

Waiting in the lobby for Wang Huizhong, a young stockbroker, I examine the photographs on the wall. They show the elderly party leaders, leaning on their canes and dressed in Mao suits, being shown the trading floor by young men in western-style suits. The leaders look shabby and bewildered, like peasants gawking at the big-city lights.

Wang exudes the easy confidence of an American businessman. Dressed smartly, smiling widely, he tells me everything is just fine, everyone is making money, Shanghai is going to get bigger and bigger. Wang studied international finance on a Fulbright scholarship. He is the new face of China. I ask him if there are any weeds in the garden of economic liberation. He gazes through the glass window of the exchange, at the young men and women in jeans, peering at their monitors. Well, he says softly, as a matter of fact, things are a bit slow right now. There have indeed been some problems: unscrupulous brokers had cheated their clients; prices had got a bit out of hand; the government had decided to suspend trading in A and B shares. "Government control," he says, with renewed vigour, "that's what's keeping us back. We want to be international, but the central government is afraid we'll grow too fast."

It's an old story. Tension between the central government and local business has plagued Shanghai since the 19th century. Many great cities (Beijing, for example) rose around royal courts or military strongholds. Shanghai is purely the product of trade, specifically western trade which began after the opium wars in the 1840s. Shanghai's rise resulted from the defeat of China by the British. After the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, Shanghai became a "treaty port," where European powers enjoyed commercial and diplomatic privileges. Shanghai was divided into Chinese areas and foreign concessions, where the Europeans prospered outside Chinese jurisdiction. The revolution of 1949 was inspired as much by nationalism as by Marxism. It was meant to be a national liberation. Naturally, then, generations of Chinese schoolchildren were taught to deplore Shanghai's pre-war period. And indeed there was much to deplore: racist attitudes among the Europeans, especially the British; the number of prostitutes (one person in 130); the racketeering; the opium addiction; exploitation of peasants in the factories, and so on. Why should one expect any affection for buildings that represent such a humiliating past? Yet that same past was also the height of Shanghai's glory. It was the single most creative period in modern Chinese history. Here is Shanghai's paradox.

I am staying at an Art Deco hotel which used to be an apartment building named Broadway Mansions. It is located across from the Bund, next to the steel-girded Garden Bridge, which thousands of terrified Chinese crossed in 1937 to escape Japanese troops. I am having tea with three men who started Entertainment Weekly, a new tabloid in Shanghai. One of the publishers, Yen Bufei, is a balding man in his late 40s, wearing a tee-shirt and blue jeans. There is something of the ageing hippie about him. In fact, he had been a Red Guard. He recalls attacking his teachers and vandalising reactionary households. Had he enjoyed himself? "Oh, yes. We had a great time. We were out of control, free to do anything we liked."

So I am surprised to hear him suddenly say: "You know what we want to do? We want to connect today's Shanghai with the Shanghai of the 1920s and cut out everything in between." I am surprised, but perhaps I shouldn't be. Yen sees himself as a real capitalist now. The only purpose of publishing, he says, is to "make money." In fact, he says, the objective of most people since the 1989 debacle at Tiananmen Square has been to make money. Money, they hope, will buy them freedom.

And so it will, up to a point. Money in Shanghai will buy you almost anything: drink, fine clothes, limousines, beautiful women. Some people are making a great deal of money. Many more are not. You see them on the building sites: tens of thousands of peasants from the poorest regions. They are builders of the new Shanghai, the waidiren, "outside people," working day and night for very low wages.

The higher crime rate is blamed on the waidiren, as is the increasing number of beggars and indeed most of the ills of high-speed modernisation. Unprotected by unions, these people depend on the whims of bosses. Almost everyone in China depends on bosses-criminal, political and economic, or a combination of all three. The only way to keep the bosses off your back is to buy them off. That takes money. In that sense, money does buy freedom, of a kind.

Where political authorities are unelected and unaccountable, where bosses rule rather than laws and where people are told that to get rich is glorious, there corruption will flourish. Once again, corruption has become the currency of power in China. This was one of the causes of unrest in 1989. There was talk of democracy, too. Foreign experts, as well as many Chinese, were quick to point to the discrepancies between democratic slogans and the demonstrators' own behaviour. Yet to ask whether democracy was the main goal of the Tiananmen Square protesters, or whether the Chinese people really want democracy, is to ask the wrong question.

He Ping, a co-publisher of Entertainment Weekly, shifts in his chair and tugs at his trendy boots when I ask him about democracy. The leaders of the 1989 protest movement in Shanghai are still in jail. "China is not ready for democracy. We need a civil society." He Ping knows the western jargon. The difference between Chinese and western societies, he says, is that China lacks a public space for criticism. But China first needs to develop an independent middle class, like those in Taiwan and South Korea.

After He Ping and his friends leave my hotel room, I am left with a young student, Zheng Xi, who had helped me with translations. "Politics!" she says. "I hate it." I ask her what she would do in the event of another uprising. "I would run," she says, and laughs. I ask what she thinks of He Ping's views. "A typical Chinese intellectual," she snorts. "They just want power for themselves. Civil society indeed! What rubbish. If people want their rights, they must demand them." She had put her finger on something that had puzzled me before. I had met many educated Chinese who talked like He Ping: ordinary Chinese did not understand democracy; the Chinese had their own ways, and so on. But I had also met taxi drivers, money dealers, workers and unemployed students eager to discuss the need for human rights and the rule of law. This seemed odd at first, but then it made sense. The most successful, most educated Chinese often managed to accommodate themselves to the system, buy off the bosses, acquire some freedom. But the others, who had no means, suffered more from arbitrary power.

The Hong Kong Chinese who voted for pro-democracy candidates in last year's Legislative Council elections were not the tycoons who have tried to make deals with Beijing, but the people who lack the wherewithal to do deals. They knew that the only way to make power less arbitrary (or corrupt) is to elect one's own leaders and be protected by laws. This kind of thinking, more than capitalism or free markets, could lead to more democracy in China.

 

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The desire for money is only one reason for Shanghainese to feel nostalgia for the past. The other is local pride. Now that a new Shanghai is being contracted to fit the new age of wild economic expansion, intellectuals are looking to the old Shanghai for inspiration. Like Berlin, whose roaring 1920s were remarkably similar to Shanghai's (cabarets, movies, revolution), Shanghai is in the process of reinventing itself. Its pre-war past, with all its peculiar contrasts, is serving as the only model at hand. And yet, despite striking parallels, it is impossible to connect the new Shanghai with the old and cut out what happened in between. Far too much happened in between.

As with Berlin, vital human ingredients were destroyed or chased away. Berlin lost its Jews. In Shanghai it is the old cultural elite which has gone, the collectors, the literati whose presence leavened the crude materialism of the businessmen and the gangsters. In the last few years some members of the old elite have returned from Hong Kong, London and New York, to retire or to help the city open up to the world again. There is a small network of old Shanghai families who play tennis together and meet for discreet Peking opera evenings in private apartments. They have learned to keep their heads down. Zhang Rushi is such a man. I meet him at the Shanghai centre, a new twin-towered office complex. Zhang enters the room carrying a black leather bag containing scrolls of his own very fine calligraphy. He rolls them out carefully on a desk. There is a delicacy about him, a daintiness, which seems at odds with the booming city outside. Zhang is in his late 60s. He tells me that he worked from 1969 to 1979 as a rice cook in the canteen of a steel mill near Nanjing. The only things that kept him going during those years were his calligraphy and his poems.

Zhang's life story is about the destruction of the Shanghainese elite; not the westernised business elite but the cultivated gentry. His father was a mandarin of the old school: a former vice-minister of finance, a landowner and collector of Chinese antiquities. Zhang was sent to Beijing with his mother in the late 1930s, when his father decided to settle in Shanghai with his concubine. In Beijing Zhang learnt the classical Chinese arts, including opera singing. After the war he worked for a foreign-trading company in Shanghai. He passes over this period lightly: he had done well, "made them a million pounds." When his story reaches the 1950s and 1960s, he begins to giggle, as though embarrassed to call attention to his misfortune. "They called me a reactionary," he says. He lost everything-even his daughter, who was sent to a remote part of China to "work in agriculture-as a peasant, actually." His father was forced to sell his paintings cheaply to Communist party cadres. While Zhang was at the steel works, his wife suffered from serious heart disease, but he was unable to visit her. Nor did he ever again see his father, who died in 1972. After Zhang was released in 1979, he found he could no longer sing. His voice was wrecked by years of hard labour. "They spoiled everything," he says, giggling softly.

Chinese antiquities are back in vogue now. Most are being snapped up by Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as the new rich of Shanghai. There are many newly rich here. You see them shopping on Huai Hai road, the former Avenue Joffre, which runs across the old French concession. Huai Hai road has Armani boutiques, French bakeries and Japanese restaurants, and on the side streets there are discreet little bars which serve cocktails with profane names. Newly rich women hang out there, wearing short leather skirts from Tokyo and high-heeled Italian shoes from Hong Kong.

The newly rich make money in entertainment, smuggling, real estate and finance. Some are in the army, others are children of powerful party cadres and still others are out-and-out gangsters. The categories blur into one another. A gangster cannot get rich without connections in the army or the police or the government. But a public official needs to know the right gangsters in order to better his fortunes.

All this is rather like the old Shanghai: everyone works his own angle. Before the war, the British, the French and the Chinese had their own police forces. Gang bosses knew how to deal with them. One such figure, known as Pock-Marked Jinrong, served simultaneously as the boss of the "Big Eight Mob" and as chief superintendent of Chinese detectives in the French concession police.

It is impossible to say exactly what deals are being made in Shanghai today. A Hong Kong magazine caused a stir two years ago when it published allegations of shady dealing between the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the Public Security Bureau (Shanghai's police force) and local as well as overseas criminal organisations. The bureau, the magazine said, specialised in opening small and medium-sized brothels, whereas the PLA and the city government operated larger, more exclusive establishments. A PLA officer is quoted as saying: "Of course we earn a lot of money"-from clubs and restaurants. "With this money we can treat the army better."

It is impossible to operate any business in Shanghai without the right connections. Every business establishment, whether a brothel or a trading firm, has to have the protection of an official institution. Connections-guanxi-are an obsession. Cultivating connections is what the representatives of foreign firms spend much of their time doing. What has changed is not so much the method of doing business as the nature of the connections. Alliances shift dramatically: a famous pre-war gangster, Snake Eyes, was a ferocious anti-communist who helped Chiang Kai-shek in his war against the revolution; his son, known as Papa Du, is well connected with the government. Historical feeling is necessarily flexible, but not wholly absent.

The British company Jardine Matheson, for example, still has an image problem in Shanghai. Jardine was one of the companies which precipitated the opium wars by demanding the help of British naval power in the 1830s to open the Chinese markets. Graduating from opium to transport, industry and real estate, Jardine became the leading foreign firm in Shanghai. The old Jardine office, a Renaissance style building, still squats heavily on the Bund. The taipans at Jardine were the closest thing the British community had to royalty. After the revolution, Jardine moved to Hong Kong, with whose fortunes the firm is still closely associated.

The present headquarters of Jardine Matheson is a modest office in a new building behind the Bund. I had lunch with the current representative, William Hanbury Tenison, in the Chinese restaurant-restored to the original 1920s style-of the Peace hotel, only a few doors from the old Jardine building. Hanbury Tenison has a lively sense of history. He thinks of himself as the last taipan-only partly in jest. Fluent in Mandarin, he has a deep interest in classical Chinese culture. But he is unfazed by the present transformation of Shanghai. So far as he is concerned, he says, they could pull down the former Jardine building: "It was an aggressive commercial statement then, just as the high-rise buildings are aggressive commercial statements now."

He is right. Instead of preserving its past, Shanghai is remaking itself in the light of its past. Where a deliberate attempt has been made to preserve, the result is usually tacky and sad, like the old jazz band in the Peace hotel cranking out Dixieland numbers for package tourists in search of old Shanghai. As in New York, what connects old and new in Shanghai is aggressive commerce. In 1934, Lu Xun, the most famous Chinese writer of the 20th century, described the difference between an imperial capital and a business centre. The literati in Beijing, he said, were like officials, and those in Shanghai like merchants.

"Even rock singers in Beijing are more political than in Shanghai," says Wang Weiming, the editor of Life Weekly. Yen Bufei and He Ping, publishers of Entertainment Weekly, seem proud of their political apathy. "Only the Shanghainese understand our paper. We never deal with politics, only sensationalism. After reading us, people don't know what to believe." They both laugh.

"Beijing culture," says Wang Weiming, "is native Chinese culture. Shanghai is more westernised, more open, but also rootless." I ask when he first encountered western culture. He says it was after he became a factory worker in the 1970s. Like many Chinese who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, Wang is largely self-educated. During the cultural revolution, when the schools closed, he used his pocket money to bribe another boy into lending him "forbidden" books. That is how he started reading Dostoevsky. Later he read Dickens, Defoe and Hardy.

"The style of Shanghai intellectuals," says Xu Jilin, a cultural scholar, "is not to pay much attention to politics." But there was something strange about the disavowal of political interest. I thought of Lu Xun, a key figure in pre-war Shanghai literary culture, the only writer whose reputation has never been touched. He was the opposite of the apolitical intellectual posited by Xu Jilin as typical of the Shanghai spirit. Lu Xun was a political satirist of the highest order. He cannot have imagined that he would be remembered one day as an "official" writer, an icon of political rectitude, commemorated in a public park by a pompous bronze bust, as though he were Marx or Engels. You can visit his old house in Shanghai, which stands in a modest row of red brick terraced houses. It is a shabby, lifeless place, with nothing but a few tables and chairs. There is no sense of the writer's personality, his humour and radical spirit. The alarm clock next to his bed remains set at the time of his death.

There is another explanation for the lack of political activity in Shanghai. In effect, a deal has been struck. For decades, Shanghai was punished for its cosmopolitan past. Now it is being encouraged to get rich again, but only on condition that its artists and thinkers stay mute. Shanghai is more tightly controlled than any other city in China because it was never trusted by Beijing and because it must make China into an economic superpower, beat Hong Kong in five years and so on. Jiang Zemin, the current Chinese president, is from Shanghai, as are some of his top officials. They are sometimes called "the Shanghai mafia." But this doesn't mean that Shanghai dominates Beijing. Rather, Beijing has co-opted Shanghai.

Before liberation, Shanghai was the centre of the Chinese movie industry and the mass media. No longer. He Ping and Yen Bufei say that some stories printed on the front page of Beijing papers could not even be published in Shanghai. They mention a notorious fraud scandal on the Shanghai stock exchange-a story printed everywhere but in Shanghai. I ask them why. Surely people in Shanghai could read about it elsewhere? That misses the point, they say. Refusing to run these stories in Shanghai is just a way to show Beijing that Shanghai is behaving.

This is why old and new Shanghai are hard to connect. Pre-war Shanghai was hardly democratic; crime and corruption were rife in the foreign concessions as much as in the Chinese districts. But the main, foreign, part of the city was shielded from the interference of the central government. Chinese artists, businessmen and intellectuals flocked from all over China to the foreign concessions to escape from mandarins and censors. By the late 1920s, the international settlement was the only place in China where Lu Xun was still able to have his books published. Lack of central control made Shanghai the richest, most creative city in China. Today it is supposed to get rich again by central diktat.

Now that Shanghai is directly controlled by Beijing, there is no reason for an artist, businessman or thinker to move to Shanghai. One might as well move to the capital where the best connections are. And businessmen have more freedom in cities farther away from Beijing: Xiamen or Guangzhou. Shanghai, as a result, has become a little provincial. The intellectual and commercial outsiders who gave pre-war Shanghai its zest no longer come.

Shanghai's problems are really China's problems. The tension between central control and individual freedom was always the main issue in China, wherever the centre happened to be. Too little control meant warlords and anarchy; too much caused poverty and stagnation. The government in Beijing wants to give people the right to make money but not to govern themselves. As a result, Shanghai today is the nearest thing I have seen to Bertold Brecht's vision of Mahagonny, the metropolis of gangster capitalism, where only money rules. He probably had Chicago or New York in mind, not the main entrep??t of communist China. Hong Kong, too, has elements of Mahagonny, but so far the gangsters have been held within bounds by British rule.

Singapore used to be congenial to gangsters. But one of the achievements of its leader, Lee Kuan Yew, was to get rid of all the patrons and bosses by making his government the only patron in town. The rulers of China cannot do the same. China is too large for one patron, the regional differences too vast. So the old dangers still threaten China; disintegration and, perhaps, another lurch into anarchy, followed by dictatorship. This might not happen as soon as Deng Xiaoping dies. China is more likely to muddle through with an authoritarian regime which will use all the traditional methods of un-elected government: exhortation, threats, police surveillance and draconian punishment for dissidents. But the longer that goes on, in an increasingly prosperous society, the greater the threat of violence-which remains the last resort for rebels as well as for their oppressors. The miracle of old Shanghai, with all its vices, was that for about 100 years the city was able to escape from this karma of Chinese politics.

The chief legacies of that period are bits of grandiose architecture, some of which might be preserved; a bracing desire to make Shanghai modern again, and a certain inimitable style which makes every other city in China appear dowdy by comparison. The heat and noise of Shanghai, the anonymity of the crowds, the sheer metropolitan congestion, encourage private liberties less evident in the empty places of Beijing. A good place to observe the Shanghainese is a public park on Nanjing road. Built after 1949 on the site of the old racecourse, it was perhaps the only place where people of all classes and races in old Shanghai mixed. It is now called People's Park.

People's Park, like Washington Square in New York or Hyde Park in London, is a typically urban public place, divided into hundreds of private spaces. Old men twirl their arms and legs in tai chi meditation, young couples kiss. A lone man is practising a jazz riff on his trumpet. Families picnic, eating out of rice bowls or plastic boxes. Middle-aged women, exercising the arts of qi-gong, rub their backs against trees, hoping to absorb the powers of nature. There, among the picnickers, the qi-gong enthusiasts and the lovers, I catch a glimpse of the quintessential Shanghai style. In the middle of a water lily pond, on a platform with a red-tile roof, is an old man in two-tone shoes, teaching a younger woman, with the utmost grace, how to dance the tango.