The Hindu : Shanghai begins to dazzle again

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 02, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Shanghai begins to dazzle again

By C. Raja Mohan

SHANGHAI APRIL 1 . As he spoke today at the Institute of Strategic Studies here, the External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh, was making a brazen pitch to the egotism of the citizens of Shanghai, who make no secret of the pride they take in their extraordinary city.

``Shanghai is one of the legendary ports of the Orient; a cradle of revolution; a seat of education, learning; of commerce, trade and enterprise constantly reinventing itself. Its emergence again as a commercial and financial centre of China, indeed of the East Asia region is a tribute to the diligence and industriousness of the Shanghainese'', Mr. Singh sang to a visibly pleased audience.

Mr. Singh's remarks sum up the greatness of Shanghai, its unique place in modern China's history and the extraordinary future that lies ahead of it.

The Minister who has been visiting Shanghai since the early 1980s and seen the unbelievable transformation has every reason to be impressed.

The gross domestic product of Shanghai municipality today is larger than that of Pakistan. Its foreign trade turnover, if it grows at the current pace, could equal that of India in the not-too-distant future.

Nothing captures the pace of China's economic advance in the last decade better than the story of how Shanghai reinvented itself.

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A cruise along the Huangpu River at night reveals the full dazzle of Shanghai. On the west bank of the river, or Puxi, is the old Bund where the old colonial buildings erected by the Western financial companies stand out in all their majesty against the background of high rise that has come up more recently.

On the east bank, or Pudong, is the city's second miracle in a decade. From what were rice fields seven years ago, a Manhattan-like skyline now glistens under the Shanghai moon. Set up as a new city to draw in investment of all kinds, Pudong threatens to replicate Shanghai across the river.

Shanghai was not the pioneer of economic reforms in Deng's China. That credit goes to Guangzhou province in South Eastern China (bordering Hong Kong) that took the lead in opening up to the world in the late 1970s. Shanghai's rise began in the early 1990s as part of a conscious decision by the Communist Party of China to put the city back in the driver's seat of the galloping Chinese economy.

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Shanghainese are proud of their history. But they are not looking back. Their immediate objective is to replace Hong Kong as the financial nerve centre of China's economic growth. That is dreaming really big about the future. It is also about returning Shanghai to its past glory.

After all Hong Kong was itself transformed from a sleepy colonial entrepot into a metropolis by the capitalist elite of China which fled Shanghai from the ravages of the civil war in China between the nationalists and communists in the late 1940s. Beating Hong Kong will not be easy, but Shanghai does not believe it is impossible.

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Shanghai has another face too. While the capitalists acclaimed it as the "Paris of China'' and the "Queen of the Orient'' at the turn of the 20th century, many Chinese in the hinterland called it the "Whore of the East''. For Chinese communists and conservatives alike Shanghai represented everything that was wrong with capitalism and the West.

It was the city of fast riches and ill-gotten gains. It was the domain of crooks, adventurers, drug runners, tycoons, missionaries and gangsters. For all the rawness of capitalism in its colonial mode that brought depravity to Shanghai, the city was also the gateway through which modernity and Western culture entered China.

Shanghai retains that spirit of openness and a willingness to experiment with new ideas just stretching the limits imposed by the Communist Party of China, which is willing to turn a blind eye. After all the CPC itself was born in Shanghai.

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Shanghai begins to dazzle again