feed is available 
Shanghai Paradox: Rush to modernize revives past sins (Peter Kwong - The International Herald Tribune)
January 17, 2007 2:56 PM
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
SHANGHAI: When in 1980 I started returning to Shanghai � the city where I had attended elementary school � my relatives had to use ration coupons to purchase meager quantities of meat and cooking oil. I helped them buy bicycles with my foreign-exchange certificates at the Friendship Store, which catered only to foreign visitors and overseas Chinese. Otherwise they would have had to wait six months to obtain sufficient coupons and pay half a year’s salary to get one. The 11-story Jinjiang Hotel where I lived towered over the French Quarter. It was impossible to imagine what the city would become 26 years later.
Today, that elegant old art deco hotel is dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers. City residents shop at foreign-owned supermarkets that are as well-stocked as their Hong Kong or American equivalents. Buick sedans have replaced bicycles as the most coveted transportation in China. As of 2005, more are sold in China than in the United States. They are manufactured at the Shanghai General Motors plant.
But even these remarkable changes pale next to the astonishing transformation of the Communist Party. Around 1980, the party leadership admitted that three decades of orthodox Communism had produced little economic gain and constant political upheaval. In a 180-degree turn, party leaders began to push a market economy, encouraging people to get rich fast instead of striving for equality.
The initial experiment was carried out at Shenzhen, a town across the border from Hong Kong, because the party did not trust that it could keep Shanghai’s notoriously capitalist-minded people under control. It was only in 1991, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, when Beijing desperately needed to appease popular discontent, that the party leadership finally “opened” Shanghai. Once let loose, the city wasted no time.
The people of Shanghai, whether rich or poor, have always believed themselves to be more rational and efficient than their countrymen. They have always reproached the people of Beijing for wasting time talking about politics, while they themselves get things done. They are especially proud of their trademark way of doing things � the so-called haipai style. True to that tradition, the city offered generous incentives to attract foreign investment: cheap office space, low taxes and, most of all, the promise to cut red tape. Foreign firms rushed to Shanghai. In a short 15 years, the city rebounded to overtake Shenzhen and the Pearl River Delta as China’s major industrial and consumer-goods production center.
Today in Opinion
Energy time: It’s not about something for everyone
Making order out of chaos: iPhone, iHope, iDream
Other Views: South China Morning Post, Haaretz, Irish Times
Click here to find out more!
But in the rush to join the ranks of the world’s leading business centers, Shanghai’s Communist leaders have evicted tens of thousands of families and razed block after block of charming old dwellings so that foreign developers could erect high-rise office complexes, hotels and apartment buildings that would look equally appalling in Paris or New York. The intended awe-invoking effect of the showcase skyline of the Pudong financial district designed by renowned Italian, Japanese, Spanish and American architects across the Huangpu River from the old Bund is usually lost in dense layers of smog. More visible is the new affluent lifestyle, reminiscent of that enjoyed by the select group of foreigners, gangsters and corrupt government officials and supported by an invisible sea of servants, handlers, singsong girls and coolies during Shanghai’s glory days of the 1930s.
Today, as then, members of the moneyed elite � foreign businessmen, overseas Chinese investors and high party officials � reside in the best part of the old French Quarter, shop at international stores, frequent health spas in five-star hotels, and wine and dine in clubs with initiation fees as high as $10,000.
For average residents, including members of the growing middle class, this lifestyle is just a pipedream. Worse off are the city’s 3 million migrant workers (out of a population of 20 million), forced by poverty into jobs reminiscent of their service-providing predecessors escaping the civil war before 1949.
Please see the link below for the entire article.
Read "Shanghai Paradox: Rush to modernize revives past sins"
Posted at 2:56 PM