Shanghai, China
Shanghai, China is growing to becoming one of the fastest economic expansions in China. What once was a city full of social inequalities and illicit behavior is now a city that is full of life and business.
In the mid 1980s, the decision was made to push Shanghai once again to the forefront of China’s drive for modernization, and an explosion of economic activity has been unleashed. In the last two decades, city planners have been busy creating a subway network, colossal highways, flyovers and bridges, shopping malls, hotel complexes and the beginnings of a “New Bund” – the Special Economic Zone across the river in Pudong, soon to be crowned with the world’s tallest building.
Significantly, China’s main money-printing mint is near here, hence the high proportion of shiny new coins and bills in circulation in the city. The Shanghainese are by far the most highly skilled labour force in the country, renowned for their ability to combine style and sophistication with a sharp sense for business, and international in outlook. Thanks to them their city is riding high.
Not that the old Shanghai is set to disappear overnight. Although the pace of redevelopment has quickened, parts of the city still resemble a 1920s vision of the future; a grimy metropolis of monolithic pseudo-classical facades, threaded with overhead cables and walkways, and choked by vast crowds and rattling trolley buses. Unlike other major Chinese cities, Shanghai has only recently been subjected to large-scale rebuilding.
Most of the urban area was partitioned between foreign powers until 1949, and their former embassies, banks and official residences still give large areas of Shanghai an early-twentieth-century European flavour that the odd Soviet-inspired government building cannot overshadow. It is still possible to make out the boundaries of what used to be the foreign concessions, with the bewildering tangle of alleyways of the old Chinese city at its heart.
Only along the Huangpu waterfront, amid the stolid grandeur of the Bund, is there some sense of space – and here you feel the past more strongly than ever, its outward forms, shabby and battered, still very much a working part of the city. Today, strolling the Bund is a required attraction for any visitor to Shanghai, and it’s ironic that relics of hated foreign imperialism such as the Bund are now protected as city monuments.
Like Hong Kong, its model of economic development, Shanghai does not brim with obvious attractions to see. Besides the Shanghai Museum, the Suzhou-reminiscent Yu Yuan Gardens, and the Huangpu River Cruise, there are few sights with broad appeal – many travellers leave the city with a sense of letdown.
But the beauty of visiting Shanghai lies not so much in scurrying from attraction to attraction, but in less obvious pleasures: strolling the Bund, exploring the pockets of colonial architecture in the old French Concession, sampling the exploding restaurant and nightlife scene, or wandering the shopping streets and absorbing the rebirth of one of the world’s great cities.