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CULTURE-CHINA: Shanghaied Into Modernity
By Antoaneta Bezlova
SHANGHAI, Jun 29 (IPS) - When one of China’s top leaders in charge of the country’s architectural landscape recently berated Chinese cities for their breathless rush towards modernity, none deserved the reprimand more than Shanghai.
This most forward looking city in China is in a quandary. Driven by its overpowering desire to modernise, Shanghai wants to forge a new identity, but is reminded at every step that its uniqueness is entirely defined by its historical legacy. So it has chosen brazenly to assert its new image by steadily obliterating its past - and its character.
Before the communist takeover in 1949 Shanghai was one of Asia’s most
international cities, home to wealthy merchants, rich compradors, great taipans, White Russian emigrants and Jewish refugees from Nazism.
In 1926 English writer Aldous Huxley summed up Shanghai’s charm as: "Life itself...dense, rank, richly clotted life...nothing more intensely living can be imagined."
During Shanghai’s "belle epoch’’ - in the early years of the 20th century, the city rose above every other to become China’s brightest star - an economic miracle and a cultural trendsetter. It was a place where the East and West entwined to create a modern economy and a vibrant culture.
For millions of Chinese, its name was synonymous with trendiness. The
Chinese believed that Shanghai represented the country’s future and saw its glittering modernity infecting the laggard life of post-feudal China with new-century vigour.
Today, while it aspires to regain its trendsetting role, Shanghai appears intent on demolishing the vestiges of its cosmopolitan past. During the last 15 years of breakneck economic growth, countless colonial-era neighbourhoods have been annihilated and swathes of historical sites have been razed over to make way for office towers, residential blocks and highways.
The city fathers, though, are proud of Shanghai’s tremendous changes and leaflets handed out in the city’s tourist offices relate this in staggering figures. There are some 1 million construction workers in the city and roughly one-fifth of the world’s cranes work here. Since the city embarked on its redevelopment in the early 1990s, two million of its residents have been relocated.
"Up until the 1980s, nearly 80 percent of old Shanghai survived," says author and city historian Peter Hibbard. "Today, more than 50 percent of it has been demolished."
It was the scale and pace of such development in Shanghai and other cities that prompted China’s vice-minister of construction Qiu Baoxing to compare the "senseless" destruction of the nation’s cultural heritage to the damage caused during the Cultural revolution of 1966-76.
At the time, radical Red Guards rampaged through old temples and ancient sites, burning relics and destroying artefacts. Today, the destruction is caused by urban developers in a "blind pursuit of the large, the new and the exotic," Qiu said.
"This is leading to a poor sight," he told an international forum on urban planning in Beijing this month. "Many cities have a similar construction style. It is like a thousand cities having the same appearance."
Paying homage to tradition and as the chosen window for China’s
modernisation, Shanghai strives to be in the forefront of all changes. But playing a role-model of modernity for every other city in the country, it is rapidly losing its unique architectural edge and turning into an urban prototype, some architects warn.
The city suffers from China’s overwhelming concerns with appearance, says renowned French-Hungarian architect Yona Friedman. "And being Shanghai, it is much quicker than places in any other countries in turning a city into a familiar prototype overnight," he said in an interview during his recent exhibition in Shanghai.
Visitors to the city are now whisked from the airport on an expensive
highway system and as they drive through the city’s elevated roads, they are able to glimpse only the middle-height of skyscrapers, rows and rows of them.
Shanghai’s once bustling street life is now an experience to sample only in few remaining islets in the city, like the old Chinese city and the former French concession. Yet, even city oases like the French quarter, with its leafy avenues and western-style mansions, is continuously encroached upon and its area is ever diminishing.
The Bund, the city’s waterfront promenade lined with rows of magnificent colonial edifices, is also eclipsed and distanced from public view by the elevated walkways of Shanghai’s new road system.
Ordinary Chinese people who do choose to take a walk along the Bund’s
pavements can glimpse a lot but experience very little.
As a part of the city’s redevelopment, Shanghai planners have converted the former colonial buildings into lavish headquarters of international fashion houses and big brand-name jewellers. The goods at the windows shops of Armani and Cartier are so conspicuously out of reach for many Shanghai residents that many of them only dare peep though the doors and never enter.
The Bund used to be "the landmark image of Shanghai" before 1949, according to Peter Hibbard, author of the book ‘The Bund: China Faces West’. With its palatial buildings housing foreign banks and trading companies, the clock tower, the elite Shanghai Club and Cathay, China’s most famous hotel, the waterfront was the centre of foreign social life.
"Now the Bund is a lifestyle showcase but rather dead," Hibbard says.
When author Pan Ling visited Shanghai in early 1980s, she lamented the dereliction and decay, and the "grime of years" lying thick upon its facades. "The city has hardly been touched by the destroyer of history’s relics, the dark angel of Development, but nor has it profited much from careful preservation," she wrote in her book ‘In Search of Old Shanghai’.
Twenty-five years later, heritage protection exists in name but it is only skin deep. "The old is made to look new and the new is made to look old," says Hibbard.
A poignant case is the reinvention of the Xintiandi neighbourhood,
hailed by the local government as a model for redevelopment. Having erased swathes of old traditional Shanghai ‘shikumen’ buildings (stone townhouses with internal Chinese yards and English-style facades), the city has rebuilt them in the original style, adding in the process fashionable boutiques, outdoor cafes and bars.
The only authentic old building remaining on site is the memorial house where the first founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held in 1921.
(END/2007)
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