Almost overnight, the metropolis, mothballed since its 1949 "liberation," took on a momentum reminiscent of its pre-communist heyday. Having expropriated the city's land under Mao Zedong as part of the communist abolition of private property, the local authorities leased it out to real estate developers in the 1990s, raising tremendous sums for infrastructure improvements. With its newfound billions, the municipality soon built the world's greatest civic infrastructure, including a brand-new international airport linked to downtown by magnetic-levitation train, a new subway system larger than that of New York or London, and a tangle of bridges and tunnels connecting the historic center of Shanghai in the former foreign concessions to the new financial center of Pudong rising across the river.
Shanghai residents whose homes stood in the way of this government-backed progress were forcibly moved. More than a million families were evicted and rehoused in the effort to resurrect Shanghai as an international business hub. Dismissed as a white elephant or even a delusional throwback to discredited Soviet-style central planning, the reopened Shanghai was soon birthing fortunes in real estate and finance and luring top global companies, including many, like HSBC and Citibank, that had dominated the city's economy 100 years earlier. Late-1990s Mayor Xu Kuangdi's oft-mocked remark that he was purposefully overbuilding Shanghai like a savvy parent who buys an oversized suit for his growing boy came to sound prophetic. The city's stunning growth vindicated its Communist Party planners, but it also threatened to spin beyond their control.
Pudong, the sparkling new glass-and-steel downtown that Deng had exhorted to rise faster, soon dwarfed the 1920s Art Deco edifices of the foreign-built Bund directly across the river. Known for the flashiness befitting a city that went from rags to riches in just two decades, the most eye-catching of the new skyscrapers is clad in an enormous LED screen illuminated at night. Like a giant television set over a bar, it's almost impossible to look away -- regardless of what's on. One expatriate European architect compared the mismatched towers of Pudong to women's outfits at the opera, where standing out and being noticed are more important than looking tasteful or, even, good. In the opinion of one American architecture critic, the point is size, not style: "Pudong's priapic towers literally overshadow the relics on the other shore, as if lifting a collective middle finger to the West."
Beyond the city's physical structure, economic and social policies were put in place to ensure the reglobalized Shanghai would not host a repeat of the city's dynamic but demeaning -- and ultimately revolutionary -- past. In stark contrast to the days of open immigration, when neither visa nor passport was required for entry, foreign visitors and expatriates are closely monitored. They make up just 1 percent of Shanghai's population today, a far cry from unregulated, polyglot Old Shanghai, let alone today's more typical global business hubs. (New York, for example, is 37 percent foreign-born.) Rather than import millions of foreign experts to help run Shanghai's global businesses, the authorities have goosed the number of Anglophone Chinese professionals in the city by treating the municipality as if it were an elite college with a competitive admissions process: Hinterland Chinese can obtain a Shanghai residence permit by earning a degree from a national-level university and passing tests in computer literacy and English fluency.
Less-educated Chinese hoping to work in Shanghai are on a much tighter leash. Cognizant that it was the discontented proletarian masses of Shanghai who turned communist and rose up to overthrow Shanghai 1.0, today's authorities use the hukou registration system, the internal passport regime in place since the late 1950s that officially binds Chinese citizens to their hometowns, to control the new coolies building the city's muscular skyline. Rural Chinese are brought in by the millions to work in construction, only to be sent back to the countryside after their job is done. According to an official government estimate, widely regarded as a lowball figure, roughly 6 million of Shanghai's nearly 19 million people are internal guest workers. Although they often overstay their official welcome (precise numbers are never reported), ID checks and domestic immigration sweeps are common, especially before high-profile international events like the 2010 World Expo. Such humiliations breed tensions between the city's ragged, leather-skinned migrant workers and its privileged official residents marked by their cosmopolitan fashions and good health. (Official Shanghai residents now have a longer life expectancy than Americans, not to mention better school-test results.)
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