Wary of the days when Western companies like Standard Oil and British American Tobacco siphoned off their locally earned profits to New York and London, leaving most Shanghainese impoverished (life expectancy in the 1930s was just 27), regulations today push multinational companies to partner with local Chinese businesses. In Shanghai 1.0, the Pudong district was home to the notorious sweatshops of Western multinationals. But the garish towers of Shanghai 2.0 rise quite literally atop Old Shanghai's shame. The sweatshops now, of course, are on much cheaper real estate inland up the Yangtze -- and owned by locals. With China standing proud, foreigners, once resented as leeches and locusts run amok, are now seen as a pleasant reminder of the city's global cachet. Even the return of a modified extraterritoriality -- expatriates enjoy more freedom of worship and association than locals do -- has not become a source of tension. At least not yet.
Mindful that it was exposure to foreign ideas, the heady brew of liberalism and communism, as much as to foreign people that destabilized Old Shanghai, today's authorities keep a tight lid on the city's intellectual and cultural life, even by the strict standards of the People's Republic. At the turn of the last century, Chinese journalists in the foreign concessions, safely beyond the reach of the emperor's censors, launched China's freest press. And seizing on the republican principles of the Shanghai Municipal Council, local Chinese taxpayers in 1905 created their own elected city council, an unprecedented form of representative government in the empire. Needless to say, contemporary authorities have no intention of allowing freedom of the press or electoral democracy in Shanghai today. Notably, Chinese authorities tar such human rights with the pejorative term "global values" (meaning: not ours), dismissing them as irrelevant -- even to China's most proudly global city.
Even less overtly political ideas from abroad are monitored and controlled. United Artists, MGM, and Warner Bros. all had major offices in 1930s Shanghai; today only 20 foreign films a year are permitted to be screened in all of China. And for all the international flights landing at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, which opened in 1999 and already has annual passenger traffic comparable to New York's JFK, Shanghai is far less open to foreign culture now than it was back in the Roaring Twenties. In those days, top jazz musicians from New York, New Orleans, and Chicago were in residence in the city's famed nightclubs. But ever since 2008, when Björk shouted "Tibet! Tibet!" from a Shanghai stage during a performance of her song "Declare Independence," local authorities have subjected touring artists to strict scrutiny. In 2009, the nascent Shanghai Fringe Festival -- an offshoot of the low-budget, high-ambition live-arts festival that takes over Edinburgh, Scotland, each year -- was forced to move its international performances to smaller peripheral cities because, as the organizers complained, the Shanghai government had "some nonsense issues." Chinese performers find the Shanghai cultural commissars particularly meddlesome. As Zhang Shouwang, the lead singer of Beijing rock band Carsick Cars, told me after a gig on his U.S. tour, "Shanghai is more restricted than Beijing.… Once, when we played there, someone called the police. That kind of thing always happens in Shanghai."
Turning down the volume on all forms of free expression is part of a bid to build a Shanghai that is seen rather than heard. The goal is a city that imports all manner of global commodities without the dreaded "global values." For the modern rulers in stodgy Beijing, the ultimate aim of Shanghai 2.0 is a sparkling model metropolis (The fastest train in the world! More skyscrapers than Manhattan!) to vindicate the top-down system that built it.
As one top reform-era Politburo member explained with uncharacteristic candor, the resurrection of Shanghai is best understood as a bid to make up for the Communist Party's Maoist-era mismanagement of the city -- a record of folly that called into question the party's right to rule. "Before liberation," former Premier Zhao Ziyang wrote in his memoir, "Shanghai was a highly developed metropolis in the Asia Pacific Region, more advanced than Hong Kong, let alone Singapore or Taiwan. But after a couple of decades, Shanghai had become run-down and had fallen far behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. This made people ask, What exactly is the advantage of socialism?"
Today, China's new mandarins hope that Pudong's skyline is the answer.
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