But Hong Kong and Shanghai were havens for personal and substantial liberty on a continent where everyone’s person and substance had always belonged to the emperor, the warlord, or the man with the largest hatchet. And they were havens for overseas merchants and Chinese natives alike. Even in 1885, seventeen of the top eighteen taxpayers in Hong Kong were Chinese.
Until the communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai was the more important of the two cities. It was one of the few deepwater ports on the China coast not cut off from the interior by mountains or crabby peasant rebellions. And its central location, where the Huangpu empties into the mouth of the Yangtze, made it the nineteenth-century wet version of O’Hare Airport. Shanghai is still the largest and richest city on the mainland—even though it isn’t really Chinese and dates back only 156 years in a country that eats eggs that old.
Shanghai has grown from a piffling village to a metropolis with a population of 13.4 million. Or so says my 1996 guidebook—outdated while still on the press. The 1996 official estimate was 16 million. Wrong, too. The city government has since decided that 17 million people is closer to the mark. But no one keeps pace with Shanghai. I had a tourist map so current that the copyright was for the next year. I went to the spot marked Shanghai Art Museum, and the museum was gone. They’d sold the museum. A department store was going up in its place.
It took me two days to find the new art museum, though it’s a whopping-big round thing with loops on the top like a granite wok—perfect for stir-frys on Jupiter. I was usually lost in Shanghai, despite the fact that the main part of the city is no larger than midtown Manhattan and is laid out more or less on a grid. Getting lost in right-angled intersections with street signs in English produces a chill of embarrassment and a hint of Alzheimer’s-to-be, like getting lost in a Kmart.
And, indeed, familiar brand names were everywhere. The very words for foreign goods are enough to conjure with. The most common form of advertising is just a product’s moniker in large roman letters, as if Toyota had a billboard in Times Square reading “” Shanghai buses carry so many logos, they look like NASCAR Chevys. Every lamppost seems to be named after a soft drink.
The new buildings in Shanghai are like giant pages in an Ugly Man-made Materials catalog. They are sheathed in kitchen-sink stainless steel, storm-door aluminum, translucent-plastic disco flooring, and vast expanses of chrome and smoked glass—vertical ’70s coffee tables crying out for a Mount Rushmore noseful of cocaine and a razor blade the size of an airplane wing.
Many structures are covered in ceramic tiles like giant inside-out shower stalls. Some have random chunks of classical decoration—pediments, friezes, Doric columns—pasted to minimalist boxes, as if the Parthenon had been converted to ministorage units. Others aspire to be Legoland built from Legos as big as 7-Elevens. And one spherical corporate HQ on a cubic plinth buttressed by hulking triangles managed to be grim, silly, monumental, and cute all at once—the Tomb of Hello Kitty.
At the top of every edifice, there’s something funny going on—a pointy or flashy or revolvy item. Favorite motifs are cocktail olive and pickle-on-a-spike. The skewered ovoid shapes culminate in the unbelievable Oriental Pearl TV Tower, 1,400 feet high, with massive geodesic globes at middle and bottom. It looks like a Russian Orthodox church of the twenty-eighth century or a launch vehicle for a pair of Houston Astrodomes or a humongous shish kebab that lost everything but two onions in the barbecue fire.
And omnipresent amid all the frenzy of Shanghai is that famous portrait, that modern icon. The faintly smiling, bland, yet somehow threatening visage appears in brilliant red hues on placards and posters, and is painted huge on the sides of buildings. Some call him a genius. Others blame him for the deaths of millions. There are those who say his military reputation was inflated, yet he conquered the mainland in short order. Yes, it’s Colonel Sanders.
In some ways, Shanghai is the familiar, homogenized world city. The restaurant at my hotel was decorated with a “Stampede ’97” theme. The waitresses were dressed in denim hot pants, checked shirts, boots, and Stetsons—the world’s only five-foot cowgirls who bow when you order a cold one. A mechanical bull had been installed across from the salad bar. One inebriated Japanese businessman got on it. And right off again. Yah-hoo.
Of course, if you want to feel like you’ve really traveled, Shanghai offers some experiences of the patently exotic kind. I went with some friends to what looked like the worst pet store ever. Inside was a wall of terrariums full of fat, angry poisonous snakes, hissing, pulling hood boners, and making wet bongo noises when they tried to strike through the glass. This was, in fact, a restaurant on Shanghai’s Huaihai Road. Spécialité de la maison: cobra blood.
One of the more expendable waiters opened the hinged front of the cobra case and pinned a four-foot serpent with a forked stick. He pried the critter out of its home, grabbed it beneath the head, and scuttled off to the kitchen, holding the thrashing reptile aloft as though it were a living string of furious bratwurst.
A few minutes later, the fellow emerged with a tray of brandy snifters, each filled with bright, gory liquid, plus an extra glass holding the contents of the snake’s gallbladder. Bonus.
There’s a ritual involved in drinking cobra blood. Of course. There’s a ritual involved in most very silly things. You have to get four males together and pledge a toast or something, and something else, which I don’t remember. Do I need to mention we were drunk? Then you slam it.
Being that a snake is a “cold-blooded” animal, I vaguely expected a chilled beverage. But it turns out a snake is a room-temperature animal. Which allows the full flavor to come through. You know the drill on exotic food. Cobra blood tastes like chicken…blood.
Drinking cobra blood makes you…it’s very good for…gives you lots of…The explanation was in Chinese. And cobra gallbladder juices do whatever even more. We let the youngest guy drink this. He said it was okay, although he was awake all night chasing mice around his hotel room.
But a more foreign foreignness lurks in Shanghai. There’s something, beyond a sip of snake squeezings, that’s alien and sinister about the place. For a very full city, the town is oddly empty. First you notice there aren’t any dogs. Then you notice there aren’t any cats. Then you notice there are hardly any pigeons. The protein is missing.
The beggars are also missing. In days of walking around Shanghai, I encountered just two, and these of the most desperately legitimate type, one with no hands and the other a crippled dwarf. Hard to believe begging was eliminated among 17 million poor people by kind admonishment or polite request. Or that children were eliminated this way, either. Families dot the streets and parks, always in trio form. China’s One Child program has succeeded (though whether at greater social costs than the success of America’s One Parent program, I can’t say).
The traffic jams seem normal for a moment. Modern cars look alike. But these modern cars look alike for the simple reason that they’re all the same. They’re all locally made Volkswagen Santanas, and all of them are painted half-gallon screw-top burgundy red.
The city streets are full to the point of stasis, but the four-lane turnpikes coming in and out of town are deserted. And in the roadside plazas where other countries would have restaurants and gas stations, there are police checkpoints instead—arrest stops.
The Chinese countryside is screwed on backward. It has vacant highways running through crowded agricultural fields. All the farmwork is being done by hand. The only tractor I saw was a rototiller thing being used in a flooded rice paddy. The operator looked like a man mowing his kid’s wading pool.
Back in the city, I was walking along the Nanjing Donglu, with its store windows full of Lee jeans and Adidas shoes and Revlon eye shadow, when I peeked into an alley, and there, six feet from the makeup counter, was a man in his underwear giving himself a bath at a sink. Because that’s where his sink was. If you live in the one-room warrens of Shanghai, the lavatory is in the street, shared with a half dozen oth
er families. And a sink is luxury. Sometimes it’s just a water tap, padlocked so that the folks from the next warren over don’t poach. The toilet is down the block, if there is one. Wagons come through the alleys in the mornings, collecting wooden chamber pots.
The houses built when Shanghai was a treaty port were huddled into narrow streets and squeezed around dainty courtyards. They are pastiches of French style, English fenestration, German brickwork, and Chinese smiley-lip tile roofs, as odd in a small way as modern Shanghai’s skyscrapers, and typically Asian in crowding. In the 1950s the little houses were divided into tiny apartments. In the 1960s the Communists inserted concrete prefab housing into every remaining open space. Hundreds of rows of two-story tin-roofed cubicles were built from tarjointed slabs of concrete in people’s areaways, in front of their doors, and along their sidewalks between the housefronts and the curb. Now the old neighborhoods of Shanghai are as intricate as Parcheesi boards and practically on the same scale.
Ground-floor rooms open directly onto the street. People live in the middle of the road, wander the snack stalls in their pajamas, tip back their kitchen chairs amid bike and motorcycle traffic, and sell cigarettes and newspapers to the passing throngs without needing to get out of bed.
And this is not poverty. Not by Chinese standards. By Chinese standards this kind of material deprivation isn’t even worth noticing. It’s negligible, one might say. And that’s what the World Bank does say. The World Bank publication China 2020 Series: Sharing Rising Incomes asserts that there are “70 million absolute poor in China,” and that “about 100 million additional people survive on less than $1 of income a day,” and then, in the same paragraph, the World Bank states, “urban poverty is negligible.”
Conditions in Shanghai are an improvement for the Chinese. This urban squalor is sought after. You need a government permit to move to Shanghai. People travel thousands of miles and sneak into town to live like this.
There’s also another kind of living in Shanghai—living large. There are women whose every item of jewelry, apparel, and accessorization bears the mirror-image C’s of Chanel—the golden ass crack. There are men in college-education-priced Hugo Boss suits (which have an unfortunate tendency to be as wide as Shanghai tycoons are high). Long black BMWs and Benzes, missing from the wino-hued daytime traffic, show up at night in front of the Hard Rock Cafe (but not, I noticed, in front of restaurants featuring cobra blood). In a real-estate-agency window was a picture of a comfy suburban house for rent: $10,000 a month. A largish three-bedroom apartment goes for $6,000 a month, a smallish one for $4,500, and golf memberships (also sold by real-estate brokers, in frank admission of snobbery’s price tag) start at 83,000 yuan, which is $10,250, almost 200 times the average monthly Chinese wage.
The average monthly Chinese wage is also about what a round of drinks costs in a Shanghai bar where double-dating Chinese fifteen-year-olds were flopping and bobbling drunk on a weekday midnight while the car and driver waited outside and one of the girls cradled a cell phone like the stuffed animal she should have been home in bed with. According to Sharing Rising Incomes, between 1981 and 1995 the Chinese increase in income inequality “was by far the largest of all countries for which comparable data are available.” The disparity of wealth is enough to turn all the people in China, me included, into Communists.
Wait a minute. They’re Communists already.
In a capitalist country we can shrug off the dress-hog broads, cash brats, and limo’d pudgies. We’ll put up with this kind of thing because it’s the price of freedom. But China doesn’t have freedom. It’s illegal to strike. It’s illegal to go to a church if that church isn’t government approved. In January 1996, Father Guo Bo Le of Shanghai was sentenced to two years in a labor camp for, in the words of the court record, “saying Mass.” Exercising rights of speech or assembly is a nonstarter. According to the U.S. State Department’s 1996 human-rights review, “All public dissent against party and government was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile, or the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention, or house arrest. No dissidents were known to be active at the year’s end.” Sixty-five crimes are punished with the death penalty, including forging tax invoices. Torture is routine. Journalism must conform to the guidelines of the Communist Party’s brazenly yclept Propaganda Department. Women are subjected to forced sterilization, and baby women are aborted so that families can get a son as their one allowable child. Most laborers belong to a danwei, a state work unit, that controls everything from the right to change residences to permission to have that kid. The Freedom House organization, in its annual Freedom in the World report, says, “China continues to have one of the worst human rights records in the world and the rule of law is nonexistent.”
I had come to Shanghai for an academic conference with, of all things, a libertarian think tank. The confab was officially sanctioned and cosponsored by a Chinese university. Why would Communists invite to their country people who are absolutely woolly on the subject of freedom? There were folks in our delegation who think Ben and Jerry’s ought to be able to sell Morphine Mint, and folks who, at a certain hour of the evening—when sufficiently full of cobra blood—mutter, “I have just two things to say to Timothy McVeigh: ‘IRS.’ ‘3 A.M.’”
But it turns out that libertarians are the only policy boffins in Washington who favor free trade, no matter what. And free trade is the only freedom on the Chinese agenda at the moment. Libertarians reason that government has no business telling independent citizens whom they can do business with or why. And some libertarians have a further theory that trading fried chicken and Pepsi with the mainland Chinese is like trading smallpox-infested blankets with the Plains Indians—that the Communists will come down with a fatal case of Western values.
So the libertarians would talk about individualism and responsibility, legal self-possession, civil society, and natural law. And the Chinese would stare into the middle distance, applaud politely, and ask us if China was going to get most-favored-nation trading status without kissing the business end of Boris Yeltsin.
The other thing the Chinese wanted to know about was Social Security privatization. This, like free trade, is a policy favored by libertarians, but not for the reason the Chinese gave. A “pro-market” Party cadre told the audience that “too high Social Security benefits encourage laziness.”
The academic conference was like being sent back to college unstoned and less practiced at doodling. The Chinese college students’ amateur simultaneous translation didn’t help. Usually the kids got just the nouns: “Problems China reforms industry strategy 1950s structure.” Afternoons and evenings, there were official banquets—the Chinese version of Thanksgiving dinner twice a day. And we should be grateful that Columbus really didn’t find the Orient, or our Pilgrim forefathers would have dined on chicken feet, pig’s face, black “preserved” duck eggs, and many less identifiable entrées. (One thing you learn in China is: Never ask, “What’s cooking?”)
My reaction to academia hadn’t changed in twenty-eight years. I ditched. I spent my time hiking the imbroglio of Shanghai through the First Bank of Mars architecture and the Third Supermall from the Sun shopping, pushing between construction workers in their rattan hard hats (an idea for U.S. real-estate developers who want an earth-friendly look), and weaving my way among the backstreet food vendors (don’t look into a bucket of live eels right after breakfast).
Retailing in Shanghai is a matter of either megastores or coolie baskets. And industry is either corporations so large that they rate a seat on the UN Security Council, or bike shops with sales-and-service facilities on the sidewalk. There are no middle-sized businesses in Shanghai, no middle-priced goods, and being middle class seems to be actively discouraged.
Take, for example, that defining bourgeois act, buying a car. In China you have to get approval to buy it from the government’s Business Administration Department, buy it, present the receipt to the revenue authorities, pay a 10 percent sales tax,
and, if the car’s imported, pay Customs duty of as much as 150 percent of the car’s value. (China favors free trade—for other countries.) There’s an inspection where they don’t just inspect but tell you to install fire extinguishers and so forth. You need a parking permit from the traffic bureau, liability insurance at $1,000 per year, a temporary car-registration license, and a receipt for your road-maintenance fees. Then you take a photograph of your car displaying all its documentation, and present it to the Car Administration Department, which will—if it feels like it—grant you a permanent car registration after you pay to have your license number recorded.
This explains why none of those VWs in the Shanghai traffic jams is a private vehicle. They’re all government-owned taxis.
The Chinese economy has grown. According to the World Bank, “China’s GDP per capita has grown at a remarkable 8.2 percent a year since economic reforms started in 1978.” But what, exactly, is growing? One of the professors from the Chinese university gave us a tour of Pudong, Shanghai’s $36 billion commerce and industry “New Area” across the Huangpu River. We took a bus through a homemade-looking tunnel and arrived in a flat, planned sterility of immense dimensions, the office park as Nebraska. Here and there the landscape was decorated with blandly abstract corporate art. Wiggly steel shapes in red, yellow, and blue rose from the middle of a traffic circle.