I had mixed feelings about coming back. I longed to be in the country again, but I also feared what I would find. I had received ample reports of the gloom that had settled over China in the months after June 4 1989, the imposition of a new program of ideological purification, and of the many arrests. The sentences handed out, particularly to the workers who had been caught up in the demonstrations, were chilling. There was also news of the bulldozing of many of the old Beijing neighbourhoods, as if the city itself was being punished. These were the years when the bonds of collective ownership of real estate started to dissolve. It was the beginning of a gigantic transfer of wealth that was to create China’s first generation of millionaires. Old residents were moved to high-rise housing on the outskirts of the city, while the hutongs where Beijingers had lived for hundreds of years were flattened for new developments. The fabric of Beijing would be altered beyond recognition during this decade, and it would only be in the 2000s that a movement supporting historical preservation would be heard.
Meanwhile, a steady stream of friends who had been active in bohemian or intellectual circles in China were arriving to take up self-imposed exile in Australia. They told of a stultifying atmosphere, of harassment by the police, of a sense of hopelessness.
And, yet, there were signs of life. The exhibition ‘China’s New Art, Post-1989’ had arrived in Sydney in June 1993. There were exciting films coming out of China, too, like Farewell My Concubine (which took out the Palme d’Or at Cannes that May), a film which hid its political critique inside its sweeping historical narrative. Word came, too, of a new strain of ‘hooligan literature’, and a drop-out culture that spoke of a kind of passive resistance among the young.
By 1991 foreign money was again pouring into China. I was intrigued by the strategy behind Deng’s ‘southern inspection tour’, especially his vision for Shanghai. In the 1980s I had got used to hearing of the Chinese government’s determination to keep Shanghai down. The city had been deliberately bypassed when decisions were being made about where the Chinese economy would be opened up, and, for a decade, as the special economic zones in Guangdong province boomed, Shanghai had laboured under the weight of out-dated state-run enterprises and central planning.
Suspicion of Shanghai ran deep. Its modern history was deeply entwined with the story of Western exploitation of China. At the conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842, Britain forced a series of commercial concessions on China, including the designation of Shanghai as a free-trade port. Standing at the mouth of the Yangtze, Shanghai was the ideal gateway to the rich hinterland of China’s south, and an excellent platform for industrial development. By the early twentieth century Shanghai had become the most important financial centre in Asia and one of the great industrial and trading cities of the world.
But trade and industry were just part of the story. Shanghai was one of those cities, like Paris or New York, whose name you could conjure with. Shanghai spoke of glamour, opium, cheongsams and chemin-de-fer, of jade, silk and easy money. By the 1920s it had been crowned in popular imagination as the Paris of the East. The city became a magnet for gamblers, nightclub singers, White Russians, writers and people looking to create a new life. Noel Coward wrote Private Lives in a suite at the Peace Hotel and Margot Fonteyn studied ballet in the city with exiled Russian masters. The French Concession had gracious avenues planted with plane trees, while the British enjoyed tennis and the Long Bar at their gentlemen’s club. Along the waterfront, known as the Bund, foreign banks, trading companies and foreign hotels raised grand granite edifices in the Western style—marble-floored and colonnaded, guarded by stone lions of stern British mien.
Shanghai was a place where fortunes were made and made quickly, and not just by Westerners. Shanghainese became famous for their business acumen; when the communists took over in 1949, many migrated to Hong Kong where they rose quickly to prominence as the leading business people of the colony. It can be argued that much of Hong Kong’s business success today was built off the back of displaced Shanghainese entrepreneurs.
Deng Xiaoping’s decision to give Shanghai its head in the 1990s was thus a calculated one. He knew what visions the name Shanghai conjured for foreigners. What better place to declare as open for business than a city that the West already felt they had a stake in? What better way to lure the foreign investment the country so desperately needed than by offering entry to this fabled city?
As for me, and the new ABC China correspondent Sally Neighbour, we were hooked. Discussing what to do for our first story together for Foreign Correspondent, we couldn’t get past Shanghai. An investigation of what was happening in the city basically chose itself. In September 1993 we were there.
Everyone told us to stay in the newly opened Hilton but we chose the Peace Hotel instead. With its dim lighting, musty, muddy-coloured carpets and somnolent staff, it had come down a long way from its original art-deco splendour. But this was where Noel Coward had stayed, and the grey-haired jazz band that played the lobby bar every evening was said to have first performed there before the communists came. Best of all, the Peace Hotel stood on the dress circle of the Bund, looking out over the Huangpu River that connects the Yangtze to the sea.
As the sun came up palely in the polluted sky on our first morning in the city, we watched a fleet of barges making their way upriver. They were laden with sand and cement, heading for the scores of construction sites around the city. We were there at the dawn of a building boom which, over the next few years, would create a whole new infrastructure of ring-roads, subway lines and a grand bridge across the river to a vast new development zone called Pudong.
Pudong was an ambitious project to be built on 350 square kilometres of rural land that had supported more than half a million farming households. It was planned as a financial and commercial centre that the leadership hoped would one day rival Hong Kong. On that autumn morning Pudong presented a strange sight. At its centre was the already completed Oriental Pearl TV Tower, decked with roseate orbs that gave the whole structure a kind of cartoonish feel, as if the design had been taken from The Jetsons. Around the tower, high-rise apartments, office blocks and factories were already taking shape, while farmers hung on in emerald patches of rice paddy between the construction sites.
As we looked out across the river at the future, the granite edifices of old Shanghai stood at our backs, while the sounds of a port city—the sad moan of the ships’ horns, the cries from the bargemen, the hum of the engines—were mixed with the sound of a Strauss waltz issuing tinnily from a ghetto blaster. All around us on the elevated walkway by the river there were Chinese couples dancing. They came here, we discovered, at dawn every day to practise their steps—waltzes and sambas, foxtrots and cha-chas—with a proficiency most Westerners could only dream of. Young, middle-aged and old couples gathered each morning wearing natty tailored outfits and sharp shoes—two-toned lace-ups for the men, and black leather court shoes for the women, all slightly worn but otherwise well cared for. You could sense they, too, had held on to an idea of Shanghai that they wanted to live up to.
Over the next days we put together the pieces of our story. During business hours we followed the agenda laid down by the city’s ‘foreign affairs bureau’, who assigned us two minders to dog our every step. After dark we pursued the encounters that would bring the story to life: the construction workers from the countryside now labouring through the night on the new city buildings; the young entrepreneur who had escaped to the West after June 4 but had now returned to sell ‘natural mud packs’ to newly beauty-conscious Shanghainese; the investors in the recently established stock market swapping tips and forming syndicates; and the farmers in Pudong chasing one last harvest before the bulldozers moved in.
Huge swathes of old Shanghai were being razed for new developments and their residents were being rehoused across the river in Pudong. In those days, few people wanted to move to the new accommodation. We visited an informal ‘housing exchange’ where a broker sorted out p
eople’s living arrangements for a fee. He would find a person willing to trade down to less space to stay in old Shanghai, and put them together with someone who was happy to cross the river for a modern bathroom. It had once been the case that you had to live where you were put, in accommodation linked to your ‘work unit’. But the old rules were gone, and ordinary people were making new ones to suit themselves.
The housing broker disavowed any financial motive for setting up the exchange. He kept trying to tell us he had established it out of a simple desire to ‘serve the people’, in the words of the old Maoist slogan. If anyone wanted to give him a gift of money out of appreciation, he said, that was just a happy bonus. Deng Xiaoping may have given his blessing to the idea of getting rich, but many people still thought it safer to keep one foot in the orthodox past while they dipped a toe in the future.
Down at the stock exchange people were happier to admit it was all about the money. The exchange had opened in 1990, trading shares in what were still majority state-owned enterprises. Issuing small parcels of shares became a favoured way for these enterprises to raise funds, bringing in investment without surrendering control.
In those days a number of small exchanges had opened around Shanghai, making it as convenient to buy stocks as to go to a betting shop in the West. The one we visited was housed in what had once been a Russian Orthodox Church, but only we seemed to think this was funny. There we met a number of ordinary traders who admitted to doing well. Many were investing what were quite large sums in the Chinese context, and some spoke of their intention to put a third to a half of their savings into the exchange. Like small investors the world over, they seemed to have little sense that the stock market might ever go down.
A number of them also claimed to be working for others as well as themselves. One told us he invested on behalf of a whole syndicate of taxi drivers, having got into conversation with one of them on a ride home from the exchange. He claimed to take only a percentage when the stocks went up, and not a cent if things did not pan out. He told us he had hundreds of thousands of renminbi (RMB) under management, this at a time when the annual per capita GDP ran at only around RMB3000.
Although I was a little sceptical, I was reminded of the taxi driver syndicate years later when the Chinese billionaire—and former Shanghai taxi driver—Liu Yiqian rose to prominence as an art collector. With his wife Wang Wei, he has now built two sprawling private museums in Shanghai to house his collections of Chinese and Western art. Soon one of the star attractions will be a Modigliani nude that he picked up in November 2015 for US$170.4 million, at the time of writing the second-highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction.
As we made our way around the city it was hard to escape the sense of excitement that Shanghai was finally on the move again. Officially some 150,000 workers had flocked into the city to work on construction sites in 1993 alone, but unofficially the number of so-called ‘migrant workers’ fuelling the building boom was believed to be much greater. These workers came from rural provinces like Anhui, where the dissolution of the communes was creating a vast surplus workforce.
The work they did in Shanghai was backbreaking, with long shifts keeping construction going day and night, but the workers still felt they were stepping up in the world. One told us that if he had stayed at home he would simply have been a ‘coolie’. Now he had his own money to spend and places to go and have fun. Moving to Shanghai had given him a kind of autonomy that not long before would have been impossible. ‘Shanghai is a good place, full of money,’ he told us, but then added with a laugh: ‘It’s easy to make and easy to lose.’
We wondered whether the government would be able to control a resurgent Shanghai, failing to notice what would become more obvious later, that much of the development in the city was being driven by the state itself, not private entrepreneurs. For all the talk, Shanghai was not going to become another Hong Kong, or even another Shenzhen. The ideas that had underpinned the economic reforms in the 1980s—that the productive forces in the country should be liberated through incentives to individual enterprise—were being downplayed post-1989 in favour of a new kind of state capitalism. In Shanghai foreign investment would be directed solely into state-owned enterprises, while Chinese banks would be encouraged to favour the state-owned sector also, leaving private entrepreneurs to raise money in a new, unregulated and risky ‘shadow banking’ sector.
The Shanghai we saw was on its way to being a leader again, but in a very different manner to its pre-communist past. The city was in the vanguard of a new approach to development that would end up defining the whole Chinese economy by the end of the 1990s. Shanghai would demonstrate how powerful the state could be in creating profits for itself when it exploited its monopolies, in particular over the ownership of land. Land grabs by the state, like those that occurred in Pudong (where traditional users of the land would be evicted with minimal compensation only to see the land-use rights re-sold at a massive profit), are now commonplace across China. Profits are turned towards new developments, infrastructure and services, but also towards creating wealth for a well-connected few. Shanghai in the 1990s was where China’s crony capitalism of today was born.
On our last evening in Shanghai, Sally and I decided to toast the city from the top of the Peace Hotel, with its stunning view across the river. In theory, the roof was out of bounds, but we ordered gin and tonics in the lobby bar and smuggled them into the lift to the top floor. We found a stairway to the roof and stood looking out, giggling like schoolgirls. Inevitably a hotel worker appeared and made a half-hearted attempt to chase us down into the hotel again. He gave us a short lecture about safety but you could tell he, too, was seduced by the view from the roof. As he withdrew he tutted with disapproval as he saw us leaning back against the dusty masonry. A couple of minutes later he returned, not to order us off the roof, but with collapsible chairs for us to sit on. The old spirit of the Peace Hotel clearly lived on in his heart.
Viewed from our eyrie the Pudong side of Shanghai was mostly dark, nothing like the neon-lit landscape that it is today, but the reflection of the ungainly pink spire of the Pearl TV Tower shimmered in the river. We recalled that the view from the tower was one of only two things our Chinese minders in Shanghai had been truly excited about showing us. The other was a ‘very special’ restaurant that they had been angling to take us to from our first hour together. Day after day we had blocked this suggestion: we had too much ground to cover to spare time for an interminable introduction to Shanghai’s local delicacies. Finally, on the last day, we relented. It said more about the new Shanghai than anything else we saw that week that the ‘very special’ restaurant turned out to be the first-ever Chinese outlet of the fast food giant, KFC.
By the time we arrived to shoot our story in Shanghai in 1993, around 70 million people throughout the country had joined what would become known as the ‘floating population’, people who had been cut free by the dissolution of the communes. These workers would power the transformation of China over the next decade, building the skyscrapers and the roads, the subways and the bridges, operating the machinery and manning the assembly lines that would turn China into the factory of the world. The displacement that had begun in the 1980s would accelerate through the 1990s at a stunning rate. By 1999 the China that had begun the great experiment in reform and opening up twenty-one years before would be almost unrecognisable.
The generation of which Jia Aili and Cao Fei were a part would come of age at the end of the twentieth century, having already experienced more change than most of us in the West would know in a lifetime. Jia Aili would witness the decline of the monolithic state enterprises, the cradle-to-grave socialism that had once guided the nation. He would see his parents made redundant while still barely middle-aged, but also find himself being given the chance to enter university—the first in his family to have ever done so.
Cao Fei would watch as her home town of Guangzhou spread out into the Pearl River delta, engu
lfing farmland and absorbing villages as it rose from smoggy backwater to a powerhouse of the Chinese economy. She would see her older sister morph from model student to advertising executive, turning her back on the most treasured ambitions of her parents. As for herself, Cao Fei would begin to dream of and make art in a different world entirely, one that could be lived in costume, online, and eventually in a new virtual space called Second Life where there were no boundaries of age, geography or imagination.
The speed of change in this decade would rival anything before or since. At the end of it nothing in China would look the same, not even in the farthest reaches of the country. And at the end of the century a whole new reality had taken hold, where a divide between rich and poor had been installed as a pillar of progress, where the idea of the state providing you with work, security and purpose had been consigned to the scrap heap, and where neighbourhoods that had existed for centuries were wiped off the map overnight.
Each year of the 1990s I would return to China, and every year I would experience the shock of non-recognition, of arriving at a place I had once known well only to find it simply wasn’t there any more. For me it was sad, disturbing, even shocking; so what must it have been like for people who did not have another home to return to?
One day Zhang Xiaogang and I sat in his studio discussing some of his new works, sculptures of ordinary but obsolete objects—transistor radios, rotary dial phones, ink bottles, music cassettes—all rendered in bronze. He told me he had, not for the first time, lately been struck with nostalgia. He felt that was OK for a man in his fifties like him, but then he said how strange it was to look at the work of artists who were only half his age and recognise nostalgia in their works, too. He saw they were also making works recording the objects and scenes of their youth, and rendering them with romantic poignancy. He realised that for them, the things and places that in their twenties they should be confident would remain with them were already slipping away. ‘To be Chinese in this era,’ he told me, ‘is to feel nostalgic when you are still quite young.’
The Phoenix Years Page 18
