New vs. old

Author: By Michael Grunwald, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 26, 1997

Page: M1

Section: Travel

``The famous Bund is renowned as a multinational architecture exhibition,'' boasts the Official Shanghai Visitors Guide.

Sure, these majestic old European banks, clubs , and hotels along the Huangpu River are vestiges of an unpleasant colonial era, monuments to a time when arrogant imperialists carved up this 700-year-old city and ruthlessly exploited its people. But what monuments! From the imposing Art Deco Hongkong Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank to the elegant neoclassical Customs House, the buildings of the Bund are unmatched in China. No wonder another guidebook claims that ``as far away as Kashgar and Lhasa, local Chinese pose for photographs in front of oil-painted Bund facades.''

Today, you can still walk along the Huangpu and see visitors snapping pictures. But there's a catch. Most of the photographers, especially the Chinese ones, no longer face the Bund. They face the other side of the river, where the hideously pinkish 468-meter Oriental Pearl Tower -- the tallest TV tower in Asia -- stands at the vanguard of the most frenetic construction boom of the 20th century.

That tower, and the Pudong Development Area in which it stands, is the new symbol of Shanghai; as the shutterbugs turn their backs on the city's colonial past, they look out at its megalopolis future.

An amazing one-fifth of the world's high-lift cranes are at work within the city limits. Pudong, a muddy swath of shacks, farms, and low-rises before it was designated for development in 1990, is already home to the largest department store and is building the tallest skyscraper in Asia, soon to be joined by the largest airport and tallest building in the world.

And in sharp contrast to the old Shanghai of the Bund, where foreigners carved up the city into sovereign ``international concessions'' and the Huangpu Park famously excluded both dogs and Chinese, the creation of the new Shanghai is an unmistakably Chinese venture. If you are curious about China in the 21st century, this is the place to start.

One of the big questions about the new Shanghai is what it will do to the old Shanghai. The Bund will certainly be preserved, and it is certainly worth seeing, if only to marvel at the materialist trappings of the imperialist pigs. And no one is going to mess with the funky Jade Buddha Temple, built 80 years ago to house two smiling white-jade Buddhas from Burma; the Red Guards wanted to during the Cultural Revolution, but the resident monks preserved the temple by plastering it with pictures of Mao.

The 400-year-old Yuyuan Gardens, a nice Ming Dynasty getaway with the typical ponds, rockeries, and zigzag bridges of that era, is probably safe, too, although it was bombed during the Opium War and ravaged after the Taiping Rebellion, so you never know.

The rest of old Shanghai is fading fast; most of it will probably be gone within a decade or two, with the treasures of antiquity preserved in the outstanding Shanghai Museum, and the rest reduced to rubble or quasi-theme parks. For example, Yuyuan Bazaar just outside the gardens supposedly used to be quaint. Now its burger joints and rip-off souvenir shops outnumber its traditional silk and herbal medicine stores, and its heavily costumed rickshaw drivers don't even drive -- they just pose for pictures with tourists.

At least the bazaar has survived. It's not clear whether the historic colonial districts like Frenchtown will be so lucky. The rapid replacement of turn-of-the-century European row houses and tenements with modern skyscrapers and yuppie boutiques has inspired a great deal of hand-wringing among Western architecture buffs, and the squalid side streets of the old French concession do make an interesting walk.

But it's also easy to see why the Chinese would ignore the high-falutin' critics. Shanghai's colonial history was incredibly ugly, a horrid saga of drugs, violence, and exploitation. And even in its imperial heyday, Frenchtown was inhabited almost entirely by Chinese families, an ``almost'' that no longer applies today. China is supposed to preserve these slums, just because there are a few crumbling fleur-de-lis and pediments above the doors?

Would Boston preserve its Chinatown if there were no Chinese there, and the few Chinese who had lived there before had terrorized Bostonians?

Then again, for all the foreigners' trespasses, their money and energy did help create a dynamic city out of the fishing village that was Shanghai in the first half of the 19th century. But when the Communist Party took over China 100 years later, it basically turned off the juice in Shanghai.

Now that same party is jump-starting the city into the 21st century, an irony that is predictably left unexplored at the Communist Party Museum in Shanghai. Still, the museum, in the modest house where the party held its first congress in 1921, provides a fascinating glimpse into modern party thinking. There are no denunciations of private property, no forecasts of proletarian revolution, no Maoist slogans about subordinating the individual to the group. Instead, the focus is on imperialist abuses and the party's unrelenting anticolonialism. My favorite exhibit was a collection of wooden tags a British tobacco company issued to its Chinese workers in order to limit their time in the bathroom.

Today, of course, only Chinese capitalists are allowed to oppress Chinese workers, along with a few joint ventures. After the mass starvation of Mao's Great Leap Forward, followed by the mass chaos of his Cultural Revolution, China rejected the old communist orthodoxies under the dictum of the late Deng Xiaoping: ``To get rich is glorious.'' (Some Westerners suspect that he added an addendum: ``To fleece foreigners is patriotic.'' It's a chronic complaint among travelers to China, but nobody tried to rip me off.)

In any case, ``socialist'' China looks more and more like a nation of capitalist running dogs every day, and Shanghai is Exhibit A. The city is building a stock market that will be twice as big as Hong Kong's, and a new container port is expected to outstrip Hong Kong's as well. KFC has set up shop on the Bund, just as it has near Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Rents are through the roof, though not quite through Hong Kong's roof, and lodging is pretty expensive, too.

In the shopping districts, you can pay top dollar for designer clothing, or bottom dollar for atrocious knockoffs, and even many of the department stores offer real service, as opposed to the state-owned model of massive sales forces that completely ignore the customers.

Finally, there is Pudong, the new heart of the city. A new subway line is under construction, along with a new freeway, and the telecommunications infrastructure is going to be state of the art. Nearly 50 skyscrapers are in place, and new ones are sprouting every day. But the area is also devoid of charm, and it's only going to get uglier. Those willing to wait in ridiculous lines and pay exorbitant prices can see it all from the top of the syringe-like Pearl Tower, which, according to the Shanghai Tourism Directory -- and this is verbatim -- ``is fich in poetic and plctorial aplendor.''

Whatever. If you want plctorial aplendor, as the old proverb goes, ``In heaven there is paradise, on Earth Hangzhou and Suzhou.'' Hangzhou, with the magnificent West Lake and the bizarre rock carvings of the Temple of Inspired Seclusion, is a three-hour train ride from Shanghai. Just an hour out of the city, Suzhou, the so-called Venice of China, has moats and canals dating to the 12th century, and brilliantly landscaped gardens.

To be honest, it's a bit more China than Venice, with industrial behemoths sprouting up along the banks of the moats, and the polluted canals getting paved to accommodate traffic. But it's a lot less China than Shanghai, which is now essentially the world's largest and coolest construction site.

Shanghai, after all, is where the new China is being built. The next question is what will happen if the building ever stops.