Author: justinoconnor

I had dinner with some people from my Chinese family. One cousin told me about his job. He works for an electricity company. It is owned by the state but all the different provinces are allowed to compete with each other for contracts anywhere in China. This does not extend to domestic supply, competition for which they realise is nonsense (take note, Thatcher). But this socialist market is just as rapacious as any other. Large contracts for industry – remember when we had this? – and transport produce real feeding frenzies. My cousin’s job was to find out what the company who was buying the power really wanted for the contract. What was the price they were looking at? What were the parameters of the job in hand? Inside information on the brief, in short. However, after getting a sense of where the brief was really coming from, his job was then to find out how much money the man who was negotiating the contract wanted if my cousin’s company was to secure the contract. This involved a bit of wining and dining. But eventually the red envelope was handed over. This would be built into the budget as an essential part of getting the contract. Though this was all illegal, it was all normal and part of the business structure. He told me that all the foreign companies do it. He had contacted one such UK firm and cold-called four or five times. Eventually they met and red envelopes were passed over. This is so obvious nobody talks about it. It is assumed that the higher you go the more you take. And, again going back to ancient Chinese times, you take people with you. You build cliques – long-term cliques, not just hanging out after work in the pub. This process was transferred to the communist party, where politicking is about who is up who is down, and if your man is going down, you’re going down with him.

In Ming times corruption amongst the bureaucracy was rife. Those who tried to deal with it believed that the yang of idealism would counterbalance the yin of self-interest. The system eventually crumbled. Maybe Mao’s idealism was about dealing with the yin of capitalist backsliding from the socialist ideal. Certainly something of this – heavily intertwined with his own yin and yang of power ego and sex – marked his launching of the Cultural Revolution. That was certain to destroy the surviving social hierarchies, those that had persisted in the previous 18 years or so. But in the end it simply destroyed people’s faith in any ideals. People say corruption became endemic in the Cultural Revolution, as back door trading and social climbing through ideological posturing grew rapidly. The Cultural Revolution, subjecting society to politics, meant there could be no legal (or democratic) redress for those wronged, or any transparent rules for the conduct of everyday life. The post-1976 reforms have tried to change this – but the inadequate legal system and the non-existent democratic system still favour corruption and cliques. All of this is hidden behind economic success; or rather, not hidden just ignored. It is assumed that this is what happens everywhere. I have no idea how this is going to develop – just to say that when it comes time for the system to change itself (as it will, though I’m not saying in which way) this will be a problem.

Went to one of the University campuses. As you would expect in a city of 15 million there are quite a few universities in Shanghai. Tongji is one of those founded in the late 19th/early 20th century, like Jiaotong here near us. Tongji is in the north of the city, beyond the old Japanese concession. They both have the kind of classical and renaissance buildings you’d see in US universities built at the same time; and here and there a few art deco buildings, reflecting the new spirit of the 20s and 30s. Tongji specializes in engineering and architecture. Its campus has some very modern buildings dotted about – the most impressive I saw being some joint German institute concerned with civil engineering I think. What I liked about it was that is was a campus right in the middle of a densely packed city. We don’t really have these in the UK. I suppose Birmingham is near the centre, and a few others maybe … but to go from the dense urban space of the city into a tree-filled space without cars and (much) noise was a real shock. The campus is walled, and has gates on four sides. Students are expected to live here if they go to university – even people who live in the city need to have formally rented a room at least. The rooms sleep six, though there are some more expensive ones that sleep two. Showers and sinks are in a block outside, like a campsite. There are canteens, huge canteens, of course; but there are also shops selling more or less everything, from pens and paper to kebabs cooked on mini charcoal grills. In fact, it looks like the city in miniature. There had been a lot of investment – a refurbished library and some foreign academic apartments stood out. But the feeling is of hard work and over crowding. And of course there are no bars and hence no students throwing up in dorms or sticking their arses out of windows. Which was nice.

The whole university entrance system is nationalized – like France I suppose – but it reminded me of what I’d read about the civil service system in Ming and Qing times. A series of competitive exams, rising from local to provincial to national, allowed scholars to ascend the civil service ladder, in theory right into the imperial palace. This complex, competitive system provided the means of social mobility and wealth for the countless sons of gentry and merchants. Often it took two or three generations to build up the wealth and the contacts to set their son off on the examination path. If they achieved some rank they could be rewarded by a commendation which not only mentioned them but also the two or three generations preceding them. They were officially honoured posthumously.

Competition for the best universities is as fierce, and often with equal sacrifice. A poor peasant sends his son to a Shanghai university – this means someone exceptionally bright who has studied hard and to whom his parents have sacrificed long hours of work in shabby one or two roomed houses. The one child policy has meant the pressure on these kids to carry the burden of their family’s hopes is intense. It’s odd too that examination results come out over a few nights in late June. There is a TV programme, a bit like election night special, which has lots of experts talking about education, whilst underneath, like ticker tape, the results of a whole nation scroll across the bottom. No choice, you are assigned to the university based on exams.

I came after the exams, which meant a gentle out-of-term feel. Students were still there but the pressure was off for the time being. Until the results came out.

The Creek Art Centre was set up by a Norwegian-Chinese and Norwegian couple. He’s a wealthy businessman but wants to do something cultural. My friend at Park 19 says there is a sense that some of the wealthy are now beginning to think about things other than money. Quality of life. But they are still few and far between. So they rented the place and set up a not-for-profit (which at present is not making any money, so it’s a good job) gallery. It is also hard to find – something to do with an eccentric address system. And it is situated right next to a very poor area of housing. The door stands like one of those Neapolitan medieval palaces right on the narrow street, with washing and locals hanging out. We arrived early – well, early for ‘arts time’ (10.30) – Monday morning. There was a blue carpet going from the road beside the river to the door. Last weekend there had been a conference organized by the LSE – with Rem Koolhaas, Richard Sennett, Saskia Sassen and others in attendance – it sounded much better than the one I went to. As we left they were rolling up the carpet. Families lived in two roomed shacks on the road. Chickens and geese ran about. Toilets were outside, as were the sinks and cooking stoves.

Inside the aesthetic was post-industrial minimalism. Walls stripped down to the brick, joists exposed, original features, like the old lift, retained. In this case the factory has been classified as a historical building, which shows how Shanghai is accelerating through the decades. First the Bund, then the French Quarter mansion, then the Art Deco, now the factories. The couple who own The Creek aren’t always around. He gets around on business; she comes over now and then. It seems that she lived in Shanghai and had a studio at Moganshan Lu. As did the guy who is Director on the exhibition side. A graduate of Guangzhou Art Academy (just behind Park 19) he’s moved from painting to time-based media – I saw a complex mix of traffic shots and fractals on his computer. The focus is on little known Chinese artists, though they had the Warhol exhibition and some other international ones. Two of its six floors have commercial space. There’s a café and a restaurant. The restaurant was fully staffed – at least four waiters beside the woman who seemed to be running it – but empty. It was 12 noon on a Monday. They run music events and such parties. The guy who runs this side is a fluent English speaking Chinese guy who spent time in Singapore. He certainly looks businesslike.

These places will continue to pop up. What goes in them? The cities are picking up that – despite how it might appear – it is art as much as popular culture that seems to make a city’s name; something condemned to the margins 10 years ago is being brought back in. But the focus on contemporary art and its spaces is also linked to the internationalization of contemporary art that has seen it become a huge and complex field of institutes, commercial galleries, auction houses, art academies, government-led capital projects – oh yes, and artists. These have become incredibly mobile in the last decade – and their mobility is at a more ‘grassroots’ level than those producing popular culture. DJs and bands travel, some of them, sometimes. But the producers of popular culture – as opposed to the consumers and the products themselves – are not as mobile as it might be assumed. Communication is done through the internet, products, magazines and so on. However, artists are very mobile and they meet others, physically. It makes ‘contemporary art’ much more influential at a global level than might first appear. This can have good and bad effects. These encounters make some real connections between people and places. But it is also easy for the international art world to demand a specific set of themes, a specific way of doing art, a specific language and comportment which will make this art recognized as ‘art’, as it circulates between the heavily curated and critiqued spaces of international art. The Bund is being transformed in this way though new galleries, which take their place next to the Armani shops and the designer bars and restaurants.

But the audience we are talking about is very small, even in a place like Shanghai. The question is, to what extent does this new art world have to drive a wedge between it and the local population? Not between it and the poor families living on the doorstep – this is too easy a contrast to make – but between it and other spaces of local culture. Where are those fermenting spaces of popular culture? Where is the work being done to transform the wave of new cultural images and ideas into something meaningful? This is just imitation otherwise, whatever they say about creativity and business and entrepreneurialism.

Of course opposite The Creek we can see what is more likely to happen. Two warehouses are being refurbished. One – Shanghai Tequila – has a ground floor full of ridiculously expensive ‘French’ fashions – way, way beyond most people’s budgets. A girl sits there, waiting for the occasional drop-in. Like Shanghai needs another designer fashion shop. Next to it, in a 1933 Art Deco building, is another development. This one of interest because it was the warehouse of the famous gangster from the ’30s, a man who sort of helped to make all the different foreign concessions hang together. It’s not clear what it will be as yet. Not an art centre, I don’t think.

I just got back from Beijing where I had been at a conference. I spent five nights there. On the first night I got that big city feel as I saw my first Chinese celebrity, James Chou from CCTV 9 (Check it out – you can get it on the internet.) This was in a reproduction Ming dynasty courtyard house restaurant, with trees and lights and crickets and Chinese music. The sort of place you should come if you’ve never been to China. You know it’s fake but somehow for a few moments you want to dream you are in one of those blue and white porcelain scenes; but meal over, back into the taxi to deal with Beijing’s appalling traffic. Beijing, through a mix of traditional Chinese city layout and communist hyper modernization, is built on a grid pattern. Huge wide ‘boulevards’ (no flaneurs of course) funnel rivers of metal and fumes at all hours of the day. Last time I liked Beijing; this time I hated it. One way of controlling the traffic in Chinese cities has been charging for registration plates. Shanghai’s are both very expensive and are also rationed. You need to go into a sort of auction. Beijing’s are easier to get. And the metro system is old. And the busses are a bit crappy. However, SUVs here are more in evidence – more than anywhere else they make you despise and loath the drivers. Not just ecology; not just the way they give more sense of superiority to drivers already used to being kings of the road; but the sheer display of wealth and power stinks.

But maybe it was the conference that was at the root of my bad temperedness. I won’t go into it here but it announced in an aggressive, swaggering way that the creative industries were the next wave of the new economy. China must move from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’ – from the factory of the world to its creative heart. Creative industries, creativity, innovation – these are to be China’s new targets. In ten years maybe China will be challenging Hollywood; maybe it will take its place as a cultural world power, a power based not on world domination like the US but on exchange and peaceful co-existence. I think this is naïve but it’s good for soft soaping the Chinese (whether they believe it or not) whilst offering technical support in ‘installing’ the new economy.

(This by the way, has been the theme of the current celebrations of Zhang He’s journey to the western Oceans. Setting out in 1405 he traveled as far as East Africa. Some claim his fleet continued around Africa to the new World. In any event this was a voyage of encounter – with a huge fleet, the most powerful in the world, he distributed gifts of great value to the leaders of the country he visited. The Ming dynasty however shut up shop in 1424 and forbade sea travel and burnt all the records. Anybody building a two masted ship would be beheaded. It worked. China became inward looking. 80 years later Vasco de Gama (maybe using Zhang He’s mapped picked up from a Venetian traveler in Calcutta) rounded the Cape and – after some nice touches like cutting the noses off a fleet of fishermen near Calcutta, to show his power – set about the ‘civilising mission’ of European colonialism in the East. A big ‘if only’ – and now the Chinese are saying “Will our century, the Chinese century, be one of peaceful encounter and co-existence?”).

So the usual array of creative entrepreneurs and proselytising academics lined up to introduce the creative economy to China. But of course, for a creative economy you need a creative class. And where is this creative class to come from?

In Europe cultural entrepreneurs grew out of the complex cultural and economic transformations of the sixties and seventies. On the one hand ‘high art’ faced up to enforced business exigencies and the dawning fact of its being unseated by popular culture; on the other, popular culture moved from bohemian margins to global domination. I exaggerate of course. In cities, a mix of large global concerns and small micro-businesses operate within ‘cultural clusters’, where cultural and economic impulses mingle in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The common culture, the shared understanding, the habitus of those negotiating these clusters is something formed over a longer period. How are we to see China? I’ve always talked about the rapid crowding of events and development here. Where in fifteen years a recognizably ‘modern’ cityscape has emerged from a city of poverty and decayed infrastructure. Now we are very rapidly to get a ‘creative class’ or at least creative industries. Where will these come from, what cultural knowledge, what cultural capacity will they mobilize?

There is a lot of talk about the new middle class in China. Some welcome it; some worry about it; some say the communist party are banking on it for its long term survival (no revolutionary bourgeoisie here); some that it does not exist. I don’t know the answer, I’ve not studied it. But I am sure that it is still at an emergent state and that culturally it is marked amongst its over thirties by the recent memory of poverty, and amongst its under thirties by the massive influx of western commercial brands and values and images. The intellectual elites – such as they existed – of the 1980s have almost no visibility. Popular culture is brands and harmless pop. So it seems to me as an outsider. But somewhere out there unpopular cultures are fermenting, in those spaces of the city which have just begun to exist, to grow out of the shadow of ex-pat bars and hangouts. In the meantime, where are the creative entrepreneurs? They are of course the kids of the rich and well connected; they have seen the new economy and want some of the action. The Chinese market for cultural goods is huge; the West wants in on it. It doesn’t care about censorship and the Chinese government knows it. Tell us what we can’t do, tell us clearly and you’re on. So the new TV clusters, the new media and advertising empires, the new pop music industry (which is about stars and live performance rather than (non-existent because pirated) record sales), the new fashion empires – all these are a fast forward beyond any bohemian radical phase, beyond the relaxed socially tolerant phase so vaunted by Richard Florida, straight into the ‘grab ’em by the balls’ phase. Much like early (early?) Hollywood or New York popular music. At the moment, however, they are not inventing as Hollywood and New York, they are replicating. “Where will the content come from?” was the big question of the conference; the answer, from creatives. Well that solves it then.

Defenders of the arts often use the idea that they are the R&D of the cultural or creative industries. This is where the ideas come from, where the innovation take place, where risks happen. I have a few issues with this, but to some extent it has been true in Europe. In China, Art is a problem. The cultural revolution set out to systematically destroy notions of ‘western art’ and, whilst they were about it, the artists themselves. Though rehabilitated in the later 1970s these things, let us say, take time to re-build. (Last year I attended a concert of Mahler’s first symphony and the conductor, who I think was French, began by saying how ten years ago he had played the same piece here in Shanghai but they could only play half the fourth movement because it was too difficult for the musicians). And of course the communist party still wanted to control content and agendas – witness the ‘spiritual pollution’ campaign of the early 80s. One of the key developments of the 90s was the acknowledgement by both intellectuals and the party that ‘high culture’ was no longer the ground on which the future of the country was to be played out. Which meant on the one hand a certain freedom of content, and on the other, the marginalisation of that art. Classical music was different – both traditional Chinese and western classical music have been promoted. New concert halls grace the major cities and form the centrepieces of their claims to be cultural cities and therefore cosmopolitan cities. (Last year I took a taxi out to a ‘cultural quarter’ where a concert hall, fancy French restaurant and sort of contemporary art gallery stood empty. The taxi driver had no idea where it was.). On the façade were pictures of Mozart and Beethoven, with Mahler making it (when they used to do this sort of this in the west Mahler was forgotten) and Shostakovitch and Prokoviev and some contemporary Chinese composers).

Museums and historical monuments have also rehabilitated Chinese cultural heritage, forming the central pillar of cultural tourism in cities – as of course they do in the west.

Contemporary art was ignored until quite recently. One of the things about cities using culture as part of their branding or renewal strategy is that they have to know something about it. Or find someone who does – but how do you identify this someone when you distrust the traditional cultural elite? Certainly museums and galleries and concert hall are sort of straight forward. But when cities began to think about contemporary culture, when they became aware that cities in the West do not sell themselves on popular culture that much, but on that strange thing ‘contemporary art’ – what to do? This is a problem which seems to me only recently – 2 years – to have come into view for Chinese cities.

For example, Beijing has a huge old factory complex which was taken over by artists. It’s got a sort of fancy arty restaurant, ‘interesting’ shops, bars and commercial galleries along side existing studios. This is where the discerning western cultural tourist would make for if they had done the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. The Beijing government is thinking about knocking it down. They might want Rem Koolhaas to build their huge TV complex, but why keep an old factory? Maybe Rem could have a word?

In Guangzhou a much smaller development exists in an old factory, very difficult to find and much less likely to gain the attention of the passing tourist in the city. Park 19, however, has been in the sights of various visiting arts people and organisations; the British Council let Antony Gormley speak there last year. I too was roped in for a session. It had the feel of a space of excitement and innovation, existing on the margins of toleration. Since last year the city government became more interested in it. They began to think: ‘Why did the visiting German consulate delegation want to go and see it? What’s wrong with our concert hall and its fancy French restaurant?’

Last year I also visited a place on Suzhou Creek (watch the film, a glimpse into old – 1990s – Shanghai) called Moganshan Lu. It was an old textile factory with a long history going back to the Chinese business community of the 1920s and 30s. It’s now a place of studios and commercial galleries. The British Council use it as part of its visiting arts scheme; an Italian art entrepreneur has a studio there (Bizarts). It is surrounded by very poor housing and shabby streets. Last year it was under threat. This year I hear that the city now think it has some value; maybe this is what is meant by cultural cluster? Not only that, since the February there’s a new development, just along the river – The Creek Art Centre.

Coming to a place a second time gives you the comfort of the familiar, though you may barely understand it more than the first time. But you have enough points of reference for the full existential shock to diminish. You have space to look around. But the familiar is not always the comfortable, like the way the waiting crowd mows you down as the metro door opens, or the sweat drips down your back after five minutes, or one more taxi blares its horn as you cross the road on green. Concert audiences here, I’d forgotten about.

One week ago I was at a Beethoven concert in Manchester. Being the Ninth it was treated as an event in the way the others in the series had not been. I went to all of them. That early concert of symphony 1 and 3 was half empty; the Pastoral and the 7th had been quite full. But the Ninth always packs them in. I was reading about it in Lewis Lockwood’s book on Beethoven and it’s clear that this has always been the case. The Ninth is a civic occasion, as highlighted by Leonard Bernstein’s concert before the Brandenburg Gate in 1989. The Ninth transformed the idea of the symphony (again) and set a definitive seal on the idea that music, symphonic music at any rate, was for a ‘public’. Of course bourgeois, but by implication open to all. It was the French composers during the revolution who first thought about public music, music with a public function. Music that would stir hearts and minds. Music that would communicate in a new way. But it was Beethoven who first did this with real musical integrity (John Carey’s latest book would say this was a meaningless judgment; I would say his book is mostly nonsense from beginning to end, but I’ll return to this), molding the details and structures of the musical language into one that could perform this public work using an inner musical logic rather than external ‘sound effects’. In 1824, Europe – from a revolutionary’s perspective and Beethoven was a bourgeois revolutionary – was a place of gloomy counter-revolution. The ancient regime was back in power. Beethoven set out to make a statement – in that special way music can – about freedom and joy and human brotherhood, not as an easy idealism but as a memory of a vision of liberty in a dark place. Once, in St Petersburg, I asked a senior figure in the Arts Council North West who had just come from a performance what she felt about listening to the Ninth – could she bring herself to believe in that final vision? She said she did not intellectualise music and let the violins just wash over her. This is not a sneer – well, OK the Arts Council bit was – being washed by violins is fine. It made me wonder what on earth classical music audiences are thinking about – what is this ‘public’ at all? Is there any sense that Beethoven’s music still speaks to a public? The audience in Manchester, or that bit around where I was sitting, were all turned out well for the performance. There is an idea amongst people who never go to classical concerts – which is the majority of the population – that it is full of people in tiaras and cummerbunds. Maybe the opera still has a bit of this in it, the high prices and emphasis on connoisseurship – you don’t need to know about the music, it’s the timbre of the voice – give plenty of opportunities for displays of taste and distinction. But your average symphony orchestra concert attracts a much less ‘arty’ crowd than the theatre, or slightly quirky art exhibition, even a season of sub-titled films. Less arty means they dress up. But these are Marks and Spencer not Armani. Beethoven’s Ninth is a spectacle – once the first bits are got through and the big tune comes along. And it is something people want to go to to do something cultural, and something to which they bring their kids because it’s ‘educational’.

When ‘pop’ music (read modified African American music) began to challenge the codes and the language of European art music (and also popular music, which derived from it, not vice versa) one of the key charges against it was that ‘classical’ music repressed the body. It was about the head not the hips. And the most obvious example of this was the symphony concert. The new public space of music was – more or less from Beethoven on – still and silent. You sat still, you did not nod or tap to the music. You did not eat or talk or pick your nose. Only loud repeated coughing was allowed. Accounts tell us of how new audiences were ‘civilised’ into this strange new behaviour. The uproarious bun throwing and surreptitious chatting up of 18th century public spaces gave way to the hushed cathedral of the 19th century concert hall. (Maybe the opera house still kept some of that rough and tumble – at least until Wagner came along). It’s a learning process that has to be passed on from generation to generation. Small children are told what is in store for them if they misbehave; as they wriggle, a life long hatred of classical music begins to form. But there are grown ups who missed out on this education. Coming in from the chocolaty user-friendly tones of Classic FM; encountering the bright young things and customer-centred atmosphere of the British concert hall (in Milan, ushers in suits viciously police the concert venue, which has let you in for a couple of hours as a very great privilege) it can come as a shock to be told to be quiet by the woman behind. I sat next to a woman who had a bottle of water which she screwed and unscrewed through the concert. Slowly, so as not to bother anyone. Orwell once said something about a tooth ache taking priority over a Beethoven symphony (or was it a Shakespeare play?). A crumpling plastic bag does the trick just as well.

The ‘civilizing’ process is now, of course, seen as another example of ‘discipline’ in western techniques of power and domination. Which I’m sure it was, in part. But the music was written for it – it has to be heard in silence and stillness. The bottle-opener next to me was listening to music in her own way – I don’t think it is the way Beethoven meant it to be heard, but does that matter or not? – but it was a way that pissed me off. Behind me was a wriggling boy – feet gently kicking my back, sniffing very loudly – really suck that snot right up, get your throat into it, yes, that’s right all the way – through the whole thing. Especially in the very quiet bit. At the end – ultimate embarrassment for the English – my partner complained to his father, that you shouldn’t bring kids to the concert if they can’t act properly. The father looked sheepish. The bottle-opener (no relation to the boy) jumped in, “Excuse me, but that little boy might have asthma”. Complaining about our complaint. How horrible that we should deny an asthma sufferer the right to go to a concert. Typical classical music snobs.

Little did I know it but exactly a week later I would be sat in another concert hall half a world away in Shanghai. It was Beethoven (though 4 not 9) and Mahler. The Shanghai concert hall was built in 1930. I’m not sure where the money came from – the Brits trying to make up for their uncultured rapaciousness of the previous eighty years? Auden and Isherwood had made the trip out there, maybe the post-Bloomsbury Brits had decided that culture – rather than the race course which lay just across the road – was now required. Or maybe it also involved the new Chinese bourgeoisie. They now owned most of the new department stores on Nanjing Road, they owned the film studios – Shanghai had the most dynamic industry in Asia – maybe they wanted to prove their cultural rather than entertainment credentials. Across the other road lay the Great World, a music hall-circus-dance hall-casino-pick up joint famous across China. It’s built in neoclassical style – only the presence of a man with a movie camera suggests a touch of modernism in the Greco-Roman frieze across the front. What happened to it during the cultural revolution (a subject of my next entry) I don’t know. But since the ‘opening up’ it has become central to Shanghai’s claim to be an international city of culture. It was in the path of the great elevated expressway that goes to the Bund; between 2002 and 2004 they moved it 66.42 metres (it says on the wall) to its present location. All re-gilded and polished it now welcomes the cultured bourgeoisie of Shanghai.

If bourgeoisie is the word. A visit to the concert gives a glimpse into the civilizing process in action. Not just the introduction of classical music, of ‘culture as worthwhile leisure’, but how to conduct yourself at a concert. This is new to the Chinese. The Chinese market for classical music is the fastest growing in the world (but then, isn’t everything?). This, along with the explosion in music lessons, relates to a symbolic vacuum where markers of cultural distinction are seen to relate almost exclusively to the ‘West’. This also relates to the fact that people have new apartments and have to put in a music system for the first time and need to buy music as part of the outfit, so classical music selections, preferably in posh red boxes, are shifting quickly. A classical concert is expensive – between 8 and 16 quid, or the cost of a very good meal for four with drinks in a restaurant. The hall was full. It was hard for me to read the audience. Well-to-do certainly, and much younger than here. My partner tells me most people will have got free tickets in some way. Such tickets, like vouchers for restaurants, are part of the lubricant of everyday business connections. It is less formal than our heavily sponsored concerts – you can always tell these because large sections of seating are empty after the break – just different individuals, families, friends taking advantage of some tickets to go see some culture. The public announcement told people to turn their mobile phones off, to not talk, to not eat or drink in the concert. This was in English. The Chinese announcement also added, ‘Respect others’ and ‘Don’t rustle plastic bags’. I could see the first audiences at a Beethoven concert, being told this was high seriousness when they’d paid good money for a night of music and were bloody well going to enjoy it. I read last year that in Beijing an usher and a female customer got into a fight because the woman wanted to take a whole roast duck into the concert. There was none of this bad behaviour here. During the concert those on mobiles talked very quietly, as did the others – probably one per row – who had lengthy discussions throughout. A woman in the next row had lost something in her plastic bag, which she looked for for around 20 minutes. The same woman waited until the delicately poised last chords of Mahler’s slow movement to get up and leave. She tripped over the slight stair and her friends rushed out to pick her up whilst she shouted ‘you should have reminded me it was there’. Of course people came in between movements, making people stand up to let them pass. And they left early – whilst the singer was doing her stuff.

But I sort of enjoyed it. I gave up listening to the Mahler. What on earth did a rustic Austrian dance written by an intellectual Viennese Jew mean to the Shanghai bourgeoisie of 2005? It made me think about how specific such ‘universal’ music is. Not just in its ‘meaning’ (if such there is) but in the very musical language; Mahler’s music never seemed so strange – and so difficult. Fragmented themes moving around a blaring trumpet, quiet woodwind, separated strings. At times the music simply fell apart. All I could think about was the Great World and maybe the Shanghai Film Studio where East met West to create a ‘Shanghai Moderne’, a chaotic, energetic, popular culture intrinsic to Shanghai but utterly modern. All there was here of that was an unruly audience – but not an exciting energetic audience. Just the new not-quite-yet-a-bourgeoisie coming to a concert because the government tells them culture is good leisure activity and shows Shanghai is part of a new international cultural mainstream. If only they would stop acting like bloody uncultured peasants all would be well.

My welcome back to Shanghai was in two forms. First, the ultra-fast new Maglev train, which jets across the city at 440 km per hour. You have no problems finding the train because as you come out of customs you immediately see two groups of three girlies in Maglev costume carrying a board and singing some sort of Maglev ditty. Most locals catch a bus or even a taxi – the latter are cheaper than the magnetic train. Floating over the city it allows you to look at grimy old factories, new apartments and small sheds with washing hanging outside – contemplating at a distance. Having got to my apartment I noticed the building work of last year was finished. A long low train siding dug next to the canal was now covered over in some fake grass. Around it trees had been planted and new exercise machines and leisure area created for the local apartment dwellers. A curved neo-classical loggia – I think this is the term, and about as much related to Bernini’s in front of St Peter’s in Rome as the thousands of Ralph Lauren imitations, and in fact Ralph Lauren, are related to the actual polo and sailing club styles of an imagined Long Island – has seats and things which exercise different parts of the body in a gentle after dinner sort of way. A metal frame has spinable discs like large steering wheels; a bench with little swings for your feet; one of those skiing machines – as in gyms but purely mechanical; and a sort of stand up swing that everybody can work with ease. Delicate old ladies do it in the early evening, I break out in sweat and have sore muscles in the morning. Technique. The thing is, apart from the bits of wood holding the new trees in place, it all looks, well not old, but sort of recent or recently shabby, as much of Shanghai does.

The second form was a motor bike taxi. Last year I wrote about the Shanghai traffic – a chaotic scramble where ‘might is right’ is the rule. The pedestrian comes bottom of the pile. The green man shows but first, all the motos and bicycles have to clear, and then you have to look out for cars turning right on red which is allowed here. They do not see it as a privilege for which they owe a certain gratitude to the pedestrians crossing – lean on that horn, stay off that brake. And I spotted my first SUVs, which bodes well for the future I must say. But on the back of a motorbike you are one up from the scum on the street. Bike lanes here can be well marked, physically separate from the road. Or not. When not, take care. When separate, the peloton builds up in intimidating fashion. Motos at the front. Young boy bike racers second. Elegant ladies in white gloves and capes third. Suffering, straining peddlers with unfeasibly large loads come last. My motor bike taxi relished the unmarked road – this allowed him to pit his wits against a range of large vehicles across the full width of the road. I must say it was very exhilarating if you put absolute faith in the guy.

Yishan Road, the long standing DIY street for the Shanghai masses, passes by. Still there were the small shacks selling thousands of colours of tape or edging, paint, screws and nails, dado railing and cornices and so on. And so too was the big emporium selling statues of David, Venus, elephants, rearing horses etc for those who love their objects d’art. But now, flashing between these, were Italian designer bathroom and kitchen shops. And between a gap in the buildings, IKEA loomed (I’d already spotted B&Q from the Maglev).

Yishan road soon became Xushahui, the huge shopping center on the outskirts of the city center proper. It consists of huge new apartment blocks, four separate shopping malls and many smaller streets full of restaurants. Getting off the bike here, on one side there’s the entrance to one of the malls, on the other a row of small restaurants and the street full of people selling peaches and lychees, and other fruits I didn’t know – all from twin baskets carried across their shoulders with a yoke in time-honoured willow pattern fashion. Very few westerners get out here – I saw two in three hours. Though, like everywhere else in Shanghai, English is written everywhere. The fashion shops on the ground floor have well known brands. Then, as you go up, there are shops that look as if they should be famous brand shops but aren’t at all. They are Chinese imitations of these – ‘Gather Jewels’ was my favorite shop name. Of course all the clothes on sale were made in China – just that the western brands then re-export them, taking their value-added.

Outside it’s crayfish season, so the restaurants were all selling these, cooked in a hot curry sauce. On the pavement people sat out with bottles of beer and buckets of crayfish, smoking and talking until midnight.

“I wrote earlier that I was wracking my brains for some stored images of Shanghai’s past. I knew they were in there somewhere, and I found them. Last weekend I was taken out to the ‘countryside’ around the city, to a ‘historic village’ now being promoted as a tourist attraction. The landscape outside the city is very similar to that on the Po plain between the Apennines and the sea: flat, slightly scruffy, with a mixture of intensive, small scale agriculture, farmhouses with adverts painted on the side (though here they are new and evoke modernity not the nostalgia or old brands of Italian beer), small scale industry, and one water buffalo. Hot, unpicturesque, cluttered, tedious. (On another trip we drove four hours from the coast to Shanghai at night. Only in the last ten minutes did we hit city – it rears up quickly out of the landscape.) Nearer to the city proper there is a jumbled spread of theme parks, water-worlds, science and technology parks, cemeteries and highways. Our historic village destination was preserved out of the many that must have existed here previously. For reasons I could not tell.

You paid at the entrance and were given some old Chinese coins – big, brass, with square holes in the middle – which you could spend in the village. The village was ‘traditional’ in more ways than one. It had the old street and lots of food shops; but it was also poor, and dirty, with clothes out to dry and families grouped in shabby courtyards just behind the main façade. There were about ten museums – textiles, brewing, an old cricket house (with jars containing a live cricket for your inspection), miniature furniture, miniscule writing on bits of jade, etc. One of these museums was an artist’s residence, that of Chang Chong Chen. I’d never heard of him but he was born in this village. He’d obviously done well under the socialist regime, and his busts and paintings on show suggested a late 19th Century realist-cum-symbolist – evolving nicely into a socialist realist. It was a small courtyard house, with the exhibition rooms grouped around in interior balcony. He’d done a bust of Mitterand, and of Deng Xiaoping. Suddenly, in the middle of a room was a bust of Hergé. Behind, in the glass cabinet, lots of press clippings in French, and then illustrations from Tintin. And there it was. I knew I’d seen them. Chang Chong Chen had been introduced to Hergé in Brussels. The cartoonist had been encouraged to treat China with sensitivity by the (presumably Jesuit) chaplain to the Chinese students at the University of Louvain; Chang Chong Chen was at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Brussels and worked with Hergé on The Blue Lotus.

Hergé’s book was anti-imperialist, and led to his invitation to China by the nationalists in 1939, though he never went. He was later invited to Taiwan – which partly explains why The Blue Lotus was banned until 1984 in mainland China, though the ban in the Soviet Union after Tintin’s first adventure there, also might have had something to do with it.

I’d read them when I was 8, 9 or 10. A picture of a barbed wire fence and some Japanese soldiers. A Chinese boy in a traditional gown and cap. Bankers in big hats. Shifty looking gangsters, smoking. Rickshaws. Big ships in the harbour. It was sort of a petit madeleine moment, bringing back memories of futures past – childhood memories of an already old modernity – and an unknown (and unknown to me, already disappeared) elsewhere.

The Rough Guide says “parts of the city still resemble a 1920s vision of the future”. The Blue Lotus was an image of Shanghai Moderne; big ships, machine guns, money and corruption, rumours of war, fat white businessmen pushing Chinese around. It’s what I had in my head. It’s what many westerners have in their heads, though not necessarily from The Blue Lotus. The old Shanghai of the concessions, the interwar years – is this what’s coming back with the new Shanghai? The Rough Guide talks of one of “Asia’s great metropolises in the process of re-inventing itself”. Looking down from the Pearl TV tower in Pudong The Bund is displayed in full night-time illumination; is this the grain of sand in the oyster of this new global city?

What is the memory of a city, the inheritance of the city and what difference does it make to the present, especially after an interruption, a hiatus? Writing on Manchester always has to start with the 19th century ‘shock city’, the experience of boom and slump, disorientating change, its embracing of the disturbing, the radical new. But does this persist in Manchester today, or does it merely satisfy the macho posturing the leaders of the North of England’s one party city-state? What was Shanghai?

Did I say Shanghai was new Crobuzon – no, I was wrong, that’s the old Shanghai. The Shanghai of European nostalgia. Where colonialism escaped its moral qualms and the restraining façade of civilizing mission. Shanghai was about money. Did I suggest that its layout came from a non-European perspective? – no I was wrong; the layout of the city streets and spaces derive from colonial times and represent a complete abandonment of any attempt at building for the future. This was a get rich quick city, and take your pleasures whilst doing so. Illusions of a new Florence, or Genoa, of Venice floated through some of the higher-minded inhabitants in the 20s and 30s. Some mix of East and West., a multi-racial paradise. This was illusion. They never built anything for the civic public, except for park (and they kept the Chinese out of that). Official and commercial buildings (mostly the same, in this oligarchic city falling outside colonial administrations), domestic villas, and entertainment – the rest was just left to get on with it. Government worked with gangsters; factory legislation was systematically refused; rents on rickshaws, slums, commercial licenses, brothels etc., along with local taxes (which the Chinese tenants paid not the landlords, and did not bring with it the right to vote in the municipal elections) all went into the pockets of the city bosses.

On the other hand it was an open city. Nobody bothered about what you were before – white Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese – Shanghai took you in. It was the only place to accept Jews without passport, visa, papers – just pay the customs on the way in (this ended after complaints from prominent British Jews –with strong local support – who thought the new arrivals lowered the tone. This in 1939.) It was modernity. Here everybody could re-invent themselves, if they had the money; if they didn’t they needed to in order to get some. Certainly the city allowed the British to brush with decadence, providing they kept up appearances (Hong Kong, as a colony was too stuffy and restricted). W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had fun. But Shanghai was an escape from China; the new Chinese middle class found a new world beyond stifling tradition. They took it and made it their own. The Nanking road, then and now the main shopping district, was (I since discovered) financed by Chinese money. All the department stores were owned by Chinese businessmen. They invented a new entertainment industry. The Great World, some mix of Vauxhall Gardens, Blackpool’s Winter Gardens, and the London Palladium, became an emblem of the city. (It still stands, though being restored, probably after previous restorations as the nationalists bombed it at one point). A new Shanghai film industry, whose rumbustious history makes Bollywood seem like a NFT afternoon workshop, was set up, re-inventing the political film and as creative as early Hollywood or Berlin. Women found new freedoms in the city. Shanghai was where China got modern – forget that huge, dark continent upon which the city perched, this was to be the future.

Of course it wasn’t. The Japanese destroyed the city, and the Communists distrusted it. For those in the West it was a wistful dream. Shanghai by Harriet Sergeant, is based on lots of interviews (with some very posh people over sherry – she must be connected) with old Shanghai residents – of all nationalities – from the 20s and 30s. “Nearly everyone I interviewed affirmed that the period they spent in the city was the best in their life. Sounds, smells, and sights exuded a pungency never experienced again. Foreigners talked about those years as reformed drug addicts recall a hallucination” (p.337). These memories surround the word ‘Shanghai’, giving it an exotic charge, a resonance from elsewhere, a déjà vu, some peripheral image of a lost past; that’s how dead cities live on. For westerners this is what makes the city something else, makes it feel like it could be something else, even though maybe it’s not. Yet. Maybe.

Sergeant writes: “When Shanghai fell in 1949 to the Chinese communists a door was shut. During the Cultural Revolution it was bolted for good. A World had gone”. After her last visit (1989; the book was published in 1991): “Shanghai is bigger, there are more people and a few new skyscrapers but otherwise communism has fallen on the city like a sandstorm, burying and preserving. The street names are different but not the buildings, from the office blocks and hotels on the Bund to the villas in the suburbs. Even the interiors are untouched. The marble lobbies and art-deco swimming pools are as pre-war as the light switches. Communism has mummified Shanghai’s appearance in a manner inconceivable to a westerner. Shopping center, over-passes and subways are all missing. So, despite the carefully preserved wrappings, is Shanghai’s spirit.” (p.6)

The book was reprinted in 2002, with a short preface: “Now Shanghai is one of the most exciting economic centers in the Far east. The place is booming, with new investment and building projects. There is no place for sprung dance floors or an art deco swimming pool and no sentimentality at their loss. On the other hand Shanghai is not the spiritually dead city that I first explored. The highly charged atmosphere of the Twenties and Thirties…has returned. It seems entirely possible that Shanghai will overtake Hong Kong and Tokyo to become one again the leading city in the far East… Shanghai’s former inhabitants would have approved.”

Sergeant is torn (as she would say ‘like the city itself’) between the suffering and degradation of Old Shanghai and its energy, its bursting modernity. She is also torn between recognizing the heroism of the Communists in the city, and the depths of oppression which fed them, and condemning the authoritarian kill-joy mentality of the new system (and especially the Cultural Revolution). This ambivalence is part of modernity. It’s easier for the escapees to invoke ambiguity, chiaroscuro and paradox than it is to ‘change the world’ – with all that promethean hubris and drawing of clear lines (not to mention all those broken eggs in the omelette). (One of the illusions of this new post 1989 century is that we can have the paradox and eat the omelette (I’ll probably regret that metaphor): but let’s not talk about ‘creative industries’ just yet). She seems to feel most for the new Chinese middle classes; if the westerners had been living a dream, “their deception went deeper. They could not foreseen China’s past re-emerging beneath the disguise”(p.337). Communist was not modernity but the past, China’s past. Shanghai’s delirious excess and suffering the future; no matter, it’s now gone, and Shanghai is an economic capital once more.

And therefore ‘not the spiritually dead city’ of 1989? Well, forget the reactivated DNA memories or westerners in search of modernities past, the Chinese middle classes are back. How can you tell – well, skyscrapers and money. But has Shanghai come back with them?

Chinese people say Shanghai is very western, it is very open. Those attributes that 20 years ago were routinely condemned by the party now seem to gear the city up for its new global role. They mean open for business. What does the past mean to them? It’s hard for me to say. Looking down from the Pearl TV Tower onto the Bund there are mixed feelings. A great tourist attribute, a unique skyline; but also revenge, a memory of bad times, humiliating times, and a promise of the future – we now build bigger and better. I doubt if the world of the Chinese middle classes of the 20s and 30s means anything in contemporary historical memory. The modernity Shanghai bought was at the expense – or at least ignored the plight of – a whole continent. The modernity represented by Shanghai was a humiliating, degrading modernity to the many, not just the communists. The new Shanghai certainly wants modernity – but this modernity is not one of ‘liberation’, of new worlds and experiences, of the escape from old Chinese values (in communist disguise or otherwise). It is about leaving material poverty behind. It’s about consumption. And it’s orchestrated by the communists who – shaken by 1989 at home and in the Soviet Union (plus the fall of Marcos in the Philippines) – see consumption as the only way to buy legitimacy.

Shanghai is also famous for being the home of the Communist party, which it always dominated until the Japanese and Mao came along. It was also the home of the Cultural Revolution, base of the Gang of Four. And it’s well known for being the home town of the recent group of leaders who led China into the socialist market economy – and its uber-architect Deng saw it as his special place…. The party is well in control of the city. Its ‘return’ is a showcase of consumerism not the resurgence of Shanghai Moderne. Now it’s not perched on the edge of a ‘dark continent’ but its outlet, its economic motor, its display cabinet. The skyscrapers are there to represent the modern city; what happens inside them is rather dull.

The spiritual re-invention of Shanghai has yet to take place. In the foreign magazines they hope the Old City will add glamour to the same old clubs/restaurants/café bars/brunch places that make up the jaded fodder of those magazines world wide. Chinese people define modernity as more consumer goods. The communist party refuse to have nipples on the tv and persecute artists now and again. They control the production bases of the consumer economy and they are moving rapidly into establishing Chinese creative industries – from top down. So fashion shows, pop stars, soap operas, glamour writ large are the order of the day it seems. The culture bit of the cultural industries – art galleries, music, theatre, opera – well that might have to wait and who wants it anyway, apart from foreign tourists. Even Rem Koolhaas seems to see nothing odd about the absolute modernity, the hypnotic future of the Beijing Television production center and the vacuity of its products. Of maybe he thinks “do the building, culture will follow” (come back Corbusier).

I wrote about Benjamin’s ‘most recent past’, that which, abandoned by the modernity whose dreams it once incarnated, stands as a point of leverage (if critique too strong), a dialectic image which illuminates the present. What is that? It’s not the old Shanghai, at least not for the Chinese. Is it Tiananmen Square – the founding act of the new consumer economy – or is it the Cultural Revolution – currently the absolute other of the new China. I don’t know. But some wholesale abandonment of the past is going on, and a whole hearted embrace of westernization as consumption. The communist party, the intellectuals and most people still reveling in or hoping for a period of material prosperity and national pride – all these believe that traditional values somehow hold it all together. It’s when innocent consumption ends and some other, more complicated modernity begins in the city, when the Party starts to think about what next, and nobody can think of an answer. That’s when Shanghai might become Shanghai Moderne again and not just Singapore.”

The idea of speeded up modernity, telescoped modernity might come from a few facts gleaned from CCTV 9 – China’s international service. They ran an excellent documentary series on housing in China. (We used to have documentaries in England. I look forward, as the Chinese catch up, to ‘Apartment Blocks From Hell’ and, given the scale of things here, 50 long-haired designers talking a whole block of residents through their attempted makeover of the neighbouring tower). The English-language magazines in the city have real estate supplements – and there is a dedicated real estate publication for foreigners. They also run ads on old property, refurbs, top locations etc. The streets near where I live are covered with new estate agent offers – who come and try the hard sell when you peer at the notices, trying to convert millions of RMBs into (in my case) pounds.

Half of all accommodation in Guangzhou is privately owned. Shanghai is catching up. So part of the modernization boom here is how ownership and property speculation is accorded a great responsibility for post SARS recovery. CCTV 9 tells me the first private mortgage (for 5.5 thousand pounds) in China was in Shanghai – in 1992! It showed the woman, with 00001 on her mortgage agreement – for the whole of China! It’s two decades since the great council house sale in the UK but my parents, upwardly mobile working class, bought a house in 1955. Here, the richest and the poorest started buying less than 15 years ago. Think of how the property boom in the UK has reshuffled towns and cities – changing cityscapes, mental maps, cultural capital, urban imagery. Shanghai has gone from centralised allocation to a pure free market in property in less time than it took Islington to gentrify. The sense of unreadability derives not just from the urban layout, or (it must be said) from the fact that I am foreign, but from the sheer scale and speed of redevelopment. Who knows where the next big construction is to be – and at whom it is targeted. Expensive apartment blocks are plonked down next to tin shacks. They might be near a metro – but they too are built next to tin shacks. Why are they expensive – well, apart from obvious locations such as waterfronts, they are expensive because they cost a lot of money. What I mean to say is, they don’t derive their economic worth from some symbolic or cultural value of the area. This in not culture-led urban regeneration – up-market developments milking the associations with urban villages, metropolitan living or cultural quarters. And, apart from a few areas, there are no ‘bad bits’, to be wrenched from the dodgy streets by walls and gates and hedges. There is crime, and all apartments come with walls and gates and hedges and concierge – but this is not Latin America. It’s only low-level crime that is feared. No, this is Barratt Homes building, completely unrelated to the cultural cache of location (unless there’s already some Barratt Homes there, and there usually isn’t). It’s about newness and money. The newer and the more expensive the better.

The old city centre certainly does have some cultural cache – though this is only just beginning to emerge. The foreigner magazines highlight some new refurbishment of a warehouse, or a concession-era villa, or even a courtyard hutong. But this is against a background of their systematic destruction. The old art deco city was ignored, frozen in time – then stripped out as soon as the money started flowing. There are ‘popular areas’ where lots of cheaper housing allows migrants and young people to live – but these are difficult to pin point and at any time a new modern block can land amongst them. But, if newness and price are the key attributes, if symbolic capital is not really required as yet, then this fits with the still democratic ‘enrichez-vous’ rush which is the slogan of the new China. In 15 years money is still democratic – its language is the currency of everyone. It’s no good going for cultural value – how much does it bloody well cost? The hidden codes of a city like London – where only the initiates know quite who is who and what they’ve got (are they stuffing me?), which serves to mark out some fairly old class lines – don’t appear here.

And of course, you have to put things in your new apartment. Nobody did DIY on their rented flats – why would you? But now, the whole new market has exploded in a few years. The street on which I live is – it took me two weeks to realize – the city’s DIY quarter. It stretches about a mile and a half and (apart from some real estate shops sneaking in the top end) purely DIY shops. There are big stores going down to backstreet stalls, bloke selling sinks and taps, and er, other stuff, which I’m not sure what to do with. In the general shouting match between shop signs a few under-stated bathroom and kitchen shops appear – usually called ‘Euro’, and associated with ‘style’. But in fact, the style is the latest-biggest-most expensive. If you’ve got it, put it in your front room.”

“My Finnish friend Hanna sends me top tips on science fiction reads. Recently I read Perdido Street Station by China Mieville and I brought with me City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer. (It’s still clocking in at over 36C. They reckon it will never reach 38 because that’s when work has to stop. It’s an oddly exciting feeling to watch the world weather report and to notice that only Tehran equals your score. So you stay in, reading). The first (‘a big, powerful, inventive, mesmerising and memorably horrid novel’ says the Amazon review, which is about right) is set in New Crobuzon, which ‘sprawls like a mutant Gormenghast‘ (Amazon again). The second is set in Ambergris, a similarly sprawling Peake-esque creation, though made less oppressive by the Pratchett-like whimsy (and O’Brien-esque pseudo-scholarly annotation), which pervades it. Both are cities assembled from jumbled fragments of our European urban (and urban colonial) imaginary. New Crobuzon’s prime source is the ‘great wem’, London in all its ugliness and energy. It’s Pepys and Dickens (and maybe Hugo’s medieval Paris), Wells (with the steam punk images of coke fuelled robots and mechanical computers) with a bit of contemporary Brixton and Hoxton thrown in (art, fashion, bohemia and fame). Ambergris has these elements, though its history is more akin to an early colonial settlement – Macau, or Calicut, or Sydney – created by free-booters in a founding act of (attempted) extermination of the indigenous locals. It’s Anne Rice’s New Orleans, but with less heat, or Melville’s Nantucket with a bit of Lovecraft’s New England – even (as Michael Moorcock suggests in his intro) the Dutch cities of Conrad’s Far Eastern Archipelago.

The first of the two cities is run by a corrupt, authoritarian mayor who may or may not be elected, but in any event this doesn’t matter. The second seems to have no government, and if it has nobody knows who, or where, it is. Both are ‘unplanned’ – jumbled, sprawling, cheek-by-jowl – but also segmented into quarters, sometimes based on clearly readable function (as in medieval cities), sometimes ethnic group (or species – this being SF), sometimes on class. The absence of government and planning means no attempt at modernist social justice – getting on is about power, money, contacts, violence. Only sometimes can it be about fame or art. Neither city is pretty or safe but both, even the ‘horrid’ Perdido Street, are woven out of a nostalgia, a longing, for the noise, the smells, the mix of people and things that marked an earlier and elsewhere city – ‘when life was hot and brief and the devil takes the hindmost’, as the opposition leader says in the film of Well’s ‘The Shape of Things to Come’. In these cities obviously, the opponents of Raymond Massey’s vision of shining modernity have won the day.

But in reality these cities have long disappeared from the European experience. Peter Ackroyd’s TV series based on his London book began by trying to resurrect the dense overlay of memory, the multiple histories, the emotional investments, the spent energies and violence that haunt the London present. This usually involved some fade ins and fade outs over an unprepossessing street or alley marked out by bright double yellows and a sandwich shop. Iain Sinclair’s urban fictions succeed more through their astonishing research and the dogged acts of transformative seeing in which they engage. But if you want to see these cities, you have to go elsewhere – and Shanghai will do for starters.

One immediate thing stands out. Like those fictional cities, set against the fantasy geography of forests, mountains and badlands, it is a distinct point in space – it begins and it ends. Like ancient cities, like the new shock cities of the 19th century, it is distinct from the countryside. You come here to make your fortune; you leave your past behind. Shanghai is another country, and it is a new culture – that of the city dweller. You travel for miles. Then the agricultural plain gives way to big buildings. You arrive here and gawk. Nobody imagines that the hill farmer, the small town shop girl, the spotty Essex student does not know exactly what they are going to find in London. In fact it’s the reverse – everybody in England knows what London is, it’s London that has no idea of what exists beyond it, nor does it want to. The city holds out a promise of a new life.

Shanghai sprawls, and it multiplies its densities in fractile complications and infills. A high level freeway grid sits 50 meters above this dense undergrowth. The city is perfectly navigable in this way. Come off it and it’s more difficult. The skyline is the thing – look up and it’s the image the city wants to project. Shining modernity. On the ground it’s a jumble. Shanghai is less uniform in its layout that Beijing – built with the rectangular pattern of the ancient Chinese cities – but it is no more complex than the London layout. And, though there are more people, it is not as big in area. The complexity comes at street level. Each skyscraper is dropped on an urban fabric that ends – as far as it is concerned – a few meters from its front door or taxi rank. Maybe there is some Feng Shui master guild which has carved out a lucrative niche – but if so this geomancy is fractile, hieroglyphic, algebric. It is non-euclidian. It makes no attempt at the imposition of perspective which marks out the European notion of ‘town planning’. If you do want a square, with a museum and a concert hall and some trees – and every modern cultured city needs one so we better have one sharpish – then you can have one, but it is not inserted into any legible European perspective. This might relate to a traditional structure of the Chinese architecture, state and domestic, where things took place behind walls – rather like pre-Haussmann Paris in fact. But I suspect it relates more to the mix of authoritarian planning powers (a symbol inside a circle painted on your building indicates you have a month to leave. This might be the first time you have heard of it), lack of an overall urbanistic plan outside that of the maximization of real estate value, and power-politics (or shall we say corruption – though this is such a blunt word).

The new buildings clear a space and leave the rest. Into the gaps and crevices left behind, and into those newly newly created, creep the new uses, the infill uses. Those areas which – aside from designated tourist zones and shopping malls (difficult to tell them apart) – represent the limited, provisional public space in the city. It is this mix, this seeping, seething chaos, kept at bay by the shiny facades and the air-conditioning, which makes Shanghai like New Crobuzon. Not a Dickensian period drama, but a steam-punk timeslip, the newest and the oldest, the brightest and the shabbiest, different imagined futures grinding. No nostalgia here – the past is simply rubbed out, obliterated, buried under mountains of concrete. The most recent past has no time to fulfill Benjamin’s critique of the present – nobody’s looking, nobody cares. Maybe there are places like the old house (church?) in metropolis, some enclave of something older, another city buried beneath the flyovers. There were protesters on one of the main roads – the Linongs, small courtyard single story dwellings, were to be demolished. Artists photo and sketch, like Nadir before the coming storm of Haussmannisation – the old lintels and gates, the old courtyards and roof gables. But down they come, and up go the skyscrapers – and this is great. This is what we want. And it is this aspect perhaps, the energy and optimism of an unthinking modernity, the re-living of the destruction of the past – with relish, with relief – that also links the nostalgia of New Crobuzon with the excitement of Shanghai, new Metropolis.

In the air, the new modernity; on the ground the new Dickensian (Crobuzian). There is a master plan; all the plots have been drawn up, the transport and other infrastructure is in place (such as outside my building, all day, all night, all weekend), huge areas are earmarked for extensive and massively ambitious developments (Pudong, for example). In this it is Haussmann, writ large. But if the new developments have no reference to the previous urban ground, nor they have any reference to human uses other than the delivery of customers/ users to the buildings in question. There is an absence of recognizable urbanistic qualities other than those of our own cities’ period of brutal primitive accumulation (a troubled nostalgia). But the unexpected, the barely tolerated, the unthought of, the opportunist – these very quickly cover the ground in thick layers. The non-shopping humanity spilling out of the density in search of a domesticated public space of chatting and sitting and watching; rag-and-bone men with bike trailers and bells; people with single boxes of fruit, or a bowl of cooked food for sale; women selling wild flowers wired into broaches (for about 2p); construction workers sleeping; people handing out flyers; a billion plastic toy sellers; a stall with five blouses hanging up; invalid beggars – see! no arms, no legs; mobile phones offered in whispered asides.

But New Crobuzon is horrid, claustrophobic; Dickensian without the belief that deeper connections of humanity in the city will bring justice to bear. Nobody is going anywhere; no justice is going to be delivered; the energy is corrupt and circular; the future utterly absent. In fact, just like London. Shanghai in the end is more New York, those huddled masses smell opportunity somewhere, have a sense of liberation. The country bumpkins, arriving here to gawk, are now more materially behind the urban living average than ever (a recent survey put this at more than African cities). And income differentials withiin the city are growing at alarming rates. But at the moment everybody thinks they can make it. This is Walt Whitman not Dickens. They feel proud of the big buildings. One Chinese translator had never been able to afford to go to the top of one of the buildings that she frequently evoked as one of the symbols of the city. But to live in the Emerald City, Pudong’s bright lights a backdrop to the illuminated cruise ships going up and down the river, is to be part of its promise. If the past is being left behind, all well and good.

But what’s the future? Maybe another reference point is Rem Koolhaus’s idea of Junkspace – not the Dickensian sprawl but the proliferation of macro-system without content, meaningless space, redundant space. (see Fredric Jameson’s review)

“Junkspace exposes what previous generations kept under wraps: structures emerge like springs from a mattress, exit stairs dangle in didactic trapeze, probes thrust into space to deliver laboriously what is in fact omnipresent, free air, acres of glass hang from spidery cables, tautly stretched skins enclose flaccid non-events”.

Or again:

“Junkspace is a Bermuda triangle of concepts, a petri dish abandoned: it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of care . . . Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends . . . A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed.”

Maybe this describes it better – not just the quality of the urban space but that which underlines the energy and promise of this space: shopping. That’s what people see as their future. It’s what they all want to do. Without stop. Without end. I mentioned that there was no ‘most recent past’ to critique the present. Maybe we’re actually in this most recent past, just before it becomes it. Like Baudelaire, if we look carefully we can see it all in ruins already. It is shopping that makes us westerners gawk. I sometimes feel like those Saharan tribal chiefs brought to France to meet their colonial benefactors who, taken to an alpine waterfall kept looking and looking and looking. After a long time the minders said have they not seen enough. ‘No, hang on, we’re waiting for it to stop’. This shopping, it has to stop sometime, doesn’t it?”

“After the last entry I started to read an article by Jing Wang: “Culture as Leisure and Culture as Capital” (Positions, Vol.9 No.1 Spring 2001) where she writes:

“Dichotomous thinking seems to have trapped all (cultural) tourists who, after a sightseeing trip to Tiananmen Square, are prone to turn themselves into instant China experts”

She proceeds to give Terry Eagleton a bit of a kicking for his contrast of the Mao portrait and McDonalds occupying the same space. I took the ‘instant China expert’ to heart. So I thought less of the speculations – more of what’s under your nose. But what is under your nose? Is it the first encounters, the obvious things that strike any tourist. When I saw a taxi driver with his old Nescafe jar filled with tea (one third leaves, the other liquid) I thought – good idea. Within a day I realized that this was ubiquitous. You can even buy fancy jars with silver tops. And were they ever Nescafe jars? Or something like food culture – the most obvious place for a westerner to start. It’s all over. Hundreds, thousands, millions of restaurants, street stalls, market stalls, corner shops, bakeries, 7-elevens, individuals with fruit, melons, corn-on-the-cob. I felt sorry for the Rough Guide team – how on earth do you do a food listing in such a city? Actually they are forced to include McDonalds and various western-style restaurants, to give some relief to the challenged tourist palate. My big moment was when I realized that the huge Tiger Prawns ‘cooked’ in the ice bucket – to be picked out, heads ripped off and dipped in washabi sauce – were in fact moving. They were cold, and moving slowly, but for the first time in my life I felt like a predator, bite into that living flesh. It was the eyes though. But generally the big problem is that Chinese like meat that is closest to the bone, so all the gnarled and twisted bits we throw to the side of the plate – they’re the best bits. I used to think that Chinese restaurants were saving the best bits elsewhere – little did I know that I was in fact eating them. So eating is not about cutting, selecting, paring, separating, chewing, swallowing – putting food into the mouth is just the first bit of a long complex process before you get to the swallowing bit. And how many chefs and waiters in this city?

I went to a posh place on Friday. The doors opened automatically and you walked a long passage of wood with water running on either side – like crossing a river to a tea house on the lake – then more swoosh and into a very stylish restaurant. The style I suppose was contemporary Chinese – though I’m still not sure what it is. It reminded me of Petersburg. There, when the money, the stylistic understanding and the bribes clicked together, you could feel a cultural inheritance of 200 years geared up for the 21st century. This was not imitation of the West, it was a re-interpretation of its stylistic imperatives. But what stood out was the food first – a lot of it cooked and served at the table (in a not very gimmicky way, because I’d seen versions of this in less posh restaurants) in a way that spoke to Chinese tastes and appreciation – which are far more ‘democratic’ or ‘popular’ than in the UK. Then what amazed was the sheer number of chefs and waiters. But most Chinese like to eat out in big, huge, enormous restaurants – three, four floors all big, all brightly lit, full of shiny colours and glittery decorations. In fact like UK Chinatowns but more modern, more shiny, less down at heel. And the food is fresh and cooked very quickly. Sometimes the first bits start arriving before you’re finished ordering the full list. And it’s all over by 9 pm.

After the posh meal I walked back from the posh French Concession area – the most ‘European’ area in the sense that it still is mainly low rise, tree lined, with a street life not dominated by looming residential towers. Somehow readable. It was an odd mix, walking South West to the first major ring road (Shanghai has a system of concentric ring roads, which are all elevated – the outermost is M25 size). Bits felt like South Kensington, big hotels and some small bars down side streets, light in the trees; others like LA (or is that Golders Green?) – strips of restaurants, bars, real estate, beauty products, and darkness behind. You could see quite a few westerners – out looking for bars, jumping in and out of taxis, up for it on a Friday night. Then further out those bars that think they are appealing to westerners but don’t – brightly lit ‘Judy’s’, ‘Lill’s pub’, ‘Bourbon Street’, ‘Energy Bar’ (all display lights seemingly secured from a very active Johnny Walker rep). The fancier ones have girls outside, stood behind a desk with a ledger (what for?). This is not some prostitute come-on – in Guangzhou (Canton) there is a whole city-promoted street full of bars each with a team of these girls (all matching costumes) stood around a desk. It is called (as the neon archway tells you in English) ‘Bar Street’. I don’t know who goes in these as yet. I’m sure other people do. Then further out, more street life, fewer westerners, more bicycles. You don’t notice many bikes in the centre, but gradually they increase until they are five abreast, great swarms of them. But then, when it seems you are leaving the modern centre a huge shopping and entertainment complex appears. You might think Blade Runner – but the seediness and urban brutalism (Ridley Scott was a child of Thatcherism) are not there. Huge towers lit by neon ads; walkways in the sky; thousands of people out walking amongst the street vendors, the Budweiser-sponsored something-to-do-with-BMX thing in one corner, some other film or TV shoot in another – Friday night in the big city without some angry, bitter, drunken male (mostly) throwing up or trying to hit you. These places don’t register in the Rough Guide, partly because they are so new the probably missed the last edition, but also because they don’t fit their image of what a westerner wants to see.

But these centers are springing up all over. Right out west, coming nearly to the limits of the city proper there’s a huge new development – an ‘international’ (what does this mean?) leisure-culture-entertainment (read Jing Wang on this) centre. On the hoarding there is a picture of the old houses it replaces – two story houses clustered densely together. You could image a sixties shopping centre in the UK with a similar picture of back-to-backs on it (if they’d bothered to think about informing you in those days). And this would make you think about the down sides, the deracination of modernisation. In Beijing the hotel in which I stayed was in the middle of an area of very small one floor houses grouped in quadrangles – Hutongs. Some of these date back to the Ming but most to the Qing dynasty (ie. between 15th and 19th centuries). They were being knocked down as I was there, to make a road to the Olympic Village. They were about 20 minutes walk from the historic centre. One would be there one day and as we passed the next – they were broken, exposed, intimate spaces revealed, wallpaper flapping in the breeze.  Looking through the dark alleys into the interior, past silhouettes of bicycles leant against the wall, a glimpse of window ledge with plants, washing out to dry, old men sitting and staring. The streets in the Hutong district were living rooms – people sat out, lay on camp beds, watched TV, played cards. Little hole in the wall shops sold kebabs. Bottles of beer (they’re all satisfyingly big at 640 cls., which makes me wonder if this corresponds to an old Chinese measure, hidden behind the metric) and some of the sour strong spirit (53%) stand next to chairs with groups of men and women. It’s all like some cup-of-sugar version of the old working class communities of England – but hot, exotic, quaint, nostalgic. This is what being a tourist should be like – a glimpse of another past somehow evoking how far you’re come, what you have lost. But any romanticism (A Year in the Hutongs by Peter Maile, this week’s ‘Book at Bedtime’…) is easily dispelled by the public toilets. Like the Nescafe jars – very quickly I realized that the ubiquitous provision of public toilets was not some enlightened tourism and street life policy – they were there for the locals. And they were as pretty as an outside bog in Salford in mid-November.

In Shanghai the Hutongs are called differently – Linongs. They’ve disappeared in the centre mostly, though there are some that were sufficiently rare to be pointed out to me from the elevated freeway once. And of course one of the new leisure and culture developments in the centre are new build retro-linongs – very good replicas of the dense clustered houses with kitsch art, knick knacks, McCafe, expensive restaurants, Haagan Daz. We’re all been there before. But whilst we westerners can only look ambiguously on a hoarding with a picture of the old working class houses (I say working class, this was more or less everybody really) declaring their demolition in favour of an ‘international’ leisure and entertainment complex – for the Shanghainese (?) this is a source of pride, progress and anticipation. Anybody over 25 can remember real poverty and deprivation. (Which still exists; out in the west, far from any tourists, we got a bicycle rickshaw, three of us in one, and got a 15 minute ride in the heat for 50p. I was embarrassed about how this might look; the two Chinese people I was with had no such problem: he’s just a peasant in from the countryside – there’s nothing else he can do).

But back on the streets the shopping gave way to lower rise modern complexes of bars and restaurants and hairdressers (still open of course, it was only 10pm) – families sitting out on tables in their vests, piles of shrimp shells, paper tissues, beer, tea. This was street life as in southern Italy and it survived through density and the appropriation of whatever space seemed to work. Every now and then on my trip back I came across groups of dancers – older people but not all so. They would find a space – a park was one such spot but further out is was the space infront of a shopping centre or office block – and dance to a portable stereo. Waltzy sort of music. Sometimes similar groups could be found of mostly young people, this time doing some exercise related stuff, tai chi with a bit of pink leg-warmer thrown in. Then further out now, onto the end of ‘my’ street which is in fact one of Shanghai’s interior decoration quarter’, of which more of later. Here there were many bikes, and people sitting and lying on the streets, but this time not consuming, they just looked exhausted. Probably waiting to go back to the cramped temporary accommodation provided for the construction workers.

So that’s what’s under my nose. But I looked out this morning and saw that the electricity sub-station opposite didn’t have a wire fence. I was sure I’d seen one but it’s not there. In England there would be one, so I saw it and wrote it. In fact only now can I see the streets, only now can I focus on what shops are there. Seeing the city is not innocent, even the most basic things. Reading the city for me means reading the words about it, the histories and analyses, the maps and the reviews. It’s a city of words as much as images.

And, though it rained it did not go below 36. So we’re now record breaking and going for the big 20 days.”