Category: Shanghai Diaries

“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.”

“The Huangpu river flows through Shanghai. The photos show Pudong, the new international city centre of Shanghai, built on paddy fields and now boasting (as everybody does) amongst the tallest buildings in Asia (they all know that Taipai and K-L have the first two slots, but they’re working on that). On the opposite shore is The Bund, the old international concession, which sort of looks like Liverpool (this is the big myth; and Liverpool is twinned with Shanghai) but actually more like a composite Victorian Manchester, Leeds, Bradford laid out on a river front. The big tourist thing to do is get a river tour. After 15 minutes you leave the big office buildings and the docklands begin. There are some new looking residential towers, but these come bereft at any attempt at landscaping or upgrade of the site. The view must be the thing and as long as security and car parking are sorted, well, who needs the landscape? From the elevated Metro you can see some more landscaped developments, but the vertical rise is the real landscaping – leave the mess below. From the river cruise the docklands look like docklands everywhere; tourists finally at rest, not quite bored, get brief glimpses into other lives, other spaces. Container ships with unknown cargo – Shanghai is the biggest port in China, so that’s big – line the banks. But the big docks must be elsewhere because whilst there are a lot of ships, these seem small scale operations (small scale = just the one container ship). And then lots of small rusting boats, shacks, concrete buildings, tips, plastic and metal drums.

The trip down river takes about an hour and a half. After that time the sea looms into view as the river opens out. Only this isn’t the sea, it’s another river, the Yangtze, the third largest on earth. The Huangpu looks like the Thames; imagine the Thames then going into the main river of which it is the final tributary. This is where the docks are -– and you can’t see them from the boat, they’re lost on the horizon. The shift in scale takes you from a London-sized city to a huge continent and it makes you dizzy. Shanghai is like Victorian Liverpool (and stick Manchester in as well why not) perched on the edge of country it prefers not to know about. The British sent the gunboats up the Yangtze, the first foreign forces to do so for hundreds of years. When they reached a small city just before Nanjing, they were attacked and quite easily defeated the city defense force, who fought doggedly. The British were only there to make a bit of a point really, sail up there and make a bit of noise. But the surviving defenders then killed all their wives and children then themselves, shocking the British. The Chinese were defending civilization against barbarians; they’d failed and were not prepared to live with it. The gaping mouth of the Yantgtze is the portal to a huge interior, and until they built a bloody big dam up there you could sail in a cruise boat to within sight of the mountains of Tibet.

Scale is something in China. Guangzhou (Canton as was) is 2000 kms from Beijing. That’s like London as capital of a country whose southern port is Naples (and whose far reaches take in Moscow!). The temporal scale is just as great. China was unified in 226BC; but it had some sort of common political culture from 1000BC. Confucius (of which more) was born in 551BC, which is around the time of the great days of Athenian Democracy, and just as currently influential, in fact more so really, than the Greeks. Confucianism is seen as key to the non-western modernisation model. I run a Masters course on European Urban Cultures, which we call Polis – but can you imagine a hard-hitting well-connected development think-tank calling itself Neo-Platonist? So, if I can indulge in a bit of very bad history: China is as if the Roman Empire did not collapse but continued as a more or less continuous political entity until the present. China is a world; you feel its nationalism is not ‘petty nationalism’ but the defense of the planet. All nations and cultures faced with the pressing crisis of modernisation have attempted to find ‘their own way’, and somehow attempt to preserve some local heritage and meaning in the face of the homogenisation – or westernisation – seemingly demanded by the doing of what it takes to become modern. But something about the size of China, its power and its history, make this something unique, and maybe world shaking.

This is both the hope and temptation of China’s rulers and intellectuals. The reason – and every Chinese school kid knows this – the British started to import opium was that there was nothing else the Chinese wanted. The story (it seems, after reading some revisionist histories – British bien sur) is more complicated – but in essence we have a country whose technology and socio-economic system was perfectly capable of producing anything the West could – and to a higher quality. The Chinese sent silk back to England wrapped in Manchester cotton cloth – that’s all it was fit for. The exception was guns and ships; but it held true until the last third of the 19th century. Every school kid knows also how the political structure of China failed to cope with the threat posed by the modern West – although this found its sharpest form first in Russian and then in Japanese imperialism, both ‘feudal’ powers. The narrative of the communist party was clear – uttermost collapse was the only way forward to modernity. In this they opposed the Nationalist’s ‘bourgeois’ modernisation programme. I’m not glossing over the work of Mao (maybe later…) but it seems that China could be seen to be back where it was a hundred years ago – but this time talking from a position of strength and intelligence. 1979 was the date when ‘the reforms’ were announced by Deng Xiaoping; what struck me was an accompanying statement that China was still now in the ‘primary stage of socialism’. Is this a vision of a socialist future or a uniquely Chinese future (someone said: ‘is socialism saving China, or China saving socialism?’). Or both. And if both then what is to be the distinct legacy of Chineseness – where does it come from? Marxism or Confucius? I’m not able to answer this; it just strikes me as possible only for China to pose the possibility of a distinct, a separate, a unique modernity. One that would not just be left alone, like Switzerland, or become some regressive nationalist authoritarian regime using culture to justify repression, but whose weight and scale (every fifth person on the planet is Chinese; already the 4th largest trading nation; set to become the second largest economy in 10 years etc.) actually tip the balance. What balance and in which way is something else.

You can feel this in Beijing. The Forbidden City is in fact a city, not just a palace complex. And there is a sense there, an hour’s drive from the Great Wall, of Planet China. It is a capital established by invaders – Genghis Khan et al – and adopted by the next two dynasties – one of which was also an invader. It was the South, on the Yangtze where Chinese culture was held to thrive – where the mandarins and the literati ruled, not the court Eunuchs. But it remained the capital – here power counts. China’s cultural influence extended beyond her borders, across to Korean and Japan, South to Vietnam and Thailand, down to Singapore. The distance between Beijing and Singapore is the same as that between Dublin and the current western border of China. Somehow Beijing remains the power center which holds this together, and makes the world look like an ‘out there’ to be managed.

Shanghai is different, it looks out to the world. It’s a fairly new city, because from 1423 the Emperors outlawed foreign trade (there’s a book out now which claimed that, just prior to the ban, Chinese sailors had circumnavigated the world and drawn maps, which were then acquired by the Portuguese who miraculously popped up in India 50 years later.) The British made Shanghai China’s main port. I’m wracking my cultural memory for images of Shanghai in the 20s and 30s. I know they are in there but I can only find a few. Madonna seems to have taken over a lot of these. General images of decadence (but not as clear as Berlin, for example) and opium dens. Shanghai Lil? Is this something outside of Danny La Rue? The main images I have I think come from Ballard’s (or Spielberg’s) Empire of the Sun: the English suburban housing estate where they all lived, and which I have not found evidence of yet (somebody told me where this was actually filmed, but I forget – not in China).

Of course the Chinese authorities don’t ever stress the period outside of a decadence caused by imperialists, and thus not to be celebrated. A famous Chinese Jazz band played here, were banned and reemerged in the Peace Hotel Bar in the 1990s. But there are as yet no Blue Badge guided tours of Shanghai’s Art Deco, not many books that I can find. Rather like the ‘Silver Age’ in Petersburg, I suspect it is more known about outside than inside Shanghai, and thus simply not available to tourism. The Chinese have of course torn down and ripped out most of these remnants. The Nanjing road, which was and is the main shopping street is being revamped. The hoarding has pictures of old Shanghai, but the new development has no resemblance to those pictures. It’s all relentlessly modern. A recently purchased pack of postcards had images of high rises, fly-overs, interchanges and new build museums and libraries. There was only one traditional building – a tea house, which was of course a replica and now houses within a faux Ming dynasty quarter of dim sum and nick-knack shops. Where is the distinctly Chinese here? What does Chinese modernity mean in this Asian capital? Are the Confucian traditions merely intellectual pipe dreams and Beijing political flim flam?

Yesterday we equalled the record. Today we were about to beat it, but it rained. For five minutes, but a lot. Scale is big in China.”

“From the eighth floor I look out onto a canal well kept but never used except for the occasional small boat collecting floating rubbish. On the far side there is an electricity sub-station – lots of small pylons and grey boxes behind a wire fence. On this side, under the window, there is construction work – apparently a depot for the overground metro line nearby. It’s now the 12th day in a row over 36C. Last year the record was set at 13 consecutive days: tomorrow’s all set for the equalizer. Actually it’s hotter, but the thermometer is put somewhere in deep shadow, to be on the safe side. The men on the construction site work from 6am I think, definitely before 7am. They wake me up, but gently, the drop of metal and scraping of shovels slowly gathering weight around the dreams and then tugging and pulling and then – you’re awake. They work in the sun but drink tea in the shadows. They work until late. It’s hard to tell when, they’re gradually absorbed into the background. Then the flare of an arc welder reminds you. Last night they were laying concrete at 2am. Nobody opened the window and shouted shut the fuck up you fucking inconsiderate fucking fuckers. I suppose they all lay there, tired, hot, that’s just the way it is.

I started to say something about how this would not be allowed in England – people would complain, they’d plague the council, demand compensation. And anyway, they’d never a build a depot so close to a residential black, without compensation at least. That, I said, was what citizenship really meant. But it sounded very parochial, very small-minded, very irrelevant. I’m not sure why yet. On the streets – walking cycling driving queuing paying – there are constant crowds. It reminded me of St. Petersburg or Moscow. Huge cities, huge populations. Shanghai is 14 million, if you don’t count the migrants. Negotiating the crowd is about absolutely ignoring it except to avoid a collision at the last moment. Crossing a road involves avoiding people, cars, bikes, scooters coming from all angles. Cars have priority. The green man lights up – but cars can turn right on red here so this means simply cross now if you can. In the first few days I slapped cars that just ran an inch from my foot. But nobody does this. You avoid it and carry on. English people constantly apologise in crowds. It’s a chance to show off how nice they are. Here constant exposure to crowds means you block them out – even collisions don’t involve communication. Drivers use the horn a lot – as little warnings with carefully graded tones and volumes. Only once have I heard somebody actually shout something out of a window – a taxi driver to a pedestrian who had the nerve not to give way before the car. I’m not sure how to read this complete priority of the car over pedestrian – sitting in a big jeep with one of the new urban middle class it seems like a dismissal of the losers, the nobodies on the street. But all traffic drives like this – maybe all car owners feel the same. But maybe its just the logical application of the same rules – you push, you push in, you squeeze into that space left between you and the barrier, you thrust your hand with your ticket of money over the shoulder to get in first. And cars simply push harder that’s all.

Did somebody write a book “On Living in a big country”? I always think about those countries with big populations where historically life has been cheap. The tsars and the Soviets could spare millions of men. When I say ‘spare’ I mean kill or allow to die. Mao lost nearly a million men in the Korean war, to the US’s few hundred. The Germans could not kill enough Russians. These war time events are by no means exceptions. An American said Chinese development consisted of ‘a million men with teaspoons’. So what does it mean to live in a country in which live has historically meant nothing. Or rather, life at the bottom (and it’s a large bottom…). At present the Chinese newspapers and the TV (I watch CCTV 9, the English language ‘news 24 channel’ which has lots of nearly kosher western news readers and special reporters; the nearly is in the absence of any flicker of irony, the completely straight face when obvious glosses, euphemisms, omissions occur. Taiwan (‘Taiwan province’) and Tibet are obvious, but there are many others) are concerned with a Chinese woman who was beaten up by US border guards. The Chinese execute (a bullet in the back of the head) hundreds every year; police beatings are regular. But this is the Americans …

I give a lecture on Manchester – shock city – trying to evoke the newness of the city, of its unprecedented growth, its raw energy, the brutal but exhilarating power of its modernisation. Because it ate its children, it sucked them into its furnace stomach from farther and farther afield. Shanghai is doing this now. The architects are exhilarated, but it’s fuelled by cheap migrant labour. Labour is cheap. Haircuts come with an optional head massage (a quid) and they wash your hair after cutting it – what a fantastic idea. Food quality is amazing – it is all over in all the forms and price ranges you wish. But a serious banquet for 8 in a Chinese restaurant with the best food you could find – without getting into shark fins, tiger penises and monkey brain territory – would come to 30 or 40 pounds. Including drink (apart from wine). Ironing, laundry, whatever. A five star hotel in Pudong charged 5 pounds for a full breakfast delivered to the room.

Here’s a city that everybody says is ‘exciting’ because it’s being built on a huge scale, aiming to become Asia’s (yes, including Japan) economic and financial capital. Already Hong Kong is feeling slightly less exciting. It is far more powerful financially – but it feels like a place that has had its time. But apart from the architects – always slaves to power and money – what’s exciting other than a vicarious reliving of the West’s own innocently brutal days of early industrialisation and modernisation. That’s a difficult one.”