New spin on Shanghai

A culture evolves behind the blazing emblem of economic strength

September 10, 2006|Tom Haines, Globe Staff

SHANGHAI -- Stand on the concrete promenade of the Bund, a once-chaotic river wharf at the very center of this city, and spin: The horizon towers for 360 degrees. Neon streaks in blue, red, orange, and green. Silver apartment buildings merge at the edge of sight. Turn after turn, the fantasy of the Oriental Pearl Tower and the certainty of the 88-story Jinmao Tower punctuate new Pudong, a district sprung from swamp and farmland .

If the goal were simply reinventing the physical face of a place, then the game in Shanghai has been won: In the blur of a dozen years, hundreds of acres of low, lane-linked neighborhoods have surrendered to skyscrapers. So many people in this city of 18 million have scrambled from their torn-down homes and traditions into dizzying new terrain of 2,000 towers and more. Individual lives react again as Shanghai leads China's charge from closed communism toward free-market modernity, stopping who knows where. Politicians and planners cite statistics and strategies to debate whether Shanghai, and China behind it, will conquer or crash.

It is better to enter this place, senses alert, at street level: There lurk subtler signs of progress and peril.

Nearly lost, less than a mile south of the Bund on an open riverside lot littered with bricks and timber of tumbled homes, stands a solitary three-story building. A windbreaker hangs from a clothesline outside a window, and a shaking staircase leads to a door. When he answers a knock, Lu Wai Ming opens it only a few inches. Soon the thin man with thick black hair steps over the threshold and points at four white sheets of paper posted on the outside of the door. The typed Chinese characters announce repeated warnings of eviction from Shanghai Qili Moving Co., Ltd. At the bottom of one page, Lu penned a response in blue ink: "Do you think you are doing moving work? What kind of flag are you holding? What, exactly, are you doing?"

Most of Lu's neighbors were happy enough to take cash or a new apartment, lifted from decayed dwellings to new heights of comfort, if 20 miles toward the city's edge. The movers offered Lu too little money, he says. Then, he says, they beat him.

Lu was born in 1957. His school years dissolved amid the anti-intellectual insanity of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966. Lu is too weak, he says, to work in one of the hundreds of Shanghai factories that make magnets and metals, plastic toys and premium packaging paper for use around the world. Nor is he strong enough to get a hand in the city's building boom. He cares alone for his 84-year-old father, who was born 11 years after the fall of China's last emperor, in 1911.