Pudong

During the mid nineties, more than half the world’s cranes were in Shanghai, the price of the world’s steel dramatically altered because of the massive skyscraper building craze in Pudong.


“Pudong has become a ‘must see’ phenomenon. Its landmarks, the Jin Mao Tower, Oriental Pearl TV, the Broadcast Tower, and Shanghai Maglev Line, among others, are modern marvels.” “How did this happen? First, the idea of creating Pudong was not a matter of public debate but came from the very top of the CCP hierarchy, more specifically, from Deng Xiaoping himself. [...] Second, even if there had been opposition to the idea, it would have been difficult to publicize without a free press or other organs of civil society independent of the Party. Nor could the judiciary also beholden to the Party, have adjudicated disputes fairly. But perhaps most importantly, once the decision had been made in Beijing, virtually nothing could have prevented the Chinese government from carrying out its agenda.”


“Shanghai had been fêted in colonial times as the Pearl of the Orient, a mercantilist and mercenary trading hub where it was ‘hard to know where the government ended and gangsterism began’. When Mao’s sandal-clad army marched into the city in 1949, they cast a cold eye on the freewheeling entrepot. Branding Shanghai the ‘whore of imperialism’, the communists submitted the city to a lengthy punishment, closing private businesses and locking up, or banishing, entrepreneurs, gangsters and foreigners alike. By the mid-sixties, history had turned full circle. Shanghai, once a gangster’s paradise, had become the stronghold of the Party’s ultra-radicals. The spell that these two contradictory political currents cast over the city was not broken until 1989. The Shanghai that these days dazzles foreigners and local out-of-town visitors alike ironically owes its resurgence to the military suppression of the demonstrations in Beijing and other cities across the country that year.”
In 1992, “Shanghai was finally let off the leash.” Shanghai’s leaders inherited a city in the early nineties with a great commercial history that had been emptied of commerce. They wasted little time in getting back into the game. In the decade from 1992, the city roared back to life, spurred by decades of pent-up demand. The visible fruits of this growth -- the city’s gleaming skyscrapers, grand public buildings, sweeping flyovers and bustling metropolitan vigour -- are a stunning advertisement for Shanghai’s and China’s, revival. Shanghai’s own turnaround was symbolized by a single image, the spectacular and much-photographed Manhattan-like skyline of the Pudong financial district, an area which only a few years before had been a small, scrappy village.”

“Streams of foreign visitors have been dazzled by the view of Pudong, usually while clinking glasses on the terraces of the upmarket eateries housed in the colonial-era buildings that line the riverfront strip opposite, known as the Bund. The image this view conveyed--that Shanghai had returned to its entrepreneurial heyday--was far from reality. Unlike southern China and the Yangtze delta region, where Deng’s policies had bred a risk-taking, private economy, Shanghai was developed as a socialist showcase. Few visitors admiring the skyscrapers realized that most of them had been built by city government companies. Far from being the free-wheeling market place that many visitors believed, Shanghai represented the Party’s ideal, a kind of Singapore-on-steroids, a combination of commercial prosperity and state control."



Quotes from:

Richard McGregor's The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers


Tarun Khanna's Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures--and Yours (http://www.amazon.com/Billions-Entrepreneurs-China-Reshaping-Futures--/dp/1422157288/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309209486&sr=1-1)