Yet while some see Shanghai as the most advanced, most livable of China’s megalopolises, others sense that the city is developing into a Singapore-style “nanny state.” The city suits those who already have Westernized tastes. Many of its partisans are expatriates, who find its European architecture and its ethos more comfortable than those in places like Guangzhou or Beijing. Tree-lined streets mimic residential blocks in Paris, while a glittering financial district has materialized across the river. “There is a kind of classic Western order to Shanghai. Glass windows suggest transparency, and doors open onto city streets,” says Beijing-based consultant Lawrence Brahm, noting that in the capital’s traditional hutong dwellings, “if you enter the front door and walk straight, you will literally hit a wall.”
Businesses are attracted by Shanghai’s almost brand- new infrastructure. Smoke- spewing factories have been banished to the outskirts. Pudong, the city’s new development zone across the Huangpu River, is slowly filling out its skyline with more and more needlelike office towers. The city has made sure its bankers and businessmen are never too far from a Starbucks or a good bar, and has even installed a people mover that transports passengers from one side of the river to the other using a tunnel. Although vacancy rates remain high, Pudong is beginning to attract more banks and financial-services firms.
But to many Chinese, Shanghai may be a little too clean and efficient; they say the city lacks the creative passion that fuels underground culture in Beijing, where the number of artists and musicians has already reached a critical mass. Says Shanghai author Wang Anyi, one of China’s most widely read post-Mao fiction writers: “Shanghai people have a long tradition of following the rules; Beijing people are a bit wild and grandiose.”
Unlike Beijing, where ministries are perhaps more preoccupied with running the country, Shanghai cultural authorities keep a tight rein on the arts. The city has funded two impressive venues, the Shanghai Museum and the Grand Theatre. But promoters claim that American musician Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra were not allowed to perform in the Grand Theatre last year because jazz wasn’t considered an appropriate art form.
According to Internet consultant Duncan Clark, who relocated from Shanghai to Beijing recently, the city has modeled its Internet infrastructure on Singapore’s–and in doing so, inhibited Internet penetration, compared with that in Beijing and Guangzhou. In many ways the municipal government seems to play a more active guiding role than in Beijing: Chinese who know both cities say there may be fewer rules in Shanghai, but there are also fewer loopholes to exploit. That might surprise some who would expect the twin metropolises to fall along a New York-Washington, D.C., divide, with Shanghai as the Big Apple. But little in the People’s Republic, even in Shanghai, is so neat and clean.
