A staple of 19th century popular literature was the lurid expose of the glamour and grit of the modern metropolis, be it London, Paris or New York. These books invariably highlighted the cruel contrast between airy boulevards lined with elegant townhouses and, right behind them in the middle of city blocks, ramshackle warrens of courts and alleys packed with malnourished inhabitants living in dark, dank, pestilential lodgings. The word “overcrowded” does not do justice; one slum in central London had 256 residents per acre.
Happily, inequality is not so stark in today’s Shanghai, but it’s still pretty dramatic. Aura Lounge, on the 52nd floor of the Ritz Carlton in Pudong, was fully booked at 4:00 PM on a Wednesday; beautiful people in fashionable garb enjoyed tea and scones as they peered out at the nearby financial towers, elegantly enveloped in smog. BMW’s, Porsches, Mercedes and other luxury vehicles are common in Shanghai, and the buyers are locals, not rich tourists.
Quite a few of these high-living nouveaux riches are what I call “Red Robber Barons”—government bureaucrats who miraculously struck it rich while orchestrating China’s modernization over the past few decades. They are not all big shots at the pinnacle of the Beijing bureaucracy. The China Daily told the story of a “low level official in Hebei province” who stashed $19.5 million in cash in his house, along with 37 kilograms of gold and 68 property ownership certificates. Who knew that being the “general manager” of a provincial state-owned water company could be so lucrative?
A Traditional Working-class Neighborhood
I got some sense of how “the other half” lives when we visited a neighborhood that is just a five-minute drive from the oh-so-chic and over-priced Peninsula Hotel. We were on a tour chronicling the history of Jews in Shanghai; this particular neighborhood is where Jews escaping the Holocaust had to live in the 1930s and 1940s. (It was not really a “ghetto” because Jews lived alongside Chinese citizens.)
We visited the house of Mr. Wang, in a neighborhood of 19th century two-and-three story brick buildings. Turning off a major street, we entered a narrow lane crowded with small shops, mini-bikes, bicycles and residents preparing food, playing cards, etc. One gentleman was squatting on the sidewalk, skinning a couple of live chickens. On one side of the lane is a pit, recently covered with a metal shield, where residents dump their chamber pots (there is little indoor plumbing in the neighborhood). Running off this lane are even more narrow passageways, only about eight feet wide, which provide access to block upon block of low brick tenements.
Mr. Wang moved to the neighborhood in 1947 and purchased a three-story house. Bad timing: The Communists seized control of China two years later and informed Mr. Wang he would be sharing his house with several other families. The front room of the first floor is a small, dark kitchen which was once used by at least three families. It has three tiny hot plates and three dim light bulbs dangling from the ceiling. To avoid disagreements over paying the electric bill, each hot-plate / light bulb combination runs on a separate electric meter. Brilliant solution to a perennial problem! I am not completely clear about how space was allocated in this small abode, but it became more crowded over time, and some families were compelled to live their lives in rooms no larger than a walk-in closet.
Big brother, or rather the local Shanghai government, decides the fate of old-style neighborhoods such as this. Some survive; others are torn down to make way for new office buildings and high-rise apartments. (Just a couple of blocks from this neighborhood, a new business district of giant office buildings is under construction.) When neighborhoods are razed, residents are relocated to one of the thousands of high-rise apartment buildings that surround Shanghai, in which case their “journey to work” may increase from a ten-minute walk to an hour and a half riding subways and buses.
Not only do residents have no say in the fate of their neighborhood; they do not even have reliable information about what the government plans to do. Therefore, any minor investment by the government in the area—new street lights, a fresh coat of paint on the side of a building—is heralded as hopeful evidence that Big Brother has decided not to eradicate the neighborhood. This is the dark side of the administrative efficiency lauded by gullible China cheerleaders like Tom Friedman of the New York Times.
Copyright Thomas Doerflinger 2014. All Rights Reserved.
