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.Then they can be more like China.We know we need economic growth to keep everything together, so we make a point of it.”*The first floor of The Great Indoors, a national big-box interior-design chain that aims to sell luxurious living spaces to middle-class families, looks like a Sotheby’s furniture auction.Tables and chests from every colonial and kingly period, highly buffed, well-weathered or hand-painted with flowers all over, make up the mock living quarters.Around it are the touches amateur Martha Stewarts love: leather hatboxes, satin tasseled pillows, jacquard ottomans, and gilded picture frames around real paintings of old-world seashores, horses and hounds, and Dutch children with cows.A large red sideboard covered with vines costs a mere $1,200.It looks enough like an heirloom costing $20,000 to make a buyer think he or she will never find something this great and this low-cost again.But he will.Costco and Sam’s Club have sideboards just as fine, still in the box, for $200 less.Chapter OneTaking a Slow Boatin a Fast ChinaTHE BANKS OF THE HUANGPU RIVER RUNNING THROUGH SHANGHAI do not just bend.They mind-bend.For a century and a half, the currents of change coursing through modern China have been more visible from Shanghai’s banks than from anywhere else.Here Western powers pushed in most aggressively in the mid-nineteenth century, and later the Japanese made their claim in 1895.The foreigners established an all-but-independent city-state to run their China trade.Western tastes mingled with China’s on such a grand scale that The Bund, then Shanghai’s commercial center on the west bank of the river, looked like the gleaming boulevard of a great European capital.In the early twentieth century—until China and the world unraveled in the 1930s—Shanghai counted as one of the world’s five most important commercial centers together with London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo.The city was also the world’s second-busiest port.Its banks, housed in the imposing hodgepodge of broad European money palaces and slim towers on The Bund, were flush intermediaries in an irresistible trade with Western and Japanese sellers of machines, cotton cloth, medicines, and opium.Chinese factories poured out clothing, paper, and other simple manufactured goods at prices foreigners could not match at home.Commodities in vast quantities moved in both directions.While foreigners created Shanghai as a world port, the city soon proved a magnet for Chinese looking to work in factories or, during periods of social unrest, for sanctuary.The large migration into Shanghai, and the foreigners’ fears that their city would be engulfed, helped lead to the system that ultimately divided the city into separate zones, gated sections of town for the colonists, known as concessions, and the rest for Chinese.Paradoxically, the division also created China’s first modern city when the Europeans imposed a formal municipal government over Shanghai.Previously, Chinese cities, though often large, did not have single municipal governments.Interestingly, the English word modern was transliterated into Chinese for the first time in Shanghai, and the city became synonymous with the new.1This Chinese city reborn with Western management built the country’s tallest buildings, was home to its most prominent banks, had streetcars and running water, beauty parlors, business suits, and French fashions.2 The city’s modernizers were not always Europeans or Americans of the standard colonial mold.Since Shanghai’s modern beginning it was also the home of a small but extraordinary group of Jews, many from Iraq, Spain, Portugal, and India.Controllers of property, entertainment, and financial interests, the Hardoun, Kadoorie, and Sassoon families helped create the new world of Shanghai that was neither Occident nor Orient.The city, however, was never new enough to wash away old prejudices.Stories are told of the notorious sign outside the British Huangpu Park that forbade entry by “Dogs or Chinese.” Shanghai then, as now, collected the world’s contradictions.Asia’s capitalist hub was also the site in 1921 of the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party.* The city that gave birth to the verb shanghaied also played host to the lost.In World War II, the city, which stood apart from the world of nations, became a refuge for as many as thirty thousand European Jews fleeing the Nazis.In 1949, the Communists seized the country, and for the next forty years the creative power of Shanghai turned away from enterprise.Commercial life stopped dead.Shanghai’s grand European architecture and the pre-1940s brick blocks that reflected the city’s worldly blend withered.Today Shanghai is again China’s most proudly modern and global city.Yet the city’s history of foreign domination is one of China’s enduring national wounds [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]