‘Culture shocks’ for visitors to Shanghai

Press, 8 May 1980, Page 20

‘Culture shocks’ for visitors to Shanghai

By

COLINA MacDOUGALL

in the “Financial Times,” London

The world offers few culture shocks like that awaiting someone from the West arriving in Shanghai. The drive from the airport to the heart of this great Chinese city is lined with villas, many mock-Tudor, which look as if an unseen hand had plucked them from an English village and set them down on the China coast. Most amazing of all is the former Sassoon mansion with its pseudo-baronial hall, now inhabited by British Petroleum engineers. Shabby though most others are, they powerfully evoke the Western commercial strength and free-wheeling values which once dominated the city. Architecturally time has stood still in Shanghai since 1939. Like a fly in amber, inner Shanghai is a perfectly preserved period piece. The famous Bund, with its towers and domes and opulent facades, breathes the commercial spirit of that time. China’s poverty, however cruel for its people, has saved the city centre from

the ravages of faceless modern building. This humming seaport with its 11 million inhabitants is a major key to China’s future. Already it handles a third of the country’s foreign trade and produces a sixth by value of all China’s manufactures. Many of China’s intellectuals come from Shanghai. The workforce is the most skilled in China, its bureaucrats the most worldly. Now the West is on its way back. Already the United States and Japan have opened consulates in princely villas along a prominent thoroughfare. The French, West Germans, Italians, Romanians, Yugoslavs and Poles are in the queue. The British seem unlikely to join in at a time when they are closing consulates elsewhere, and in any case the question of the old consulate closed<n the Cultural Revolution is not yet fully settled. But if business multiplies, they, may have, to. British business, which once ruled the commercial life of Shanghai',- has main-

taiiied a presence since 1949 in the form of branches of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and of the Chartered Bank, now discreetly housed in an ancient block with a creaking lift in a side road. The magnificent interior of the old Hong Kong building on the Bund, now municipal offices, is.said to be' lovingly maintained by the Chinese. The banks may expand into a new building as their business grows in the wake of Chinese moves to attract foreign investment. With their strength in Hong Kong, where there are a quarter of a million Shanghai Chinese, they may have a special role to play as middle-men. Shanghai now has its own foreign investment corporation independent • of Peking Already the West German firm Busch is advertising a low-cost housing project for overseas Chinese in the Shanghai Press. Surprisingly sophisticated manufacture and assembly deals, like the arrangement by McDonnell Douglas to buy. aircraft

parts from a Shanghai aircraft factory, are on the increase. Shanghai has great projects for the future. There is a town plan under discussion. in which industry will be moved out of the centre and residential areas will be improved. Shanghai c people already live, better than anyone else in China, and the expected inflow of foreign money will, widen the gap. It is not difficult to .imagine the growth of a -new and thriving international community, in which the local people might mix more freely than they do elsewhere in China. Shanghai has a few rehabilitated millionaires who socialise occasionally with resident foreigners. But the unfettered capitalism of the past is unlikely to reappear as, the paint brushes come out to refurbish the ■ elegant villas. Shanghai was, after all, the scene <of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in the 19205, No one doubts though, that the city could play; a crucial role as a melting pot for new ideas.