Shanghai, City on the Make

Shanghai, City on the Make

Like Nelson Algren’s Chicago or Dashell Hammett’s Los Angeles, Shanghai is a city of hustlers, players, pimps, scammers, dreamers, climbers, and wannabes. 17 million people live in the metropolitan area, so it’s roughly the size of New York or Calcutta, bigger than London or Rio. Thanks to the People’s Republic of China’s experimentation with free markets, Shanghai’s growth is explosive. The skyline is expanding by the minute – everywhere you look, cranes are straining away to create new buildings of 40, 60, even 100 stories. Architects top these creations with whimsical turrets, pagodas, fountains, ziggurats – seemingly with whatever springs to mind. They’re like designer hats, or children’s toys, Lego blocks for the egos of Shanghai’s Gatsbys. The man (or the woman) in the street is aching to get a taste of the action too.

As a big tall white guy, I walked the streets with a flashing neon sign that read, “Scam me.” In my five-day visit I was approached with scores of offers of various stripes: salesmen wanted to sell me everything from fake watches to designer bags to “antiques” to real estate to tours to kites. Pimps wanted to take me to hotels for “special lady massage.” When I showed one my wedding ring, he said, “your wife never know.” Students eager to “practice their English” (a particularly tempting approach for me) turned out to be trying to hustle me to a tea ceremony where I’d end up paying hundreds of bucks US for a few sips of oolong, to their “surprise.” (I didn’t – but google “tea ceremony scam” if you want to read dozens of stories from people who did.) Taxi drivers with a poor sense of direction and pedicab hucksters were common. Restaurants often have two sets of prices. Some people come up to you on the street and claim to just want to “make friends” or “have coffee.” And I haven’t even gotten to the beggars …

Beneath it all is a striving energy that I couldn’t help but admire. The old city lies slowly crumbling under the weight of its gaudy new dreams, coming through in brief flashes at the Yuyuan Gardens or on the art deco edges of the Old French Concession. For decades the people of Shanghai lived with work collectives and the guaranteed jobs of the “iron rice bowl” system; now they’re scrambling to negotiate their way through the glorious jungles of capitalism. The results are decidedly mixed. On an extraordinarily lame “cruise” along the Huangpu River to the Yangtze, Allison and I saw industrial sludge pouring from numerous drainpipes into the drinking water of the city’s masses, as barges filled with garbage floated amidst barges filled with coal, all of it on its way to be burned and choke the sky, obscuring the view of those fabulous new skyscrapers. Meanwhile thousands of people arrive every day from the countryside to add to the population of the “most prosperous” city in the most populous nation on the Earth.