The Rebirth of Shanghai

Until the birth of the People's Republic, Shanghai was China's artistic center. Can it regain its former glory?

By John Leland and Anna Esaki-Smith

The Gap restaurant in Shanghai's French concession is a squeaky-clean place, all checked tablecloths and stylishly bland Chinese food. But over dinner there, the journalist Yu Lei's mind runs to illicit thrills. Yu, 29, who writes for the state-run Shanghai Star, has a studious look, set off by a stark buzz cut and bookish glasses. When he was a kid, he recalls, Western arts and media were still banned in China, so one of his teachers recorded an American song off the shortwave radio. Huddling the students behind closed doors, and warning them not to tell anyone, the teacher wrote the lyrics on the blackboard and taught the class to sing along. It was dangerously exciting, the lure of forbidden fruit. But what struck Yu most was the sweetness of the melody, the purity of the singer's voice. The singer was Karen Carpenter, who shortly became one of the first Western performers sanctioned in China. Years later, as the Filipino band at the Gap shinga-linga-lings into the Carpenters' "Yesterday Once More," Yu can still hear the sweet strains of revolution. Karen Carpenter, he declares, "was the beginning of the opening of China."

A floor show at a trendy Shanghai restaurant (Andres Hernandez for Newsweek)

Now Shanghai is trying to create the next Chinese revolution. For a century, the city had been China's most open metropolis, the see-no-evil cultural playground to Beijing's political stronghold. But during the drab and dull communist era, the artistic and intellectual center shifted north, leaving Shanghai a vice den short on vice. Now the city is angling to regain its status of cultural hothouse. While the capital rebuilds at its bureaucratic crawl, Shanghai is reinventing itself at a frontier pace that would seem impossible in any other city of 15 million people. A 1991 edict, plus $15 billion in state funds, are behind the arduous transformation of the city's mud-flat Pudong sector into a global financial hub. Next come the arts. This fall the $150 million Shanghai Grand Theatre, designed by the architects who built Paris's Bastille Opera, will open its doors, just across People's Square from the first world-class art museum in China. The investment from the government, argues Ma Chengyuan, director of the new $100 million Shanghai Museum, marks the city's cultural rearrival. "Why not have an appropriate museum to complement a big name such as Shanghai?"

And below this official big-footing, the culture of the new Shanghai is already coming together in venues of lesser repute and ambiguous provenance: in discos and karaoke bars, in businessmen's "mistress" clubs, in a budding gay scene, all swelling with the city's newly moneyed. There's no trouble with organized crime, says one nightclub manager, "because no matter what mafia you could have, the police is a higher crime syndicate." At Time Disco, a dancer who calls herself Fang Fang descends in a metal cage, mouthing lyrics that Karen Carpenter never sang: "You've got to lick it/Before we kick it," and so on. She wears a white bra top with the letters NYG, for New York Girl. "I came to Shanghai because I wanted to take control of my life," says the dancer, 20, who lives with her boyfriend. "I learned [to dance] by myself. I love Madonna." A New York girl, she speculates, "is sexy, avant-garde."

In a city where personal liberation is psychically entwined with free enterprise, the culture is rapaciously entrepreneurial. "I have to become a millionaire," says Yu Rong, 29, who started a small plastics company with his mother two years ago. "I don't want a fancy house; I just want to be a regular person. But if you aren't a millionaire, your life is very restricted. In this world, in China, money is everything." Two recently staged plays are "The Color of Stock" and "OK Stock," an indication of what Shanghainese like to think about when they aren't at work.

With its prefab cosmopolitan decor, the Gap is the perfect artifact of Shanghai's cultural moment: a lifestyle venue, dedicated less to food than to the glossy celebration of pleasure and commerce. The fare is mediocre and overpriced, but the place teems with groups of young professionals. On the dance floor, couples test a tame intimacy that would have seemed out of bounds just a few years ago. The band segues, inevitably, into the theme from "Titanic." The movie and its ubiquitous theme song--available here in English, Chinese, disco and elevator versions--are like the weather: everybody complains, but nobody does anything about it. Whatever else Shanghai's future may hold, Celine Dion's heart will go on.

On a sunny Saturday morning, the city heads to Huating Road, a crowded outdoor bazaar of dubious designer merchandise. Shanghai is starting to develop its own fashion industry: "We're designing for the new 'office ladies,' who work for the big foreign companies," says designer Yiyang Wang. But the ascendant labels here are Calvin Klein and, sometimes, Kalvin Clein. Today, the three members of Sunflower are shopping for stage clothes. Sunflower--that's Angel, Molly and Shirley, all 28--is one of the few working rock bands in Shanghai. Wearing retro-chic mod gear and playing shimmery oldies, they could be from anywhere, a swinging throwback to a cultural moment that never happened here. "Shanghai people tend to go to extremes," says Shirley, the group's guitarist, trying on a floppy hat. "One side is reminiscent, the other side is avant-garde." Sunflower is naively both. The band has had offers to perform and record overseas, but the Foreign Ministry denied it permission. All still work day jobs. Molly sells insurance, for which her night gig has proved to be a blessing. "Insurance is the hot topic in Shanghai now," she says. "People come up to us after shows, ask us what we do. They become my customers."

From the market, the shanghai skyline recedes in a series of construction sites. It is widely repeated here, if seldom supported, that one fifth of the world's cranes are in Shanghai. Despite the economic slump in Asia, much of the construction has kept going, sometimes without apparent reason. There is a tipsy synergy to all this unchecked development: the definitive will of the Chinese government, turned loose in the chaos of the free market. With the Pudong vacancy rate at 50 percent, work crews on what will be the world's tallest building may have slowed, but continue undaunted. Old deco showplaces or Parisian-style small apartment buildings are coming down, to make room for elevated highways or towering concrete monstrosities.

In the rubble of all this construction, small corners of the city are reviving the decadent chic of old Shanghai. "I was raised under the red flag, so it should be almost impossible for me to be interested in old things," says photographer and bookseller Deke Erh, 40, who has devoted five books to Shanghai's vanishing Western architecture. At his Old China Hand Reading Room, antique typewriters and radios create a tranquil oasis from the tumult outside. His interest in old buildings, he says, is not just nostalgic. When the communists took control in 1949, they purged all foreign elements; the architecture was Shanghai's only connection to its cosmopolitan side. "Unconsciously, these old buildings have had a big influence on the people."

Clubs like the swellegant Golden Age, where hostesses in white satin dresses sit and drink with the male clientele, toast tradition with mildly risque, pre-revolution showgirl revues. On a recent evening, a dance troupe wearing bustiers and exotic shrubbery wiggled to a pair of disco songs extolling the virtues of oral sex (his and hers). Another new bar called 1931, furnished in deco to die for, is a shrine to Shanghai chic, down to the waitress in the red silk qi pao dress. "People are nostalgic for the 1930s because it was a very up society," says Wang Yong, a former ad exec who recently launched a temp agency for displaced workers. "There were lots of bosses, entrepreneurs, mafia figures. Now that we're all trying to be bosses, we're very interested in that period."

All this activity may be starting to make officials uneasy. Police recently warned Deke Erh to remove some foreign religious books from his shelves--for a veteran of the Cultural Revolution, an uncomfortable blast from the past. Then this spring, police swept through Park 97, one of Shanghai's tiniest foreign restaurants, demanding to see diners' passports. But Erh tries to remain hopeful. "All things will be improving," he offers. Whether the police actions signal a coming backlash, or just growing pains, remains to be seen. In the meantime, though, Shanghai moves at the speed of its massive cranes and beat-fueled discos: a step forward and a step back. It is a city defined by its blind rate of change--a fitting bellwether for a nation ambiguously on the edge of radical change.