In search of the real Shanghai
 
Philip Bowring IHT
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
China's contradictions
 
HONG KONG Even Karl Marx might have managed a wry smile. On Sunday the contradictions of Chinese socialism were on full display. Shanghai celebrated in typically flamboyant fashion the debut of Formula One motor racing in China. "And the winner is ... Shanghai" proclaimed this newspaper. Other foreign news media gushed more extravagantly and national ones exuded pride in Chinese achievements. Meanwhile Beijing was unveiling a weighty document entitled "Decision of Enhancing the Party's Ability to Govern," the outcome of the recent plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The message: Tighten the party's faltering grip.
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It is unfair to brand Shanghai as a Potemkin village. Its modernity stretches out well into neighboring cities such as Nanjing and Suzhou, the heartland of China's growth. Its dynamism, driven by local, Taiwanese and foreign talent, is unmistakable. But while staging a grand prix might enthuse China's new legions of car fanatics and impress swarms of rubbernecking foreign bankers, the expenditure of huge sums of public money on such an elite and environmentally unfriendly sport said much about the party's present condition.
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As well as the most shiny example of China's new “socialist” construction, Shanghai is also an example of vast waste of public funds and the locus of the most extensive graft. It is the antithesis of what the document sets as the goals of the party: eliminating corruption and paying more attention to the rural areas, where 60 percent of China's population still live.
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Shanghai's gleaming high-rise offices, subways, highways and adventurous public buildings are a source of national pride for the new elite and have awakened foreign investors to the pace of change in China. But at what cost? Will a later generation look back on these constructions as they now do on Stalin's efforts to portray Moscow's modernity with symbolic skyscrapers and marble subway stations? Does Shanghai need a grand prix track and an ultraexpensive, energy-devouring maglev railway for anything other than a big Communist Party show?
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If you want to know why infrastructure is so deficient in the rest of China, why rural incomes have lagged, why rural education and health services have declined, come to Shanghai and see where public money has gone. Want to know why China's banking system is so riddled with nonperforming loans? Come to Shanghai and see the office palaces built by state enterprises with money from the state banks and tax breaks from the central government. Want to know the biggest sources of the corruption that so distresses the party? Come look at the processes of real estate development in Shanghai. Want to know why the party is unable to contain abuses? Look at how those with political power seek to maintain state control while glorifying private acquisition of wealth. So much for the party's demand to resist "hedonism."
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Want to know why income distribution in China is now worse than almost anywhere in the developing world? Look at how Shanghai has made itself into a kind of Monaco, with citizenship only for newcomers with heaps of cash or a doctorate in information technology. So much for the "socialist harmony" in which people contribute according their abilities, as enjoined by the party document.
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Want to know about cultural development in China? Try to work out where the cultural development will come from to fill Shanghai's opera house and art gallery when the plenum calls for the party to strengthen its effort to "correctly guide public opinion" and instill such "fundamental ethics" as patriotism.
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Want to know why high-level corruption in Shanghai, as elsewhere, though much bemoaned, is seldom exposed? Listen to the party's demand that controls on the news media be tightened - in other words, that nothing be written that brings senior party men into disrepute, whatever their behavior.
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Like much of urban China, Shanghai is alive with capitalist endeavor and individual entrepreneurship. But as a city it seems unwilling to face up to how much it owes both to the central government and its own exclusivist city-state policies, which would be unthinkable in freer countries, like India or Indonesia.
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Left to its own devices, Shanghai could hardly fail to prosper, given its internationalist attitudes and its central position on the coast. But for now, Shanghai is the contradiction of Chinese socialism writ large.
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Individual enterprise to get rich, by any available means, is acceptable. But only so long as the state - guided by the party and its elite - is in control, and state enterprise "plays the dominant role" and patriotism is the dominant ideology.



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