Shanghai Is Ready For Its Close-Up

Zhou Libo’s show at the cavernous Shanghai International Gymnastics Center has been sold out for days, and after I finally get a ticket, I understand why. Sporting a tuxedo and a white bow tie, Zhou, 43, a stand-up comedian, delivers rapid-fire jokes, mostly about life in Shanghai. The theme is “I’m crazy about money,” and Zhou riffs on soaring property prices, how much it costs to raise kids, even how much the U.S. owes China. The audience of some 3,700 roars its approval. People are clapping, slapping their thighs, stomping the floor. I manage a smile, but even though I am a Mandarin speaker, I don’t really get the humor, and many of my Chinese friends would be almost as lost. While Zhou sets up his jokes in Mandarin, the punch lines are nearly always in the local Shanghai dialect. This much I do get, however: the performance is an unabashed celebration of all things Shanghai and Shanghainese.

For China’s most dynamic, most cosmopolitan and sassiest city, this is a time to celebrate. After decades of hibernation following the founding of Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic in 1949, Shanghai is returning to its roost as a global center of commerce and culture. This year Shanghai, as host of Expo 2010, is squarely in the international spotlight. The fair opens May 1, and organizers expect more than 70 million visitors over six months.

(See 10 things to do in Shanghai.)

Shanghai’s style is to do things big. Its population of 19 million makes it one of the largest metropolises on the planet. More than 750 foreign multinational companies have offices in the city. The skyline counts more than 30 buildings over 650 ft. (200 m) tall. Stroll down certain streets, and you can easily imagine that you are in midtown Manhattan — so much so that on visiting the city in 2007 for the MTV Style Gala, Paris Hilton was moved to declare, “Shanghai looks like the future.”

Yet Shanghai is still trying to determine what that future should be. For all the money (local and foreign), the constant building and rebuilding, the international profile — and the pride and confidence all these things engender — you get a sense when you speak with many Shanghainese that the city is suffering from a bit of an identity crisis. Much of it revolves around whether and how to preserve the past — not just physical structures but also what has always both made Shanghai part of and set it apart from the rest of China. “On the one hand, living conditions are better than before,” says prominent crime novelist Qiu Xiaolong, who sets his books in 1990s Shanghai. “At the same time, people feel kind of lost. In my books, people sit in front of their shikumen [stone gate] houses and talk. Nowadays people are shut up in air-conditioning. They want things to be better, but they don’t know whether to look forward or back.”

A Rich Heritage
Shanghai has been here before. The Chinese fishing and trading port gained global prominence in the mid – 19th century, when after the First Opium War, British forces opened the city to foreign trade. Britain, France and the U.S. carved out concessions. Investment poured in, and foreign businesses built stately temples of commerce along the Bund, the line of early – 20th century buildings along the Huangpu River. The population of foreigners grew to nearly 70,000 in 1932 and more than doubled over the next decade as Russians fleeing Stalin’s purges and Jews escaping the Nazis found sanctuary in the city. Old Shanghai was known as the Paris of the East for its cosmopolitanism, but in truth it was more international than just about anywhere else in the world.

(See pictures of Shanghai.)

All that came to a halt after the communist takeover in 1949, when the foreign community fled en masse and educated Shanghai residents were dispatched to other provinces to help develop the nation’s industrial base. China was effectively closed for the next three decades, but Shanghai’s worldliness was never fully extinguished. TV host Cao Kefan recalls how his father — who graduated from Shanghai’s prestigious, Anglican-run St. John’s University in 1949 — taught him English and Japanese as a boy when the languages were no longer offered in school.

After 1949, Shanghai’s residents learned some painful lessons in humility, chiefly playing second fiddle to Beijing. “When I studied in Beijing in the late 1970s and the early ’80s, the best compliment I got from a classmate was that I did not really seem Shanghainese,” says Qiu, the novelist, who grew up in Shanghai and now lives in the U.S. “It was a negative thing.” Today, while any idea of inferiority has vanished, many Shanghainese yearn for a past grandeur. Says Cao, the TV host: “The heart of the people in Shanghai is now returning to that of the 1930s and ’40s. Everyone wants to return to that former glory.”

Shanghai’s former glory came on the West’s terms. This time Shanghai is doing it on its own, which is why there is such interest in local culture and language. In December, when two hosts on the Shanghai radio station Moving 101 were chatting in Shanghainese between songs, a listener wrote in to express disgust that they weren’t speaking standard Mandarin. To the delight of his Shanghainese fans, host Xiao Jun replied that the listener should get out of town. Even longtime expatriates can feel excluded. “I’ve been here for many years,” says Beryl Wang, 50, a designer from Taiwan who runs a trendy shop selling handicrafts. “But because I’m an outsider, I still don’t feel like I’m treated the same.” Wang stays because the city offers the kind of opportunity she can’t find anywhere else. “I was attracted by the energy in Shanghai,” she says.

See pictures of China at 60.

See the top 10 everything of 2009.

The City of Choice
It’s that attitude that promises to make the Shanghai expo such an extravaganza. The event’s organizers are adamant that this is not merely a commercial affair. World’s fairs may have a bygone ring to them, but as it did with the Beijing Olympics, China is fully embracing the expo. On 2 sq. mi. (5 sq km) of former dockland just south of Shanghai’s downtown, stand more than 100 pavilions. The designs range from the exuberant — a “breathing organism” that looks like a pink manga character for Japan, a bristling “palace of seeds” that recalls a Buckingham Palace guard’s bearskin hat for Britain, a “kite forest” for Mexico — to the staid. (The U.S. pavilion looks like a gray suburban office park.) “Most Chinese don’t have a chance to go abroad,” notes Wu Jianmin, a former ambassador to France who promoted China’s bid for the 2010 expo. “But with the Shanghai expo, they have a chance to see how the world has developed.”

To spruce up for the event, Shanghai spent as much as $58 billion, according to official Chinese media. The subway was massively expanded, the city’s Hongqiao airport added a huge new terminal, and workers spent three years overhauling the Bund, routing traffic underground and widening its famous waterfront walkway. In a nice touch, Hongkong & Shanghai Hotels Ltd. launched the new Peninsula Shanghai on the Bund in March. The company is controlled by the Kadoorie family, whose roots in Shanghai go back to the late 19th century, when Ellis Kadoorie, an Iraqi Jew, moved to the city. To top off the Bund redevelopment, the city has commissioned Italian-American artist Arturo Di Modica to sculpt a bull, like his famous one near New York City’s Wall Street, to reflect Shanghai’s ambitions as a financial center.

(See pictures of the 2008 Beijing Games.)

But in the rush for the new, Shanghai is losing some of what made it unique. Wujiang Road, once euphemistically called Love Lane, was a center for prostitution in prewar Shanghai and was later known for its snack stalls. Over the past year, it has been rebuilt into a generic pedestrian mall with Starbucks and Krispy Kreme outlets. “The downside is that over the last 18 months, we’ve probably lost more old buildings than in the last dozen years. That’s the saddest part for me,” says Shanghai-based author and consultant Paul French, as we sit in one of Wujiang Road’s new coffee shops. Among the destruction French has documented: stained-glass windows smashed out of the former Jesuit Recoleta Mission to make room for beds to house laborers at the expo; the 106-year-old Shanghai Rowing Club torn down last year as part of the Bund’s redevelopment; and parts of the city’s former Jewish enclave, including the glamorous White Horse Inn, demolished.

French has an old photo of Earl Whaley and Red Hot Syncopators, an all-black band from Seattle that played in the mid-’30s at the St. Anna Ballroom, at the end of Wujiang Road. What’s left of the ballroom is now behind a blue fence advertising the expo. Two workmen survey the site in the shadow of a giant excavator. Not even official preservation orders have managed to stop the relentless destruction of Shanghai’s beautiful old buildings. The urge to destroy the old isn’t new in Shanghai. Its city walls were largely demolished in 1912. But conservationists point to Tianzifang, a shikumen-style neighborhood that has been filled in recent years with stylish shops and restaurants, as an example of how Shanghai can develop while maintaining its old charm — though not all residents see it that way. Chen Yuzhen, 90, a retired acupuncturist, says that for all the upgrading of her neighborhood, “we still don’t have toilets [in our homes].”

(Read “Shanghai: After Beijing Games, Back in the Spotlight.”)

Mixed Feelings
Like the expo, Shanghai’s leaders are focused on a better tomorrow. At the same time, the city has been at the forefront of activism by urban Chinese who want to block threats to their quality of life. In 2008, Shanghai residents staged a series of protests against plans to extend the city’s magnetic levitation, or maglev, train system, fearing it would harm property values — and possibly their health. In the Minhang district, an area of newer apartment complexes with leafy gardens, the air of resentment against officialdom is strong. “Some government officials and interest groups unashamedly misuse land resources and urban space,” an anonymous critic recently wrote in an online bulletin board. “It’s a crime against us as well as many generations to come.” The protests aren’t revolutionary, but they are designed to press the authorities to heed Shanghai’s wealthier, more self-assured citizens. With China becoming ever richer and more urbanized, other cities will look to see how Shanghai handles its growing pains.

The city relishes the attention. “We Shanghainese are used to being an object of interest,” says Zhou, the comedian, during his show. “There are people who are envious of us when we do well and show no sympathy when we are down. To them I would say, ‘We Shanghainese would much rather be the object of envy than sympathy.'” The thousands in the audience roar assent. They know their city is back on top, where it belongs.

— with reporting by Jessie Jiang / Shanghai

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

See the Cartoons of the Week.