The Asian Aspiration by Greg Mills & Olusegun Obasanjo & Hailemariam Desalegn & Emily van der Merwe

Author:Greg Mills & Olusegun Obasanjo & Hailemariam Desalegn & Emily van der Merwe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Shanghai effect

The basis of post-feudal modern China was cemented by the role of Sun Yat-sen. Influential in overthrowing the Qing dynasty in 1911, he had been born to poor farming parents. After a period abroad, Sun forsook his career as a doctor in 1894 to seek political fortunes, troubled by the way China had been humiliated by the technologically superior colonial powers. A 16-year exile followed a failed uprising in Guangzhou. Based in Japan, he founded the United League and continued to mobilise against the Qing regime. After a period of instability, Sun installed himself as generalissimo in 1923 until his death from cancer in 1925. He is still a symbol of Chinese modernisation.

When Sun came to Shanghai in 1912, he and his family set up house in a two-storey Western-style building in the former French concessionary area of the city. Even by his global standards, he would have found it a very modern, cosmopolitan city.

Once a small fishing village on the Huangpu River, Shanghai developed during the late Qing dynasty as a trading port. In 1842, following their victory in the First Opium War, the British opened a concession in Shanghai. Thereafter, the city entered a period of growth and transformation interrupted only by the Mao regime. French, American and Japanese concessions soon followed that of Britain.

By the 1930s, Shanghai had developed into the most important port and most modern city in Asia, as notorious for its licentious character as it was famed for its banks and business. Known as ‘the wicked old Paris of the Orient’, with ‘as vivid a cast of chancers, schemers, exhibitionists, double-dealers and self-made villains as had ever been assembled in one place’, the city was ‘both glamorous and squalid, extremely rich and poor, unscrupulous and tough’.20 Street names in Shanghai’s Old City – Honglangan Jie (‘street of the red banisters’) and Hongzhuang Nong (‘red hamlet lane’) – invoke not the colours of Marxism-Leninism but the brightly painted facades of the legal and ubiquitous brothels. ‘Tit-pinch lane’, Monai Nong, was narrow enough, as the name suggests, to provide pedestrians with groping opportunities.21 The term, to ‘shanghai’, lower case, now means to coerce or scam.

It was a city of what were, by the standards of the time, stunning mod cons. The Astor House Hotel was established in 1846 as Richards’ Hotel and Restaurant near the confluence of the Huangpu River, where it remains. Enjoying the reputation as the finest hotel in China – Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and Zhou Enlai have all stayed there – this was the site of the debut of the first telephone, first electric lamp and talking movie in China. The Peacock Hall ballroom was once the site of the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

The city’s rise came on the back of commerce, but of a shady kind. By the 1830s, 24 000 chests of opium were imported annually from India at a vast profit (estimated at £100 per case), enough to feed two million addicts. When the Chinese authorities resisted, after lobbying by William Jardine, the Scotsman who later co-founded Jardine, Matheson & Co.

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