The Phoenix Years by Madeleine O'Dea

Author:Madeleine O'Dea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2016-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Over the next days we put together the pieces of our story. During business hours we followed the agenda laid down by the city’s ‘foreign affairs bureau’, who assigned us two minders to dog our every step. After dark we pursued the encounters that would bring the story to life: the construction workers from the countryside now labouring through the night on the new city buildings; the young entrepreneur who had escaped to the West after June 4 but had now returned to sell ‘natural mud packs’ to newly beauty-conscious Shanghainese; the investors in the recently established stock market swapping tips and forming syndicates; and the farmers in Pudong chasing one last harvest before the bulldozers moved in.

Huge swathes of old Shanghai were being razed for new developments and their residents were being rehoused across the river in Pudong. In those days, few people wanted to move to the new accommodation. We visited an informal ‘housing exchange’ where a broker sorted out people’s living arrangements for a fee. He would find a person willing to trade down to less space to stay in old Shanghai, and put them together with someone who was happy to cross the river for a modern bathroom. It had once been the case that you had to live where you were put, in accommodation linked to your ‘work unit’. But the old rules were gone, and ordinary people were making new ones to suit themselves.

The housing broker disavowed any financial motive for setting up the exchange. He kept trying to tell us he had established it out of a simple desire to ‘serve the people’, in the words of the old Maoist slogan. If anyone wanted to give him a gift of money out of appreciation, he said, that was just a happy bonus. Deng Xiaoping may have given his blessing to the idea of getting rich, but many people still thought it safer to keep one foot in the orthodox past while they dipped a toe in the future.

Down at the stock exchange people were happier to admit it was all about the money. The exchange had opened in 1990, trading shares in what were still majority state-owned enterprises. Issuing small parcels of shares became a favoured way for these enterprises to raise funds, bringing in investment without surrendering control.

In those days a number of small exchanges had opened around Shanghai, making it as convenient to buy stocks as to go to a betting shop in the West. The one we visited was housed in what had once been a Russian Orthodox Church, but only we seemed to think this was funny. There we met a number of ordinary traders who admitted to doing well. Many were investing what were quite large sums in the Chinese context, and some spoke of their intention to put a third to a half of their savings into the exchange. Like small investors the world over, they seemed to have little sense that the stock market might ever go down.

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