China on display III: Shanghai’s Pudong and the Bund

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games come as an apex in China’s intent to be seen as a serious and active player in global development since the early 1990s. The Pudong Development Area is an instructive specimen of a development methodology that combined centralized planning and private capital formation for a delineated and designated geographical area, but with national implications, regional influence, and worldwide impact.

China’s Premier Li Peng in 1990 officially launched the development of the “Pudong New Area” (Pudong Xinchu) in the most advanced economic center of the country – the Shanghai municipality. The plan, grand in conception and bold in design, was to be the catalyst in revitalizing Shanghai proper after the benign neglect it got from China’s planners, and in anchoring the future development of the entire Yangtse River basin spanning Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Jiangxi provinces. Discerning its successes and failures would be worth the while of any area determined to take hold of its own economic development.

Seventy years earlier, Sun Yatsen declared a program of developing the “Great Port of Pudong.” This indicates a process of urban planning and modernization that began and continues to place Shanghai and its environs in the forefront of mass urbanization in China. Acceleration of that development in the 90s anticipated an unprecedented capital formation and intense international investment that was fueled by cheap labor, sustained government protection, and the presence and potential of an immense market.

The Bund in Puxi on the westside of the Huangpu River, in a sense, anticipated and prepared Pudong, the eastside. With the opening of China following its defeat in the Opium War, various western nations including Britain, France, the States, Russia, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands and Belgium opened up trading houses, as well as the consulates of Russia and Britain, a newspaper, the exclusive male only Shanghai and the Masonic Clubs. The “big four” (Barclay’s, Lloyd’s, HSBC, and the Royal Bank of Scotland) pretty much regulated finances until Chairman Mao sent Generalissimo Chiang and the Kuomintang Government across the Strait of Taiwan.

The city of Chou En Lai was never really a straitjacket of doctrinaire socialist economics. Temporarily occupied by government agencies after the Civil War concluded in 1949, the Bund would revert back to the private sector in the 70s and 80s and reclaim its role as the financial hub of East Asia. Now, the Bund is the primary tourist attraction for the city, it’s famous promenade facing the new skyline that has arisen from the marshland of Pudong, and has turned into a spectators’ spectacle when it’s skyscrapers’ lights turn on each evening on cue.

Admittedly, the sidewalks of Pudong Ave. and Pudong Rd. have seen better days. Posters in the city bearing the Beijing 2008 sign, also have underneath it a second announcement: Shanghai 2010. The Bund’s old historic structures are presently undergoing a massive facelift, and its traffic flows getting epic re-orchestration, with bridges and tunnels, highways and subways, and the revived old river ferries restoring a lively and well patronized public transport access between the Bund and Pudong. While it has played second fiddle to the gargantuan construction efforts in Beijing until this year, Shanghai will take center stage after the Beijing Olympics award its last medals of achievements and recognition. Hosting a World Expo is less than a couple of years away.

At the intersection of Minyao and Jinhai Rds. is what seems to be a replica of Paris’ Arc d’Triumphe fronting an upscale housing development. Pudong has definitely become home to China’s nouveau riche. It is also home to the managerial staff of the high-tech and innovative industries of the multi-national corporations that have moved their operations into the area. Numbering among these are such stock exchange index habitués as diverse as General Motors to Kia, Sony to Sharp, GE to Dupont, Honeywell to Omron, i.e., anyone who is anyone in the Fortune 500 has a foothold in the area. DHL just announced the construction of their East Asia operation center at Pudong.

Many cities around the world developed enclaves for their old money. There is Shoto in Tokyo, Georgetown in DC, Grosse Point in Detroit, Pacific Heights in San Francisco, the Lakeshore in Chicago, Highland Park in Dallas, Park Avenue in New York and Puk Fu Lum in Hong Kong.

Rio, Taegu and Oslo, Mumbai, Dubai and Shanghai have all created their rich ghettoes but to me, the affluence in Pudong is exemplified in a lounge bathroom I recently used. One walks into the toilet where the seat cover automatically lifts up, the seat contact surface kept at a comfortable temperature, and a lit digital panel on the side controls a bidet that would not displease the Le Parisienne, and definitely, not Madam Carla Bruni Sarkozy. I over indulged, if not became a wee bit kinky, as I allowed the oscillating water perform its cleansing job and the warm air blower keep dry and pristine the remaining virgin orifice in my anatomy. Now, that really spells r-e-l-i-e-f!

Research and development in bioengineering and scientific agriculture, primary and secondary industries in technology parks, tertiary and ancillary manufacturing operations are all to be found in Pudong, not to mention the outlaying industrial parks in Shejiang and Jiangsu provinces. These are where the machine shops and factories, with their management overlay, all got transported out of the small towns of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan so that American consumers get cheaper goods from the inner city WalMarts and the suburban Price Costcos.

The Wrigleys of Chicago evidently found a niche as a young smiling couple with Guilin’s green tropical forest and karst rock formation on the background extol the virtues of chewing sugar and double mint layered rubber gums. McDo’s double arches and Starbucks smiling mermaid are not to be outdone as they lay in the shadows of the towering new Shanghai World Financial Center (building whose penthouse looks like the handle of a tote bag), right by the Huangpu River bend, just off the Pudong end of the Bund Sight Seeing Tunnel.

The World Expo mascot for 2010 is the Haibao, a people-oriented symbol out of the calligraphic character of ‘human.’ Perry Tenorio’s MVA group, I am sure, are smart enough to know that if we were to get a slice of the Chinese tourist market, it would come from the Shanghai Metro Area. Thus, this interest in this area this summer’s China on display.