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Poverty rate from 85% in 1981 to 33.1% in 2008. Based on China's official poverty line, the poor population was reduced from 250 million in 1978 to 26.88 million in 2010, and proportion of poor people in the total rural population dropped from 30.7% to 2.8%.

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Hi watch this have fun!

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THE POWER LONG, Shanghai, China / Richard's Architecture+Design

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HAHA!

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This is about the time lapse in shanghai

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This video shows the beauty of shanghai.

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CITY2CITY | The Destinations | Shanghai |

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This is an article some of Shanghai’s most impressive architectures

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The city of Shanghai has undergone some of the fastest and most dramatic changes over recent years, initially flourishing in the 1920s/30s and adopting the fashionable Art Deco architecture of the time, the city is full of sleek eclectic designs and buildings. With so many buildings to choose from and so many fascinating architectural feats presently in progression, this list is just a drop in the ocean of the awe-inspiring architecture to be found in the bustling city of Shanghai.

Many of the city's most famous buildings can be found along the waterfront of the Huangpu River in areas such as 'The Bund', and this acts as a hive of tourist and business activity. New structures such as The Shanghai Tower - which will take over The World Finance Center as the tallest building in China - show the constant progression of the skyline today.

This utterly vast, concrete dominated space is far from its initial use as an abattoir, now home to shops and upscale restaurants. However, the building still maintains some of this previous eeriness, with many of its rooms and walkways left empty and the wide corridors and cattle signs as a constant reminder of its history. A labyrinth of concrete, the building has a circular center that is connected to the exterior walls via 26 'air bridges'. These bridges jut out of the walls at obscure angles, giving a different view depending on where you stand within the building.

This stunning temple serves as Shanghai's largest and oldest monastery, dating back to the 10th Century. Like most ancient structures in the city, it has undergone a rich and violent history of war and fire, with much of the building being renovated. It has rained many original features and is considered to be the most authentic temple in Shanghai. An inspiring place to visit, with the name referencing the Pipal tree under which Buddha achieved enlightenment, Longhua temple was constructed in 242 AD and covers a vast 20,000 meters squared.

This 88-story skyscraper was designed by architect Fazlur Khan and represents an Art Deco/modern style. Housing the Shanghai Grand Hotel and a selection of offices, the structure has a beautiful 33-floor atrium. Externally, the building is covered in an aluminium alloy lattice frame, which encloses a wall of glass, granite, stainless steel and aluminium. Sections of the skyscraper stack on top of one another elegantly, and the design intensifies as the build rises taller into the sky, twisting to its peak, an observation deck topped with a pinnacle.

Designed by Morphosis Architecture, this long, angular building exists around canals and a man-made lake. Home to office spaces, executive suites, a library, an auditorium, exhibition space and cafe, this 'compact village' is impressive both inside and out. With its natural focus, the structure is designed to maximize natural light and also features a green roof to help control temperature. This open feeling continues throughout the building with its composition of glass, straight sleek lines and neutral colors set against joyful shades of natural green. One end of the build hovers over the man-made lake, whilst the rest of the building snakes back into the landscape behind.

Promoting sustainable, green and modern architectural design, this building was structured around an existing warehouse for the largest organic food farm in Shanghai. Using old freight containers, Playze designed the build to appear both functional and comfortable as a hospitality destination. Holes in the green containers create a playful use of sunlight during the day and at night make the exterior walls of the build appear dotted with lights. Surrounded by wooden walkways, the 78 containers maintain a cool character, with the previous warehouse sitting around the back.

Shanghai is renowned for its many bridges, with a total of six crossing the Huangpu River. The fourth-longest cable-stayed bridge in the world, the Nanpu Bridge was built in 1991 and was the first steel and concrete cable-stayed bridge in Shanghai. Leading in from Puxi, the bridge features an astonishing spiral, an engineering feat admired by professionals all over the world. Large towers soar 150m tall, holding the cables in place, majestically permitting drivers to pass through. The turn of the road also enables passers to view the bridge and admire its grand structure.

Situated on The Bund, this TV and radio tower is a landmark of Shanghai, and rightly so. Its futurist architectural style makes it stand out even against the diverse collection of buildings and structures in this area. Finalized in 1994, it held the prize for China's tallest structure up until 2007. Made up of a total of 11 spheres, the largest and most central globe is supported by a number of legs that drive deep underground. Perched on the edge of Lujiazui, right by the edge of the riverbank, the bizarre shape of the tower is highlighted at night, when a series of lights shine from the structure, enhancing it as a national landmark.

Like several of Shanghai's best structures, the Oriental Sports Center can be found along the Huangpu River, on the Eastern side. Made up of three main buildings, this structure resonates a grandiose style. Designed by GMP Architects, the design of the sports center reflects the overall theme of water as it sits beside canals and a man-made lake. Tall, curved sides of the center rise upwards, reminiscent of waves or as many suggest, the sails of a boat. These broad, overreaching arches define all parts of the center but each are impressive in their own right. Inside the gleaming white features enhance the natural light that bounces off the water's surface.

Situated in the center of Shanghai and serving as an entrance for those arriving into the city by boat, this structure is one of Shanghai's most impressive and complex designs. A smooth glass surface is topped with a ribbon of green garden, serving as a roof and pedestrian path. A huge skylight allows light to flood into the below ground level space. Should you wish to see the site from above, there is a staggering glass bubble hovering over, from which you can see into the many different public spaces. Designed by Frank Repas Architecture, this building is not only impressive to look at, but functions with optimum energy conservation in mind.

Steering away from the fashionable and towards the more functional, this pedestrian bridge was built to cross the 50-metre gap in the river. Its structure reflects its purpose, as the bridge is curved to allow for adaptation of the river and its surroundings. Made up of a set of triangular metal trusses, the engineering minimizes the amount of materials needed. Delicately perched over the riverbed, the crisscross of white metal set against the light wooden walkway and roofing make it visually light. With its understated yet strikingly exquisite design, the Qingpu Pedestrian Bridge is almost ethereal to look at.

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10 Of Shanghai's Most Impressive Architectural Feats

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The city of Shanghai has undergone some of the fastest and most dramatic changes over recent years, initially flourishing in the 1920s/30s and adopting the fashionable Art Deco architecture of the time, the city is full of sleek eclectic designs and buildings.

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This is a 3D model of buildings in Shanghai.

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This is a map of Shanghai.

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This video shows the largest slum being wiped out in Shanghai

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The Largest Slum Being Wiped Out in Shanghai

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This pic shows shanghai poverty

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This is about the growth of shanghai through satellites

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This is a picture of KFC,Pizza Hut,Zara,Sony,and McDonalds

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This is all about the architectural design and cultural influences

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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

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Abstract

How does one begin to decipher an urban landscape if it is constantly changing? Four thousand years ago the land on which Shanghai is located was submerged beneath the sea. Today it is one of the most rapidly globalizing cities in the world. In looking for ways to approach the architectural and urban history of Shanghai, it may be useful to focus on the moments of change, acculturation, tension, and dilemma. It is such encounters or intersections that redefine and establish anew the very reality and imagination of the city's timescape. In general, a city can be viewed through its overall layout, planning, policies, changing environmental conditions, and interactions between different social and cultural groups. In Encountering the Dilemma of Change in the Architectural and Urban History of Shanghai, Cary Y. Liu argues that the goal should not be to establish an immutable chronology of facts and events but to better comprehend the complex tensions and issues defining each encounter.

(Im)perishable Monuments

Above I have offered the briefest of reviews of Shanghai's long and ever-changing physical and visual history. How then to assess an urban space whose only constant appears to be change? One rather straightforward approach to reconstructing a city's history entails a step-by-step analysis of the development of its architecture, a task infinitely more challenging for a city than for a single building, though in many ways it gives rise to a similar set of problems. If we take an entire city as our subject, and attempt to reconstruct its history by identifying a series of durable monuments as representative markers of its urban and social space over time, two important questions come to mind. First, how are the particular monuments to be selected? In other words, what criteria or points of view are to be used to determine which monuments are "representative" and hence will be the focus of the narrative, and what alternatives will be omitted from consideration? Second, what defines a durable architectural monument? Construction from lasting materials? Physical longevity is not always and everywhere the definition of durability. Architecture's connection to memory and the word ( wen) is a conception found in many cultures, but rarely is it so heavily emphasized as in traditional Chinese attitudes toward the past, which held that the imperishability ( buxiu) of words took precedence over physical durability. As long as societal or even individual memory endures, an edifice's name and the poems and inscriptions associated with it can outlast its built reality. For example, in the Ming dynasty, Liu Shilong (act. early seventeenth century), who styled himself the Snow-Eating Recluse ( Canxue jushi), wrote the "Record of the Garden That Is Not There" ( Wuyouyuan ji), in which he observed that nothing remained of famous gardens of the past except the words written about them. In building his own garden, therefore, Liu decided: "On its construction I neither need waste gold nor expend effort. ... To build in reality is to be limited by reality itself; while a construction conceived only in the imagination suffers no constraint. ... My garden relies not on form but on thought. It can be harmed neither by wind nor rain, flood nor fire. Even if my descendants are wastrels, they will not be able to give away so much as a single plant or a tree." This garden of the imagination survives purely in words.

Prospect Garden (Daguanyuan), which appears in the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber (or The Story of the Stone), similarly epitomizes the power of words to conjure traditional Chinese architecture. The novel gives but passing notice to the actual construction of the garden, instead emphasizing the act of composing titles and poems to characterize the perceived spirit or nature of specific scenic spots and buildings in the garden. This bestowal of words embodies an aesthetic of spontaneity. As important as the first note in music, or the first brushstroke in calligraphy and painting, the instant of naming in architecture confers on a building its imperishable mark of authentic originality. Prospect Garden is a fiction, but through words it has become so real that today it has even been given physical form in the Qingpu District of Shanghai. It is as if today Liu Shilong's imaginary Garden That Is Not There were suddenly to be given material reality based on the permanence of the words that describe and celebrate it.

Many of the older structures in today's Shanghai boast a similar venerability and link to the past conferred partly by the power of words. The famous Yu Yuan (Garden of Tranquil Ease), located inside the former walled Chinese City ( Figure 5), is sometimes dated back four hundred years to the Ming dynasty or called an epitome of traditional gardens in Jiangnan (a region south of the lower Yangzi). Actually, very little of what remains dates earlier than the nineteenth century. The garden was first created between 1559 and 1577 by the Ming dynasty official Pan Yunduan (1526-1601) for his elderly father Pan En (1496-1582), who had supervised the building of the city walls to defend against marauding pirates. The descendants of the Pan family, having fallen on hard times, sold the garden in 1760 to associations of rich merchants. After extensive restoration and rebuilding, the garden was donated to the adjoining City-God Temple (Chenghuang Miao) complex and became the headquarters for trade guilds and societies of various sorts. In the late nineteenth century, the garden was made into an administrative center for commerce and industry, and at the same time became a crowded public bazaar, with teahouses, taverns, and vendors. Although other private gardens were incorporated into the grounds of the Yu Yuan, over time the garden's footprint shrank by more than half. Its layout has also changed significantly, as evidenced by the well-known Lake-Center Pavilion, which was once inside the garden precinct but is now located outside it ( Figure 6). The garden was also severely damaged after being commandeered on multiple occasions to headquarter and bivouac European, Chinese, and Japanese troops. Because the Yu Yuan was heavily restored or rebuilt from 1956 to 1961 and again during the 1980s, today little remains from the Ming or Qing dynasties. At best the garden can be called a modern evocation of a traditional Jiangnan garden, a characterization that also applies to the restored and rebuilt classical gardens in nearby Suzhou. It is words -the garden's name, couplets, poems, titles, and inscriptions-that link the Yu Yuan with its past, and despite countless changes in physical shape and form, these words and the memory they evoke allow the present-day architecture to be perceived as the authentic original.

Although in many cultures the conception of architecture is often shaped by word and memory, recollection of the past is today usually overshadowed by a more future-oriented belief, in which durable material serves as the primary medium for a permanency yet to come. Encountering a greater emphasis on words as irrefutable evocations of the past, consequently, may seem strange to someone more accustomed to look toward physical durability as predictor and guarantor of the future. This difference in viewpoint has had a significant impact on perceptions of the traditional architecture and city of Shanghai.

This difference in perspective may help explain the persistent myth that portrays Shanghai as a mere "fishing village" before it became a treaty port in 1842. The historian Linda Cooke Johnson and others have already debunked this "fishing village myth." Shanghai was a county capital as early as 1292 during the Yuan dynasty (1260-1368), the central port for inland river trade as well as northern and southern overseas trade routes, and a leading world port by the early nineteenth century, with shipping rivaling that of London, so why have so many past and present-day observers and historians misconstrued this major urban center as a small backwater fishing village? Johnson has suggested that in the West the faulty interpretation resulted in part from a "Eurocentric branch of historiography that maintains that China had to have ... the impact of the West to be transformed into a modern society, and that without that catalyst, it would have remained its old traditional, backward self, stuck (to employ the terminology of Karl Marx) in the Asiatic mode of production." This slant corresponds to the arguable belief that, whereas Western social development is characterized by reason and progress, Eastern society fell victim to "Oriental despotism" and stagnation. For some in the West, it is within this polemic that Chinese art, architecture, and cities came to be seen as stylistically static and "unchanging" for thousands of years. An alternative explanation depends on what is understood to be the medium of durability. If monumental stone buildings are the chief indicator of an enduring history and future permanence, then the relative absence of such structures may have given rise to a conviction that mid-nineteenth-century Shanghai was relatively undeveloped. In contrast, if words can confer architectural monumentality and perdurability, then it is possible to acknowledge Shanghai as a thriving port metropolis with a rich history of architecture.

Divergent Encounters

These differing points of view are not mere chauvinism. They are the paradoxical aftermath of global encounters between clashing cultural orientations and histories. China's history before the concession of Shanghai as a foreign treaty port in 1842 has often been perceived as parallel to but isolated from the histories of other countries. Afterward, the various strands of world history began to intermingle through a process of acculturation. China could no longer imagine itself standing alone as being "all under heaven" ( tianxia) and had to acknowledge, albeit fitfully, its new status as a culture among cultures or nation among nations: a "country in the world" ( guojia). Correspondingly, the anthropologist George W. Stocking, Jr., noted that the idea of culture as a human trait has long existed in the West but there was originally "no real notion of culture as the constituting medium of different thought worlds," and "by the same token, civilization, like man, was singular: the plural of the noun did not appear until the nineteenth century." It had certainly become plural in the context of Shanghai by the late nineteenth century. Beyond plurality, when "thought worlds" collide, the ensuing encounters force all sides, first, to conceptualize what is newly encountered in other cultures (ideas, technologies, skills, beliefs, and ways of seeing and thinking) and, second, to reconceptualize their own cultural imaginaire-the past, present, and future as "precursors" that thereafter can never be seen as they were before. The aftermath resembles a Borgesian conundrum in which "every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." Put another way, as a question, does the writer define the story, or does the story redefine the writer?

Collisions between cultural thought worlds forced the Chinese to redefine Shanghai according to an updated global storyline. For example, while Shanghai's own account of its earlier history had focused on its role as a county capital and center of a regional cotton market, after becoming a semicolonial treaty port, Shanghai began to be seen as a key entry point for the introduction of capitalism and modernity from the West. Chinese scholars fervently countered that view, insisting that the "seeds of capitalism" had originated independently in China, without a Western catalyst, and that semicolonial oppression had served only to delay China's natural evolution into a modern society. The issue of capitalism's origins had never been relevant in traditional China. It became so only after the encounter with new points of view required a redefinition of the Chinese cultural imaginaire. Similar questions in Chinese architectural history arose only when China began to encounter foreign ideas, for example, why Chinese roofs are curved and why the Chinese use wood instead of stone. Such questions had previously been irrelevant; conversely, it would have been equally valid for the Chinese to ask Western cultures why they build straight roofs and why they made structures of stone. The interpretation of an encounter with a divergent thought world depends on one's cultural perspective and can thus, to repeat a phrase from Xuefei Ren, result in "multiple-often contradictory-interpretations." And a redefinition of the cultural imagination transpires on all sides in the aftermath of an encounter.

Attempts to invent or reconstruct multiple narrative histories of a city through its architectural monuments in stone or words, therefore, permit targeted glimpses of specific themes or viewpoints but may not capture the larger complexities and contradictions of the urban environment. An alternative approach may be to think of the city's history as an ever-changing kaleidoscope of diverse encounters and divergences in perception. Each encounter encompasses a dialectical set of issues and dilemmas. Such encounters present diverse perspectives, and from the always changing matrix of encounters emerge multiple and often contradictory pictures of the urban landscape. Though not all encounters involve a convergence of different thought worlds, they do lead to dilemmas in defining and redefining the cultural imaginaire.

At the core of any encounter is an exchange of ideas, which may be occasioned by a chance meeting, an adversarial conflict, or a discovery of unknown worlds, real or imagined. Every encounter fosters a dialogue that questions or confronts similarities and differences. What is accepted and familiar (i.e., traditional) in the art, architecture, culture, and environment of any people is apt to go unquestioned until an encounter with something that is different yet similar, or similar yet different, provokes a reevaluation and redefinition. Such encounters elicit curiosity, bemusement, or, sometimes, furious rejection. When individuals face a difference in similar forms, shapes, and conditions, what they had considered familiar can become conspicuously strange. When they confront similarity in cultural objects and ideas from a different cultural imaginaire, what they had thought strange can become unexpectedly familiar. Cross-cultural encounters result in entangled interaction, mutual impact, and translation. The points of encounter can occur across place as well as time, and the direction of the gaze controls how the one culture then sees the other and how it sees itself-sometimes in the guise of the other and sometimes in relation to its own past, present, or future. In the end, every encounter is between people; every encounter motivates them to question what is different yet similar, or similar yet different, and all such questioning affects what all parties see in the world around them.

In Shanghai, such entangled interactions involving exchanges of ideas between peoples and cultures, as well as between times and places, became increasingly evident after the establishment of the international settlements. Native residents considered the new form of lilong housing an updated version of traditional courtyard housing in the Jiangnan region, but foreign landowners and developers thought it derived from the European row-house models to which they were accustomed. Each side identified with what was more culturally familiar, while at the same time accepting or rejecting what they perceived as new or different. In a similar manner, the intrusion of Western-styled buildings and innovations along the Bund and in other areas of the city incited divergent responses. The contrast of those structures to traditional Chinese building and technology may have signaled modernity and progress to many Chinese, but others saw foreign-style buildings and railroads as alarming interventions that threatened to disrupt harmonious fengshui and upset the natural order. Western observers, however, often deemed these so-called Western constructions in China derivative at best, quaintly old-fashioned, or just plain ugly (but still better than Chinese buildings).

The Shanghai cityscape also included other late nineteenth-century cross-cultural examples: the Hardoon Garden, built by the Jewish British merchant Silas Aaron Hardoon (1851-1931) in a Chinese style, and the Zhang Garden, built by the Chinese merchant Zhang Honglu (also known as Zhang Shuhe, 1850-1919) in an occidental manner. The Hardoon Garden included an area reconstructed according to the fictive Prospect Garden from the Dream of the Red Chamber, and Hardoon's adoption of Chinese forms and aesthetics raises questions about his reasons for turning away from his own cultural heritage. Indeed, his own countrymen looked down on his effort, seeing it as a mere fantasy or folly. Zhang Honglu, in contrast, may have imitated Western styles as a way to gain or express social status and to establish a broader international network of political and economic connections. Both gardens engendered complex transcultural interpretations, including some that saw both patrons claiming roots in more than one culture at the same time, a global outlook avant la lettre, or as figures struggling with their own cultural identity.

Encountering Water

The name Shanghai literally means "on water" or "above the sea," and the confrontation of city and people with the waters of the sea, rivers, canals, reservoirs, and wells has been and continues to be a life-and-death matter. After every flood or near-disaster, the city is forced to reimagine its place and fit in the natural and cultivated landscape. In many ways the definition and redefinition of Shanghai's cultural imaginaire can be said to depend on its ongoing encounter with water. Recall that this entire area had originally been underwater; tidal deposits aided by dikes and seawalls slowly created landfill. The littoral of the Bund was itself built on fill, and the territory occupied by present-day Pudong was also reclaimed from the sea. Today the land is only about four meters above sea level; river flooding, storm surges, tidal flows, sinking land, and rising water levels owing to global warming continue to threaten the city. Extensive seawalls, dikes, river embankments, and floodgates have been erected in defense ( Figure 7), but the fear of deluge is not the only concern. Fresh water for drinking, agriculture, and industry is crucial to the city's sustainability-it is a need common to all cities, but one that has been exacerbated by Shanghai's rapid urbanization and population growth.

Shanghai's encounter with water has also included its changing economic and cultural interaction with the regional network of rivers, streams, and canals. Present-day Shanghai straddles the Huangpu River as it wends north to join the Yangzi. The Huangpu began life as a small stream or drainage ditch. Before the early fifteenth century, the main watercourse for inland transport had been the Suzhou River (formerly the Songjiang River) that led west upstream to the main port at Qinglong and the city of Suzhou where it intersected with the Grand Canal. At Shanghai, where it met the Huangpu, the Suzhou River had originally flowed east, directly to the seacoast, but that course exposed the river to tidal silt deposits that blocked shipping. To remedy this situation, in 1404 the river was rerouted northward to discharge into the Yangzi, and the Huangpu became dominant. This remarkable achievement in river engineering should be seen in the context of China's long history of water control projects. Water had always been a significant force in China's cultural landscape, and the management of waterways by means of dams, dikes, and canals was traditionally one of the primary duties of the government. From the ancient legendary ruler Yu to the present-day construction of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangzi, water control has been an important responsibility of the government and a symbol of its legitimacy.

This legitimacy was seriously challenged by the foreign presence of the domineering stone buildings overlooking the Bund. On the fundamental relationship between the Shanghai Bund and water, the historian Jeremy Taylor has written: "Access to great expanses of water ... was perceived as highly valuable, given the prime importance of water for travel, communications and trade. ... Without water, the treaty port lost its very meaning." Because the Bund's direct access to water allowed trade and anchorage for merchant and military ships, early twentieth-century Shanghai became a symbol of foreign authority and commerce on Chinese territory. China's loss of control over local waterways to extraterritorial powers, as well as the humiliating reason for Shanghai's concession as a treaty port-the opium trade-made this quasi-colonialist encounter especially unfamiliar and poignant to the Chinese. In contrast, many observers outside China interpreted Shanghai's vaunted rise to cultural and commercial prominence (as the Paris of the East) as a success. This interpretation arose in part because of the outsiders' familiarity with certain imitated, imposed, or transposed elements of so-called Western civilization and modernity, such as neoclassical architecture, electric lights, municipal governance, sanitation, parks, music, fashions, art, and even sports and other lifestyle activities. In Chinese eyes, however, these elements were largely considered to be more different than similar-unfamiliar novelties, curiosities, or veritable abominations.

The diverse reactions among the Chinese populace are recorded in the printed images and photographs published in Shanghai's popular illustrated newspapers and periodicals, including the Dianshizhai huabao ( Lithography Studio Pictorial, 1884-98) and Liangyou ( Young Companion, 1926-45). The very proliferation of such periodicals, as well as images of Chinese dressed in Western attire or living in houses with interiors furnished in Western style, demonstrated a general acceptance of some foreign ideas. In contrast, illustrations depicting the apparent Western fixation on sports and physical exercise-ranging from horse and dog racing to tug-of-war and sack racing-aroused both curiosity and bewilderment. The compulsion to exert oneself constantly as opposed to resting quietly, or to compete aggressively instead of acquiescing tranquilly, seemed comically incomprehensible. Other illustrations recorded instances of cultural misunderstanding, abhorrence, and conflict. For example, the illustration "Taking Pigs into Custody at the Police Station" ( Figure 8) shows what happened when a group of swineherds, following their customary practice, had brought several dozen pigs through the streets of the French Settlement, violating the French standards of hygiene and sanitation that had led to restrictions against herding livestock through the city streets. The swineherds, unaware of the prohibition, were arrested. The absurdity of the situation to the Chinese is expressed in the depiction of the pigs actually being herded through the main entrance into the French police station. I do not want to belabor here the contrast in cultural viewpoints or their racial and religious implications. Instead, I return to the process of acculturation between differing thought worlds, because it redefines each culture's past history, present circumstances, and future direction.

Acculturative Tension

Acculturation occurs as the result of an urban encounter, generating adaptive, imitative, or reactive change in any one or every contact group. The field of social psychology has looked closely at acculturation in studying the effects of colonialism, immigration, and multicultural societies, but the process is actually difficult to conceptualize and measure. The historian Joseph Levenson, writing about Chinese modernization, observed that acculturation is "the process of displacement or modification of the techniques, institutions, values, and attitudes of one culture by those of another." In Shanghai, the prominence of (or displacement effected by) the foreign settlements centering on the Bund elicited nationalistic efforts to redefine and reclaim the city for China. Plans were devised to circumvent the Bund's prime authority and meaning, its "access" to water. As early as 1919, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), founder of the Chinese Republic, proposed that the Huangpu River be rechanneled to flow past a "New Bund," a future urban commercial hub and port to be built in Pudong and that the stretch of the Huangpu (Whang poo) fronting the old Bund be filled in ( Figure 9). Though funds were lacking at that time, there was clear historical precedent. Shanghai's main river had been rerouted once before, in 1404. After 1927, when the new government of Shanghai became answerable to the Nationalist government, its City Planning Commission began discussing ideas for a new administrative center and port for the expanding city. A design competition in 1929-30 led to the selection of a grand Beaux-Arts plan for a civic center ( Figure 10) in the Jiangwan area north of Suzhou River. This Greater Shanghai Plan, like Sun Yat-sen's proposal, was "intended to shift the focal point of Shanghai away from the international settlements, and form the nucleus of a reclaimed Chinese metropolis." When the Chinese sections of Shanghai fell to the Japanese in 1937, construction, already under way and several major buildings completed, was halted. (The foreign settlements were not seized until 8 December 1941.)

During the war years and the subsequent Communist regime that redirected resources to industrial production and collective ownership, Shanghai and other cities languished. With economic reforms and investment since the 1990s, Sun Yat-sen's vision of reclaiming Shanghai was finally achieved with the building of the Lujiazui financial district in Pudong. The new steel-and-concrete skyline of Pudong is a symbol of the New Shanghai and China (see Figure 3). It stands across the Huangpu River facing the Western- style stone buildings along the Bund (see Figures 1, 2) that epitomize Old Shanghai in its heyday as an international settlement. And although the river separating the old and new skylines has not been filled in, by 2020 there will be about twenty vehicular crossings linking the two sides, making the Huangpu "one of the most crossed, spanned, and tunneled urban waterways in the world." The patriotic precedent and political symbolism of Sun Yat-sen's vision for Shanghai, which was first set out in words, should not be underestimated. To bridge the Yangzi at Nanjing and to construct the Three Gorges Dam-projects that have been hailed as modern engineering marvels and symbols of national pride and progress-were similarly first proposed by Sun.

This faceoff between Old and New Shanghai across the Huangpu, reveals a tension in the multiple definitions and redefinitions of the city, people, and nation. The foreign-style monuments of the treaty-port period in durable stone confront the traditional Chinese architecture, which often derived permanence from words. The tension between them was heightened by foreign military and economic dominance during a period when China was at its weakest and subject to extraterritorial manipulation. Under these circumstances, Western architecture in Shanghai became a model of strength to be emulated and at the same time a symbol of humiliation to be subdued or destroyed. Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that the Bund was not demolished after Shanghai returned to Chinese control, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Possibly, instead of dismantling the Western and Nationalist regime (e.g., Bank of China) buildings, it was judged sufficient to destroy or conceal almost all of the buildings' cornerstones or to mutilate their inscriptions. In essence, the original ceremonial cornerstones bearing foreign words were effectively purged and new titles and inscriptions sanctified by Chinese words were substituted. The foreign buildings were thereby appropriated and redefined so as to center on China's past.

Appropriating foreign innovations by redefining them in terms of Chinese precedent is one facet of the well-known dictum coined in 1898 by Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909): "Chinese learning for the fundamental principles, Western learning for practical application" ( tiyong). This approach influenced activities ranging from politics to science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it had a significant impact on the national self-strengthening and reform movements. Peter Rowe and Seng Kuan's book Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China discusses its crucial influence on the encounter between Chinese and Western architecture. New modern Western ideas in architecture constituted the practical application, or external "form" ( yong), set into a matrix-or against a touchstone-of Chinese principle, or internal "essence" ( ti), thus rendering Western thought suitable to China. Never a simple dichotomy between East and West, this intellectual framework, or acculturative tension, has been so open to interpretation and translation that it exemplifies a Borgesian conundrum writ large in Chinese terms. What is considered Chinese precedent or essence, consequently, was often used to disguise newly encountered ideas as an interpretation of Chinese tradition, and this frequently required the creation of new precursors that redefined China's past, present, and future-does the writer define the story, or does the story redefine the writer? For example, Confucius was recast as a reformer in order to both validate and serve as precedent for modern political reforms. Likewise, to justify the appropriation of some practical features of newly encountered Western stone architecture, a precedent in Chinese tradition had to be found. Thus wood architecture was proclaimed the paradigm in China and the use of other building materials, including stone, was justified by the concept "imitating the mode of building with wood" ( fangmugou). That is to say, the use of steel, stone, and concrete, though new, is rooted in past modes of traditional building in wood.

But what about buildings designed wholly in Western styles by Chinese or Western architects for Chinese clients? In early twentieth-century Shanghai, examples include the Bank of China building ( Figure 11) on the Bund, designed by Lu Qianshou (1904-92), working in the firm of Palmer and Turner, and Hudek's Park Hotel. How do these appropriations of Western architecture compare with the modern buildings, skyscrapers, bridges, and themed satellite New Towns ( Figures 12, 13) that are copied from or designed in Western styles in Shanghai and throughout China today? Are they all to be considered derivative imitations, or do they indicate a global architecture or world "stylistic matrix," in which works of art and architecture are related by formal characteristics, regardless of history, location, or culture? Such appropriations provoke the question, is a Chinese aesthetic, style, or essence ( ti) still discernible? Put another way, though rapid urban development over the past two decades has led to Shanghai's ranking as a "global city" (an important node in a transnational socioeconomic system), that designation relies on criteria drawn from a perspective that may not take into account the local or historical "fit" that is so much a part of what defines architecture. Such criteria may appear global because of their transnational reach and because the Chinese seem to have embraced them with gusto. But participation through outward imitation cannot be assumed to mean docile acceptance. Perhaps the present-day appropriation or imitation of external forms (practical application, yong) "is not meant to flatter the West, nor is it a form of 'self-colonization.' The copies are built as monuments to China's technological prowess, affluence and power. The Chinese have seized on the icons of Western architecture as potent symbols for their own ascension to-and aspiration for-global supremacy."

Acculturative imitation of Western architectural forms should not be understood as mere copying. It can appear so, because it adopts a similar vocabulary, but it uses that vocabulary differently to accommodate the cultural, aesthetic, and socioeconomic needs of another people, place, or time. The external forms can be appropriated to various degrees of acculturation that range, according to the psychologist John Berry, from "assimilation" to "marginalization" or from "integration" to "separation." As a parallel example, take the introduction of Western oil painting during the early twentieth century, which led those calling for modernization and reform to relegate traditional Chinese ink painting to a legacy of the classical or dynastic past. Some in the arts called for an integration with Western techniques that would transmute the style of Chinese painting into a Western style ( xiyanghua). Others sought separation, drawing on China's past to refine a new modern national style ( guohua). The degree of integration or separation varied with time and circumstance as a dialectical tension revolving around the tiyong intellectual framework. A similar acculturative tension can be seen in the recurring efforts to search for a national modern style in Chinese architecture. Modern architects, by retaining traditional Chinese motifs-such as a Chinese-style "big roof" crowning a modern building, or bracket-sets ( dougong; see Figure 4)-and juxtaposing them to new technologies, functions, and materials, make this tension part of the modern discourse in which they converse. Engineering feats such as the heroic building of the Nanjing Bridge across the Yangzi were seen as markers of progress. Similarly, the Oriental Pearl Tower ( Figure 14) exemplifies a Chinese attempt at a national style (about 1960s-90s) that was meant to symbolize China's modernization. Notwithstanding its space-age style and technology, the Pearl Tower's futuristic structure, with eleven spheres suspended over a circular base, came to be popularly associated with a verse by the Tang-dynasty (618-907) poet Bo Juyi (or Bai Juyi, 772-846), in which the sound of a pipa-lute is likened to that of large and small pearls falling onto a jade plate. Along with an exuberant pursuit of enduring modernity in towering steel and concrete was a longing to establish a link to China's cultural past, an anxious desire for validation from antiquity. This anxiety or tension is embodied in the words of Shanghai's mayor: "Rejoice in the present, while recalling the past," engraved in Chinese and English on a low stone wall near the base of the Pearl Tower. Inextricably tied to China's modernization is this "taste for antiquity" ( shigu) or "addiction to antiquity" ( nigu)-the urge to recover and revitalize what is proper or ideal in the past ( fugu)-that underlies much of China's attitude toward the past, present, and future.

Where Yesterday Meets Tomorrow

In looking for ways to approach the architectural and urban history of Shanghai other than reconstructing the city's history as a narrative march of monuments or as a stylistic matrix of visual and structural similarities, it may be useful to focus on moments of change, acculturation, tension, and dilemma. Such encounters or intersections redefine and establish anew the reality and imagination of the city's timescape. In general, a city can be viewed through its overall layout, planning, policies, changing environmental conditions, and interactions between different social and cultural groups. The goal, however, should not be to establish an immutable chronology of facts and events but to comprehend the complex tensions and issues defining each encounter. Understanding any city's cultural history also requires the examination of specific urban sites as they encountered change over time. Tracing how the former exclusive Shanghai Racecourse in the International Settlement changed into the present-day People's Square and People's Park reveals the ideological, moral, racialist, and nationalist tensions as they played out in history. Similar issues surface in studying the cultural history of the Canidrome, a dog-racing stadium built in 1928. After 1949 it became an arena for political rallies and executions, then a flower market, and then a stock exchange. Most recently the site has been redefined as the Shanghai Culture Center, a large theater complex for international performances. Originally scheduled for completion in time for the Shanghai Expo 2010, the center was designed by the New York firm of Beyer Blinder Belle and has been nicknamed the "space turtle" for its new age carapacial appearance.

At each stage or change in the cultural history of any site, encounters may cause the urban landscape to be reimagined and redefined. Because every city is constantly reinventing itself and the only constant appears to be change, examining the cultural history of any particular site adds to the kaleidoscopic mosaic. In addition, encounters occur not only between peoples and cultures but also across time. Before the 1980s, the dialogue in China revolved chiefly around interactions with new methods and ideas from outside the country: encounters between Chinese tradition and Western modernity. With economic reforms and rapid urbanization since the 1990s, China now invents its own modernity while still appropriating Western forms and making them its own. Today, however, the tiyong framework has changed: now it is less a geographical or cross-cultural exchange between East and West than an attempt to bridge the gap between China's present/future and its past. Nowhere can this be better seen than in the Xintiandi redevelopment project at Shanghai's urban core ( Figure 15). Formerly this area in the French Concession had been occupied by city blocks with internal alleyways fronted by decorative stone gates or shikumen (literally "stone warehouse gates"); along the alleyways ran rows of low residential units. This block pattern, known as lilong, developed in Shanghai as some of the earliest mass-produced commercially marketed housing in China. Until the mid-twentieth century about three-quarters of Shanghai housing was of the lilong type, which gave rise to a distinctive alley-based community living, much beloved but now quickly disappearing ( Figure 16).

Xintiandi, transformed into a lifestyle center with upscale housing along with shops, restaurants, cafés, and bars, has been called a historical redevelopment project. Highly successful, it has become a prototype for historical redevelopment in other Chinese cities. Almost the entire project area, however, is new construction, incorporating only some architectural elements from the original historical structures-architectural elements transplanted through time. Developed by the Hong Kong-based Shui On Group and designed by the American architect Benjamin Wood, Xintiandi retains a semblance of Shanghai's past, somewhat in the way Western architectural styles and forms are incorporated in the design of the nine themed New Towns around Shanghai-architectural elements transplanted across time and geography. The New Towns were outside Shanghai and were designed by foreign architects to imitate the urban forms of different Western nations: Australia, England, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. Fittingly, Xintiandi is billed as a place where "yesterday meets tomorrow in Shanghai today." In this center of commercialism, ironically, the one historical site that was preserved and restored by government mandate is the shikumen-style hall in which the First National Communist Party Congress convened in July 1921 ( Figure 17). Now a museum, this Congress Hall is heavily repackaged in the lore of Communist historiography. A monument in both stone and words, it may also be the impetus for the name Xintiandi, meaning "New Heaven and Earth." In the heart of Shanghai, the new image of China's present and future is joined to its recent past by the Congress Hall, the symbolic birthplace of a new China.

Footnotes

Xiangming Chen, "The Urban Laboratory," in The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, ed. Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (London: Phaidon Press, 2007), 118.

↵3. Rhoads Murphey, The Outsiders: The Western Experience in India and China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 163-64; and Linda Cooke Johnson, Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1047-1858 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 5, 165. The Reverend W. H. Medhurst, approaching Shanghai on the American brig Huron in the summer of 1835, noted that the "forest of innumerable masts ... told us ... of its commercial importance. The native shipping of Canton in the height of the season never amounts to half of that which was lying at Shanghai." See W. H. Medhurst, "Voyage of the Huron," Chinese Repository 4, no. 7 (1836), 329.

↵6. The character li in lilong can also be understood to refer to a district, village, neighborhood, or jurisdiction. Zhao Chunlan, "From 'Shikumen' to New-style: A Rereading of Lilong Housing in Modern Shanghai," Journal of Architecture 9, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 49-76. Zhao identifies "the significance and uniqueness of lilong as a particular dwelling form in a process of moving from tradition towards modernity" (50). See also Samuel Y. Liang, "Where the Courtyard Meets the Street: Spatial Culture of the Li Neighborhoods, Shanghai, 1870-1900," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67, no. 4 (2008), 501. Notions about the arrival of modernism in Shanghai and China are controversial and will be briefly discussed below. See Renee Chow's analysis, "In a Field of Party Walls: Drawing Shanghai's Lilong," in this issue.

↵18. Mote, "Millennium of Chinese Urban History," 35-65; and Pierre Ryckmans, The Chinese Attitude towards the Past, Forty-seventh George Ernest Morrison Lecture in Ethnology (Canberra: Australian National University, 1986). I have discussed this connection elsewhere in terms of "embodied images"; see Cary Y. Liu, "Chinese Architectural Aesthetics: Patterns of Living and Being between Past and Present," in House, Home, Family: Living and Being Chinese, ed. Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), 139-59; Liu, "Embodying Cosmic Patterns: Foundations of an Art of Calligraphy in China," Oriental Art 46, no. 5 (2000), 2-9; and Liu, "Calligraphic Couplets as Manifestations of Deities and Markers of Buildings," in Robert E. Harrist, Jr., Wen C. Fong, et al., The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection (Princeton, N.J.: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1999), 360-79.

↵19. Liu Shilong, Wuyouyuan ji, in Wan-Ming xiaopin xuanzhu ( Selected essays of the late Ming dynasty), comp. Zhu Jianxin (Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1964), juan 6, 1185-90. See Stanislaus Fung, "The Imaginary Garden of Liu Shilong," Terra Nova: Nature & Culture 2, no. 4 (1997), 15-21; and Ryckmans, Chinese Attitude towards the Past, 11-12.

↵26. For literary couplets, poems, titles, and inscriptions associated with Yu Yuan, see Xue Liyong, ed., Wen yi xing you-Yu Yuan biandui, beiwen shangxi ( Appreciating the titles, couplets, and steles of Yu Yuan) (Shanghai: Tongji Daxue Chubanshe, 1987). This practice is still a living tradition; for a compilation of recent poetry for the garden, see Zhou Daonan, ed., Yu Yuan xin yong ( Yu Yuan's new poems) (Shanghai: Tongji Daxue Chubanshe, 1989).

↵39. Joe McDonald, "Shanghai Is Sinking," abcnews.go.com (28 July 2000), http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=120074&page=1 (accessed 20 February 2013); Shi Hua, "Seawalls to Keep Typhoons at Bay," chinadaily.com (28 March 2000), http://app1.chinadaily.com.cn/star/history/00-03-28/c15-sea.html (accessed 10 May 2012); and Coco Liu, "Shanghai Struggles to Save Itself from the Sea," nytimes.com (27 September 2011), http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2011/09/ 27/27climatewire-shanghai-struggles-to-save-itself-from-the-s-43368.html?pagewanted=all (accessed 17 April 2012).

↵55. The translation of tiyong follows Yü Ying-shih, "The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century," Daedalus 122, no. 2 (1993), 136. For tiyong and East-West interaction in the late Qing, see Ding Weizhi and Chen Song, Zhongxi tiyong zhi jian ( Between East and West, essence and utility) (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 1995).

↵62. For "global city," see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). Shanghai is ranked twenty-first in A. T. Kearney, "2012 Global Cities Index and Emerging Cities Outlook," atkerney.com, http://www.atkearney.com/documents/10192/dfedfc4c-8a62-4162-90e5-2a3f14f0da3a (accessed 20 February 2013). For "fit," see Robert Geddes, Fit: An Architect's Manifesto (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013).

↵69. The term fugu is often translated "return to the past," which overemphasizes antique prototypes as the chief goal and overlooks the importance of orthodoxy or propriety ( zheng) sought after in antiquity. A better translation of the term may be "recovering the legitimacy of what was orthodox and proper in the past." For an analysis of the concept fugu in the arts, see Frederick W. Mote, "The Arts and the 'Theorizing Mode' of the Civilization," in Artists and Tradition, ed. Christian F. Murck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 4-8.

View Abstract

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Encountering the Dilemma of Change in the Architectural and Urban History of Shanghai

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How does one begin to decipher an urban landscape if it is constantly changing? Four thousand years ago the land on which Shanghai is located was submerged beneath the sea. Today it is one of the most rapidly globalizing cities in the world.

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This shows the differences in poverty in the 1900s to 2008.

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This is about the dilemma in architectural change

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"Encountering the Dilemma of Change in the Architectural and Urban History of Shanghai," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73, no. 1 (March 2014), 118-136.

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"Encountering the Dilemma of Change in the Architectural and Urban History of Shanghai," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73, no. 1 (March 2014), 118-136.

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OLD and New Shanghai

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A short history of shanghai and how their architecture started

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Shanghai, which literally means the "City on the Sea," lies on the Yangzi River delta at the point where China's main waterway completes its 5,500-km (3,400-mi) journey to the Pacific. Until 1842 Shanghai's location made it merely a small fishing village. After the first Opium War, however, the British named Shanghai a treaty port, opening the city to foreign involvement.

The village was soon turned into a city carved up into autonomous concessions administered concurrently by the British, French, and Americans, all independent of Chinese law. Each colonial presence brought with it its particular culture, architecture, and society.

Although Shanghai had its own walled Chinese city, many native residents still chose to live in the foreign settlements. Thus began a mixing of cultures that shaped Shanghai's openness to Western influence. Shanghai became an important industrial center and trading port that attracted not only foreign businesspeople (60,000 by the 1930s) but also Chinese migrants from other parts of the country.

In its heyday, Shanghai was the place to be -- it had the best art, the greatest architecture, and the strongest business in Asia. With dance halls, brothels, glitzy restaurants, international clubs, and even a foreign-run racetrack, Shanghai was a city that catered to every whim of the rich. But poverty ran alongside opulence, and many of the lower-class Chinese provided the cheap labor that kept the city running.

The Paris of the East became known as a place of vice and indulgence. Amid this glamour and degradation the Communist Party held its first meeting in 1921. In the 1930s and '40s, the city weathered raids, invasions, then outright occupation by the Japanese. The party was over. By 1943, at the height of World War II, most foreigners had fled and the concessions had been ceded to the Japanese, bringing Shanghai's 101 years as a treaty port to a close. Despite the war's end, fighting continued as Nationalists and Communists fought a three-year civil war for control of China. The Communists declared victory in 1949 and established the People's Republic of China, after which the few remaining foreigners left the country. Closed off from the outside world with which it had become so comfortable, Shanghai fell into a deep sleep. Fashion, music, and romance gave way to uniformity and the stark reality of Communism.

The decades from 1950 to 1980 passed by with one Five Year Plan after another, marked by periods of extreme famine and drought, reform and suppression. Shanghai's industries soldiered on during these years; the city remained the largest contributor of tax revenue to the central government. Its political contribution, however, had far greater ramifications: the city was the powder keg for the Cultural Revolution and the base of operations for the infamous Gang of Four, led by Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing. The so-called January Storm of 1967 purged many of Shanghai's leaders, and Red Guards in Shanghai fervently carried out their destruction of the "Four Olds": old ways of idea, living, traditions, and thought.

Yet, in 1972, with the Cultural Revolution still raging, Shanghai hosted the historic meeting that would help lay the groundwork for the China of today. Premier Zhou Enlai and U.S. president Richard Nixon signed the Shanghai Communiqué, which enabled the two countries to normalize relations and encouraged China to open talks with the rest of the world. Twenty years later, the 14th Party Congress endorsed the concept of a socialist market economy, opening the door ever wider to foreign investment.

Today Shanghai has once again become one of China's most open cities ideologically, socially, culturally, and economically, striving to return to the internationalism that defined it before the Revolution. Shanghai's path to this renewed prominence began in 1990 when China's leader, Deng Xiaoping, chose it as the engine of the country's commercial renaissance, aiming to rival Hong Kong by 2010. If China is a dragon, he said, Shanghai is its head. Indeed the city is once again all about business. Having embraced competition and a market-driven economy in just a few years, it now hosts the nation's stock market, accounts for approximately one-fifth of the country's gross national product, and serves as the most important industrial base in the nation.

Today, beauty and charm coexist with kitsch and commercialism. From the colonial architecture of the former French Concession to the forest of cranes and the neon-lighted high-rises jutting above the city, Shanghai is a city of paradox and change.

Revised by Kristin Baird Rattini

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Shanghai, which literally means the "City on the Sea," lies on the Yangzi River delta at the point where China's main waterway completes its 5,500-km (3,400-mi) journey to the Pacific. Until 1842 Shanghai's location made it merely a small fishing village.

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This is a comparison between odd shanghai and modern shanghai

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This article is about the satellite technology change in shanghai.for four decades landsite satellites collected over a million pictures of shanghai

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World of Change: Sprawling Shanghai : Feature Articles

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If you could go back in time to the 1980s, you would find a city that is drastically different than today's Shanghai.

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This is about the modern change in shanghai urban architecture

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This article is about poverty is Shangahi. This shows how it is a poor part of china and what is happening with poverty.

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Shanghai: Grinding poverty amid corporate opulence

By Jean Shaoul
5 April 2011

Shanghai's vast road network, its maglev and gleaming metro, its forest of more than 5,000 office and residential skyscrapers, luxury hotels and shopping malls, non-existent just 18 years ago, testify to the enormous growth and wealth of China's commercial hub.

Migrant rader from Shanghai baking bread

But amid this commercial opulence, there is grinding poverty and deprivation on an even greater scale in this city of 20 million people. China has a Gini coefficient, an indicator of inequality, approaching 0.5, up from less than 0.3 a quarter of a century ago. The 0.4 mark is seen by analysts as a predictor of social unrest.

"Bang Bang man" in the street

Millions are unable to afford decent housing, as real estate prices have soared due to low profits in other sectors, particularly manufacturing, which has been hit by the European debt crisis and the US recession. While manufacturing offers returns of about 5 percent, the property market offers an eye-watering 30 percent. The government has directly fuelled the speculative bubble by ordering the state banks to flood the economy with cheap credit to stave off rising unemployment. More than a quarter of all bank lending went into real estate development.

This was exacerbated by the US quantitative easing, which injected billions of dollars in to the American banking system to lower the value of the dollar. Speculation was further encouraged by US pressure on China to revalue the yuan against the dollar, encouraging speculators to buy yuan-denominated assets, especially under conditions where interest rates are higher in China than the US.

A view of Shanghai housing

The real estate boom has also been driven by rapid urban expansion, with 15 million rural migrants moving into the cities each year as cheap labour for the corporate elite.

Confiscation of farmland, often for commercial development, coupled with insufficient compensation, has led to up to 25 percent of farmers who lost their land leaving for the cities, according to a recent National Bureau of Statistics survey. The authors estimated that more than 40 million farmers have lost their farmland and about 2 million became homeless in each of the past five years.

Residential property prices in China's major cities have more than doubled in the last decade. According to statistics from China Index Academy, housing prices in the 10 largest cities, including Shanghai and Beijing, saw an increase of at least 15 percent last year.

Looking down a row of houses

Some of China's new housing has been built on brownfield sites once occupied by polluting factories, such as steel, iron and smelting plants releasing toxic heavy metals, chemical plants releasing persistent organic pollutants from pesticide residues, and petrochemical and electronic plants releasing organic chemical compounds, a recent World Bank study reported. These sites are often heavily contaminated because pollutants from the factories leaked into the soil and hazardous wastes were not properly disposed of. Once contaminated, the soil may release toxic substances for decades that may be absorbed into the body through drinking water and the food chain, posing a major risk to both construction workers and residents.

As the World Bank study noted, China lacks the regulations, laws and technical frameworks to manage and remedy the brownfield sites, believed to number between 300,000 and 600,000. Few of the developers are prepared to pay for the most commonly used remediation practice-the removal and burning of the polluted soil-secure in the knowledge that they will not face retribution.

Worker sorting garbage for recycling

Officials regularly ignore the most flagrant breaches of construction safety and fire regulations in exchange for bribes. In a rare prosecution, the Shanghai authorities have charged 24 people with bribery and other crimes relating to last November's fire in a 28-storey apartment building in the downtown area of the city that killed 58 and injured another 71 people. The fire swept through the building after welding sparks ignited the nylon netting and bamboo scaffolding during a refurbishment programme.

The investigations shed light on the criminal nature of the relations between the construction companies and government bodies: the construction company failed numerous safety checks, but won the contract after bribing officials. Professor Jing of Fudan University notes that 75 percent of public procurement in the Pudong commercial district of Shanghai was based upon "invited bidding and other non-competitive means".

Large carton added onto roof to provide a home

The fire also exposed the total inadequacy of the fire prevention system for residential buildings and of the firefighters' equipment.

Food prices as well as housing have risen sharply, up 10 percent in recent months. Average wages are about 3,200 yuan a month (US$522). But the Shanghai Daily cited an office worker earning more than double that, 7,000 yuan a month, who was finding it hard to make ends meet despite living with her husband and child at her parents' home to save money.

Along with poverty, child begging and homelessness has soared. While there are no figures on this, Premier Wen Jiabao was forced to recognise the scale of problem.

A worker sewing outside

There are disabled people exposing shrunken limbs on the sidewalks of prosperous shopping streets, paper cups outstretched, symbols of China's dire lack of a social safety net. With health care, pensions and social welfare linked to state-owned enterprises and public sector employment, privatisation and the outsourcing of public services have left hundreds of millions of workers without access to welfare benefits.

Many migrant labourers working on construction sites, in factories and the service sector, live and work in desperate conditions. They are paid wages well below those of city residents. Without a Shanghai hukou registration card that would provide entitlement to subsidised public housing, health care and education covered by government funds, and access to unemployment benefits, pension and other social welfare programmes, they are forced to live an insecure and an impoverished existence far away from their families, whom they see possibly once a year.

Internal view of housing

Soaring food and house prices have made life in the richer coastal cities unaffordable, leading to a shortage of migrant workers returning after the annual Spring Festival, as many preferred to seek work in the cheaper central and western cities. Many cities in the Pearl and Yangtze deltas were forced to increase wages to attract workers, with the Shanghai government raising the minimum monthly wage by 14 percent to 1,280 yuan, the highest in the country. Shanghai also sent 400 buses to bring workers in from Anhui, Henan and Hubei provinces.

Washing up outside

Just a stone's throw from Shanghai's central railway station, on Xhongxin Road, there is crowded slum housing, accessible only on foot, with shacks and shelters added on to existing buildings, often with outside stone sinks and no bathroom. Residents must use potties, whose contents are thrown into the gutters, or use the public neighbourhood toilets, a common sight in China's cities.

Outdoor sink and potty

In another slum district, Cao Jia village in the Putuo district, one householder on Baiyu Road showed the World Socialist Web Site a small kitchen shared by three families. Trapped in dreadful housing, residents, predominantly elderly and migrant workers, said that their only way out was for the Shanghai government to buy them out for redevelopment. But home demolitions that uproot residents often abuse their legal rights and pay minimal compensation in favour of commercial developers.

A kitchen shared by three families

The government has responded to the housing crisis by increasing interest rates, introducing a property tax in Shanghai and Chongqing, two of China's largest cities, limiting to two the number of houses an individual may own, and requiring a 60 percent down payment for a second home.

It has also announced that it will spend about 1.3 trillion yuan (US$197 billion) on government-subsidised housing this year-10 million in 2012 and 16 million from 2013 to 2015 in a bid to curb surging property prices and assuage social tensions. When complete, the 36-million housing building programme is expected to provide 20 percent of the country's housing supply. This could bankrupt many real estate developers. But it is far from clear where the funds will come from for the 2012-to-2015 programme.

To fight this blacklisting:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shanghai: Grinding poverty amid corporate opulence

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By Jean Shaoul 5 April 2011 Shanghai's vast road network, its maglev and gleaming metro, its forest of more than 5,000 office and residential skyscrapers, luxury hotels and shopping malls, non-existent just 18 years ago, testify to the enormous growth and wealth of China's commercial hub.