From Sandton to Shanghai

(Will the Dubai Burj soon have a Shanghai Rival? Source: Imre Solt)

Shanghai is about first impressions and built to capture not just your attention, but your imagination as well. The Dream of the New China is represented no where else in the country as clearly as in this city. Shanghai is China’s new face for the rest of the world.

Step off your plane at Pudong’s brand new international airport and the Maglev train whisks you into the city at 431km per hour. A short while later you will be dwarfed by the city’s futuristic Financial Centre with half a kilometer high buildings rising out of what were rice paddies not that long ago. It is hard not to be impressed by this sight.

Tourists to China always joke at China’s love of being the best, first, oldest or longest. It is surprising that the Guiness Book of Records were not started here first. Want to ride on the world’s longest bridge, see the world’s highest mountain, biggest company, most populous country with the longest continuous civilization then you have come to the right place. Whether you take all the statistics with a pinch of salt or not is another question.

So, when Dubai announced plans to build the world’s highest building, it must have been something of a slap in the face for Shanghai’s top brass. After all their efforts of cultivating the world’s most modern city out of Pudong’s rice paddies, along comes along a little desert usurper to contruct the Burj Dubai.

The Dubai Burj planners have cloaked their building in mystery and have not announced its exact height yet. However, the monolith is already at 611m (far surpassing Taiwan’s Tapei 101 - at 508m it was the world’s tallest building) and is rumoured to be heading over 800m into the heavens.

Sip cocktails from the 87^th floor Sky Bar of Shanghai’s Jin Mao Tower and the helicopter-like view is magnificent. Look straight down and you will see a golf driving range occupying one of the most prime land spots in the city - a strange anomaly until China recently announced plans to build the world’s city’s tallest building on that spot.

This is where it gets interesting for me. The Burj will be finished in 2009 and then the records will become clear for China and their team of international architects to peruse. China’s new mega structure will start its construction process in 2009 and it is ‘proposed’ to reach 580 meters.

The city planners have always envisaged a triumvir of buildings dominating Shanghai’s Financial skyline. This will be their last shot at another Guiness Book of Records. In something of a faux pas, China’s official news agency - Xinhua - recently claimed that the ‘Shanghai Centre’ would be the world’s tallest building surpassing the Burj which is still under construction at 555m.

My prediction is something of a long shot. Shanghai will definitely soon have the world’s second and third tallest buildings by 2010. Whether building plans ‘change’ to challenge the Burj is something to watch. However, given Shanghai’s large empty office rate in Pudong and the difficulty of building on what is essentially swamp land with a high water table is something to be seen.

Whatever the case, there is no doubt that China would love to occupy number 1 spot to add to all is many other highest, tallest records.

(The old and the new of Shanghai. Our first apartment is in the distance. Photo: Julian Hewitt)

Bordering the East China Sea on one side and flanked by the Huangpu River on the other is Shanghai’s Pudong District. For all intents and purposes, Pudong is the golden child of the Chinese economy. The reason for this is that it does what no amount of facts, figures, GDP growth rates and statistics can ever do – and that is quite simply that Pudong puts a face to China’s economic miracle.

Go back 15 years and Pudong was essentially a smattering of low lying buildings and a collection of small scale agricultural plots supplying fresh produce to the city. Fast forward to 2007 and Pudong’s riverfront vista has to be one of the most impressive skylines in the world. Take Johannesburg’s tallest buildings and you would need to double their height to get a proper sense of Pudong’s scale.

Stare across the river at night and a rocket-like TV tower adorned with giant red spheres rises almost half a kilometer into the sky. Its impressive structure is bathed in light to capture every ounce of your imagination. To its right two massive skyscrapers compete for attention. The Jin Mao Tower stands at 88 storeys and has recently been eclipsed as the 95 storey World Financial Centre nears completion.

Someone one said that Pudong’s rice paddies were watered with money and it is a great metaphor to describe the frenetic-paced development taking place here. This really struck home when I recently tried to locate our flat using Google Earth’s satellite imaging. Instead of a huge complex that housed over two dozen, 30 storey apartment blocks, I found a vast track of dusty land and an old Chinese community nestled in the top corner.

The image on my computer screen had a rather surreal museum-like quality to it, and I felt a compulsion to locate other Shanghai landmarks I knew had not escaped the passage of time. Whole blocks of Shanghai’s old town replete with mazes of alleyways and old men playing Chinese Chess on the side of the road now stood in forlorn states of demolition. A massive swathe of industrial land between Shanghai’s bottom two bridges has been completely flattened to give way to what will blossom into the city’s 2010 World Expo venue.

It seems that Shanghai’s history is measured in months and years, not decades and generations. It’s the sort of change that affects living here on a month to month basis. For example, when we first arrived in the city, a gravel road connected our flat to my wife’s business school. Now, a brand new 2-lane highway has taken its place. The metro line I travel on everyday has been extended by 4 stops and a brand new line bisects it one stop up.

But it is the sheer scale and ambitions of the city’s development that I find most exciting. Shanghai’s 4000 plus skyscrapers already exceed that of New York City. The city’s 130km long metro line has another 400km in the planning or construction phases. The total figure will soon surpass the length of the London Underground. At the same time, the world’s longest trans-oceanic bridge is currently under development between Shanghai and the major seaport of Ningbo to the south. The 36km long bridge will reduce the current 4 hour journey to 1 hour.

To try and get a sense of the city’s dynamism, I enjoy frequenting a coffee shop alongside the Huangpu River to absorb myself in the many facets of the fascinating vista in front of me. The Huangpu is definitely no Riviera, so there are no yachts, no cruiseliners and no private jetties to be seen. It is a dirty, muddy coloured working-river punctuated with a plethora of barges going about their daily coal carrying, ore transporting duties.

The river makes for a perfect canvas to describe Shanghai. On the Pudong side, the massive skyscrapers and one of Asia’s most important financial hubs tower over the river. On the opposite bank, the elegant sophistication of classy sandstone buildings point to Shanghai’s strong colonial influences. In one panoramic view, Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past, industrial present and aspirational future make for rather odd acquaintances that merge into the city’s present.

If you go beyond the glitzy shopping malls and watch the city at work, whether it is the investment bankers in Pudong or the huge informal recycling community, you can start to tap into the essence of the city. What Shanghai does have in large doses is the kind of edgy energy than seems to punctuate some of the most dynamic cities in the world.

It is the same raw energy that you will find it in places like Johannesburg or New York City. Like Shanghai, these cities are melting pots of civilizations that attract people from far flung corners to play out their greatest dreams, or at the very least, to be standing in the theatre of those more fortunate.

There can be something quite disconcerting about watching the world change in front of your eyes. I like to call this the privilege of change – the opportunity to quite literally watch a society transform in front of you. I was lucky to live through South Africa’s political transformation and now I am living in the middle of one of the greatest economic miracles in modern times.

Despite all the paradoxes that change brings, there is one thing that I am certain about in Shanghai. While money does not grow on trees, it can do wonders for dusty tracks of land and rice paddies…