Shanghai, a Star in Eclipse
China's Sparkling Economic Hub Outshone by Dour Olympic Host Beijing
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 13, 2008; A10
SHANGHAI -- On the traffic-clogged flyover leading from Hongqiao Airport into the frenzy of downtown Shanghai stands a large billboard reading, "Welcome to stylish Shanghai."
This is China's most fashion-conscious metropolis, its most dynamic business center and the Chinese city most open to foreigners. Shanghai is home to the country's most spectacular skyline, its most exquisite cuisine and, Beijing chauvinists would say, a lot of snobs.
One thing Shanghai is not, however, is the site of the 2008 Olympic Games. That would be Beijing, whose residents are reveling in a role that, beginning Aug. 8, will make their city an international star Shanghai can only envy.
In this chapter of the long rivalry between China's two most influential cities, Beijing is the clear winner. For two weeks in August, it will fill the world's TV screens and attract hundreds of thousands of visitors, while Shanghai languishes with the consolation prizes of a few Olympic soccer games and the prospect of hosting the World Expo in 2010.
For all their bravado, Shanghai's 20 million people know it's true: They have missed out. Nevertheless, they cling to the belief that, compared with their own polished and cosmopolitan selves, Beijingers are like country cousins -- warmhearted, perhaps, but bumptious, ill-mannered and prone to drinking too much rice wine in their dusty hutongs.
"Shanghai has always been a more cultured city than Beijing," said Wang Huijiu, 41, who runs a small antiques shop just off the Bund, the avenue running alongside the Huangpu River where European banks built their elegant Asian headquarters before World War II. "The British came here. The French came here. They all left their imprints. And so Shanghai is more open than Beijing. Beijing people are a little crude."
Like everything else in China, the competition for primacy between Shanghai and Beijing has been going on for a long time. More than folklore, it is a product of China's history, its political system and the regional personalities of its 1.3 billion inhabitants. In the rivalry lies a struggle that, despite the reforms of the past three decades, is still undecided.
The traits that Shanghai people vaunt -- business acumen, savoir-faire, the embrace of things foreign -- are not those in which Beijingers have traditionally taken pride. The capital's residents know their city is at once the seat of an ancient empire, the heart of officially sanctioned culture and, particularly since Communist Party rule began in 1949, the source of unquestionable power radiating out across the country.
In that light, Shanghai people have a simple explanation for why the Olympics are being held in Beijing. It is the capital, the place where the party has its headquarters and President Hu Jintao, the party leader, has his office. End of discussion.
"I think it's fair to have the Olympics in Beijing, because it's the capital," said Shao Youzhen, a 54-year-old retiree. She added, only a little snidely, "I'm sure the Olympics will bring Beijing more glory."
Foreign Flavor
Lin Dongfu, a Shanghai TV talk-show host who doubles as a jazz club impresario, recalled once visiting a friend in Beijing and instinctively opening a car door for the friend's girlfriend. The woman turned to her boyfriend, Lin said, and asked him why he was never that polite.
"Ah, he's from Shanghai," the friend said, dismissing the gesture as unworthy of further discussion in Beijing.
As Olympic visitors are about to discover -- and as Shanghai residents would be glad to tell them -- Beijingers have earned a reputation for brusqueness. By contrast, the people here seem to pride themselves on their smooth manners.
"Beijing people give us the impression of being rude, freewheeling and bad-tempered," said He Mindong, 58, a night watchman at a downtown store. "An argument of a few sentences will trigger a fight in Beijing, that kind of thing. I prefer Shanghai. Beijing is too dull. Last time I was there, I could not even find a decent restaurant. Plus the weather is bad."
Wang, the antiques dealer, was sitting shirtless in a rattan lounge chair when an unexpected visitor walked into his shop on a recent day when the temperature was in the high 90s. He immediately rose to put on a shirt. As he cheerfully gave his views on Beijing's backwardness, Wang's neighbor walked in and admonished him for lying back in the lounge chair instead of sitting up straight to address his visitor.
"Oh, sorry, I forgot," Wang said, and put the chair upright.
Lin, 51, greeted a visitor to his club in a brightly patterned shirt hanging casually over his pants, his uniform for another late night of blues. He recounted his joy at meeting Bo Diddley during a trip to the United States and traveling down the Mississippi Delta to taste the origins of jazz. Photos of blues greats hung around the club, and a band from New York was on the bill for the evening.
The foreign concessions imposed on the city by European powers in the 19th century left their mark, Lin said, making residents more open to foreigners and more worldly in their hospitality. In Shanghai, he bragged, a waiter knows not to put tap-water ice cubes into a glass of San Pellegrino, whereas in Beijing nobody would have a problem with it.
As a result, what is taught in Chinese schools as evil foreign intervention is still widely regarded in Shanghai as a leaven in its culture. Some of the city's best restaurants are located in restored versions of the European-style buildings along the Bund, for instance, giving diners a view over the Huangpu and its ceaseless barge traffic.
"Shanghai is a metropolis, with more foreign flavor than Beijing," said Cheng Naishan, author of books on local lore titled "Shanghai Fashion," "Shanghai Lady" and, most recently, "Mr. Shanghai."
"Beijing has always been the emperor's place," Cheng added, "but Shanghai is a place where Chinese and foreign cultures converge. Just look at the buildings. Everywhere in Beijing there used to be courtyard houses. But Shanghai long ago had international hotels and skyscrapers."
Beijingers want to seal a business deal by having a meal and exchanging toasts until everybody feels fuzzy and fraternal, Lin said, while Shanghaiese prefer to read the fine print and limit their interaction to business matters. "In Shanghai, we don't become brothers," he explained. "If we are doing business, it's cooperation, and so we sign on the dotted line."
But Lin said the rivalry between Beijing and Shanghai has varied over time. Before 1949, he noted, Shanghai was the undisputed cultural capital, home to movie studios, art galleries and writers. But once the Cultural Revolution was halted and the government started loosening restrictions in the 1980s, he said, Beijing became the center of reemerging Chinese culture.
Even his agent, Lin said, has moved to Beijing, because that is where young artists go to take their chances these days. That was another reason it seemed a natural choice as the site of the Olympics when China organized its bid.
An Inter-City Power Play
Far from the Olympic playing fields, Beijing's current preeminence was dramatized by the fall of Chen Liangyu and the rise of Xi Jinping.
Chen, a 60-year-old Shanghai party secretary and member of the party's elite Politburo, was detained in September 2006 on corruption charges and eventually sentenced to a prison term for milking the city's pension fund to give loans to his business associates. He was replaced in March 2007 by Xi, then 53, a revolutionary hero's son who had risen through the ranks and was brought in from a similar job in neighboring Zhejiang province.
Chen's demise signaled more than just a determination on President Hu's part to fight corruption in the party. According to a well-informed anti-corruption specialist, it was primarily a show of Hu's Beijing-based power in the face of Shanghai's pretensions. The city's leaders, as befitted the representatives of a key economic power, had long enjoyed a special place in the party's uppermost councils. Former president Jiang Zemin, Hu's predecessor, had also made his mark as Shanghai's party leader and retained strong influence, even after retirement, through loyalists in "the Shanghai clique."
Perhaps just as important in Chen's fall, according to Chinese analysts, the Shanghai leader had openly challenged Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao over their attempts to spread economic growth more evenly between China's fast-developing coastal cities -- Shanghai foremost among them -- and inland areas where farmers' incomes were falling behind the national growth rate.
At a key Politburo meeting, the analysts said, Chen used irony to suggest that Hu and Wen should let economic forces work naturally until the coastal cities' wealth trickled down to the hinterlands. His attitude created an impression that he, the Shanghai sophisticate, was talking down to the party's senior leaders in Beijing. That tipped the scales against him, the analysts said, and Jiang was persuaded to let the corruption investigation begin.
Xi, who was brought in to replace Chen, was catapulted seven months later onto the Politburo's Standing Committee and given a ranking that indicated he was favored to succeed Hu as secretary general in five years. Hu was reported to have favored another candidate but was forced to compromise in the interests of consensus. His move against Chen, however, made it clear that Shanghai's pretensions to a special place in the party leadership had been quashed.
It also established beyond all doubt that Beijing was the seat of power in China, as well as the seat of the upcoming Olympics.
Researcher Crissie Ding contributed to this report.