Shanghai is definitely a city in search of a profit, but maybe Yatsko is right about that soul part. The Shanghai people have built up a reputation for being smug and aloof, for being trendy and faddish, for being materialistic and conservative, and above all for being open to new ideas. They are not as entrepreneurial as their brethren to the south, nor as hard-nosed as their brethren to the north, but they have character, the Shanghainese character. You find a different breed of expat in Shanghai as well.

"Beijing has always attracted more China hands, while the adventurers come to Shanghai," says Lisa Movius, English language editor for Chinanow.com, Shanghai. She herself says she was "sucked in" by Shanghai many moons ago. Out of this mish-mash a discernible middle class is emerging, what Movius terms "the Shuppies" (Shanghai-yuppies) which many experts believe (and all the retailers hope) will dictate taste and parity in the future. This could signal great changes to traditional Shanghainese values and lifestyle, though don't expect to see a complete inversion of Confucian values. What we are witnessing now is Shanghainese with more money (the per capita annual income is up to about US4000 these days) and they are now trying to figure out what to do with that extra cash.

Aside from the designer clothes and mobile phones, Shanghainese are spending their money on apartments for themselves, traveling abroad, boarding schools for their kid, insurance, and buying off their older dependents. This last phenomenon is interesting because traditionally the Chinese idealized three generations under one roof. Nowadays, successful children are apt to set their folks up in a separate apartment to give themselves a little breathing room. The internet is contributing to that by liberalizing people's access to information, despite repeated attempts to rein it in from above. It is not that the old order is dying, but it is being reinvented.

For the expat, life in the next century will see the sharpening of competition for jobs. No longer will "English-speaking" be the only necessary credential. The days of the hardship post are dead, the top tier managers at major multinationals are not expats but Western-trained locals, and the second tier are young, ambitious, workaholics just out of B-school looking to make the jump into light speed.

The foreigners will keep coming in droves and in ten years could we see the first western cab driver in Shanghai? Could Shanghai be the next great City of Possibility? In the next century, Shanghai will grow into one of the most powerful and dynamic cities in Asia and possibly the world. The Jinmao Building will look shrimpy compared to some of the buildings being drawn up. The gaojia will resemble a meandering country road. Businessmen, tourists, and the merely curious will fly in and fly out on Concorde-like jetliners. Shanghai will be a multileveled, multifaceted city of the, well, Future: technologically savvy, well-schooled, and moving at an incredible pace.

Dan Coultas, a young advertising exec with Bates Advertising, sees Future Shanghai as "the Chiba City from Neuromancer or the neo-Tokyo from Akira." Fast, dizzying, dangerous. Such conjecture is warranted considering that Hollywood producers were scouting Shanghai as a possible location to film Blade Runner II. But maybe this derives as much from Shanghai's infamous pedigree than from anything else, but what does it matter? As Hunter Thompson wrote, "Character is destiny."

The End of the Golden Days?
What will happen to those ghosts of the past that linger in the old edifices of earlier times? Movius thinks they will gradually fade away. No doubt to be replaced by heroes and monsters from the book currently under production.

The Shanghainese
friend of mine who talked of Shanghai's ghosts already mourns the loss of the past. "Let me give you an example," she said. "Jiang nan wen wei dao is a sort of tradition of the area south of the Yangzi River. In that tradition, they had many small restaurants by the rivers, maybe the fish they served wasn't the best, but the taste was good, very special. A writer who grew up with jiang nan wen wei dao tried to order the same fish in a big, fancy hotel 15 years later, but it wasn't right, the taste just wasn't the same, he wrote. This is what I also worry about, the loss of the original flavor." One thing seems likely though: no matter how many new roads, skyscrapers, fiber-optic lines, ports or bridges are built, no matter how rich people become, no matter which side of the river you live on, the past will still haunt us.

Searching Pt I

Searching Pt II

Copyright 2000 - used with permission of the author.