Shanghai Boom Advancing at Too Rapid a Pace

Nanjing Road, 8:30 a.m. Lines form outside stores 30 minutes before they open along Shanghai’s busiest, most congested shopping street.

Tens of thousands of bicyclists, bells ringing, surge down the Nanjing Road, battling for space with trolley buses, trucks, cars and pedestrians.

Young girls in bright silk jackets jostle with shoppers at a vegetable market.

Men carry home squawking young chickens and ducks. A traffic policeman barks a rebuke through a microphone to an errant cyclist. Vendors show off live fish to housewives already clutching fresh cabbages or a basket full of noodles.

Eggs for Sale

At one corner, an old lady sits on a stool by an open fire, boiling eggs for sale.

It’s all part of the everyday scene in Shanghai, China’s largest city, where a new vitality has been sparked by the country’s economic liberalization and by the city’s plans to alleviate severe overcrowding with a construction boom.

The port, where Western bankers and opium traders rubbed shoulders with flamboyant adventurers, Chinese businessmen, gamblers, prostitutes and beggars in the heady days before the 1949 Communist takeover, is today a bloated giant where 12 million people struggle for living space.

Shanghai’s canny traders have been quick to cash in on the reforms of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Around 380 free markets have been set up where peasants can sell surplus vegetables, fish and poultry.

Along the waterfront, next to impressive pre-1949 Western-style stone buildings, such as the Peace Hotel and the Customs House, vendors hawk shirts and ties to passersby.

Outside the park infamous in colonial days for its sign barring dogs and Chinese, youths in long coats ask foreigners if they want to change money.

Four Shanghai companies have now issued shares. At the last offering in January, the shares were snapped up in a few hours by people who lined up in biting cold. There is now talk of opening a stock exchange, a step that in Mao Tsetung’s China would have been an unthinkable great leap toward capitalism.

Daunting Problems

Rapid post-1949 development has left Shanghai with daunting problems. The overcrowding has led to transport and housing difficulties as well as bad water pollution.

“We never had a comprehensive plan,” says Shanghai’s senior vice-mayor, Ruan Chongwu. “And Shanghai’s history of foreign intervention created its own difficulties. For example, there were separate sewage systems in the three foreign concessions.”

But he says it is now time for a big construction effort. The city is spending $700 million a year on housing, transport and communications projects.

The metropolis was one of 14 coastal cities declared open to foreign investment last April under China’s plans to attract overseas capital and technology to aid its modernization drive.

But planners realize that lack of facilities, like hotel rooms and apartments for foreign businessmen, is hampering development.

Shanghai plans to double its hotel capacity in four years by building 8,000 rooms, according to Yang Zhenhan, vice director of the city’s Foreign Economic Relations and Trade Commission.

The airport is being expanded and a second tunnel built under the Huangpu River, which Shanghai straddles.

New Development

Round the city, work has begun on new development areas and satellite towns. Sheng Laiyun, deputy head of Shanghai’s House Management Bureau, says 12 new areas--each designed for 700,000 people--are being built.

In line with Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies, residents of Shanghai are being encouraged to buy their own houses, partly because the government doesn’t have enough money to build new ones.