High-quality product launches and debut exhibitions held in the city will also have access to subsidies of up to RMB 1.2 million.

The incentive is part of the “First in Shanghai” campaign, which also includes provisions to optimise the application and approval process for permits for launch events, and ease customs clearance requirements for imported products to be used in those events (e.g. displays, samples, etc.).

While the incentive is unlikely to be significant enough to tempt major international brands (which most likely already have a store in Shanghai anyway), it could prove useful for SMEs or brands looking to test the waters in the Chinese market.

One international brand that has already bet on Shanghai this year is Supreme, which opened its first store in China in the city in March. Despite social media chatter that the brand had missed the peak of its popularity in China, the store attracted massive queues for the first few days after it opened. Also in March, luxury brand Loewe unveiled its first public exhibition, Crafted World, at Shanghai Exhibition Centre.

According to the Shanghai authorities, 5,840 stores opened in the city between May 2018 and December 2023, 80 of which were first stores in Asia. New retail concepts are already up 55% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2024.

Shanghai is a key destination for brands looking to tap the China market, and this policy is a step towards encouraging greater diversity in the city’s retail scene. Nevertheless, as journalist Yaling Jiang noted in her Substack publication, Following the Yuan, the policy doesn’t address China’s key economic pain point, which is consumer confidence.

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Formula One is back in China for the first time in five years this weekend, the latest in a series of major sporting events to return after the restrictions of the pandemic years. F1 currently has an agreement to hold the Shanghai Grand Prix until 2025.

F1 owners Liberty Media see China as a key future growth market, and F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali has previously said that a second Grand Prix race in China is “100% realistic”, with Guangdong being the rumoured second destination. Only two other countries have more than one race on this year’s calendar: Italy with two and the US with three.

The popularity of F1 in China has been boosted by the country’s first F1 driver, Zhou Guanyu, who drives for Kick-Sauber’s Stake F1 Team. Nevertheless, F1 is still very much a niche sport in China and Zhou is not yet a household name in his home country. This is something that he hopes to change with the release of a 90-minute documentary “The First One” that tells of his race career so far.

The poster for F1 driver Zhou Guanyu’s autobiographical documetary, ‘The First One’. Photo: Instagram/@zhouguanyu24

Since the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, China has welcomed back several major international sporting events, including the 19^th Asian Games, the Shanghai Masters snooker tournament (featuring world number one English snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan), and the China Open tennis.

China’s General Administration of Sports has emphasised that sporting events have an important role to play in the country’s economic development, with sporting events in Shanghai alone generating RMB 3.71 billion (£411.6 million) of consumption value in 2023.

Sporting events are also part of the Chinese government’s wider efforts to lure visitors back to the country after the pandemic, which include visa-free travel for citizens of an increasing number of countries and widened access to mobile payment options for foreigners.

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At the opening ceremony of International Biopharma Industry Week Shanghai on 11 October, CEO of AstraZeneca, Pascal Soriot, announced the inauguration of its newly-upgraded global R&D centre. As reported by Yicai Global, at the ceremony Soriot said that the new centre has introduced “state-of-the-art technologies and expanded our R&D team to reflect [its] increasing importance within our global network.” The centre will not only bring innovative new medicines to China, but will speed up R&D and clinical trials of new medicines for China and abroad.

Speaking at the same event, Dr He Jing, senior vice president and head of R&D China, said: “Our R&D pipeline in China currently has more than 120 projects under development, of which more than 85% are being developed simultaneously with our global pipeline… This year, we have established a translational medicine team and a digital and data innovation team, and the overall number of R&D personnel has increased by more than 20% year-on-year.”

Alongside the upgraded R&D centre, AstraZeneca has also launched the Shanghai International Life Science Innovation Campus (also known as the Shanghai iCampus), which aims to bring together academic and industry resources to help Chinese and international startups in the fields of Medical AI and digital therapy.

The inauguration of AstraZeneca’s R&D centre comes at a time when the Shanghai government is putting an emphasis to make the city a world-class hub for the biopharmaceutical industry. As China.org reported, in May 2021, the municipal government issued a three-year action plan aiming to boost the annual output of the biopharma industry to RMB 180 billion.

A couple of months later, the Central Committee and the State Council issued another set of guidelines supporting the high-level reform and opening up of the Pudong New Area in Shanghai, including corporate income tax reductions of 10% (down to 15% from a universal rate of 25%) for the first five years following business registration for companies in key industries like biopharma. The guidelines also give a boost to science and technology research, exempting research institutions from import duties on research equipment.

AstraZeneca first entered the Chinese market in 1993 and has since become the largest multinational pharmaceutical company in the country, with its headquarters in Shanghai and regional headquarters in cities including Beijing and Guangzhou. China is not only AstraZeneca’s second-largest market, accounting for USD 5.4 billion of sales in 2020, but also a key destination for its research and innovation. Since the 1990s, the company has invested more than USD 1 billion in R&D, and developed eight new medicines in cooperation with partners in China.

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Jenny Lin lived in Shanghai for many years and is now Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California. Her recent book “Above Sea: Contemporary Art, Urban Culture and the Fashioning of Global Shanghai” (Manchester University Press) takes a deep dive into the notion of Shanghai as China’s “capital of cool”, and its promotion of contemporary art and design.

In Above Sea you describe the explosion of galleries, museums and art districts in Shanghai in the 1990s. It certainly was a vibrant time, but how would you describe the art scene in the city now? To an outsider, it seems to be focused on formal museums now rather than perhaps more ad-hoc art districts and independent galleries?

The contemporary art scene in Shanghai continues to boom. Dozens of new museums and galleries have opened in recent years, including the gargantuan China Art Palace and Power Station of Art, which is now host to the ongoing Shanghai Biennial. The government has ramped up investments in Shanghai’s art and culture industries, most noticeably with projects along the Huangpu Riverfront, such as Shanghai Urban Space Art Season, a bi-annual public art exhibition featuring large-scale works by local and international artists.

As you note, Shanghai’s most visible recent art developments tend to be formal, such as government-backed museums and city-sponsored exhibitions. However, less overtly official art endeavours still flourish in private museums like the Rockbund Art Museum, commercial galleries and artist-run initiatives like Xu Zhen’s MadeIn Gallery, publications and websites like Art-Ba-Ba, underground clubs and festivals, and also in Shanghai’s cutting-edge art schools and institutes.

The height of art ‘retailing’ seems to have been in the earlier 2000s. What is the health, or otherwise, of the art sale market in Shanghai now?

Art collectors, many from outside mainland China, had voracious appetites for contemporary Chinese art, especially from Beijing and Shanghai, in the early 2000s. During these years, the Shanghai Art Fair became a major destination within the international art market, and arts professionals around the world began touting Shanghai as a hot cultural capital. At the same time, high-end retailers like Christian Dior sponsored exhibitions and commissioned works by Shanghai-based artists, hoping to tap into this new-found excitement for the city’s art amongst foreign shoppers, while preparing for Shanghai’s expected emergence as a centre of luxury goods consumption.

Fast-forward to today, and Shanghai has indeed become a hotbed of high-end retail and art development. These days, we see more local (i.e., Chinese and Shanghainese) investment driving the city’s continuously strong art market. The Long Museum, founded by famed Shanghai-born billionaire and art collector Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei, marks a striking example of this increasingly localised art investment. 

You discuss the government’s desire to promote Shanghai as an ‘international cultural capital’ and that, back in 2008, there was a forum entitled, “Los Angeles vs Shanghai: Who is the Art Capital of the Pacific Rim?” How far has Shanghai emerged as an ‘international cultural capital’ in the intervening years?

Shanghai has soared high as an international cultural capital. No longer reliant on comparisons to Western cities like Los Angeles, nor evoking its early twentieth century monikers such as “Paris of the East” and “New York of the West,” Shanghai has emerged as a major world city on its own terms. Countless people around the world, even if they have never travelled to mainland China, will be able to conjure images of Shanghai in their minds. The city’s iconic Lujiazui skyline in Pudong, which has appeared widely in mainstream media everywhere from fashionable advertisements to the James Bond movie Skyfall, now signifies a premier global metropolis.

China Art Palace, a museum of modern Chinese art located in Pudong, Shanghai

You are quite critical of biennales, of generic ‘biennialisation’ with more emphasis on tourism, domestic politics and ‘worlding’ Shanghai than genuine artistic creativity. We’re just coming to the end of the 13th Shanghai Biennale in July. For the first time, the Biennale has operated over eight months through three phases between November 2020 and July 2021, challenging the usual art biennale format. Despite obstacles, has this in any way rejuvenated or significantly changed the Biennale and ‘biennialisation’ in Shanghai? And, if not, can anything?

While I remain sceptical of large-scale, government-sponsored art biennials, this past year during the pandemic has made me acutely aware of their potential benefits and what we stand to lose without them: cross-cultural exchanges and the forging of international relationships, both friendly and professional, among participating artists, curators, and visitors. The longer, diversified format we saw in this last iteration of the Shanghai Biennial, along with other experimental approaches such as the international city pavilions introduced in the 2012 Shanghai Biennial and increased presence of Latin American artists in the 2018 Shanghai Biennial, showcase the sincere efforts of a new generation of curators and organisers to foster sustained, transnational artistic exchanges. As extreme nationalism and nativist movements rise around the globe, and as I witness increased instances of anti-Asian hate and violence from where I write in the United States, cross-cultural exchanges and the sharing of personal perspectives through art assume a new urgency.

China has sought to position Shanghai as an international city, a financial centre, a focal point for art and design and, as you discuss in your book, even to hark back to a form of its previous semi-colonial cosmopolitanism. Yet art in the service of becoming a world financial centre may not necessarily be great art! How has the government gone about reconciling the two objectives of finance and art in one place?

The Chinese government, keen to promote Shanghai’s soft power nationally and internationally, has invested in local artists by providing studio space in officially designated creative zones, commissioning public artworks, and sponsoring exhibitions in state-run museums. Sometimes such investments result in art that appears blatantly propagandistic, basically churning out artworks as civic advertisements. Yet, when artists are granted space, time, financial support, and at least a modicum of freedom, they often yield beautifully interesting, arresting, critical, and contemplative results. In Shanghai, as elsewhere in the world, finance and art frequently converge quite literally in one place. Seen, for instance, in the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, established by China Minsheng Bank, and Shanghai’s K11 Art Mall.

While I remain sceptical of large-scale, government-sponsored art biennials, this past year during the pandemic has made me acutely aware of their potential benefits and what we stand to lose without them

As I argue in Above Sea, private spaces, such as the art gallery in the Bottega Veneta shop in Shanghai, unencumbered from governmental restrictions, have been able to feature some of the city’s most experimental and edgy art. At the same time, private and governmental support often go hand in hand in China, and we also witness interesting artists benefitting from both state and corporate support. For example, the artist Liu Jianhua, who I discuss at length in my book, has produced easily digestible commissions for private corporations, as well as government-sponsored public art, which, in turn, help support his more probing projects that ruminate on the promises and pitfalls of globalisation.

Author Jenny Lin

You juxtapose that while government officials promote Shanghai’s contemporary art scene, they are also increasingly seeking to dictate that art through control of the display mechanism (i.e. what goes into galleries and museums) and encouraging artist self-censorship. Can a genuine local art scene emerge in Shanghai given this scenario, or is it all just ultimately a façade?

I believe a genuine local art scene can emerge under almost any conditions, including this push and pull with governmental forces and self-censorship, which is inescapable in China today. I found the documentary Sky Ladder, about the art of Cai Guo Qiang, quite revelatory in this regard. As I discuss in my book, Chinese-born and currently US-based artist Cai has produced large-scale public art commissions for the Chinese government, including the spectacular fireworks display over the Huangpu River for the 2001 APEC conference in Shanghai. Simultaneously, the artist creates critical projects that call audiences’ attention to pressing, intentionally hidden social issues, such as the undervalued importance of migrant labour in fuelling Shanghai’s urban development.

Watching Cai Guo Qiang’s difficult negotiations with the Chinese government in completing public art commissions, and how these commissions ultimately helped support his very personal, localised dream of exploding a ladder into the sky in his home village, made me extra sympathetic to the pressures Chinese artists endure. While governments, as well as purely commercial enterprises, frequently exploit art in order to erect shiny façades, we can still find, beneath these veneers if we look hard enough, critical, experimental, quixotic, funny, surreal, and dreamy projects – the stuff that constitutes a genuine local art scene.

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On 15 July 2021, the Community Party of China Central Committee and the State Council issued a set of guidelines supporting the high-level reform and opening up of Pudong New Area in Shanghai, and to make it a pioneer of “socialist modernisation.” The document sets the tone for Pudong’s development until 2050.

The guidelines focus on supporting the development of high-level industries, as well as Shanghai’s position as an innovative global finance centre. 

Specific measures include corporate income tax reductions of 10% (down to 15% from a universal rate of 25%) for the first five years following business registration for companies in key industries such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and biopharmaceuticals and civil aviation. Pudong is already home to China’s biggest chip manufacturer, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

The guidelines also give a boost to science and technology research, exempting research institutions from import duties on research equipment.

Unlike similar New Areas in Guangdong, which focus on integration with Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area, the future development of Pudong focuses on international integration as part of the dual circulation strategy and will likely be viewed positively by foreign companies and investors.

The future development of Pudong focuses on international integration as part of the dual circulation strategy and will likely be viewed positively by foreign companies and investors.

As Bill Bishop noted in a recent edition of the Sinocism newsletter, this is good news “for Shanghai and its development and real estate, less so for Hong Kong. Because this document, if implemented, would seem to go a long way to Shanghai replacing Hong Kong as a key financial gateway to the rest of [mainland China].”

Pudong has been at the forefront of China’s fast-paced development for more than 30 years. Literally meaning “east of the Huangpu River,” Pudong New Era as it is now known was originally a predominantly agricultural area across the river from the Bund and Shanghai’s foreign concessions. It was designated a Special Economic Zone in 1993, including the Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, China’s main financial centre. In 2009, the existing New Area was merged with Nanhui County and today extends all the way out to the East China Sea. 

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The renders of the 1000 Trees Project under construction along the Suzhou River in Shanghai look stunning and extremely ambitious. Can you describe the project?

The project has the shape of two mountains topped by living pillars. Each pillar will contain plants, hence the name ‘1000 Trees.’ There are two phases of the project: Phase one is the west mountain, which is about 60 meters high and is going to open next year, around Chinese New Year.

The east mountain is the second phase, and is 100 meters high. They’re probably going to commence piling this month. It’ll be quite interesting to see the first phase opening while the second phase is still under construction.

The project will have living pillars filled with plants

What will the spaces contain?

Well, the first phase is predominantly retail and food and beverage. The second phase is going to have 50,000 square meters of workspace and a 200-room hotel. There’s this very dramatic bend of the Suzhou Creek which we are turning into a riverside park.

How did you come up with the idea of such original buildings, topped by pixelated, elevated pillars?

The idea came up as a natural response to the site. It was the area that inspired us: Imagine a brownfield site with a few historic heritage buildings, right next to this incredible Arts District, the M50. Plus we had the gift of this park running all along the Suzhou Creek. We wanted something that unified the whole site together, although technically the M50 isn’t part of our site, in our minds it is.

Embedded in the south facade there is a huge open-air art wall, which used to be along Moganshan Road. People would come and paint from all over the world, so it was a very special place for the city. We’ve worked with artists to create new pieces of art that can then be positioned within our south façade. It will be a bit like keeping the wall.

Initially, we had permission for a very classic podium, two towers, with a typical building form. All you could see around the area were copycat residential towers. We felt compelled to create some sort of contrast to the existing urban landscape.

Height restrictions also helped define the project. On the west, we could build up to 60 meters, and up to 100 meters on the east. That is how we came up with the idea of a park rising up to these two peaks, from which the park just slopes down.

And the more we worked on it, the more we developed this pixelated language. We created a grid that encompasses the whole site. Then, on every point of the grid, we put a piece of the park. And that’s how we came up with the idea of 1,000 Trees, of creating these elevated pops.

Also, green roofs usually have the problem of being very heavy, and they lower the floor to ceiling height inside, so placing the landscape right on top of the column is the most structurally efficient solution, which frees up all the roof space to be used as terraces.

We were able to create 1,000 large terraces as well, measuring nine by nine metres. The retail units will have their own outdoor terraces, the restaurants can spill out.

Having exposure and understanding a different culture is a great influence for our designs

The site will contain retail and dining areas as well as a 200-room hotel

What was the biggest difficulty you encountered working in Shanghai?

Working during and after the lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic has definitely been the biggest challenge. There’s been nothing quite like this. Not being able to go to a physical meeting, not being able to be in the same room, always seeing things on footage…

Our site architects, who are based in Shanghai, are doing site visits at a distance. That’s only commenced in the last couple of weeks. As a lot of meetings have resumed in the clients’ offices, they all wear masks. Everybody’s very vigilant about lift buttons and are taking it incredibly seriously. As long as this is carried out safely, we are happy, so we are fine with projects taking a little longer to complete.

Working with your architects on site must have felt like taking a peek into the future…

We’ve been seeing how they would have responded to working under lockdown conditions before we had to. We watched our colleagues doing video calls with their children appearing in the background. And then, a month later, here we are.

1,000 Trees as it stands in 2019. Picture credit: Qingyan Zhu

How have you adapted your way of working with China during the pandemic?

Well, we’ve always had a connection over video call. It feels like we’re just that little bit more connected now because everybody’s doing it. During the lockdown in the UK, we’ve had a couple of competitions that we’ve been doing in China. Taking the design process remotely and everybody sketching on-screen has been pretty interesting. Bizarrely, it’s been quite efficient, because everybody can just work in their own space and in their own time.

Do you have any plans for China in the future? And what are your expectations for this market?

What we’ve seen most recently is that a lot of competitions focus on bringing back to life some of China’s industrial heritage, such as factories or grinding mills. That’s something that we’re very aligned to. In South Africa and the UK we refurbished a distillery and other heritage buildings. It is something we’re very passionate about, especially because of sustainability.

I think in China in the next few years there’ll be some really interesting sustainable projects coming out because they can potentially leapfrog into the future. They can see mistakes that we’ve made and skip them and move straight to the next phase. We’re very excited about projects where environmental agendas are high on the list of priorities.

You have identified sustainability as one of the main trends for the future. What do you think are the main architectural trends for the years to come in China?

Besides sustainability, there is craft – there is a resurgence of craft. What we’ve found working in China is incredible access to makers and to materials. On the contrary, in Europe, everything is imported. In China, we always try to talk to the people who are actually producing materials. In a country like China, where things are produced on such a vast scale, we’re always looking to bring forward the idea that there can be individuality and personality in the production of materials. Craft-based influences are the reason why we love working in China. Besides sustainability and craft, the third most significant trend we have identified in China is that of wellbeing and health. This is especially important in the new age of the pandemic: having good public spaces is more critical to our lives than ever.

You were mentioning materials. What do you think is the best project when it comes to the way materials have been used?

For us, it’s always about a level of detail and some kind of richness and texture. As we were looking at doing a project in Zhengzhou recently, we looked into the history of an ancient iron pagoda in Kaifeng, a city to the east of Zhengzhou. Made of bricks clad in iron, it almost looks like a metal pagoda. Imprinted into every panel are ancient texts and fantastic figures. It’s inspiring to see that level of detail and craftsmanship.

More locally, the 1,000 Trees team were inspired by the Moganshan Mountain Retreat.

The 1,000 Trees team were inspired by the bamboo forests at nearby Moganshan

Has working with a different the culture changed your way of dealing with all projects?

We see things from different perspectives, we understand things from a different point of view – and I think that’s really, really important. Sometimes we’ve presented a project and we thought we loved it for one reason, but then they loved it for a different reason. Having exposure to and understanding a different culture is a great influence on our designs.

Did you have to adapt your style to Chinese tastes?

Not really. We felt like we were understood there. The British Pavilion, which we designed for the Shanghai Expo ten years ago, was such an important project for the studio. There was a worry that people wouldn’t get it. Instead, they got it quicker and better than everyone else. Before we knew it, they had a nickname for it, they called it “The Dandelion.”

It was such a special project for us. It’s the smallest, yet the most extreme and memorable. As a studio, it meant so much because it opened us up internationally. From that project, we were invited to do ambitious, interesting things. One was the Bund Financial Centre, for which we collaborated with Foster & Partners. Then came 1,000 Trees.

I think The Dandelion has been our best project in China so far, but I hope 1,000 Trees will be our next best project.

Heatherwick Studios designed the British Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo

What trait do you think made the Chinese audience like what you do?

I wonder if it’s about our confidence and our ambition to do things. In all the projects that came through there has to be real confidence to commission something so different. We do things wholeheartedly and our clients are aligned with this. That’s why we would love to continue our relationship working in China.

Chinese people are entrepreneurial, so ambition and confidence must have resonated with them. Do you think that this spirit makes projects go faster than in Europe?

Well, like in the case of 1,000 Trees, sometimes we come up with a design, and it’s commissioned before there is a physical mock-up. And you could never commission anything that quick usually, but they’ve done it. It still needed some adjustment, but the passion was there.

There are two sides of the coin, though. While some things are incredibly fast, some others have gone more slowly – partly because of regulation changes. Maybe something is approved at one point, and it might change in the future. We’ve found that quite difficult to navigate. But all in all, working in China has been a great experience.

Lisa Finlay, partner at Heatherwick Studio

You seem to love Shanghai and China in general, where does this love come from?

I think they love us. It’s like a mutual thing that we feel because it’s a place where we can do creative things. It feels like anything can be possible there. I don’t think that you get that feeling everywhere. That’s something we’re very, very drawn to. And I also think due to the cultural history, all the layers of culture that come into daily life. For example, the traditional ground-breaking ceremony. Learning about that culture and being part of that is very special as well.

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Before new recycling rules came into effect last summer, taking out the trash used to be simple for Ni Yuan, a resident of a leafy middle-class Shanghai neighbourhood. She would sort household waste into only two categories, wet and dry, and deposit it at her convenience.

On July 1, the Shanghai government enforced the Domestic Waste Management Law, making it mandatory for all citizens and businesses to recycle waste into four categories at designated times of the day.

Failure to comply now results in fines of up to RMB 200 (around £22) for individuals, rising to RMB 50,000 (£5,500) for companies. While Shanghai officially adopted a recycling policy fifteen years ago, this seems to be the first with teeth.

The recent crackdown is the latest battle in China’s war on pollution, first declared by Premier Li Keqiang in 2014. If successful, it could become a shining example of how to clean up cities in the modern digital era — and a template for Southeast Asian nations struggling to decouple their economic growth from waste production. Failure could prove the opposite: that a centralised, top-down approach to socio-economic reform has serious limitations.

The municipality of Shanghai has implemented a variety of measures to educate the population to correctly sort their waste. In a bid to win over youngsters, video games have popped up in arcades around town offering players a chance to practise their trash-dunking technique.

Along with them, gaming apps for smartphones help users navigate the new rules. Virtual Reality simulators have also appeared around town, allowing players to accrue points by dropping waste into imaginary bins.

“It’s simple and easy to understand. Residents can practice sorting garbage without actually going through their trash, and it is a more effective method than using paper materials when training volunteers,” Wu Xia, founder and chief executive of VitrellaCore, the company that created the game, told China Daily.

Not only video games, but also songs about recycling set to the tune of revolutionary-era hits have gone viral.  Even Peppa Pig has acted as a guide on the dos and don’ts of kitchen waste – often reused as animal fodder. In residential compounds, wardens go door-to-door educating people on the new protocol.

Smart bins use this technology to weigh the amount of rubbish deposited and assign social credits in the form of gifts or cash rebates.

In Shanghai, any initial resistance to the reforms appears to have acquiesced with many embracing the call for collective action. “At first a lot of people complained that it wasn’t convenient. But this is exactly what garbage sorting means, you have to walk to a certain place at a certain time so the system can work”, says Ni.

“People have just gotten used to it, as is so often the case here,” observes one expat resident.

Ancillary news reports and social media campaigns are also dying down. Ni Yuan noted that in her residential compound wardens no longer need to instruct people on how to sort their trash. “At the beginning, I had doubts at the grassroots level that the government could do things right, but they did. People are taking this seriously”, she says.

Shanghai has invested over US$ 3 billion in the recycling system so far, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

Artificial intelligence projects benefited from these investments. Such projects have become central to the Chinese approach, and make use of facial recognition. For instance, smart bins use this technology to weigh the amount of rubbish deposited and assign social credits in the form of gifts or cash rebates.

Conversely, facial scanning has been used to punish violators. Surveillance cameras identify in real-time people who drop litter in waste-free spaces. Perpetrators will get a fine, and in some instances, have their face humiliatingly projected onto public screens, reports the South China Morning Post.

Environmental groups agree that while it’s too soon to tell how lasting these reforms are, early signs are promising. “It is still too early to say it is successful or not, but it is absolutely a great start. According to the data the Shanghai government released, more than 8,000 tonnes of kitchen waste is being sorted every day. It is beyond the target they set” says Miao Zhang, founder of Rcubic, a Beijing-based social enterprise that tackles waste. She attributes the success to “powerful and efficient community management systems”, rather than tech aids.

“A greater share of waste is being treated according to waste management practices. It is a better situation for the environment,” says Liu Hua, a campaign specialist in waste and resources, collaborating with Greenpeace Beijing.

However, not everyone is so optimistic. Simon Ellin, chief executive of the UK’s Recycling Association, represents the interests of UK businesses which have been adversely affected by China’s ban on foreign waste imports. He believes that ­– despite the big investment – China currently lacks the capacity required to process its domestic waste output.

Chinese imports of foreign waste fibre fell by 80 percent in the past three years. The same has happened to plastic and scrap metal.

Shanghai has invested over $3 billion in the recycling system so far

“This leaves a huge capacity gap”, says Ellin. “Part of the objective is to become self-sufficient to stimulate their own domestic infrastructure, but they are a long way off.” To meet the shortfall, he says domestic manufacturers are importing more virgin fibre which “flies in the face of any environmental ambitions”.

On the other hand, green reforms are also creating new opportunities for business.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma, has promised to formulate a “green logistics standard”. Other e-giants are following suit. Jingdong, an online platform, offers buyers the option of selecting a “green box” for free, a type of packaging that can be reused up to ten times. The company estimates the initiative could save US$ 4.7 million per year if 10 percent of orders switch.

According to a 2018 study by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, circular economy policies in 2030 could save Chinese businesses and households approximately US$ 5.1 trillion on high-quality products and services.

China is the second-largest producer of urban waste globally after the US, according to research by the World Bank, which estimates that by 2030 China will have twice the volume of municipal solid waste (MWS) than America.

Despite heavy investment into incineration capacity, much pollution still ends up in landfill, waterways or the ocean. China needs better solutions to prevent cities from drowning under the weight of their own rubbish.

Last year, China launched a zero-waste cities pilot programme. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment has chosen 11 cities as model trash-cutters. Amongst them are Shenzhen, Chongqing, Hainan and Beijing’s Xiongan new area. They aim to recycle 35 percent of waste by 2020, up from less than 10 percent today. Shanghai has been the last to join the programme.

Like other rich cities, Shanghai is moving towards a circular economy, where waste is not rubbish but a potentially valuable commodity. Ni is already convinced: “Shanghai will become a study centre for a lot of Chinese cities”. Those who fail to grasp this could end up wasting a golden opportunity.

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In Shanghai, only ten years ago nobody would have wanted to go for a cultural stroll along the Xuhui Waterfront. No travel guide book or city directory mentioned its West Bund Cultural Corridor, simply because it did not exist. Instead, art lovers would rather have headed to M50, a hip, cosy complex of former factories filled with independent art galleries on Moganshan Road.

That has now changed. A stone throw’s away from a pleasant riverside runway park that stretches miles along the river, the Bund Cultural Corridor now comprises dozens of Museums. The latest addition is a newly opened outpost of Paris’s Pompidou Centre, which French President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated last November.

The corridor represents the archetypal genesis of art partnerships between Chinese and foreign art institutions. “Chinese museums are strong on the hardware: they spend a lot on the architecture, but they do not invest in the software, that is on staff and curation,” says Lisa Movius, a China-based journalist specialising in visual arts.

This has resulted in Chinese museums seeking to import foreign know-how, which led to the realisation of one-time shows as well as long-term collaborations. Seizing the opportunity to fill up beautiful architecture in the Bund Cultural Corridor, partnerships with foreign art institutions have brought exhibitions of the likes of Giacometti and Warhol to the Yuz Museum, the West Bund Museum and the Long Museum. Inevitably this has culminated with the launch of one of the most prestigious art franchises in the world, the Centre Pompidou x West Bund Art Museum.

It all began in 2008. The desire to show its cultural lustre for the 2010 Shanghai Expo made the Shanghai municipality realise that the city – unlike other megalopolises in the west – lacked an art centre and that building one could yield great opportunities, both cultural and commercial. Thus, in 2008 Shanghai initiated a “comprehensive development plan along both sides of the Huangpu River” that called for the development of the Xuhui waterfront.

This stretch of land in the Xuhui District of Shanghai was only the beginning. The numerous Memorandums of Understanding signed between Chinese museums and international collections are a clear sign that the art craze has spread beyond the borders of Shanghai. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was amongst the first to initiate a partnership in China with the Design Society in Shenzhen, for their 2017 opening. Whilst last year, the Tate signed an MoU with the Shanghai Pudong Museum of Art, which is due to open in 2021.

The latest additions to the list are a 15,000 sqm branch of Paris’s Musée Rodin, due to open in 2023 in Shenzhen, and a five-year collaboration to open Paris’s Fondation Giacometti and Musée National Picasso-Paris in Beijing’s 798 art district, both launching in June.

International museums are eager to seize the endless prospects that this art fever is bringing. And they are not the only ones. A great deal of enthusiasm comes from local property development companies and governments. The former see art spaces as a good chance to invest, but their effort is limited to building classy museums, often with the help of some ‘starchitect’.

Should the property market slow down, international museums will always be the winners in this race, as their expertise in providing trained staff and know-how will be more and more in demand for such partnerships. For them, entering China is a profitable business, that allows them to build upon their brand by getting unprecedented exposure abroad.

Regardless of the mutual benefits, these partnerships may bring by, a few factors may hinder their blooming. International museums often enter China expecting that they are going to face an identical situation to that in their country, both professionally and organisationally. “Coming from a very structured museum and history in the west to China where foreign exhibitions are a relatively new thing can be challenging for the international museums,” says Lisa.

Blaming management problems on cultural differences is sometimes the easiest way out. On the contrary, international museums should rely on the knowledge of the several local, yet foreign-trained, qualified art experts, who could help them navigate their new venture. Moreover, developing a deeper understanding of the novel reality – and rules – in which they are operating is key to setting a successful example for the art partnerships to come, and for these cultural exchanges to keep on flourishing in the future.

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Paul French: A Shanghai free taxi? You’ve got to explain the concept, please?

Frank Langfitt: I got the idea from my experience as a cabbie in the 1980s in Philadelphia, my home town. I found driving a cab was a great way to meet and talk with a wide variety of people, who would often share their thoughts and open up about their lives in the privacy of a taxi.

Flash forward to Shanghai in 2014. As a reporter, I was looking for a way to understand the changes in China from the ground up, so I created a free cab service with signs in Mandarin. People in Shanghai know a good deal when they see it.

I met a lot of people this way and then followed the lives of my most interesting passengers for the next four to five years around China and around the world.

People often ask if the Chinese government tried to stop me. In fact, Chinese state security knew what I was doing but never interfered. I later heard indirectly that one agent who monitored me actually related to the characters and liked the free taxi stories, which I broadcasted on NPR.

PF: Your subtitle is ‘the hustlers and rebels of the New China’ – for those migrating to the city is hustling and rebelling in myriad ways essential?

FL: I think hustling is the natural state of the Chinese migrant. Migrants have to work extremely hard to pay for housing, food and other amenities in an expensive megacity like Shanghai. In addition, they always need to be looking for ways to get ahead given the incredible competition in a city of about 24 million people.

Under China’s household registration system, migrants don’t enjoy the same benefits to health care and education that people born to cities like Beijing and Shanghai do, so that is another source of frustration and insecurity.

Most people in Shanghai don’t rebel. They are too busy just trying to get by. This societal and economic pressure works to the advantage of the Communist Party.

I did meet some people who were rebellious, which made them all the more interesting. They included Fifi, who tried to teach high school politics in post-Tiananmen China, and Ashley, who moved overseas, rejecting the systemic corruption that her parents, Communist Party officials, had little choice but to embrace.

PF: One of the characters, Sarah, is very typical of many young women migrating to the city for work and a new life. After two decades of internal migration, what’s changed for the Sarahs of China coming to Shanghai?

FL: Sarah is an archetype: the young woman from the provinces trying to make her way in the big city. But the Sarahs of an earlier era were very different financially and educationally.

Sarah 1.0 would have arrived in Shanghai in the 1980s or 1990s. She would’ve been a blue-collar woman with limited education who would’ve found work in either factories or homes, cooking and caring for children.

Those migrants still exist, but Sarah 2.0 is a different species. She is a college-educated, aspirational professional, who has benefitted from decades of strong economic growth and China’s massive expansion of university education.

For instance, when I first met Sarah, she was working for a company that made computer chips for credit cards and wasn’t sure whether she could find a foothold in Shanghai.

Years later, we had lunch at a university cafeteria where she was getting her masters in psychology – with financial help from the government – and aiming for a PhD.

To put this in perspective, Sarah’s mother, who also lived in Shanghai, cleaned rooms at the Ritz Carlton a few blocks from my apartment.

Frank Langfitt

PF: Your interviews seem uniquely penetrating and successful. Any tips for getting meaningful and helpful conversations going in China? 

FL: Thanks. I’m glad you found them interesting. The key to the free taxi concept was that it turned the normal foreign reporting process upside down. When passengers stepped into the car, they started interviewing me, so they felt much more comfortable directing the initial conversation than facing questions about sensitive issues from an American reporter.

I used other techniques as well. One was what the American writer Gay Talese once called the art of hanging out. I spent hours in the car, in people’s homes and later on the phone, just chatting and listening and letting people bring up more personal or sensitive topics when they felt comfortable.

A boss had forced him to work as a human ox, ploughing a field in Xinjiang

Sometimes, I spoke with people for two hours and only 10 minutes near the end of the conversation was relevant and useable. I also tried to be patient and wait until people were comfortable revealing painful parts of their pasts.

When I asked one character, Charles, about spending years travelling across the country from one dead-end job to another, he repeatedly broke down.

Two years later, I pressed him on his experience. He told me a horrific story where a boss had forced him to work as a human ox, ploughing a field in Xinjiang in China’s far northwest.

In another example, it took several years before a woman I knew was willing to reveal and detail how she had suffered a forced abortion.

PF: You say ‘trust is a scarce resource’ in China’s cities. Is this not the case in all big cities or is Shanghai, as some would argue, especially ruthless?

FL: To varying degrees, distrust is a part of the urban experience, but I think it is more acute in China and Shanghai for several reasons. Consider Fifi, whom I mentioned earlier. One day, her knee gave out while she was crossing the road and she sat on the pavement for twenty-five minutes. No one helped her. The reason: they feared that if they did, she would falsely blame them for her injury and sue them.

In an infamous case, a judge ordered a young man to pay $7,000 in compensation to an elderly woman who’d fallen at a bus stop. The judge argued that no one would help a stranger unless he or she had been responsible for their injuries.

The atmosphere of deceit and distrust is driven by a clash between an old, rural system of ethics based on family and kinship ties, and the reality of a modern megacity

Yunxiang Yan, a professor of anthropology at UCLA, says this atmosphere of deceit and distrust is driven by a clash between an old, rural system of ethics based on family and kinship ties, and the reality of a modern megacity, such as Shanghai, filled with people from all over China and around the world.

“Taking advantage of a stranger or even hurting a stranger might not be considered as morally wrong because that stranger is not part of the group,” Yan told me. “Morality is relative.”

To me, this tension seems even sharper in Shanghai, which has a long, colourful history of cons and scams. Consider, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Shanghai as “to put aboard a ship by force often with the help of liquor or a drug.” I never encountered anything so severe, but it was common for sex workers on Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s main shopping street, to lure tourists to private rooms where thugs threatened them and maxed out their credit cards.

PF: You first covered China back in the ’80s and ’90s and then again more recently. Many of your passengers were millennials and younger people. What are the big generational differences we need to understand and appreciate? 

FL: There are big divisions between parents, who may have grown up during the political tumult and poverty of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and their children, who have only known spectacular economic growth.

Children tend to be far more worldly and better travelled than their parents. They also spend far more of their savings, because they’ve never lived in a time in China where annual GDP growth fell below six percent. But this is only one of many generation gaps.

The velocity of change in China is so great that a generation lasts between three to five years. For instance, one person I got to know, Ashley, was born in 1989 and grew up with access to Google and the writings of the Tiananmen democracy figures. She spent a semester during her MBA in Paris, interacting with younger classmates who had grown up in a much more nationalistic China where the internet is heavily censored.

One classmate, who was just five years younger, said he thought the 2014 Occupy campaign for democracy in Hong Kong was crazy and stupid and the protesters were trash.

Ashley, by contrast, was sympathetic to the cause. “I think generally people who are born in the eighties, most people with sense, would think that democracy is a good thing,” Ashley told me, “but I think the younger generation doesn’t think that way anymore.”

The post Frank Langfitt talks about his adventures as a part-time taxi driver in Shanghai, and his book The Shanghai Free Taxi appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.

Dancers, actors and singers travelled to Shanghai in the 1920s and ‘30s to perform at some of the world’s most stunning dance halls and clubs. The international settlement became home to American merchants, British bullion dealers, White Russian émigrés and Eastern European Jews fleeing Nazi Europe. As a major trade centre, the city was awash with cash, and for many it was a place to come to make their fortune. As an international settlement, it was also relatively easy to run away from a past, to disappear into anonymity in the international community. For two young men, from very different lives, it served both purposes.

Paul French’s new book City of Devils, follows the lives of “Dapper” Joe Farren, a Jewish dancer from Vienna, and Lucky Jack Riley, an escaped convict from America, as they arrive in Shanghai, and their lives gradually intertwine.

During the interwar years, Joe and Jack rise up to become legends in their own lifetime, running the city’s best parties in the world’s biggest party town. They rise from poverty to become millionaires and – partly through charm, partly through fear – end up running drugs, girls and guns, as well as the clubs. By the late 1930s, as Shanghai’s immunity from the ravages of war gradually erodes, their fortunes fall and they find themselves on the run but with nowhere to go.

City of Devils is set in a similar period to French’s previous work, Midnight in Peking and also lifts the lid on the foreign underbelly of China. This is not the story of well-known characters but people whose names have been lost beneath the rubble and dust of time. The depth of research and the attention to detail that French has achieved was honed from more than a decade of life in the city and many more years uncovering articles and conducting interviews to form what is an incredibly lucid depiction of the period.

The setting for this true crime story is portrayed so vividly the reader is transported to the back street bars of Shanghai’s Badlands. The smell of acrid blue opium smoke wafts out from the moment you open the dust jacket and characters, with Mausers tucked discreetly under an armpit, gently encourage you to turn the next page.

For anyone interested in crime, or history, or Shanghai then this is a must-read. If you’re interested in all three, then it’s all you can ever ask for in a book. Truly gripping, shocking, exciting and enlightening, French opens doors that have been closed for the best part of a century, and for some, those doors should perhaps have remained closed.

Your last book was set in 1930’s China but in Beijing. This is in Shanghai during the same period, what makes this period of China’s history stick out for you?

Nellie Farren 1929

The interwar years all over the world are a honeypot to writers, the 1930s were Auden’s “low, dishonest decade”, and we know it all ends catastrophically with war. China was a massive part of that period – effectively a new republic emerging from the wreckage of a 267-year-old dynasty. The tumult of the warlords’ era gave way to the nationalist government and then, from the early 1930s, there was Japanese interference before war broke out in 1937.

It’s unimaginable now how for that entire period, China was not only weak but on the verge of disintegrating. The Second World War really starts in the summer of 1937 in Beijing and Shanghai – once Japan has attacked those two cities there is no going back. It is all out war with China and then the British Empire and then across the Pacific with America.

It’s unimaginable now how for that entire period, China was not only weak but on the verge of disintegrating.

Secondly, I think we have lost our awareness of the foreign community in China between the wars – perhaps because in Beijing they were sojourners and in Shanghai part of an international concession – not colonies like Hong Kong or Singapore. And after the war we had a great interruption when the bamboo curtain fell until the late 1980s. We’ve forgotten how many foreigners were in China and how multinational and multicultural they were, as well as how diverse they were in other ways (there were plenty of criminals and conmen as well as missionaries and diplomats). As foreigners now our collective memory of our grandfather or great grandfather’s generation in China is largely missing.

You have a family connection to this period, is that right?

My paternal great grandfather joined the Royal Navy in WWI and shipped out to Gallipoli. He survived and decided to re-enlist after the war. He was a stoker – down in the bowels of the ship with no windows shovelling coal into a furnace all day (“Join the Navy and See the World!”). Shanghai was a major coaling station for the Royal Navy China Squadron sailing up and down the China coast. He ensured there was enough coal in Shanghai for the Navy’s needs. In the 1970s, when I was about 6 or 7 he was still alive and living in Tottenham, London. In the summer he’d sit around in his vest, already in his 80s but still strong. An early memory for me is that he had enormous forearms (all that coal shovelling) and up each arm was a vivid Chinese dragon. The dragon looped over his shoulders and then intertwined their tales down his spine. The head of each dragon was on his hand.* It was quite a tattoo, even by the standards of the Royal Navy and entranced me. He’d tell me he had it done in Shanghai. He’d then wink and get a slap from my great grandmother. I didn’t get it at the time but obviously Shanghai held quite a few pre-marriage memories for him.

Later my dad – who wasn’t a great one for travelling and never visited Shanghai – would like to look at books about art-deco architecture and, of course, Shanghai featured a lot. So perhaps sub-consciously that’s how I ended up studying Chinese and spending over a decade in the city.

*I have thought many times over the decades of recreating great grandfather’s tattoo on my own arms but, sadly, completely lack the courage to do so.

Shanghai seemed unique in the world in that it was at war, but flooded with cash and the party carried on. How did Shanghai end up in this bizarre situation whilst nowhere else did?

Joe Farren

Yes, Shanghai’s position between summer 1937 and December 1941 was very odd; unique even. In August, Japan attacked the Chinese portions of Shanghai, just outside the foreign concessions (what is now Zhabei and Baoshan). After fierce fighting and stiff Chinese resistance they occupied the Chinese areas. But they did not invade the International Settlement and French Concession of Shanghai – that would have meant effectively declaring war on Britain, America and France. Surrounded by Japanese occupied China and the Huangpu River down to the sea, Shanghai’s foreign concessions were effectively isolated, yet continued to function. This period was called Gudao, or the “solitary/lonely island” period.

In June 1940, after the fall of France, the French Concession fell under the control of the collaborationist Vichy government; and the International Settlement was eventually invaded by Japan minutes after the attack on Pearl. For four and half a years, war raged around Shanghai but Shanghai survived and, arguably for some, thrived. There were a number of reasons for this – ships did still arrive and depart, trade with Hong Kong continued as well as with the Japanese and Free China; Shanghai remained a major banking centre for Asia, especially in gold and copper bullion and various currencies; and, of course, Shanghai was a massive criminal centre – smuggling, drugs, prostitution.

We also have to remember that Shanghai, despite being the product of unequal treaties signed after the First Opium War and semi-colonial, was also a place of refuge – it had offered sanctuary to millions of Chinese from flood, drought, famine and warlords (it is worth remembering that Shanghai was the world’s fifth-largest city in 1940); and many more Chinese wanted intellectual freedom, religious freedom and the right to publish. Several Chinese newspapers based themselves in Shanghai, as well as the film industry and much of the modern intellectual elite. It was also a refuge to tens of thousands of White Russians and, latterly, to European Jews fleeing Nazism. These people did not technically come to China but rather to the foreign concessions of Shanghai where passports and entry visas were not required. That’s a massive and fascinating contradiction about Shanghai – a creation of imperialism that became a place of safety for so many Chinese and foreigners (including the men and, I think, one woman, who established the Chinese Communist Party!).

The book follows the lives of two characters, Jack and Joe. How did you end up deciding on these characters when there were so many to choose from? Did you know from the start they were your focus or did you discover them along the way?

Jack Riley’s baseball picture

You’re right – there are so many to choose from. I worried City of Devils would become some sort of impenetrable Russian novel with too many characters. But Jack and Joe seemed to me to epitomize two sides of Shanghai’s inter-war demi-monde. Jack was a crook – an escaped convict from the American mid-west who ran bars and slot machines all over town under a false name. Joe was different – a dancer from Vienna who came to Shanghai and created some of the city’s most amazing nightclubs and chorus lines – much of that image of Shanghai dancing girls and nightlife we have from the period was the creation of Joe Farren. But both wanted more – money and power. Shanghai still has a way of doing that to people – it’s a city that’s always brought out the venal side of folk! 

The book cameos a few other well-known Shanghai characters such as Victor Sassoon and gang boss Big Eared Du, were you not tempted to write about better-known characters?

I think people like Sassoon and Big Eared Du Yueshang have been written about a lot. The challenge of all my work is to try and recover lost lives and lost events, usually from the underbelly of Beijing or Shanghai. Actually the reason the foreign criminals in Shanghai prospered so in the Solitary Island period was that Du was gone by then; his Green Gang collapsed – the foreign criminals in the city inherited it all. That’s a much less well known tale. Joe and Jack walked the same streets as Sir Victor and Big Eared Du in the late 1930s and 1940s; everyone knew them, they were always in the papers. Shanghai was a village in many ways, especially among the foreigners. But they’ve been rather lost to history and Sassoon and Du haven’t. It was the same with Midnight in Peking – everyone in Peking in 1937 knew about the Pamela Werner murder; everyone knew her father. But somehow for some reason that whole story got forgotten with war and revolution coming soon after.

Lucky Jack seemed to come from the wrong side of the tracks, whilst Dapper Joe was the epitome of a gentleman. How did they end up being partners?

Farren’s Follies

Money…and a bit of greed. Joe dreamt of running the biggest, swankiest and richest nightclub in Asia. He knew he could do a great floor show, the best music, dancing and food but in Shanghai in the late 1930s the ‘best nightclub’ meant one with a casino. Casinos are expensive to set up – and massive robbery targets so Jack provided the start up cash, the gambling know how and the muscle. It was certainly not a match made in heaven, but it was very much a match made in 1939 Shanghai!

Although they were both working in organised crimes, the reader is obviously rooting for them to succeed. Did you grow attached to them yourself?

Mostly they didn’t do anything I’d consider too bad or wrong – I don’t mind if people want to drink and dance all night, play slot machines, spin roulette wheels or pay to dance with beautiful women (Joe ran very upmarket taxi-dancer operations). Until things got really bad they were not overly violent men though Jack certainly threw a punch and swung a baseball bat occasionally.

We’ve forgotten how many foreigners were in China and how multinational and multicultural they were

Of course, there are some educated guesses in City of Devils as to how they made money and things they got involved in. They may well have rigged boxing matches and dog racing; they certainly participated in illegal gambling and smuggling booze to America during Prohibition. They were probably also involved in smuggling Chinese opium to America to be refined into heroin – this was a massive business in the 1930s and links them to New York and Californian organised crime.

But yes, I like them both – people did at the time. “Dapper Joe” and “Slots King Jack” were seen as successful self-made men, charmers who’d both kissed the Blarney stone and knew how to get good publicity. They dressed well, drove smart cars, lived in fancy apartments, made a lot of money, loved beautiful women, ran amazing nightclubs. They were a class act.   

The criminal underworld and the cultural and business elite seemed to be very intertwined in those days. How socially acceptable was it for these two groups to rub along so closely? Or was that no different from say east London in the 1960s?

Vertinsky’s Gardenia Club

Politics, business and the slightly shadier side of things intermingled very closely in Shanghai. In, as you suggest London in the 60s, this happened between the Establishment, the new worlds of TV, fashion and gangsterism, but behind closed doors largely. In Shanghai it was always wide open – making money was number one; how you made it a very secondary concern. Madame Chiang Kai-shek loved to dance to Buck Clayton and his Harlem Gentleman, the house band at Joe Farren’s Canidrome Ballroom. A lot was tolerated because the Shanghailander elite and wealthy Chinese in the Settlement were so involved. It also helped that Shanghai had a messy and complicated justice system and, by the late 1930s due to stagflation and rising crime, a very corrupt and increasingly ineffectual police force.

Were you shocked by some of the research you discovered about this period? Any specifics that stand out?

We all know Shanghai was a wild town – nightclubs stayed open till dawn; women, drugs… pretty much everything was for sale. But sometime you get a surprise. One woman (who was in fact English and a member of Britcham then) opened a brothel on Avenue Joffre (now the Huai Hai Road). Nothing immediately unusual – Shanghai had hundreds of them. This one was a bit different though – it catered to bored ex-pat housewives, opened in the afternoons and was staffed by very good-looking Latin lovers from the city’s Spanish and Argentine community. Husband always travelling or gets back late and tired? – this was the place for you. Shanghai had a few places like this but then there’s another twist – a very Shanghai twist I think. She had all the rooms rigged up with cameras, took photos of the afternoon trysts and then blackmailed the women clients with the photos!

By 1940 it was also getting so tough economically in Shanghai that you could hire a hitman for about twenty pounds (in today’s money) and the police were so overstretched they hardly even bothered to investigate the murders – that was very tempting to many people!

Why were the powers that be so inept at stopping the gambling, whoring and drug dealing that was going on?

Slot machines at the Arcadia Russian Restaurant & Nightclub 1940

Well, there was nothing they could do. The vast majority of late 1930s vice in Shanghai took place in the Western Roads District (around what is now Huashan Lu, Jiangsu Lu, Panyu Lu etc). This area had been a rather leafy suburb of Shanghai, though just outside the borders of the International Settlement and Frenchtown. It became known as “The Badlands”. The police had limited to no powers there; the Japanese allowed it all to happen in return for “taxes”. Criminals pursued in the Settlement simply went to the Badlands.

Also, Shanghai had extraterritoriality in the Settlement – each country had its own court. It’s complicated and confusing but, basically, if you could hide your nationality you could escape justice.

The book is incredibly well researched. How did you go about getting so much information? The locations, the details, the visual descriptions of the bars?

Well, it’s a lifetime of research really. Several decades of reading, studying and living in Shanghai – old newspapers, memoirs, photo archives. Slowly trying to build up a picture of old Shanghai at this time and then honing it down to a story over 300 pages. People at the time knew these were amazing times they were living in, in an incredible place, in some brilliant venues, so they wrote their impressions, took photos. The newspapers recorded and photographed everything. Shanghai loved, and loves, celebrity and gossip so the papers (which were often wonderfully tabloid) recorded crimes, murders, nightclub scandals, court cases in minutiae and at great length. It’s a wonderful treasure trove when you add in all the old police and Special Branch reports. There’s a million great books in all that.  

It seems that all of the characters were actually real people, how did you get so much detail on them?

Buck and the Harlem Gentleman at the Canidrome

As above – over years. There are not many actual witnesses left nowadays but they had children and grandchildren. Because I write and blog about this period a lot people will contact me for help to track down their old family house in Shanghai or their grandparents old shop, etc. I’m happy to do it in return for any anecdotes, letters, photos. Over the years that become quite a lot. Nowadays you can access ship logs to see when people came and went from Shanghai, passport applications, births, death, marriages, online newspapers. It’s so much easier now but there is a bit of information overload if you just dive in without any focus.

There are passages in the book such as when describing Vertinsky – “He blinked noticeably slower than most people, the languid eyelid flicker of the cokehead. It was disconcerting all the same, along with his propensity to let his head droop forward and then suddenly snap back up and stare straight at you.” These bits of detail are throughout the book, giving so much personality to the characters. Are these all artistic license or is that actually based on something?

Paramount Peach chorus line

Well, I do write literary fiction about criminals so there are some leaps required. Ask any of my characters what happened and they surely deny everything of course.

The descriptions of Alexander Vertinsky – a great White Russian singer and entertainer who owned the Gardenia nightclub on the Great Western Road (Yanan Xi Lu) – comes from someone who knew him and left a record. That person, another White Russian, left Shanghai in 1949 and went to America. They wrote their memoirs and published them in Russian. A Russian guy interested in Shanghai posted them and told me I might like them. Hours ensue with Google Translate and then I find out Vertinsky blinked slowly due to his massive cocaine habit. A lot of my life is like that – chasing down details. Perhaps it’s silly – I should just write fiction but the real people are crazier. If I made it up you’d never believe it but here they are, with sources for their anecdotes and pictures of them. You never need to make up people in old Shanghai.

I spent a lot of time with maps whilst reading, looking up Great Western Road and Avenue Haig and Avenue Joffre, until I had a clear idea of where these places were. Are any of these clubs or streets still in any way similar today to then?

The basic street pattern of Shanghai is the same today as it was in 1940 – fortunately the city wasn’t bombed in WW2 and, despite massive development, the streets are mostly the same. This isn’t true for the massive longtang networks of shikumen and lilong architecture, which has disappeared, and continues to disappear, at a catastrophic rate. That is the great sadness of Shanghai – the French Concession and Settlement are still being destroyed – Hongkou and Yangpu particularly brutally. The current bulldozing of the Laoximen district will mean that, effectively, the entire old town of Shanghai has now been eradicated. I personally don’t see what replaces it as an improvement. I think one day young Shanghainese will look at old pictures of their city and ask ‘why?’ It’s also important to remember that the longtang housing system – the networks of lilong alleys and shikumen housing – is unique to Shanghai. When the last one goes (and that will probably be within the next decade) it will be architectural extinction – there will be nowhere else in the world you can go to see this form of architecture. To me, a lover of the built environment, this is equivalent to slitting the throat of the last panda.

People at the time knew these were amazing times they were living in, in an incredible place, in some brilliant venues

So the streets are there, and a dwindling number of buildings. There’s maps and old/new street name guides in the book for anyone that wants to go exploring. And for anyone that really wants to track streets down I did publish The Old Shanghai A-Z some years ago that lists every street with both old and new names and what was on it, all the Settlement, Frenchtown and the Western and Northern External Roads (just in case you thought I wasn’t obsessed enough about Old Shanghai).

Your last book Midnight in Peking will soon be on our screens as a TV series. When is that expected to be and can we expect the same for City of Devils (i.e. is this series two?)

Paul French

Nellie Farren 1929Quite possibly – Kudos Film & TV in London, who hold the TV rights to Midnight in Peking have also bought City of Devils. We have a script (from the brilliant Richard Warlow who created and wrote Ripper Street for the BBC) and a star attached to the TV show of Midnight in Peking but the wheels move slowly – but they are still moving! I would love to see City of Devils turned into a TV show – my elevator pitch (as they say) was that it was “Boardwalk Empire Far East” and that seemed to work.

Will there be another one from this era of China?

I want to go on and look at the crazy time in Shanghai after the war – around 1947/1948. America liberated Shanghai; the city held trials of the collaborators and Japanese; the civil war restarted and Shanghai became a giant black market. The neon glamour of the 1930s was gone; the economy was tough; GIs were everywhere and crime was rampant. The foreign gangs that had survived the war resurfaced. Also, as the communists approached, all those stateless and passport-less Russians and Jews had to work out a way out of China. For those men and women with criminal records, dodgy pasts, this was not easy. I have a number of murders and other crimes I think are linked and I want to go back to that world. I’m taking a break in August after launching City of Devils in the US and UK and then diving into grubby and seedy 1947 Shanghai – can’t wait!

This article was edited for clarity. ‘City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir’ published by Riverrun is out now and available at Amazon.co.uk

The post Paul French, author of City of Devils, on the Shanghai of the 1920s appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.