One way that we intend to peer back through time

Here in Shanghai building is going on everywhere.

We are staying in a superblock of highrise apartment buildings in the New District area far from the downtown. These structures are enormous, built on campuses of shared green space, a la Robert Moses. Like their American counterparts, building quality and material seems to be mediocre, ( the one where we are staying only opened last Summer and shows signs of decline). But, here, we are close to the people. Last night, as we arrived at our Shanghai Metro stop near Boxing Road, it was clear as ever that once you step off the tourist trail in China you become an instant pioneer of sorts. Unlike most of Shanghai, the Metro has maps and stations written in English making it highly navigable. Getting off of the Metro to connect to our bus, however, especially with Shanghai’s constant overcast sky, proves more difficult. As has become habit, we asked a group of younger persons for directions. They were immensely helpful trying to locate our bus, flagging down numerous taxis, (none of whom knew the address of the brand new street where we were going), then finally hopping in the taxi to guide us and the driver to our locale.

There are many questions we have been asking as to how China can sustain and support such massive growth, however. What are the values of China where cities are constantly being razed and replaced with new more expensive development?

Older parts of the city are summarily being knocked down and rebuilt in more magnificent and denser forms. But, their have been some very small efforts at historic preservation. Some of old Shanghai is still preserved though. Known by old designations - the “French Concession,” the “Dutch Concession,” and so on; these were areas where countries essentially rented long-term a portion of city where expats could live under home country jurisdictions. Of course, with this early planned segregation, cultures of the ‘old country’ were maintained more exclusively so that today - 200 or so years later - you can still see fine examples of 18th and 19th Century European architecture, buy decent pastry or eat a modern haute couture

One way that we intend to peer back through time will be to visit the schools, YMCA type community centers, and churches begun in these communities to educate and acculturate offspring of tradesmen, diplomats, and missionaries living abroad, (who might otherwise not have know western systems, values, and social norms). We expect to find a mix of results and some lacking continuity between the 19th Century introductions of western thoughts, cultures, and traditions and the ways these are used and interpreted today. 21st Century modern structures, markets, and fashions have reached China in an avalanche of change which we keep describing in this blog. However, this was no accident and in fact may be linked in some ways to the upheavals of the 2oth century when despotic rulers, communist revolution, and the ‘cultural revolution’ all claimed massive change for China and thrust formerly peasant masses and indigenous communities to buy in to massive transformations of family life, industry, and culture. The praise that is heaped upon the current ‘progress’ taking place in China with its openness to market economics and certain capitalistic tenets of free market economies surprisingly may have shallow roots in its not so distant Marxist past.

As is commonly described, China’s window on history has many distant and bright panoramas. Nanjing, where we will visit for New Years, is described in Chinese literature and history as the ‘Capital of Ten Kingdoms’ - meaning that ten times beginning around 400 BC this city has been a capital to dynasties, kingdoms, occupying countries, and finally the Republic of China (1929). There are remnants of these dynastic kingdoms across the city in the high walls, moats, canals, monasteries, temples, cemeteries, parks and so on. If you only have a short visit to China, Nanjing would be an obvious place to land for a few days, each day could be as full as you could make it.