High life and low living(2)

Wealth and poverty

There's probably no another city in China that has had such obvious upper and lower areas as Shanghai. At first sight it seems to be about locations but there's a deep-set understanding in the city that the division is more about wealth and poverty.

In Shanghai social status counts a good deal. Even the old ladies who cleaned toilets in Upper Shanghai apparently felt superior to their counterparts in Lower Shanghai.

There was also a lot of middle ground or undefined areas. Many of the city's literati lived around Sichuan Road North in Hongkou district, including the most famous of them all, the writer Lu Xun. For most writers of the era, Upper Shanghai was for the rich and Lower Shanghai was for the poor.

"If you enter a longtang (lane), you will find urinals, snack stalls, swarms of flies, children fighting, angry disturbances and bitter cursing. What a disorderly small world!" Lu Xun wrote in his article, Children in Shanghai, depicting a working-class longtang.

Although they couldn't afford an apartment in Upper Shanghai, the writers believed their locations were just as decent.

The shanty towns

The thought of Lower Shanghai also evokes pictures of shanty towns. There's a proverb: "If you didn't develop in your previous life, you will have to live in a shanty town in this life." Before liberation this was a popular saying among the workers in northeast Yangpu district. Their homes were often thrown together with bamboo, sticks, straw and clay. Garbage and filth was spread everywhere. It stank to high heaven and got worse during the Plum Rain season.

Their homes had no electricity or water supplies. Even today some of the residents in this area have to have their chamber pots collected early in the morning.

It was the migrant farmers and workers coming to Shanghai who had to live here. They didn't have the money to rent real houses so they created shanty towns on unused land, by the sides of roads and rivers and around factories. The slums started more than a century ago on the banks of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek, and made their way inland, finally sprawling over much of the city center.

The continuous warfare that involved the city exacerbated the expanding slums. In 1860 when the Taiping Army surrounded Shanghai, merchants and landlords swarmed into the concessions. Overnight the concessions were overpopulated. Some businessmen saw this as an opportunity and built makeshift housing, renting it out for exorbitant rates.

During the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, Shanghai was bombed and homes in Zhabei, Hongkou and Nanshi (Huangpu today) districts were destroyed. Refugees fleeing these attacks assembled on the north bank of the Suzhou Creek adding more huts, hovels and makeshift homes.

Burned down

The slums had always been headache for administrators. In 1925, the administrators of the former International concession set fire to around 1,000 slum homes on the current Pingliang Road (Yangpu district) after other attempts at clearing them up had failed. In 1936, the slums in Zhabei were also burned to the ground when the residents refused to move out.

Though some slums had been razed like this when Shanghai celebrated its liberation in 1949, there were still some 1.15 million people living in 197,500 dilapidated houses covering 1,100 hectares.

The city government started demolishing the slums in these areas and built new residential compounds for the residents. It was a long process. By 1990 the city still had 365 hectares of slums to clear.

Zhaojiabang Road, which links Huangpu and Xuhui districts, was one of the redevelopment projects. Originally it was a 10-kilometer river that connected the Huangpu River with Songjiang. After the French built a cathedral in Xujiahui in 1910 and built roads around it, the river was disconnected from its upper reaches.

Refugees from neighboring provinces came down the river on their boats and lived there on their boats. It became a major slum after the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45). After the cathedral was vandalized during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), it reopened in 1978. It has been largely restored and is now the center of a lush boulevard.

With the city continuing to develop, the upper and lower city areas will also develop. Shanghainese used to say about Pudong, before it was redeveloped in the early 1990s, that people in Shanghai would rather have a bed in Puxi than a house in Pudong. Now it has become an internationally popular place to live. One of the new parts of Upper Shanghai perhaps.