Into the 21st Century

In 1990 the central government began pouring money into Shanghai, beginning the city’s epic turnaround. The process was simply staggering in scale and audacity. By the mid-1990s more than a quarter (some sources say half) of the world’s high-rise cranes were rising over Shanghai. A huge proportion of the world’s concrete was shipped into Shanghai as China sucked up a staggering 50% of world production.

A 2012 survey discovered that fewer than 40% of the city’s elementary school children speak the Shanghai dialect (Shanghaihua) at home (even then it may be mixed with Mandarin).

Towering over Lujiazui, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower was completed in 1994, establishing an architectural template for Pudong that survives today. What followed was a roll-call of skyscraper heavyweights: the Jinmao Tower (1999), Tomorrow Square (2003), Shimao International Plaza (2005) and the Shanghai World Financial Center (2008). Shanghai’s vertical transformation mirrored its growing stature as an international city.

Before the 1990s were out, the city had already built two metro lines, a light-railway system, a US$2 billion international airport in Pudong, a US$2 billion elevated highway, several convention centres, two giant bridges, several underground tunnels and a whole new city (Pudong).

Always a byword for excess, Shanghai had effortlessly outstripped every other city in China by the dawn of the new millennium, except for southern rival Hong Kong. The government deliberately sought to make Shanghai the financial centre of Asia, replacing Hong Kong as China’s frontier of the future, swinging the spotlight of attention from the ex-colony on to a home-grown success story.

When the clean-up of Suzhou Creek was finally completed in 2012, a total of more than a hundred wartime bombs had been dredged from the muck at the river bottom, many dating to the Japanese occupation.

The Shanghai Chinese obsessively compare themselves to Hong Kong and the Huangpu River city was catching up at breathtaking speed during the noughties. Served by two airports and the world’s first Maglev train (2004), Shanghai now commanded some of the highest salaries in China with per capita incomes around four times the national average. The metro system was massively expanded, and is to date the world’s largest (running to 11 lines) at 434km in length. Pudong was built from the soles up, creating mainland China’s most electrifying skyline. Skyscraping residential towers irrepressibly sprouted across the city while car ownership trebled between 2007 and 2012. Swelling numbers of residents dwelled in gated villa communities, rewarding a life of hard graft with an enviably middle-class standard of living.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14