Shanghai Before the Foreigners
jaapgrolleman.comHere's Shenzhen, before and after tech. Shenzhen really was a fishing village in 1950, and a small town into the 1970s. All the action was in Hong Kong nearby. A local photographer has been taking pictures from the same spots every year since 1985.[1]
Population of Shenzhen:
1950 3,000
1960 8,000
1970 22,000
1980 59,000
1990 875,000
2000 7,193,000
2010 10,223,000
2020 12,357,000
I first visited Shenzhen in 2008 and back then it was almost impossible to find anyone who was actually born in Shenzhen. It's increasingly common nowadays with the younger generation. Also, many Hong Kongers I knew were literally afraid to visit Shenzhen and nowadays, Shenzhen feels more modern and safe than Hong Kong (IMO). It's mind blowing how fast this city grew.
Bear in mind that the growth of one fishing village involves growing-into aka annexing neighboring villages, I've heard it said "Shenzhen did not start as one village, it started as thousands"
This is a super important point, Chinese city are the equivalent of American MSA's.
No, Shenzhen is just one city. The metro area is the Pearl River Delta Metropolitan Region. That includes Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Huizhou, Foshan, Zhongshan, and Dongguan. The metro area is about 75km across. 86 million people.[1]
You can randomly circle area. But that is integrated, even cat ones gov is not totally on charge of Shenzhen, let alone the hk even after suppressing freedom there. This is different kind of cats herding cf inside major china area.
Compare New York Metropolitan Area.[1] Involves several states. Not a governmental unit.
Metropolitan areas are usually computed by working outward until the density drops. Look at the Pearl River area in satellite imagery. It's a roughly circular high density region, and then farmland appears.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
100x growth in 20 years starting from 1980 is insane. Would’ve been very interesting to witness.
the migration during the last decades from rural China into the cities has been the largest population migration in the history (something like 800M people moved). One can imagine how future generations will be learning about great migrations - like that of the Goths and Huns in the 4th century or this migration in China in the 20-21st century and the resulting large scale effects on the history lasting for centuries.
Btw, interesting depiction of Shanghai - exterritorial status of the foreign concessions for example - in 1937 in the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eight_Hundred . In the West we sometimes miss that the 2nd Sino-Japanese war can be naturally considered part of the WWII which thus de-facto was already going in the 1937.
> One can imagine how future generations will be learning about great migrations
They won't be. Twisting and erasing history is part and parcel of Chinese education.
Shenzhen received, in 1980, the special legal privilege of engaging in commerce with Hong Kong. It's not natural growth.
That doesn't dull their point; that kind of growth, natural or not, is wild.
That kind of growth is what you see when everyone outside is legally required to be poor.
For a country with nearly one billion poor people, one will never make all of them rich with one step. That is why China "allows some peasants to get rich first", and why they say "Common Prosperity Does Not Mean Equal Wealth" and "Those Who Become Prosperous First Helping Those Who Lag Behind". Although it is truly questionable if those get rich first want to help those lag behind, with a big government, it is more or less realized.
So trickle down economics ?
"Trickle down economics" is a loaded term. It's not an actual theory advocated by any economist or politician[0].
[0] https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/01/14/the-trickl...
kind of, but with the actual intent to make it work. the lie behind "trickle down economics" wasn't that it can't or never works as advertised, but that it doesn't automatically happen just by letting people get rich and the reaganites talking about it never intended for it to work. basically every rich country got rich through some form of uneven development
Related:
Taipan by James Ckavelk.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai-Pan_(novel)
I had read it some years ago. Interesting depictions of that period, Hong Kong, interactions between the British and Chinese then, and more. Good writing, IMO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clavell
Excerpt:
>Clavell wanted to write a second novel because "that separates the men from the boys".[21] The money from King Rat enabled him to spend two years researching and then writing what became Tai-Pan (1966). It was a huge best-seller, and Clavell sold the film rights for a sizeable amount (although the film would not be made until 1986).[22]
King Rat was also good.
Great book. Noble House (also by Clavell) is also excellent and takes place a century later, also in Hong Kong, and about the same firm established in Tai-Pan.
I didn't realize Shogun was his third book. I somehow always thought it was his first.
Also this
> Clavell admired Ayn Rand, founder of the Objectivist school of philosophy
Never meet your heroes, I suppose..
If you had read his books you wouldn't have been surprised. Libertarian capitalist ideals and individualism are themes throughout his works.
>If you had read his books you wouldn't have been surprised.
Is that condescending tone improving the discussion quality, what do you think?
I have read at least Tai-Pan, Shogun and Gai-Jin. In Shogun it's harder to point out, but in the others sure. But they describe Western trade houses operating in Asia, so the themes you mention fit them quite well.
It's been a while since I read the books, and I might feel differently if I read them now with the randian perspective in mind.
What does a "randian perspective" mean to you and why would the Clavell's admiration of Rand warrant the comment to "never meet your heroes"?
I enjoyed Clavell's books quite a bit when I read them, so I consider him a good writer. What I know about Rand tho is that she was quite the dummy (starting from naming her very subjective "philosophy" objectivism). Her books have typically been described as hollow (haven't read any and don't intend to). So it's somewhat disappointing to see Clavell admiring her.
By randian perspective I mean reading the books while particularly focusing on themes of liberalism, individualism and the like. Of which there is certainly plenty, but not limited to.
Atlas Shrugged was her objectivist/philosophy of selfishness novel and it's a terribly wooden and poorly written work of literature. The Fountainhead and Anthem were both written before the formalizing of objectivism and are much more philosophical novels of individualism. While Anthem does lean a little towards her philosophy of selfishness called "objectivism", The Fountainhead is almost completely absent of this. It is the most similar to Clavell's novels, in the way of it's individualist protagonist. Running themes in it include shirking of orthodoxy and cultural norms, and finding success against the odds to achieve lofty unorthodox individual goals, despite much easier orthodox life paths existing. I find it somewhat bewildering that it is sometimes referred to as a conservative novel when a running theme of the novel is to cast away conservative tradition in pursuit of the new progress, as is done by the iconoclastic protagonist.
Nice share but after reading the article my existing view that the area of greater Shanghai was an agricultural area without substantial urban development until the opium wars is unchallenged.
Nice to see some familiar spots. About 21 years ago I used to go to the Jing'An temple for lunch on weekends and chat with the monks. They had excellent vegetarian food in the temple, and often the monks would buy me lunch.
If you want to look at hydro-engineering wonders, the nearby grand canal is amazing. I would post a wayback machine link of a trip I did up there circa 2005 but archive.org are still half down right now.
Can't stand Shanghai - no nature.
Nanjing, just an hour or so up the river, is multiple thousands of years old and is one of the most important historical cities in Chinese history. So it is really no surprise that Shanghai was not developed until foreign trade became important.
It is also hard to talk about the relatively new coastal development without the fact that in the 1600s the Qing forcibly evacuated most coastal areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Clearance
And before that, the Ming banned coastal trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin
That's an interesting pair of policies to mention together. The reason for the evacuation of the coast was that coastal trade had flourished so much that the Qing weren't able to defeat one guy's private navy militarily.
the Ming policy was never 100% effective and mostly just resulted in a lot of smuggling and piracy. The Qing attempted to get around this by literally forcibly moving everybody.
> the Ming policy was never 100% effective and mostly just resulted in a lot of smuggling and piracy
I don't think this can really be a complete description of the situation. You can't stop smuggling as a phenomenon, because you can't oversee everything that happens everywhere. So, as much as you might wish it would, the law doesn't really apply to random smugglers.
But by the time you're one of the 100 richest men in China, the law certainly does apply to you. A ban on trade that's "less than 100% effective" is more than enough to stop someone from doing so much trade that they become personally more powerful than the court, as long as "less than 100%" still means "more than 0%".
Haijin wasn't really meant to stop people from becoming more powerful than the court. It was supposed to starve out Japanese pirates.
In reality, the people who were trading mostly continued to do so, becoming pirates and smugglers themselves in the process, and Ming China simultaneously lost a bunch of tax revenue from trade as well as tying up a huge part of the labor force in enforcing a sea ban.
The Qing policy was more successful but also required all property destroyed within 30 miles of the coast or face the death penalty, which is extreme to say the least.
Not sure how you can mention Nanjing without Yangzhou, Suhzou and Hangzhou. Together they basically encircle modern Shanghai.
It is documented in the Tang Dynasty that boats from Japan bound for China would sometimes land along the coast of Jiangsu then the occupants would move inland. IIRC if riverborne the first small town they would reach was Nantong, and the first major town up-river would be Yangzhou. Approaching overland, they would no doubt be escorted directly to Yangzhou. Jiangsu seems to have essentially consisted of a vast canal network and agricultural lands. Presumably the Koreans hit Shandong (dodging pirates), and the South (India) and Southeast Asians (Philippines, Sumatra, Borneo, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia) hit Guangdong or Guangxi. Fujian, in the middle of these landing zones, had sometimes in history a flourishing trading culture, with Quanzhou IIRC the town from which historically attested Chinese Zhenghe expeditions departed as far as Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and Africa, and global religious communities are attested.
Zhenghe was himself a sufi muslim Eunuch born inland in the Himalayas at ~2200m altitude, last bastion of the purged Mongol-era ruling family of Yunnan, descended from the pre-Mongol invasion Emir of Bokhara, Uzbekistan, and through his family thought to be fluent in Persian, which was then something of a pan-regional lingua franca.
Despite this, the modern Chinese state narrative is that everyone is flat "Chinese". Further leaning on the Central Asian cultural nexus, it is worth re-stating that Li Bai, arguably classical China's most famous poet, was actually born in Kyrgyzstan and after moving to China lived primarily in the then-remote province of Sichuan, quite peripheral to northern Chinese culture, in fact the province was contemporaneously successfully invaded by the Tibeto-Burman rival kingdom of Nanzhao, whose still visible legacy includes undeniably Hindu grottoes carved in Sanskrit.
If you want to learn history, don't look at modern textbooks.
China is a gold mine for archaeology. It seems like every year there are huge discoveries. Like forgotten cities or something. https://www.world-archaeology.com/features/the-lost-world-of...
> just an hour or so up the river
Bullet train takes nearly 2 hours. So I assume it would take about half a day by boat. But still good point.
Haha, you’re absolutely right. It’s about 250-300 KM from the ocean.
Another thing to consider is the long historical record of Yangtze flooding and the depositing of silt and debris in the delta. Until good flood control structures were built, Shanghai is not really in a good place to grow.
Can I suggest you the novel "Maiden Voyage" by Denton Welch. Is a portrait of Shanghai in 1930 by an english boy
I'm enjoying Shanghai Grand by Teras Grescoe , it follows the Americans and other foreigners hanging out in the French and American concessions in that same era. Really interesting period, America itself being in a great depression while Shanghai was booming, attracting investors and clout chasers from all over the world
This kinda reminds me of how Edo (nowadays known as Tokyo) was a little fishing village back in the Sengoku period.
Same about Hong Kong.
Loosely related, but two of my favourite quirks of historic international development / trade relating to China
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_International_Settl... The Americans/British and other European powers held and administered sovereign territory in Shanghai. Truly remarkable considering the historical implications.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Factories
Also the “factories” in Canton each administered by a foreign power or “Hong” (i.e. Jardine Mathieson (worth a google if you are unfamiliar), the portraits on the wiki link paint an otherworldy romantic picture of what was a remarkably profitable and wild trade…
Not before f but United Kingdom, even though for Shanghai later it is not just. One can say up until 2019 also not just …