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SKY-HIGH SHANGHAI
Shanghai stands taller, bigger and brasher than anything else in China.

Text: CHARLES FORAN

FROM WHERE I AM VIEWING IT, THE CITY NEVER ENDS. The sprawl is simply spectacular. I am standing at the window in a five-star hotel room on the 59th floor of the Jinmao Tower in Pudong. I’ve never stayed in a room with such a window: clear glass, sloping inward from the ceiling to the floor, to create the effect of rolling out of bed and into thin air. Birds loop in the expanse below. Wisps of cloud drift past.

Shanghai, everyone is telling me, is the Chinese economic dragon. Pudong, the new financial district across the Huangpu River, is apparently the head of the mythological beast. Since the Jinmao is the tallest building in the country, and the third tallest in the world, the hotel must be the lens through which the creature can keep watch over the city in all directions, at all times.

The Chinese are crazy about the dragon metaphor. It is cultural short form for talking about their nation in a certain way. Still, I don’t think the metaphor really works for Shanghai and I don’t think it applies to the Jinmao. With its soaring bamboo pagoda design, its bar on the 87th floor and atrium spiralling up the hollow of the tower, the building is sleek and mysterious. The audacity of it, and the beauty, take your breath away. The tower is an example of Shanghai’s – and China’s – current obsession with wealth and prestige. I’m sure glad to find it in Pudong. Before I explain that remark, let me back up to the days I’ve already spent in the "other" Shanghai, the older one along the west bank of the Huangpu. Most Westerners are familiar with this city. It is the fabled Paris of the East or, for the stiff-necked, the Whore of the Orient. It is the waterfront of neoclassical buildings called The Bund and the art deco masterpiece known these days as the Peace Hotel. This Shanghai is the former playground of mobsters and corrupt officials and rapacious international businessmen who carved an urban pie into private pieces, called concessions. That Shanghai was so torn apart by social injustice and ruled by vice that it nearly single-handedly provoked the 1949 Communist Revolution.

No surprise. Those who live here have always been a breed apart. To the rest of China, the city is home to 16 million overbearing entrepreneurs, rude, arrogant and prone to pushing things to the extreme. They’re obsessed with being different. They don’t get enough sleep.

Here’s the confession: I’m fascinated by this Shanghai. Its terrible history is riveting, its outsized personality delightful. Yes, the city is too vast for a visitor to take in all at once. The trick is to feed off the energy and not have a set touring plan. As for the locals, they may be all elbows on the sidewalk and no fun in a ticket line-up – here, "swarm" is clearly a synonym for "form a line" – but they are also friendly as they carry on in their inimitable manner, indifferent to who might be watching.

"You are alone in Shanghai?" a restaurant host asks, seating me at a table.

"I’m not sure you can be alone here," I answer.

"Everything we do, we do in front of others," he agrees.

One evening I follow the strains of music into People’s Park. Two stages are being used simultaneously. On the first platform, a troupe enacts scenes from a traditional opera. The costumes are colourful and the voices pitched to pin back ears, if not actually break glass. A crowd of mostly old people enjoys the show. On the second stage, four wannabe hipsters are belting out Sweet Home Alabama. Costumes are Beatles-ish, circa Rubber Soul, and voices are pitched to break the heart of anyone who has ever liked that song. The old people enjoy this show as well.

Another evening I catch a set by a pop singer in a club in Xintiandi, the recently opened entertainment complex in a neighbourhood of restored gatehouses. The club is jammed with twentysomethings demonstrating just how different they are from young people in the rest of China. Their appearance is one difference – all-black apparel, cellphones dangling from neck chains (the latest look) and PalmPilots on tabletops. How they spend money is another: ten-buck martinis and bottles of champagne that cost what their parents would have earned in a year are ordered with studied ease.

A follow-up confession: Every night I indulge my fascination with Shanghai’s past by staying at the Peace Hotel. There, I wander the hushed corridors in a nostalgic fog, wondering which room Charlie Chaplin stayed in and where Noel Coward, bedridden with the flu in 1930, scribbled Private Lives in four days. From the rooftop, I gaze down at The Bund, its domes and facades carefully illuminated to keep light soft and certain shadows undisturbed.

I could go on like this, but modernity beckons. I brace myself and cross the Huangpu River to Pudong. On the ferry, I am approached by a man who introduces himself as Wang Jinrong. He says he is glad that a foreigner wants to explore the new Shanghai. "Pudong is the future," Mr. Wang says. "The Bund is the past." I nod. "The head of the dragon," he adds without prompting, pointing to the lurid outline of the Oriental Peace Tower, reigning symbol of Pudong. (The tower is often compared to a giant syringe with pink sacks.)

"The Chinese dragon," I concur.

Barely a decade ago, the tract of land along the east bank of the river was farmland. Now it is an insta-city, thrown up with the same manic zeal that saw the Shanghai municipality outfit itself with a modern infrastructure – subways and elevated highways, tunnels and bridges – faster than it takes to get a street sign replaced in Toronto.

Pudong has no history, terrible or otherwise. As such, it is a clean slate, a vision of how the central government wants its largest city to look, and behave.

How Pudong looks is in the eye of the beholder. Many Chinese are awed by its futuristic chrome-and-glass skyline. Others frown at the Blade Runner qualities of the financial district, especially after dark, when the wide boulevards empty and construction sites glow with sinister fervor.

I feel like I’ve left Shanghai and am lost in a life-sized model for a generic urban core. It could be anywhere in China, anywhere in North America, anywhere in Europe.

The Jinmao Tower, located in the heart of Pudong, returns me to the city that I am already missing. I can’t figure out why this is so, until I run into a friend in one of the Grand Hyatt’s restaurants. He calls the hotel "outrageous" and "nervy." He says that he couldn’t imagine it being built any place else but in Shanghai.

Of course.