Shanghai, China, February 2018 - The opening up of China and the growth of a global city

For the first thirty years of my life, and the lives of most people born, like me, in the early 1950s, China was one of a small number of countries that we all knew existed but which we had little knowledge of and which we never envisaged being able to visit.  It was to all intents and purposes closed off from the rest of the world.   That closure was partly imposed by China itself, but it also came from outside – I don't remember any discussion of China in either History or Geography at school, and it featured very little in news media reporting either.  By my mid-teens what little I thought I knew about China had been derived from missionary stories taught at Sunday School, and from picture books that stereotyped the Chinese as rice farmers wearing conical hats and splashing through paddy fields all day. At secondary school I had a Chinese friend, but his parents had fled from the Revolution of 1949 in the company of the nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek and had arrived in the UK as refugees via Hong Kong. He seemed to know even less about China than I did – but I did learn to use chopsticks in the flat above the newsagency in Shepherd’s Bush in London where his family had ended up.

It was the Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966, that first stirred my interest, and that of those around me, in China.  I still have the ‘Little Red Book’ (“Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung”) that I purchased in the left-leaning Collets Bookshop in London that year. And more news reports started to filter out. But practical connections were very sparse.

My father once worked for a timetable publisher and I have inherited some of his old timetables.  The ABC World Airways Guide for December 1965 has only three Chinese airports listed as having regular commercial flights.  There were flights from Peking (such was its name in the listing) to what was then Canton - now Guangzhou - 3 per week; to Shanghai, 5 per week; to Hanoi, 2 per week; to Pyongyang, 2 per week; to Rangoon, 1 per week; and to Irkutsk, 4 per week with 2 of those operated by Aeroflot going on to Moscow.  The only destination from Shanghai was Peking / Beijing. But from Canton / Guangzhou there were once a week flights to Djakarta, Pnom-Penh and Dacca with the last of these going on to Karachi (Dacca was still a Pakistani city at that time, and the flight was operated by Pakistan International Airlines). Even 50 years ago this was an extremely limited menu of international travel possibilities, indicating a country that was still almost entirely closed to the outside world.

I was in Italy when Mao died in 1976, and not long after that two friends of mine actually visited China and the country started slowly to establish some detail in my mental map and ceased to be marked terra incognita. But the airline timetable I have for August 1979 still shows no flights from China to the UK.  By early 1984 there were 2 per week from Beijing but the frequency had only increased to 4 per week by the last timetable I inherited from my father - 1993. 

Today I have just returned from four days in Shanghai – my third visit to the city but the first during which I have had the chance to look round under the expert guidance of a local resident instead of primarily attending meetings.  In the various visits I have made to China over the years (I first went in 2007), I have only visited a few of the major cities of the east – Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Beijing – so I can’t comment on the country as a whole.

But what an incredible transformation there has been in those cities in my lifetime, or even just in the last 40 years.  I can now take as ‘normal’ flying into Shanghai for a weekend of leisure, catching up with friends, and sightseeing – something that would have been inconceivable when I was starting on my career. (I should add that I was already in Hong Kong for work reasons this time, so didn’t have so very far to travel.)

Shanghai is clearly now a world city.  To stand on the Bund, the area of substantial early twentieth century buildings erected by the western powers, and look across the Huangpo River to the ultra-modern office blocks of Pudong on the other side is to witness a transformation that is well-nigh incredible.  Thirty years ago the other side of the river was little-used marshland.  Last time I was here, in 2014, I stayed in a skyscraper luxury hotel on that site; and a few days ago my Shanghai friend took me to the viewing platforms of the Shanghai Tower – the second tallest building in the world – from where we looked back at the Bund and beyond it at the old city centre with the low-rise shikumen housing districts pierced here and there by apartment blocks, office complexes, hotels and the other paraphernalia of a city that is playing on the global economic chessboard.

We rode the super-efficient metro, with its signs and announcements made in English as well as in the local language.  We ate in French as well as Chinese restaurants, including street food in our quest as well as formal meals.  I drank vodka cocktails with British friends who work in journalism and marketing in the city.  I stayed in a French-owned hotel but could have chosen establishments belonging to many other global brands.   Going round the Shanghai Museum on a wet Saturday I heard a myriad of languages from around the world being spoken.

But my Shanghai guide also led me into housing neighbourhoods into which foreigners rarely penetrate.  Nevertheless, the economy of Shanghai is now intimately connected to the global economy, so whatever is decided in the World Economic Forum in Davos, or in bilateral trade talks between China and partners around the world, inevitably affects the wealth and well-being of the 30 million or so residents of the city.  Yet Shanghai is still politically in a different position from other global cities outside China – it was explained to me how the government is steadily closing down some of the street food stalls in neighbourhoods where a different image is desired; how migration to Shanghai by anyone without a residence permit for the city can to some extent be controlled; and how the government is now seeking ways to turn the tide of rural-urban migration by supporting a range of mid-ranking cities in more rural areas to foster economic growth there.

To me, though, Shanghai is a wonderful vibrant modern metropolis – full of interest and with the boom growth of recent years overlaid on much older social, cultural and economic foundations that still shine through.  For most of my life I may never have envisaged going there, but now that I have started to get to know Shanghai I’m hungry to go back.

Nice, France, March 2017 - The post-attack normal

I don’t think it was inevitable, but within a minute of getting in the taxi at Nice airport the driver was referring to the events of 14 July 2016.  He was explaining the heavy security presence at the airport exit – soldiers holding sub-machine guns.  And he was also alluding to the fact that I was arriving in the city on the last day of Carnival 2017 – the first major public celebrations since the Bastille Day massacre of 84 revellers by the driver of a 19 ton cargo truck last year.

We went a long way round to get to my hotel.  The Promenade des Anglais was closed for the evening and we had to skirt the city centre via the inner ring road and come back through the port area to reach my address on the edge of the oldest part of Nice.   We talked about the impact of last July’s events.  According to the taxi driver, tourists only kept away for a couple of months and then things returned to normal.  (Although in later conversations with others I heard anxiety about the numbers that might come for Bastille Day in 2017.)  This year’s Carnival was a little smaller than usual, and with the parade on a curtailed route, but that didn’t mean that much.  The driver went on to reflect on the litany of attacks in the last few years – Paris, Brussels, Tunisia, Istanbul, Berlin, Nice.  (The London and Madrid attacks in the early 2000s were perhaps too long ago to be brought into the discussion.)  “It’s become normal now.  We just have to get on with it” was his verdict.  And over the next few days I saw Nice ‘getting on with it’ with no reduction in the level of the street activities I have come to expect after several visits to the city.  I have heard the same response elsewhere – to stop ‘getting on with it’ would be to hand victory to the attackers.  And in a way I have been part of that – as must countless other people.  I have visited Paris, and the 11^th arrondissement, since the Bataclan attack; I have travelled on the top deck of a 134 bus through Tavistock Square in London (it was actually the 30 that was attacked on 7/7); next time I am in Berlin I will almost certainly walk through Breitscheidplatz; and now here I am  in Nice.

Of all provincial French cities (including Strasbourg which I blogged about in May 2015), Nice has perhaps the greatest claim to diversity.  Nice only finally became part of France in 1860, when it was handed over by the Kingdom of Savoy (the fledgling Kingdom of Italy).  The roll of those killed during the first world war, displayed outside the cathedral and the churches of the older part of the city, shows as many names from Betti and Bianchi to Rossetti and Rossi as more typical ‘French’ names.  Italian elements are very much present in the local dialect.  And I am delighted that near my hotel (and on the Google map) the old Italian street names are given on the signs as well as the French – and they are often not translations, thus offering a source of some confusion.  Nice (Nissa, Nizza) still has the feeling of lying on the cusp of France and Italy. 

But it is also a gateway in other respects.  Ferries from Corsica and Sardinia dock at the port, and the market in Cours Saleya in the mornings has a stall selling Corsican meats and sausages.  There has been a strong North African presence in the city for many decades, although that history has not been an entirely felicitous one since many of the pieds-noirs who fled Algeria at the time of independence ended up here, unhappily.  The prominent monument on the promenade, specifically dedicated to ‘The French of North Africa of all Faiths’ was labelled by the local newspaper, Nice Matin, a ‘monument of discord’ before it was unveiled.

And of course Nice is one of France’s premier tourist cities – with around 5.3 million visitors in 2015, in a city region of a little over 1 million residents.  The English aristocracy were here by the early nineteenth century, even before Nice became French.  And the Russians soon followed – Tsar Alexander II came in 1864.  Today, spending several days in the city, I hear languages and see visitors from all over the world.  It seems to me that the diversity is just as great as on my previous visits – before the events of July 2016: the one exception is that there seem to me to be many fewer American voices audible. 

There have been high winds during my visit, and the waves have rattled the shingle on the beaches.  Particularly in the late evening, when the traffic has been less, the sound has been like a roar.  I have been reminded of part of Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’:

            Listen!  You hear the grating roar

            Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling,

            At their return, up the high strand,

            Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

            With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

            The eternal note of sadness in.

Arnold was likening the ‘withdrawing roar’ of the waves on the shingle to the ending of old certainties about faith and trust.  Looking out at the dark sea near the Citadel at the eastern end of the Nice promenade, and hearing the waves on the pebbles, I have wondered whether we are now reaching the end of another era – an era of tolerance of diversity, of respect for difference.  Are we now, as a result of events such as that of 14 July last year, and rising nationalist and protective populisms in many parts of the world, retreating towards bounded societies defined by strong symbols of inclusion (language, religion, sporting allegiances) and even stronger markers of exclusion of ‘others’ who ‘don't fit’?

But then walking round a city where events 8 months ago shocked the world, I find normality everywhere.  The local trains in and out of Nice-Ville station late in the afternoon are full of college students from all of France’s diverse communities joking together; the big department stores along Avenue Jean Médecin are busy and with no extra security visible; children are being bought mountainous ice creams at Fenocchio in Place Rossetti; the older residents of the city are still parading their tiny pedigree dogs up and down the promenade (and carrying them in baskets when the minute creatures with their spindly legs go on strike and refuse to walk).  The trams out into the suburbs are still jammed in the rush hours, despite their 5 minute service interval.   Two old North African men are deep in conversation in Arabic on a bench outside a social housing block to the east of the port.  And two or three mixed groups of teenage boys are surreptitiously smoking cannabis on the steps of the dock where the ferries to Corsica unload – in view of the works still being carried out to extend the city’s tram network.  But best of all, on a warm Sunday afternoon, up on the headland where the château used once to stand, there are families of every French origin enjoying the sun, the children’s playground, and the offerings of the little café.  Three teenage girls are talking and laughing together in excitable French – one obviously of Chinese origin, one probably from a long-standing French family (although, here in Nice, it could have been Italian), and one wearing the Islamic veil.  That exemplifies the ‘normal’ here in post-attack Nice.  That taxi driver on my arrival was right – Nice is just getting on with it.  And that’s the way to retain and reinforce the values of toleration that the city, and to a greater extent Europe as a whole, has espoused for some decades.

The many tributes to those who lost their lives last July had accumulated around the bandstand on the Promenade des Anglais, but these had been removed shortly before the start of Carnival, with the intention of digitising them all for an online memorial.  I could find little physical sign of the July 2016 attack, except that on the road close to where the attacker was overpowered and killed someone has painted the old historic motto of Nice ‘Nicaea, Civitas Fidelissima’ (Nice, the very loyal city) and added the words ‘In Memoriam’.  I disagree.  I don’t think the spirit of Nice has been transformed for ever.  It’s still the same Nice, going about its normal business. 

Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, January 2017 - from distinctive to ordinary?

My paternal grandparents were Letchworth pioneers, moving to the town in 1915 only 12 years after the turf had been cut for the creation of the first ‘Garden City’ in the world.  My family has been proud of its connection to Letchworth, and in a way so am I.  It was significant that my ancestors were in at the beginning of a town planning movement that has had its effects in many other parts of the world.  But even so, as a teenager I thought Letchworth a very boring place – particularly on a Sunday afternoon when the only thing to do seemed to be to go for a walk: I wasn’t allowed to go to the outdoor swimming pool, or the cinema, or to the park.  I will explain why not shortly.

Letchworth was the brainchild of Ebenezer Howard. I have two copies (in different editions) of his book ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’, first published in 1902 and itself a reworking of an earlier volume entitled ‘Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform’.  Howard’s vision was of the bringing together of the best of urban and of rural life, to create a new type of town.  And as with all planning, there was an element of social engineering involved since the expectation was that people would create a different sort of society in such a place. 

I have just been in Letchworth again to visit an exhibition about the early days there.  Howard had written of garden cities as being places of freedom, co-operation, with ‘bright homes and gardens’, ‘plenty to do’, scope for enterprise, and social opportunity.  Some people saw the first residents (‘citizens’ was a word strongly associated with Letchworth, with ‘The Citizen’ as the name taken by the local newspaper) as cranks.  As the exhibition in the Broadway Gallery showed, there were strong interests in socialism, communal activities, theosophy and various alternative religions, the wearing of ‘rational dress’, vegetarianism, the promulgation of Esperanto as a universal language, and the revival of seasonal folk traditions such as maypole dancing. 

My grandfather was far from being a crank.  A printer, he was attracted to Letchworth to work for the Garden City Press which printed the ‘Everyman’ series of books – a series for autodidacts of which he was very proud.  But he was also a Methodist local preacher and a strong trade unionist, and he served on the board of the local cottage hospital.  He was a lifelong socialist.  He was a devoted keeper of the Sabbath (hence, to me, the boring Sunday afternoons), and an equally devoted teetotaller.  As  a child I was taken to a neighbour’s house (we didn’t have television at the time) to watch my grandfather being interviewed for ‘Panorama’ on the proposal that a first licence to sell alcohol should be granted in Letchworth: needless to say my grandfather was against it.  For over 45 years no alcohol could be sold in what was by the early 1960s a town of around 20,000 inhabitants.  (But there were pubs in the villages round about!).  

What of Letchworth today?  A first impression is that the architectural style developed in the town by its initial architects, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, is very much intact in many of the older areas, and creates a distinctive ‘Arts and Crafts’ or cottage-style atmosphere to the built environment.  In these original neighbourhoods, subject to conservation orders, the houses are all painted cream, and there is uniformity in external decoration, doors and the like.  It is  a very pleasant and attractive feel.

But the newer areas, added from the 1960s onwards, are little different from similar estates in towns all over England.  The spacious layout, mature trees, wide verges and plentiful grass areas of the early parts of the town are replaced here by standard estate architecture and street planning that has clearly been influenced by the town’s origins but which have a watered-down feel to them.

The industrial area is still, rightly, separated from the residences – in a planning feature that has since been repeated in so many places around the world, from Stevenage and other post-war new towns to the socialist estates built around East Berlin.

There is still a profusion of small halls and premises for community-based activities – although whether the Esperantists and the theosophists are today as active as a century ago is unknown.  However, some of these buildings seem to be falling into disuse.

But where the current state of Letchworth surprises me today is in the commercial centre.  On a Friday lunchtime the main shopping street is almost deserted.  And I notice that there are many empty shops throughout the town centre.  The co-op where my grandmother proudly held share number 3 is now a pizzeria, and there is a pawnbroker’s nearly opposite.  Talking later to old friends who own a corner shop towards the outskirts of the town, I hear that Letchworth is declining rapidly as a self-contained retail centre.  24 hour superstores in Baldock (2 miles away) and Stevenage have taken over Letchworth customers.  Corner shops with post offices attached are themselves threatened as more and more activities traditionally carried out at post offices move online.

Leys Avenue, Letchworth, at midday on a Friday

 

Ebenezer Howard expected his garden cities to be largely self-contained, providing within themselves almost everything the citizens could need for everyday living.  But it isn’t just retail activities that lead residents away.  Letchworth’s autonomy in employment has gone.   The fastest trains to London now take only 32 minutes to Kings Cross and because the arts-and-crafts-style Letchworth station has inadequate parking, many residents now commute into London from neighbouring stations.    So Letchworth has in many ways become a commuter town – like so many scattered around London.

Letchworth takes its place in all the standard texts on the history of town planning, and many aspects of its development have been echoed elsewhere – or in diluted form.  For example, little of Letchworth’s original plan was purely geometric in nature, with gently curving roads – replaced in newer developments, such as many of the council housing estates built after the First World War, by straight lines and perfect circles.  Visually Letchworth remains distinctive and attractive, and fulfils Howard’s aims of blending aspects of urban and rural environments. 

However the self-sufficiency and many aspects of the social development of his garden city are not as Howard would have expected.  The town centre, in particular, has gone down-market since I was a child and has a rather sad air.   But although my grandfather was very happy in, and proud of, Letchworth, there was one respect in which he disagreed with its founder.  Whilst my grandfather preached temperance throughout his life, Ebenezer Howard, in his writings, was not in favour of his garden city being alcohol-free. He was frightened of discouraging what he called ‘the very large and increasing class of moderate drinkers’ from settling there.  And he also felt that community pressure in his utopian town would encourage ‘healthful influences’ in those who needed them.  Howard would perhaps approve of the public house that now stands half way up the main shopping street – it is named ‘The Three Magnets’ after a famous diagram he created illustrating his views on the merits of the country, the city, and the garden city.

Ledbury, Herefordshire, December 2016 - An ideal exemplar of a small English town

I have been in discussion with a Chinese colleague about attitudes to cities, suburbs and villages in our two countries.  We have talked about Sheffield and Shanghai, London and Beijing, the shikumen of Chinese cities and working class housing in the industrial north of England, villages in the Peak District and in the Chinese provinces.  We have talked about the role of the elite, both in culture and in economic structures.  We have contrasted the more organic development of urbanisation and the economy in England with the discontinuities of Chinese history – not just the 1949 transformation, the Cultural Revolution, and the development of capitalism under Deng Xiaoping but also the earlier historic shocks to the system with the replacement of one dynasty by another.

This has led me to consider what might be seen as archetypal English cities, suburbs, villages or towns.  I obviously acknowledge that there are significant differences between England’s various regions, dependent in part on local economic foundations and activities.  But I have alighted on one particular small town that I would put forward as an exemplar of what such a settlement in England is today – at its best.  So my example is not necessarily ‘typical’: it is more like an ‘ideal-type’ as developed by the sociologist Max Weber.  But this is a real town, so I will briefly describe it as it is, rather than for what it represents.

I was in Ledbury earlier this month, repeating visits that I make several times a year.  Many people, told which county it is in, mistakenly hear Hertfordshire in place of the correct Herefordshire: one letter of difference goes with over 100 miles of separation and a shift from the suburban Home Counties around London to the rural fringe of England as one approaches Wales.  Ledbury actually has a direct train service to London – around 5 (rather slow) trains each way a day along a very beautiful line through Malvern, Worcester, Evesham, the Cotswolds, and Oxford.  But it is not a place that features strongly in most people’s mental maps of England, nor on their satnavs (the M50 passes a few miles to the south).

The town had just under 10,000 inhabitants at the time of the 2011 census, having grown rather rapidly in the previous couple of decades to fill in the space up to the bypass built in the 1990s.  There seems to me now a danger that it will grow across the road that currently circumscribes the town.  A recent threat of the construction of an out-of-town supermarket has been thwarted by local activists.  One distinctive feature of Ledbury, resulting from the compactness of the town, is that every able-bodied resident can walk to the main shopping street in less than 15 minutes.

So what is it about Ledbury that makes it such an exemplar of an English small town?  Clearly a lot of its employment lies in servicing the surrounding area – with shops, agricultural suppliers, pubs and restaurants.  But there is also a variety of small-scale industrial employment in light engineering, various manufactured products, and in agricultural processing (a jam factory, and a few miles down the road, a cider works).  November 2016 data show that the unemployment rate in Ledbury (as in Herefordshire as a whole) is well below the national average.  But some of the local activities have resulted in recent immigration – particularly from Lithuania and Poland for work related to agriculture.  In my view this has actually brought some welcome diversity to what was until recently a very white English town.  Walk through the Market Place and up the Homend (its continuation) on a Saturday morning and one will now hear various Eastern European languages, and find products more commonly seen in Vilnius, Warsaw or Wroclaw for sale at a market stall.

Which brings us to the variety of shops in the town – a choice of butchers and greengrocers, two bookshops, a cider shop (perhaps inevitable here), more than one ironmongers, a gunsmith.  And a number of market stalls under the medieval market hall on a Saturday.  Tesco’s is there but tucked away near the station at the northern end of the town.  And for those prepared to go from shop to shop everything sold in the supermarket is also available in the town centre.  Mention of the butchers needs supplementing with a comment on the range of meat in a window a couple of weeks ago – including venison, pheasant, partridge and rabbit as well as the more everyday cuts of lamb, beef, pork and chicken.

Although not so well known, Ledbury rightly attracts its share of tourists – both as day visitors and to stay.  They probably help support the two bookshops, and they certainly frequent the design and craft shops in the town.  And the cafés in the cobbled Church Lane (a path that often appears as a calendar illustration), as well as the Feathers Hotel (a magnificent half-timbered Elizabethan structure) must depend on visitors for a significant proportion of their trade – although when I occasionally eat in the Feathers I find that there are numbers of local residents dining there as well.

And there are educational and cultural attractions to the town.  The poet John Masefield was born here, as was Elizabeth Barrett Browning – and hence the town has created an annual poetry festival. The secondary school is also named after Masefield.

This may all sound as if I am trying to ‘sell’ Ledbury.  But I am not being employed by any public relations consultant for that purpose.  Whilst Ledbury today seems to me an excellent place to live and to visit, there are clearly risks for the future of the town as a balanced organic whole – as also for similar places throughout England.

That balance of economic activities could shift, in particular away from what is still a strong local agricultural base and towards the increased importance of tourism.  Any future restriction, post-Brexit, on the recruitment of Eastern European labour, could weaken the more intensive aspects of the agricultural sector – particularly given the fact that there isn’t a local pool of unemployment to be mopped up.  And while tourism and visitor activities today complement locally-orientated service demand, were tourism to grow too rapidly it could lead to the supplanting of shops serving everyday needs.  That could also result from successful planning applications to construct more town-edge retail facilities (particularly supermarkets).   Further urban growth beyond the by-pass could encourage more car use which the town centre could not cope with. 

The British planning system does not give any agency strong enough powers to guard against these various eventualities.  Some of these forces lie with private sector interests, others with the weak responsibilities of the local council.  That is a contrast with China.  When I have asked my Chinese colleague about why various things are happening in small towns and villages across China her answer is always the same – “the government is making it happen.” 

Will Ledbury still be a place that I would recommend in ten years time to foreign scholars or visitors as an archetypal English small town?  I don’t know, but I hope so.