Everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing. The climate is arid and prone to northerly sandstorms. Its streets are unwalkable, but a stroll would reveal that its imperial heritage, made up of alley houses called hutongs, is slowly being taken over by its socialist heritage, made up of gray Soviet blocks that tower over all. Beijing is therefore a desert steppe city with Stalinist characteristics. A decade ago, the city was a lively place. One can find no shortage of people reminiscing about visiting art shows and fun bars in hutongs, then grabbing roadside barbecue just outside. Today, it is a concrete no-fun zone and the most restrictive city in the country. But Beijing is redeemed by its intellectual life. It is the center not just of state power, but also universities and the biggest-dreaming startups. For those who can work up the courage to confront the mess of its urban city, a sparkling dinner awaits.
A hundred years ago, Shanghai (where I currently reside) was the city in Asia where the ambitious could live comfortably while making a great deal of money. A rough few decades later, that fact is true once more. Shanghai is by far the most westernized city in China, attracting perhaps the majority of foreign nationals as well as Chinese who have spent time abroad. One can live in the tree-lined former French Concession, which today hosts the greatest concentration of coffee shops in the world, and work in office settings little different from those in Singapore and Hong Kong. It’s easy to make day trips to the canal cities of east China that enchanted poets and emperors alike. Shanghai today is culturally on par with Beijing, offering no fewer selections of visual and performance art. A more valid contrast is that Shanghaiers are more concerned with practical affairs. Its people are focused on producing the sorts of food and fashion businesses that make the city still more livable.
The Greater Bay Area is a bit more of a mystery to me, given that I lived in the failing part—Hong Kong—rather than the growing part: Shenzhen. At the start of reform and opening, Shenzhen absorbed the shock troops of Chinese entrepreneurialism. The southeastern region has long focused more on commerce than culture, having produced relatively fewer objects of historical resonance. When the British seized Hong Kong, the port was a mostly-barren rock, while Shenzhen was barely a settlement at all. Even Guangzhou, a major mercantile hub, has never quite been a center of culture, only cuisine. The southeast is pursuing a strategy similar to Shanghai’s: the development of service sectors around a vibrant manufacturing base. But it is doing so with less taste. Although Shenzhen is less fun than Shanghai, its region is probably the most dynamic and forward-looking part of the country today.
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The north is economically dysfunctional.… Beijing however has bucked the region and seen strong growth. It is the political center of the country and reaps every economic advantage from that status. That means retaining the bulk of the state sector as well as the industries most dependent on political rents. Thus it’s not so different from Washington, DC, with its mix of embassies, think tanks, and industries that need lobbying.
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Shanghai is more commercially oriented. Around a thousand years ago, the region of east China started to transform into the fiscal center of the country, as people moved from the millet-growing north into the more productive rice-growing east. The area received another boost with the influx of New World silver, propelling Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou into the first cities in the world that made luxury goods for global markets. Dotted around these metropolises were market towns producing rice, ceramics, silk, and other goods. Shanghai came into its own through the slow collapse of the Qing. By the turn of the 20th century, it attracted the most dynamic Chinese entrepreneurs and became the center of the country’s industrial works. At the same time, Shanghai was the gambling and brothel capital of the world, the center of the country’s opium trafficking, and the extraterritorial playground for British, French, and American businessmen.
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The fact I appreciate best is that Shanghai is highly livable. Among cities in Asia, Tokyo is a singular miracle, but I think that Shanghai is not lesser than Singapore, Hong Kong, or Seoul. Business executive types tell me that New York is the only city that rivals its dynamism. I agree that both cities have a special energy: both are on major waterways, invest a great deal in greenery, and have a thriving business environment to support excellent leisure activities. A huge number of people moved from Beijing to Shanghai after the start of the pandemic, including me. Whereas Beijing is hit hard by every domestic outbreak, Shanghai hasn’t had many cases while being the least restrictive city in the country. It’s hard for us fresh arrivals not to smirk at our friends in the north each time we read about new restrictions in Beijing.
The Shenzhen region is harder to write about given its patchwork nature. Shenzhen surpassed Hong Kong to be the region’s richest city in 2018. But it hasn’t been able to wrest leadership away from Guangzhou, which jealously guards its political power. Dongguan, Zhuhai, and Huizhou each pursue their own strategies, while Macau fits into the constellation as well (although it is less interesting given that it’s a single-industry town). Hong Kong, meanwhile, is a world unto itself. Since the political problems there over the last three years, the central government has made it obvious that it can think of the city only with exasperation. Rather than expect it to lead, Beijing is treating Hong Kong as something like an ulcer: a problem to manage away with hopefully not much more pain.
I left Hong Kong in 2018, before its protests and the ensuing political crackdown. I had hastened to leave then because I already felt the keen disappointment of living in a city in structural decline. I acknowledge that Hong Kong is an urban paradise: a tropical island with a splendid geographic setting, featuring a ring of skyscrapers that hug thickly-forested mountains. There the amenities of the tropics are easy to find: beaches, forests, wild birds and animals galore, all accessible by excellent systems of public transit. Manhattan meets Maui, in other words, at the mouth of the Pearl River. And there is still an interesting cast of characters, many of whom have adventured on the mainland or the rest of Asia, to enliven the city.
But Hong Kong was also the most bureaucratic city I’ve ever lived in. Its business landscape has remained static for decades: the preserve of property developers that has created no noteworthy companies in the last three decades. That is a heritage of British colonial rule, in which administrators controlled economic elites by allocating land—the city’s most scarce resource—to the more docile. Hong Kong bureaucrats enforce the pettiest rules, I felt, out of a sense of pride. On the mainland, enforcers deal often enough with senseless rules that they are sometimes able to look the other way. Thus a stagnant spirit hangs over the city. I’ve written before that Philip K. Dick is useful not for thinking about Hong Kong’s skyline, but its tycoon-dominated polity: “governed by a competent but fundamentally pessimistic elite, which administers a population bent on consumption. Instead of being hooked on drugs and television like in PKD’s novels, people in Hong Kong are addicted to the extraordinary flow of liquidity from the mainland, which raises their asset values and dulls their senses.”
Therefore I think there is little excuse for young people to live in Hong Kong. They should hop over to Shenzhen, which is an hour away by subway and decades younger by spirit. Shenzhen and Guangzhou are still attracting entrepreneurial types, producing an even more commercially-oriented culture than Shanghai. But while Shenzhen is pleasant, it is also a boring city with minimal culture. A friend relates an anecdote from a gallery artist, who said that clients in Shenzhen rarely comment on the art that they plan to buy. Instead they ask only its expected price in five years.
