The New Shanghai Person: Software for a New Century
Brian Hammer
Under the heading “Words for the New Century”, Shanghai’s Liberation Daily
greeted the New Year 2001 with an article titled “‘New Shanghai Person,’ Happy New
Year! ,” this New Shanghai Person as subject for the New Century is introduced to
readers as follows:
Attentive people have certainly noticed that the 10 million strong population of
Greater Shanghai has added quite a few “New Shanghai People”: married
graduates with master’s degrees from a university in the northwest who opened
the road to creating their own business in a development zone; a married couple
from rural Jiangxi who in a Shanghai suburb successfully started a modern pigeon
farm, a post-doctorate-awarded; U.S. green card holding medical expert who
accepted a position as assistant chief administrator of Huashan Hospital; even
more interesting is a young woman (guniang) who called 114 (directory
information) to locate the Pudong New District Human Talent Exchange Center
and ended up becoming the Center’s receptionist. Now she is helping the Center
to think of methods to attract even more human talent. Besides these, there are
already more than 100,000 new young Shanghai women (guniang) called “wives
from outside” (wailai xi) who have married into Shanghai. (ibid.)
The old ways of differentiating people and delineating spaces of inside and
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outside the city—hukou and personnel management systems of the planned economy—
no longer apply to Shanghai. As a result, the article continues, the New Shanghai Person
of the twenty-first century can be any aspiring individual willing to take chances and
create their own future irrespective of hukou, U.S. green card, or citizenship status. The
New Shanghai Person is anyone and thus as one such New Shanghai Person states,
Shanghai belongs to everyone: “Shanghai in the midst of building an international
economic center has already become our common Shanghai, it is a stage on which
aspiring Chinese nationals and foreigners can realize their dreams.” (ibid.)
In what follows, I focus on the idea of a New Shanghai Person for a New
Shanghai made possible through the establishment of Opening and Reform policies and
“the healthy circulation of human talent and human labor resources between other places
within China (waidi) and Shanghai as well as between Shanghai and foreign countries.”
(ibid.). Some recent scholarship emphasizes the economic and institutional components
of spatial transformations in urban China (Wu 1997; Zhu 1999; 2004), others see a
consumer-citizen revolution in the new everyday (esp. (Davis 2000). Drawing on
Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I discuss a cultural logic inherent in and integral
to the political economy of producing built spaces—hardware (yingjian1)—comprised of
the infrastructure projects, the new built city of bricks and mortar and masterfully
designed green space. At the center of this logic is the new software (ruanjian) – the
people who define the new city of (liberated) enterprising subjects, i.e., the New
Shanghai Person. In the process, I hope to shows how the “existing conditions” of
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past/future and global/local are the ““conditions of existence” (Gibson-Graham 2006, p.
16). Critically, the discursive production of built spaces and new subjects recalls a
contradictory combination of so-called golden era Shanghai before 1937 while
simultaneously relying on a revolutionary rhetoric of “liberation” for a revitalized future
founded on “invariant logics” (ibid., p. 33), putting Shanghai back on track with the
global (guoji jiegui).
Figure 2: Jiang Zemin Observes Pudong Plans. Jiang Zemin observing a model
of the Pearl of the Orient tower during a visit to Shanghai, where he was mayor in
the 1980s. He was accompanied by Wu Bangguo, Shanghai’s Party Secretary of
the Communist Party of China (CPC). Published with an article titled 踏踏实实地
加快浦东开发和开放—纪念浦东开发和开放两周年, by Wu Bangguo, in 解放
日报 (Jiefang Ribao), April 12, 1992, p. 6. (Chen 1992).2
Intersections of Neoliberalism and Governmentality in 1990s Shanghai
一座城市，一旦具备了比较价值，对他的大量和认识，才显得特别重要.3
In April 2001, a few months after the New Year, Liberation Daily (Jiefang Ribao)
published an article titled “Raising the Overall Quality of Urban Citizens (shimin) – How
can the city’s overall competitiveness be enhanced?” This article detailed which
characteristics will define New Shanghai Persons in the future, including the classic
attributes of responsibilization of ‘continuing education’ (jixu jiaoyu), worker education
(zhigong jiaoyu), that will constitute what is called a “learning city” (xuexixing chengshi).
Here I quote at length how the overall quality of urban citizens will be enhanced:
On a foundation of continued greater government investment in social
undertakings (shehui shiye), by actively facilitating and attracting the participation
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of society’s power (shehui liliang) in the development of social undertakings, and
improving resource allocation in the area of social undertakings. By 2005,
improve the level of health and quality of life for urban citizens (shimin) will be
improved…(including at the community level) a spirit of being the master of
one’s own development (zizhu fazhan de jingshen)…a cultivation of self-managed
community service organizations, and the attraction of multiple sources of
investment to construct and maintain community facilities, and promote the
development of community undertakings in welfare and of public benefit (Zhao
2001).
Signaling a changing relationship between government and its population of selfmanaged residents of communities, this article places responsibility for urban residents’
future on the ingenuity of the residents themselves to develop and to generate revenue for
community- rather than danwei-based services. Quality as signifier (Anagnost 2004)
finds its spatial form as responsible urban individuals as members of a new horizontally
dependent society of communities form the foundational cell of the nation.4
Neoliberal governmentality connotes an art of governance commensurate with
self-responsibility and generalized entrepreneurialism (See Lemke 2001, pp. 198-199).
As an art of government, governmentality is not specific to any particular economic
relations, but here I argue that the advent of reform and opening in Shanghai in the early
1990s also signaled a shift in the mentalities of government in relation to the city’s
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population, a particular rationality analogous to neoliberal governmentality. In this
section I will discuss very briefly how I understand the relationship between
governmentality and neoliberalism and how that understanding frames my analysis in the
two chapters comprising this section of the dissertation.
Central to the mentalities of government is the power over life through the
concept of population. This particular form of power is comprised of two opposite yet
reinforcing components of individualizing disciplinary practices on the body and
biological regulation of the species or population, known as bio-power (Foucault
1978:139). Whether through disciplinary campaigns on the body or techniques of the self,
population is both the object of intervention and subject of aspirations, both processes of
which constitute modern forms of government (1978:136-137). Foucault theorizes that
governmentality, or the governmentalization of the state, allowed the state to survive
through the “continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the
state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on; thus the state can only be
understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of
governmentality” (Foucault 1991, p. 103). Without the development of the dual processes
of disciplining individualized bodies and managing a massified, regularized population
called bio-power, Foucault himself argues, capitalist production founded on the
accumulation of men commensurate with the accumulation of capital would not have
thrived (Foucault 1978:140-141, 2003:247).
During excursion to the South in early 1992, Deng Xiaoping exhorted the
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recognition of a link between the people of Shanghai and their willingness to take this
responsibility for economic growth and prosperity seriously. Positioned as a critical place
in which to realize national development after 1990, Shanghai was China’s “lao dage”
and leader through which market mechanisms and self-management techniques would
maximize investment and reduce dependencies on the state, no matter the scale. Thus the
urban scale is positioned differently relative to and in direct competition with other urban
places in the desire to attract headquarters of companies, investment in real estate, and
prestigious international events and the spending power of tourists (on whom a positive
impression could also be made), in addition to being the site of low-wage (temporary)
manufacturing and service labor. One headline in the city’s Liberation Daily (Jiefang
Ribao) summarized the conclusions of a 1992 conference of experts on the 1990s
Shanghai Person this way: “Recognize the ‘Dragon Head’, Dare to Be the ‘Dragon
Head’” (JFRB, July 30, 1992: 1).
This headline, as one example, points to the ways in which the city not only plays
an important role relative to national development in an abstract sense of economic
processes, but the people of Shanghai were also asked to support this role for the city by
actively exhibiting the personal qualities necessary to see it to realization. I relate through
empirical examples how this framework concerning the “right disposition of things”
(Foucault 1991:94) allows me to interpret processes by which 1990s Shanghai is made
new.
Missing from this analysis is how “culture” is integral to thinking through ways
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power even in the context of neoliberalism is productive (see Larner 2000, p. 12). Their
argument understands the economic as the ends rather than a complex, inter-related
component of the cultural, such that “hegemony” is produced and questioning is
relegated to not only an economic outsider but a very personal non-belonging in a social
and political sense as well. Their understanding, in other words, fails to take into
consideration the possibility that the economic may be a means to broader goals than
simply economic power, that learning and eventually mastering a system of engagement
could be a means to socio-cultural power as well, which in the end may be more
important (Lefebvre 2004).
As the preface to Comprehending Shanghai begins (quoted above), the city of
Shanghai has been derived a relative value in relation to the global economy and
leadership in national modernization as China’s economic reforms. As the most important
fiscal contributor to central government coffers, Shanghai’s opening and reform in the
1990s was an attempt to attract international capital and develop a consumer economy. In
this new economy the commodification of housing forms a critical structuring component
with innumerable correlated effects, a bundle of benefits. Homeownership entails through
individual (family) ownership is constitutive of an autonomization of the previously
collectively organized danwei system which for most entailed both access to employment
and entitlement to those benefits (housing, healthcare, education, and foodstuffs).
In the organizational environment of the danwei system, society per se did not
exist as a sphere outside the state but rather as a self-contained whole of state-owned
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enterprises and institutions (though they were not equally positioned relative to funds
from the state).5 So while in this context the urban clearly existed in structural terms (see
Chan 1994),6 those terms were quite different than the reform period in which society (社
会),7 under the mantra of “small government, big society” (xiao zhengfu, da shehui) (Tao,
T. 2000:38) came to mean in the 1990s a self-sustaining sphere outside government
where the previous system’s shortcomings and the end of welfare benefits distributed by
the state’s (central, provincial, municipal, sub-municipal) enterprises might be resolved
by instilling in the people a greater sense of self-responsibility and initiative. The changes
in this relationship between state and urban population (in distinct contrast to agricultural
populations) was neither immediate nor even across all sectors within the city. They were
however dramatic enough to publish Comprehending Shanghai, for example, at the
conclusion of the long decade of the 1990s to help explain how and why the city, and
people’s lives, is so different at the turn of the twenty-first century.
While the publication of these articles on the New Shanghai Person in 2001 helps
to clarify the need for resolve in light of current struggles of self-responsible service
provisions in the global context of APEC and WTO, they also mark achievements since
the initiation of the public discussion of re-constituting a New Shanghai Person in the
decade of the 1990s, a discussion begun with the opening of Pudong New Area in 1990
and Deng Xiaoping’s re-affirmation of the trajectory of China’s market-oriented reforms
in early 1992 (Wang 2004). This New Shanghai Person in the early 1990s was figured
temporally and with critical urgency in a decade understood as Shanghai’s last chance.
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I begin to tell part of that story of the knot of development over the past decade, in
terms of magnificent skyscrapers and high-rise apartment buildings, in terms of
hardworking migrants and liberated old Shanghai residents. I address the process of
producing a constitutive subject of the new hardware, both the globally oriented city
center of Lujiazui in Pudong and the intricately designed living spaces of Brilliant City, a
new housing development near the city center. That is, the effectiveness of the new
hardware depends on the simultaneous production of a new software, the users of the
spaces produced through design and planning a New Shanghai together mutually
constitute the means by which the city that is getting (back) on global track (国际接轨).
It is a story about the city’s new hardware (yingjian) and software (ruanjian).
Innovative scholarship on neoliberal governmentality in China has focused on the
autonomization of job seekers in China’s new labor market among college graduates in
Dalian (Hoffman 2002), young women migrant workers from rural Anhui province
working as domestic help in Beijing (Yan 2003), and young women migrant factory
workers in Shenzhen (Ngai 2003). In the following, I focus on the remaking of 1990s
Shanghai fit for the twenty-first century, a city of “calculable subjects operating in
calculable spaces, formidably empowered by their very subscription to, indeed inscription
into force by, technologies of calculation” (Dillon 1995:324).
The state’s ceasing to provide public goods and benefits, which defined the
distinctiveness of urban citizenship in high socialist China, the inculcation of
technologies of the self can be understood as a parallel, neoliberal art of government in
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which individuals, institutions and states are all “lean”, “fit” and “autonomous.”
(Dillon?:201-203). With the discursive operatationalization of these two primary
elements of Shanghai’s development in the 1990s, the limits defining the relationship
between state and society shifts such that a combination of direct intervention and selfregulated empowerment of entrepreneurs, thus displacing risk onto responsible individual
(Lemke 2001:201). The mutually constitutive technologies of the calculable subject-self
and rationality of spatial delimitation (ibid., p. 333) form the primary elements of the new
Shanghai in which the new subject of the city (software) and the new built spaces of the
global city (hardware) form the new city as machine of the future (Kingwell 2005).
The Appearance of the “New Shanghai Person” Signals a Deep Change (Shi 2001)8
The competitiveness article (above), published in April 2001, specifically traces
the New Shanghai Person’s appearance to a series of Liberation Daily newspaper articles
begun in late 1991, under the banner “1990s Shanghai Person”.9 Interestingly, the 1990s
Shanghai Person series is introduced by the editors as the result of a reader who travels
and gains a new perspective on Shanghai, the so-called ‘elder brother’ (dage) of China’s
cities. The idea of two primary components of Shanghai’s modernization drive come
neatly together in the following note from the editors of Liberation Daily introducing
what became a seven month-long series of articles organized on the theme of 1990s
Shanghai Person:
Note from the Editor:
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Reader Wei Lan wrote a very good letter to the editor and we suggest that you
read it. In the letter Wei’s suggestion to launch (kaizhan) a discussion on the
1990s Shanghai Person (jiushi niandai Shanghai ren) is a very meaningful one.
Premier Li Peng recently praised the Great Nanpu Bridge (Nanpu Daqiao) as an
expression of Shanghai standards, Shanghai character, Shanghai effectiveness,
Shanghai spirit. This praise for the builders of the Great Nanpu Bridge sets
higher demands on both Shanghai people (renmin) and also each aspect of
Shanghai’s future work. Shanghai is our country’s largest economic city. The
1990s constitute a crucial decade for the revitalization of the motherland (zuguo)
and also a crucial decade for opening (kaifa) Pudong and revitalizing (zhenxing)
Shanghai. The revitalized development of Shanghai in the 1990s in the final
analysis depends on the unified struggle (fendou) of all Shanghai’s people. What
kind of demeanor (fengmao) and spirit should the 1990s Shanghai person
possess? What kind of image (xingxiang) should be established?
This is actually a big question for each Shanghai person to deliberate.
Therefore, we decided to accept Reader Wei Lan’s suggestion and launch a
discussion on the “1990s Shanghai Person,” welcoming readers to discuss it
openly, each with their own views, and to send us your letters (JFRB 1991)
With the linkages between capital construction in the city that builds a new
modern infrastructure and symbolizes Shanghai’s great potential, this note from the editor
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of Liberation Daily makes a clear statement of the relationship of the people’s
fundamental attitudes and behaviors in making this potential a reality at this crucial
(guanjian) moment in the country’s and Shanghai’s history. The weight of this success no
matter how many great projects may be planned and built depends on an objectified and
subjectified people internalizing this relationship. The power of this need is all the more
tangible when one of the people, a New Shanghai Person, writes a letter that inspires the
discussion. The letter, published on December 11, 1991, reads as follows:
“A Letter from Our Reader”
Dear Editors:
I am from Shanghai and I have been making business trips around the country
for many years. People I meet often ask me: “What’s going on with Shanghai
people?”
In the past, Shanghai was positioned as a national leader on various fronts:
Shanghai’s technology was first rate, Shanghai’s products were first class, and
Shanghai was consistently the top (fiscal) contributor to the nation. One was
honored and proud to be from Shanghai; one could even say that it was trendy
and popular to speak Shanghai dialect. But, in the 10 years since the start of
Reform and Opening, development in our brother provinces has also been very
fast, such that Shanghai’s various advantages, or the challenges we face, are in
the process of disappearing. No wonder people want to ask: “We used to think
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of Shanghai as “elder brother,” but what’s happening today?”
Last year, after the central government decided to open Pudong, the warmly
felt concerns and hopes for Shanghai were once again ignited in people. Is
Shanghai able to restore its prestige? Even the building of the Nanpu Bridge
and its opening to traffic has become a hot topic of conversation among quite a
number of people. If someone were to ask once again: “What’s going on with
Shanghai people?” This question is well posed.
When I tell my friends and colleagues these things they all think that every
responsible Shanghai person, every drinker of the great, long waters of the
Huangpu River, has the duty to answer themselves.
Certainly, hesitation will not do; indolence will not either. The spirit of
Shanghai’s people must be roused to work vigorously and both create
prosperity and make progress. They must see that the 1990s is the critical
decade for opening Pudong and rejuvenating Shanghai. For this, I have a
suggestion: Would it be possible for this esteemed newspaper to start a
discussion about the “1990s Shanghai Person”? The discussion could be very
broad-ranging, such as Shanghai people’s responsibility to history, Shanghai
people’s spirit, Shanghai people’s efficiency and rhythm, the qualities
Shanghai people should espouse, and those they should abandon.
Shanghai’s work relies on each and every Shanghai person; Shanghai’s
beautiful tomorrow requires real dedication and hard work of each and every
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Shanghai person. With this perspective as a starting point, I believe this
discussion forum will embolden both Shanghai people’s spirit and Shanghai’s
future development (JFRB 1991) .
If Wei Lan’s letter to the editor, accompanied by the editor’s introduction, sets
forth a goal for all Shanghai’s people to understand their personal role in the process of
reform, the series of articles following this initial letter spells out the conundrums facing
the city, with specific reference to the critical role of the residents who are as Wei Lan
writes “responsible to history.” Indeed, the four letters to the editor published in the first
installment in the series “Regarding the Discussion of the ‘1990s Shanghai Person’”, on
December 13, 1991, contrast a high socialist past to Shanghai residents’ daring mindset
before the revolution. In the following, I translate excerpts from three of those four letters.
The first letter written by Zheng Zhizhong, Assistant Professor of Huashan Hospital in
Shanghai, reads as follows:
“Promoting ‘Team Consciousness’”10
Shanghai people have some strong points, but they also have a fatal weakness
in that they are not able to unite as one. On this point there is also some
reaction from overseas. When I studied in France my advisor said that a single
Shanghai person may do outstanding work, but two Shanghai people working
together will create ‘internal costs.’ Japanese people are the opposite. One
Japanese person is an insect, but two Japanese people are a ‘dragon.’ France
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has a “Shanghainese Community Association in which a Chinese friend said
to me that Chaozhou people and Wenzhou people are able to unite like a
monolithic bloc, but Shanghai people are like ‘seven sleighs heading in eight
directions’, like a dish full of individual grains of sand’. They expressed it
well. Many Shanghai people believe in a philosophy of ‘sweeping the snow
before one’s own door while paying no attention to the frost on the neighbor’s
roof’. This perspective is very backward. Opening Pudong and Rejuvenating
Shanghai requires uniting as one; unity is strength (zhong zhi cheng cheng).
1990s Shanghai people must have a collectivist perspective, a group mentality,
so as not to be an ‘insect’ but rather a ‘dragon.’ (Zheng 1991)
Professor Zheng cautions that “autonomy” and “self-direction” are not to be understood
too literally. The goal rather is to re-condition each Shanghai persons’ sense of parochial
interests in family and neighborhood as personal aspirations contributing to broader
interests of the abstract city and nation. Thus rather than, say, focusing on the internal
contradictions within the city or the nation, the goal is to place the personal or local as
integral to an abstract politics of serving the city, and the nation, as discrete, organic
wholes positioned relative to like-positioned geographic units, in this case cities or
provinces within China, and in some instances relative to other nations in the context of
Reform and Opening (gaige kaifang). Thus while the “revolutionary” cultural politics of
the Maoist order (Ross 2005) may be castigated, the cultural continues to form a critical
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component of the “new” Shanghai as a process facilitated by a “liberation in thinking”
(jiefang sixiang) as a necessary adaptive strategy to new circumstances, a process linked
to revolution as nation-state building which today is commonly referred to as “China’s
historical mission” (Zhongguo de lishi shiming).
We learn from another letter published the same day just what may be implied in
adopting a team (tuandui) mentality that will produce a ‘dragon’. Titled “Establish a
Concept of “dajia” (One Big Family),” Xu Zhishan, Assistant Chair of the Nanshi
District Residential Housing Office, writes:
Shanghai people have a weakness: their sense of family (jiating) is too strong. I
do resettlement work, so I strong feelings about this. Nearly every resettlement
case involves constant jabbering. Endless talk…and all for only the smallest bit of
personal interest. I am not opposed to looking out for personal interest, as long as
it’s lawful and reasonable, but you shouldn’t go overboard; you cannot knit-pick
about everything. I often have people say to me: ‘Please think about me, please
think about my family.’ But I have to say your family is a ‘small nest’, Shanghai
is a ‘big family.’ Please consider the big family. The Great Nanpu Bridge cost
more than 800 million yuan, but less than 400 million can be used for resettlement.
People say Shanghainese are very shrewd, but it is not very smart to be overly
knit-picky. Therefore I say that 1990s Shanghai people should establish this idea:
Give up the little family, care for the ‘big family.’ Supposing you agree in a
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beautiful tomorrow, please first love Shanghai as your ‘family.’ (Xu 1991)
In this sense Old Shanghai People can be reorganized as contributing to New
Shanghai by accepting their role in the city’s redevelopment. If their place of residence
were to be razed, New Shanghai needs New Shanghai People to understand this as a
common good for the city and for all people rather than in terms of their parochial
interests. Circulation in this sense may mean displacement from the city to the suburbs, or
as few wanted to do in the early 1990s, to Pudong. The next letter called “Don’t Make the
‘Elder Brother’s’ Heart is Sad Again,” is written by reader Han Yueting:
In recent years, some of Shanghai’s products have fallen behind, but when
Shanghai’s workers head off to other provinces they are very popular, but we’re
not strong due to our relative wealth since even our retired workers are treated as
precious quantities. This exemplifies that perhaps if Shanghai is no longer able to
praise itself as ‘Elder Brother,’ Shanghai’s workers are still ‘Elder Brother.’ Still
this awkward situation makes ‘Elder Brother’s’ heart very sad: why is Shanghai
backward? Why aren’t we able to use our talents and knowledge, and make better
income here on this piece of land? Large- and medium-sized enterprises need to
be enlivened but it cannot be accomplished with ‘lukewarm drinking water.’—
that doesn’t fill your stomach even if it does keep you from starving to death. This
requires policy, requires workers, and even more requires workers’ ‘bosses’ –
factory managers… (Han 1991)
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Those factory managers require the courage to begin reforms in their workplaces. This
proper allocation of talent in the new economy critical as I mentioned above remains
central to the idea of a New Shanghai Person at the turn of the twenty-first century. The
new policy involves reworking people’s relationships to their places of work.
The focus of the initial letter by Wei Lan and the introduction by the editors is
primarily on Shanghai’s decline relative to domestic competitors after the implementation
of reforms in 1978. On the Opening of Pudong in a year and half earlier in April 1990,
however, a similar article had already appeared in the same newspaper asking Shanghai’s
people to accept Pudong as a challenge like those living in Asia’s “Little Dragons” have
done before them:
“Shanghai People’s Responsibility” (Shanghai Ren de Zeren)
Opening Pudong Construction Bonds (Pudong kaifa jianshe zaijuan)…Each and
every person contributes to Opening Pudong (renren wei kaifa Pudong zuo
gongxian)…During a short period in the past, in introducing the time during
which the ‘little dragons’ took flight, we nearly over-emphasized their ‘economic
milestones’ (jingji qiji), but with regard to those difficult times—the dedicated
spirit of the people and enduring struggle—we discussed a little less thus actually
leading some people to think that these ‘economic milestones were heaven sent.’
Today with these beginning steps of Opening Pudong, only by making very clear
the relationship between the struggle of the people and the glorious road ahead
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will the fact of Opening Pudong be accomplished (banhao)…Opening Pudong is
also a true challenge for Shanghai people, a test of history for Shanghai people.
No Shanghai person can place themselves outside it (zhi shen du wai) (JFRB
1990).
This article appeared immediately following the announcement that Shanghai’s
Municipal Government would be allowed to issue Construction Bonds for the
development of Pudong, during the meetings of the Communist Party and the People’s
National Congress in April 1990. What this article also marks is an important turning
point in the discussions of the relationship between economic reform and the city’s
residents. Whereas previous discussions of the successes of the ‘Little Dragons’ in East
and Southeast Asia focused on economic policy prerequisites for development, here the
focus as the author makes clear must widen to incorporate the critical relationship
between people and economic policy. That is, like the “Little Dragons,” the successful
implementation of reform and opening in Pudong in particular, the focus of Shanghai’s
efforts to engage international networks of trade and finance can only be realized through
a proper combination of policy and individual effort. Economic reforms in fact are a
“great responsibility sent from heaven” (Kang 2001), but as this article emphasizes their
realization, the successes noted in the ‘Little Dragons’ as model11, came only through the
hard work and sacrifice of the people. In this sense, a simple “economism” will not
suffice (Ross 2005). Rather only if each and every person understands the fullness of
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their responsibility by “liberating their way of thinking” (jiefang sixiang), can the path to
Shanghai’s historical mission be forged.
In the following, I introduce the edges of that future that demarcate what
constitutes appropriate aspirations, not only among those who flow, by returning to for a
moment to the ideas of a ‘lean’, ‘fit’ and ‘autonomous’ self of neoliberal governmentality.
As understood in readings of Liberation Daily as well as a series of illustrated readers
published in conjunction with the 80th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s
founding in 1921 (Pang 2001) the self-disciplined, competitive, law-abiding, and healthy
subject of New Shanghai comes into view.
1. Self-Discipline
Figure 2: “Management Worker, Please be Self-Disciplined!”
This Liberation Daily (Jiefang Ribao) newspaper article is another reader’s letter
to the editor in which Li Jian, the letter’s author, asks Shanghai’s people to note the irony
of a public space monitor like this Management Worker who even when working fails to
maintain proper comportment in public (Li 2001). This problem, like so many throughout
2001 in the city’s daily newspapers, was linked explicitly to the APEC summit scheduled
to take place in Shanghai in October 2001.
2. Competition Promotes Development
This series of four images, from both the illustrated reader and Liberation Daily,
reveal some of the gendered implications of rethinking employment in a competitive
labor market of the city. Appearing under the heading “So Long ‘Big Rice Bowl’,
20
Competition Promotes Development” [see Figure 3], the image of a business suit-wearing,
cell phone using man communicating in the midst of radar, radio waves, and a (peaceloving) dove connotes a sense of action and movement for this New Shanghai Person.
For many people, however, the process of becoming a person fit for the New Century
may require retooling after years of employment in state-owned factories, and thus may
involve temporary, hourly work.
In February 2001, Liberation Daily published an article title “Paying Attention to
‘Hourly Work’” (Jiang 2001) in which concern for the use of hourly like highly
development market economies around the world will also serve an important role in
China’s, particularly Shanghai’s, economic development in coming years. A subheading
declares that the “Flexible Work System Receives Welcome.” While expressing concern
that wages for hourly staff of supermarkets and McDonalds [Figures 4-5] remain high
enough to meet basic needs and to get people off welfare.12 Overall, however, this new
system of employment by the hour is a model to be emulated, such that temporary work
may be understood as a necessary interlude to entrepreneurial independence [Figure 6].
An example, the woman pouring tea for a man and child is accompanied by a vignette of
how this laid-off worker’s successful transition from state-owned textile factory worker
to teahouse entrepreneur. This image asks readers to understand how being laid-off not
scary but it is the chance for new beginning, through hard work and retraining.
Figure 3: “So long “big rice bowl”, Competition Promotes Development.”
(Pang 2001)
21
Figure 4: Example of Hourly Worker in Shanghai (1): Woman Stocking Supermarket
Shelves (left). Figure 5: Example of Hourly Worker in Shanghai (2): Woman Working at
McDonalds (right) (Jiang 2001).
Figure 6: “Getting laid-off isn’t so scary” (Pang 2001).
3. Obeying the Law
While government in China presses forward in the context of entering WTO and
creating property rights based on a new market valuation of land and housing, the Rule of
Law figures centrally to the reconfiguration of social relations. Here the idea that
“Obeying the Law is a Fundamental Quality of Citizens” (Pang 2001a) begins with
personal, public conduct such that the norms of public behavior are upheld as a starting
point for all behavior relative to the law. As shown in the photograph [Figure 9] from
Shanghai, these behaviors include smoking and jaywalking, among others.
Figure 7: Obeying the Law is a Fundamental
Quality of Every Citizen (Pang 2001).
Figure 8: Shanghai Citizen “Seven Nos” Norms. 1. No Spitting; 2. No Littering; 3. No
Destruction of Greenery; 4. No Defacement of Public Property (gongwu); 5. No
Jaywalking; 6. No Smoking in Public Places; 7. No Cursing. Photo by author.
4. Health: The “Capital” of Any Undertaking
While Shanghai’s built spaces in the Lujiazui Financial District are planned by a
“global intelligence corps” of highly trained architects and planners, lived spaces of the
city are sometimes overshadowed. In the context of a New Shanghai Person for the 1990s
suitable for the New Economy competitiveness is the key to success. A healthy body, then,
to compete on the Shanghai family is critical. As a result the municipal government in
conjunction with the Communist Party called for the building of exercise areas in
22
residential areas of the city, as part of the community system of people management in
the city (JFRB 2001). The illustrated reader series supports this goal with the heading:
“Health: The ‘Capital’ of any Undertaking,” in which effective individual life, work, and
study are all predicated on a healthy body.
Figure 9: Health: The “Capital” of Any Undertaking (Pang 2001)
Figure 10: Senior Citizen Center. This image shows Shanghai’s senior citizens using
exercise equipment in a “community” senior center in 1997.
Figure 11: Community Exercise Area. Exercise Area constructed in a Shanghai
residential community primarily with community resident-donated funds, 2000-2001
(Hammer 2001).
Figure 12: ‘“Poverty Street”-- It has disappeared from Shanghai’s Map” Source: Zhu, B.,
Wenhui Bao (Wenhui Newspaper), September 21, 2001, p. 1.
Conclusion
Using Shanghai counts as an important measure. Shanghai is our trump card (王
牌); to engage Shanghai is a shortcut (捷径).13
On the preceding page are the headline and color photographs that help to tell the
story of the “disappearance” of “poverty street” and its transformation as “Brilliant City”
[Figure 12]. In black type on each of the photographs two Chinese characters provide
cues to alert the reader to the temporal progress as well, as ‘poverty’ depicted in the
close-up shot of an individual engaged in an unspecified activity on a rooftop appears
with the caption “yesterday” (zuotian) while “Brilliant City” in the photo twice the size of
yesterday appears for the reader as a grand, vertical vista of crisp high-rises and neatly
designed green spaces on the shores of the reclaimed Suzhou Creek. No people are in
23
evidence in Brilliant City but the presumption is clear enough: these special spaces are
now available for habitation in this sparkling like-new metropolis, and as the Brilliant
City brochure explains “It’s not hard to be a Shanghainese.” [Figure 13]
The “disappearance” of “poverty street” is an example fundamental to
understanding the evolving relationship between hardware and software. As this banner
headline in Shanghai’s Wenhui Bao on September 26, 2001 makes clear, a new residence
called Liang wan yi zhai (“Two Riverbends, One Residence”) stands in place of “poverty
street” (ibid.). 14 Two Riverbends, One Residence is a world-class housing development
much beyond the scale of a mere street; it encompasses 49.5 hectares of land in central
Shanghai, a patch of land once home to 10,500 households15 and 160 large- and mediumsized municipal-level danwei. Prior to the completion of phase one, Brilliant City (the
development’s official English language name) had already garnered three national
awards for its design, environment, and planning, respectively. As the largest resettlement
project among Shanghai’s Old Districts (旧区) (Li, H. 2001), the transformation from
“poverty street” to “Brilliant City” is a celebrated example of how Shanghai’s urban
landscape is undergoing social, political and economic transformations from a high
socialist centrally planned economy to late socialist16 guided intervention. As an article
leading up to the celebration of National Day on October 1, a small-banner at the foot of
the photograph of the new housing development, Shanghai’s new hardware, read: “Create
Brilliance, Greet National Day.”
While not “typical”, the housing development in central Shanghai called ‘Brilliant
24
City’ (discussed above), is a celebrated story of the city’s regeneration in the 1990s. In the
days leading up to National Day on October 1, 2001, Brilliant City was featured in the
media for its re-molding of 49.5 hectares of valuable land from its poverty-stricken past.
A few weeks later Brilliant City again featured prominently as an example of model
developments, on the opening day of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
meetings held in Shanghai in late October. In the lead article in the Housing Consumption
Section (住宅消费) of Jiefang Ribao, cites Brilliant City as the type of new housing
development but on an even larger scale that should be replicated in areas surrounding
the city’s outer ring road (Shen 2001). Promotional literature provided when visiting the
site’s showroom and model units explains how Brilliant City is a natural projection of
modern living in a high concept environment.
The New Shanghai Person possessing globally intelligible entrepreneurial spirit
and self-discipline – “conditions of existence” – meets its limits in the anachronistic copresence of Old Shanghai – “existing conditions” – even with the all of the successes of
the critical decade since the opening of Pudong. Happy New Year, New Shanghai Person.
The hierarchies of old may be no longer be apparent, yet the revolution in thinking, in
service to new forms of production, is simultaneously constituted through the “invariant
logics” of a new form of bio-power, of a new consumer, a new worker, a new homeowner,
a new mentality of contributing to history (of the city and the nation) through the
operations of a newly liberated self.
25
Figure 13: It’s not hard to become Shanghainese (heading, left panel)
Wenzhou residents who like Shanghai – now you have an opportunity to become a real
Shanghainese…special privileges to obtain a ‘lanyin’ hukou (household registration)
when you participate in our special program for Wenzhou residents who buy a home in
Brilliant City…
Source: ‘Brilliant City’ promotional pamphlet distributed 2001.
Notes
1
Yingjian is a term used at least since the 1930s when the Nationalist government in
Nanjing was planning its new national capital around wide avenues and grand vistas,
common elements in the construction of new capital cities around the world at that time.
See Musgrove 2000.
2
This photograph was published in conjunction with an article titled "Prudently Hasten
the Opening and Reform of Pudong--In Commemoration of the Second Anniversary of
Pudong's Reform and Opening," by Wu Bangguo, in Liberation Daily (Jiefang Ribao),
April 12, 1992, p. 6.
3
Translation: “As soon as a city possesses a relative value, its appraisal （打量）and
cognition （认识）seems particularly important.” (Kang Yan (2001:1).
4
This is part of my broader research project involving “Community Building” policy in
Shanghai, which is understood as the basic call (xibao) of China. In a case study of
building one such community, I discuss the ways in which ‘community’ builders
26
appropriate “New Shanghai Person” discourse to meet community building needs relative
to the Street Committee’s goals of re-defining community boundaries.
5
See graduate-level textbook on shequ jianshe (community building) edited by Tao
Tiesheng: 《社区管理概论》(Community Management Concept), Shanghai: Shanghai
Sanlian Shudian, 2000.
6
Chan 1994, is a critical intervention in the more typical notion that Maoist China was
anti-urban and pro-rural, while as Chan shows here the urban industries and urban
populations that supported them with their labor received subsidies never seen by
agricultural rural residents who produced goods in support of those urban residents under
a dual price system which the central government managed in favor of cities, while
controlling the movement of people between these dual systems through China’s ‘internal
passport system’ called Household Registration (hukou zhi).
7
Tao's (2000) textbook on shequ jianshe discusses the new idea of shequ and shehui in
2000 Shanghai.
8
Shi, 2001. All translations are by me.
9
I initially learned of this series when reading Comprehending Shanghai, 1990-2000 in
spring 2001.
10
Hai Ren pointed out the need to translate tuandui as “team” in this context.
11
As per personal communication with Urban Redevelopment Authority architect,
Singapore, December 8, 2004, Singapore trains Shanghai municipal urban planning
27
software designers. Furthermore the idea of a model city in Shanghai’s new urban
planning exhibition hall is an idea taken from Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment
Authority visitor’s center.
12
A portion of the article is dedicated to the problem of hourly wages and sometimes
hours of work being insufficient to encourage Shanghai residents to take employment
over welfare benefits as a result of being laid-off.
13
This statement was made by Deng Xiaoping in a speech in Beijing to the central
government about the importance of opening Shanghai to development and investment.
This quote is found on p. 110, in “’Yi nian yi ge yang, san nian da bian yang’ – Deng
Xiaoping tongzhi yu Shanghai gaige kaifang” (Each year is different, every three years
sees major changes – Comrade Deng Xiaoping and Shanghai’s Reforms and Opening),
Shanghai 700 nian (Shanghai 700 years), edited by Shi Xuanyuan, Shanghai: Shanghai
Renmin Chubanshe, 2000 (revised edition), pp. 109-113.
14
Technically, qiong should be translated as “poor,” but I chose to translate it as
“poverty” in order to convey this meaning more clearly in English in which poor more
connotations that I understand qiong to have in Chinese.
15
Another source counts 2,000 displaced households. See Li Heng 2001.
16
I am using this term based on Li Zhang’s (XX) definition in her study of making a
community among Beijing’s non-hukou residents from Zhejiang Province in living and
working in Beijing.
28
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Glossary of Chinese Terms
4