Classes and Class Struggle in China

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[from ["Jay Moore" <pieinsky@xxxxxxxxxxx>]]

In Shanghai, Capitalist Development Surrounds Communist Shrine
NYT, July 17, 2001

SHANGHAI China's Communist Party is celebrating its 80th anniversary this
month as the gap widens between its increasingly anachronistic
pronouncements and the reality those words struggle to describe.
.
Nowhere is that paradox more pointed than at the site of the party's
founding meeting. In a few years, according to current development plans,
the building in which Mao and 14 comrades plotted the eradication of
capitalism will be part of a small, gray-brick island surrounded by office
towers bearing the names of some of the world's biggest corporations.
.
Already the modest brick house sits in the middle of a new, upscale
entertainment quarter designed by Ben Wood, one of the architects behind the
restoration of Faneuil Hall in Boston, otherwise known as the Cradle of
Liberty. One block behind the Communist Party site, a Starbucks serves
frozen lattes, and one block in front, a McDonald's will soon be serving
burgers.
.
The entertainment quarter, dubbed "New Heaven and Earth" by Vincent Lo, the
Hong Kong property tycoon behind the project, is just one corner of his
company's 52-hectare (129-acre) redevelopment plan.
.
The project is transforming the heart of old Shanghai from a teeming
proletarian residential neighborhood into a landscaped corporate park and
luxury housing complex where private homes will sell for millions of
dollars.
.
Henry Cheng, who oversees the project, said no one in the government had
mentioned the incongruity of the birthplace of Chinese communism being
cradled in capitalism's mighty palm. But he said the city had gone to great
lengths to ensure that none of the planned high-rises would be visible from
the doorstep of the First Congress Meeting Hall, the current name of the
building where the first Chinese Communists met. The view will be blocked by
the second-story roof lines of the surrounding buildings, deliberately
preserved to give the impression of an intact neighborhood.
.
The contradiction is not lost, though, on many of the residents being forced
to make way for the urban renewal.
.
Just one block from the site of the founding meeting, Song Houfu, 55, a
laid-off factory worker, sat in his shabby, one-room apartment on the second
floor of a half-demolished building and groused about how the party had
changed.
.
He said it was wrong to surround such an important party shrine with so much
capitalism, though he does not oppose development in general.
.
His real complaint is with the compensation the city is offering him to
leave. He wants to stay in the centrally located neighborhood, where he
shares a 24-square-meter (260-square-foot) room with his wife and
20-year-old daughter, rather than move to the outskirts of the city, where
the government is offering him an apartment. The government has offered him
money instead, but it is far too little to buy a place in the same area once
the development is done.
.
"They want to buy from me at planned-economy prices but sell to me at
market-economy prices," he said.
.
In fact, Mr. Song has little choice but to accept the government's offer.
The city has already moved scores of families to make way for the
restaurants and shops that now stand around the party's birthplace. Most
recently it relocated 3,800 families in 43 days to raze about four hectares
for a lake and a park that will someday divide the area's high-end offices
from its high-end housing. The city wanted the lake finished before the
party's birthday.
.
Mr. Lo's development company would also have torn down the old buildings
immediately surrounding the party's first meeting place, had it not been
encouraged to preserve the integrity of the block so that the site would not
look entirely abandoned.
.
Instead, the company dismantled nearly two hectares of gray-brick buildings
typical of the city's 1920s architecture, cleaned the bricks, dug
foundations, installed septic tanks and rebuilt the buildings in their
original style, though their interiors are now spacious and modern and house
trendy shops. Vidal Sassoon has opened a hair salon there, and Jackie Chan
has opened a restaurant.
.
So while busloads of political pilgrims - as many as 5,000 a day - troop
through the room where the Communist Party is said to have held its first
meeting on July 23, 1921, and ogle such party memorabilia as a pair of Mao's
white cotton swimming trunks (with a 203-centimeter seat), Chinese yuppies
and Western expatriates get fancy haircuts and eat expensive cuisine just
one or two buildings away.