THE ‘NEW
WORLD’ OF THE 21ST CENTURY
The
greatest “Wow” factor in the world today is. . .the explosion of China. None of the words, statistics or pictures
illustrating its metamorphosis can provide a full understanding of what is
happening there. Its “wow” factor
cannot be described. You have to see it and feel it for yourself.
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SHANGHAI'S
HIGH RISE.
It grows while you are watching- skyscrapers shooting out of an eon's old swamp.
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More than
600 seasoned world travellers, most of whom had visited China probably several
times before 1994, were back there last month to take a new look.
Retired
millionaires, stockbrokers, doctors, engineers, architects and lawyers from
across the Western world looked twice as they sailed into Shanghai, and reacted
with exclamations ranging from
‘incredible!’ to ‘astonishing!’ .
Later, most
of them did so again after disembarking at Tianjin.
Tianjin? It
is not a remarkable city. It is hardly
bigger than greater Johannesburg (except that it has a million more
residents). It has grown no faster than
Johannesburg’s new northern business district in the 14 years since both leapt
into transition after1994. The difference is Tianjin is the sea’s gateway to
Beijing. The new freeway between the two is transformed into a triumphal gateway to
Beijing’s Olympic Games. Millions of
tall transplanted trees, several ranks wide have suddenly appeared, supported
by millions of wooden cages – over a distance of 115 kms.
Welcome to
the Olympics.
They may be
overshadowed this year by the new and startling deeds of China itself, but
media coverage of the venue of the Games is likely to cause gasps around the
globe.
The last
time I visited China’s capital was in 1992, soon after the student revolt was
publicly crushed in Tiananmen Square. I
was staying in one of Beijing’s tallest
buildings, the Shangri La hotel. No
skyscrapers to be seen. No motor traffic, except for a few ancient buses. A
tangled mass of bicycles filled every space on the double highway in front of
the hotel.
By coincidence I was back in the renovated (and double-sized) Shangri La
the other day. The hotel was hard to find among the high-rises that have
mushroomed on all sides. Now there are pedestrian bridges spanning ten lanes of
trams, buses, taxis and hooting cars on this periphery of the city.
Beijing, in
just 14 years, has stretched itself and has jumped into the future.
However,
for Westerners, Shanghai is incontrovertibly the biggest “wow”. The epicentre of its explosive growth is, or
was, a giant, eons-old swamp. Now standing upon it is Shanghai’s latest hotel –
the world’s highest. The foundations of the building go down 100 metres (a
depth equivalent to 25 storeys) into the mud. Upon this solid, waterproofed
base stand 58 storeys of shops and offices. On top of these 58 levels are
poised another 30 floors containing the hotel. This building is no longer the
highest in Shanghai. Another is rising above the same ancient swamp to more
than 100 storeys, among the world’s highest.
It is a sheer glass tower with a hole near the top to negate seasonal
typhoons.
The old
colonial trading post of Shanghai now has an official population of 15 million
– plus a “temporary workforce” numbering one-and-a-half times Johannesburg’s
entire population. The migrant workers are needed to maintain the compulsive
growth of a city which deserves to be China’s biggest. But, no. Hongkong still
stands tall, and its neighbour Guangzhou, in China’s most populous state,
rivals Shanghai by claiming to be China’s ‘technological capital’, with the
highest GDP in the nation. But
Chongqing is definitely biggest.
Chongqing?
Well, it now has a population twice as big as Shanghai’s – over 32 million. It
is a sprawling metropolis with more people than there are black Africans in all
of South Africa.
Shanghai
refuses to be overshadowed, however. It
is becoming the world’s leading powerhouse, and you can see why as you sail
from the new city centre down the estuary to the ocean. Mile after mile of
shipbuilding yards shoulder aside steel mills, cement factories and heavy
industrial plants all seeking space near the waterfront. Behind them, clusters of
Manhattan-style skyscrapers rise to every horizon. Freighters, tankers and
barges queue up on the broad waterway like rush-hour road traffic.
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After a few
hours sailing, you can still see the line of giant cranes stretching to the
horizon along the shore of the East China Sea. You can sense this powerhouse
sucking up the mineral resources of Earth. You can see, often smell, the
poisonous pall of pollution hanging over Shanghai’s huge factories. |
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Statistics
give little comprehension of China’s growth in these 14 years of transition.
Instead let me describe modern Shanghai this way:
If you were
to scatter across Shanghai the 50 tallest buildings in Africa (with the
exception possibly of the Great Pyramids), you might have difficulty in ever
finding them. Shanghai has built six
thousand high-rises recently.
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For every
“wow” there is also a massive problem in China. And a million Chinese puzzles.
How to lift
nearly a billion peasants out of their pigsties and into their futuristic
cities? How to adjust to excruciating growing pains? How to cope with the
pollution that is killing thousands of
people every month?. How to keep in check her rapacious appetite for the
world’s raw materials, and hide her dominant form of financial colonialism in
Africa and Latin America?. How to find the skills to lead, instead of copy, the
Western world?
Of course
there are some answers. Education programmes are stupendous, and Chinese
students, paid for by the state, are flooding all the best universities of the
West, a Stanford professor told us. China is also buying the best foreign
brains it can find. While it is moving steadily towards being the most modern
state in the world, its new preoccupation is to save the edifices of its
4,000-year-old unbroken culture, even in the centre of skyscraper cities that
are often only a decade old.
It is not
only China that is engaged in an economic revolution. From the highest spires
of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and the tallest towers of Seoul in Korea
(“fifth biggest city on Earth”) to the
101-storey ‘pagoda’ and the elegant boulevards of Taipei, the leading cities of
the East are rising rapidly in state-of-the-art splendour.
The ancient
Orient, it seems, is due to become the “New World” within decades. Perhaps as
soon as 2030.
[See ‘China
Growth’ and “China Shopping’] |
