RED CHINA: The Long Decade

Ten years ago last week, the word sped swiftly through Shanghai: “Palu tao-le [The Communists have come] ” Along the narrow streets, through the scrupulously landscaped European concessions, onto the wide Bund fronting the busy Whangpoo River, swarmed the small neat soldiers in mustard-colored uniforms. The uneasy Red conquerors turned a startled gaze on the Western-style skyscrapers, the banks and private clubs and cabarets of the greatest city on the Asian mainland (pop. 5,000,000), which had just fallen to them without a fight.

Bastard Daughter. Though the Nationalist soldiers had fled, the Communists were not left without opponents. Let the Reds do their damnedest, boasted cocky Shanghailanders, we will change them before they change us. Big, brawling and unpredictable, the “bastard daughter of the West and China,” proud of its reputation as the noisiest, wickedest, dirtiest and most vital city in the world, Shanghai was long accustomed to swift alternations of luck. Its quick-witted citizens viewed other Chinese as yokels. Though impressed by the discipline of the Red troops,

Shanghai was soon laughing condescendingly at jokes about Communist peasant soldiers washing their hands and faces in unfamiliar toilet bowls.

The Reds had links with Shanghai, too, but no liking for it. The Communist Party of China was Shanghai-born in 1921; Red leaders, including Chou En-lai and Liu Shao-chi, had fought in its streets for control of the city workers—and lost. Mao Tse-tung viewed Shanghai with suspicion, believed that it was the “City of the Five Too-Manys”: too many rascals, robbers, opium smokers, thieves and prostitutes.

The first instinct of the Red rulers was to let the city wither and die as a hated symbol of capitalism. The busy docks, which had berthed as many as 30 ships a day, stood empty; factories were stripped of machinery; efforts were made to reduce Shanghai’s “swollen and unreasonable” population by deporting surplus workers to the provinces. A wave of suicides swept the city. Foreigners, who had once numbered 60,000, dwindled to a handful (there are now fewer than 100 Westerners, of whom 53 are British), while the Reds confiscated millions of dollars’ worth of Western holdings.

All that had been colorful and lively went grey and quiet. The Race Course became a sedate People’s Park; the famed Shanghai Club, where British merchants had dozed over month-old copies of the London Times, a seamen’s club; Blood Alley, where sailors used to break each other’s heads in chauvinistic brawls, resounded only to the click of chopsticks in cooperative noodle shops. Bars and dance halls and opium dens closed down; prostitutes and beggars vanished from the newly swept streets.

Mistakes in Typing. But grey though Shanghai became, it was still gayer than the rest of China. Thousands of “volunteer” workers were shipped out to forced labor, but hundreds of thousands of desperate peasants poured in. The population leaped from 5,000,000 to 7,000,000. By 1956, the baffled Reds gave up trying to reduce Shanghai. Factories were restored, new industries developed. Satellite towns housing 200,000 workers grew up on the city’s expanding outskirts.

It was all done by the numbers. Gongs clanged in the streets at 6:30 a.m., routing out the sleepy citizens for calisthenics. Wall boards in shops and factories blossomed with depressing socialist criticism: “Miss Wang makes too many mistakes in typing,” “Mr. Chung spends too much time in the toilet.” Workers “volunteered” to come to the job an hour early, stay an hour late without extra pay.

Crowed Vice Mayor Chang last month: “In the ten years since liberation, Shanghai has changed from a consumer city to a center of production. Its filth and vice, once notorious the world over, have given place to cleanliness and a healthy atmosphere.” Shanghai boasted it produced 1,990,000 bales of cotton yarn a year or “more than the entire output of Great Britain.” Steel, machine tools and turbines poured from the new mills. Determined to make Shanghai “more beautiful than New York,” the Reds built ten new parks, claim to have planted the incredible number of 80 million trees in 1958 alone.

Old China hands, revisiting Shanghai, concede its growing industrial might and its new cleanliness. Earthen spittoons alternate in the streets with litter baskets. A woman may walk alone at night, unthinkable in the old Shanghai, without being assaulted, though she risks being picked up by police patrols making block-by-block searches to arrest anyone without proper papers.

Rare Smile. But the impertinent, self-assured Shanghailander of the past has disappeared. A longtime resident who recently left the city describes its people as “timid rabbits” who rarely smile or speak to their neighbors. Explained one Shanghailander: “You never know what’s happened to your friend since you last saw him. You also avoid speaking to him for fear you might get into trouble tomorrow, and then he would be hauled in too.”

Food queues outside the shops begin before dawn. Eggs are virtually unattainable, and the ten-day meat ration has just been cut from four to two ounces, and sugar from five to three ounces. There are no sweets or cooking fats, and rice is uniformly adulterated with millet, and flour with sweet potatoes. Typically, the tenth anniversary of the “liberation” of Shanghai was celebrated last week with political films and plays, discussion groups and, most important, a new “emulation campaign to raise production,” a bit of Communist jargon that translates “work harder or else.”