"Shanghai’s Past, Hong Kong’s Future"
From Public Books:
Sometimes, when a city changes,
residents are suddenly forced to ask themselves hard questions: Should
we stay, or cut our losses and leave to start afresh somewhere else?
Will this place still be enough like the community we love in a year or a
decade to make it worth sticking it out? If we don’t leave now and
things get worse, will we still be able to get out? Even if we’re okay
now, what about our children? And all these personal questions boil down
to bigger ones: What does it mean for a city to be free? What happens
when a free city loses its freedom? And when does that occur?
Seventy-one years ago today, these questions were being asked by many
residents of the most cosmopolitan city on the China coast: Shanghai.
Some had considered leaving in 1937, when the Japanese took over all
Chinese-run parts of Shanghai, and again in 1941, when the city’s two
enclaves of foreign privilege, the International Settlement and the
French Concession, fell to Japan. But they had stayed, only to face a
choice early in 1949, when the Red Army advanced toward the great
metropolis of the Yangtze Delta. While many locals welcomed the
Communist Party’s arrival, others, Chinese and non-Chinese alike, feared
that their way of life would be dramatically changed once Mao Zedong’s
forces took over, and changed for the worse. As the first battles
outside the city began on May 12, 1949, those who had remained surely
wondered if they’d made a mistake.
Seven decades later, the same questions are being asked again, but in
Hong Kong. In the Pearl River Delta’s most cosmopolitan city, the
people asking the questions today might have pondered leaving in 1984,
when Beijing and London made the deal that would change a British colony
into a part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). They also might
have considered leaving at other, later points, including before July 1,
1997, the day of the Handover. Today—as the mainland government warns
that it is losing patience with locals seeking to defend the liberties
and legal protections that make their city markedly different from all
mainland ones, protesters battle with police after nearly a year of
struggle, and the novel coronavirus disrupts daily life and the economic
activities that make the city’s unique lifestyle possible—Hong Kong
residents may be wondering again if they’ve made a mistake.
Hong Kong and Shanghai are connected by more than just history: they
have long competed for the crown of the China coast’s most worldly,
wealthy, and cosmopolitan city (even during eras when racism and
segregation limited the freedoms of many of their residents). And each
one’s successes have been matched by the other’s downturns. For a time,
Shanghai was an open and prosperous city far outstripping its sleepy
colonial counterpart—before 1949. But as Shanghai suffered under Maoist
rule, Hong Kong prospered. Both have triumphed when they remained open
to outside finance and outside cultures; both have turned stagnant when
denied access to the world.
Therefore, the story of Hong Kong and Shanghai isn’t simply a
defining story of the last two centuries of Chinese history. It is
really the story of all world cities around the globe today: how they
thrive and how they decline.
Twin CitiesThe histories of Shanghai and Hong Kong have long
been entangled, sometimes running on parallel tracks, sometimes
diverging sharply. Since the Opium War (1839–1842), colonialism and
commerce have linked the cities (each of which is the focus of a book
that each of us has just finished writing).
After that conflict, the triumphant Britons forced the Qing Dynasty
(1644–1912) to open Shanghai to European trade, creating a foreign-run
enclave that developed into the “International Settlement” at the city’s
center, and also to transform Hong Kong into a British colony. For
decades—a period lasting until 1949, which Chinese leaders and mainland
textbooks call a “century of humiliation”—the two cities, twinned by
empire, vied with each other for primacy.
The story of the region’s leading bank illustrates the tight
interconnection between these two cities. The first two initials of HSBC
stand for the pair of ports, which make its full title the Hongkong and
Shanghai Banking Corporation (the official British spelling for its
colony was as a single word). Throughout most of the “century of
humiliation,” the bank’s official headquarters was in Hong Kong; indeed,
HSBC continues to issue the city’s bank notes. Even so, the most
important branch was on the Bund in Shanghai, in a spectacular building
that in the early 1900s was as grand as any structure in any city on the
Pacific....
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