You have to go back a few decades to experience the old romantic city of Shanghai. It was a city with heart, style and life. Shanghai is now pitching to recover it's lost glories as one of the world's great cities.. but something is missing.

Ive known Shanghai only for a dozen years or so. And read accounts and talked to some of the old men who remember Shanghai in much earlier times.

To visit today, Shanghai is what Malaysians call rojak. An opportunistic mix of fruit usually topped with a sickly sweet sauce.

It's hard not to be impressed, even for a Rat jaded by the modernity of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. The cityscape is impressive, but increasingly like Singapore and now even Kuala Lumpur the soul of the city and people is being sucked out by commercialism and materialism. Neighbourhoods are raped by new development. A polluted mess ala Bangkok threatens. It is a city where, being in offically atheist China, you cannot thank God, but only the all-powerful government. For both Marx and Mao knew that there could be no God greater than the State for their misguided schemes to work. China's government has dropped the "anti-capital" plank of communism, but not the rest.

Indian based BusinessWeek bureau cheif Kriplani sums it up well in An Indian's Epiphany in China:

And then I realized something: I felt little heart and soul in Shanghai. Shanghai was all head, and the head works. The soul may be there, but to a first-time visitor the glitter and consumerism dominate.

Maybe someday, in both countries, the two great strengths of Asia -- heart and head -- will meet.

Well said...

Shanghai may well reclaim it's lost claim of becoming one of world's top business cities. After all it was commerce that created it's first incarnation. To be one of world's great cities, however, will take some spirit. Some art - some culture - some good old fashioned larrikanism....

"Shanghaied" means to be "kidnapped, drugged and taken for compulsory service on a ship". This time, let's hope it is not the Chinese elite themselves that serve a different opium to the people..