Enlarge Photo

No other city in the world is changing as quickly as Shanghai. The city sprawls over 2,448 square miles and is home to an estimated 20 million people. In the past fifteen years, more than 5,000 skyscrapers have been built in the city (so many in the Bund area that one newspaper recently reported that it is sinking 1.2 inches a year). The energy and ambition of its citizens make New Yorkers look laid-back. Regular visitors marvel at how entire neighborhoods emerge in a few months’ time. The city Shanghai is most often said to resemble is Metropolis, the futuristic city of Batman comics, but critics note that the gleaming buildings will not establish a truly great city if the people who inhabit them do not have guaranteed freedoms.

I experienced awe at what has been built—the flower boxes that line the freeways and the miles of clipped hedges along the highway on the drive from the airport alone are staggering when you think of the horticultural manpower. But I also found it disconcerting when I spoke to the very Western-looking Shanghainese about the Communist Party’s one-child policy. They acknowledge that many more families have sons than daughters; they don’t discuss how this happens. They recognize how wonderful it can be for their children to have four grandparents doting on their only child but also worry about the competitive pressure to secure a spot at university. Many Chinese still live next door to a neighbor whose reports were responsible for a relative’s torture or time in jail. “They do not exact revenge,” one expat told me. “They have been told that those years were a ‘mind error’ and that we have to move on.” And it’s not just bulldozers and cranes that have commanded these streets. Tanks rolled into People’s Square (also called Renmin Square) in June 1989 during the Tiananmen Square protests, and some demonstrators were shot.

It’s an interesting time to see this city as it races toward the future and away from the past. In fact, so little of the past can be seen, you may find yourself a bit nostalgic for what has been lost. I know I did.