Shanghai: Introduction: Overview

In 1966, when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, he chose China’s former capital of vice, Shanghai, as the first place to excise the “four olds” (old customs, old habits, old culture and old ideas). The city that had once been known as the Paris of the Orient—thanks to its European-style boulevards and the fashionable folk from around the world who strolled them in the 1920s—became an example of hard-line Maoist reform. Foreigners who visited in the 1970s remember it as a place where everyone seemed to shuffle disconsolately along decaying streets in drab blue uniforms. Today, Shanghai is the heartbeat of the new capitalist superpower, a city that Merrill Lynch recently predicted would consume 20 percent of the world’s luxury goods by 2009. Already there are more cell-phone users in China than there are citizens of the United States.