will be able to stand in People’s Square and guess whether tanks will squash them and also run downstairs and buy a pair of Guess? jeans so they’ll be dressed for the occasion. There was so much scaffolding in Shanghai that when I saw a framework of bamboo poles holding nets over a sapling, I thought, “Christ, they’re building trees.” Actually not. Miles of once-shady streets have been timbered to make way for steel and glass. Although new trees were being planted. I counted a dozen. And at least two parks hadn’t been completely paved. Not that Shanghai has turned its back on nature. The downtown freeway overpasses, stacked four deep, had little flowering window boxes hanging from their guardrails. Like Hong Kong, Shanghai began as an enclave of market freedom—albeit market freedom imposed by military force (the way we’ve tried to impose it in Cuba several times). Both Hong Kong and Shanghai were “concession ports” granted by the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 after the first opium war. Hong Kong belonged to Britain, but Shanghai belonged to practically everybody. A slew of foreigners threw together the Shanghai city administration, described thus in a 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry: “As there are now fourteen treaty powers represented at Shanghai, there are consequently fourteen district courts sitting side by side, each administering the law for its own nationality.” Recipe, if ever there was, for a failed civic soufflé—which rose anyhow. China was experiencing one of its 4,200 consecutive years of bad government. Imagine a ruling elite so lousy that fourteen Western political systems all operating at the same time wouldn’t be worse—fourteen Jesse Helmses curling your hair in the Senate, twenty-eight Bills and Hillarys bloviating at the White House, and seventy people yelling at each other on the McLaughlin Group. But Hong Kong and Shanghai were havens for personal and substantial liberty on a continent where everyone’s person and substance had always belonged to the emperor, the warlord, or the man with the largest hatchet. And they were havens for overseas merchants and Chinese natives alike. Even in 1885, seventeen of the top eighteen taxpayers in Hong Kong were Chinese. Until the communist takeover in 1949, Shanghai was the more important of the two cities. It was one of the few deepwater ports on the China coast not cut off from the interior by mountains or crabby peasant rebellions. And its central location, where the Huangpu empties into the mouth of the Yangtze, made it the
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