Chinese university gave us a tour of Pudong,††††† Shanghai’s $36 billion commerce and industry “New Area” across the Huangpu River. We took a bus through a homemade-looking tunnel and arrived in a flat, planned sterility of immense dimensions, the office park as Nebraska. Here and there the landscape was decorated with blandly abstract corporate art. Wiggly steel shapes in red, yellow, and blue rose from the middle of a traffic circle. “What is the meaning of the sculpture?” asked the professor, who answered himself: “I don’t know.” He seemed to be a reasonable guy. He didn’t exactly criticize the government, but he pointed to ranks of new condominiums, unprepossessing with their Plexiglas-screened sunrooms and window air- conditioner units. He said that the condos sold for between $100,000 and $200,000. Or didn’t. Almost all the units were vacant. “Why are these buildings empty?” asked the professor. “Overbuilding and overpriced.” Multinationals were visible in every direction, Shanghai booby-hatch headquarters for Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, Sharp, Coca-Cola, SmithKline Beecham, Hoffmann La Roche, Sony. There was just one thing wrong with this business district—no business. Nobody seemed to be there at all. In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, nothing was going on. We drove up and down empty streets along concrete fences decorated with those international cross-out silhouettes indicating prohibition of this or that: No spitting. No martial arts. No cutting trees. No firecrackers. No breaking the phone. No breaking the phone? Along the ground were miles of conduits that formed into tall pipe arches at every intersection. These were water and waste lines. Pudong had been built on a floodplain only a few feet above sea level, on ground too muddy to dig sewers in. This hadn’t slowed construction. “The floor space of high-rises in Pudong,” said the professor, rolling his eyes slightly, “exceeds New York City.” The real-estate glut in Shanghai is such that prices had already fallen by 30 percent in the first half of 1997. Yet the city’s supply of office space was set to increase by a third in 1998. A free market is a natural evolution of freedom. There’s a missing link in Shanghai. This is not a Darwinian economy where enterprises prosper according to their ability to survive and grow. This is a creationist economy where prosperity is bestowed by a greater power.
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