Susan Buckland: Shedding shackles in Shanghai

COMMENT

Citizens of China have been receiving some good news. From October 1 they no longer need state permission to marry or divorce. And Shanghai citizens can get a passport without first obtaining permission from a state employer or the police. This should apply to every city in China by 2005.

I feel sure that Gao Da, a Shanghai guide who showed me around the city, will welcome these changes, especially for his son, the only child the Government allowed him to have. But for Da, the erosion of such controls cannot come fast enough.

Da was born in 1949, the year Mao Zedong "liberated" Shanghai. Then, when barely a teenager, he watched the Red Guards raid his parents' home to burn their cherished English classics.

In his 20s he was given the option of marrying or moving to a poorer province to become an agricultural labourer. Once married he was told to have only one child or suffer the economic penalties dished out by the One Child per Family Inspectorate.

When we met he told me he wanted to visit New Zealand but at that stage he still needed his boss' permission. "I am freer, but not as free as you," he said.

After I returned home he posted a story he had written about his parents' efforts to hide their books in English text from the Red Guards.

In unusually good English he described how during "the disastrous Cultural Revolution" (1966 to 1976), the guards, many of whom were former students of his mother, said the books were part of the "four olds"(old culture, old ideology, old habits, and old customs), and destroyed many of them.

"I knew my mother felt a lot of deep pain in her heart," writes Da. "She and I carried the English novels on a bicycle to a salvage store. In her school days she and her brother had bought them one by one with the little money they had saved painstakingly from their lunch money.

"Their signatures and purchase dates were written on the title pages. Even when they were fleeing the Japanese during World War II they had carried the books with them.

"At the store my mother looked at the title page affectionately as if she were bidding farewell to a dear friend and decided to keep some of these books at any cost. That left a lasting impression.

"I promised my mother I would begin to study English diligently so that someday I would be able to read the books that had survived the disasters. With this my mother held me in her arms and I saw tears in her eyes. At that moment I felt the whole world icy cold and only she was warm."

Da knew I was interested in Shanghai's pre-Cultural Revolution days, so he also sent me The Bund Then and Now, another book he had written.

Built on opium, silk and tea pre-Mao, Shanghai was the busiest port in Asia. Variously called the Paris of China and Whore of the East, the city revelled in entrepreneurs, exploitation and vice. Success led to excess and finally to Mao. The Red Guards chased the foreigners from the neo-classical buildings and the sumptuous Cathay Hotel (now the Peace Hotel) on the Bund (river-front road) and moved in.

A great reawakening of Shanghai began in 1990. Since then Beijing has poured money into the city. Skyscrapers have rocketed. Foreign multinationals now have their names spread over them in neon lights. Ships queue in the harbour and the docks teem with trade.

Da has sent me a copy of an article he wrote about the massive Yangpu bridge across Shanghai's Huangpu River. The equivalent of 17 storeys high it allows ships of up to 55,000 tonnes to pass underneath.

With good health Da may well live to see Shanghai become the world's number one container port. And maybe several grandchildren from his single son.