The Ideal City

When the Communists seized Shanghai, the world wondered how its new masters would cope with the city's violent melee of crowds and commerce, swept together from east & west by winds of empire, trade and war. From Shanghai last week, TIME Correspondent Robert Doyle cabled:

Three months after the Communist takeover, the once booming, bustling, bawdy metropolis is dying. Shanghai has been withered by Nationalist blockade, damaged by flood and typhoon, weakened by arrogant Red treatment of its foreign businessmen and consulates. Brisk, bald General Chen Yi, Shanghai's new Red mayor, standing on a platform in front of a huge oil portrait of Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung, told a handpicked group of "Shanghai representatives" what the Communists propose to do.*

Shanghai's past prosperity, he cried, had been built on an "infamous union of imperialism and compradores." Of 6,000,000 people in the city, barely half were engaged in "productive" labor. Therefore, the remedy was to cut its population in half, to change it from "a consumptive to a productive" place by uprooting non-productive citizens and sending them back to the land. Echoed one Red paper: "The ideal city of modern times is the 'garden city,' where the population should not be too large."

The Frugal City. The Communist plan fell into several stages. Decentralization would not only move out "nonproducers" but shift factories to the interior, where they would be closer to food, raw materials and coal. What remained of Shanghai would be turned "inward," i.e., weaned away from dependence upon foreign trade.

Workers were politely but firmly reminded that wage demands would have to be "compatible" with production--a reflection of official Communist concern with "liberated" labor's cry for more pay. Further, party members and intellectuals would be mobilized for trips into the countryside to re-educate peasants who are balking at high Communist taxes and taking to banditry and guerrilla forays.

Finally, all citizens would have to tighten belts, practice extreme thrift and frugality. Thundered Ta Kung Pao: "The rest of China is poor, but Shanghai looks wealthy. The rest of China lives a spare and simple life, but Shanghai indulges in luxury. The time has come for this abnormal situation to be corrected."

The Dying City. Despite Ta Rung Pao's complaint, Shanghai was well on the way to becoming an economic graveyard. Industrial production was down an estimated 50%, and still falling. "The Chin Chong Iron Works," read an item in the press, "is trying to sell electric fans for 30,000 jenminpiao each (about $12 U.S.), which is only sufficient to cover labor costs, but there are no buyers."

Since the automobile license fee was upped to $50 U.S. monthly, more than 9,000 automobiles have vanished from the streets; gasoline is $3 U.S. a gallon. In Shanghai's curio bazaar, where foreign visitors used to throng, merchants slump disconsolately beside their stalls or aimlessly play Chinese checkers. In once-thriving jewelry stores on Nanking Road, where intricately wrought gold ornaments and glistening jade once brought handsome prices, merchants have turned to selling soap, DDT, medicines, towels and underwear. Of 136 factories that formerly made headily scented cosmetics, only 30 are in operation, and they are engaged exclusively in manufacturing toothpaste.

The Simplified City. First of the "nonproductive" elements to be driven from the city would be its ragged, half-starved refugees. Through three years of civil war they had fled before the Red tide, which had finally caught up with them. They had funneled into the city to set up dirty, mat-shed colonies. They had lived by begging or scratching in garbage piles. Already, said Communist authorities, 400,000 refugees had left the city--half "voluntarily," the remainder "sent." Still to go were more than 1,000,000 refugee landowners, "loafers" or petty black-marketeers, paupers, unemployed factory hands and dismissed government workers.

"All kinds of worries" were in the minds of the refugees, reported the Communist Liberation Daily. "Some even thought the government was trying to chase them away, with the result that they didn't dare accept the flour given to them as relief after the [recent] typhoon, for fear of being obliged to leave Shanghai." To soothe them, a Red directive called for propaganda and education, promised a magnanimous attitude toward refugee landowners if they would "repent of their mistakes and engage in production."

For those who have lost government jobs because of a Communist "economy" wave in administration, the Communists had coined a new euphemism. What Chinese used to call bluntly tsai yuan (cutting personnel) has become ching chien ("considered simplification" of office personnel).

Ching chien would undoubtedly provide more & more Shanghai Chinese with one-way tickets to the country, until the fabulous crowds thinned out, and Shanghai becomes an ideal city.

* In another speech, on the anniversary of V-J day, Mayor Chen Yi revealed a striking historical fact, hitherto known only to some of the more eager Communist scholars. Said he: "On this day, four years ago, Soviet Russia defeated Japan and brought the second World War to a conclusion."

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