The Tale Of Two Cities

By Hannah Beech/Shanghai

When the municipality of Shanghai invited the city's leading society figures to a sneak preview of its new art museum last month, more than a celebration of culture was involved. Scheduled to open in November, the colonial-era building once used as a police storeroom and now renovated with state-of-the-art lighting and sleek marble and wood walls is also part of a challenge by the country's largest commercial city to Beijing for the title of China's cultural capital. The multimillion-dollar Shanghai Art Museum, which houses traditional and contemporary Chinese paintings, was only the latest major new public building in a spree that has transformed the coastal megalopolis. Just two years ago, the visiting Cleveland Orchestra had to play in a Shanghai gymnasium because there was no suitable auditorium. But today the city boasts the new art space; the elegant Shanghai Museum for antiquities; the luminous $150 million Grand Theater and concert hall; and the Shanghai Library, with one of the largest collections in the world. A $200 million science center is scheduled to open in 2001. "Shanghai's museums and cultural centers don't just aim to be the best in China," says Chen Xiejun, executive director of the Shanghai Museum. "We're competing to be among the best in the world."

So, as it happens, is Beijing. Without fanfare, crews in the capital last month started construction of Beijing's National Theater, a glitzy, $420 million monument to modernity just minutes from the imperial splendor of the Forbidden City. Designed by French architect Paul Andreu, the voluptuous glass and titanium complex will encompass an opera house, a 2,500-seat conventional theater, an experimental theater complete with rotating stage, and a 2,000-seat concert hall. The cultural overhaul has taken nearly a half-century to get under way: former Premier Zhou Enlai first conceived of a national stage in 1958, but plans languished during both the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and the no-frills practicality of the Deng Xiaoping era. It took President Jiang Zemin to convince the country's leaders that Beijing needed to replace its fraying theaters with a new cultural landmark. It is the city's biggest public cultural landmark since Mao Zedong's mausoleum was built in 1977.

The public arts spending plans are a sure sign of bureaucratic rivalry that might strike outsiders as an oddity in a country whose Communist Party exercises sole authority. But prestige and commerce are both at stake, and the competition reflects the continuing tension in China over what will define the future: power politics or flashy commerce. Beijing sorely needs a stellar arts complex if it hopes to continue drawing the topflight international performers who have begun flocking to Shanghai's Grand Theater. One of Beijing's major venues, the Great Hall of the People, is such an acoustic nightmare that Luciano Pavarotti despaired for the future of opera in the capital. By contrast, in March when Chinese composer Tan Dun presided over the national premiere at the Grand Theater of his tragic opera The Gate, which recounts the doomed affairs of Chinese, Italian and Japanese lovers, operagoers were thrilled by the crystalline sound. "There's nowhere in Beijing that could have done justice to this performance," says accountant Ellen Tan, who paid $85 for her ticket--more than the average Chinese makes in a month. "The audience would be full of bureaucrats who wouldn't know when to clap."

But the bureaucrats, still know how to obstruct things when they wish. When Chinese-American cellist Yo-Yo Ma was scheduled to join the Tan Dun extravaganza, Beijing reminded Shanghai that all international performers had to be vetted by the Ministry of Culture. Two weeks before the performance, Beijing was still dithering. "The Shanghai government had already submitted the application," says Jane Huang, executive director of the Committee of 100 Cultural Institute, which organized the event. "But with Beijing taking so long, Ma had other commitments and had to postpone."

And forget about financial help from Beijing. While some other regional theaters receive central-government subsidies, the Grand Theater gets nothing. That means that while performances in Beijing are packed with freeloading senior cadres and official media types, Shanghai must find paying customers and corporate sponsors. One of the foremost supporters is Shanghai businessman Bonko Chan, 36, who has almost singlehandedly revived the city's cultural scene. Son of a Communist bigwig, the flamboyant, self-styled impresario runs Jinhai-Jet International Transportation, a cargo- and freight-forwarding subsidiary of a state-owned conglomerate that operates in 12 cities and had 1999 revenues of $200 million in Shanghai alone. Last year, as part of Jinhai's advertising budget, he donated $1.8 million to opera, ballet and art exhibits. Chan's real passion is opera, and he has funded performances of half a dozen works in Shanghai, including Aida and La Traviata. "I made a $100 bet with friends that I could bring world-class opera to Shanghai," he says. "I won the bet, but I spent half a million dollars in the process."

For the moment, Beijing is still a bigger draw for young artists and performers, though the lack of space limits many dance and music troupes to one or two shows a year. "It's hard to be a young artist in Shanghai because the city is so expensive," says Lorenz Helbling, owner of Shanghart Gallery, one of the city's few private art spaces. More important, snobbish Beijing prides itself on being culturally hip and encourages a vibrant jazz scene, avant-garde performance art and stylish modern dance. Shanghai's conservative cultural czars are loath to entertain politically touchy fare, and because there are fewer artists in the city, censors can exercise tighter control. "If a writer wants to publish something with sensitive content, he'll have much better luck trying in Beijing," says Wang Zhousheng, a writer and associate research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Sciences.

Shanghai's entrenched Establishment has blocked several big-name modernist events. When Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra toured China in February, the city's political leadership nearly barred the Grammy-winning Marsalis from performing at the Shanghai Center Theater. Jazz, they sniffed, just wasn't serious enough to merit such an exclusive venue. Marsalis faced no problem in the capital. "In Beijing there are so many cadres from so many different ministries that we could play them off one another," says a promoter involved with the event. "In Shanghai the channels were much narrower, so there was less room for negotiation."

Ultimately, the question is whether Shanghai's money will win out over Beijing's authority. Awash with cash, Shanghai is perpetually dabbling in marquee-name ventures that don't alarm political censors. A splashy Shanghai Biennale is planned for November to showcase contemporary artists from China and elsewhere, and composer Tan Dun has agreed to a China premiere of his next opera, Tea, in Shanghai in 2002 (with help from Bonko Chan and his advertising team). "Beijing will always be the cultural center of China," says Chan. "But with money to import top stars, Shanghai has the potential to be the international arts capital of Asia." Such a Solomonic division isn't likely to dampen the rivalry. But at least it provides the possibility of a kind of cultural dynamism that few living Chinese can remember.