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God held his fire, although existential writer Andre Malraux found Man's Fate (as he titled his famous 1933 novel) in the combine of revolution, decadence and the world's races thrown chaotically together. Shanghai's cleanup fell to Mao after the 1949 revolution, upon which two new cities were born. Old Shanghai would survive only in memoirs, Hollywood film noir and endlessly repeated tales of refugees who found sanctuary in British Hong Kong. Its immediate successor was a gray, Socialist Shanghai, where women were admonished to "love guns and not lipstick." Local writer Pan Ling described the weird, overnight transition: "Strange that so contemporary an experience can vanish so completely--the street names changed, the capitalists fled, the glitter faded."
Shanghai slipped into colorless hibernation, its most glorious moment a two-month period in late 1966 and early 1967 when local radicals nearly hijacked the Cultural Revolution from Mao and his Red Guards. After Deng Xiaoping started China's economic liberalizations in the early 1980s, Shanghai was left deliberately behind: such potent forces of change weren't trusted in China's old intellectual and business powerhouse. Though still an engine of the economy--in 1981 Shanghai accounted for one-sixth of China's industrial output and 20% of its exports--the city had to surrender up to 80% of its collective income to Beijing. It became grayer, dirtier, more crowded, without hope: a historical shadow.
Chen Rong was 23 back in 1981. Life in Shanghai hadn't been easy. Shunted off to live with a childless uncle, he was all but neglected when, a year later, his aunt gave birth to a boy. "I was already asking 'why' when I was five," he recalls. "I contemplated suicide when I was nine." The turning point came when he was 14: "I raised ducks--and earned more cash than my elder brothers." Suddenly Chen found his reason to live. He gave up plans for a career in the People's Liberation Army and opened a clothes shop instead. When Deng started up stock exchanges--the second was in Shanghai--Chen became a stock whiz kid. He now produces equipment for bowling, a sport foreigners introduced to China in 1863. Chen owns a BMW, a Lexus, a stretch Lincoln Continental limo and a Rolls-Royce.
The late Deng expressed few misgivings about the momentous events of the two-decade era that now bears his name, including, in the category of lows, the Tiananmen massacre of 1989. But in 1992, Deng did go public with one regret: Shanghai should have been economically unshackled much sooner. Had he possessed the courage to push for that in the early 1980s, Deng conceded, the pace and depth of China's modernization might have been significantly hastened. Then Deng allowed himself to ponder: "What if?"
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