Who Is Uprooting These "Creatures of the Night"? | The Vanishing Shanghai, Part 2

A street once called Shanghai's "musical skyline" no longer exists. Do a city's landmarks have to be buildings?

Xue Hui, in the black waistcoat and white shirt of an English bartender, sat curled up alone in a dim corner of his own bar, a drink beside him. Business was bad that day. Business had been bad ever since he moved Magpie Bar from Yongkang Road to Wanping Road.

If Magpie were still on Yongkang Road, every day from 5 p.m. until late at night would be Xue Hui's busiest stretch. On this evening, at 6:15, a light rain was falling and Wanping Road held no drinkers — not even anyone with an umbrella. "Not one of my customers is just passing by. This isn't a bar street, after all," Xue Hui said.

Yongkang Road, once packed with bars, was folded into the "Hengfu Historic Area Environmental Improvement" project in May 2016. Within months every bar on the street had been closed or forced out, leaving Xue Hui almost no time to find a new address. Wanping Road was a choice made out of necessity.

Most people haven't noticed, but Shanghai's nightlife has been in real upheaval in the space of a single year. Demolitions and closures carried out in the name of improving the cityscape and reclaiming property have shut down or displaced a long list of venues.

Shanghai's nightlife has a bit of everything. Search for places to go at night in Shanghai and you'll find that regulars have already drawn up long lists, carefully noting how each spot differs from the next. Shanghai reportedly has more bars than any other city in the country — 3,961 of them. The figure comes from the 2016 China Bar Industry Data Analysis Report, whose author, Wei Taiwu, has published several books on business management. The report puts China's total at 55,000 bars in 2016, with Beijing second at 2,372 and Chengdu third at 2,078.

Public figures on nightlife venues are scarce, and the report doesn't say whether these numbers include livehouses, independent music clubs, and nightclub lounges. People come to all of them for drinks, for music of every kind, for company and pleasure — but their styles and their business models differ widely.

As a business, cocktail bars are the rage in Shanghai right now, yet only five or six are actually doing well. Nightclubs do best: on a good night one can take in several hundred thousand yuan, more than an independent music club makes in a year. One thing holds across the board, though. Move once, and a venue never fully recovers.

1

Xue Hui came to Shanghai from Anhui in 2005. Over the next decade he washed glasses, worked as a barback, and became a bartender. Opening Magpie Bar on Yongkang Road counted as his first milestone, the first business of his own. "March 15, 2013, No. 189 Yongkang Road."

The 20-square-meter bar filled Xue Hui's WeChat contacts with all sorts of people and brought him a decent income. He put in 200,000 yuan to start. Over three years only the first month failed to turn a profit; each of the remaining 30-odd months netted 40,000 yuan. His labor costs were almost nothing — one young helper, one cleaning lady, and himself behind the bar. The money was good enough that he bought a car and an apartment in Shanghai, married a Shanghai woman, and had a child. Everything looked smooth.

Now everything has changed, whether or not the move caused it. He got divorced, sold the car, gave the apartment to his ex-wife, and kept the child. The bar no longer earns enough to cover the child's expenses, so the child had to be sent back to their hometown in Anhui.

Xue Hui can reel off the date Magpie opened without pausing, but when asked when it closed he tried twice to remember and couldn't. He seemed to have forgotten that detail on purpose. The process was a sad one, and he got no compensation for it.

A new place was hard to find. Not because the rules are complicated, but because there are no clear rules. In this trade you need a full set of papers — a hygiene permit and a discharge permit from the health and environmental protection bureaus, a "building fire-safety approval certificate" from the fire department, a filing with the cultural bureau — and you also have to find people who can "smooth things over and show you the way in." You can't open on the fifth or sixth floor of a mall; a building that's too tall won't do, a whole building won't do, and a place with no back door or emergency exit won't do either.

"To them it's all the same. Nightlife is bad, full stop," said the operator of an independent music club, who spoke to QDaily on the condition that his name not be used. "I tried to find plenty of people to put in a word [so the club wouldn't have to close], but it just couldn't be fixed," he said. "They think this kind of wine-and-women business has no positive effect at all. Why would they back you?"

Arkham, an independent avant-garde music venue, opened in 2012 and, being in a basement, earned itself a reputation as an "underground warehouse." Four years later, in October 2016, it closed for "unavoidable special reasons." Since then, WeChat official accounts that follow Shanghai nightlife, such as Smart Shanghai, have kept posting updates on its move and reopening. The latest word was that it would open officially around May.

Max Shen, one of Arkham's operators and a DJ himself, usually books performers and sets schedules several months to half a year ahead. The club's abrupt closure last October meant every event Arkham had planned was either canceled or shifted to another club, and the shows that moved nearly all lost money. "But we weren't trying to break even by then. Getting to put the show on at all was already good," Max said.

Rent at Arkham's new address went up by more than 50%. New construction, more staff, dearer drinks — in the end all of it had to be passed to the customer. "What used to cost one yuan now costs five to ten."

Zhang Haisheng and his venue, Yuyintang, went through their own stretch of being pushed from place to place. Yuyintang was one of Shanghai's first rock live-music bars and one of the main stages for independent bands. It started out as a performance company in October 2004 and opened its first rock live-music bar on Longcao Road in Shanghai in 2006.

In May 2007, Zhang Haisheng moved Yuyintang to Kaixuan Road. He is reluctant now to say much about why it closed. But in a statement issued at the time, Yuyintang said: "Because the Yuyintang warehouse does not hold a performance license, that day's show was ordered to stop." "It's like when JZ reopened. Once there's a spending threshold, young people are less likely to come," said Zhang Haisheng, who has been through it.

2

Two months after Arkham closed, The Shelter — nearby on Yongfu Road, known for avant-garde electronic music — closed too, and dramatically.

Hu Lin, a bartender at The Shelter, still remembers that night. "December 30, 2016 was our last night open. The police showed up at 10:30 and told us to cap the crowd. Ten-odd minutes later the manager had the music stopped for a while to cool things down. Then more than ten officers arrived all at once and ordered The Shelter shut, saying it was dangerous. There were still a lot of people waiting out on the street to get in. Once they knew they couldn't, they stood in the street shouting 'Shelter, Shelter.' It was around 1:30 in the morning."

"It was very sad," Hu Lin said.

The Shelter's original address was No. 5 Yongfu Road, a former government civil-defense structure. It could no longer stay because "the government took back the property and decided not to keep running the space."

On the surface it was the government reclaiming property, but Hu Lin knew that even without that, The Shelter might not have lasted much longer. Like the places on Yongkang Road, it had drawn noise complaints from residents, tried talking things through with the neighbors, and even helped install soundproofing.

The bigger reason was that the audience for electronic music was shrinking. "An event used to draw 700 people. Now 200 to 300 is already pretty good," Hu Lin said. Zhang Haisheng mentioned the same slump at independent-music livehouses: "Yuyintang used to get a few hundred people for a single show. Now we get a few tens of thousands in a whole year."

Hu Lin puts it down to "a bad economy — a lot of the old regulars stopped coming." Electronic music is niche to begin with, and many of the "old regulars" she means were foreigners posted to China by multinational companies. As the economy slowed and the multinationals pulled back, a large share of those customers disappeared.

Competition inside the industry has also grown fiercer. Many young people don't know electronic music culture and would rather go to a commercial bar. The two aren't quite the same trade, but the festival-style EDM (electronic dance music) played at those bars has cut into the electronic music The Shelter stood for. The clearest sign: The Shelter had no booth seating at all. It was never a place for socializing.

Hu Lin's favorite story is about a man she noticed who worked in an office building near The Shelter — suit and tie by day, then through the door at night in a hip-hop cap. That was one of the great pleasures of the job: seeing lives other people never see.

Max misses the old Shanghai too.

He has been a DJ in Shanghai since he finished high school, 17 years now, and can no longer count the venues he has played. "The gap between niche culture and the mainstream used to be huge, and people used to be purer about it," he said. "Back then you'd play one record mailed from England every day. Now you can listen to ten albums online. You can't take it seriously anymore."

Max is in his thirties, and many DJs from his day have vanished. "They're all gone, I don't see them anymore," he said. "Honestly, I feel pretty old myself."

"The work isn't steady, it isn't teamwork… night and day flipped around… As a DJ you have to hold the crowd in the club. You're the one out in front of the trend, you need an attitude." He worries his attitude is gone. "I can't get out in front anymore. How is anyone supposed to dance along with you?"

"Six months later there are new things and new people, and young people's enthusiasm for you drops. How do you get it back? How long would it take?" Saying this, Max sounded like he was asking himself.

3

Often a new venue that takes more work and more money doesn't win the customers over. When Xue Hui first came to Shanghai he felt lonely, and he often went by himself to JZ Club to hear music. Going alone never embarrassed him. "After a show, things that had felt hard didn't seem so hard."

JZ Club's new place on Julu Road is bigger, with plenty of booth seating, but Xue Hui no longer feels the warmth he once felt in the small Western-style house at No. 46 West Fuxing Road. The new place feels distant to him. He still goes often, mostly to "show support."

More than a decade in Shanghai as an outsider has taught him to see a pattern. "Anywhere in Shanghai, the moment a place catches on, it gets stamped out. The first bar streets — Maoming Road, Hengshan Road, Yongfu Road, Yongkang Road…" Even when a displaced venue finds somewhere new, the outcome is not what most people assume: "just moving house, not going out of business."

"It's as if something has been taken out of our inner world," Xue Hui said.

Zhang Haisheng sees it the same way. "Arkham and Cotton will reopen, but Fuxing Road will never feel like that again." He said it with real regret. "Middle Fuxing Road could have counted as one of Shanghai's musical skylines."

Middle Fuxing Road sits near the Shanghai Conservatory of Music on Fenyang Road, and the street itself was already full of instrument shops and sheet-music stores; even the surrounding residential compounds were mostly housing for the conservatory's teachers and their families. On this road stood JZ Club, called "Shanghai's jazz landmark," and another jazz club 20 years old, The Cotton Club. The four or five streets radiating out from Middle Fuxing Road — Hengshan Road, Yueyang Road and Yongkang Road, all once thriving centers of nightlife culture, plus South Urumqi Road, where Arkham was, and Yongfu Road, where The Shelter was — were all once the fashionable places to spend a night in Shanghai. They scattered overnight, most of them because the property they rented belonged to the government or to public institutions. Plenty of the displaced venues gave the same reason: "the government took back the property and decided not to keep running the space."

"This place was already a landmark of musical culture. Does a landmark have to be a building?" Zhang Haisheng said.

The last time Xue Hui walked past Yongkang Road he felt a chill of desolation; he could no longer "find the old feeling." His former storefront is now a real estate agency.

4

Bars are closing in other corners of the world too. Since the financial crisis broke in 2008, London has lost 7,000 pubs, along with 50% of the city's nightclubs and 40% of its music venues.

But the government soon moved to protect "assets of community value" through new legislation. The law shields a pub from demolition. It also lets community groups buy pubs, instead of letting them fall to property developers. So far 300 pubs have been protected this way.

More recently London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, followed the example of France and the Netherlands and appointed a night czar, whose main job is to develop and protect the city's nighttime culture. Last year the night czar opened 24-hour weekend subway service, so that people can get home however late it is.

The mayor's intent is plain: "I don't want young, creative Londoners to give up on us and go to places like Amsterdam, Berlin or Prague that support nightlife venues and let them flourish."

Xue Hui particularly envies those hundred-year-old places abroad, which hold the nighttime memories of several generations at once. Like a lot of other things, they are rare in China.

Zhang Haisheng also noted that Shanghai rarely "produces" musicians. The main reasons: it lacks Beijing's deep musical foundations, and in recent years many small music venues have not survived. "A lot of bands and musicians have lost their chance to get started. Going straight to a room that holds a thousand people, or even five or six hundred, isn't realistic."

"Over the past couple of years the government's attitude has been shifting from not understanding to supporting. The cultural department is supportive. Other departments aren't as aligned. The main problem is that policy isn't consistent inside the government, so sometimes there's confusion. This can't be sorted out quickly. It's hard," a person familiar with the situation told QDaily. Yuyintang only began putting itself on a formal footing after 2007 — negotiating with the government, working through application procedures and qualifications.

Xue Hui knows the bar on Wanping Road is no long-term answer. He still has no bar license. "It isn't that it's hard to get. They simply won't issue it to you." A foreign friend who pulled out of Yongkang Road with him last year moved his bar to Donghu Road. "I hear that one has to close within two or three years too. Not much longer." Staying in business costs more than Xue Hui imagined. A friend of his runs a 70-square-meter bar with every license in order, and still has to hand over 8,000 yuan a month in "protection money."

"It's outrageous," Xue Hui said.

He feels like he is back where he started. Rent used to be 8,500 yuan a month; it has doubled to 15,000. What he earns now is about what he earned in wages four years ago.

Xue Hui has given himself a deadline of two years. "If it's still like this in two years… I'm definitely out." In two years his child will be six. Only if business improves will he be able to bring the child back to Shanghai for school.

Shanghai in two years… who knows?

Note: At the interview subject's request, Hu Lin is a pseudonym.