Street Shops Keep Disappearing. What Kind of City Does Shanghai Want to Be? | The Vanishing Shanghai, Part 3

What street-level shops do for a city's charm goes far beyond "small business." At the current pace, it is hard to imagine how open and varied Shanghai will still be 20 years from now.

Shanghai is losing its distinctive face.

Countless words and images have tried to pin down this city's temperament. Its most captivating years were probably the 1920s and 1930s, when people from every corner of the country and every walk of life gathered on the banks of the Huangpu River and turned Shanghai into what was then called the "Ten-Mile Foreign Quarter" and the "adventurers' paradise."

But over the past year, as a new round of urban redevelopment has gotten under way in Shanghai, the spaces that a growing number of people rely on to survive in this city have taken a devastating hit. Some will try to find another foothold here; the rest may simply leave.

The reasons behind the blows vary — tighter government oversight of the restaurant trade, a change in the designated use of a leased property, the government's push to restore a district's original architectural character — and each one seems to come with its own justification. But in the process, this international city, which once prided itself on taking in all comers, has begun to turn petty.

When it comes to the flexibility of street commerce, Shanghai has always beaten Beijing. Business people, when they compare the two megacities, often bring up Beijing's "two halves": half a day, and half a street.

Business in Beijing can only run for half a day because the city sharply divides where people live from where they work. During the day, people pour into the big commercial districts downtown; at night they go home to Tiantongyuan, Huilongguan, or farther out to Tongzhou and Yanjiao. That geographic layering leaves the shops in any one district with only half a day of foot traffic.

In Shanghai, by contrast, homes and workplaces are mixed together, nowhere more so than in Puxi. Along Huaihai Road, office towers like Aimeigao Tower stand next to shopping complexes such as iapm, Parkson, and K11. Walk south or north from Huaihai Road and you are quickly in a residential neighborhood. So the shops on Huaihai Road serve white-collar workers by day and local residents by night.

Beijing's businesses can also only draw from half a street. Wide roads and dense clusters of overpasses form natural barriers; crossing the street often takes a long time, so people are reluctant to wander back and forth, which leaves roadside shops with only one side of the street to sell to. Shanghai's road network, by comparison, is narrow and dense. In the core districts, one-way lanes and two-lane streets weave through each other, so people drift easily from block to block, and wandering the shops becomes a pleasure.

China spent two or three decades making Beijing the template for the Chinese "metropolis," and Beijing's separation of housing from work, along with its broad, endlessly widened roads, was copied straight from the standard American suburban city. Shanghai did not escape the pattern. Pudong was built from nothing on the same road-first planning. Cars, rather than people's feet, became the yardstick for the city, and life there turned out nothing like life in the other half of Shanghai.

In Puxi, the street grid and the historic buildings left over from the colonial era have been there a long time and are extremely hard to rebuild. So apart from a few main roads that were widened, the narrow-street system — the city's capillaries — was preserved as far as possible.

As Shanghai opened up further toward the end of the twentieth century, that urban structure gave all kinds of people somewhere to land. Street-side shops sprang up by the hundreds, old and new buildings stood side by side, and new kinds of business kept appearing. Puxi ended up with a varied local character and a remarkably flexible way of living.

This year, we are watching that side of Shanghai fade.

We have written before about how Yongkang Road once drew a dense cluster of bars, how Yongfu Road was a well-known nightlife strip, how Fuxing Road, home to jazz bars like Cotton Club and JZ Club, became what people called the city's music strip, and how Guyang Road was Shanghai's earliest cluster of Japanese and Korean restaurants.

"Yuyuan Road, Fuxing Road, Yongkang Road, Dagu Road, Guyang Road, Redtown — and after that, maybe Songshan Road too." Qian Jin ran through the wholesale street relocations in Shanghai she knows of in recent years. She works for Smart Shanghai, an English-language outlet whose main beat is the city's lifestyle and how it is changing. Few people follow what is happening to Shanghai more closely than she does.

Yuyuan Road falls under Changning District's neighborhood-character improvement project, whose first phase was finished in April 2016. The second and third phases called for adjusting and upgrading the street's existing mix of shops. In the course of turning it into a creative park, a number of the original restaurants, pharmacies, and hardware stores shut for good.

The shops on Yuyuan Road mostly served the daily needs of the surrounding community, so their reach was limited. Far more attention went to the redevelopment plan the Xuhui District government launched for the Hengfu conservation area, which swept up Yongkang Road, a bar street many people regard as a Shanghai landmark.

Thomas, a Belgian, puts it this way: "They killed that street."

Thomas came to Shanghai in 2011. He was studying hotel management at a school in Switzerland, and to satisfy an internship requirement he followed his French mentor to Shanghai, where they opened their first bar on Yongkang Road. They called it Café des Stagiaires — the interns.

The bar's success quickly gave Thomas a solid footing in Shanghai. After graduating in 2012, he came back and opened several more bars and restaurants on Wuding Road, Dagu Road, and Taian Road, using Shanghai as a base to expand into Thailand and France. It looked like a run of fast growth.

Then, as the wholesale overhaul of Yongkang Road advanced in August 2016, Café des Stagiaires could not stay. A large number of other restaurants and bars on the street closed along with it. Yongkang Road was once a nighttime playground packed with foreigners; now only a scattering of people turn up after dark.

Guyang Road was Shanghai's famous Japanese-restaurant street, and it is where A Hua used to work, at a restaurant called Yamatoya. Yamatoya's original name was Kitono, and when it opened on August 21, 2005, it was the first Japanese restaurant on the street. On March 3 this year, when the government's demolition notice reached Yamatoya, A Hua was stunned. The whole team had checked with their landlord again and again beforehand, and the landlord had assured them that Guyang Road would not be torn down.

The assurance did not slow the demolition down. The planned route for Shanghai Metro Line 15 was adjusted after a public consultation, and it now runs right along Guyang Road. For construction reasons, the entire street was to be cleared. March 25 would be the last day of business for its restaurants.

Confusion has spread among the shopkeepers along these streets. On Yongkang Road, Thomas opened a bakery after the bar. What he found strange was that the bakery was ordered to close and then allowed to reopen in the storefront right next door. He says he has no idea why.

A year earlier, Yuanlong Bookstore, which sold music books on Fuxing Middle Road, was also ordered to shut. Police officers, urban-management officers, and masons carrying hammers and drills sealed up the storefront behind a brick wall. The owners, Tang Yuanlong and Wang Wujing, were left baffled: "I thought all our paperwork was in order. We ran this bookstore for 24 years — what could the problem be?"

Then there is what happened to the jazz bar JZ Club and the electronic-music bar Shelters. They closed in April and December of 2016 respectively, both for the same reason: the properties they leased belonged to the government, and when the contracts ran out the government decided not to renew either lease, because the designated use of the property had changed.

As noted, the reasons for the demolitions vary. Guyang Road came down for municipal transit construction. The overhaul of Fuxing Road and Yongkang Road was folded into the Xuhui District government's plan for the Hengfu conservation area. Yuyuan Road belongs to Changning District's neighborhood-character improvement project. Redtown was relocated because the Fujian-based Rongqiao Group, which took over the site, changed the development plan and decided to build a culture-themed commercial and office complex there instead.

In the end, all of these large-scale rebuilds may fall under a plan known for short as "Shanghai 2040." It is a master plan for the city running to the year 2040 that the Shanghai municipal government released in mid-2016 and has already submitted to the State Council for approval. The plan sets out Shanghai's goal of becoming an outstanding global city.

"We hope that in the Shanghai of the future, the buildings can be read, the streets can be strolled, the parks can be savored, and the skyline can be gazed at from afar. Shanghai's urban expression should be grand yet modest, elegant yet warm, a pleasure to be in." So says the public reader that accompanies "Shanghai 2040."

But under this grand plan, a long list of names — Café des Stagiaires, Yamatoya, Shelters — vanished before that "urban expression" ever took shape.

The city government clearly has high hopes for "Shanghai 2040." It brought in 40 research teams for the plan and coordinated 22 municipal departments and the governments of all 16 districts. At the release of the draft, Zhuang Shaoqin — head of the office leading the drafting of Shanghai's overall urban master plan and director of the Shanghai Municipal Planning and Land Resources Administration — called it, with evident pride, "the first master plan for a megacity to look ahead to 2040 and be submitted to the State Council for approval since the Central Urban Work Conference."

The version of "Shanghai 2040" now on public display offers only an outline and a set of broad goals; the district-level plans have not been made public. Compared with Shanghai's earlier urban plans, two ideas in it are new. The first is to "build 15-minute community living circles that are good to live in, work in, visit, and study in." The second adds, on top of the earlier goals of building Shanghai into a center of economy, finance, trade, and shipping, the goal of making it a great cultural metropolis.

The 15-minute living circle and the cultural metropolis suggest the city government does not actually want every street-side shop to disappear. But there are signs that its overall thinking is to tighten control over these shops and let them exist again only in places of the government's choosing.

A Hua guesses that oversight of street-front restaurants and bars like Café des Stagiaires and Yamatoya will only get stricter. "More and more restaurants are going to open inside shopping malls. That's much easier for the government to manage — it just hands the responsibility to the big property companies."

Asked why he thinks so, A Hua said: "Everything it does points that way. All the shops that were disturbing residents have been closed, haven't they? The government goes after anything unlicensed."

Thomas's own experience seems to bear the guess out. As he sees it, the government has deliberately tightened approvals for the licenses a street-side shop needs. "In the past, when we went to the government to renew licenses, they always said yes." Later, when he went back to renew one, he was told to "wait." In the end the answer came back: no.

"The government is enforcing the rules more and more strictly," Thomas said. "Before, enforcement might have been at 40%. Now it's maybe 80%."

Meanwhile, the number of commercial property projects in Shanghai keeps climbing. By one count, 45 large and mid-sized commercial property projects, shopping malls among them, opened in Shanghai in 2016 — more than in any other city in the country, and nearly three times the number in Chongqing, which ranked second. Forecasts put another 40 to 50 large and mid-sized malls opening in Shanghai in 2017.

Thomas ended up moving Café des Stagiaires into one of those projects. Found 158, on Julu Road, was developed by Shanghai Datong Yanlu Real Estate. In a patch of green space beside the elevated Yan'an Road, the developer dug out a sunken plaza that now holds a cluster of restaurants and bars, along with JZ Club, which had just relocated as well.

Large commercial property projects really are thriving in this city while its traditional neighborhoods shrink. The small shops that grew up on their own, the ones that give a block its life, are moving into centrally planned spaces — and for the owners, though it may look like nothing more than a change of address, it is a different business entirely.

Counting from the day they signed with Found 158 last August, it took Café des Stagiaires eight months to reopen on Julu Road; on Yongkang Road, opening a place took them two. Thomas sees that as one measure of how much harder it has become to do business in Shanghai.

Running costs rise noticeably too. Arkham is about to move into Found 158, and according to another operator we spoke with, rent at the new address is more than 50% higher, while renovation, staffing, and drinks have all gone up as well — and all of it ends up passed to the customer. "What used to cost 1 yuan now costs 5 to 10 yuan." Afraid that such talk might bring "bad luck" to a new opening, he asked not to be named.

That is the difference between Julu Road and Yongkang Road — or, put another way, between a shop that grows up on its own along a street and one kept under tight management inside a commercial property project.

The shops we record, or that attract attention, are usually the ones tied to somebody's memories of growing up. Most ordinary small shops probably just go, without a sound.

Shops like those draw no attention and can look a bit "grubby." They get noticed only on the day you find it is no longer easy to take care of some small everyday thing.

All of it connects to the sprawling plan that is "Shanghai 2040." The plan sets the city's long-term population target at 25 million. That is the figure for 2020, and it is still the figure for 2040. A cap that strict may well mean Shanghai no longer welcomes newcomers.

That is a dangerous strategy. Lu Ming, a chair professor at the Antai College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, wrote a book called 《大国大城》, Big Country, Big City, whose central argument is that if China wants to keep growing fast, it should let its cities keep getting bigger, and should treat the urban ills that come with that through more efficient social management. Do the opposite — hold the population down — and the whole city, even the whole country, may shrink.

To Lu Ming, controlling population is an extremely short-sighted policy: "We keep looking at the local, short-term thing, and in doing so we lose the long-term interest of the whole. As I keep stressing in the book, we should pursue the public interest and the long-term interest. If those get ignored, society's pie gets smaller — and that's bad for the country's development and for individuals' development alike."

In reality, though, what counts as the public interest, and what counts as merely local and short-term, has never been clearly defined, and there is no broad public debate to sort the concepts out. Much of the time, Chinese society runs almost entirely on the government's overall planning and forceful execution, and where there is no real discussion, individuals and communities are usually the ones sacrificed.

That is exactly what is happening on Guyang Road. When we got there on the night of April 14, the last of the clearing was under way.

At the eastern end, an excavator shifted rubble under the glare of the work lights while trucks loaded with construction waste pulled away one after another, the roar of heavy machinery rolling down the street. Outside a Japanese barbecue restaurant called Marumichi, a crowd of movers had gathered, carrying an enormous kitchen out piece by piece to a truck parked at the curb. A short way off sat a car marked "Public Order," lights flashing, the man inside looking thoroughly bored.

Guyang Road, once famous for gathering Shanghai's best Japanese restaurants, is now a stretch of broken walls. Every storefront stood wide open, and apart from the buildings' bare frames, nothing was left.

Under the city government's plan, Metro Line 15 will soon be built here. For a city with more kilometers of metro track in service than any other in the world, the government is counting on Line 15 to solve the north-south transit problem in western Shanghai. But for the restaurants of Guyang Road, in A Hua's words, it is "a devastating blow."

"We'd been running the place for more than a decade, and nobody here feels it makes sense," A Hua said. "It's a restaurant, after all — every bit of paperwork has to start over. And with this many employees, we also have to find a new space. Moving takes time."

Japan's way of doing it strikes him as more humane. "To run a restaurant in Japan, you file a record with the relevant commercial authority — you can even do it out of your own home — and then you're responsible for running the place properly and doing regular hygiene checks," A Hua said. "Every neighborhood in Japan has its own little shops, and it feels so warm... Our neighborhoods are going to get more and more monotonous. You can't even run a coffee shop or a small eatery. For a cup of coffee, you'll have to walk a long way."

"Shanghai will end up as boring as Pudong."

Unless otherwise noted, all photos in this article were taken on site.