Why Does Changle Road Matter So Much?

Each person's fate is also the fate of this road.

Like many Americans newly arrived in Shanghai, Rob Schmitz first came to know Changle Road through a few big, history-heavy labels. The landmark was the Jinjiang Hotel — Mao Zedong is said to have stayed there on his visits to Shanghai, it held one of the few temperature-controlled swimming pools of the time, and it was where the Shanghai Communiqué was signed. President Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai issued that communiqué in 1972, marking the end of hostility between China and the United States, the single most important event of the Cold War era. Less than 200 meters away, running parallel to Changle Road, is the famous Middle Huaihai Road, one of Shanghai's busiest streets and the site of the US Consulate General.

In the first half of the 20th century, Changle Road belonged to the French Concession, the part of Shanghai that foreigners liked best. Back then it was called Rue Bourgeat, and before the Communist Party took over the city, many prominent people lived there.

Schmitz chose to make his home on Changle Road too, in a development called Huixianju. The seven towers were built by the famous Hong Kong developer Li Ka-shing, and in 2010 it was one of the most expensive places to buy in Puxi, on Shanghai's west side. "One of the towers is 40 stories tall. Drop the whole complex into my home state of Minnesota and Huixianju would be the seventh-tallest building in the state. But in Shanghai it's just a cluster of small towers woven in among hundreds of skyscrapers of every shape and size," Schmitz said.

Schmitz's office was on West Nanjing Road, which runs parallel to Changle Road less than a kilometer away. That is another famous shopping street on the west side, stretching from Jing'an Temple to People's Square, where his office was — also part of the bustle of greater Shanghai.

Changle Road "held something back," Schmitz said, meaning its buildings: narrow streets, few people at night. Next to the tightly packed high-rises of West Nanjing Road, the old buildings here feel comfortable and inviting. "It doesn't make you feel like you're living in a city of 24 million. It pulls you out of reality." Schmitz likes to walk this street, shaded by plane trees and lined with cafes, streetwear shops and tea houses.

Rob Schmitz is a correspondent for NPR (National Public Radio). In 1996 he first taught in the countryside near Zigong, Sichuan, as a Peace Corps volunteer, then worked as a reporter in Chengdu, and finally arrived in Shanghai.

He caught more than two decades of China's most drastic change. As a volunteer in his early twenties, he earned 120 US dollars a month, more than two-thirds of the Chinese population. He remembers the small town where he lived plastered with bright red slogans reading "Girls are people too," meant to warn rural families who killed infant daughters out of a preference for sons.

By the time Schmitz reached Shanghai it was 2010. China had gone through a "stunning transformation," was about to pass Japan as the world's second-largest economy, and tens of millions of Chinese had climbed out of poverty from nothing. Shanghai was hosting the World Expo that year, and like the ambitious cities that had hosted expos before it, the city was living through its peak. Haibao, the Expo mascot, was a good deal cuter than the slogans he had seen in 1990, though both were reminders of the correct direction for China that day: then, don't kill baby girls; now, believe that city life is better.

That was also one of the stretches of time people would later look back on with longing when they thought of Changle Road.

Xiong Qi got his first education in fashion on Changle Road.

"Everything I'd seen in magazines on stars like Edison Chen and Hiroshi Fujiwara, you could find on Changle Road," Xiong said. His home was at the corner of Nanchang Road and Sinan Road, a 10-minute walk from Changle Road, and he used to play basketball at Xiangming Middle School on Changle Road.

In those years Changle Road became the first place to go for streetwear. ACU, the sneaker store Edison Chen opened at No. 139-11 Changle Road in 2006 with Tom Chung and Michael Chung, was mainland China's first real multi-brand, high-end sneaker store, and the only place in Shanghai that released limited-edition sneakers.

In 2008 Li Chen and Wilber Pan took No. 139-11 over from Edison Chen and turned it into NPC. When NPC hired in 2010, close to 40 people interviewed and three were chosen. Xiong Qi was one of them. "When I was in high school, everyone knew NPC," Xiong said. Now he was inside the machine driving the scene.

Xiong reckons those were the years when streetwear culture ran thickest. On the night before an NPC limited release, a long line would often form outside the shop before it closed. One morning Changle Road was packed with three or four hundred people, the queue filling both sides of the street.

Scenes like this kept happening on Changle Road, always pulling in young people who loved streetwear from Shanghai and from across China, standing in line and showing off their collections to each other. In the minds of young people then, "the only name anyone could put to Shanghai's streetwear scene was Changle Road," Xiong said.

That is also why the hairstylist Pan Yulan opened his shop on Changle Road in 2009. Pan wears black and gold ornaments on both wrists, and his bare arms and neck are covered in red and green tattoos. "Back then Changle Road was a street of trendsetters," he said. That owed a lot to the "Urban Fashion Street" the Luwan District government built in 2004 under the Yanzhong Green Space on Changle Road, an underground mall full of streetwear shops and toy stores. NPC founder Li Chen called it "an underground city, a kind of utopia that belonged to young people." "Everyone says this was one of the birthplaces of Chinese streetwear culture," he said.

Schmitz liked Changle Road partly because of small shops like Godhands — not big, but each with a character of its own. Changle Road was changing, though. Small shops closed one after another, replaced by chain brands like Starbucks. The Chinese restaurants that used to line the street were "upgraded" into Japanese and French ones.

He read all of this as a stage every city passes through, "gentrification." As a city keeps growing and rents keep climbing, small shops are squeezed out because they cannot pay, and powerful chains and developers redefine the look of a neighborhood. "It's sad, but it's inevitable," Schmitz said.

Liu Jing, who worked at Godhands, came back from a two-month trip once to find four nearby shops gone. "It was crazy. We thought, is Changle Road going out of business? Where did the shops go?" That was 2016. Liu worked on this street for more than five years, and as she remembers it only two or three streetwear shops held on to the end: NPC, Shangye Eyewear and Godhands. As she saw it, this street had no room for a shop that wasn't "cool enough."

Rents kept rising, and they made life hard for those small streetwear shops.

Rents on Changle Road even began to pass those of some big shopping malls. Ben Chueng, lifestyle and culture editor at the streetwear publication HYPEBEAST, said MU821, a 10-square-meter streetwear shop, paid 25,000 yuan; Shangye Eyewear paid 50,000; NPC paid 100,000. Pan said the rent on his Changle Road shop rose 7 to 8 percent every year.

A ground-floor storefront on the street was worth roughly twice a second-floor one. To save money, Pan rented only the second floor at first, and it took four years before he expanded downstairs. To judge how a Changle Road shop was doing, you only had to look at which floor it was on: the ones doing well moved down to the ground floor, the ones struggling moved up.

Pan thinks he rode Changle Road's best years. Starting with the Urban Fashion Street in 2004, the good times lasted nearly a decade. From 2013 he could feel the foot traffic thinning. One year his shop stayed open through the Lunar New Year holiday and the street outside was empty. Pan put it down to rents: shops passed the increases on to customers through higher prices, which scared some of them off. The 2010 opening of Xintiandi Phase III, a mall built around designer and streetwear brands, sped up Changle Road's decline as well.

Around the same time, NPC's monthly revenue fell from a peak of more than 1 million yuan to about 400,000.

"Big developers have their own ideas about a district. They like large chain brands moving in, so local rents go up, and small shops end up being pushed out because they can't pay. For a city like Shanghai, this is completely normal," Schmitz said.

"Normal" includes the subway line being dug at the corner of Changle Road and South Shaanxi Road, and the Starbucks beside the construction site. Schmitz said he felt some regret. "Those small shops were the reason people came to Changle Road. There used to be a shop every five meters, independent and interesting. Now it's turned into one big commercial district."

"Normal" may also include what he calls "gentrification." "I feel like Changle Road has become more of a rich people's neighborhood now," Schmitz said.

In time, Changle Road stopped being only the street with the deep history and the new sense of fashion.

More of its secrets came out in front of Schmitz.

A friend gave Schmitz a shoebox holding more than 100 letters. They spanned nearly 40 years, the earliest going back to the 1950s. They were written by a husband and wife: she lived at No. 70, Lane 682, Changle Road; his address was a labor camp in Qinghai, more than 3,000 kilometers away.

The Changle Road that showed through the letters was a cruel one.

When the husband left Shanghai in 1957, his wife had just become pregnant with the family's seventh child, and their first son. From the letters he learned that the baby boy was growing, had been weaned, and could eat rice porridge and congee; he also learned that their youngest daughter had been given away. The Great Famine had come, and his wife had handed the girl to a grain-growing family in the countryside because she could not care for seven children. "I was forced to sell everything we owned. Now I can only live on the welfare payments from the Bureau of Industry and Commerce," she wrote in one letter.

Schmitz started making a podcast in 2012 and kept it going through 2013, and the tragedy inside that shoebox drew the biggest response of anything in it. In his seventh year in Shanghai, in 2016, Rob Schmitz worked the podcast material into a book, Street of Eternal Happiness《长乐路》, which The Economist called "a poignant China in miniature."

The bitterness always arrived in a form no one expected — for Schmitz's listeners and readers.

"Hukou is the complaint I heard most on Changle Road," Schmitz said, and it was also the piece of "new knowledge" his American listeners could not grasp. Ms. Zhao came to Shanghai from Shandong in 1997 and ended up running a flower shop on Changle Road. Her elder son joined her in Shanghai in the sixth grade and got into Shanghai's Bile Middle School, where he was top of his class. His hopes of university ended in high school: with no Shanghai hukou, he had to return to Shandong for his final years. Back home he could not cope with the province's ferocious exam machine and eventually dropped out. Her younger son, left behind without parents to look after him, developed depression and became one of China's "problem left-behind children."

Behind the Changle Road story Schmitz tells about Ms. Zhao is a bigger one: in the ten years after 1997, 250 million rural Chinese left home and joined the largest migration in human history, and 61 million Chinese children like Ms. Zhao's two sons were left behind — about one-fifth of all children in the country.

More than 40 percent of Shanghai's population comes from elsewhere, which means close to 10 million people have no local hukou, and their children all face what Ms. Zhao's sons faced. "If a child has no parental support during middle school, it directly affects how they do and whether they succeed later, and Chinese secondary school is especially brutal," Schmitz said.

Outside Schmitz's field of view, in a lane a little over 100 meters from Ms. Zhao's flower shop, lived another outsider like her. Mr. Ding, from Jiangsu, had been collecting scrap on and around Changle Road for more than a decade. In the bitter story he told us, he had been "repatriated" twice: once to Nanjing, from where he borrowed money and fled back to Shanghai the same day; the second time he was "sold" to Nantong, where the local reception center bought him for 50 yuan a head, then shipped him on to Lianyungang, where he had to hand over 200 yuan to get his freedom.

Mr. Qin, a local who had lived in the same lane for more than 30 years, never had to fear the "repatriation" that worried outsiders in the 1990s. But set against the cramped, pinched lives of Ms. Zhao or Mr. Ding, his own was not much better. He still empties a chamber pot every morning. "I don't have a bathroom, so I pour it into the gutter. What else can I do?" For most of his life here, Mr. Qin has washed with a basin of water at home. He describes life here as "a total mess." He lives in the center of Shanghai and leads a life he can hardly bring himself to describe: a kitchen of barely a dozen square meters shared by four households, everyone waiting their turn at the same tap to cook.

Push the door open and you step into the most fashionable, busiest part of Shanghai. But the bustle belongs to other people. The trends have nothing to do with them.

Schmitz, who is from Minnesota, came to see how much early-21st-century Shanghai resembled early-20th-century New York. More than half of Shanghai's people come from somewhere else, from different parts of China, just as early-20th-century New York gathered huge numbers of European immigrants speaking dialects that were alike and not alike.

"On Changle Road, the dialects of migrants from Sichuan, Hunan and Fujian are as hard to make out as those in New York when Italian, French and German immigrants poured in during the 19th century. Both became melting pots full of newcomers, driven by the same thing: poverty. These were people willing to take risks, with outsized ambitions, who left home and sometimes abandoned everything to start again. The immigrants who landed at Ellis Island were much like China's 'outsiders' a century later, leaving the farms their ancestors had worked for as long as anyone could remember and heading straight for the city," Schmitz writes in Street of Eternal Happiness.

In his eighth year, the mainland Chinese edition of Street of Eternal Happiness was finally about to be published.

Over those eight years, Rob Schmitz, by now a longtime resident of Huixianju, looked out of his apartment window: to the north, Changle Road; to the south, a patch of ground held by weeds and stray cats. A large empty lot in the center of the city, dotted with brick houses that carried burn marks. It was strange.

Behind it was a bigger secret: Maggie Lane. In Street of Eternal Happiness, Rob Schmitz tells what happened there more than a decade earlier. In 2002 the Xuhui District government sold the land to a developer and 3,000 households were ordered out. Redeveloping an old neighborhood was supposed to mean better housing for residents on the same site, so they protested. Three years later most had moved away and a few were still there. By Schmitz's account, on January 9, 2005, three demolition workers poured gasoline over the home of a couple in their seventies.

They had lived in Maggie Lane for more than 60 years.

The next morning, the couple were dead.

In 2010, not long after he started work in Shanghai, Rob Schmitz began interviewing Chen, the lane chief, and his wife, who were holding out there with four other families. Through them he ran into the question where nearly every conflict in this changing country converges: demolition, redevelopment, and a powerful government that means to have its way.

This was the subject people on Changle Road talked about most.

The writer Wu Liang grew up on Changle Road. In 2001 he watched a classmate who lived across from him move out of the lane — in the name of "solving the urban heat island effect and providing a place for residents' daily life" — and the lane became a pocket park.

What drew the most attention, though, was that the streetwear shops treated as landmarks of youth and style were facing the same eviction. On July 2, 2017, NPC founder Li Chen wrote on Weibo that, because of "force majeure," the whole of Changle Road might be torn down within six months. "Eight years. I've witnessed an era, the rise and fall of Changle Road, the ups and downs of NPC…" he wrote. "Changle Road holds far too many stories for our generation of young Shanghainese."

Godhands got the same "force majeure" notice to move at the same time. The place where Pan Yulan made his first money closed on December 30, 2017.

NPC was running an exhibition called "Contentment Brings Happiness." When it ended, the shop would close too, on January 31.

It was the last shop on this street that had once been called a "streetwear store."

In 1996 a large fire broke out on the site where Huixianju now stands. A 10-year-old boy watched it happen; his father died in the fire. Twenty years later that boy graduated from Cornell University and went to work at a hedge fund in Hong Kong.

Rob Schmitz said: "Their house was taken from them just so the place I live in now could be built. He and I became friends, and I see him every time I go to Hong Kong. He's in his thirties now."

Layer by layer, Changle Road unwraps itself, and countless secrets and individual fates come to light, bit by bit.

We will keep reporting stories from Changle Road, in "Housing and Our Lives" and other columns.

Graphics: Lin Yuyao

Cover image: unsplash, hypebeast