The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (23 page)

Following Bangalore’s lead, other Indian cities, such as Hyderabad, developed new office parks, academic institutions, highways, and airports conducive to the growth of advanced industries. In the late 1990s, Andhra Pradesh State, which includes Hyderabad, housed more than fifteen thousand software workers and saw its software exports increase twenty-six-fold.

As global demand for talent expanded, the technology and service industries began to spread even to lagging megacities such as Calcutta.
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None of this brought an end to poverty in Calcutta, renamed Kolkata, or other Indian cities. In even the most economically dynamic centers, large pockets of unemployment and impoverished laborers, including millions of children working for pitifully low wages, struggled alongside an expanding middle class.
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Without question, the most spectacular urban evolution in Asia took place farther east, among cities influenced directly or indirectly by the rich urban culture of China. Long before India’s urban economy began to show signs of maturation, these Asian cities followed the path trod earlier by Osaka and Tokyo, financing their urban expansion from the fruits of rapid economic growth.

In the 1960s, most cities in Asia had been considered parts of the largely undifferentiated, impoverished “developing world,” alongside the likes of Cairo, Lagos, or Calcutta. By the end of the millennium, urban areas such as Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong had evolved into something much more. Like modern Asiatic versions of the vigorous trading city-states of Phoenicia, classical Greece, or Renaissance Italy, they now strode the world stage, looking for new industries and markets to conquer.
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Until 1876, Seoul served as capital of the Korean “hermit kingdom,” cut off almost entirely from the rest of the world economy. Only under intense prodding from commercial interests from Japan did it slowly open itself to outside influence. Early in the twentieth century, the Japanese occupied the country outright. During Japan’s often brutal reign, Seoul subordinated itself to Osaka or Tokyo, much as Bombay and Calcutta serviced the needs of London, Birmingham, and Liverpool. Like European colonialists in India and elsewhere, the Japanese also helped to transform Seoul, turning an old imperial capital into a modern city with manufacturing industries, streetcars, and a growing professional class.

Seoul regained its independence after the defeat of Japan in 1945, serving as the capital and principal city of the new Republic of Korea. Five years later, a surprise attack from the Communist-controlled north devastated the city. Over the ensuing three-year-long conflict, the city and its environs served as a critical battleground between Allied and Communist forces.

The South Korean capital emerged from the Korean War both battlescarred—47 percent of its standing buildings were destroyed—and desperately poor. Like many cities in the developing countries, it swelled with rural migrants; in the 1960s and 1970s, over three hundred thousand people migrated annually to the still largely devastated capital city.

As migrants poured in from the countryside, Seoul’s population increase paralleled that of Cairo, São Paulo, Mumbai, and a host of other cities in the developing world. In 1960, the city was home to 3 million people; by 2000, it had grown to more than 11 million, with a surrounding metropolitan area accounting for an additional 9 million.
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Initially, Seoul also displayed the familiar ill effects of this growth— ramshackle squatter settlements, perpetually overburdened transport, substandard sanitary and health facilities.
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What proved the critical difference was an economy that expanded faster than almost any in the world.

Seoul’s growing wealth provided the wherewithal to meet many challenges posed by its rapid demographic expansion. New roads, housing, office buildings, and research parks arose throughout the region. To make way for the development of the central parts of the city, sprawling squatter settlements were demolished throughout the 1960s and again in the 1980s, in part to prepare for the 1988 Olympic Games. Although many people were displaced, poverty was effectively reduced.
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By 1988, only 14 percent of Seoul’s population, according to one UN study, lived in slums, roughly one-sixth the level of Cairo’s.
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By that time, the Korean capital had more in common with crowded, congested, and expensive Tokyo, or modern Western cities, than with the impoverished urban centers of Africa or the Middle East. Seoul dominated the Korean economy even more than the Japanese capital; it was home to forty-eight of the country’s fifty largest companies, the main government agencies, and most foreign corporate headquarters.
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The city also served as home to as many of these megacorporations as such older commercial centers as Frankfurt or Osaka.
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Seoul’s dominance was so overwhelming that by the early twenty-first century, some advocated moving the capital to rural areas to the south.
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Seoul’s emergence represented part of a remarkable, wider-ranging late-twentieth-century pattern among East Asian cities. The progenitors of this event in modern urban history lay in the evolution of two commercial cities, Singapore and Hong Kong, spawned under the authority and economic power of the British Empire.

Hong Kong, granted outright to Britain in 1841, had emerged as a European microcosm, which helped it supplant Canton (Guangzhou) as the primary trading port in southern China. Increasingly, it also nurtured a formidable Chinese economic culture that would soon spread throughout East Asia. A new kind of urban society, a blending of Chinese and European influences, now evolved rapidly, as the population soared from a few thousand at the onset of the twentieth century to more than a million in 1937.

A decade later, the Communist revolution in China devastated that country’s commercial centers. Hong Kong now established itself, after Tokyo, as Asia’s second business capital. Crammed with refugees from the Maoist regime, it more than tripled in population by the 1980s. The city’s ascendancy rode on more than swelling numbers; it benefited from the presence of entrepreneurs and professionals from across China, most notably the former financial and industrial elites of Shanghai.
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Founded in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles as an imperial trading post, Singapore became a full-fledged British colony in 1867. Located far to the south of the Chinese mainland, the city attracted masses of migrants from that country. Sizable populations of Indians, Malays, Arabs, and Jews, as well as colonial representatives, transformed Singapore into a dynamic cosmopolitan society, connected not only to London, but to Baghdad, Jakarta, Canton, and Shanghai. Described by Joseph Conrad as “riotous with life,” the city teemed with merchants, sailors, and a primarily Chinese working class.
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The Japanese occupation during World War II severely disrupted this colonial society. Humiliated by an Asian power, Britain lost its claim to unchallenged supremacy. Pressure for independence grew, and in 1965, the British finally left the old colonial city.

Initially, the prospects for the tiny, 225-square-mile republic appeared dubious at best. The city suffered all the usual problems associated with developing countries—large, crowded slums, criminal gangs, and a relatively unskilled population. The country also faced hostility from neighboring, far more populous, and predominantly Muslim Malaysia from which it had broken away.

Singapore’s great achievement—so rare in the postcolonial world— was using its new sovereign power not to promote a small, and corrupt, elite, but to construct one of the stunning urban success stories of the late twentieth century. Under the authoritarian leadership of Cambridge-educated Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore broke dramatically with much of its colonial past and forged a new model for Asian urbanism. Tenements and low-slung shops were replaced by planned apartment complexes; congested streets were supplanted by a modern road system under which ran an advanced subway system; and crime, once rampant, was nearly eliminated.

As in Seoul and Hong Kong, the key lay in large-scale economic growth. Lee and his government worked assiduously to exploit Singapore’s natural advantage as a harbor and transit center for trans-Asian trade. Moving rapidly from low-wage industries like textiles to high-technology and service industries, Singapore by the end of the twentieth century boasted among the world’s best-educated and economically productive populations. Class divisions remained, but most now achieved a standard of living and wealth unimaginable for the masses in other cities of the postcolonial world. Income levels, barely $800 per person in 1964, had risen to over $23,000 in 1999.
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Singapore’s literate, English-speaking middle class, lack of corruption, and modern infrastructure also attracted a great deal of investment by global multinationals. Lee was not only interested in improving the short-run economic prospects for his tiny city-state; he wanted to develop a new Asian urban culture capable of competing globally well into the twenty-first century. “Having given them a clean city, modern amenities and a strong economy,” one of his ministers declared, “we are now thinking of what culture we should give them.”
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By the mid-1980s, Lee had decided upon what “kind of culture” he wanted for his people—one built on the bedrock of the city’s Asian, and particularly Chinese, value system. The self-described Anglophile, who once suggested he was no more Chinese than President Kennedy was Irish, now promoted an essential Confucianist ethos, based on respect for the authority of a wise and powerful mandarin elite. Without this culture, he suggested, Singapore would soon degenerate into what he scathingly described as “another Third World society.”
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This revitalization of the Confucian discourse increasingly shaped perceptions not only in Singapore, but also in the Chinese-dominated economies of Taiwan, under nationalist direction, and in Hong Kong.
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Confucian attitudes of “collective egocentrism,” combining Western and traditional notions of personal and familial improvement, provided a sense of moral order and collective will not apparent in many other parts of the developing world.

By the 1980s, even China’s Communist leaders, long contemptuous of their capitalistic-minded overseas brethren, began to shift their attitudes toward this perspective. In 1992, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, openly expressed particular admiration for Singapore’s “social order,” embracing the city-state’s authoritarian approach to capitalism as the best blueprint for the rapid development of China’s own cities.
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Such attitudes would have been unthinkable in the early years after the Communist revolution. The Communists had risen to power largely through their support of peasants and rural villagers. Their vanquished rivals, the Kuomintang, drew their strongest backing in the coastal cities and their cosmopolitan elites.
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Once in control in 1949, Communist leader Mao Zedong sought to steer his country’s development away from the “corrupt” coastal commercial centers and toward countryside and interior towns. He consciously curbed big-city growth by restricting rural migration. Periodically, as during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, the Communists also “sent down” large numbers of young urbanites to the countryside to learn from the peasantry and provide manpower for massive development schemes.

As a result, China urbanized at a slower pace than elsewhere in East Asia and the rest of the developing world. At a time when cities such as Hong Kong, Bombay, and Mexico were enjoying rapid population growth, many of the country’s established commercial centers—Guangzhou (Canton), Tainjin, and Shanghai—expanded only modestly. In contrast, Beijing, center of the all-powerful Communist bureaucracy, continued to grow, adding twice as many people as Shanghai between 1953 and 1970.

In all cities under the Maoist regime, many traditional aspects of Chinese urban life were suppressed. Old shrines were either abandoned or destroyed. Public markets, a critical component of Chinese cities for millennia, were discouraged. Once “riotous with life,” China’s commercial cities became largely drab places, albeit with drastically less crime, prostitution, and open corruption.
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China’s urban evolution shifted dramatically following Mao’s death in 1976. Under Deng Xiaoping’s “Four Modernizations,” Beijing gradually loosened its strict control over municipalities. Local officials now encouraged private initiative and outside investment. The creation of special economic zones, such as that in Shenzen between Hong Kong and Canton, attracted the largest amounts of foreign capital, much of it from Hong Kong, Taipei, and Singapore. Within fifteen years, the area around the Pearl River Delta had become much like the British Midlands in the mid-nineteenth century, not only the “country’s workshop,” but rapidly the workshop of the world.
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Arguably more so than at any time in Chinese history, the country’s cities now assumed primacy as central places in the national life. Freed from strict controls on their movements and seeking new opportunities, rural migrants streamed toward the cities by the tens of millions.