Cocktail of past and present

Residents reflect on elements of their city, where local traditions and globalization collide

It is a Sunday afternoon in May, and I am inside a Fudan University classroom, where more than a dozen people - mostly young students - have come to attend a voice-training workshop for the Kunqu Opera. The theater form, less common in modern Shanghai, has its roots in southern China on the banks of the Yangtze River.

This 14-year-old program is held weekly during semesters at Fudan and witnesses the participation of an average 20 to 30 students. The current teacher is Zhao Wei, an architect by profession, who appears to enjoy spending his weekends on making youngsters learn proper phonation for onstage activities.

In Shanghai, China's most globalized city, some residents are fighting to keep local traditions alive.

As the middle-aged Zhao explains a scene from the well-known Chinese operatic piece, The Peony Pavilion, he sings in a range of high-pitched voices. The students, with their scripts in hand, listen carefully. The late Kunqu Opera veteran and radio presenter, Liu Xuantu, had taught Zhao the art years ago.

The workshop is a way to raise awareness about Kunqu, according to Hu Jiaji, a doctoral candidate at the university. Hu makes a distinction between this protected heritage and the relatively more famous Peking Opera from North China, by saying Kunqu didn't come up as a commercial art, but rather as a hobby for its practitioners.

Fan Ruoan, a professor of English and comparative literature at the university, whose love for opera draws him to rehearsals in different parts of the city is here today.

"Survival doesn't mean just being around, evolution is a part of it," Fan, 38, says of the need to cultivate an attitude for cultural preservation among the Chinese youth.

In 2004, when a contemporary version of The Peony Pavilion was shown at a Fudan auditorium, people enjoyed it, he says, pointing to improvisation as a means to make past cultural elements relevant to present generations. Fan also says he often visits a functional 90-year-old opera house that's located on Fuzhou Road in central Shanghai.

The city landscape significantly changed in the past 15 years owing to planned reconstruction, and along with it, people's lifestyles.

Away from the university's Handan campus, where classical music is somewhat still in vogue, scenes from bars and nightclubs on the Bund reveal how young Shanghainese revel in techno.

The Shanghai dialect too has been affected by the city's attempts to become international, sociologists say.

Politics and architecture

Earlier that day, I toured the Xintiandi area, which many consider a top tourist attraction. The leafy boulevards there are now interspersed with high-end foreign and Chinese luxury brand stores in a neighborhood that once sowed the seeds of the country's Communist revolution.

But for Shanghai residents such apparent contradictions are nothing because their city's modernization was shaped by Western culture, according to Yu Hai, a professor of sociology at Fudan University. "Shanghai was forced to open its doors by Western countries," he says of the establishment of a treaty port more than 150 years ago.

Other scholars too have previously commented on the city's "stunning contrasts".

It is where the best and the worst of the East and the West converge, Liu Heung Shing and Karen Smith wrote in their book, Shanghai - Images of a Great City (1842 - 2010).

In 1921, the Communist Party of China was effectively born out of a meeting held at a shikumen-style house in Xintiandi that belonged to Li Hanjun, one of the attendees.

The site subsequently became a museum looked after by the State Council - China's cabinet.

New China's founding father Mao Zedong, Li and 11 other Chinese and two foreign Communists clandestinely congregated at the house that summer, but their meeting was broken up by police from the former French concession, and had to be concluded later in eastern China's Zhejiang province.

Xintiandi shows Shanghai's political past even if the city is largely known to the world as China's economic powerhouse.

A block from the CPC museum is Shikumen House: a sample of the olden-day Shanghai architecture that mixed Chinese and European designs.

The keepers say it is the real thing, complete with displays of original furniture and household items such as paperweights and glass lanterns used decades ago, and laminated copies of the defunct US movie magazine Photoplay resting on a wooden dressing table.

Walls made of rocks characterized such houses that had long alleyways between them and often open courtyards.

"Xintiandi's commercial success by means of shikumen demonstrated its success in the imagination of old Shanghai," the 62-year-old Yu wrote in a 2011 paper on socio-spatial perspectives on urban changes in Shanghai. But the loss of shikumen houses led people into more isolated living in present-day Shanghai, he added.

Shikumen houses, the majority of which were built in the 1920s and '30s, and where about 70 percent of the city dwellers lived, were torn down in the 90s, with urban planners arguing that they were dilapidated.

A Hong Kong-based company developed Xintiandi as an entertainment hub in the past 20 years.

In a separate paper on Shanghai's urban development from Mao's era to that of economic reformer Deng Xiaoping's time, Yu and his academic colleague Yan Fei, described Xintiandi as the "new landmark of 'capitalist' Shanghai".

satarupa@chinadaily.com.cn