The dragon's head
BILLINGHAM-on-Yangtze is booming, and shows every sign of it. Tower blocks rocket upwards through the night. Marmo- real hotels offer every kind of restaurant, including Shanghainese. A new house suit- able for an expatriate manager will cost his company, say, £700,000. An old house, abandoned by some merchant who fled south in 1949, will cost twice that. The mayor of Shanghai, like the Lord Mayor of London, holds office for a year. Mayors of Shanghai, some of them on their way to even higher things, use their year to put their stamp on the city. If the last mayor built a suspension bridge and the next one plans a subway line, there is just time for the incumbent to put up an overhead high- way, letting contracts to firms from all over so as to get the work done before he stands down. (Lord Mayors of London should think about this.) Investment multiplies. The deafening staccato thud of a can-mak- ing line shows where Crown Cork has set up a joint venture whose best customer is the joint venture set up by Coca-Cola. Unilever is here to make toothpaste. ICI seems to be waiting its turn in the queue. Someone, some time, will catch a cold here (McDonnell Douglas has been trying to make aeroplanes, without much luck) but, for the moment, Shanghai's economy is driving China's — or, as the Shanghainese prefer to put it, Shang- hai is the dragon's head.
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