Cultural glob alisation

Martin Gaylord is reminded why free trade in ideas is a Good Thing

China is the future, or so many people say these days. Personally, I feel that I've heard that one before about other Far-Eastern places (weren't Japan, and then the tiger economies, going to overhaul and dominate the West?). But there's no doubt that great changes are taking place: huge buildings shoot up in weeks, massive fortunes are made. There is no better place, I mused, as I flew into Shanghai a few months ago, to think about globalisation — the cultural sort, as well as the industrial and the monetary.

China is of course the great example of what happens to you if you don't globalise. Famously, in the 15th century, the Chinese government concluded — quite rightly — that the Middle Kingdom was more advanced in every way than the rest of the world. So the Chinese explorers' fleets were burnt, and the Chinese took no further interest in outsiders for a few hundred years. As a result, China was in no condition to resist when hairy barbarians turned up in the 19th century — the latter having pooled their ideas, and come up with some handy developments in military hardware.

On the other hand, Shanghai in the 20th century is an object demonstration of what unrestricted globalisation might be like. The city was in the first half of the 20th century one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world. It was a melting pot to rival New York, with prominent British, French, American, Russian, Jewish, Japanese and Chinese elements in the population.

By the 1930s, Shanghai was given over to unrestrained entrepreneurial greed. In those days — as is described by Harriet Sergeant in her excellent book on the subject — the city was effectively run by a combination of the opium king Du Yuesheng and a municipal council dominated by British businessmen.

The result was much what you might expect if the City of London went into partnership with the Mafia to rule, say, Barcelona. There was epic corruption and endemic violence. A group of policemen on secondment from Al Capone's Chicago left Shanghai after a brief spell on the grounds that the place was far too dangerous. On the other hand, Shanghai before the war was unquestionably lively — which is more than could be said for the city under the rule of Mao Zedong.

As evidence of its jazz-age status it boasted the world's largest display of Art Deco architecture. Noel Coward wrote Private Lives in a suite in the luxurious Cathay Hotel — now renamed the Peace Hotel but still boasting a jazz band, the successors of a famous ensemble in the 1930s. Now, after a dormant period from the 1950s to the 1980s, when the communist regime did its best to run down the place, Shanghai is booming and international again.

It struck me not that Shanghai was and is again a global town, but that the elements that made it distinctive — among them jazz and Art Deco — were themselves the result of cultural melting and intermingling.

Jazz itself is a combination of extraordinarily diverse ingredients. African rhythm — brought to America by slaves — was of course crucial. But military bands, Protestant hymns, Italian opera, Latin American dances and other musical bits and pieces all played a part.

The New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton — aka Ferdinand La Menthe and himself a bit of a one-man Gallic-AfricanAmerican cultural fusion — traced Tiger Rag back to its origins in a French quadrille. And the city of New Orleans was and is an extremely international place — a partly Francophone American city facing towards the Caribbean and Latin America.

Once jazz, born at any rate according to one hallowed version of history in New Orleans, had travelled up the Mississippi to Chicago, it rapidly spread to most of the rest of the world. Within a decade or so, one of its most important exponents was a Belgian gypsy, Django Reinhardt.

A noted clarinettist who gets a reference in the Grove Encyclopaedia of Jazz —where Chinese excursions by various American musicians are also noted — is Bhumibol Adulyadej, who also doubles as King of Thailand. He occasionally plays, it seems, with a court orchestra in a style mingling 1940s swing — His Majesty is a Benny Goodman follower — with traditional Thai music, but owing to his regal status no recordings have been issued.

If jazz was the first truly global musical idiom, something similar is true of Art Deco in the sphere of architecture and interior design. One of the surprises of last year's exhibition at the V&A was the extent of Art Deco's global spread. It may have had its origins in an exhibition of decorative arts in Paris, but one of the most spectacular manifestations of the style was to be found, for example, in a Maharaja's bathroom in Jodhpur.

There was more Art Deco in New York and Shanghai than ever there was in Paris or London. The catalogue of the V&A show has chapters on Latin American, South African, East Asian and Australian Deco. Everywhere, local details were put into the mix — Japanese-flavoured Deco in Tokyo — but such details also tended to migrate from place to place, so Milan Central railway station has ancient Egyptian touches, and skyscrapers in New York bear Aztec motifs.

Right now Shanghai is rebuilding vastly — as is Beijing — in the anonymous international corporate style. That, of course, is often regarded in 1066-and-All-That terms as a Bad Thing. Just as there are many who complain about economic globalisation, plenty more object to the cultural sort. Both are frequently identified with capitalism and Americanisation, and efforts are made to resist their influence. (Jazz and abstract art were both discour aged in the old Soviet empire as examples of capitalist decadence.) But whatever its drawbacks, free trade in cultural ideas is one of the main reasons why anything interesting happens anywhere. China might have been sealed off from the rest of the world after the 15th century — and was slowly running down, artistically, as a result — but it wasn't always that way.

In the Shanghai Museum, you can see Chinese Buddhist sculptures which ultimately derive, like Buddhism itself, from India. And those Indian Buddhist carvings, which in turn were derived from Greek forms. were left behind in the region by the passage of Alexander the Great and his armies. And those Greek sculptures initially depended on models from Egypt and the ancient Middle East; while the somewhat less ancient Middle East got much of its ceramic inspiration from China. And so it has always gone, around and around.

In the modern world the process is just speeding up, that's all. Or that's what I was thinking to myself as I flew out from Shanghai's colossal, stunning, brand-new airport at Pudong, designed in an ultra-hitech style by a French architect, Paul Andreu, who also designed Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, which is where I took off.