1. Introduction

Shanghai became known as "the news capital of China" for foreign journalists in the early 1930s, as world interest focused more on upon the Far East and the growing threat of Japan. Some journalists already based in Beijing moved down to Shanghai; many more arrived during the decade. Most were young, adventurous and keen to report a dramatic story. They had a cockpit view of Japan's aggression in the Shanghai region, from the first assault on Chabei in 1932 to the second offensive of 1937. Shanghai was also the base from which the Nanjing Massacre was reported to the outside world. A number of journalists followed the Nationalist government to Hankou and then to Chongqing where the first Foreign Correspondents' Club was established. From there, a few managed to reach Yan'an, wartime capital of the Chinese Communists. At the end of the war in 1945, Shanghai again became the main base for China reporting -- and for coverage of a new war. Foreign correspondents documented the growing corruption and brutality of the Kuomintang regime till its collapse in 1949 and the birth of a new China.

After an interval of several decades, Shanghai has again become an increasingly popular base from which to report on a very different kind of revolution now under way as China becomes a modernised and developed country. A group of foreign journalists based in Shanghai have formed a modern history study group, focusing its research on the activities of their predecessors. This collection of short extracts from the pre-Liberation period is the first result of their work.

2. Reporting prewar Shanghai

The veteran US correspondent Archibald Steele has recalled that "virtually all news out of China was "funnelled through Shanghai…. Life was comfortable, news plentiful, and communications good." The presence of four English-language daily newspapers in the city also provided employment for young journalists arriving from elsewhere and seeking to make their mark. Tillman Durdin of the New York Times began his career as real estate editor for the Shanghai Evening Post: Harold Isaacs, author of "The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution", also worked for it. The China Weekly Review, founded in Shanghai by Thomas Millard (who had covered the Russo-Japanese War), and then edited by J B Powell, had earlier on given Edgar Snow his first job -- in 1928 as assistant advertising manager. The Shanghai Evening Post, edited by Randall Gould until after Liberation, was another haven.

Though Shanghai provided a pleasantly cosmopolitan atmosphere, not all the journalists were comfortable with the "semi-colonial" attitudes of the Western elites who ran the French Concession and the International Settlement. Early on in 1927, the writer Arthur Ransome caused great offence to the "Shanghai-landers" by criticising their outlook in an article for the Manchester Guardian.

"Whereas both England and China have been profoundly affected by the war, the Shanghai-landers behave and talk as if the events that have followed 1914 had passed, so far as they are concerned, in a different planet. For them the last important political event was the suppression of the Boxers. Europe is far away from them and China, at their very doors, seems almost as far ….

These people 'think imperially' in the manner of the Rand magnates at the time of the South African War. They are at pains to see in the present stage of the Chinese [Nationalist] revolution a new Boxer rebellion, to be put down by force. They think of 'anti-foreignism' as China's original sin, to be exorcised by periodical penances. They look around on their magnificent buildings and are surprised that China is not grateful to them for their gifts, forgetting that the money to build them came out of China. … English prestige is at stake when their interests are threatened, but unless English policy coincides with their own they are prepared at any moment to be the Ulster of the East."

("The Shanghai Mind", reprinted in Arthur Ransome: The Chinese Puzzle, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927, pp. 29-30)

In 1930 Edgar Snow accused Americans in Shanghai of living in a "comfortable but hermetically sealed glass case". Nym Wales satirised both conservative Britishers and Chinese: "To label his position the Chinese wears long fingernails and a (k)nob on his flat hat. The Englishman wears long coattails and a high hat on his nob."

[Robert M. Farnsworth, From Vagabond to Journalist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), p.157].

Some journalists made friends among the radical intellectuals who congregated in Shanghai, and through them began to understand the dynamics of Chinese revolution.

In a review of Living China (a collection by Edgar Snow of new Chinese writing), Randall Gould commented:

"Few Shanghailanders have any real idea what expression, if any, the creative mind of modern China is seeking and finding. Few realise that there is any such creative mind, or the terrific struggle and repression which has been in progress..." [ibid. p.210].

The sweatshop conditions in much of Shanghai industry were also the subject of critical articles. In 1936, the Australian journalist Harold Timperley (also writing for the Manchester Guardian) moved to Shanghai from Beijing and was appalled by what he saw.

"Soon after his arrival from Peiping, Mr Timperley visited several of the factories in and about Shanghai, finding in all of them an urgent need for recreational and medical facilities. Working from ten to twelve hours a day, undernourished, and suffering from eye troubles, poisoned arms and legs due to lack of medical attention, the apprentices who are all under eighteen, and one-third of whom are under sixteen, have very little time or opportunity for anything in life but work of the hardest kind..

From people interested in these boys, a provisional committee headed by Mr Timperley grew up, and sponsored, as an experiment, three nights a week of recreation for apprentices employed in the Yangtzepoo district....

It is a discouraging fact that one of the effects of the depression plus the smuggling in the North of China has been to bring about an increase of unpaid labour.... Mr Timperley estimates that there are between ten and fifteen thousands of these unpaid workers in and about Shanghai.... However, steps are being taken to register every apprentice in the city so that they shall not be entirely at the mercy of the employer."

[North China Herald, September 30, 1936].

In 1938 the poet W H Auden and writer Christopher Isherwood were guided around the Shanghai sweatshops by the New Zealander Rewi Alley who was about to set up the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives in the hinterland. They saw how children in the accumulator factories "already (had) the blue lines in their gums which is a symptom of lead-poisoning. Few of them will survive longer than a year or eighteen months." Alley estimated that 40,000 refugee children would die in the streets of the Shanghai in the next twelve months from under-nourishment and epidemics.

Returning to England, Isherwood wrote his famous description of a city still flaunting its pleasures while the Japanese army was at its doors.

"...The tired or lustful business man will find here everything to gratify his desires. You can buy an electric razor or a French dinner, or a well-cut suit. You can dance at the Tower Restaurant on the roof of the Cathay Hotel, and gossip with Freddy Kaufmann, its charming manager, about the European aristocracy or pre-Hitler Berlin. You can attend race-meetings, baseball games, football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath-houses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea.... Finally, if you ever repent, there are churches and chapels of all denominations."

[Journey to a War (London: Faber and Faber, 1939,) pp. 227-28].

3. Reporting the battle for Shanghai

The Shanghai battlefield and the Yangtze River delta provided easy -- and grim access -- for foreign correspondents to cover the successive stages of Japanese aggression. In January 1932 the Japanese, while overrunning Manchuria, opened a second front at Shanghai in order to divert attention from the north-east. Then, and again in August 1937 when a full invasion was launched, correspondents had a cockpit view of the fighting, and easy access (until Japanese censorship was imposed in Shanghai) to outgoing communications.

In March 1932 the Far Eastern correspondent of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung eluded Japanese pickets to inspect the battlefield at Kiangwan.

"There is not a living creature to be seen, and naked bodies with the flesh burnt to the bone are lying about in the streets and in the ditches. In the fields civilians killed by projectiles are lying dead amongst dead horses, pigs and sheep....

Although the battle was over several days ago the Japanese have made no attempt to bury the Chinese dead. No Japanese dead are to be seen anywhere. While foreigners are kept away from the battlefield very many Japanese civilians are now to be seen, some of them accompanied by their wives and children. They are allowed to visit these scenes of horror and desolation. Japanese fathers show their sons the dead soldiers lying in the trenches."

[The Manchester Guardian, March 9, 1932, reproduced on the Guardian Century website].

Edgar Snow reported similar horrifying sights in Chapei:

Bodies of civilians lie clustered in alleys and scattered on the streets where the marines have advanced. I see a mother with her child, both of whom appear to have been pierced by a single thrust of a bayonet. In an old rice-shop with an open front I come suddenly upon an improvised crematorium. Bodies of Chinese civilians are piled four deep inside this shop, and ronin, preparatory to setting fire to it, are dragging new corpses to the threshold. Seeing me, they glare menacingly. Three marines come up and with bared bayonets order me to move on.

[Far Eastern Front (London: Jarrolds, 1934), p. 212.]

Many more correspondents were on the scene in 1937. "Nowhere else", wrote Edgar Snow later, "is a great metropolis likely again to have a ringside seat at a killing contest involving nearly a million men."

People stood on their apartment roofs and watched Japanese dive bombers, right before their eyes, emptying tons of bombs on the Chinese trenches hidden beyond the horizon of tile and masonry. Guests at the swank Park Hotel, on the security of Bubbling Well Road, could gaze out through the spacious glass facade of its top-storey dining-room, while contentedly sipping their demitasse, and check up on the markmanship of the Japanese batteries..... Though the outcome of the engagement was never in doubt, it was full of surprises, and taught some new lessons in the art of butchery.

[Scorched Earth (London: Gollancz, 1941), vol. 1, p.52]

In November 1937 the North China Herald reported the death of the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, while watching a battle south of the French concession as the Japanese tried to wipe out a last-ditch struggle by Chinese defenders in Nantao. The dead man, and other journalists including Edgar Snow and Malcolm MacDonald (the London Times correspondent). had climbed a water-tower inside the French power-plant which offered a good view.

Mr Philip Pembroke Stephens, correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, London, who came to Shanghai to cover the hostilities, was killed by Japanese machine-gun bullets on November 11, Armistice Day. The late Mr Stephens was on a water-tower at Avenue Dubail, French Concession, at 3 pm on November11, watching the fighting across Siccawei Creek. Unexpectedly, a Japanese machine-gun elevated its aim, and sprayed the water-tower with bullets, causing Mr Stephens and his companions to take cover.

While the others managed to get safely under cover of the concrete pillars holding the tank, Mr Stephens was shot through the head. After noticing his absence, his companions clambered up to where he was lying. Three others were wounded, but none of these wounds was considered dangerous. Mr Stephens was 34 years old [...] and covered the war in Abyssinia and the Civil War in Spain. As soon as hostilities broke out he was despatched by aeroplane to China. The Japanese tendered their apologies for the incident, explaining that they had been shooting at snipers on roof-tops in the French Concession at the time Mr Stephens was killed.

[Five Months of War (Shanghai: North-China Daily News & Herald, 1938), p.133]

4. Reporting the Nanjing Massacre

Five correspondents remained in Nanjing during its siege till its capture on December 13, 1937, and witnessed the beginning of the massacre. They were Tillman Durdin of the New York Times, Archibald Steele of the Chicago Daily News, Yates McDaniel of AP, LC Smith of Reuters, and Paramount cameraman Arthur Menken. (Four escaped on the US gunboat Oahu on the 15th, and McDaniel left a day later).

Steele filed a dispatch on the 15th on what he called "Four Days of Hell". Durdin filed two days later, describing "wholesale looting, the violation of women, the murder of civilians, the eviction of Chinese from their homes, mass executions of war prisoners and the impressing of able-bodied men (which) turned Nanking into a city of terror." On arriving in Shanghai, Durdin filed another longer report which appeared in the New York Times under the headline "The Conquerors Ran Wild".

The range and dimensions of Japanese atrocities were already clearly established in these first dispatches, even though they only described the onset of the massacre. Some of what they described was based on information given to them by other foreigners in Nanjing, but they also witnessed atrocities for themselves. Durdin in his first dispathes gives this chilling account of the mass execution of Chinese men in civilian clothes -- suspected by the Japanese of being former soldiers.

Just before boarding the ship for Shanghai the writer witnessed the execution of 200 men on the Bund. The killings took ten minutes. The men were lined up against a wall and shot. Then a number of Japanese, armed with pistols, wandered nonchalantly around the crumpled bodies, pumping bullets into any that were still kicking.

The army men performing the gruesome job had invited navy men from the warship anchored off the Bund to view the scene. A large group of military spectators apparently greatly enjoyed the spectacle.

["Butchery marked capture of Nanking: all captives slain", New York Times, December 18, 1937]

Information continued to be gathered by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, a group of foreigners who strove to protect the Chinese residents, and included missionaries, doctors, teachers and businessmen. Much of this was presented in memoranda to the Japanese embassy in Nanjing, whose staff were either unwilling or unable to have more than a marginal effect upon the Japanese military command. Copies of these documents and other letters were smuggled down river to Shanghai where they were used by journalists notably included Harold Timperley.

In January Timperley sent a number of cables to the Manchester Guardian about what was happening in Nanjing, based on the material sent to him by the Committee and on other sources. Three of these were censored by the Japanese who had forced the international cable offices in Shanghai to cooperate with them. Timperley made it clear he was referring to the entire delta area, not only to Nanjing. The censorship led to an official protest from the British consul-genertal in Shanghai. Here is the original text of the first cable from the Guardian archives.

Press Manchester Guardian London

Since return Shanghai few days ago investigated reported atrocities committed by Japanese army Nanking elsewhere stop verbal accounts reliable witnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility beyond question afford convincing proof Japanese army behaved and continuing behave in fashion reminiscent Attila his Huns stop survey by one competent foreign observer indicates in Yangtze Delta no less than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians slaughtered many cases cold blood stop robbery rape including children tender years and insensate brutality towards civilians continues to be reported from areas where actual hostilities ceased weeks ago stop deep shame which better type Japanese civilian here feels at reprehensible conduct Japanese troops elsewhere heightened by series local incidents where Japanese soldiers run amok Shanghai itself stop today's North China Daily News reports particularly revolting case where drunken Japanese soldier unable obtain women and drink he remanded shot killed three Chinese women over sixty and wounded several other harmless civilians Timperley.

[January 16, 1938, now in John Rylands Library, Manchester]

In the first cable Timperley used the figure of 300,000 for the number killed by the Japanese which has since become the standard figure used by Chinese sources. However in the original version of the cable (which for complex reasons has later been misquoted) the crucial phrase "in Yangtze delta" was omitted, making it seem that he was referring only to Nanjing. This issue has become a point of acute controversy between Japanese revisionist historians (who seek to prove that the masssacre never took place) and authors of recent works such as Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

In January 1938 the Committee decided to ask him to use the material as the basis for a book to be produced as soon as possible. The book was published in London and in New York and reproduced much of the material in full. An author's copy of What War Means (London: Gollancz, 1938) is on display in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.

5. Reporting the war years

As conditions worsened in Shanghai and the story of Chinese resistance moved further inland, many foreign correspondents left the city to follow the Nationalist government at first to Hankow and then to Chongqing.

Freda Utley, who then wrote for the London News Chronicle, would later recall in her autobiography the atmosphere of Hankow and the personalities of many foreign correspondents.

Most of them had spent many years in China, years during which, instead of acquiring the narrow prejudices and arrogance of the 'Old China Hand', they had learnt to love and understand the Chinese, whilst yet preserving no romantic illusions about them....

They had seen the war from the beginning and had been in danger many times, but they rarely spoke of their personal experiences. The sufferings and constant danger to which the Chinese were exposed loomed too large....

Most of them would probably have subscribed to the view of Far Eastern experts expressed by Randall Gould, the editor of the Shanghai Evening Post, who has spent the best part of his life in China:

'Show me a Far East expert and I will show you a Far East fool or liar or both.'

[Freda Utley, Odyssey of a Liberal (Washington: National Press, 1970), ch. 19].

Those correspondents who stayed in Shanghai came under increasing pressure. In 1940 Hallett Abend, whose reporting was less hostile to Japan than many others, sent a memo to the New York Times, complaining of attempts at entrapment by Japanese agents.

Japanese anti-Americanism is growing here with dangerous rapidity…. I am now packing with such secrecy as if possible, and I am shipping all of my valluable possessions to New York at once. This shipment will include my large collections of jades, ivories, bronzes, Chinese paintings, and china. In addition, I am sending all f my good teakwood furniture, my Peking rugs, my household silver, and most of my library. In the future I am intending to "camp out", reserving only necessary furniture and rugs of litle value which I will not mind abandoning, plain dishes and old bedding. I am not an alarmist, as my fourteen years' record shows, but I think these precautions are dictated by common sense.

[Hallett Abend, My Years in China 1926-41 (London: John Lane, 1944), p. 324]

After Pearl Harbour, the wartime capital of Chongqing became the only possible base

for China reporting. A year later, 25 foreign correspondents and photographers were based there. They included Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, Archibald Steele, Guenther Stein of the Manchester Guardian, Harrison Forman of the London Times, Spencer Moosa of AP, and Israel Epstein, then writing for the Allied Labor News. Visitors in 1942 included Edgar Snow, then writing for the London Daily Mail, Jack Belden of Time magazine, and Wilfred Burchett of the London Daily Express.

It was in Chongqing that the Foreign Correspondents' Club was first set up in the communal atmosphere of a press hostel provided for foreign journalists by the International Department of the Ministry of Information. In July 1941, the hostel was hit by Japanese bombs, but it was soon back in operation. FCC members organised social events some of which were held in the International Department's press conference hall.

At the end of 1942 the hostel residents and the department staff jointly put on a New Year's Eve program of games, stage play and movies. The 'Murder at the Press Hostel', a skit written and presented by foreign correspondents, drew rounds of applause and laughter. Mr & Mrs Spencer Moosa, Arch T Steele, Ernest O Hauser [Readers' Digest], Henry Bough [Reuters], Mr & Mrs Karl J Eskeland [UP}, Israel Epstein, S Speight [Sydney Morning Herald], and Harrison Forman were among those who took part in the play.....

One of the contributions of the department to the press is the completion of a wireless station exclusively for press messages.... with the machinery carefully concealed in a dug-out, the new station was inaugurated on May 18, 1942.

[Lin Sen, Zhanshi Zhonghuazhi (Record of Wartime China) (Washington DC: Chinese News Service, 1943), pp. 704-05].

However Israel Epstein has recalled that the Information's Department generosity was limited. Every correspondent was allowed to send out 1,500 words a week using the government service. "But this was on a reward and punishment basis. If you wrote things that the Kuomintand wasn't very happy about, they would withdraw this facility for a week or two" [Stephen MacKinnon & Oris Friesen, China Reporting (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1987), p. 110]

Chongqing was also the point of contact between many foreign correspondents and the Chinese communist party, through the liaison office headed by Zhou Enlai which functioned under the fragile authority of the CCP-KMT second united front. After much fruitless lobbying, the Nationalists finally allowed a few journalists to visit the wartime communist capital at Yan'an in Shaanxi province. They included Harrison Forman, Guenther Stein and Stuart Gelder, all of whom wrote books about the wartime "liberated areas". Information about the CCP also came from other visitors to Yan'an and from members of the Allied Observers' Group ("Dixie Mission") which was based in Yan'an from mid-1944 onwards.

Another visitor to Yan'an was John Roderick who arrived in Chongqing for AP after the war and a month later flew to the communist capital.

'Next to the Gobi Desert and the Great Wall of China, Yan'an was like no other city I had ever seen,' [Roderick recalls]. 'The Japanese had destroyed the walled city in 1938, and the communists found shelter in 10,000 caves dug into the soft loess mountains. I lived for seven months in a primitive cave of the American Dixie Mission, a handful of American military men stationed there to assess communist wartime military strength and to rescue downed American pilots.' He had two long stays in Yan'an, where he was the only foreign correspondent in residence. He met and interviewed Mao Zedong and other survivors of the epic Long March.

[from a profile by Vivienne Kenrick, Japan Times, November 17, 2001]

6. Reporting Postwar Shanghai

After 1945, Shanghai once again a convenient base from which to report on China. English-language newspapers including the Shanghai Evening Post with Randall Gould as editor were re-established. Before very long, it also became a convenient base from which to report on a new war -- the civil war which followed the breakdown of CCP-KMT negotiations.

In May 1949 Roy Rowan, who was reporting from Hong Kong for Time-Life International, returned to Shanghai in the dying weeks of Kuomintang rule. He found terror on the streets as KMT soldiers carried out summary executions, a dwindling foreign community although the British still played bowls, and near-empty bars with idle Chinese and Russian hostesses. But life in the Chinese City continued unaffected, with opera, acrobatics, and packed street markets.

Roy's colleague Jim [?] Burns took roll after roll of pictures: Roy has kept his vivid notes which accompanied the films when they were sent to New York. The text below has been edited from portions of his notes.

(a) Nationalist police terror:

By implementing a reign of terror in Shanghai, the [Nationalist] police hope to maintain discipline in the City and keep the people from turning traitor, engaging in subversive activities, and looting as happened during the last days of Nanjing. To accomplish this, all petty offenders as well as serious offenders are being executed without delay at the scene of their crime.... Thousands of onlookers jam the street and hang from the buildings to watch the victims being carted off to die.

These shots show the huge crowd outside the Central Police Station. Weapons carriers loaded with tommy-gunners may be seen parked on the opposite side of the street....

It's a gruesome sight to see petty thieves herded off like cattle to the slaughter, and the crowd is obviously stunned by the savagery of the police. The cops themselves are frightened, fearing an attack by members of the Communist underground in Shanghai..

(b) Foreign drinks

-- Members have leisurely drinks on the verandah of the French Club while more members are drinking on the lawn under beach umbrellas... Built in 1926, the luxurious Club boasted two thousand members six months ago, but is now down to less than one thousand. The French seem to be the calmest of the foreign population in Shanghai, and are enjoying themselves as if the emergency didn't exist. Many of them are planning to stay on and see what happens under the new regime..

-- James Mack, 64-year-old Anglo-Chinese son of British Police Commissioner, Inspector Mack, sips a glass of wine in the Lear Bar (on the Hongkew waterfront). Out of work and bumming meals and drinks along Broadway, Mack is waiting for the Communists to come and hoping it will mean a change for the better.

(c) Life goes on

A circus in the Old City is packed despite the threat, In fact life goes on just as it has for hundreds of years. A large crowd watches a girl acrobat balancing precariously atop a bamboo pole resting on the cheek of her partner below. Kids lacking the price of admission to the circus peek under the fence. The tension which exists in the foreign sections just does not penetrate the walls of the Old City. All the narrow allies are jammed with people, shops, food laid out to dry, filth, disease and kids who get in the way when you try to take pictures.

(d) Last-ditch defence

[The Nationalist army is] dismantling fine buildings and private residences along Hungjao (Hongqiao) Road to clear a good field of fire for the outer defences around Shanghai. Of course the Garrison Command could have created their outer defence line about a half mile further out, but the stripping and burning of some of the beautiful estates in this section seems to give the reeling Nationalists a chance to express their resentment against foreign intrusion. The Army is having a wonderful time ripping down what their 'masters' spent decades building.

Conscripted coolies [are] herded into rough formation by soldiers on Hungjao Road. Coolies are used for the construction of defence positions in this area.

(e) Civilian misery

-- A Shanghai Benevolent Association truck loaded with bodies of dead babies picked up from the streets en route down the Bund to jetty where they are loaded on lighters and taken to the country for cremation.

-- Hawkers clutter the sidewalks of Shanghai now that barter and payment of wages in goods has to a large extent replaced cash transactions during this period of terrific inflation. On many streets the hawkers are packed so solidly they block the way of the pedestrians.

7. After Liberation

The story of Western reporting from Shanghai after Liberation is too extensive a subject to be dealt with in this brief survey. For the next two decades there were hardly any foreign correspondents stationed there (the exceptions were from the Soviet bloc) [check if poss.] The English-language papers closed down: the last to go was the China Weekly Review in 1953.

However Shanghai was on the itinerary of most visiting foreign journalists who wrote extensively on the social and economic changes under way. Pierre and Renee Gosset, after their visit in 1956, gave their chapter on Shanghai the title "Shanghai: virtuous Babylon". Shanghai had become "totally, irredeemably, Chinese" [Chine rouge: An VII (Paris: Juillard, 1960), pp. 214-15].

Edgar Snow after his 1960 visit to China, wrote in a chapter on Shanghai: "Gone the pompous wealth beside naked starvation... gone the island of Western civilisation flourishing in the vast slum that was Shanghai. Good-bye to all that" [The Other Side of the River (New York,: Random House, 1961), p. 529]

Shanghai remained on the itinerary even during the Cultural Revolution when it was presented as a model for revolutionary politics and a new type of labour relations.

After the reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping, it presented a different image again: Harrison Salisbury wrote approvingly that "the whole Chinese economy has surged forward" because of Mr Deng's new economic policies which included plans to re-open the Shanghai Stock Exchange. ["China's CEO" in Success, Jan-Feb. 1986, p. 72]

Since then an ever-increasing number of foreign journalists have visited Shanghai, and in recent years many have been based here again. Once more Shanghai offers a fascinating city to report, with a rich past, present -- and future.. And it is also a good base (some correspondents think it is the best base) from which to follow the sweeping changes taking place elsewhere in China.