7. Rebuilding on the Ruins (1945–1978)

The starting line in 1949

The last chapter ended with a table; let me stress one line of it here: Zhabei after 1945 was a ruin that had been bombed twice.

More than 95% of its buildings in ruins, 41.94% of its people living in shacks, more than 20,000 unemployed. Zhabei's "reconstruction" was not patching and mending; it was urban renewal from zero — and under the hardest conditions in the whole country.

Step one: pull down the shacks

In June 1950 the Zhabei and Beizhan districts each set up a Communist Party committee and a district people's government. What followed is clear in its sequence:

1. Confiscate bureaucratic capital and build a state-run economy, set up consumer cooperatives, support private industry and commerce;
2. Steady market prices, secure the supply of daily necessities;
3. Carry out the "three antis" and "five antis" campaigns and democratic reform;
4. In 1956, joint state-private ownership across whole trades: 3,160 private factories and 6,433 private shops in the district entered joint state-private ownership, and 1,462 handicraft households and 9,132 fixed stalls were cooperativised.

By 1957 the industrial base had visibly thickened:

And "the unemployed and jobless of the early liberation period were basically provided for".

Fangua Lane: a place that got into a primary school textbook

If only one place could stand for the history of Zhabei's urban renewal, it would be Fangua Lane.

Where the name comes from

Fangua Lane lies east of Datong Road, south of the Shanghai–Nanjing railway, west of Gonghexin Road and north of Tianmu Middle Road, covering about 6.05 hectares.

There is a charming account of how it got its name. At the end of the nineteenth century this area was called Yaojiazhai; after the Shanghai–Nanjing railway opened in 1909 commerce and industry gathered here, and by the 1920s it had become one of the busiest spots in south-western Zhabei.

In 1947 the residents here grew an enormous pumpkin — a fangua in the local speech. Because "its vines curled like dragon whiskers and the warty skin of the fruit was like dragon eyes", people called it the "fangua dragon" and took it for a lucky emblem; the lane took its name from the homophone: Fangua Lane.

A slum named itself after a pumpkin. The detail says a good deal about how the people here faced their lives.

Five generations of Fangua Lane

It has been through almost every stage of Shanghai's urban renewal:

1965: Shanghai's first five-storey workers' village

In December 1965 Fangua Lane became Shanghai's first five-storey workers' village. Thirty-one blocks with water, electricity and gas, and nearby a bank, a bookshop, a food shop, a barber, a hotel, a bathhouse and children's play equipment. Inside the estate eighteen gundilong were kept as a "patriotic education base for recalling past bitterness and savouring present sweetness".

The detail is striking: among the brand-new five-storey blocks, eighteen shacks were deliberately kept as an exhibit. The point was to make the people who moved in remember where they had come from.

Two things that made it famous

(1) A primary school textbook. In the 1970s an essay called "Fangua Lane Has Changed" was included in primary school Chinese textbooks, and Fangua Lane became known throughout the country.

(2) Antonioni's camera. In 1972 the celebrated Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni came to China to shoot the documentary Chung Kuo, Cina, and chose Fangua Lane as one of his locations, using it as a window onto Chinese society.

A Shanghai workers' village became one of the world's windows onto China in 1972. That is Fangua Lane's place in the international view.

Pengpu: the second story

Unlike Fangua Lane's "rebuild in place", the Pengpu story is "start again elsewhere".

The Pengpu industrial district

From 1958 the Shanghai municipal party committee and people's committee decided to lay out, in the Pengyuepu area of the district, the Pengpu industrial district, centred on the electrical and mechanical industries. The Shanghai Metallurgical and General Machinery Works (today's Pengpu Machinery Works) and other large key enterprises moved in one after another.

By the way, Zhabei's machine-building industry later produced a good number of "firsts for China": China's first large antenna mount, its first bulldozer, its first pneumatic-electrically controlled cold rolling mill, its first water-tube industrial boiler and so on were all born at Zhabei.

Pengpu Xincun

Once there is an industrial district there must be somewhere to live. In 1958, in the Pengpu industrial district — north of Changzhong Road, east of Gonghexin Road, west of Pingshun Road, along both sides of Wenxi Road — 56 workers' dormitory blocks were built, with 169,000 m² of floor space, and more than 1,200 workers' households moved in, forming the earliest Pengpu Xincun — one of Shanghai's first workers' villages.

What followed:

Pengpu Xincun's administrative home changed several times: it belonged to Baoshan county when first built, was transferred to Zhabei District in 1978, and residents' household registration changed to urban status with it.

Two faces of one community

Pengpu Xincun has a striking statistic today: 48.6% of its registered residents are over 60. This is the common fate of Shanghai's earliest workers' villages — the young workers who moved in then are old now.

But Pengpu Xincun also did something famous in Shanghai: the "Pengpu model" of converting old housing into self-contained flats.

• From 2005 the Pengpu Xincun sub-district was the first in the city to press ahead with the conversion of old, non-self-contained housing;
• 102 blocks of non-self-contained housing have been converted, benefiting 4,907 households;
• in June 2025, with the return of residents to the rebuilt Pengyi estate, Pengpu Xincun became the first sub-district or town in the city to complete the conversion of a whole area of non-self-contained old housing.

"Two or three households sharing one kitchen and one bathroom" was the common complaint of these workers' villages. Turning them into "one household to a door, with its own kitchen and bathroom" took no less effort than building them in the first place.

The 1960s and 70s: standstill and undercurrent

The Gazetteer of Zhabei District does not avoid this period:

• in the Great Leap Forward, there were at one point mistaken practices of rushing for results and setting inflated targets;
• under "leftist" thinking, market trading disappeared, distribution channels became monolithic and commercial outlets declined;
• during the three difficult years, more goods were rationed by coupon and by quota;
• from 1961 the eight-character policy of "adjustment, consolidation, filling out and raising standards" was applied, and from 1963 the economic situation began to improve.

As for the renewal and reconstruction of the 1960s and 70s, "because of the many political movements, renewal came to a standstill".

In short

In these thirty years Zhabei accomplished two things: it turned shacks into blocks of flats, and field paths into factories. It was not yet prosperous, but it was on its feet.

The real turning point would have to wait for 1978.