Ants on the locust tree assume a great-nation swagger
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On this nameless junction, where Fuzhou Road
Crosses Jiangxi Road on its way to the Bund,
For a hundred years the British Concession
In the Far East — Shanghai’s City of London;
And where, today, a red light means ‘stop’
But also continue as well and instead,
And a green light means ‘go’ but be careful
Of those who are still moving through a red.
Where a circus turned into a crossroads
Has left four corners outside its circle
For sweating tourists to be delivered
By electric cars and motorcycles;
Where taxis reverse into one-way streets
For a WeChat fare on the pavement,
And Chinese families in single file
March noisily to neighbourhood restaurants.
Where a right turn into oncoming traffic
Is a matter for negotiation,
And lights on bicycles ridden at night
Are an unnecessary affectation;
Where groups of women — always women,
It seems — in pursuit of Western fashions,
Push babies in prams alongside the cars
To Nanjing Road East’s retail concessions.
And where — were this scene enacted in London,
The street would erupt into violence,
With black fists flying and cops arresting —
Here the evening is all but silent:
The horns occasional and politely sounded,
A warning and not amplified abuse —
Except for the taxi-drivers who argue
Over public space and its proper use.
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Watching all this from the fourth-floor window
Of my hotel room on a Maundy Thursday,
When the heretic in Holy Trinity Church
Commanded us ‘to love one another’,
And a woman in the building opposite
Blow-dries her hair in the morning’s sea breeze,
Whose sun falls on my English translation
Of the Constitution of the CPC —
It appears to me, as I read aloud,
That here is another side of China
To the fences around the People’s Square
Or the security checks in the Metro,
The Alipay app for every payment,
The quick-response code at every entrance,
The facial scan at immigration,
The panopticon of digital surveillance.
For here the state has taken the form
Of a consensual order of the free
Working towards their common weal
(Like swaggering ants on a locust tree);
And not, as we are in the West, labouring
Under the constant threat of punishment,
Where every free movement has its law
And every true word its prison sentence.
For a nation is judged by its police:
And whereas, in the West, every train-station,
Every airport and shopping mall is patrolled
By an army of occupation,
Here no-one carries a gun in public
And it is the people who police their own brawls:
For the future will be communist,
Comrade, or it will not be at all.
— Shanghai, April 2025
• • • • •
Over Easter we flew to the city of Shanghai, located on the delta of the Yangtze River. As we made our descent, the plane travelled over an area not much smaller than London, lined with hundreds of docks and their cranes, criss-crossed with roads and canals, filled with factories and warehouses, and inhabited by hundreds of high-rise housing estates. In the descending gloom, I at first thought the latter were individual houses; and it was only when I adjusted my perception that I realised the scale of what I was seeing. I’ve travelled across the Midwest of the USA by train and seen mile after mile of industry outside Chicago; but I’ve never seen anything like Shanghai Port, the busiest container port in the world. The airport express into town, a journey of 8 minutes, reached speeds of 301 kilometres per hour and cost 40 yuan, around £4.00.
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Commander of the British Eighth Army between 1942 and 1943, of the Allied Ground Forces in 1944, of the 21st Army Group between 1944 and 1945, and Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe between 1951 and 1958, told the House of Lords in 1962: ‘Rule one on page one of the Book of War is: “Do not march on Moscow.”’ At the time of our trip, the USA had just pulled out of the disastrous proxy-war in the Ukraine only to immediately start a tariff war with China. This aerial view of Shanghai’s industrial might convinced me that rule two of the Book of War is: ‘Don’t start a trade war with China’.
We stayed in the Jinjiang Metropolito Hotel, which had been built in the former British concession in 1934 when the rest of Shanghai (excluding the French and American concessions) was under Japanese control, and from which I observed the scene I describe in my poem. The Bund, from the Hindi word for embankment — a legacy of Britain’s other colony — runs along the western shore of the Huangpu River, itself a tributary of the mighty Yangtze to the north. Nanjing Road East, which runs west from the Bund to the People’s Square, is today one of the busiest shopping streets in the world. The Holy Trinity Church, a formerly Anglican and now Protestant church, was designed by the Gothic Revivalist, George Gilbert Scott, and sits on the Jiangxi Road. The attached school was attended by the English writer, J. G. Ballard, and appears in his novel about the Japanese occupation, Empire of the Sun (1984). Now the headquarters of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the supervisory organ of Protestantism in China, it has been closed to the public since 2018.
In John Le Carré’s novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the character of Bill Haydon, modelled on the British double agent, Kim Philby, says that the only real measure of a nation’s political health are its secret services. The behaviour of our own — since at least their invention of the Weapons of Mass Destruction that justified the 2003 invasion of Iraq — has been consistently criminal and largely directed against the British people; but as the electorate has handed more and more power into the hands of the deep state, the behaviour of our now politicised and paramilitary police forces has become a more public image of the UK’s decline into a police state.
My copy of the bilingual edition of the Constitution of the Communist Party of China, like that of Mao’s Poems, was purchased from the Foreign Language Bookshop on Fuzhou Road. The final two lines of my poem are a reference to the famous conclusion to André Breton’s book, Nadja (1928): ‘La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.’
A Communist in Hong Kong 