波士顿咨询法 矩阵:浦东：从“鬼城”到热土

对于观察中国楼市起伏的人士来说，浦东的崛起是中国对新办公楼和住宅楼仍有巨大需求的证明。中国楼市的波动起伏成为众多担忧的焦点，因为全球第二大经济体遭受的冲击可能波及全世界。

其中一个大问题是，对于那些没有上海特殊优势的城市来说，浦东那种“房子只要建好就有人买”的方法也会奏效吗？上海独特的优势在于：工业基础雄厚、城市普遍繁荣、地处长江口的有利位置。

随着中国各地到处在新建宏伟的高楼大厦，新的城市中心也同样开始建设令浦东的改头换面得以成为可能的各类基础设施。

近几个月来，包括浦东在内，中国各地房价开始下跌。尽管如此，中国各大城市还处于城市化强有力的进程中。在中国，每年都有1,700万人从农村向城市转移，这一数字相当于全美前四大城市的人口总和。浦东的规划者得以利用国内人口大量迁移的趋势，吸引了建设基础设施的劳动力大军，为这里的工厂提供了丰富的劳动力资源，也为盖好的新房找到了房主。10年来，有200万人搬迁到浦东。

浦东被定位成中国的国际窗口并得以推广，这一营销策略现在被广为学习。在中国，几乎任何一个城市的中心都有一座“世界贸易中心”，几乎每个城市都想成为全球金融重镇。分析师们说，事实上，对于浦东的演变，当地人所起到的作用比外国人大多了，因为当地人会向新的市区迁移。

10年前，房地产分析师高思品 (Sam Crispin)看涨浦东的报告令他与主流观点相左。

如今已成为普华永道会计师事务所（PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC）中国房地产业务董事的高思品说，越来越多有关中国无人居住的“鬼城”的讨论令他想起了此前很多人对浦东的质疑。高思品说，说实话，当时很多评论与今天有关中国房地产市场的讨论相似。两者的逻辑非常类似，谁能把这些房子住满？

高思品说，浦东的教训是中国的需求被大大低估了。他说，房地产开发往往会引出“耸人听闻”的观点。

1990年，在邓小平做出开发浦东的决定仅几周之后，政府就公布了一项蓝图，并划拨了数十亿美元专款。

浦东建设的首个项目就是一座华丽的、比帝国大厦(Empire State Building)还要高的火箭型大厦。位于浦东最前端的东方明珠塔已经成了中国快速现代化的象征，与外滩遥相呼应又形成对比。外滩地处黄浦江对岸的浦西区，是一个有着各种殖民地时期建筑的地带。

自1995年以来，浦东区的建筑所占面积已经达到了曼哈顿的两倍。按照官方的说法，总面积达1.2亿平方米，其中包括70多座摩天大楼。不过，按照国际房地产服务公司仲量联行(Jones Lang LaSalle)的报告，浦东甲级办公楼的空置率略低于曼哈顿，前者是9.5%，后者是10.3%。每平方米的年租金为693美元，比曼哈顿中心区贵了近10%。

一开始，浦东非但没有吸引到租客，反而引来了不少冷嘲热讽。1998年，当时任一家杂志主编的雷默(Joshua Cooper Ramo)曾写过一篇文章，说这是“上海泡沫”，并把上海市建筑的爆炸式扩张与战后欧洲重建相提并论。他写道，这在经济上将引发一种“这到底出了什么问题”的后果。如今，担任基辛格顾问公司(Kissinger Associates Inc.)董事会副主席的雷默把浦东称为“中国例外论”的典型代表，并把浦东的崛起归功于中央政府使用了手头大量的经济工具。

2001年出版的《中国即将崩溃》一书的作者章家敦称，浦东的浮华掩盖了这一模式不可持续的事实。他说，我绝对是属于不为所动那一阵营的；只要肯花钱，总是能换来增长。

不过，在25处黄浦江越江设施和其他基础设施的影响下，上海市的重心已经发生转移。

建筑企业意迅公司(iaction)的董事总经理怀特(Stephen White)说，最终人们意识到，他们确实说到做到了。意迅公司最初曾为国际银行在浦东建办公楼，不过这些办公楼目前大多被中国人占据了。

苹果公司(Apple Inc.)在上海的第一家店就设在浦东。华特-迪士尼公司(Walt Disney Co.)即将在这里兴建有史以来最大规模的灰姑娘城堡(Cinderella Castle)。花旗集团(Citigroup Inc.)和汇丰控股有限公司(HSBC Holdings PLC)在浦东都有自己的办公楼。其他即将入驻浦东的还包括常州贸易发展办事处这样的机构。在办事处的处长Thomas Zhang看来，浦东就是招商引资的桥梁。

人们纷纷涌向浦东，就连土生土长的上海人的思维模式也已经发生了转变，40出头的房地产公司高管姚薇（音）就是其中之一。她曾长期信奉“宁要浦西一张床，不要浦东一间房”这句老话。

1994年姚薇第一次来到浦东时，阻止了一位客户想要租下尚未竣工的东方明珠顶层开餐厅的计划。她为客户提供的意见是：为时太早了。10年后，她又对另外一个客户给出了同样的建议。

不过，如今的姚薇已经在浦东拥有了一套颇具现代感的临江公寓，并为浦东与伦敦相比也不遑多让的房价感到不可思议。从她家的阳台望出去，令人目眩神迷的上海城市风光让客人倾心不已。她说，他们上得楼来，然后感叹，啊，这就是上海。

JAMES T. AREDDY

Pundits once mocked Shanghai's Pudong district, a purpose-built version of Manhattan, as overdesigned and underoccupied, evidence in steel and glass of a property bubble of historic proportions.

Deng Xiaoping sparked the transformation of Pudong's riverfront of warehouses with a 1990 utterance: 'Shanghai is our trump card.' A decade later, Pudong was Exhibit A for critics of an urban-development model guided by state planners, a soulless district where 70% of the buildings stood empty. Visiting economist Milton Friedman called it 'a statist monument for a dead pharaoh on the level of the pyramids.'

Today, as worries of a Chinese property crash are back in force, there is an unlikely bright spot: Pudong.

The district's transformation into a vibrant nexus for finance, trade and entertainment is testament to factors like the strong momentum of Chinese migration toward urban centers. Pudong was conceived as an international gateway-fronted by a world-class skyline-but its foundations today rest on domestic trends, including leaders' development plans and an expanding middle class.

For watchers of China's property fluctuations-the focus of much angst since shocks in the world's second-largest economy could reverberate around the world-Pudong's ascendancy serves as a reminder of still-vast demand in China for new office and apartment buildings.

One big question is whether Pudong's 'build it and they will come' approach will work as well in cities without Shanghai's advantages: a strong industrial base, widespread prosperity and favorable geography at the mouth of the Yangtze River.

As grandiose new skylines sprout across China, new urban centers are also replicating the infrastructure that was crucial to making Pudong's makeover viable.

Apartment prices have started to weaken across China in recent months, including in Pudong. Still, Chinese cities are riding a powerful urbanization trend. Each year, 17 million people move from rural to urban areas in China-equivalent to the populations of the four biggest U.S. cities. Pudong's planners were able to harness this vast internal migration, attracting armies of workers who built the infrastructure, provided a pool of labor for its factories and filled its apartments. Two million people moved to Pudong in 10 years.

Pudong was advertised as China's international window, a marketing tactic now widely copied. Hardly any Chinese downtown lacks a World Trade Center or plans for global finance. In fact, analysts say locals were far more important to Pudong's evolution than were foreigners, as they will be in newer urban areas.

Sam Crispin's bullish reports on Pudong a decade ago made the property analyst a contrarian.

Now, as director of China real estate at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC, Mr. Crispin says growing talk about China's unoccupied 'ghost cities' reminds him of the doubts many had about Pudong. 'A lot of the commentary frankly was quite similar to the ideas that are being bandied about for the property market today,' he says. 'The reasoning is quite similar-who's going to occupy all those buildings?'

Mr. Crispin argues that the lesson of Pudong is how badly Chinese demand was underestimated. Real-estate development, he says, tends to produce 'sensationalist' viewpoints.

Within weeks of Mr. Deng's 1990 endorsement, the government unveiled a blueprint and earmarked billions of dollars to pay for it.

A garish rocket-shaped tower higher than the Empire State Building was the kickoff project. Positioned at Pudong's tip, the Oriental Pearl Tower was a cartoonish totem for China's race into modernity and an emphatic counterpoint to the Bund, a strip of colonial-era buildings on the opposite Puxi bank of the Huangpu River.

Twice the surface area of Manhattan has been constructed in Pudong since 1995 ─120 million square meters of floor space by the official tally, including more than 70 skyscrapers. But according to international real-estate agency Jones Lang LaSalle, less of Pudong's grade-A office space is empty than Manhattan's─9.5% versus 10.3%. The space leases for $693 per square meter annually, nearly a tenth more than Midtown Manhattan.

Initially, Pudong drew snickers faster than tenants. 'The Shanghai Bubble,' a 1998 essay by Joshua Cooper Ramo, compared the city's building 'explosion' with Europe's postwar reconstruction. 'The result is a kind of what-is-wrong-with-this-picture economics,' the then-magazine editor wrote. Today, Mr. Ramo, vice chairman at Kissinger Associates Inc., calls Pudong the capital of Chinese 'exceptionalism' and attributes its rise to the central government's use of the massive economic tools at its disposal.

Gordon Chang, author of the 2001 book 'The Coming Collapse of China,' charged that Pudong's glitz masked an unsustainable model. 'I'm definitely in the not-impressed category. You can always get growth when you spend money,' he says.

Still, spurred by 25 river crossings and other infrastructure, Shanghai's center of gravity has shifted.

'You came to see they actually did what they said,' says Stephen White, managing director of iaction, an architectural firm that initially built Pudong offices for international banks but now sees mostly Chinese take-up.

Apple Inc. chose Pudong for its first Shanghai store. Walt Disney Co. is erecting the biggest-ever Cinderella Castle there. Citigroup Inc. and HSBC Holdings PLC own Pudong towers. Also arriving were tenants like the trade-development office of Changzhou, a Chinese city that uses Pudong 'like a bridge' to engage foreign investors, says its director Thomas Zhang.

Filling the district hinged on mindset changes for Shanghai natives like Yao Wei, a 40-something real-estate executive who long swore by the adage 'Rather a bed in Puxi than a house in Pudong.'

Ms. Yao made one of her first visits to Pudong in 1994 to check a client's plan to rent restaurant space atop the yet-uncompleted Pearl Tower. 'It's too early,' she advised. A decade later, she offered the same advice to another client.

But Ms. Yao now owns a modern riverside apartment in Pudong and marvels at its affordability compared with London. The twinkling cityscape from her balcony mesmerizes guests, she says. 'They come to the building and say, 'Oh, this is Shanghai.'

JAMES T. AREDDY