first actions taken in the Chinese Communist Revolution was to kill people considered counter-revolutionaries. Places such as the Canidrome were transformed from elegant ballrooms to mass execution facilities. This included the mass arrest of thousands of vagrants, criminals, and rickshaw drivers beginning in December 1949, alongside a broader crackdown on gambling and prostitution. This reality has been largely censored, despite numerous western texts describing the hostile takeover following the arrival of the People's Liberation Army. Most foreign firms moved their offices from Shanghai to Hong Kong, specifically North Point, whose Eastern District became known as "Little Shanghai". Although the Communists initially tried to allow the city relative autonomy, its economy declined due to a Taiwanese blockade and Communist restrictions on foreign trade. Home of leftism Shanghai was, along with Beijing, the only former ROC municipality not merged into neighboring provinces over the next decade. Shanghai then underwent a series of changes in the boundaries of its subdivisions. During the 1950s and 1960s, Shanghai became an industrial center and center for revolutionary leftism. The city stagnated economically during the Maoist era. Shanghai remained the largest contributor of tax revenue to the central government, but this came at the cost of severely crippling Shanghai's infrastructure, capital, and artistic development. This also initially denied economic freedoms to the city that were later available to southern provinces such as Guangdong. During the mid-1980s, Guangdong province paid nearly no taxes to the central government and thus was perceived as fiscally expendable. Guangdong would benefit from Chinese economic reform under Deng Xiaoping, while Shanghai would have to wait another decade until 1991. Economic and cultural rebound (1990s–Present) Although political power in Shanghai has traditionally been seen as a stepping stone to higher positions within the PRC central government, the city's modern transformation really did not begin until the third generation General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Jiang Zemin came to power in 1989. Along with his premier Zhu Rongji, Jiang represented the politically right-of-center "Shanghai clique" and began reducing the tax burden on Shanghai. Encouraging both foreign and domestic investment, he sought to promote the cityparticularly the Lujiazui area of Pudongas the economic hub of East Asia and gateway to the Chinese interior. Since that time, Shanghai has led China's overall development and experienced continuous economic growth of between 9–15% annuallyarguably at the expense of Hong Kong. Shanghai is China's largest and greatest commercial and