Today I decided what I want to be when I grow up... a writer. However, I realize my inability to write well, and so I am left having to copy another person's work. Today I started to read a book called China Road. It is a book written by a British gentleman who records his travels from Shanghai to Kazakhstan in hopes to learn more about China's future from regular people. Anyways, the first part is about four days he spent in Shanghai. I really enjoyed this part of the book and the descriptions he had about Shanghai and life within Shanghai. For someone who has never been to Shanghai, or rather has only been to Shanghai (and nowhere else in China), he might be blinded by the amazing fast pace of life and sky scrapers and bright lights, but there actually is a lot of history in Shanghai. And so here are some cool descriptions of Shanghai that I am stealing from Rob Gifford:
There is an intangible feel in Shanghai, an urgency, a hope and optimism that hangs in the air all around you from the minute you arrive. People are pushing forward, with their feet and in their heads, building a future, building a country, moving towards some distant, unseen goal.
New York City makes a good comparison. Beijing is Washington, DC, a capital city, too obsessed with politics to be at the forefront of commerce. Shanghai is Manhattan, although in many ways it is Manhattan in about 1910- a boomtown with immigrants flooding in. There are roughly 13 million people in Shanghai (New York in 1910 had about 5 million). As in New York a hundred years ago, many of these people have just arrived from somewhere else.
There is no Statue of Liberty to welcome them here, but as I stand looking out across the corrugated river to the Elysian Fields of Pudong, it seems to me there should be. Or at least a Statue of Opportunity...
One shiny new office tower on the other side of the river has become a huge TV screen, with advertisements and government propaganda alternately lighting up the entire side of the building, one message replaces five seconds later by another.
Welcome to Shanghai. Tomorrow will be even more beautiful.
1,746 more days until the Shanghai World Expo.
Sexual equality is a basic policy of our country.
Eat Dove chocolate.
First of all, yes, there is a consumer boom, but the majority of people have no access to it. If in the US you need money to get power, in China you need power to get money. China's prosperity today is just a patina of wealth, accessible mainly to the corrupt and the very fortunate at the top, which disguises a seething mass of urban social problems, such as unemployment, crime and outdated housing. And don't even mention the countryside. Just go a mile from the neon on the Bund and Nanjing Road and you will find thousands of people living on $40 per month, severance pay from their former factory jobs at now-defunct factories. They have no health insurance, and if they become really sick, all they can do is go home and die.
Sections of the big department store are permanently empty, as are many of the new office blocks and shopping malls, built as a result of corrupt deals, giving a veneer affluence that makes the city look more prosperous than it is. For every member of the emergent middle class who drives her family to Pizza Hut in her new Volkswagen, there are perhaps a hundred who can barely afford a bicycle.
Everything I have just written, from both points of view, is true. It just depends on how you look at it. Is the glass half empty or is it half full? How foreigners see China often has as much to do with their own characters and their own prejudices (or the character and prejudices of the reporter who writes the article or book they read) as it has to do with the reality on the ground. For every fact that is true about China, the opposite is almost always true as well, somewhere in the country...
What do I think? It depends on which day you ask me. China messes with my head on a daily basis. One day I think that it really is going to take over the world, and that the Chinese government is doing the most extraordinary thing the planet has ever witnessed. The World Bank says China has lifted 400 million people out of poverty since 1978. That's more than the entire population of South America.
The next day it will all seem built on sand and I expect it all to come tumbling down around us. I'll be disgusted at the way the Communist Party treats its people, and shocked at the sheer cost it all, the human cost, which seems acceptable to the government in everything it does.
