Four Days with 19 Million Friends

Last week my wife and I took advantage of her school’s fall break and spent four full days in Shanghai.  Our goals were to take in the Shanghai World Expo before it closed at the end of the month and to get a better feel for the city.  We visited Shanghai several times before as far back as 1981, but this visit was the longest.  I’ve posted some photos here.

THEN Looking back over the 29 years since our first visit, it’s impossible to capture the extent of the transformation.  That time we stayed at the Park Hotel which was the tallest building in the city and had remained so since its construction in 1932.  Our room contained the furniture and mattresses from the opening.  There were simply no modern hotels in the city.  Foreigners were almost as rare.  Locals stared at us.  In the People’s Park when I struck up a conversation with an old gent who had been marketing accounting manager for Mobil before the political climate changed (his words) a crowd of several dozen gawkers formed around us.  And several asked us to change money or help them get to the US.  There were virtually no private cars nor any subway system. But bicycles were everywhere.  They flowed down Nanjing E. Road day and night like water down the Huangpu River nearby.  Clothing was uniform and drab: baggy Mao suits in olive green or navy blue with occasional black and gray versions for variety.  Restaurants often had long menus but most of the dishes were unavailable.  Cuisine was built around cabbage.  Housing was state owned and assigned, dilapidated and horribly crowded.  Shoving matches often broke out as citizens struggled to board buses, buy train tickets or accomplish many of the other routine chores of daily life.  These encounters frequently degenerated into full fledged fights born of frustration with the whole system. (Go here for views of Pudong in 1990 and now.  You’ll have to scroll down a bit to the two photos.)

NOW The city is totally transformed.  Of course, the obvious changes are in the built environment.  Thousands of modern high rise apartment blocks, office towers and shopping malls, a clean and modern metro system that is the longest urban system on the planet, ample consumer goods of all types, cars.  Because the public transport system has moved much of the traffic below ground the city seems less crowded. But what touched me more was the transformation of the people.  While the majority are still poor by US standards, they are hopeful, well fed and clothed and generally happy.  They take no notice of foreigners in their midst but are ready to strike up friendly conversations when one shows a knowledge of Putonghua.  The pushing and shoving that was commonplace three decades ago has largely (but not entirely) given way to courteous public behavior.  These people are proud to be Chinese.

Shanghai World Expo seems aimed primarily at the people of China.  About 73 million attended during the 6 month run.  The Expo and the Beijing Olympics two years earlier show the people that the CCP has restored the nation to its rightful position in the world from which it had been dethroned almost two centuries ago.  The Chinese Pavilion was the centerpiece of the Expo in both size and location.  Even the grandest of the “foreign” exhibits seemed tributary to China’s.  The government has become very skilled at reinterpreting ancient imperial rites in a modern vernacular to reinforce its power. (Go here for more photos of the Expo and here for some facts about the modern city.)

Caught behind the great firewall Earlier posts on this blog have commented on restricted freedom of expression in China.  On this trip I found myself a minor victim of that restriction.  Our hotel room was equipped with a modern Lenovo desktop PC and a free internet connection.  My email and my regular electronic newspapers (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times) came through unimpeded.  However, I could not view my own blog or the others that I follow and neither could I view You Tube clips.  This was only a minor inconvenience for me as I was returning to Hong Kong in a few days and had I been more determined I could have found out how to circumvent the censor.  However, this choking off of free expression impoverishes the whole nation.  For a moving statement about human rights by Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, go here.