The City of the Future

I loved Shanghai from the moment I arrived. I had just stepped off a train, left arm in a sling thanks to my snowboarding mishap in New Zealand. With my obvious disability I was a helpless lamb ready for slaughter to any sneaky taxi driver. China is full of them, and instantly I was hounded by four drivers each trying to rip me off. It was one of Shanghai's hottest days in 60 years - 39°C and with staggering humidity. It was 8:00 in the morning, I had been outside for 5min and was already sweating profusely and my clothes were almost wet. Madness characterised the streets - there were scooters hooning everywhere, cars honking needlessly, rickshaws and carts towing anything the mind can think off to all types of destinations. And taxi drivers were still trying to lure me into their respective taxis. It was chaotic.

The train I had stepped off was a Maglev (magnetic levitation) train, where we comfortably reached speeds of 430km/hr. The train buzzed past cars driving at 100km/hr on the highway, similar to how cars going at 100km/hr buzz past people walking. As we approached Lonyang Rd Station I could see the skyscrapers of Pudong glittering the horizon as far as the eye can see. I had arrived in a futuristic city via one of the fastest trains in the world. Is there really a need for a 430km train to ferry people between the airport and the city? No, but that is hardly the point. Already thoughts were flurrying into my head - when this city does something, it does something extravagantly.

A mix of inherent chaos and futuristic eccentricity, Shanghai left an imprint on me that few cities ever achieve. It is the flagship city of China and a symbol of its unstoppable economy, but at the same has so many striking contrasts that make one crazy, one-of-a-kind city.

China International Summer Law School

It was my interest in what really was making China's thriving economy tick that led me to attend the China International Summer Law School. It is common knowledge that China is fast becoming a global power to possibly rival the US, but I really had no idea how and why. This course answered that well, given our short time. It is run as an affiliation between Tongji University and the Center for International Business and Commercial law. We studied aspects of China's legal framework, business environment, some of its culture and customs and also some of the language (which is pretty damn hard!). Many important cities act as political and economic centres, but Shanghai is this and a whole lot more. Unlike London, New York and Sydney; the notion of Shanghai itself is actually a message from China to the world about just how important China wil become.

We also went to Hangzhou for a weekend. We were originally going to go to Putoshan, one of the four holy Buddhist mountains. However this was cancelled literally two hours before we left, thanks to a typhoon that threatened to enter the South China Sea... Hangzhou was a great escape from The Hustle And Bustle of Shanghai with its romantic West Lake, Buddhist Temples and symbols of that fascinating ancient Chinese culture and dynastic history. But I won't go into that here - the photos can do the talking.

A City of Contrasts

Shanghai has been a melting pot of East and West since the beginning of its development. Walking through the streets of Shanghai, I was fascinated with this mix. It still has that typical Asian chaos and atmosphere. People here live their lives on the streets - street vendors everywhere sell phone cards, fruit, watches, bags and DVDs. Bicycles fill the sidewalks and the spaces in the streets. The rest of the streets are filled with scooters and cars. Small, cheap restaurants serve delicious Chinese food for cheap. The signs in Chinese characters are totally unreadable for foreigners like me. The air is filled with noise; there is beeping, shouting, revving, more shouting and some more beeping. Blue sky is not visible thanks to the pollution haze (unless the wind blows it away). This is what I always thought life in a massive Asian city was like.

Then you move your eyes above street level. Modern skyscrapers grace the horizon - New York City. You see Communist-like high rise apartments everywhere - St Petersburg. Billboards hang off buildings and massive screens flicker with advertisements - Piccadilly Circus in London and Times Square in NYC. Beautiful Renaissance, Gothic and Baroque buildings line The Bund - Paris. Trees-lined avenues host Tudor houses in the French Concession - again Paris. Neon lights brighten the night sky - the consumerism and nightlife of Las Vegas. I had been to all these cities before, and suddenly there were all here in the one city! All these foreign characteristics thrown in amongst China and its own unique culture - too many contrasts to really even think about.

But there are disadvantages to unabashed foreign intervention. Just like how consumerism and image consciousness trapped the minds of the younger generations in the West long ago, it is doing in Shanghai right now. All over the city are gigantic images of the hottest stars wearing the coolest clothes, gigantic shopping centres (Superbrand Mall) and multi-kilometre shopping roads. The traditional Chinese Tea House is also being taken over by Starbucks (see the photo of the Old Town centre). And to finish off the list, instead of opting for a traditional small corner restaurant serving fried rice and sweet and sour pork (Mao's favourite dish, by the way!), people are heading out to McDonalds. All of this is possible thanks to China's booming economy, driven by the West's continuing need for efficient production and cheaper goods.

The distinction between rich and poor is more evident here than most places I have been. Usually you can tell one city is either filthy rich (e.g. Monaco) or poverty-stricken (e.g. Africa in general - some towns in the Tunisian deserts which I visited come to mind, but I have not seen much of Africa so cannot comment on that strongly). But in Shanghai you have the mega-rich living right next to the dirt poor. Young go-getters in latest-model Mercs whiz down the same road where an old man in raggy clothes tows a 3-wheeled cart loaded with watermelons. Classical multi-storey houses line the lush boulevards of the French Concession, while in the next neighbourhood entire families live in 2 bedroom apartments. The boom always make the rich richer and the poor poorer - and nowhere in the world is booming faster than Shanghai, literally.

Another more subtle contrast is more economic and political - China (and this is most evident in Shanghai) employs a very interesting dichotomy of a "socialist economy with Chinese characteristics". Effectively they combine free-market capitalism with a strong government noose on everything. In theory that does not even make sense, but somehow the Chinese did it, and they've obviously done it well! On one hand free-market business enterprise thrives, on the other hand the government has strict and imposing regulations on everything - it is Big Brother. Pretty interesting when you study it.

The Future?

Whether all this is good or bad, it's hard to say. China has to grow economically like everyone else, and so do other less-developed countries. But I think it is developing far too quickly for the people to get accustomed to all this money floating around, the environment and the economy itself. Sure China is experiencing phenomenal economic growth upwards of 10%. But the Chinese economy needs to sustain growth at a whopping 7/8% just so the economy doesn't collapse! As always, things are best in moderation.

One that is for certain - Shanghai is the wave of the future. This place is going to become - if it already has not - what New York was in the 20th century. Even if you oppose notions of globalism, consumerism, China and all its negative baggage, you cannot deny that China, and Shanghai as its flagship, is precipitating a fundamental shift in the balance of political and economic power in the world. Since WW2, and all my life, global affairs have been dominated by the US but this will soon change and I find such a dramatic shift quite exciting.

Whether that means I "like" China or not is another matter. I think China's story is truly remarkable and interesting, but I also oppose much of its costs and its politics (costs like blatant consumerism and significant environmental degredation and politics like Tibet, the Olympics, it being the factory for the world's consumerism, unabashed government propoganda, restriction on freedoms etc). As a young professional (to-be) I am attracted by the commerce and career opportunities and the dynamism Shanghai provides, but I am also deterred by that other side of China's coin. Which makes me different to some of my peers who are much more commercially-orientated than me and love the potentials and opportunities of China's rise irregardless of its costs. At the end of this balancing act my position still loves Shanghai, but for me China is too evenly balanced between its contrasting economic importance and its political murkiness for me to board the Maglev bandwagon in its ride to a "prosperous" future.

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