Images from the Future: Shanghai

Welcome to Shanghai
Evaded affection
Pieces of pieces of the heart.
Thank you very much.
--Original poem written on a plastic bag from the fabric market

Shanghai Pudong International Airport

Buttonville

It wasn’t until we went to Buttonville that I finally knew we were in real China. The rugged busyness of this layered hall of fabrics and materials is a reminder of China’s proficient and industrious nature. Although it is a market and not a factory, Buttonville’s buzzing activity is not unlike what one can find in the factories in and around cities like Chongqing, a somewhat unknown Sichuanese city that is home to some 30 million souls, which are like small towns themselves where thousands of workers spend the majority of their time on Earth. The factories have shops and places to drop off kids who, odds are, will also be working there in the future. The China of the 90s was like US during the 1870s up till the early 1900s when it was experiencing a dramatic industrial rise. Everything just happened bigger and quicker in China. A Pyrrhic victory, the Chinese factory masters are the Carnegies, the JP Morgans and the Chases of today and they work deals with bribes to get more and more for themselves, creating bigger gaps between those who have access to the fruits of China’s rise and those who are just manual labor.

Nevertheless, places like Buttonville are humming with activity and I found myself quite at home enjoying the scenery here.

Fabric Market

Note the sign for James Tailor. Shopping for suit material and coats in the Shanghai Fabric Market. A level 5 language task with 0 level Mandarin. Greer’s tailor, Tailor Zhu, made a fine suit for me and it was fun to interact with him.

The Set of Blade Runner

People prone to epileptic seizures from flashing neon lights should avoid travel to Shanghai.

Dwarfed

Everything after China will be boring.

The Bar at the Top of the World

Old Town

“Scores of neighbourhoods, once criss-crossed with colonial-era residences housing tens of thousands of people, were laid to waste in the 1990s and the early part of this century in Shanghai. Swathes of the city were left resembling Berlin after the Allied blitz. The frenzied reconstruction which followed was one of the largest building booms in recorded history. About 20 million square metres of land were developed in the city between 2000 and 2005 alone, equal to one-third the size of Manhattan.”
“What about Pudong’s three hundred thousand displaced farmers? Under the Sunshine Relocation Policy they were methodically and incrementally moved to previously prepared accommodations and received some cash compensation based on the acreage they lost. [...] Many young farmers took on miscellaneous jobs. Many of them became local officials, entrepreneurs, or salaried workers in nearby factories. Observers pointed out that most displaced farmers were better off, even if they became janitors in the offices built on what had been their land”

Quotes from Richard McGregor's The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

Yuyuan Garden

Hidden Alley

UFO in a Forest

“Vast Woods and Peculiar Mountains.” Zhang Zongchang hanging scroll, Qing Dynasty

Shanghai Museum

Calligraphy, landscape painting scrolls, Silk Road coins, red seals or chops which represent the institutions and are used where signatures are used in the West, creating a fundamental difference in cultures, as the lack of signatures erases the personal responsibility for business taking place.

Bar Untouchables

Tucked away in an alleyway hidden from the madness of Shanghai and only marked by a red light above its door is the Bar Untouchable where Japanese businessmen come to sip the finest cocktails known to man and listen to the Cotton Club Jazz popular during the 1930s, when Shanghai was in another heyday of sorts. A Japanese man who wears a white tuxedo and won the best bartender of Japan serves up classic cocktails and his originals. It was here that I witnessed the ritual exchange of business cards among Japanese businessmen, each bowing lower than the other.

Shanghai Taxi Nights

In Shanghai, it's Christmas all year.

China in Motion

Parallel Universes

Shanghai is a city of expats and foreigners who live in their parallel universes while the locals zip around on motor bikes that are like Star Wars speeder bikes. You can see the Old Towns swallowed up and feel the super high-energy pulsing of a city in motion but the people are relatively laid back.