I first travelled into China in 1992. Those were the days when
Cantonese businessmen mixed cognac with Coke, made telephone calls to each
other while sat at the same restaurant dinner table, and kept the labels on their
suit sleeves because it was the only outward marker of their commercial
success. Today some of the semaphores of
financial acumen or social rank are a little more subtle but equally evident.
People buy one drink a week at Starbucks but retain the cup for several days,
carrying their homemade tea to the office.
Higher up the social (money) strata are those who shop
at the International
Financial Centre. In the bowels of this landmark skyscraper is a mall that
shouldn’t be called a mall because the term is too pedestrian, too déclassé to
describe the display of wealth-signalling accessories and clothing. French and
Italian uber-luxury brands sit side by side and yet, despite the no-expense
spared instruction surely given to their architects and designers, merge into a
whole. It reminds me of a long-ago visit to the Vatican. Instead of
appreciating its history, architecture and decoration, I drowned in the unbridled
ostentation. Similarly, the IFC is a visual cacophony of bling.
Emerging from places like these, I wonder where the ‘old’ China
has gone. Bicycles are few, people scream into phones or tap furiously at
I-somethings. Only when a solitary man cycles past, a mountain of used
Styrofoam perched impossibly behind him, do I sense that not all has changed.
It’s building site workers who most remind me of an earlier time. Their
clothes, teeth and demeanours point to origins both geographically and -
increasingly - culturally distant from the waifs picking through Versace or
Prada accessories at IFC. Just as they
did 20 years ago, these workers stop and stare as I walk past, temporarily relinquishing
their tasks as they behold me with the curiosity as westerners do them. When I
look back some 50 yards later, they are still looking. I wonder if their notions
about me are as fixed as mine are of them.
On clear days, I can see the stacks of the power stations that feed
the city’s electric grid. Some, no doubt, were constructed on the periphery but
have now been swallowed by the city’s outward surge. Others are perhaps relics
of a time when power stations were built in the city, close to demand.
The immensity of Shanghai is hard to comprehend. It’s home to 23
million people, stretches immeasurably in all directions, and in many parts is
disconcertingly new.
It’s as if someone bent down with a bucket load of urbanisation,
started pouring, and the spill somehow ended up in something akin to
orderliness.
Nice start...
ReplyDelete