Better City, Better Life, Part II

By Gina Anne Russo

In my first post on the "Better City, Better Life" Expo promotion campaign, I focused on the centrality within it of visions of Shanghai as a special sort of distinctively modern and distinctively international Chinese metropolis, but here I'll emphasize the second half of the slogan, which draws attention to the quality of urban existence. Expo public advertisements don't just glorify Shanghai’s place in the modern world, they also strive to present Shanghai as a place where good behavior is on display. For example, on the subway one day I ran across a person dressed up as Haibao, and he was surrounded by people in vests that read “Make this city better, be a loveable Shanghaier.” Along with being cute and loveable, however, the most common adjective connected with expected “Expo” behavior is wenming I have been in Shanghai now for nine months, and within those nine months more and more small signs, specifically in very public places, have popped up, telling people how they should be behaving. For example, most escalators now read “stand on the right, walk on the left, use the escalators in a wenming way.” Or, “Don't spit on buses, be more wenming.”

Wenming is difficult to define. Most dictionaries say it means “civilized,” but this definition carries as many problematic connotations in Chinese as it does in English. Leo Lee, in his book Shanghai Modern, traces the development of this word in modern Chinese. The term was originally borrowed from the Japanese, who used the same characters (pronounced differently of course) in the late nineteenth century to define behavior that was specifically “modern” and “Western,” thus maintaining the same connotations as “civilized” in English. This was picked up by China at the beginning of the twentieth century with similar effect.. The Nationalist government in the 1930s emphasized wenming behavior; it was often used in publications promoting the New Life Movement put forth by Chiang Kai-shek, a movement which encouraged people to be more hygienic and well mannered in terms of clothes, food, behavior, and deportment.. If we look at textbooks affiliated with the drive to improve weisheng (hygiene or health)—another complex term, whose links to visions of urban modernity are the subject of an important recent book by Ruth Rogaski we see them using similar language: calling on readers to raise the level of China’s weisheng by being wenming in the way they use the bathroom, stand in line, and so on.

According to Lee, this word shifted in connotation after 1949 to mean “manners” rather than “Western defined behavior.” However, it seems to me that in today’s usage, the meaning still carries this kind of “civilized” meaning. The term tells people not to do things that are considered uncouth or uncivilized by the international community, and by “international community” the reference remains Europe and North America (with Japan or Singapore getting an occasional look-in as perhaps honorary members of the Western modernity club) In this sense, the Expo is connected with making the lives of Shanghai people better, (hence the “better life”) which is inextricably tied with a population that maintains “modern” and “civilized” behavior.

Other public advertisements emphasize Shanghai’s “coming of age” as it becomes a modern part of the Western world in 2010. At Hongqiao airport, for example, a large mural depicts Shanghai (represented by the Oriental Pearl Tower) as it is connected with the rest of the world. Representations from outside China include the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Coliseum, and the Empire State Building. A friend from Hong Kong with whom I was traveling bitterly commented, “So I guess Africa and South America don't count?”

While this may seem a somewhat simplistic way to read these advertisements, representation of the third world are almost always absent in images of the “global community” (and you’ll look in vane in such visual representations for any sign of India, which constitutes ¼ of the global community). And a final illustration of this phenomenon brings us back to one place you see Haibao, which is on the interactive TV screens located in many Shanghai taxis. While riding in these cabs, people can watch sponsored advertisements (including ones for the new Barbie Store) or play “Expo” games, ranging from a Dance-Dance-Revolution-like one featuring a gyrating Haibao to trivia quizzes that test (and thereby try to increase?) your knowledge of the “world,” via answering questions like “What utensils are used to eat pizza?” and “What type of wine is served with fish and spaghetti?” I’ve only seen one non-Western country even mentioned in these games, and it was Japan, and it only figured in one of the many trivia games on offer in the taxis. The message that this sends is that modernity the West, and Shanghai is ready to become a major player in the modern global community. And this will happen with the Expo, the ultimate symbol of Shanghai’s crossover.

With the Expo less than a year away, Shanghai has a lot of preparation still ahead of it (the most pressing of which are the massive building planned in Pudong). But philosophically, Shanghai has been waiting for this opportunity to regain its status as the center of gravity for China’s modernity for decades. To Shanghai people, this has always been Shanghai’s legacy, and current advertisements feed this sentiment by both naming Shanghai as China’s most modern city and tying it to the Western world, creating, in a sense, a two-dimensional modern identity, both national and international. And while these messages include a certain amount of nationalistic fervor, the real star of the show is not China, but China’s most modern city, its gateway to the rest of the world. 

Better City, Better Life

By Gina Anne Russo

This month began with the countdown clocks ticking away the time until the start of the 2010 Shanghai Expo hitting the one-year-to-go point, and the weeks that have followed have seen the international press pay a good deal of attention to this upcoming event, which had gotten relatively little media coverage in the Western media. There have been a flurry of op-eds (including this one by China Beat's Jeff Wasserstrom), reports on the question of whether the U.S. will have a national pavilion (such as this one by Shanghai Scrap's Adam Minter), and feature stories on the city of Shanghai that highlight the build-up to the Expo (such as this one in the Washington Post). In addition, while Shanghai-based publications had long been trumpeting its importance, the focus on it in major Chinese national press organs also increased last month, with Beijing Review, for example, devoting several articles to it in a recent Shanghai-themed issue (particularly noteworthy is this one by Fudan University historian Li Tiangang).

In light of this, we thought this was a good time to ask Gina Anne Russo, a Fulbright scholar based in the city that is gearing up for the Expo, and someone whose "Gina in Shanghai" blog had caught our attention, to fill our readers in on the publicity campaign under way to whip up enthusiasm for an event that has been called an "Economic Olympics" and also "China's First World's Fair" and will run from May 1-October 31 of 2010. We'll be running her response in two parts, which focus on different aspects of the "Better City, Better Life" slogan that is being used to promote the extravaganza:

Shanghai has had a history of personality cults that permeate the visual landscape of the city. However, today, Mao’s presence, ubiquitous only 40 years ago, has all but faded —though you can still find some reminders that he was once omnipresent, such as the big statue of the Chairman that continues to stand on the East China Normal University and the kitsch items for sale at Shanghai souvenir stalls (though these are aimed largely at foreigners). Even the pervasive symbols of American consumerism Colonel Sanders’ and Ronald McDonald’s are not as common as they once were—though each of them have some statues as well, standing (the Colonel) or sitting (the clown) near the entrances to venues selling buckets of chicken and Big Macs, respectively. Today, the latest personality to overcome Shanghai's visual landscape is quite different, a symbol of neither Communist Revolution nor capitalist consumer culture. His name is Haibao.

Haibao, a bright blue wave with a face, is in constant public view. His animated likeness looks out at you from TV screen advertisments in subways, his picture looms down on you from the walls of construction zones, his statue is an even more popular photo subject at the Yu Gardens than the Ming architecture, and he is even often seen dancing on a giant LCD screen that moves slowly up and down the Huangpu River on a barge.

His cult of personality displaces all others, including those of the Olympic Friendlies (not so last year) and Barbie (whose pink allure is celebrated in the city now that it is home to the world’s first megastore devoted to the doll), and he brings with him a simple message: the World Expo is coming to Shanghai, and with it a new chance for Shanghai to become internationally recognized as China's most progressive and global city. The important word in that last statement, the one that draws the distinction between the message of the Expo and of the Olympics (mega-events that have been linked in various ways, including similar roles for countdown clocks and promotional videos featuring Jackie Chan), is the word “city,” not “country,” and this distinction illustrates a lot of underlying issues regarding Shanghai's own self understanding.

The slogans for both events, the Olympics and the Expo, illuminate this distinction. Whereas the Olympic slogan reads “One world, one dream,” connecting China to a world of nations, the Expo slogan reads “Better city, better life,” putting Shanghai on the map of globalized cities, not countries. Creating this type of identity for Shanghai is not difficult either, as Shanghai historically has always seen itself as connected, yet separate, from the rest of China, a gateway through which China connects with the rest of the modern world.

This is similarly emphasized in academic discourse. It is no accident that many books about China’s search for modernization are almost entirely concerned with Shanghai and present the city’s modern history as unique (though other treaty-ports sometimes get a look in as well). Leo Ou-fan Lee and Yeh Wen-hsin, along with countless others, have demonstrated that Shanghai was the birthplace of the modern Chinese nation because of its unique cultural connection with the outside world at the beginning of the twentieth century.

I did my senior thesis research about the magazine Ling Long, a Shanghai women's magazine from the 1930s. The layout and message of this magazine very clearly demonstrated the way that modern people, specifically modern women, should look and act. These modern Shanghaiers lived a unique lifestyle of "East meets West," a lifestyle that could be lived in Shanghai but no other Chinese metropolis. At the same time, Shanghai’s city landscape and unique institutions gave way to this lifestyle, and also fed the belief among Shanghai people that they were the leaders of the modern world in China, and even in Asia as a whole.

The current campaigns for the Expo play upon this Shanghainese notion that it is the center of Chinese urban modernity. One particular advertisement that seems to run on constant replay on twenty meter high screens on the sides of skyscrapers depicts Haibao’s journey through China. He first stops in Yunnan where he is greeted by the Miao people, in traditional costume (the Miao costume includes a very large and distinct white and red headress), who offer him local gifts. He then moves onto Xinjiang, where Uigher girls in flowing country dresses offer him grapes (a regional specialty) and play traditional Uigher instruments around him as he smiles and dances. Then, suddenly, we see a man in a light cotton button up shirt and slacks and a girl in a Western sundress, and they run along a road lined with modern skyscrapers and they take pictures of Haibao with their digital cameras.

The distinction between the “traditional” and “modern” is accentuated by the fact that our modern Shanghairen (Shanghainese) actually watch the “traditional” scenes on a TV screen on a skyscraper (where, in real life, this whole advertisement is played), making the "traditional" elements seem like a movie, not the real and modern Chinese world (in Shanghai). This advertisement sends a clear message: Shanghai is the end of the natural progression from traditional to modern, and therefore the logical place for the world Expo—the contemporary counterpart to the World’s Fairs of old, the first of which were held in London and Paris when those cities represented state-of-the-art modernity.

Furthermore, while also making the dichotomy between a traditional lifestyle and a “modern” lifestyle, the advertisement also implies that all of China’s elements, its diversity, celebrates Shanghai’s greatness. The advertisement actually ends not in Shanghai, but in Hong Kong, as Hong Kong people wave and welcome Haibao. While this could be interpreted in many different ways, what it seems to symbolize in this context is Hong Kong recognizing Shanghai as the new urban center of China, just as all of China’s different minorities recognize it as well. In a sense, there are many forces at play here: the dichotomy of tradition and modernity, the stark contrast between China’s minorities and Shanghai’s urban elite, and even competition among China’s urban centers. But as all of these places and peoples greet Haibao, they are in fact greeting Shanghai’s coming of age. China is essentially centered around Shanghai.

To be continued in Part II.

Rambling Notes: Tracing “Old Shanghai” at the Futuristic Heart of “New China”

By Niv Horesh

Shanghai is in many ways the face of the new People’s Republic. Even as the city has been remade in recent decades, efforts are underway to selectively salvage what remains of its pre-war architectural heritage (1842-1937) and many of its archival records are becoming accessible to foreign researchers. Touted as Asia’s biggest and most cosmopolitan urban centre in the pre-war era, Shanghai has (re)emerged over the last two decades as “a harbinger of China’s future and a testing ground for the world at large.”

It is therefore worth reprising Shanghai’s distant treaty-port past not just as tourist-trivia pursuit: the past also offers a perspective from which to observe the imminent rise of the city to global prominence.

Memory Lane

One of few exhilarating privileges Shanghai history buffs can nowadays enjoy is staying at the city’s oldest-running hotel, the tactfully-refurbished Astor House (est. 1846), near Suzhou Creek. In its heyday, The Astor hosted luminaries like US President Ulysses S. Grant, Charlie Chaplin, Guglielmo Marconi, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and even Zhou Enlai. A 15-minute walk due south, along the ceaselessly re-vamped Bund is the Shanghai Municipal Archives. There, history buffs can relish on demand letters written by the managers of the very same Astor over a century ago, complaining to the foreign-run Shanghai Municipal Council about “natives,” “coolies” and “rickshaws” making too much noise for patrons to bear.

Returning to the Astor from the Archives, history buffs cannot but note that road hazards and noise are still a feature of the hotel environment; however, Santanas have by now supplanted rickshaws as the most common means of transport, and whites no longer run the municipal council. Neither is there a sign of Shanghai’s once ubiquitous double-deckers and trams, though Soviet-style electric-powered buses still ply the routes between the Bund and Nanjing Road. Back in the 1940s Shanghai’s traffic amenities fired up rustic imagination, with newly-imported American automobiles and regular flights serving the high-heeled between the city and Hong Kong, as was beautifully captured in Eileen Chang’s classic screenplay Taitai wansui. The comparable traffic novelty at present is the fact that one can, as of this year, board direct flights from Pudong International Airport to Taipei after decades of cross-strait political chill.

China’s relative openness is evident elsewhere too. Official mouthpieces like the China Daily unabashedly carry the occasional translated op-ed piece from Japan’s Asahi Shinbun. And against the backdrop of a global financial crisis, the local press is explicitly calling for a more transparent central-government stimulus package to the provinces, warning that such ad hoc funding might be siphoned off by corrupt officials.

This openness can also be felt in any Shanghai bookshop one walks into: Nobel prize winner Gao Xingjian’s titles are still off limits, but one does find a local variant of Obamania with the First Lady’s translated biography selling fast alongside localized editions of anything from Forbes to Marie Claire; DVDs of American sitcoms like Friends; scores of yoga exercise books; European classics from Dickens to Zola. Even the flippant Lonely Planet travel guides are on offer in Chinese, though the LP volume on the PRC itself presumably contained too much politically sensitive commentary to be approved by censors. The sheer variety of printed matter is such that one is even tempted for a second to comb shelves for a Chinese novel of Slumdog Millionaire appeal, only to realize that such searing social critique of the inequalities attending “emerging economies” clearly cannot be accommodated even in this era of PRC openness.

As Jeff Wasserstrom described in his Japan Focus article (“Red Shanghai, Blue Shanghai”), the hype surrounding Shanghai is set to peak during Expo 2010 with the inauguration of a huge pavilion and bridge complex in Pudong combining traditional Chinese motifs and the last word in urban design. Already, visitors cannot but marvel at Shanghai’s cityscape, which is rapidly being transformed, while preservation of pre-war architecture is almost inevitably taking the back seat. Unlike Beijing, where the global economic turnaround has cast a pall over the Olympics construction frenzy, leaving much office space practically empty -- high-rise construction in Shanghai still seems in full swing, presumably in anticipation that demand will hold as the city prepares for Expo 2010. The official press is buoyant, but elsewhere pundits talk of a major glut and impending price collapse. What will happen the day after Expo 2010 closes is anyone’s guess.

Skyscrapers have by now popped up well beyond the pre-war city perimeters. The suburb of Jiangwan, for example, had remained all but a ghost-town on the northern outskirts, even as the KMT was trying to turn it into the city’s new civic center in the late 1930s. The KMT-built Jiangwan stadium, once Asia’s largest white elephant, and the eerily empty civic library are still there. But the suburb has re-invented itself as a hi-tech and tertiary-education powerhouse where Oracle’s China headquarters, amongst other multinationals, are located.

The North-eastern suburb of Wusong, on the mouth of the Huangpu River, was until the 1980s a sparsely-populated (though strategically important) frontier. It is now a crowded mesh of maritime warehouses and shopping malls. The local Qing-era cannon platform (Wusong paotai) is the only reminder of the old frontier. The real frontier nowadays is South-western suburbia where Disney-fied compounds are being built for the nouveau riche; there is now a huge gated community with perfectly Victorian streets in Songjiang (“Thamestown”) and a “German New Town” near Volkswagen’s plant in Anting.

As indicated above, the city’s geographical features are quite different than the pre-war setting in both name and substance. Some milestones endured: Nanjing Road is still Nanjing Road; the once patently louche Great World Amusement Centre (Da shijie) and carefree Wing On (Yong An) Department Store are still there, albeit tamed by state ownership; the exquisite Huxinting tea house, one of China’s oldest, endures millions of tourists annually. But true to communist frugality, “Yan’an Road” was chosen to replace “Edward VII Avenue” in what was once the International Settlement. And in what was once the French Settlement, Huaihai Road replaced the famous “Avenue Joffre.”

In the 1950s, a Soviet-style Exhibition Centre was built over the semi-legendary Hardoon Garden; streets once named after foreign tycoons like Silas Hardoon or Chinese financier Yu Xiaqing have been “rectified.” The semi-legendary race course, once the lynchpin of expatriate social life, has been carved up to make way for the People’s Square – Asia’s semicolonial horseracing streak lives on in Hong Kong and, more recently, a few new mainland locations.

China’s erstwhile “Fleet Street,”Wangping Road, is now Shandong Road. But the unique pre-war vibrancy of that area in which scores of independent publishers thrived is long gone. So too are many of the quaint creeks and canals which once crisscrossed the city, and were reclaimed in the 1910s to make way for tenements and roads – their traces are barely evident in street names carrying the suffix bang 浜 or gang 港 for “waterway.” Similarly, the wall which had once encircled Nantao, or the “Native City,” is only evident in the crescent shape which Renmin Road and Zhonghua Road form.

The Pudong-Puxi Antonym

Lying east of the Huangpu River, the ultra-modern precinct of Pudong was first envisioned by Sun Yat-sen. In the 1920s, he dreamed of a Chinese-run Shanghai that would overshadow what expatriates called “the model settlement,” namely, the International and French concession areas west of the Huangpu River (Puxi).

Pudong’s spectacular skyline and its sleek Century Avenue were built only in the last two decades, much faster than any other comparable city in the West. If during Sun’s time, and through much of the PRC’s history, the Bund’s waterfront edifices connoted Shanghai’s prosperity under European tutelage, today’s Pudong vicariously lives up to Sun’s vision of overshadowing the old foreign concessions. This symbolism is by no means lost on Shanghai history buffs, and was most certainly on urban planners’ minds in the late 1980s. The Bund’s colonial flavor has been wonderfully preserved, cynics might add, precisely so that it can be dwarfed by Chinese-developed high-rise construction to the east.

As if to make the historical analogy clear, urban planners ensured that every bit of the Bund’s neo-classical and art-deco gems would be meticulously preserved at the expense of most other heritage sites elsewhere in Puxi. In recent years, agile state-backed property developers have been able to take over some of these neglected sites, turning them into exclusive “Old Shanghai”-themed hotels. The great majority, however, still lie dilapidated. More often than not, their 1930s grandeur is drowned out by prosaic eye-sores like shabby air-con wiring or by garish nearby office-blocks.

***

Clearly, Pudong is built to overawe visitors: many of its waterfront skyscrapers not only rank among the tallest in the world, but also light up at night, morphing into gigantic LCD screens. Their glass veneers carry a corny blend of commercials and local-government slogans calling on locals to, among other things, congenially greet visitors from other parts of China in standard Mandarin.



The place has definitely got a “Blade-Runner” feel to it, with multinationals headquartered there in magnificent high-rises, alongside even greater high-rises housing newly-established, semi state-owned corporate entities that are aggressively primed to become the Sonys and IBMs of tomorrow. It boasts the world’s only magnetic-traction bullet train (Mag-Lev) and a state-of-the-art subway system and Zeppelins constantly screen commercials and slogans overhead as they waft between skyscrapers.

Gazing at Pudong from across the river, Shanghai seems unfazed by the global financial crisis: the official line pledges to steam ahead with greater investment in higher-education and R&D (Kejiao xing shi). Amid the shine and sparkle, many locals have reassured this history buff that the global financial crisis was not going to hit Shanghai at all. Otherwise, why would banking giant HSBC erect its new 250-metre tall China headquarters in Pudong ? Such, we are told, is the bank’s “confidence… in the Chinese economy” that its Pudong home would be much taller than its Hong Kong base (180 m) or, for that matter, its London world headquarters (200 m).

There is canny symbolism to all of this. Completed in 1923, the much smaller domed building which rules the Bund skyline on the opposite bank was once HSBC’s old China headquarters. That was an era when HSBC was China’s de facto central bank. In the 1950s, this building was expropriated by the CCP, and in a wry twist of fate, is now home to the state-owned Pudong Development Bank.



In another twist of fate, foreign banks whose forerunners are less associated with colonialism are returning to the Bund waterfront; Citibank and ABN AMRO are but two examples. The former case is particularly interesting since Citibank’s other Shanghai building dominates Pudong’s skyline from across the river. Citibank accentuates, in that sense, an affiliation with both “Old” and “New” Shanghai. But the big question, of course, is whether Citibank’s upbeat China outlook can help mitigate its sub-prime shemozzle at home. Or could it be that Shanghainese optimism is misguided, and Wall Street will eventually catch up with Century Avenue?

AIG was a supposedly invincible multinational now groaning under the load of US-derived bad debt – this group and its executive bonuses are the talk of the day in Wall Street and on Capitol Hill. However, it seems that only history buffs are aware that AIG actually owes its rise to prominence to Shanghai in the first place. It was here that Cornelius Vander Starr set up the American International Group without much fanfare in 1919. Like HSBC, AIG relocated after the Communist take-over to eventually become one of the largest financial arbiters in the world. Like HSBC, it returned to China with a vengeance in the 1990s. But unlike HSBC, which has survived sub-prime vertigo relatively well, AIG’s future existence is uncertain. Thus, this is not only a question of Wall Street catching up with Century Avenue, but also of the PRC reminding Wall Street and Capitol Hill of Shanghai’s global stature in times past, and of staking out what it sees as the city’s rightful claim to the future of global finance.

***

Is the claim legitimate? Granted, for all its hype Pudong does connote quite a bit of contrivance. At dusk, the neon lights loom large, but on closer look the precinct does not exactly teem with life, and traffic is surprisingly light for a Chinese city.

For a moment, one cannot but wonder if Pudong, too, was perhaps an artifact of sub-prime-like self-delusion. It is, after all, well-known that the central government has poured billions of yuan into this area, often with very little scrutiny. The Mag-Lev is a striking example: for all its gripping special-effects and dazzling speed, it fails to reach populous Puxi, and is therefore hardly-used by commuters. Its main proponent, former mayor Chen Liangyu, now languishes in jail on corruption charges.

Pudong’s skyline clearly offers a counterpoint to the enduring mystique of “Old Shanghai.”[1] But despite two decades of heady redevelopment, for most Shanghainese the west bank beckons brighter, as this popular saying suggests: “I’d rather have a bed to lie on in Puxi than own a whole flat in Pudong!” (Ningyao Puxi yi zhang chuang, bu yao Pudong yi jian fang 宁要浦西一张床，不要浦东一间房!).

This hints at a deeper sentiment: for many Pudong is still too contrived and showy. It lacks the historical sediment of Puxi, nowadays re-enacted in Puxi in upmarket theme malls such as Xintiandi. One history buff’s blog captures this desire with the phrase shili yangcheng (十里洋场), a four-character expression connoting the “wondrous metropolis of foreign flavours”, which was renowned the world over in the 1930s for its ballrooms, cinemas, cafes, and bars.

What’s more, stunning skyscrapers are increasingly being built around Puxi too. They often encircle what little remains of Shanghai’s distinctive pre-war shikumen tenements. Chinglish, on the other hand, is still alive and well despite the catch-cry of globalization. Thus, for example, People’s Square is rendered “Civilised Park” on a prominent plaque at the entrance. Below the Square is a huge underground shopping arcade themed after “Old Shanghai” with 1930s-style peep shows (la yangpian 拉洋片) and distorting mirrors (haha jing 哈哈镜).

The arcade is one of many venues capitalizing on “Old Shanghai” mystique, ranging from the quirky history museum at the Oriental Pearl TV Tower basement, to restaurants professing to serve “Old Shanghai” fare, to countless “Old Shanghai” brand names.

The Last Word

For all the reasons described above, Shanghai has (re)emerged as a magnet for visitors, micro- entrepreneurs and laborers from all over China. It is also attracting more and more Western expatriates of all socio-economic rungs, though their ratio of the city’s population is still smaller than in the 1930s.

That said, we should reserve the last word for the Shanghainese themselves. They are not – and cannot be – the enterprising sojourners of “Old Shanghai.” Ironically, the strict hukou residency restrictions of Mao’s era nurtured an elitist, linguistically and culturally cohesive sense of Shanghaineseness. The city was quite subdued during the 1989 student protest movement, and has since 1991 been smothered in preferential central-government funding.

The Shanghainese of today are a “born-and-bred” privileged corps. Though clearly approving of foreigners, they are often said to be haughty and suspicious of other Chinese. They are described as much more inward-looking and risk-averse than their migrant-society forebears: those resourceful sojourners who had converged on the city from every corner of China at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, for all their perceived shortcomings, today’s Shanghainese project optimism. This history buff is convinced Shanghai will weather the global financial crisis, and maintain its growth momentum for the most part. The end-product, though, may not eclipse “Old Shanghai” insofar as cosmopolitanism, openness and innovation are concerned. Other parts of China may (or may not) fill the gap.

That Shanghai and its dwellers are future-bound there can be no doubt. But whether Shanghai is the future is another question.

[1] On the enduring mystique of ‘Old Shanghai’ see e.g. Hugo Restall’s excellent piece [March 5, 2009] in the Wall Street Journal

Playing Politics with Cats and Dogs

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

As regular readers of this blog already know, I recently crossed the Pacific to take part in the Beijing Forum, a fascinating if sometimes hard to figure out event that was valuable in part simply because of how many different countries were represented by at least one presenter. How often, after all, does an American academic find himself or herself in a room where there is an exchange of opinions going on between a scholar based in Moscow and a scholar based in Cairo, or hears an administrator from a university in Nairobi respond to comments his counterparts from Sri Lankan and Australian institutions have been making? (I know that dog and cat lovers may be getting impatient with this lead-up, but I promise I will get to animals and politics eventually, so feel free to skip to the final paragraphs.)

After the Forum concluded on November 9, as followers of China Beat also know, I had the opportunity to give a talk at the Beijing Foreign Correspondents Club of China. This was memorable for various reasons. One was that just before, during and after the formal event, I got to take thoughtful questions from and exchange ideas with a mixture of both people whose bylines I often come across, such as Mark Magnier (who writes for the Los Angeles Times, the paper I read with my morning coffee) and Melinda Liu of Newsweek (who graciously hosted the event), and journalists I hadn’t known of before (but will now look out for on the web). Another thing that made it memorable was that the talk’s setting afforded a great bird’s eye view of part of the city, which according to local residents is still enjoying post-Olympic reduced smog levels. And, finally, the talk led to me being quoted, for the first time ever I think (and quoted very appropriately at that), in an Indian newspaper.

Over the next week or two, I’ll blog about other parts of that quick trip, which began right after the American Presidential election (the result of which was seen as a very good one by every Chinese person I encountered who voiced an opinion) and ended with a few days spent in the big city on the Huangpu River that's the subject of my latest book, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010, a work due out in Britain in two weeks (with slightly later release dates in other parts of the world). I’m not sure yet what the focus of my future trip-related posts will be. I’ll likely have things to say about how Shanghai is gearing up for the 2010 Expo, the event that provides the endpoint for my book. I’ll also have something to say about two publications by China Beat contributors I read and enjoyed while traveling: Lijia Zhang’s engagingly written and often moving Socialism is Great! A Worker’s Memoir of the New China, and Xujun Eberlein’s compelling short story collection, Apologies Forthcoming.

In addition, though this site hasn’t gone in for restaurant reviews in the past (and probably won’t often run them in the future), I’ll have something to say about two eateries that were mentioned recently on China Beat in the interview with NPR's Louisa Lim, “Fish Nation” (pictured in the accompanying photograph) and “Southern Barbarian,” since I had enjoyable meals in very interesting company in each of them. I’ll also likely refer to other restaurants I ate in or simply noticed that provide windows into how China is changing and the complex ways that globalization can work.

For now, though, just some ending comments about the feline turn that political commentary about the American election took while I was in China, just as U.S. discussions of Obama made a lot about the puppy problem his family is facing. Let me begin with the canine conundrum—or what in Mao’s day might have been dubbed the canine contradiction. On the night before my Beijing FCCC talk, I caught a CNN report on President-Elect Obama’s first press conference, which included his now much-dissected humorous reference to being torn between getting a specially bred hypoallergenic dog (due to one of his children being allergic) and getting a shelter dog (even though these tend to be “mutts,” a term he said could also apply to himself).

Nothing related to dogs came up the next day (if the Chinese press latched onto the mutt maodun, they didn’t do so in the papers I saw). But cats did—via the first joke in Chinese I have ever been sent via text messaging. On my second day in Beijing, I had bought my first Chinese mobile phone—it didn’t take long to discover how essential it is to have one of these, in part simply to be able to inform people you are planning to meet how late you will be due to traffic delays. Until November 10, though, the only text messages I had gotten had either been spam advertisements or queries about whether traffic delays were going to make me late for a lunch engagement (for once, they didn’t). Then, as I sat with a colleague, he began chuckling at a message he’d received and when I asked him what he was laughing at, he said “why don’t I just zap it to you.” So, through the wonders of modern technology, the joke, which had likely made its way around much of the PRC by that point (since I later learned it was a more refined version of one that China Daily had written about a few days before), moved through the ether from his phone inches away to mine.

It was a perhaps predictable play on Deng Xiaoping’s famous line, which has been riffed and mocked and modified in so many ways before, that it is foolish to be too ideologically dogmatic, for when it comes to catching mice, it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, just whether it gets the job done. The Chinese characters that showed up on my phone said, in essence: “It used to be that in the electoral process, the American people would only choose white presidents, never black ones. But then after the American people studied Deng Xiaoping Theory, they realized that it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, a cat that can solve a crisis is a good cat.”

By the way, the photo of the dog at the top of this posting obviously has nothing to do with the presidential election. It was just a shot I found interesting, since it was taken on a street that in general looks much like those I remember from my first trip to Shanghai back in the mid-1980s (in the way that, say, the face-lifted and spruced up Nanjing Road doesn’t at all), yet via the pet in the sweater flags one of the many ways that the city has changed since then.

Shanghai Expo: A Preview

We imagine that some of you are now emerging from your post-Olympic stupor and feeling capable of turning attention to the next Chinese mega-event: the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Here are a few places to check out to get up on Shanghai’s preparation for the Expo:

1. Start off with the official site, where you can meet mascot Haibao (the little blue guy with the Tintin hair to the right), watch promo videos, and find lists of participating countries and organizations.

2. The organizing group for the world Expos (the equivalent to the International Olympic Committee) is the Bureau International des Expositions. At the BIE’s website see lists and detailed information on previous Expos, the logos for coming Expos (such as the Expo that just occurred this summer in Zarazoga, Spain—seriously what is it with lumpy little blue men?), and browse photos from select Expos.

3. The U.S. is in danger of missing out on the Shanghai Expo—federal legislation passed a few years ago prevents the government from funding the exhibit, so the endeavor has to be privately funded. This is a piece on the American group bidding to host the U.S. pavilion.

4. China Beat’s Jeff Wasserstrom's forthcoming book, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010, puts the Expo into historical perspective. my forthcoming book that places it into historical perspective. For a little insight into how he will frame the Expo historically, see this piece Wasserstrom wrote at History News Network.

5. Susan Fernsebner, who teaches in the history department at University of Mary Washington, recently published a historical piece on Chinese participation in early expos and an early expo held in China (available for those with access to Late Imperial China).