The rapid demise of post offices worldwide certainly isn’t limited to China, and is just one of the many global trends being fueled by the Internet. But in China the trend seems particularly poignant, thanks to the country’s penchant for bloated bureaucracy and lifetime employment for government workers.
I’m one of the few people below the age of 60 who still uses China’s post offices, not because I want to but often because I have no choice. And my trips to the post office, while not excruciating, are often unpleasant enough to make me wish that each trip might be my last. Most poignantly, the post office is staffed with legions of young bureaucrats who will only do things a certain way, by the book, and refuse to vary from their official protocols. Read Full Post…
Residents urged to accept new homes at complex set for demolition
As my 6 year sojourn in Shanghai rapidly winds down, a couple of items from my daily life this past week seem to nicely summarize many of the themes I’ve written about these last 4 years. One of those was related to China’s vast bureaucracy and propensity for scandals, while the other reflected the relenting change that is so much a part of daily life not only in Shanghai but throughout China.
The former instance involved a visit to my local bank, where my attempt to make a simple ATM money transfer turned into a half-hour-long ordeal that didn’t even end with accomplishment of my original task. The second saw a banner emerge outside a large residential compound slated for demolition near my home, encouraging residents to quickly sign agreements to relinquish their apartments in exchange for new ones outside the city. Read Full Post…
In 6 years of living in Shanghai, I’ve come to discover my adopted China hometown has a major common characteristic with my US adopted hometown of Los Angeles. Both are major cities that are quite comfortable for people who live there, but are far less notable as tourist destinations.
In this week’s Street View, our city is in the headlines for major new plans that promise to make huge swaths of land on both sides of the Huangpu River friendlier for not only local residents but also tourists. I’ve seen the main plan discussed several times before, but the latest reports say work is already nearing completion on creation of continuous spaces that will allow people to walk for long distances on both sides of the river. Read Full Post…
Ikea clamps down on freeloading seniors in Shanghai
As fall rapidly descends on Shanghai, two of our city’s newer traditions are in the headlines this week, raising the question of what really defines tradition in a place where change is so rapid.
One headline involves a well-known IKEA furniture store in Xuhui District, whose cafeteria-style restaurant has become famous as a hang-out for lonely retirees. The other involves an eatery famous for its scallion pancakes, or congyoubing, which may soon get a new lease on life after being shut down due to lack of a proper license.
Both stories have become fixtures in our local lore in recent years, meaning many longer-term residents are familiar with them and consider them almost a part of Shanghai’s urban fabric. Read Full Post…
The fast lanes of Shanghai’s streets have been full of change these last few months, in a campaign by thousands of police and other assistants to tame our unruly traffic. But this week’s column takes us instead to the slower lanes of the streets of Shanghai, where a quieter revolution is reviving China’s bicycling tradition.
In a somewhat unusual twist, this new revolution is both high-tech and low-tech at the same time, involving the roll-out of two new Internet-based leasing services deploying thousands of very basic bikes in the city. The revolution seems to be centered in my own stomping grounds in the Hongkou and Yangpu districts, due to the high concentration of wide streets, and students and young professionals who are the primary audience for such services. Read Full Post…
Mid-Autumn Festival is fast approaching, and that means time for all the usual scandals and other negative news surrounding mooncakes, the ultra-heavy treat that suddenly becomes a fixture in city life during this time. I’ll touch on some of those stories in a moment, including one headline on the plunging black market for mooncake vouchers and another on how unhealthy mooncakes really are.
But this year I want to focus on a more positive mooncake story, and one that’s quite personal. That story saw my university unexpectedly resume its practice of giving out mooncakes to employees this year, ending a two year ban of a tradition that dates back at least for the last few decades.
The resumption did come with a number of changes, mostly designed to discourage waste and which I’ll detail shortly. Read Full Post…
That was my first reaction on reading a thinly sourced report on news portal Sina that Shanghai’s somewhat cerebral Oriental Morning Post was planning to cease publication on January 1 next year. I made some of enquiries of my own, and it seems the Sina report may have been a bit premature. But it does appear that plans are indeed in the works to shutter this venerable institution of Shanghai’s media scene. Read Full Post…
I had a sense of deja vu on reading about a plan to develop a scenic river town near our new Disney Resort into a bed and breakfast (B&B) district as a way to raise local living standards while providing some alternate housing options for park visitors. Then I remembered writing a few years ago about a similar plan to transform an aging but colorful area of Hongkou District near my home into a similar B&B hotspot.
These kinds of plans are great in theory, as they raise living standards by helping local residents to upgrade their aging homes into thriving businesses. Such plans also help to restore old architecture and can create unique communities with their own individual personalities, like the bustling Taizifang area. Read Full Post…
Beijing may have APEC Blue, but Shanghai is quickly developing its own brand of welcome for the upcoming G20 Summit set to take place next month in nearby Hangzhou. But in this case, it’s an obsession with security that seems to be riveting our city, though perhaps we’ll also see some pollution and traffic-easing measures as the event approaches.
For anyone new to China, the term APEC Blue came into fashion 2 years ago when Beijing hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, a meeting of major world leaders that briefly put the city in the global spotlight. A similar light will shine on Hangzhou next month when leaders of the world’s largest economies gather in there for a similar meeting. Many visitors may arrive via Shanghai, which has much more international connections and therefore could also be on prominent display. Read Full Post…
Two stories from our 2-month-old Shanghai Disneyland are taking center stage in this week’s Street View, one involving some irate visitors who had to wait in long lines for attractions that were closed, and the other a campaign to rid our subways of Disney balloons. But the real story here is the fact that our new Disney Resort has been relatively scandal-free in the 2 months since its grand opening in June, which seems like a major accomplishment due to the huge attention it’s attracting.
As a longtime reporter who formerly covered Disney, I can say with authority that the US entertainment giant is a magnet for publicity, both negative and positive. Any sort of accident or other negative thing that would normally be considered quite minor suddenly becomes major news when it happens inside a Disney resort, which undoubtedly causes numerous headaches for the company’s public relations team. Read Full Post…
A sense of loss and also a surge of nostalgia were my first reactions on reading an obituary this week for the man credited with creating mainland China’s first major English-Chinese dictionary in the post-1949 period. It was quite telling that the dictionary compiled here in Shanghai by renowned lexicographer Lu Gusun wasn’t even technically completed until 1991, reflecting China’s conflicting feelings towards the West over the years.
From a much more personal perspective, some of the most enduring memories of my time in China revolve around such Chinese-English dictionaries, which were an integral part of my life when I first arrived here in the 1980s. Such translations were not only useful for getting around in daily life, but were also an occasional source of humor for myself and other foreigners due to their occasionally political overtones. Read Full Post…
