This week I wanted to take a look at the more serious issue of guns, which have made several appearances in the headlines these last few days. The series of stories on the topic began with the high-profile destruction of hundreds of confiscated real and fake guns, highlighting the city’s efforts to rid Shanghai of these weapons that are both unnecessary and dangerous in the hands of ordinary citizens. Days later, the city also detailed new plans to arm hundreds of police officers with guns. Read Full Post…
Shanghai environmental officials have been busy this past week boasting of the latest improvements to their system for informing the public about the city’s most up-to-date air quality. In the latest advance to the ever-improving system, people can now get real-time updates online and over their mobile phones to find out just how good or bad Shanghai’s air is.
Perhaps I’m being a bit cynical, but I’m starting to get just a tad tired of this constant stream of improvements to the city’s air quality reporting system, each of which gets huge coverage in the local media. Obviously it’s good to know just how polluted our air is, and more information will allow ordinary people to make better choices about how they structure their daily activities. Read Full Post…
What a difference a year makes. Many of us have been out and about these last couple of weeks enjoying the springtime weather, taking in cherry blossoms and celebrating the end of winter. Amid the spring fever, few people seem to recall that Shanghai at this time last year was a far different place, gripped by fear as the new and unknown H7N9 strain of bird flu swept through the city. Read Full Post…
Shanghai is finally taking more action to combat the growing problem of attacks on health care workers, urging hospitals to take better measures to improve security to prevent such clashes. The campaign is certainly a good first step, though much more needs to be done to tackle a growing problem that looks quite bizarre to a westerner who never heard of such attacks before coming to China.
Obviously there are many reasons for this problem, which in extreme cases has even seen doctors killed by angry patients who believed they or their relatives received inferior health. While lack of civility is partly to blame, health care professionals themselves are bear some responsibility for this strange and unacceptable behavior that has no place in modern society. Read Full Post…
Shanghai is working hard to reclaim its place as Asia’s entertainment capital, and has made big progress in that direction through recent major tie-ups with 2 of Hollywood’s leading stars, Disney (NYSE: DIS) and DreamWorks (NYSE: DWA). But that drive to the stars took on a new dimension over the past week when local media exposed a major local scam that feeds on people’s hopes of becoming celebrities.
Before coming to Asia a decade ago, I worked and lived in Los Angeles for most of the 1990s and got a first-hand look at the inner workings of the world’s entertainment capital. That included a thriving field of fake talent agents and other scam shops that sell the Hollywood dream of fame and wealth to ordinary people who secretly harbor dreams of stardom. Read Full Post…
The issue of corkage fees has been popping in and out of the headlines these past few months, spotlighting a practice that many Chinese consumers feel is unfair even though it’s quite common in the west. The issue is quite straightforward, with restaurants charging an extra fee to customers who drink their own wine or other beverage with their meal. Such fees are often quite high, and are meant to encourage people to purchase drinks from the menu. Read Full Post…
New numbers from the Education Ministry show a rising number of Chinese are returning home after study abroad, reflecting the growing attraction of living and working in their native country. As someone who has lived and worked in China for much of the last quarter century, this turnaround is quite remarkable and reflects the fact that the China of today is in many ways a completely different country from the one that I remember in the 1980s. Read Full Post…
I’ve refrained from writing before about Shanghai’s ongoing brouhaha over taxi apps, mostly because it seemed too local and didn’t have any broader significance beyond the unruly adoption of a new technology. But Shanghai’s latest move forbidding cabbies from taking new orders while they still have passengers seems worth writing about, as it speaks to a broader issue that looks like simple greed at first but is really a much larger part of the modern Chinese psyche. Read Full Post…
A new survey on marriage patterns in Shanghai is casting an interesting spotlight on what it means to be an outsider in one of China’s most international cities, whose high-profile embrace of foreigners and foreign things often overshadows a much bigger influx of domestic immigrants. The survey also draws attention to the bigger Chinese fondness for characterizing everything as either “insider” or “outsider”, a centuries-old tradition that Shanghai could and should take the lead in discarding.
The “insider” and “outsider” mentality goes way back in Chinese history, and is physically present across the Chinese landscape and deeply embedded in the language. Its most potent physical symbol is the storied Great Wall, which drew a clear line between the inside, or civilized China to the south, and the outside, populated by barbarian tribes to the north. Read Full Post…
A new report about a brawl on Metro Line 3 is casting a spotlight on the ongoing drama involving subway beggars, featuring a colorful but also unruly cast of men, women, children and even babies who spend their days pandering for money beneath the streets of Shanghai. I have some thoughts about how to tackle the problem, though there really are no quick and easy answers. Such subway beggars are far fewer in the US cities, and don’t exist at all in other major Asian cities like Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore. Read Full Post…
Shanghai’s local dialect has been back in the news these last few weeks, rekindling the debate about whether the city should make special efforts to save a colorful language that is quickly being overtaken by Mandarin. I’ve previously said that the disappearance of local dialects is inevitable throughout China as the nation modernizes, even though there’s nothing wrong with local governments and individuals trying to preserve such languages. But I’ll also add my view that those same preservationists should change their approach to target a younger, more modern audience if they really want to succeed. Read Full Post…
