For the latest news on U.S.- and Hong Kong-traded Chinese stocks, visit our new Bamboo Works site.
Shanghai’s signature Oriental Pearl Tower takes center stage in this week’s Street View, following a much-needed cleaning for the original high-rise in city’s fast-evolving Lujiazui financial district. This concrete and purple glass tower has been the source of controversy since its construction in the early 1990s, winning praise from some for its futuristic look and scorn from others who called it an urban eyesore. Read Full Post…
A recent story about a group of stubborn street vendors in the Zhabei and Baoshan districts got me thinking about the broader problem of sidewalk clutter in China, a seemingly mundane topic but one that Shanghai really needs to address as it tries to transform into a modern, cutting-edge city. Vendors of this type are all too familiar not only in Shanghai but throughout China, and are colorful and sometimes convenient but more often just an annoying presence on the sidewalks they inhabit. Read Full Post…
Results from a recent poll about Shanghai’s hospitals made for some entertaining reading, but also showed that local residents are quite content with the state of local health care. Despite the frequent complaints some people have about our local hospitals and practices that westerns find strange, I personally also agree that the current system is surprisingly satisfactory and efficient, even if it sometimes lacks the personal touch.
China’s healthcare system has undergone huge changes since the first time I stepped into a hospital in Beijing in the 1980s for a physical exam. The hospitals of that era were truly basic institutions lacking in much equipment, even if their staff of doctors trained in western and traditional Chinese medicine were friendly enough. Read Full Post…
I thought I’d close out the year with a look at 2 upcoming bans that could have a profound impact on life in Shanghai in 2014. News junkies will know I’m talking about a ban on live chicken sales in local markets that will begin next month at the Lunar New Year, and another proposed ban on eating in the city’s sprawling subway system.
Both bans look like good ideas to me, and I also like the way the city is implementing each. The live chicken ban is aimed at curbing and hopefully preventing another outbreak of bird flu in the upcoming flu season, and is quite strict. The subway eating ban, by comparison, is just a proposal at this point and still open for public discussion. Read Full Post…
A new scandal involving the sudden closure of Marie France Bodyline beauty salons in Shanghai didn’t surprise me much, leaving its hundreds of members holding cards with thousands of yuan in worthless credit. This kind of rapid shutdown made headlines because it involved such a high-profile name, but frankly I’m most surprised we haven’t seen a lot more similar closures.
More broadly speaking, the demise of Marie France in Shanghai reflects the ridiculous explosion in spas, massage shops and beauty parlors and other centers of hedonism in China over the last decade. My own daily walk around my neighborhood takes me past at least a dozen such shops, and the density is even higher in more commercial areas of Shanghai. Read Full Post…
A recent case involving some bathhouse bandits seemed like a good excuse to look at the colorful history of public showers in China over the last half century. Such public bathhouses were a fixture of everyday life for years in a densely populated city like Shanghai, where many homes lacked running water.
In addition to their more functional role as places to wash, these bathhouses were traditionally an important place to socialize, where people could chat with friends and neighbors and catch up on all the latest news and gossip while soaking in a hot tub. Much of that glamour has been lost these last few decades in Shanghai’s current generation of grungy bathhouses, which themselves are rapidly drying up. Read Full Post…
My first reaction to a report about Shanghai’s latest business scandal was one of disgust, as I read about scoundrels who use homemade radio devices to block mobile signals and send thousands of cellular spam messages. Anyone who owns a cellphone is well aware of the spam problem, receiving dozens or even hundreds of such unwanted text messages each month offering everything from restaurant discounts to rip-off investment schemes. Read Full Post…
Shanghai often looks more like a laboratory these days than a modern financial hub, as the number of new and experimental zones and projects in the city accelerates under Beijing’s new, reform-minded leaders. On a single day last week, I read at least 6 reports about various new projects and zones coming on stream in the city, including several in the Pudong area. Read Full Post…
I thought I’d read about every kind of food safety scandal imaginable until I saw a new report on an eatery here in Shanghai that found a creative way to encourage customer loyalty for its crayfish dishes. I had to smile to myself as I read the report, and even had to slightly admire this restaurant for its creative, albeit illegal, approach to building up repeat business.
At a broader level, this “Case of the cagey crayfish shop” shines a spotlight on a more widespread phenomenon in China that amuses both me and many of my western friends. Put simply, we marvel at the inability of Chinese entrepreneurs to differentiate themselves from their rivals, with the result that many shops often look identical to one another and give little reason for customer loyalty. Read Full Post…
Shanghai residents who like to show their visiting friends some of the city’s better preserved traditional neighborhoods, known locally as shikumen, will be disappointed to hear that one of the best ones is now off the market. I’m referring to a recent clean-up of the shikumen neighborhood on West Nanjing Road near Shaanxi Lu, where a new gate has been installed to keep out everyone except local residents. Read Full Post…
This week’s Street View zeroes in on Shanghai’s growing love for plastic, which has fueled an explosion of membership, gift, credit and debit cards issued by just about anyone in the retail sector. This strange love of plastic has led government officials in Pudong to take the much-needed step of trying to regulate an unruly group of merchants, some of whom sell cards worth thousands of yuan to consumers and then suddenly close up shop and disappear with the money.
Read Full Post…
