More international cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai have an advantage over smaller rivals in preserving this element of local culture, as many of these bigger places have big academic communities that actively work to protect the local dialect. Most of those academics are often older folks who have admirable goals but don’t know how to speak to a younger generation that’s interested in speaking the more cosmopolitan Mandarin than a local dialect that often has many associations of backwardness. Read Full Post…
What started as local news of hundreds of dead pigs found floating in Shanghai’s Huangpu River has suddenly morphed into a major story, captivating global audiences with its graphic images and air of mystery about where the corpses came from. The news has now traveled to much of the world including the US city of Denver, prompting even my own brother take notice and send me an email warning not to drink the Shanghai tap water.
As a frequent traveler in Greater China, I’ll openly admit that Hong Kong is my favorite airport in the region, boasting an interesting array of shops and restaurants and convenient layout that makes it easy to find things and get to flights. But on the mainland, Shanghai is easily my favorite flying destination, thanks to its well-run Hongqiao Airport focused on domestic flights, and the more international airport in Pudong. Both airports are easy to get to, offer fast check-in and security screening, and a wide array of amenities that are both convenient and useful.
The Chinese obsession with history has a major impact on the country’s major cities, which are constantly trying to show how old and historically significant they are to somehow prove their “value” to both local and out-of-town residents. It seems that any city with less than 500 years of history is considered “insignificant” in some ways, no matter how big the city is. That reality has given Shanghai, China’s leading city by any other measurement, a major inferiority complex that I find both amusing and also a bit distressing at the same time.
I’ve lived in a number of Asian cities before taking up my current residence in Shanghai, including 3 years in Taiwan from 2006 to 2009. While I enjoyed may things about Taipei, one of the things that I found less appealing was the tendency for shops and companies there to overpackage many products, especially items intended as gifts. The phenomenon would often cause objects such as bottles of perfume or liquor to suddenly morph into packages that were 3 or 4 times the size of the actual product. I’ll discuss shortly my theories on where this phenomenon came from and the psychology behind it, but first I want to congratulate Shanghai for taking the lead in trying to curb this extremely wasteful practice that has spread from Taiwan to China in the last decade.
This week I thought I’d write about a topic that’s become quite popular these last few years, and also quite expensive and a bit excessive in my view: the big-ticket wedding. Before I start with the news item that was the basis for this column, the controversial opening of designer Vera Wang’s first China bridal shop here in Shanghai, I’d like to start by talking about the many things that I like about Chinese weddings. Like their counterparts in the west, Chinese weddings can come with a wide range of traditions for the bride and groom to choose from, which are both fun and add to the air of festivity with minimal extra cost.
I often fill this column with positive stories on Shanghai’s sophisticated approaches to problem solving, but today I want to explore a darker issue that has seen China’s biggest city rapidly emerge as a haven for increasingly sophisticated fraud. Perhaps it’s just my personal view, but it seems like the number of con artists in Shanghai has exploded in recent months, with the result that media reports now appear regularly about the latest sophisticated racket. I’ve also seen growing signs of the problem in my personal life, and recently nearly fell victim to one clever scam which I’ll detail shortly.
If the number of foreigners living in a city is the best measure of how international it is, then Shanghai is rapidly overtaking Beijing as China’s most global city. For years Beijing held the title as home to China’s biggest expatriate population, drawing on its big diplomatic, business and international student communities to easily take the crown in most of the 3 decades of the Reform Era. But then Shanghai began its own rapid development in the 1990s, nearly a decade after Beijing, and started quietly building up its own expat community centered much more in the white collar business crowd.
