More than a month after Shanghai launched its campaign to tame our unruly traffic, I want to use this space to call for a similar campaign that is badly needed to clean up our city’s increasingly chaotic sidewalks. Anyone who lives here will know I’m talking about the legions of delivery bikes and scooters that have exploded onto Shanghai’s sidewalks over the last few years, creating a nightmare for those of us who actually use sidewalks for walking.
This particular tale began 5 or 6 years ago with the rapid rise of e-commerce, which spawned a flood of courier services delivering everything from major items like computers and furniture to tiny parcels like USB thumb drives. But the problem has become much worse over the last year with a newer explosion of take-out dining services, which have unleashed thousands more bikes and scooters onto our sidewalks. Read Full Post…
China’s love affair with paper money looks set for a major shake-up soon, with a new plan to eliminate 1 yuan notes and replace them with coins. But anyone who lives here in Shanghai knows that change took place a while ago in our city, and no one seems to miss the ratty, green 1 yuan notes too much, myself included.
Money is an integral part of any nation’s identity, and the paper-versus-coin argument seems to be a broader subset of that dialogue. The issue has a historical twist here, since China was the actual birthplace of paper money back in the Tang Dynasty more than 1,000 year ago. Read Full Post…
A story this week about a woman busted after trying to smuggle thousands of yuan worth of makeup and luxury goods through Pudong Airport brought a big smile to my face, jogging some of my earliest memories of living in Asia in the 1980s. Back then luxury goods were just taking off in some of the region’s newly emerging “tigers” like South Korea and Taiwan the same way they are now in China, creating a cottage industry for similar smugglers throughout the region.
Nowadays such smuggling is far less common even here in China, since many consumers have more than enough money to easily travel to nearby places like Hong Kong, where they can legally purchase items like Gucci handbags and Cartier watches. And prices for luxury goods in China itself are also coming down these days, as many brands roll out global uniform pricing policies to discourage the kind of smuggling in the Pudong Airport story. Read Full Post…
These past few weeks have been tinged with sadness and some melancholy for me, as 2 close friends on the streets of Shanghai quietly shuttered their doors forever. The pair both came from the family of traditional media, whose slow death is taking a quieter toll on the hundreds of newsstands that have become a fixture on Shanghai’s streets over the last 2 decades.
The creeping demise of these newsstands has been happening for the last 2 or 3 years now, but the closure of 2 familiar stops in my daily routine so close together made it feel like the trend is accelerating. I pass around a dozen such newsstands every day in my old neighborhood in Hongkou District, and probably about half of those are now permanently shuttered. Read Full Post…
I have to admit I was quite skeptical when our city launched a new campaign to clean up Shanghai’s streets of rude and unruly drivers a couple of weeks ago. After all, such campaigns are quite common here, and usually last for just a day or two before city officials seem to lose interest and redeploy their resources elsewhere.
But lately I’ve had to rethink my initial stance, and am even starting to hold out a glimmer of hope for improvement, as the campaign remains in the spotlight and appears to be maintaining momentum a full 2 weeks after its launch. Read Full Post…
After several months of going nowhere, a pilot plan aimed at reviving Shanghai’s slowly dying water transport network is quietly sailing off to the land of innovative local projects that sank after failing to find an audience. In this case the quiet closure of a ferry service connecting destinations in Hongkou District, the Bund and Lujiazui financial district was almost inevitable, since it really didn’t seem well conceived and was operating at big losses.
That said, I do have to commend the city for taking an innovative step to try to revive a dying water culture that is one of Shanghai’s most unique and picturesque assets, even though it remains largely unknown to many outsiders. Perhaps the city should send a team to study the example of Hong Kong, which has been far more successful at developing a vibrant water transport network that serves local commuters and is also a major tourist attraction. Read Full Post…
This week’s Street View takes us to the offices of one Shanghai’s hottest Internet companies, though take-out delivery superstar Ele.me probably would have preferred to avoid the spotlight on this year’s global Consumer Rights Day that fell on March 15. But anyone who missed that story, which saw Ele.me blasted for using unlicensed restaurants, needn’t worry about accidentally missing this particular day designed to draw attention to a specific cause.
That’s because I’ve recently become aware of Shanghai’s fondness for commemorating many of the growing number of global days designed to draw attention to just about any cause imaginable. While there’s certainly no harm in using such events to raising awareness of things like environmental protection, it does seem like Shanghai’s growing obsession with these promotional days is getting slightly out of hand and may need to become a little more selective. Read Full Post…
A scalping story that saw a person scammed after buying an invalid ticket to Century Park brought a smile to my face, partly because the money involved was quite small and also because the tale itself was rather ridiculous. But my smile was quickly followed by some eye rolling and exasperation, as the story once again showed just how pervasive scalping is in here in Shanghai and throughout China.
Reasons for buying tickets and other items from scalpers vary widely, but this particular case also highlighted another phenomenon that perplexes me and many others here in China. That phenomenon is the “back door” mentality, which sees many Chinese, especially from the older generation, always looking for short-cuts to do even the most common things like buying a park ticket. Read Full Post…
A popular restaurant chain called Memory tops the menu of this week’s Street View, with word that the local eatery is living up to its name with a sudden closure that’s sending it into the history books. Memory’s particular form of untimely death is all too common in China these days, usually occurring when an owner abruptly shutters his business and flees after piling up huge piles of debt.
The story was even more personal for me, since I was just introduced to the chain a few weeks ago when a friend suggested it for dinner one evening. I was so impressed by its innovative take on traditional Shanghai cuisine, combined with its nostalgic decor and extremely reasonable prices, that I even went back for a second helping just last week. But it seems the low prices that were one of its biggest draws were also Memory’s downfall, leading to the sudden closure. Read Full Post…
This week’s Street View takes us back to my other adopted hometown of Los Angles, where a case of extreme bullying is shining a spotlight on what sometimes happens to the growing number of Chinese kids who get shipped abroad by their parents to study in US high schools. Back when I first came to China in the 1980s, only the hardest working and brightest young people could go to study abroad, almost always on full scholarships that they applied for and received by themselves for graduate studies.
The difficulty of that early process weeded out all but the brightest and most motivated students, who were usually in their early 20s or older and savvy enough to take care of themselves in a strange and unfamiliar environment. Fast forward to the present, when a new generation of young kids from big cities like Shanghai are being sent abroad to study in US high schools with little or no adult supervision and even less experience of living on their own. Read Full Post…
Shanghai passed a major milestone over the Lunar New Year holiday by becoming China’s quietest major city during the period, thanks to our new ban on all fireworks inside the Outer Ring Road. I’ll admit I was quite skeptical when the ban was initially announced, since it sounded nearly impossible to enforce in a city where thousands love to welcome the Spring Festival with the centuries-old tradition of setting off such noisy and heavily polluting fireworks.
But the city proved me wrong, by mobilizing a massive army of enforcers that included thousands of regular policemen and many times more volunteers tasked with stopping any merrymakers. As a result, I didn’t hear a single firecracker explode near my home in Hongkou District on Lunar New Year’s Eve, nor on the fourth evening of the New Year when people traditionally welcome the god of wealth. Read Full Post…
