Shanghai Street View

This week’s Street View takes us off the street and into the air to examine a couple of recent news stories involving objects that caused damage or even death after falling from apartment buildings. My description of these objects as “falling” is somewhat generous, since in at least one case, and possibly both, the objects were carelessly thrown from buildings by people who had little or no concern for consequences their actions might cause.

More broadly speaking this kind of action is an extension of the litterbug phenomenon, which sees some people often treat our streets and sidewalks as a garbage bin for their cigarette butts, empty drink containers and other unwanted things. The problem has certainly improved over the last decade, in no small part thanks to a major public awareness campaign about pollution in general. Read Full Post…

As someone who has followed financial markets for years, I can say with authority that a daily stock market move of more than 1.5 percent is quite rare and most often happens when there’s big news. The last time we saw frequent movements bigger than that was during the global financial crisis of 2008, when it became almost surreal how often global stock markets would occasionally rise but more often fall by 3 percent or more.

Fast forward to present day China, where the big swings have returned and changes of 3 percent or more have become quite common in our daily stock market reports. One restaurant owner in Pudong thought he was pretty smart he created a promotion tied to stock market moves, offering different discounts depending on the size of the market’s rise or fall that day. Read Full Post…

This week’s Street View takes us to historic Jing’an District, where a pair of headlines are spotlighting the closing of a storied expat landmark and the opening of a new museum that’s likely to become one of our city’s top future attractions.

News junkies will recognize the second item as the newly opened, state-of-the-art Shanghai Natural History Museum, which was flooded with visitors in its first days of operation. Far fewer people will know that the once ground-breaking but now faded expat hangout Malone’s is preparing to close its doors, after losing its relevance among much of the city’s foreign community. Read Full Post…

News of the looming closure of one of Shanghai’s oldest wet markets is once again casting a spotlight on the issue of traditions, and their place in our city is it tries to balance its move into the future while also preserving some of its past. At the same time, a separate story about a new helicopter tour of some Shanghai’s famous sights is igniting another controversy over the high prices for a type of attraction that is clearly part of our city’s future.

These 2 stories nicely summarize the many conflicts between old and new that seem to grip our city on a daily basis. One thing I love about my adopted city is the huge contrasts here that often see people living in very basic conditions on the same streets shared by state-of-the-art high-rises. Read Full Post…

I’ve always thought Shanghai was quite a colorful place, and now it seems our city is determined to drive home that point with yet another color schemes in a growing series designed to keep us informed on everything from the quality of the air we breathe to the storms that keep our waterways full. This latest scheme will apply to traffic conditions on our congested roads, allowing us to quickly tell when to expect long delays and consider possible alternate routes.

This kind of color coding certainly isn’t unique to Shanghai, as other countries and cities around the world have similar ways for keeping ordinary citizens informed using symbols that are quick and easy to understand. But that said, our city seems to be embarking on a particularly aggressive color feast that could ultimately end up creating more confusion than clarity as everyone tries to figure out if the latest red alert applies to weather, air quality, traffic or perhaps something else. Read Full Post…

As the spring semester gets underway at the university where I teach, I’m once again confronted with an issue that seems to get trickier with each passing year. That issue involves my ongoing quest to improve my written Chinese, and the constant challenge posed by a trend that has parents choosing increasingly obscure names for their kids.

My Chinese was far worse when I first came to Beijing in the 1980s, and yet it was quite easy for me to read and pronounce names back then. That’s because many people had very similar names, often with revolutionary themes incorporating characters like hong for red, or bing or jun for soldier. Nowadays I struggle to read many of my students’ names on our first day of class, and many students themselves don’t know the meanings of the obscure characters their parents have chosen for them. Read Full Post…

As someone who has lived and worked in both China and the west for roughly equal periods over the last quarter century, I can say with relative authority that Chinese pay scales are one of the things that vex me and often seem to defy logic.

The many pay-related inconsistencies in today’s China were on display in a couple of news reports this week showing how many people continue to have high salary expectations despite signs of a maturing economy. One report showed how a huge number of Shanghai workers are considering leaving their jobs due to discontent with annual pay raises that seem quite acceptable by western standards. At the same time, another report showed that annual salaries in Shanghai and other top Chinese cities are starting to actually drop due to a slowing economy, reversing years of rapid gains. Read Full Post…

I had to smile to myself on reading the latest statistics about Shanghai’s ongoing crackdown on smoking in public places, which is showing generally positive trends. My smile was partly one of encouragement at the progress, but was more due to amazement at the relatively meager 1.5 million yuan in fines that Shanghai has issued for illegal smoking over the last 5 years.

That translates to just 300,000 yuan in fines for each of the last 5 years, which looks rather low for a city of Shanghai’s size, especially when one considers how common it is to see people smoking in forbidden places like office buildings, restaurants and shopping malls. On a daily basis the figure becomes even more miniscule, translating to just over 800 yuan in fines each day. Read Full Post…

While many spent their Lunar New Year in a cutting-edge world of smartphones and virtual red envelope grabs, I had a chance to travel back to an older edition of China with a trip to interior Shanxi province. Several experiences there seemed uncomfortably close to the China from my memory in the 1980s, including a brief but chaotic ride on a local train that was packed to the gills with Spring Festival travelers.

But one particular experience seemed to summarize the many growing pains that China continues to feel in its ongoing transformation to the modern era. That experience saw the small historic banking city of Pingyao plunged into complete darkness not once, but around half a dozen times during my brief two-day sightseeing visit.
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I’ll finish out the Year of the Horse with a bang, by touching on the explosive topic of fireworks and their rapidly evolving role in both our city and more broadly in Chinese culture. Perhaps it’s more appropriate to say we’ll end the year on a whimper rather than a bang, as the latest rules issued by our city are rapidly clamping down on the centuries-old Chinese tradition of lighting off firecrackers to welcome in the Lunar New Year.

I’m certainly not the first to write about this topic, and I should begin by disclosing my own view that the use of firecrackers by individuals should be prohibited completely in a big city like Shanghai. My stance may seem a bit curmudgeonly, and I’ll openly admit I always dread the approach of the New Year because it’s nearly impossible to sleep on the Lunar New Year’s Eve. Read Full Post…