Shanghai Diary 2005 #8
I know NHS stories are boring but … sparing you the details of my swollen toe, I visited the hospital yesterday. It’s about 5 minutes walk away from where I am. This is how it goes. You walk in. It’s crowded. There are no fried fast food stalls in the front as in the UK. If you…
Keep readingShanghai Diary 2005 #7
On Saturday night we went to a football match. It was Shenhua against Zhejiang. ‘Shenhua’ means flower of Shanghai. They seem to be the older of the teams, with a new stadium in the Huangpu district (in the ’30s a dense impoverished working class neighborhood). There are two other sides, another based in the stadium near where I…
Keep readingShanghai Diary 2005 #6
I had dinner with some people from my Chinese family. One cousin told me about his job. He works for an electricity company. It is owned by the state but all the different provinces are allowed to compete with each other for contracts anywhere in China. This does not extend to domestic supply, competition for…
Keep readingShanghai Diary 2005 #5
Went to one of the University campuses. As you would expect in a city of 15 million there are quite a few universities in Shanghai. Tongji is one of those founded in the late 19th/early 20th century, like Jiaotong here near us. Tongji is in the north of the city, beyond the old Japanese concession. They both have the…
Keep readingShanghai Diary 2005 #4
The Creek Art Centre was set up by a Norwegian-Chinese and Norwegian couple. He’s a wealthy businessman but wants to do something cultural. My friend at Park 19 says there is a sense that some of the wealthy are now beginning to think about things other than money. Quality of life. But they are still few and far between.…
Keep readingShanghai Diary 2005 #3
I just got back from Beijing where I had been at a conference. I spent five nights there. On the first night I got that big city feel as I saw my first Chinese celebrity, James Chou from CCTV 9 (Check it out – you can get it on the internet.) This was in a reproduction Ming…
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Shanghai Diary 2005 #2
Coming to a place a second time gives you the comfort of the familiar, though you may barely understand it more than the first time. But you have enough points of reference for the full existential shock to diminish. You have space to look around. But the familiar is not always the comfortable, like the…
Keep readingShanghai Diary 2005 #1
My welcome back to Shanghai was in two forms. First, the ultra-fast new Maglev train, which jets across the city at 440 km per hour. You have no problems finding the train because as you come out of customs you immediately see two groups of three girlies in Maglev costume carrying a board and singing some…
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Shanghai Diary #6
“I wrote earlier that I was wracking my brains for some stored images of Shanghai’s past. I knew they were in there somewhere, and I found them. Last weekend I was taken out to the ‘countryside’ around the city, to a ‘historic village’ now being promoted as a tourist attraction. The landscape outside the city…
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Shanghai Diary #5
The idea of speeded up modernity, telescoped modernity might come from a few facts gleaned from CCTV 9 – China’s international service. They ran an excellent documentary series on housing in China. (We used to have documentaries in England. I look forward, as the Chinese catch up, to ‘Apartment Blocks From Hell’ and, given the scale of things here,…
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Shanghai Diary #4
“My Finnish friend Hanna sends me top tips on science fiction reads. Recently I read Perdido Street Station by China Mieville and I brought with me City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer. (It’s still clocking in at over 36C. They reckon it will never reach 38 because that’s when work has to stop. It’s an oddly exciting feeling to…
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Shanghai Diary #3
“After the last entry I started to read an article by Jing Wang: “Culture as Leisure and Culture as Capital” (Positions, Vol.9 No.1 Spring 2001) where she writes: “Dichotomous thinking seems to have trapped all (cultural) tourists who, after a sightseeing trip to Tiananmen Square, are prone to turn themselves into instant China experts” She proceeds…
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Shanghai Diary #2
“The Huangpu river flows through Shanghai. The photos show Pudong, the new international city centre of Shanghai, built on paddy fields and now boasting (as everybody does) amongst the tallest buildings in Asia (they all know that Taipai and K-L have the first two slots, but they’re working on that). On the opposite shore is The Bund, the…
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Shanghai Diary #1
From the eighth floor I look out onto a canal well kept but never used except for the occasional small boat collecting floating rubbish.
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Justin O'Connor 