03 Nov Getting rich is glorious ? a trip to Shanghai
There are 2 sites I recommend visitors to Shanghai to go because it will help to understand what is happening right now in China and gives us a clue about how the future there might look like:
The first one is the Urban Planning Museum in the heart of the city at Renmin Square. The most impressive thing to see there -apart from old pictures and plans when Shanghai was still a small fisher village- is a room-sized model of Shanghai 2020. You will learn that the city has tripled metro lines in 8 years, has built 11 suburb cities to host the constant flow of people to the city (with a total population of aprox. 15 million people) and is spending an estimated sum of 3 billion Euros in the project of the World Expo in 2010.
The other multimedia exhibits there tend to be a bit self-congratulatory but I think it was one of those China experiences that has finally opened my eyes and made me understand that ?Yes, we’re in the Chinese century? and they want the world to know. There’s loads of money around, there are loads of people (and cheap labour force), there’s space and there’s a market everybody tries to conquer. But most important, there is a clear vision of the future and if we like it or not, this vision beyond doubt, reflects the Chinese claim to become a global superpower. Taking into account the speed and dynamism of economic and urban development and current social changes that won’t take too long.
The second place I warmly recommend is the relatively small building in a neighbourhood called French concession (Shanghai was ruled by a multi-national colonial government until 1949) where in 1921 the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held. Mao Zedong was among the 13 participants of this first meeting.
The museum itself is actually not that interesting but it’s quite bizarre to see that the founding place of the glorious Chinese Communist Party and one of the most important monuments of modern Chinese history is surrounded by shopping malls, Starbucks outlets and just opposite there is Ferrari’s Shanghai showroom!
And that’s the second lesson I have learnt from travelling China: it is probably the only country where people live in capitalistic communism without getting schizophrenic? «Getting rich is glorious», at least, that’s what Deng Xiaoping said when he started economic reforms in the 1980ties and opened China to the world.
dorisobermair@yahoo.com
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