10 days back in my old stomping grounds. First to Shanghai for a global governance conference. Take home message: we could solve climate change but won't even try, we can't stop nuclear proliferation but will try anyway, and we're trying to mitigate financial crises with one hand while fanning their flames with the other. Here we are hard at work:
Those white bottles are 73% alcohol.
The conference was out at Fudan University, on the outskirts of the city, so I didn't really get a chance to do Shanghai stuff until later in the week. These forays confirmed a suspicion I have long nursed: I don't really like Shanghai. I like the idea of it--a giant, hybrid city of high stakes and low morals--but not the actual experience of being there. For a large Chinese city it's certainly comfortable enough, with a decent public transport system and a human-scale central area. The problem is rather the inhabitants. Chinese and foreigner alike are united in an extreme form of shallow materialism that is really just unbearable. Everyone either looking down on or envying everyone else.
Also, the food is not very good, or at least not as good as Beijing. I do like one kind of fried soup dumpling they do there (sheng jian bao), and sought out the famous place that does it. It is now, I kid you not, a Starbucks. So I went in and had a mediocre coffee. That is the truly authentic Shanghai experience.
This was also basically the message of the Shanghai Expo, a sort of Disney World with less fun and more waiting. As someone told me, Expos are cool if you are the kind of person who thinks electrification is cool. This is why they were popular in the West in the late 19th century, and in China today. The point of the Expo, like the Beijing Olympics, was for the government to demonstrate to the masses that it is leading them to a wonderful high tech future, if only they would be a bit more patient. Of the 90 million people expected to attend the Expo, fully 70 million of them will be from the Chinese countryside (i.e. the kind of people your average Shanghainese wouldn't touch with a long stick). Still, I expected it to be a bit more international. Instead it was a very Chinese affair, not sure I even saw any other foreigners there.
We had a special invitation to visit the China Pavilion, an impressive structure filled with, well, we'll get there.
First we wait. For a long time. The special invitation was apparently not so special, as it seemed all 1.3 billion inhabitants had also decided to attend on the same day.
To alleviate the stress and overheating of those in these interminable queues, the government has helpfully installed a kind of misting device that sprays the crowd at regular intervals, like fruit at an American supermarket.
So when we finally make into the Pavillion, we are as wet as we are tired and angry.
Then the fun starts. A series of displays meant to extol the virtues of economic growth under that CCP. The exhibits ranged from the hyperbolic (a rah-rah propaganda film was so over the top it elicited only tepid applause from an otherwise enthusiastic audience), to the bizarre, to the just pathetic. A little train ride takes you through a series of rooms full of...plastic trees! If this is the best the propaganda department can do then the regime is doomed.
There were two cool things. First, a giant electronic screen showing an animated version of a famous Chinese watercolor painting. The figures move and interact. Very cool. Second, there was a lot in the Expo about moving to a low-carbon economy. This is a trend throughout China; everyone is banging on about low carbon this, low carbon that. Measured in rhetoric, China is the world low carbon leader. If only it were true...
After all the waiting, I had very little time to see the rest of the Expo, just a quick run across the site that only took me as far as Europe.
It seems like they could have managed a nicer sign than this. Pavilions ranged from the elaborate (Australia)
To the just plain weird (Hong Kong)
To the crapulent (poor UN)
To the painfully earnest:
The China pavilion loomed over all in a vaguely menacing fashion..
Anyway, I was very happy to leave all that for my beloved Beijing. I was very gratified to find that much was still intact. For example, my old apartment!
Even my old barber was still there, and he remembered my name. There was little time for all this though, as I had a lot of eating to do. Dumplings: tick. Hotpot: tick. Went back to the old favorites and wasn't disappointed. Also made some new discoveries:
Does what it says on the box.
Even if one corrects the translation ("balsamic" should be "fragrant"), it still doesn't seem to make much sense.
This is a new cafe dedicated to Asian boy bands, the kind of thing you would see in Hong Kong or Seoul. Now in Beijing!
All in all, an excellent trip. I had sort of forgotten how much I missed it. Next time it won't be so long before I go back!
But now, off to a slightly different part of the world: Maremma. Then again, there is one important similarity: gluttony.
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