Shanghai miracle

"Don't talk to me about the Shanghai miracle. It's a mirage." (marlowe)

You know, I found myself unexpectedly (well, on short notice) in China last March (and a Long March it was!) on a sort of vacation, and although I didn't make it to Shanghai I did spend the better part of two weeks in Beijing, and was darned impressed: if modern China's an illusion, it's a very impressive job of conjuring. Impressions follow:

1. I had anticipated a city of bicycles, and although there were many more of these by far than you'd see in any American metropolis, Beijing has discovered the private auto in a big way. Traffic lights and lanes appear to be advisory only; as a pedestrian one crosses a street by finding a nearby vehicle, preferably a van, and trotting beside it. If the roadway is painted for four lanes, then six or seven will be employed in practice. Think of all the jokes you've ever heard or made about "Chinese drivers" and contemplate the implications of the mother lode--although the carnage you might imagine logically proceeding from these conditions does not ensue.

2. Monuments and historical sites apart, Beijing appears to have four principal architectural strata: the "hutongs," dense, low residential warrens representing the traditional residential sectors, many of which are being demolished to make room for new commercial development; cheesy high-density housing erected in the sixties or seventies, looking not unlike American public housing of the same era, and also being demolished (new housing tends to go for the outskirts of this large, unlovely city); public architecture of the fifties and sixties, done up in glorious Stalinism; and new commercial construction, which runs the gamut from modernism to post-modernism to something I can only describe as retro-Jetson: the 21st century as it was imagined here forty years ago. Flying cars would not seem out of place.

3. I don't know a single word of Chinese, and hence did not have any conversation with non-English speaking nationals. This being said, I nevertheless did not take away the impression that the people in the street felt themselves particularly oppressed. On the contrary, the Zeitgeist seemed more like something from the American 1950s: a boundless confidence and energy. Again, there's the language and cultural barriers, so it's possible I was completely clueless here. I don't think so.

4. I had the impression that everyone was working really, really hard and yet not all that efficiently (piles of rubble, for example: the prevailing ethos appears to be, when a building collapses, to let the debris lie there in a pile for two or three hundred years until the site is needed for something else. Unless the Chinese master modern notions of preventive maintenance their new retro-Jetsons buildings are going to look pretty seedy in a few years). I think this want of efficiency is probably a Good Thing, for different reasons, for them and for us.

Conclusion: from my (firsthand but admittedly not informed by economic expertise) perspective the 1950s America perspective seems apt: development is roaring, and the culture is confident. I don't think it's a "mirage."

cordially,

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