Pictures from an Ancient Ultramodern Land
Pictures from an Ancient Ultramodern Land
Four cities of the future and past
I visited four cities in China on this trip.
Shanghai, China’s most populous city, at 29 million people—another 10 million if you count the metropolitan area.
Hangzhou, the ancient capital of the Song Dynasty and now a high-tech hub. With roughly 12 million people, it has a a population similar to Sweden’s and a GDP that is larger.
Ningbo, at just over 9 million people, is considered a “sub-provincial hub”. The city is said to be more than 8000 years old and is now among the wealthiest ten cities in China per capita.
And Taizhou, a city of 6 million people that was largely inaccessible by road until the 1990s, it became a model of China’s economic reforms and was the birthplace of the giant car manufacturer Geely I mentioned in my last post.
Obviously, this is a very select sample from a vast and complex land—a bit like visiting just southern Ontario, say, in Canada. I wouldn’t want to overextend my observations. But what I saw was on its surface, a busier, wealthier, more modern place than anything I have seen in North America.
The historic sites seem well maintained, partly as a result of that recent wealth. Again, I am talking only about what I personally observed, but I did not see the teeming slums or dark satanic mills that often characterize places that are developing rapidly.
We began our trip in Shanghai. When we set out from our hotel to look for dinner, we didn't realize that we were on the edge of the French Concession from colonial times. We stumbled upon a police barricade which we realized only later was erected mainly to stop people from bringing selfie sticks into the area around a building where the Communist Party of China was founded in 1921.
Literally around the corner is a fashionable shopping precinct built into French colonial facades, featuring Valentino, Lululemon, bistro-type restaurants serving mainly Western food, and patronized by the kind of wealthy locals familiar in similar districts of New York, Toronto, London or Munich.
As we explored Shanghai, something that struck me was how the old or even ancient sites, many of which have religious significance, have been lovingly restored in recent years, apparently in part because their nationalist historical significance is important to the regime. I was surprised by the degree of outward religiosity shown by many Chinese at the Buddhist and Daoist shrines.
In China these days, cash has virtually disappeared. Indeed neither cash not credit cards are generally welcome by restaurants, shops or other vendors, who prefer WeChat Pay (Weixin) or its Alibaba equivalent. Alibaba, which is headquartered in Hangzhou and has driven its astonishing growth, is Amazon, eBay, Netflix, and your bank all wrapped into a single app.
In the cities we visited, China was simply a more modern, more hi-tech society than our own. Every hotel we stayed at had some of these robots to deliver room service. They summoned the elevators and as you will see if you click on the video, felt strongly about their right of way.
We did, to be sure, see little glimpses of the developing world, as at the market in Hangzhou, pictured below. But while these street scenes might have been common twenty years ago, I actually had to make a mental note to snap pictures whenever there was an opportunity because there were not that many.
All of the famous tourist sites we visited were very well maintained, but many of them, like Hangzhou’s famous Westlake, were overcrowded by North American standards. This is a very populous country and despite the current economic downturn, there’s a lot of middle class internal tourism.
But when we got beyond Shanghai and Hangzhou to the more provincial cities, this ceased to be the case.
If you visit this part of China these days, expect to see the ancient and the modern, but precious little in between.