Shanghai: Nouveau Riche

China’s economic emergence is causing a big stir, and, among other things, people want to know how the economic transformation will affect Chinese society. I don’t know enough about China now to have a strong sense of how China’s profoundly different culture will express itself in the twenty-first century, but if my two months in Shanghai this summer offered any glimpse at all, it is that the China of tomorrow may look something like a cross between the Manhattan and Las Vegas of today.

What gets you in Shanghai isn’t that between 1992 and today they’ve built twice as many skyscrapers as exist in New York City. Or that another 1,000 are slated for completion for the World Expo in 2010. (Construction is literally taking place around the clock on its tallest building, the Shanghai World Financial Center.)

Once you’re there, the sights that strike you are the 100 franchises of Kentucky Fried Chicken and views of freeways lined with alternating neon lights. Sustained economic development has conferred upon Shanghai’s urban planners and real estate developers a taste for excess that makes you forget large swaths of the country are still without electricity.

One afternoon at the Cloud 9 mall, an incomplete but already bustling nine-story shopping complex half a mile and four Starbucks from my dormitory, I noticed some workers installing several TVs as I climbed an escalator. What I thought were four TVs being mounted around the mezzanine turned out to be eight, since, naturally, they were back to back. Only after walking around the rest of the mall did I notice that 384 TVs were being installed: eight around each of the six mezzanines on each floor.

The most impressive sight of awesome excess was in Suzhou, a neighboring, “medium-sized” city of six million people (Suzhou is one of over 60 Chinese cities with more than a million people). On a lake in a hyper-modern downtown district built entirely in the last few years, the city hosts a weekly display of pyrotechnics and choreographed water-technics that puts the Bellagio in Las Vegas to shame.

The big draw, I was told—what tens of thousands of people were coming to see—as the “movie on the water”: a two hour screening on a sheet of water created by continuously shooting jets in the middle of the lake.

What these examples say about China’s future is hard to say. But, if nothing else, these displays of eccentric optimism were a constant reminder that the land of Confucius and Mao’s Little Red book is in the throes of a transition from an intense, decades-long repression into a culture of footloose, sometimes stumbling consumerism.

Clay A. Dumas ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Lowell House.