Noahpinion's China Report

When I was six, like so many other American kids before me, I tried to get to China by digging a hole. I realized how difficult this would be, and came up with a tried-and-true solution - get a big guy to do all the work for me. Tantalizing the other kid with promises of the wonders we'd encounter once we emerged onto the other side of the world (people standing on their heads!), I was a harsh taskmaster, demanding constant digging every day during recess. Finally we hit concrete, and a labor dispute erupted, which ended up with my pushing him down and him kicking me in the throat.

Moral of the story: keep the workers happy.

Nineteen years later, I finally made it to China, this time by the more conventional method of buying a plane ticket. Tantalized by starry-eyed reports of China's economic might, I wanted to see this rising superpower for myself. Naturally, I went to the first place any Western tourist seeking to be impressed by China should go - Shanghai.

Shanghai looks like a city built for alien gods. Forests of skyscrapers make New York look like a dingy little town (Shanghai has twice New York's number of high-rises). Neon lights cover nearly every building, turning windowed facades into silent fireworks, and line miles of highway like giant green fiber-optic cable arcing into the night. Brilliant signs pile one over the other, turning the skyline into the wall of some enormous electronics store - Hitachi, Toshiba, Philips, Motorola. Walking around with a crick in your neck from looking up all the time, you feel exactly what you're supposed to feel: this civilization rules not only the future, but the present as well.

And as for the alien gods that live in this impossible megacity?

On my first day in Shanghai, seven people tried to scam me into buying art (obviously machine-made, at ridiculous prices). Two women, asking me to have tea with them to help them practice their English, proceeded to order $60 worth of food and demand that I pay for it ("Let me go to an ATM," I said, "I'll be right back, I promise"...and out the door I ran). Thinking of derby-wearing hucksters selling Polish immigrants the Brooklyn Bridge, I felt like I was looking at my country 100 years ago.

True to the reports, money is the driving force, the grand quest, the raison d'etre of Shanghai and its inhabitants - at least, all of the fifteen or so I met. You take a city where few people have a lot of money, where vast wealth is on conspicuous display, and where super-fast economic growth gives everyone the sense that all that money is waiting for them just over the horizon...and you end up with a lot of very aggressive, greedy, scrabbling people. The people who tried to scam me into buying the art were all college kids, and one professor; I didn't even meet any real businessmen, but just imagining what they must be like sends a shiver down my spine.

And any pursuits other than money are a strict no-no in modern China. Squadrons of uniformed policemen on every street corner are a constant reminder of that fact. I went to Shanghai's huge, lush Century Park to get away from it all, and found that the place had guards and an entry fee; barbecues were forbidden, flying kites other than the park authority's identical rental kites was forbidden. Every tree was propped up by poles, every stone pushed so far into the ground that I couldn't find even one to skip across the elaborately landscaped pond. Tourists walked roads of identical cobblestones, following signs to the pre-arranged relaxation destinations. So much for getting away from it all.

In search of all those Chinese people who have been "left behind" in China's economic miracle, I then ventured out beyond the walls of the new high-rise apartment complexes sprouting up like mushroom forests on Shanghai's outskirts, and found some of the places tourists aren't supposed to go - blighted neighborhoods with mazes of (literally) crumbling buildings populated by rag-clad hordes of squatters. Brick walls with gaping holes like dead mouths, torn shirts and rotted blankets hanging limply outside smashed windows, piles of refuse the size of small hills clogging the streets, weather-beaten old faces peering suspiciously from inside dark rooms with eyes that saw Mao come and go. And eveywhere the smells of human waste, of shit and piss and rotten food.

It is amazing to me that a place as glorious and as disgusting as Shanghai exists on this planet. Amazing, and somehow wrong.

I met some great people in Shanghai. Among these were a woman who called herself Leanna, a trading company manager whose personal slogans are "Always ready!" and "Try five times," and a man on a train who was too shy to speak English and so communicated in writing.

And I thought: these are the people who will suffer if the Chinese Communist Party falls, or if China's economic miracle stalls - not the party officials who can take their money and run, but all the good people working as hard as they can to get just a little bit ahead. And those desperate people in the slums will have no chance of anything better. So, much as we might hope for the arrogant, authoritarian rulers of China to get their comeuppance, we should temper that schadenfreude with an understanding that Chinese people are decent, good folk - at least, the ones who don't sell art or lure customers to tea shops.

Back in LA, a somewhat more earthbound city, I sat for a while and pondered the question of whether my country, the United States, represents yesterday's news. Like most news-reading Americans, I've been bombarded for the past three or four years with warnings of how China is poised to eclipse the West, as Shanghai has eclipsed New York. Armed with a market four and a half times the size of the U.S., an obedient workforce of hundreds of millions of well-educated hard-working eager beavers, and thousands of years of history as Earth's leading civilization, will this massive empire have us bowing before it before the century is out?

Well, maybe so. But I wouldn't bet on it. Anyone who returns from a visit to Shanghai should take a moment to read sober and well-researched articles that predict that China will be brought down by rampant corruption; China will be brought down by its ageing population; China will be brought down by rural unrest; China will be brought down by environmental collapse. Any one of these arguments, by itself, would be a weak counter to those forests of glowing skyscrapers; taken together, they throw a cup of cold water on the doomsday scenarios. China spent too many of the recent centuries as a chaotic, internally divided, isolationist, authoritarian backwater to be instantly and perfectly transformed into a model of capitalistic efficiency. China's day as the "central country" may come again, but for now, all Shanghai's bright lights are just that - a bunch of bright lights.

From the top of Shanghai's tallest building, looking out across the river at high noon, I couldn't even see all those skyscrapers through the veil of smog.