Early morning with the last of our lectures, an NYU professor teaching at their Shanghai campus, Dr. Greenspan. She’s been living in Shanghai for a while now, and has made it her mission to find all the nooks and crannies of Shanghai—she even has written for a tourist’s guide book for the city. Her work has focused mostly on “figuring out” the city and the direction it’s going in, and that’s what her lecture was on. The lecture was very very interesting, and we went a half hour over the 90 minutes the lecture was supposed to last, just asking questions.
Apparently, the age of modernism missed China—while America, Western Europe, and the rest of the first-world countries were building skyscrapers and developing a credit system, China was struggling to get on its feet. Now that China has found solid footing, it’s going through a phase Dr. Greenspan calls “neomodernism”—the same stuff that everyone else did a hundred years ago, but with modern technology and a few more people. I guess I could kind of see it in Beijing, a little bit in Xi’an (which looked like Las Vegas at night!), but apparently Shanghai is where it’s at. Pudong is a case study for neomodernism—what was once a swamp, even just 15 years ago, is now this bustling urbanopolis that is the ideal set for every futuristic movie made now. The Oriental Pearl, the new Shanghai World Financial Center (we’ll go there tomorrow!) and the planned Shanghai Tower, along with the Liujizang district and an incredibly futuristic look at night, I can totally see how Shanghai can be called “The City of the Future”. While I realize that Pudong isn’t a good representation of the entire city (and man—it’s a big city), Dr. Greenspan pointed out how the rest of the city is also finding itself, and not really struggling either. Like the 798 Art Village in Beijing, there are art communities all over the place, there are districts that are known for something special, there’s a vibrancy to the city that I’m excited to explore a little bit. This just happened to be the first every gay pride week in Shanghai.
However, we spent the afternoon in one of the less Shanghai-y areas of town—we went to the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Shanghai, which was next to the Plaza 66, featuring at least one of every designer store you could possibly imagine, and some you couldn’t. Way to upper class for me—I walked around there a bit, gawked, and left. The AmCham visit was really interesting—we met with one of the company executives, and then had a Q&A session with an AmCham member, the president and CEO of a company that handles risk management for new companies starting in Shanghai. He had lots of advice to offer, lots of stories to tell, and not much encouragement to throw around. It was really funny to watch—all the business minor people started really sucking up to this guy, trying to get “in” with him. I’m probably one of them, I just hope I asked more tasteful questions than some of the others…
