Why we can never do a 40-km trip in 8 minutes

T.J.S. George, has been a longtime China watcher. In fact, when he was in Hong Kong, he was a resource person for many world media with respect to South East Asian affairs. After a gap of about 10 years he happened to visit China again and witness the Olympic preparations and a Modern Super Power.

Here goes the first of a six-part series.



The speed at which China is transforming itself is not just impressive; it is scary.

Can such massive cities come up in the twinkling of an eye? Can such elaborate infrastructure be put in place in a jiffy? What is the engine that drives this frenetic pace of progress? Is there a target such an engine cannot achieve if it wants to?

When I visited Shanghai less than 10 years ago, Pudong was a sprawling marshland which had just been drained to make the soil ready for construction activities. The first highrise hotel was coming up and a landmark TV tower was rising.

Today, Pudong is a marvel of modernity, a glittering financial and corporate centre with facilities and institutions bigger and better than the best in the world.

A fairyland kind of suspension bridge, for example, is the most spectacular link across the Huangpu river that used to separate Pudong from Shanghai. There are several other bridges, several ferry services and several state-of-the-art underwater tunnels that make that separation a thing of the past.

Consider the road system. Shanghai was a notoriously congested city—a tangled web like central Bombay. It was impossible to untangle it. But the authorities found a way: Put an elevated road system over the city’s “ground floor.”

Today an overhead network of crisscrossing flyovers make it possible to go from point A to point B without traffic lights. From the centre of Pudong I drove for 36 kilometers before the car was stopped —by a tollgate.

This determination to do what is necessary—and do it quickly and efficiently—is what is helping China catch up with lost time.

They do everything on the grand scale, planning for a hundred years ahead. The new Pudong international airport will be good enough for virtually a century. It is about 40 kilometres from the city and magnetic levitation train covers the distance in eight minutes.

Compare that with Bangalore’s agonising access problems over the new airport.

There is nothing that China has achieved which others cannot. The difference is that China has the national will to achieve it, and the leadership to turn that will into action. We may say that the authoritarian system facilitates quick execution of plans unlike in a democracy.

Is that an argument we want to push when authoritarianism is so palpably constructive as it is proving in China, and democracy so chaotic as it has become in India?

Perhaps the key lies elsewhere.

Aldous Huxley provided an insight as far back as in 1926. Talking about “the dense, rank, richly clotted life” of Shanghai, he wrote:

"Each individual Chinaman has more vitality, you feel, than each individual Indian or European, and the social organism composed of these individuals is therefore more intensely alive than the social organism in India or the West."

In other words, whether it is communism or capitalism, the Chinese have a national character that tends to give them an edge over others.

Old Confucian saying: Shanghai ain’t about dollars

Here is the Second of a six-part series.


Flickr Photo Credit : Franck

They say Beijing is all about power while Shanghai is all about money.

Two factors combined to make Shanghai that way. First, the city was “internationalised” by marauding European traders in the 19th century. Second, the Shanghainese are the banias of China, money-savvy masters of business.

Shanghainese language, Shanghainese cuisine, Shanghainese self-confidence, Shanghainese view of life—everything about the Shanghainese make them different from other Chinese. Today Shanghai is recognised as China’s smartest city as well as its financial capital, its industrial heartland, its fashion centre, the “Paris of the Orient.”

This has led to a waning of awareness about Shanghai’s cultural credentials.

The fact is that at one point this port city was also China’s intellectual centre. It was where modern literature took root. It was where the communist movement found its initial acceptance at the masses’ level. Prominent signboards in the city centre today mark the place where the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held.

It is rather like Coimbatore putting up road signs proclaiming “This is where the Communist Party of India Marxist held its Party Congress in 2008.”

One of the world’s most famous halls for performing arts is the Shanghai Art Theatre featuring French design, German construction, a Japanese stage and American acoustics. The re-birth of the arts in post-Mao China took place in this theatre—a re-birth that reminded the world that Shanghai was the capital of China’s performing arts in the 1920s and ’30s.

Shanghai’s young generation has taken to Western pop music in a big way. But they are a demanding lot. When the American band, Backstreet Boys, recently visited Shanghai, local fans complained that the “boys” had grown old and that the sound effects were poor. For an American saxophonist’s concert last month, ticket prices ranged from 100 yuan (above Rs 600) to 1280 yuan (about Rs 8,000). Half the hall was empty.

Perhaps it is in literature that Shanghai’s past glory shines best. In early 20th century, the City witnessed the birth of a literary revolution. It was led by a man who is venerated today as an icon of China, Lu Xun. Two things were special about him. He questioned everything and considered nothing above criticism. His satirical writings ridiculing Confucian ethics became powerful hits with the masses.

Lu Xun was also the inventor of a new form of written Chinese. Till then all writing was in classical Chinese which only scholars would follow. Lu Xun boldly discarded this language and developed a new style of common man’s Chinese. It made him a popular hero.

Lu Xun was a political activist, a founder member of the League of Leftwing Writers set up in 1930. His radicalism suited the burgeoning communist movement and the party leadership took full advantage of his popularity.

Perhaps Lu Xun was lucky that he died young of tuberculosis in 1936. Had he lived into Mao’s China and the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, his story might have been re-written by the party.

As it happens, he is celebrated as modern China’s greatest writer.

In a Shanghai suburb there is what is known as a Cultural Celebrities Street. The big attraction there is a bronze statue of Lu Xun. The inscription on it is written by Mao Zedong.

Trees on the sides of his grave were planted by Chou En-lai.