Short trip to Shanghai

I made a quick trip to Shanghai last weekend on the high speed train. The regular Wuhan-Shanghai train takes half a day; the high speed train, which hits 250 km an hour, takes five hours or less, depending on the number of stops. It’s a sleek, efficient, classy operation. Snack carts are piloted by women dressed in smart outfits – looking like old-line airline stewardesses. Attendants pass through the cars constantly picking up after passengers. Vast new train stations have been built or are under construction in Shanghai and Wuhan to accommodate the high speed system, which will eventually extend over much of the country.

Nanjing Road department store

This was my first visit to Shanghai since August, 1980, when I spent much of the time listening to shortwave broadcasts of the Democratic National Convention. I remembered especially Ted Kennedy’s inspiring “The cause endures” speech at the convention, and my regret he wasn’t nominated, opening the door, as it turned out, for Reagan’s ruinous presidency.

On my first day in Shanghai in 1980 I met a couple of students who offered to guide me to the Yu garden, one of the city’s tourist sights. En route, the two were taken away by a plainclothes security person, without a word to me. Shanghai then had a façade of modernization unknown elsewhere in China: there were billboards for foreign products, women wore short skirts, little children waved and said “Hello, uncle!” on the streets. But underneath the surface was harsh social control.

Pudong area

That kind of overt police action probably wouldn’t occur in today’s Shanghai, China’s commercial and cultural center. The streets are full of foreigners, some of them obviously residents. One European woman was walking her two spaniels, dressed in neat little jackets with their names in Chinese. She spent some time explaining to me the difference between English and Springer spaniels.

Vuitton trunk

Across from old colonial buildings along the Bund, facing the Whampoa River, is glaringly modern Pudong, in 1980 not much more than a mud flat. Nanjing Lu, always the city’s chief shopping area, is chockablock with high end stores selling imported luxury goods. Vuitton, a designer brand much favored for copying by enterprising shanzhai pirates, has erected a giant retro steamer trunk on Nanjing Lu, as if to say, “Get your real Vuitton here.” Things had changed so much I was only slightly surprised to see a Salvation Army band playing.

Band on Nanjing Lu

It turned out not to be Salvation Army; judging from the uniforms, they were retired PLA musicians. I’ll be making other trips to Shanghai later. This week I’m headed for a week in warmer parts of the country: Kunming and Yunnan province in southern China.