Shanghai Scrap

I’m about to begin a rather intensive couple weeks of travel, reporting, and writing. And on top of that, roughly half that time will be spent in a location where my connectivity is going to be very limited (and possibly non-existent – don’t know yet). So,with that in  mind, Shanghai Scrap will be offline until the middle of the first week of June. Please note that I’ll be slow in answering emails during this period, especially if they’ve been sent through the blog contact form. But I will get to them.

But before I sign off! … yesterday was the 2nd anniversary of this humble blog (celebrations were muted). Sincere thanks to everyone who reads, comments, and emails. And special thanks to the blogs that continue to link to my posts – in particular Danwei, James Fallows, and Shanghaiist. The readership spikes that come off those links are undeniable; more important, each of those spikes is “sticky,” bringing new readers who continue reading. Indeed, over the last year, my readership has grown considerably – largely due to those links. So thanks, folks, for sending your audiences my way.

Finally, this post is the 527th in the brief history of Shanghai Scrap. Compared to some blogs, that’s nothing. But if, two years ago, you’d told me that I’d somehow find the time to post 527 times in 24 months – well, I probably wouldn’t have started a blog. Anyway, for those who care … the top five posts from the last year:

1. Giant UFO Over Shanghai [To this day, the #1 result for "UFO Shanghai" google searches. Shocking, really, how many people are still looking.]
2. Scrap Trader Kidnapped, Held for Ransom [The post that launched a thousand radio interviews (well, a dozen). One of my personal favorites.]
3. The US Expo 2010 Pavilion Totters [#1 comment generator of the year. Resulted in more phone calls and emails than any other post. Some not so nice.]
4. Why China’s Block of the New York Times Doesn’t Matter (as much as it once did) [#1 post for generating psychotic emails. Seriously.]
5. Big Dumb Recycling Machine [Twice per week, at least, I receive emails and comments from people wanting to purchase one of these from me. And at least 25% of the prospective buyers are Pakistani. For more on my commercially-minded Pakistani readership, see here.]

Lesson learned? UFOs are more popular than recycling machines, Expo 2010 pavilions, the New York Times, and kidnapped scrap traders. Shouldn’t surprise anyone, I guess. But nice to have everything placed in proper persepctive. Anyway, I’ll be back in early June. I may twitter a bit while out, but 140 characters will be the absolute limit. If you need a China blog fix before then, check out the fine forums listed in the blogroll to the right.

I may be in the minority here, but in my experience there’s enough subtlety and disagreement in even the simplest of government policy decisions, in any country, to remove any incentive for blaming said policy decisions on a specific city. For example, whether or not you agree or disagree with Barack Obama’s fiscal stimulus program, you’re not very likely to say – much less, write – something like this:

“Washington views a multi-billion dollar fiscal stimulus as an essential part of any American economic recovery program.”

Why? Because Washington is a big place, where big disagreements take place and – as it happens – there are more than a few people in Washington who don’t agree with that statement. And that brings me to a question that’s troubled me for some time: namely, why do perfectly sane journalists who would never ascribe a policy – controversial or not -  to “Washington” (or “London,” “Rome,” “Tokyo” or “Seoul”) throw caution to the wind and insist upon referring to the Chinese government as “Beijing” – as if it were a monolithic entity ["Beijing is concerned about the declining value of the dollar;" "Beijing is concerned that the US won't have a pavilion at Expo 2010." etc etc etc], and not a government town riven by disagreements and factions? I’ve long been annoyed by this lazy practice (while occasionally resorting to it myself), but never quite so much as when I read Francesco Sisci’s absurd “China’s Catholic Moment” in the current issue of First Things (full disclosure: a publication that has been critical of me). Take, for example, this sentence:

Beijing views the Catholic Church as an unambiguously Western embodiment of Christianity, untainted by syncretic confusion and therefore indispensable to the Westernization of China.

Got that? Beijing views the Catholic Church as indispensable to the Westernization of China. All of it. (more…)

[Second in a special one-day, two-part series on things seen while driving between Ningbo and Shanghai.]

Over the weekend I finally went round-trip over the two-year-old Hangzhou Bay Bridge. For readers who don’t follow Chinese infrastructure with the same enthusiasm as I do: the Hangzhou Bay Bridge is the world’s longest (35 km/22 mi) trans-oceanic bridge (a nice Discovery Channel short on the bridge’s construction, here), and a marvel of modern engineering. It’s also a jarring experience, riding above choppy seas on a bridge that – depending upon whether or not you obey the speed limits – should take half-an-hour to cross. And this weekend it was kind of spooky due the thick haze that hovered over Hangzhou Bay, reducing visibility to 1 km, roughly.

So it was all the more dramatic when, half-way across the span, a boom crane emerged from the haze, and resolved itself into a future service area – including a hotel and restaurant – built in the shape of a flying gull. Some 17 km/11 miles out to sea. I had my camera handy, and despite the fact that we were traveling at a serious clip, I managed to pull off a few in-focus shots of this future outpost. It’s really something; click on the thumbnails for enlargements.

Monday afternoon, while riding back to Shanghai from Ningbo, I noticed a dark column of smoke rising in the distance. As we drove closer, it became apparent that the source of the smoke was in the middle of the highway. Traffic quickly backed up, but it didn’t stall entirely, and as we crawled forward with it, I watched as the gray column was swallowed by several ominous puffs of black smoke that – I suspect – were explosions. Still, traffic continued forward, and after five minutes I could see bright orange flames emerging from the back windows off an automobile parked on the shoulder. At 100 meters, I readied my camera, and in doing so nearly missed a tall, wan, balding man walking in the opposite direction the car with an overcoat slung over his forearm, and a briefcase in his right hand. I can’t say for sure that he was the driver, but I’m pretty sure of it: the pyrotechnics, and the man, were both on the elevated highway, with no exits for quite some distance, and no other cars were stopped in the area. In any case, he was a striking figure: nothing about him suggested that he’d just lost his car to flames. If anything, he looked like a man in search of a taxi after a particularly rough day at work. And he certainly didn’t look like someone who had left something – or someone – in that car (a cold blooded fellow if he did).

Anyway, as we approached the wreck, traffic came to a near standstill while people readied their mobile phone cameras. Then, as they – and we – drove up beside it, traffic accelerated, presumably to avoid being caught in another explosion. And that explains the slight blur to the photo, and off-center framing.

In the course of the ten minutes or so that elapsed from the time I first saw the smoke, to the image, no emergency service vehicles arrived on the scene – despite the fact that a hospital is located directly across from the accident scene (note the red cross on the other side of the fence in the photo). Beyond that, I’m having a hard time coming up with any kind of public-minded justification for this post.

A final note. The guy walking away from the burning car without a care in the world – I swear that I saw that in a movie, once. But for the life of me, I can’t remember the movie. So – first person with a satisfactory answer (as opposed to a correct one – because I’m not sure that there is a correct one) receives a download of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Burnin’ for You.” Email via the Contact Form, or just leave a comment below.

[MAY 21: Despite a valiant effort by Jen Ambrose (and two emailers), Joel Martinsen wins the Blue Öyster Cult download. Had I seen "Waiting to Exhale," the result might have been different.]

At the moment, there ‘s almost no reason to believe that the United State will occupy a stand-alone pavilion when Expo 2010 opens in Shanghai on May 1, 2010. And though this doesn’t seem to be a matter of much concern in the United States, it is a matter of intense concern in Shanghai, and in Beijing, with powerful voices beginning to suggest that the US will suffer real and lasting commercial consequences in China if it doesn’t use the next 348 days to rescue its floundering pavilion effort.

Over the last several weeks, as I’ve published various stories and blog posts on this subject, one question continues to come up: namely, why wouldn’t US companies with Chinese operations rush to become sponsors of a project likely to be visited by upwards of 70 million Chinese citizens during Expo 2010′s six-month run?

In the interest of answering that important question, and explaining why the authorized US pavilion team has raised only $2.8 million of a $61 million budget,  I’ve prepared this short primer on the various issues and reasons inhibiting – if not outright preventing – US companies from contributing money to what would appear to be the premier international PR event of 2010. In assembling this post, I’ve drawn upon conversations and emails with individuals connected with US corporations operating in China, many of whom have been directly solicited for pavilion contributions, or attended pavilion-related events. Most of these individuals have spoken or written to me off-record, out of concern that negative comments about the US pavilion effort might invite negative consequences, if not outright retaliation, from various quarters.

Broadly speaking, there are two issues. The first concerns US government restrictions on funding international expo pavilions; the second is broadly related to issues that have arisen with the US State Department, and its chosen entity to fund-raise, design, build, and operate a US pavilion. The first I’ll deal with briefly; the second will require more space. (more…)

On Friday afternoon I arrived at the registration desk for an international conference being held over the weekend in Ningbo (by car, roughly three hours southeast of Shanghai). The attendant checked my name off the attendee list, handed me my delegate badge, a tote bag containing a directory of attendees, a bound copy of the conference presentations, several magazines – and the vial of six vitamins pictured below:

“It is because of the H1N1 flu,” the attendant told me. “You should take two every day.”

I must’ve made a face of some kind, because she pursed her lips, tightened her brow, and added: “It’s the government’s suggestion, and we think it’s a good one. But it is up to you. We give you the choice.”

As it happens, attendance at this conference was negatively impacted by the H1N1 scare, and so I suppose it’s understandable that the organizers would want to reassure their still sizable number of attendees (roughly 300, I’m told). Whether vitamins will make a difference – I’ll leave that to the physicians.

Anyway, I post this item as a curiosity, but also as a contrast to my experiences in China during the SARS epidemic of 2003. Then, unlike now, the government was heavily criticized (and rightly so) for its delayed, anemic response to a very real health crisis, and its subsequent effort cover it up (the epidemic, and the anemic response, that is). The response to H1N1 couldn’t be much different, and for those who find the H1N1 objectionable/too cautious/ridiculous, I humbly suggest that it can’t be fully appreciated (much less, writtenabout) without the context of what happened in 2003. Mistakes were made, and now – for better or worse – they’re being avoided, and perhaps (it seems obvious to me, at least), over-compensated for.

[Additional Expo related articles and posts here, here, here, and here. More to come in the days and weeks ahead.]

Quite a bit of discussion on Shanghai Scrap, and elsewhere, on whether or not US interests are served by building a pavilion for Shanghai’s Expo 2010. That’s good: Americans need to be thinking seriously about this issue. So far, however, the Shanghai and Beijing governments have been unusually reticent about why they think the US should attend (beyond general statements that the US will “regret” it we don’t), and that’s given the debate a bit of an incomplete feel. Thus, I was quite interested to learn of a May 7 editorial on this very subject which appeared in the influential state-owned China Youth Daily, and People’s Daily. So far as I’ve been able to determine, an official English translation hasn’t yet appeared, but thanks to the (heretofore unknown to me) Watching America site, we have an unofficial one, here. Chinese, or English, the editorial does not mince words:

The lack of enthusiasm in America has something to do with its national traditions. American has traditionally pursued isolationism and is only concerned with itself rather than the outside world. Even though things changed after the second world war, on the whole, Americans still believe devoutly that “all politics are local,” and the congressmen only care about things that affect their own district. Naturally they do not approve of allocating money for this exposition.

I’ve spent a not insignificant amount of time reporting on the US Expo pavilion, and in my experience, the argument against usually goes something like this: the US already has a significant commercial and cultural presence in Shanghai, and in China, and with so much going on in the world – and in the US – isn’t there a better place to spend the US$61 million that the current, troubled US pavilion team is trying to raise? An unrelated argument, but one that is taken seriously in various quarters (including, some quarters of the US State Department) is that the US would be merely be “feeding the Chinese propaganda machine” if it builds a stand-alone Expo pavilion. (more…)

This weekend, not long after Yao Ming’s season-ending fracture in his left foot became the hottest topic in the Chinese sports world, a friend reminded me of a post that I did regarding Yao’s left foot back in February 2008. Now, I’m not real big on bloggers who quote themselves, but I’m tied up with other projects for the next couple of days, and this post seems sadly relevant, again.

One sentence backgrounder: Then, as now, Yao’s durability was being challenged by his commitments to the Chinese national team (and the Olympics) and the NBA. At the time, I wrote:

I have no idea what would bring Yao greater satisfaction: an Olympic gold medal, or an NBA championship ring. But so long as he pursues both, it’s likely that he’ll possess neither. Compare him, for example, to Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA player who most closely approximates Yao’s girth and game. Like Yao, O’Neal is an oft-injured giant. But, unlike Yao, O’Neal has benefited from coaches and a schedule that allows his body to recover from the NBA season and playoffs (during his years with the Lakers, O’Neal always managed to get a mid-season, ahem, injury providing his beat-up body with some extra rest in advance of the playoffs). Among other reasons, this is one factor in why O’Neal has four NBA championship rings. It is also why he won his only Olympic gold medal at the age of 24; after the 96 Olympics he has spent his summers recuperating, and only now – at age 36 – is he showing true signs of decline and chronic injury. Without similar rest, Yao Ming can expect to decline much earlier.

Over the weekend, Xinhua reported that the Chinese national sports authorities are still hoping to have Yao in uniform for the Asian Championships in September. As a Yao Ming fan, I hope that he’s not – or, better yet, that he’s able to escape the commitment, heal up, rest up, and come back next year in shape to go deeper into the playoffs.

For further reading: In today’s New York Times, Harvey Araton has an excellent column that explores the cost of Yao’s national-team committments.

Anyway, back with fresh posts in a couple of days.

Late yesterday afternoon Expo 2010 organizers announced that all national pavilion construction work must begin by June 30. Those who miss the deadline will not be allowed to build their own pavilions, and must instead seek space in a “standardized” pavilion or use a common pavilion. The statement didn’t single out any particular country, but the target of this ultimatum is unmistakably the United States which, along with Andorra and Columbia, is the only country with Chinese diplomatic relations that has not confirmed for the Expo – and perhaps the only nation to have missed multiple fundraising and construction deadlines (set by itself, no less).

So how serious is this deadline and the tumult? On May 2, Frank Lavin, the US pavilion steering committee co-chairman, former ambassador to Singapore, and Undersecretary of Commerce, told the SCMP [subscriber only] that “the project [pavilion] was not expected to break ground before the end of the year.” In other words, the US is – officially, charitably – five months behind the ultimatum with no plan to meet it.

So why the delay? According to the same SCMP story, the authorized US pavilion group has only raised $1.5 million of their $61 million budget.

The poor fundraising record only hints at the recent disarray and disagreements that have plagued the inexperienced US effort. In late March, Ellen Eliasoph, an authorized group co-chair, and wife to Ira Kasoff, the former Principle Commercial Officer at the US Consulate in Shanghai and current Deputy Assistant Secretary for Asia, told NPR that a loan from the Chinese government to pay for the entire US pavilion was “on the table.” Apparently, this was news to Chinese government officials, who quickly denied it in the state media and – most recently – at a widely attended May 1 press conference. Eliasoph seems to have learned her lesson, and yesterday, in the Washington Post, she claims that the United States “isn’t in the business of accepting Chinese money.” Meanwhile, her co-chair, Frank Lavin, told the SCMP that he was unaware of “any talks” about a loan, period. Perhaps there wasn’t a loan; or, perhaps, the US side wasn’t supposed to talk about it. In either case, it’s never good when the wife of a senior US government official concerned with Asia is repudiated in the state-owned media. (more…)

The second half of 2009 includes all kinds of anniversaries that seem to have the Chinese government – and much of the population – in a tizzy. Here at Shanghai Scrap, we’re in less of a tizzy, but we understand, believe me. Nonetheless, we are of the opinion that the most important date on the 2009 Chinese calendar  has nothing to do with politics, but is, instead, ordinary old Wednesday, July 22. What, you may be asking, is so important about July 22, 2009? Well, at 9:35 AM, local time, Shanghai is going to experience an unusually long (five minutes or so) Total Solar Eclipse. And, at a bare minimum, that’s gonna make for one hell of a Wednesday morning rush hour.

Hopefully, though, it’ll be something much more (we’re going to have much more to say about it in the coming weeks). So, in the interest of getting the ball rolling, Shanghai Scrap is proud to point interested readers to NASA’s eclipse website, and its extensive coverage of this event. It includes a nifty interactive map of the eclipse and, below, a NASA map of the shadow as it’ll cross over the Shanghai region (click the map for a detailed .pdf). We’re gonna be right in the middle of this thing, folks.

Here at Shanghai Scrap, we’re in no position to guess at the economic effect of the eclipse (anybody out there in a position to comment on the role of eclipses in Chinese astrology?), but I’m sure that at least a few hotels south of town are going to be deeply appreciative of eclipse tour groups, like this one, that have been scouting the Shanghai region for appropriate viewing areas since last year (check out this amazingly detailed scouting report). Here’s wishing clear skies and no visa problems to all of them.

[For the time being, Shanghai Scrap is unwilling to disclose the location from which the staff will be observing the event. But trust me, it's premium. By the way: with this post, I'm coming clean about being a lifelong space geek, and adding a new "Universe" category to the blog.]

[Perhaps it was too much sun. In any case, the title of this post has been changed on the suggestion of several readers and one commentator.]

Early this afternoon a companion and I climbed the 367 steps to the top of Shanghai’s Lupu Bridge where, 550 meters (1800 feet) at a still undetermined elevation 100 meters (328 feet) above the Huangpu River, we obtained a complete, high-altitude view of the World Expo 2010 site. Below, three images of the three main fairground sections, totaling a massive 5.28 sq km (2 sq miles). As the organizers like to point out: you are looking at the largest Expo fairground in the century-and-a-half history of Expos, to be filled with the largest number of confirmed attendees (200+ countries). And yet, for reasons that I only partly outlined in this dispatch for The Atlantic, the United States is not among them (the inexperienced, State Department-authorized US pavillion group has – with 360 days to go – raised less than $2 million of a $61 million budget; no shovel has yet been lifted). I will have much more to say about this sad state of affairs very soon (in another forum). For now, enjoy the photos, and follow along with this site map from the official Expo 2010 website.

First, the Southwest section (from the perspective of the bridge), Pudong side. Note the inverted pyramid structure in the background – that’s the nearly complete China pavilion :

More images after the jump … (more…)

A quick recommendation to take a trip over to CNReviews for their new directory of Female English-language China bloggers. Later in the week, I’ll have much more to say about why I believe this to be an important list (I’m on deadline right now). But if you’re interested in my preliminary thoughts, the directory post includes an excerpt of an email that I sent to Elliott Ng over the weekend on the subject. More soon …

[UPDATE: Jim Fallows on PR, nationalism and public health. Highly recommended. By the Fallows analysis, a better title for this post would be "Shanghai to Shanghainese: tortillas are for losers." A point for which I think there would be widespread agreement. I stand corrected.]

In my travels, I’ve learned that nothing stokes the patriotic vanities of Chinese government officials quite so effectively as praising the superiority of the local cuisine as compared to, say, anything to be found in France. Doors and lips open, friendships become permanent. And so it comes as no surprise to learn that the same Shanghai government officials who spent their weekends bullying Mexcian passport holders into quarantine would pause and, for good measure, assert the superiority of the local flavors:

Xu Jianguang, director of Shanghai Health Bureau, said local authorities would ensure the people under quarantine in the city were looked after. Internet access would be provided in their rooms and they could choose their own food.

“When first moved to the hotels, some Mexican people said they preferred delicious Chinese food and now they say they miss Western food. We will meet all such dining requests raised by the quarantined people,” Xu told a press conference.

Classy.

Me, I’m under a deadline-inspired quarantine, and so even though I won’t be blogging for the next 48 hours, I plan to find the time to go out for some delicious Mexican food in solidarity with the detained Mexican passport holders.

[A good WSJ piece on the unacceptable conditions imposed upon quarantined Mexican nationals in Beijing.]

Shanghai Scrap remains agnostic as to whether or not H1N1 is being hyped all out of proportion to its danger. But Shanghai Scrap is not agnostic about whether or not H1N1 hype is dangerous to the media and those who feed it information. Case in point: late this afternoon, Hong Kong confirmed that its first H1N1 case – a Mexican national – arrived in the city on Thursday, after transiting through Shanghai earlier in the day (h/t to Sky Canaves). As it happens, there aren’t many direct flights between Mexico and Shanghai, and the only one that arrived on Thursday (Mexicana Airlines AeroMexico098) was subject to a thorough health check – and even more thorough media coverage througout the Shanghai media. To be clear: nobody has yet confirmed that the infected man was on the Mexicana flight, but if he was, then many, many people are going to have reason to regret this story (and the Chinese versions that appeared all over Shanghai over the last two days): [UPDATED 5-2: Shanghai Daily is reporting that the infected man did, in fact, arrive in Shanghai via Mexicana Airlines AeroMexico 098]:

I don’t intend this post as an effort to make light of the efforts that the Shanghai government is making to prevent the introduction and spread of H1N1. Those are laudable. But I think that there are a couple of important take-home lessons from the above story (again, assuming the Mexicana flight carried the infected individual), and others like it that ran in Shanghai during the week. First, and most unsettling, H1N1 can remain asymptomatic for the duration of a trans-Pacific flight (Mexico City to Shanghai ~14 hours). This shouldn’t come as any great surprise, of course, but it’s no less disturbing to realize that a plane full of technicians in bio-hazard suits couldn’t detect an H1N1 carrier. Second: this is what happens when state-controlled media are called to the airport at 6AM and told to cover an event, no questions asked, with the purpose of assuring a nervous public that the government is “doing something.”  To be fair: I have no idea whether or not foreign reporters would have bothered to ask the relevant questions (“How are you going to pick up the carriers who aren’t running fevers?”), but at least the potential exists. And in defense of the Chinese reporters, at least one – Dong Zhen of Shanghai Daily – noted the absurdity of the exercise, writing: “Most of the arrivals seemed to be in a relaxed mood though they were a bit surprised by the intense media interest.” I bet.

[I realize that, by posting this before having confirmation exists [UPDATE May 2: Confirmation now exists.] that the Mexicana flight carried the infected man, I risk my own stumble. Then again, it remains very much the case that – one way or another – an asymptomatic individual passed through a major international airport’s H1N1-related health screening system on Thursday, en route to another destination. And, no doubt, Shanghai Pudong wasn’t the only airport where that happened.]

[Predictable Update - May 2: China suspends all flights between Mexico and Shanghai.]