Shanghai Scrap

There seems to be an intense amount of recent media interest in ranking and assessing what makes for a great city. Foreign Policy’s terrific Global Cities Issue (with Christina Larson’s fine profile of Chongqing, Chicago on the Yangtze) is the first to come to mind, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t include Newsweek’s desperate (and pathetic) but still very much related The World’s Best Countries list. Of course, for my American readers, the “best places” phenomenon isn’t new: Best American Cities issues are a veritable cottage industry in American magazine publishing (for example … for Artists! for Working Mothers! for Living). In any case, who doesn’t take an interest in where their city ranks in the eyes of others?

And, if you live in China, this is doubly the case. As anyone who has spent any time in China learns quite quickly, the opinions of foreigners, especially in regard to the development of the country and its cities, is important – and often more important – than the opinion of Chinese folks. To my way of thinking, this isn’t always a good thing: many Chinese, and many Chinese cities, are often too quick to develop in a manner that they think will impress foreigners, rather than in a manner that will impress much less increase the happiness of their own citizens (thus the destruction of old neighborhoods in favor of high-rise downtowns … meant to impress foreigners). So I was more than a little interested when, late last week, I received an invitation to attend the launch press conference for the first “Chinese Cities’ International Image Survey,” held this afternoon (and not yet posted to the web).

Sponsored and conducted by the Gallup Organization, in collaboration with Fudan University, the Chinese Mayors Association, and Oriental Outlook Weekly (which will publish it on September 2) the survey seeks to assess not what Chinese people think of their cities, but rather what foreigners think of their cities. Specifically, 7,980 foreigners on six continents in one-hundred countries (not including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau), who have spent at least one month in China, were asked to give a 1 – 10 ranking on twelve criteria as applied to thirty short-listed Chinese cities (whittled down from an original list of 260). Not an easy task: Wu Tao, the Chief Consultant for Gallup in China, pointed out that – in the case of some cities – only thirty foreign respondents out of 7,980 had heard of, much less had enough information on, some of the cities in question. (more…)

I realize that Expo 2010 (Shanghai World’s Fair) is getting a bit long in the tooth, but … I’d like to share with my Expo readers an interesting note that I received from someone involved in the design of an Expo 2010 pavilion. The topic is Expo lines (or queues, my British friends), and who should be blamed for the fact that visitors are waiting as many as eight hours to enter some of the most popular pavilions. Generally, it seems, the lines are treated as the inevitable consequence of China’s large population. And, in the Chinese media and blogsphere, at least, lines/queues are sited as stamps of quality: ie, the only reason people spend eight hours outside of the Saudi pavilion is that it’s so terrific inside (believe me, it’s not).

And this perverse state of affairs (queues = quality) has led to accusations from some pavilions (Turkey, most notably) that other pavilions (Saudi, most notably), actually manipulate their traffic so that they can enjoy the prestige of lone lines. The email below responds to that suggestion. I’ve edited out any information that could identify this person (and also some of his language – Shanghai Scrap is, ahem, a family blog). Beyond that, this is the unexpurgated opinion of someone who knows what he’s talking about:

The longer queues are being sited as a sign of quality by a lot of the Chinese media – it’s crazy and (as a designer) f****** insulting. (more…)

I spent much of the last two weeks in India, and the one that I’m going to share with my readers is a sign that I found in the brand spanking new, much vaunted, Terminal 3, at Indira Gandhi International Airport (the rest of that trip shall remain shrouded in secrecy, occasionally broken on twitpic). Opened in mid-July, the new DEL is – on the surface, at least – a significant upgrade on the old DEL, which – famously – was often compared to a bus station. The place was a dump.

The new DEL is big, clean, filled with technology and efficiency (I beg to differ on the latter point), and the subject of fawning coverage in the international media (here, here, and here), which not only praises the airport itself, but also the symbolic meaning of the airport for an India desperately in need of new infrastructure. So, I’ll admit it: as a travel geek, I was excited to see this new temple of flying. And now that I’ve seen it, I’d like to share with Shanghai Scrap’s readers something that I’ve never seen, anywhere, in any airport, on the planet:

That’s right: a sign prohibiting foreigners from exchanging money in the airport. Or, more specifically, a sign prohibiting foreigners from exchanging money past security. So, in other words, if you’ve cleared security and you still have a wallet full of rupees, you either are going to have to exchange them wherever you’re going, or dump them in the very small handful of concessions operating in Terminal 3. What makes it more irritating, if not offensive, is that Indian passport holders – they can exchange money.

I’m guessing that there’s a commercial motive behind this “rule,” and if so, I’d like to go on record as saying that refusing foreign exchange so that visitors feel compelled to unload their rupees in crappy airport shops is, to put a fine point on it, very bus station-like. But perhaps I’m off on this? Are there other major international airports out there which preserve the right of foreign exchange only for native passport holders? Is there a perfectly good, perfectly reasonable, explanation for this rule that I’m missing? Comments are open.

[With a special end note for my friends and colleagues in the foreign media and environmental activist community.]

China is the world’s second largest market for PCs and other electronic devices. This is a good thing if you’re a manufacturer, but – potentially – a very, very bad thing if you’re an environmentalist concerned about what happens to all of that electronic equipment when it breaks down and/or its owners don’t want it, anymore. Indeed, for years, journalists and activists have documented the devastating environmental and human toll inflicted by the low-tech extraction of recyclable metals in small workshops in south China (and, to a much lesser extent, in Africa). But, for reasons that have always eluded me, the focus of those documentaries has been on the ever-decreasing volume of electronic waste imported from developed countries, and not on the growing tidal wave of electronic waste being generated – right now! – in places like China and India.

The problem is this: recycling electronics in a manner that damages the environment and human health is highly profitable. So, even if a company wants to do it in a way that’s minimally damaging, there’s no way that compete can compete to buy old electronics from companies who use environmentally ruinous methods to recycle. So what to do?

In June, after years of discussion and argument, several Chinese ministries issued a regulation creating one of the world’s biggest and best-funded e-waste recycling programs (regulation here; additional info, here). Among other measures, it offers direct subsidies for the purchase of old electronics and appliances – computers, monitors/TVs, a/c units, washing machines, and refrigerators – that would otherwise be purchased by the environmentally destructive informal recycling sector. Specifically, it offers vouchers to appliance owners that equal to 10% of the purchase price of new electronics. So, for example, if you want to recycle a computer in Shanghai, you call up the local authorized recycling center, and they’ll give you a voucher for as much as RMB 400 (US$58) toward the purchase of a new computer at the time they pick up your old one (and, for that matter, an additional RMB 400 voucher for your old monitor). From there, the devices are sent to an environmentally secure recycling center (more on that soon).

How successful has this program proven to be in its first two months? Successful enough that canny Shanghai businessmen have already figured out a way to make money by defrauding – indirectly – the program. And that’s a good thing (for the environment)!

Here’s how it works. (more…)

I’m on the road in a place where the broadband just isn’t as broad as I’d like. That, and I’m a little busy. So we’re going offline until the 25th. You can reach me via the contact form, though I might be a little slow in getting back to you. See you in a week.

The superlatives attached to Expo 2010 – the Shanghai World’s Fair – are various and numerous: it is the biggest Expo site, with the most countries participating, and – guaranteed – the best attendance, in the history of the Expo movement. Less discussed, but just as notable, is the fact that Expo 2010 is the most secure Expo in history, as well. Or, at a minimum, it sure looks secure: fences and soldiers surround the site, attendees are required to subject themselves to metal detectors and their bags to x-rays. The situation is often so heavy-handed that staff at several pavilions have taken to calling this Expo, the Gulag Expo (riffing, of course, on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago).

So it came as no small surprise to me when, last night, while I was strolling through the busiest part of the Expo (in front of the Spanish pavilion), I came across a tout selling counterfeit Expo 2010 key chains and other knick-knacks to enthusiastic Expo attendees.

Allow me to put this in perspective: three touts selling counterfeit Expo goods at Expo is akin to  three touts selling counterfeit Mickey Mouse key-chains in the heart of Disney World – a Disney World rung by fences and guarded by thousands of national guard members, police, and private security guards. And I’m not the only blogger to notice this phenomenon: DeluxZilla, apparently, had it ten days ago. He suggests that the touts are getting the goods into the park by having accomplices toss them over fences. I suppose that’s a possibility. But I think the more likely explanation is that somebody – I don’t know who – has good reason (I’m putting this delicately) to ignore the situation.

In any case, let this serve as a new datapoint in the ongoing discussion of whether China can, or even wants to, enforce intellectual property laws. After all, if not at Expo, where?

Today, part II of my emailed interview with Amy L. Sommers (part I, here). Ms. Sommers is an American lawyer with Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, and the co-author – along with Kara L. Philips of the Seattle University Law Library – of a 2009 Penn State International Law Review article examining the historic and legal background for the decline and disappearance of Shanghai’s classic residences and neighborhoods. Her thoughts are particularly relevant at a time that Shanghai – home to East Asia’s last abundant stock of pre-World War II neighborhoods – is holding a World’s Fair devoted to examining what makes a better city. In today’s segment, she touches on her background, some interactions with individuals who were still occupying properties seized during the Cultural Revolution, and her outlook for Shanghai’s historic neighborhoods.

Shanghai Scrap: Could you walk me through how you became interested in historic preservation, and the legal and historical issues surrounding it in Shanghai?

Sommers: My interest was piqued probably over a decade ago when I came across a piece in the Far Eastern Economic Review (remember how great a news source it was on China in the 90′s?) about how some Shanghainese and returned Shanghainese were recouping houses lost in the Cultural Revolution. The descriptions of the residences sounded marvelous and incongruous with the massive new buildings I was seeing whenever I was in the Mainland (at that point, I was still based in Seattle and visiting China on business).

Fast forward to 2003 when I worked in Shanghai on a two month assignment for a client facing a nasty criminal Customs investigation and my younger son was attending a nursery school in a converted large lane house in the former French Concession. Walking down the lane and seeing all the other houses, which had such great bones, despite their dilapidation and the fact that they had been rigged into multi-family residences, caught my attention. (more…)

In 2004, Amy L. Sommers, an American lawyer with the Shanghai office of Squier Sanders and Dempsey, decided to buy a pre-War residence in Shanghai. The search included both lane  houses and Art Deco apartments in the city’s former foreign concessions – the French Concession and the International Settlement. Soon after, she and her husband learned that the acquisition wouldn’t be so easy: not only are many of those districts’ charming houses and apartments subdivided, dilapidated and even dangerous, they are often subject to complicated, intertwining ownership claims.

She was neither the first nor the last prospective buyer to run into these issues in Shanghai, home to the best and last remaining stock of original, pre-World War II housing and neighborhoods in East Asia. But she is likely the first and only one to decide to write an American law review article exploring the various factors that have contributed to the decrepit state of that housing stock and – most important – its rapid destruction in the wake of Shanghai’s extraordinary economic development.

The results of her work – “A Tragedy of the Common: Property Rights Issues in Shanghai Historic Residences” – was written with Kara L. Phillips of the Seattle University Law Library, and published in the Fall 2009 issue of the Penn State International Law Review. It’s an important piece of work for anyone who cares about Chinese cities and their historic cores. Rather than focus on the superficial, conventional wisdom explanation for why Shanghai’s historic residences are in poor condition and disappearing (people are poor; developers are greedy and short-sighted), Sommers and Phillips look back to post-1949 Chinese land reform policies and how they’ve impacted contemporary urban landscapes.

Of these, none impacted Shanghai’s historic homes so much as the property seizures and occupations of the Cultural Revolution. As multiple families occupied and sub-divided homes meant for one family, they set in motion a sorry cycle whereby nobody – neither the original owner nor the occupier – had any incentive to take responsibility for the upkeep of a property. The subsequent, forty years of unmet maintenance creates a perfect excuse and occasional need to demolish.

Last week Ms. Sommers agreed to answer some emailed questions about her work related to Shanghai’s historic residences. I’ll be posting those answers today and tomorrow.

It’s worth noting that the disappearance of East Asia’s old housing and neighborhoods isn’t a new subject. But this summer, as Shanghai – East Asia’s last great outpost of old urbanism – hosts a World’s Fair devoted to better cities, the subject has taken on palpable urgency. (more…)

For the record: nobody at Shanghai Scrap is in the least bit alarmed that a Chinese national wants to pay more than anybody else for the Liverpool Football Club. We have not read articles about this matter. We have not written blog posts about the matter. In fact, our interest is really limited to one fact: the prospective buyer, Kenny Huang of QSL, has a partnership with the Chinese Baseball Association, and the youth wing of that association just won a youth tournament over Japan, the United States, Taiwan, and several other baseball playing countries – on its first try. For years, we’ve argued that China has a glorious future on the baseball diamond, and this feels like sweet affirmation.

It also provides this blog with the perfect excuse to run a photo of a door that we’ve had hanging around the computer for a week or two. Here’s the deal: typically, 推 is translated as “push.” But on Shanghai’s Xinle Road, it receives a more sporting interpretation:

For my many non-American, non-baseball loving readers, a bunt occurs when a baseball batter taps the ball forward, rather than swings at the ball (wikipedia has an excellent entry on the bunt; e-how will give you detailed instructions on how to bunt; youtube has a treasure trove of bunting videos).

Is this an instance of Chinglish? After several lengthy discussions on the subject, I argue that it’s not (and thus does not violate Shanghai Scrap’s One Chinglish Post Per Year rule). Rather, what we have here, is poetry: to bunt is to push the ball, and the act of bunting often looks – if you squint – like somebody pushing open a door. Or something like that. Reluctantly, I open comments.

[NOTE: For those who don't follow baseball, Cooperstown is the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.]

From the moment that Expo 2010 (World’s Fair) was awarded in December 2002, the preemptive critics were ready to accuse the host country of presenting a watered-down, white-washed version of Shanghai, and China, for domestic and international consumption. And, to an extent, they were onto something: the China pavilion, and the Chinese provincial pavilions do, in fact, present a sanitized picture of contemporary and historical China. That is to say, if you go to the Expo looking for stories of migrant workers, of China’s factory culture, of its ongoing identity crisis that pits traditional culture against the chaos of market-oriented modern China, well, you won’t find it. But, then again, neither will you find stories about America’s homeless at the USA pavilion; understandably, nobody wants to air their dirty laundry at a World’s Fair. Instead, Expo 2010 exhibitors are all about progress, the ongoing march from history into the glorious present.

At least, that’s what I thought before I walked into the Shenzhen Case Pavilion and found myself standing in a shipping container hung with fake Van Goghs illuminated by a photograph of (some of) the young, shirtless artists responsible for painting the canvases. Shenzhen, for those unfamiliar with it, became China’s first Special Economic Zone in 1980, and has since been both a laboratory for free market reform, and a politically volatile symbol of China’s successes and failures as a market economy.

In any case, most of the trickle of tourists rushing through the tight pavilion space didn’t recognize – or seem to care about the paintings and artists – but I sure did. They are both from Dafen Art Village (located in Shenzhen’s sprawling outskirts), the semi-famous, oft-written-about (most recently in the July 20 edition of the Vancouver Sun) village where 60% of the world’s “original” copied oil paintings are produced mostly for export (to Wal-Mart and other mass market retailers in developed countries) by 8000 former art students and anyone else with the talent to duplicate an Old Master (or Warhol, or Chen Danqing, or whoever). (more…)

Without question, the most popular region of Shanghai’s sprawling 5 km² Expo 2010 (World’s Fair) is Zone C, home to the European pavilions, as well as the North and South American, African, and Caribbean pavilions (zone list available here). According to an email sent out on Sunday, and obtained by the staff of Shanghai Scrap shortly thereafter,  it is also home to an ” invasion.”

Dear participant,

The pesticide for your pavilion use is provided with by Zone C Department now. Please go to the property company’s office (Lu Jia Zui Property Company) on the first floor (interlayer) of Central and South America Joint Pavilion to get one bottle of pesticide (1KG). The mosquito eradication in public area is now controlled by the organizer. We hope that the supply of pesticide will help your pavilion to get away from the invasion of mosquito and other insects in time.

If you have any confusion in finding the storage place, please inquire 136——-, Ms. C—–.

Best regards,

[Name and address removed by ed.]

For the record, I’ve spent as much time at this riverside Expo (complete with an extraordinary restored wetland that is, let’s face it, ideal for mosquito breeding) as anyone who doesn’t actually work down there, and I’ve yet to see any signs of the Swarm. That is to say, bring your repellent, but by all means still visit … and allow this memo to serve as a marker on Expo’s road from theme park into something, well, quite alive, I’d say.

As regular readers may know, over the years I’ve spent a significant number of non-blogging hours investigating and reporting on the Chinese e-waste trade for trade and mainstream publications. For those who are not regular readers, e-waste can be broadly defined as waste computers, monitors, cell phones and other broken, obsolete, and unwanted artifacts from the information economy. Though safe when they’re on our desktops or in our hands, the means used to dispose of and/or recycle theses devices in China and other developing countries are not safe at all, but are rather dangerous to human health and the environment. For most of the last thirty years, developed countries have been the major sources of this material; but in the last five years, as China became the world’s second largest consumer of PCs and other electronic devices, the flood of domestically generated Chinese e-waste has overtaken what was once imported in large quantities, and begun to pose a considerable environmental risk.

This phenomenon has not gone unnoticed, both among China’s environmental officials, and among its private-sector recyclers. Over the last three years, in particular, both groups have been looking for solutions (economical ones that can compete with the environmentally ruinous methods of e-waste processing used in South China), and – reportedly – several very good pilot e-waste programs are running in China. Unfortunately, the companies and government units running these e-waste programs have not been willing to open them up to outside eyes (or, open them up for on-record review to journalists). And this is a pity for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that – so long as environmentally-sound e-waste recycling remains a secret in China – the environmentally un-sound methods will be the ones that are reported abroad, much to the detriment of the entire Chinese recycling industry.

Now, as it happens, I’ve been trying to get into some of these environmentally-sound e-waste processing centers for 18 months, now, but without success. So today I’m going to take a different approach. Above is a photo of the e-waste that I currently store in my Shanghai apartment. It includes: an old Dell laptop (worst computer I’ve ever owned), the Dell battery, the Dell powerpack; a Samsung mobile phone; a Nokia mobile phone; an old HP Ipaq; and a stack of old software CDs. I would like to see all of these items recycled in an environmentally sound manner, in China, and I am prepared to travel to do it. If you are a Chinese company capable of recycling any or all of these items in a manner that meets the standards of Chinese law, then I would like to write about you. Contact me here.

Here’s what I offer in return: (more…)

Sunday afternoon I visited a friend’s new apartment off Wulumqi Road in the heart of Shanghai’s rapidly disappearing French Concession. It’s been that way over the last few years: the old neighborhoods are being demolished, the old drafty tenements giving way to sealed up high-rises. You see it at street level all of the time, and a few photographers have made veritable careers out of documenting the evolution. But it’s rare that you get to see it presented from above (rare for me, at least). So I was surprised to see the century-long transformation played out below my friend’s new window.

The handful of still-standing houses in the middle of the mostly empty lot at the center of the image are occupied by squatters (visible from above). To the right are tenements of the sort that once occupied the lot. And in the rear are the sorts of buildings that will occupy the lot whenever – and however – the developer with rights to it gets around to building.

[UPDATE: From the excellent comment left by R, below: "A bit of history. this lot has been open for more than 5 years now, and was the site of where an overanxious developer tried to use force to remove people. If I remember correctly deaths were involved, but that may have been a different site down Changle near Agave.

Anyway, the squatters are actually 7 residents who have endured life without water, electricity, or gas. Quite an accomplishment, and when we were speaking to one of the landlords at the Summit, it was clear that this was a process that was no where near being resolved ..."

Shanghai Scrap plans to return to the area in the next few days for follow-up ...]

[A Note from the Staff: Long-time readers, and especially subscribers to the RSS feed, are aware that I've been on hiatus for the last five weeks. I'm back, both here and on twitter, and looking forward to re-engaging. And I think I'll have more to say about re-engaging, after dis-engaging (from blogs and twitter) in a few days. I'll also be blogging scrap, e-waste, baseball, my barber - and Expo. On the latter subject, allow me, for the moment, to send interested readers over to "Shanghai Shangri-La?" - Virginia Postrel's excellent  essay on why Americans just don't engage with World's Fairs, anymore (a couple of additional Postrel thoughts on Expos, here). It's terrific.]