A story this week about a woman busted after trying to smuggle thousands of yuan worth of makeup and luxury goods through Pudong Airport brought a big smile to my face, jogging some of my earliest memories of living in Asia in the 1980s. Back then luxury goods were just taking off in some of the region’s newly emerging “tigers” like South Korea and Taiwan the same way they are now in China, creating a cottage industry for similar smugglers throughout the region.
Nowadays such smuggling is far less common even here in China, since many consumers have more than enough money to easily travel to nearby places like Hong Kong, where they can legally purchase items like Gucci handbags and Cartier watches. And prices for luxury goods in China itself are also coming down these days, as many brands roll out global uniform pricing policies to discourage the kind of smuggling in the Pudong Airport story. Read Full Post…
These past few weeks have been tinged with sadness and some melancholy for me, as 2 close friends on the streets of Shanghai quietly shuttered their doors forever. The pair both came from the family of traditional media, whose slow death is taking a quieter toll on the hundreds of newsstands that have become a fixture on Shanghai’s streets over the last 2 decades.
The creeping demise of these newsstands has been happening for the last 2 or 3 years now, but the closure of 2 familiar stops in my daily routine so close together made it feel like the trend is accelerating. I pass around a dozen such newsstands every day in my old neighborhood in Hongkou District, and probably about half of those are now permanently shuttered. Read Full Post…
I have to admit I was quite skeptical when our city launched a new campaign to clean up Shanghai’s streets of rude and unruly drivers a couple of weeks ago. After all, such campaigns are quite common here, and usually last for just a day or two before city officials seem to lose interest and redeploy their resources elsewhere.
But lately I’ve had to rethink my initial stance, and am even starting to hold out a glimmer of hope for improvement, as the campaign remains in the spotlight and appears to be maintaining momentum a full 2 weeks after its launch. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Disney will face huge challenges in running a smooth opening for its new Shanghai park in June, as it faces potential negative publicity from aggressive ticket scalpers and other glitches associated with such a big event.
Tickets sell out for Shanghai Disney opening day
The official countdown has begun to the June opening of Shanghai Disneyland, in a story that contains both scripted and unscripted moments reflecting what a commotion this event is likely to become. In the scripted category, luminaries including basketball legend Yao Ming and piano superstar Lang Lang attended an event this week kicking off the 80 day countdown to the big opening. In the unscripted column, opening day tickets to the park sold out quickly after going on sale, and were showing up later in the day from scalpers who were asking for twice the price or more.
I was living in Hong Kong just before Disney opened its last theme park there back in 2005. I don’t recall nearly this level of hype before that opening, and certainly not the big issue with scalpers that are an endemic part of the Chinese landscape. But I do recall the numerous glitches that occurred in the months after the Hong Kong park opened, and how media feasted on the negative developments that are almost inevitable when launching a project of such magnitude. Read Full Post…
After several months of going nowhere, a pilot plan aimed at reviving Shanghai’s slowly dying water transport network is quietly sailing off to the land of innovative local projects that sank after failing to find an audience. In this case the quiet closure of a ferry service connecting destinations in Hongkou District, the Bund and Lujiazui financial district was almost inevitable, since it really didn’t seem well conceived and was operating at big losses.
That said, I do have to commend the city for taking an innovative step to try to revive a dying water culture that is one of Shanghai’s most unique and picturesque assets, even though it remains largely unknown to many outsiders. Perhaps the city should send a team to study the example of Hong Kong, which has been far more successful at developing a vibrant water transport network that serves local commuters and is also a major tourist attraction. Read Full Post…
A scalping story that saw a person scammed after buying an invalid ticket to Century Park brought a smile to my face, partly because the money involved was quite small and also because the tale itself was rather ridiculous. But my smile was quickly followed by some eye rolling and exasperation, as the story once again showed just how pervasive scalping is in here in Shanghai and throughout China.
Reasons for buying tickets and other items from scalpers vary widely, but this particular case also highlighted another phenomenon that perplexes me and many others here in China. That phenomenon is the “back door” mentality, which sees many Chinese, especially from the older generation, always looking for short-cuts to do even the most common things like buying a park ticket. Read Full Post…
A popular restaurant chain called Memory tops the menu of this week’s Street View, with word that the local eatery is living up to its name with a sudden closure that’s sending it into the history books. Memory’s particular form of untimely death is all too common in China these days, usually occurring when an owner abruptly shutters his business and flees after piling up huge piles of debt.
The story was even more personal for me, since I was just introduced to the chain a few weeks ago when a friend suggested it for dinner one evening. I was so impressed by its innovative take on traditional Shanghai cuisine, combined with its nostalgic decor and extremely reasonable prices, that I even went back for a second helping just last week. But it seems the low prices that were one of its biggest draws were also Memory’s downfall, leading to the sudden closure. Read Full Post…
This week’s Street View takes us back to my other adopted hometown of Los Angles, where a case of extreme bullying is shining a spotlight on what sometimes happens to the growing number of Chinese kids who get shipped abroad by their parents to study in US high schools. Back when I first came to China in the 1980s, only the hardest working and brightest young people could go to study abroad, almost always on full scholarships that they applied for and received by themselves for graduate studies.
The difficulty of that early process weeded out all but the brightest and most motivated students, who were usually in their early 20s or older and savvy enough to take care of themselves in a strange and unfamiliar environment. Fast forward to the present, when a new generation of young kids from big cities like Shanghai are being sent abroad to study in US high schools with little or no adult supervision and even less experience of living on their own. Read Full Post…
Shanghai passed a major milestone over the Lunar New Year holiday by becoming China’s quietest major city during the period, thanks to our new ban on all fireworks inside the Outer Ring Road. I’ll admit I was quite skeptical when the ban was initially announced, since it sounded nearly impossible to enforce in a city where thousands love to welcome the Spring Festival with the centuries-old tradition of setting off such noisy and heavily polluting fireworks.
But the city proved me wrong, by mobilizing a massive army of enforcers that included thousands of regular policemen and many times more volunteers tasked with stopping any merrymakers. As a result, I didn’t hear a single firecracker explode near my home in Hongkou District on Lunar New Year’s Eve, nor on the fourth evening of the New Year when people traditionally welcome the god of wealth. Read Full Post…
This week’s Street View touches on news involving fireworks and bird flu, 2 rites of winter in Shanghai that bring pleasure for some but headaches and even fear for many in the case of bird flu. The first item brought a big smile to my face, as I read that Shanghai will deploy an army of thousands to enforce a complete ban on fireworks inside the outer ring road throughout the Spring Festival period. The second item was a bit more ominous, as the city reported the first 2 cases of humans infected with the deadly H7N9 bird flu virus this year.
Both of these stories come as we head into our coldest period of winter, with temperatures set to hit some of their lowest levels in years under the influence of a super cold front. It’s during times like these that people look to festive activities like setting off fireworks to add some cheer to the otherwise cold and Spartan winter atmosphere. Read Full Post…
A recent brouhaha at our city’s Gucun Park in Baoshan District, famous for its springtime cherry blossoms, is providing food for thought on the issue of public spaces, and what responsibilities our city and we as local citizens have for supporting these places. The case revolves around the park’s decision to rent out a large section of its space to a private company, which then rented the area out for wedding parties.
It’s clear that park managers took their action to raise more money. But what’s less clear is whether they did so because of budget shortfalls, or simply because they wanted to earn more than the 20 yuan ticket price that people pay for admission. Read Full Post…
