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Times Colonist (Victoria)
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Page: D2

It is 5:45 p.m., and I'm standing inside the hot and crowded arrivals area at Shanghai's swanky Pudong Airport. I'm waiting for a couple to step off a flight from Vancouver via San Francisco. It's their first visit to China, a land they want to see first-hand after reading countless headlines about the World's Next Superpower.

Shanghai, or so I thought, would be an ideal example of China's rapid modernization. The city is home to 19 million official residents, and millions more undocumented workers. According to Germany's Spiegel magazine, Shanghai has 549 skyscrapers with more than 300 currently under construction -- but many consider that to be a low estimate. One glance from the 88th-floor lookout of mainland China's tallest building, the Jin Mao tower, will reveal skyscrapers as far as the eye can see. The city, mixing tree-lined streets and small cafés with raging capitalism and giant office buildings, is the heart of China's entrepreneurial spirit, modernization, entertainment and night life.

After they breezed through customs, I took them to the state-of-the-art magnetic levitation train which connects Pudong Airport and the city's subway system. The train, when it was built, was the first of its kind in the world and hurtles down the track at 430 kilometres per hour. Even though it was dark and stormy, the train was a perfect introduction to how much things in China have changed from the days of the bicycle.

Shanghai is widely known as China's most "modern" city, but I was surprised when my two guests mentioned that China didn't seem to be as modern or developed as they'd read in newspapers and magazines.

Old Shanghai, which sits just west of the famous Bund waterfront, remains barren of businesses. The old shops featured boarded-up entryways and broken windows, vestiges of Shanghai's opulent past that were never restored.

During our time in Shanghai, the pollution was as bad as I'd ever seen it. The aforementioned view from the Jin Mao tower was highly obscured by particulates. It was also difficult to see through the thick brown and grey haze while trundling along the city's expansive highway system. When we wandered through the streets of town, beggars, amputees, burn victims and young children approached us for spare change. It was the same China that existed before, but has somehow been pushed to the background to make room for the sexier stories of wealth, development and modernity.

If Shanghai is still suffering from growing pains, Beijing may just be entering adolescence. In one year, the Chinese capital will host possibly the largest coming-out party of any nation in history. Yet many are starting to wonder whether the city, and country, are ready.

Pollution remains a major source of frustration for the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee and residents of the capital. The municipality has taken a number of steps to reduce air pollution, including limiting the number of coal-burning plants, moving others out of the city and replacing thousands of inefficient buses and taxis. But despite their efforts, this past June was the most polluted in Beijing in seven years.

Even journalists, who were promised greater press freedom, have come under intense pressure in the leadup to the games.

Not that you would gather that from the state-run China Daily, which recently ran a story headlined "Foreign media enjoy greater access." Foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao was quoted as saying, "We are also encouraged to see that the new regulations have been widely welcomed and followed by foreign journalists, either staying in, or just making a brief visit to, China."

What the story failed to mention is that 67 per cent of foreign correspondents said China has failed to live up to its promise of "complete freedom" to report, according to the Foreign Correspondents Club of China. In fact, the recent report on the state of China's press freedom found 157 incidents so far this year of intimidation of sources, detentions, surveillance, official reprimands and even violence against reporters, their staff or sources.

Then there are food-safety issues, traffic problems, overcrowding, poverty, environmental degradation and other concerns that remain to be solved.

There's no doubt that reporters, tourists, entrepreneurs, and business people are flooding into China in advance of next year's events. But there is much more happening in China than just glitz and glamour, wi-fi hot spots and five-star hotels. The country remains a developing one.

Olympic visitors will soon discover that, just like my friends did in Shanghai.