Shanghai nights (2; and 1 in Guangzhou)

And so it was that I boarded a Thai International flight at Heathrow with a final destination Shanghai. As a rather more frequent user of easyJet than I care to admit it was a pleasure to enjoy the over generous leg room, the seat that reclined to horizontal, the meals served on china with good wines to go with them and movies, not just one but a choice. I was travelling on business and it was just like the old days!

I spent 3 excellent years in Hong Kong, 1976-79, and in those days China wasn’t a place you went to easily although there were lots of China watchers. And the China which they watched was monochrome, regimented and not exactly wealthy. It was dogmatically communist and it’s citizens enjoyed few freedoms. There were many in Hong Kong working for the various agencies there and they could always be recognised by the quality of their tailoring.

The China I saw this time couldn’t be more different. It may be communist in name but hardly so in practice. Admitted I’m an outsider so have a somewhat superficial view but I saw a China with colour, with diversity and with lots of people spending lots of money. It looked to me like China had not just decided to catch up with the world but to overtake it. The results are that the airports are bigger than elsewhere, the motorways have more lanes, the restaurants seat more diners, the city centres boast more and higher skyscrapers, the girls wear higher heels and shorter skirts and the music videos are more raunchy than in the west. Shanghai to me reminded me of Hong Kong: blatant hedonistic capitalism. Chairman Mao must be turning in his grave.

It was business in China but we had to eat and  in Shanghai there were 2 dinners. The first was conveniently down the road from the hotel and was the sort of restaurant which served honest, tasty but heavy Chinese fare. The sort of food that you don’t want to eat every day of the week  but OK for the occasional Chinese. That was old China. The second was at South Beauty just off the financial quarter close to streets of bars, designer boutiques and coffee bars. Chinese food for the 21st century eaten on fine China and with a wine list to match. I drank ice-cold Guinness as is best with Chinese food and we had several excellent dishes including a couple with lots of chilli.

The food experience continued in Guangzhou where we had lunch at the restaurant Yumin, a colossal seafood palace with seating for several thousand, I kid you not. It was a factory with tanks of fresh fish and other seafood: not just prawns for example but 6 or 8 different sorts of prawns. And so it was with every other fish. This was good food on an epic scale and is consistent with everything else I witnessed about China today: bigger and better and more ambitious.

We visited a customer. It’s a major industrial player, 4th in its sector worldwide and Hong Kong listed. It was another experience of seeing scale and ambition and we had dinner after with 3 of the people we met. It wasn’t exactly relaxed but it was somewhat social and the impression I took way from them was their confidence in their country and their pride is what they’d delivered so far. They saw China as being number 1 and were willing to work 6 days a week to ensure it got there.

There are still what you might regard as relics of the old China. There are lots of people in uniform and these ensure that there’s not too much diversity. You are not allowed to take photographs at airports or from aeroplanes. And of course there’s neither the BBC nor Google on-line. But these will change. When we talked about the Tiananmen ‘incident’ over dinner with colleagues when we left China there was a sense that such events, although dreadful, merely slow the rate of change. They neither halt nor reverse it and with its pace today who knows what we can expect of China tomorrow.