Cities may be different, not feelings

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By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-23 07:58

How do you Chinese compare Beijing and Shanghai? A Turkish man, who had already toured Beijing with his newly wed wife (from Russia), asked me this question while we were traveling on a train.

"Well, maybe, it's like husband and wife," I said. The young couple smiled understandingly. "The two are different, stick to their own ways but always stay together."

"And who's the husband and who the wife?" he asked. "Shanghai is the pretty lady," the wife chipped in, without waiting for my answer.

Is it that obvious, I thought, that even people who haven't seen it know? Shanghai has more modern buildings, more colorful lights, more middle-class shopping malls and leisure facilities, giving it a feminine look. In contrast, Beijing's stately looking, if not boring, government blocks and the old imperial palaces give it a manly look.

The cities may be associated with Mars and Venus, but their residents are definitely not aliens to each other however differently they express themselves. They want and care about the same things.

Taking me to the bookstores on Fuzhou Road in a cab, one of my friends in Shanghai complained about the city authorities' recent decision to raise the taxi fare. "It isn't a good move," he said. "No, we don't think so either," the cabbie agreed. And they started talking about all the details, from the fare structure to the cost per kilometer.

Both men seemed convinced that neither passengers nor cab drivers would benefit from the rise in fare, and the local government should not have taken such a decision.

"At least, they should have held a few public hearings before taking the decision," my friend said. "But they didn't it was a pretty rough way to get things done, wasn't it? I just don't know where they learnt that from?"

Implicitly (Shanghainese usually aren't good at hiding their condescension), he was complaining that the municipal authorities were doing their job like small town officials.

Who said Shanghainese are apolitical and lack collective consciousness? Listening to their conversation from the backseat, I asked myself this question, even though I tend to look at things differently from them.

"Look at what you guys did in Beijing," my friend turned around to tell me. "There people could at least demand public hearings over the plan to demolish the old courtyard houses once owned by Liang Sicheng and Liang Weiyin (two early 20th century artists who my friend, an amateur art collector, knows well) and overturned the redevelopment plan a crude and anti-cultural plan in the first place."

If my friend had put his conversation in the taxi in black and white, it could have been published as a column in a newspaper. If he posted such views in his personal blog, he could have become a star on the Internet.

If this is what even a trivial conversation can yield, can't officials from different cities compare notes more often in order to see how they can provide better public service or at least how they can improve their relations with disgruntled local residents?

A survey, published in last week's China Youth Daily, shows that up to 70 percent urban residents, including those in Beijing and Shanghai, are tired of the old urban-rural migration policy (hukou) and want the government to at least lower the requirements, if not abolish the system.

It is about time that cities were allowed to launch their experimental projects to ease the urban and rural migration restrictions through public hearings and democratic debates. Residents of Beijing and Shanghai both would agree, I assume.

younuo@chinadaily.com.cn