Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Last week I was in Shanghai, China’s most modern city, to lead a week-long course for MBA students on doing business in China. When the course ended Saturday I took an overnight train back to Beijing, arriving in the city about 7 am.

Later that morning my wife and I took a car to the Great Wall. We hiked from the Jin Shan Ling section of the Wall in Hebei province to the Si Ma Tai section (which is technically back in Beijing).

The contrast between walking on Shanghai’s Nanjing Lu one day and then the Great Wall the next was striking. It captures some of the diversity and dynamism of what’s now happening in China.

Pedestrian portion of Nanjing Road in Shanghai, Friday night.

Great Wall, Sunday morning.

I’ll post more photos from the Shanghai course here and some from our Great Wall excursion here.

The hike from Jin Shan Ling to Si Ma Tai is popular, but it’s an arduous excursion. It crosses large sections of the Wall that haven’t been fully restored. Also, much of it is steep going. We probably only covered about 10 kilometers from the spot where the driver dropped us at Jin Shan Ling to where he picked us back up at Si Ma Tai, but the hike took us around five hours. At the end we didn’t need more exercise. But it was a lovely day and the scenery was tremendous. I was glad I made the trip.

Shanghai is an entirely different part of China geographically, culturally and economically. Yet Shanghai, like hiking along the Great Wall, is both delightful and grueling. Shanghai pulses with life and has been transformed by new construction in recent years. It has the best retail and dining in China. There are lots of interesting people there. Business opportunities seem to abound. Shanghai’s traffic and air quality are better than Beijing’s, too (not great, but better).

However, Shanghai crowds can be overwhelming, and the rudeness common in daily life is difficult to accept.

Despite 1) instructions about where to stand printed on the platform where subway car doors open, 2) audio broadcasts in the station and 3) propaganda posters on the station walls, most people simply refuse to let commuters get off the subway cars before trying to barge on themselves. The result is an unpleasant and inefficient scrum each time a train pulls in.

I also find many Shanghainese speak in a comically loud manner. It sounds to me like they are having an intense argument, but actually they are just chatting with friends and family.

Also, while China is filled with good-hearted people who are often extremely hospitable to foreigners (usually treating us better than they treat their compatriots), China is also filled with people trying to rip you off, and Shanghai seems to have a particularly high concentration of them.

A foreigner walking down Nanjing Lu is guaranteed to encounter someone hawking fake luxury brand watches, a Uighur whispering “hashish?” and a young woman, probably a succession of them (or, more annoyingly, their male agents) trying to entice you into a “lady bar” or massage parlor (I understand some of these women get kickbacks from the cafes, bars and karaoke halls where they lure unsuspecting customers for wildly overpriced drinks).

I found another annoyance at the Shanghai rail station. The first class waiting room for trains to Beijing is on the third floor. The train platform is on a lower level. Consequently, every day thousands of people head towards the train (after a line-less scrum to get their tickets checked), then pile-up in a bottleneck as people stop at the stairs, pick up their wheeled bags and lug them down to the platform. I was overburdened with luggage this trip, having spent a month in the US and a week in Shanghai, so I really struggled to get down the stairs with all my bags. There are porters where taxis drop off passengers under the rail station, but they can only accompany you to the security checkpoint, not all the way to the train. So where’s the ramp or elevator? In the same place as the cooler for the shop that sells drinks in the first class waiting hall—gone, non-existent. Train service in China is often excellent, but as an architect speaking to my class last week pointed out, train stations are usually awful. (Though, thankfully, there were ramps when I got back to Beijing).

Despite some of the frustrations, I’ve been infatuated with China for nearly two decades now. It still never fails to seduce, infuriate and mesmerize me. I feel fortunate to be able to experience its contrasts and changes up close.