Culture Shock! China - A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette, 2nd Edition

2 CultureShock! China

Wild Wild East

Imagine living in a city where if you forget to pick up your dry

cleaning for just a week, you run the risk of losing it forever

because the block the Laundromat is located on is slated that

week for demolition. In 1995, that was the risk that you ran

of forgetting your dry cleaning for more than a few days in

Shanghai. Twenty-five per cent of the construction cranes in

the world were in Shanghai.

Imagine living in a city where the day you arrived, the

place known as Pudong was a single-standing TV tower,

grandiosely called ‘The Pearl of the Orient’, which looked

like a cross between a Jetson’s space home and a series of

onions skewered on a stick, standing amid farmland and

rundown wood shacks. A mere six years later, that same TV

tower was surrounded by a shining city of iconic architecture,

inhabited by millions, which hosted leaders from around the

world attending the 2001 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation

(APEC) meetings. Global news broadcasts from the APEC

meetings made that skyline, which didn’t exist six years

before, the new image of modern China.

When we arrived in China in

1995, it was like living in the

wild, wild east. Nothing was

possible and everything was

possible. You were coated each

day with the construction dust

Each week, city blocks were
moving parts of a giant puzzle,
whose complete picture would
be the modern day, world-class
city that will host the World Expo
in 2010.