Village Voice December 2013/January 2014 | Page 22

parties and barbecues in the sunshine
before exploring the plethora of glitzy
discotheques in the evening. And this comes
as no surprise because Shanghai is
certainly a party town. Indeed, those who
live and work in the city have little else to
spend their money on apart from pretty girls
in nightclubs. A vacuous competition
therefore exists between the big spenders;
who has the bigger bottle of champagne and
whose entourage of Russian models is fairer
on the eye? For these exhibitionists to
flourish, the nightclubs themselves have to
be particularly unique. Yet I was surprised to
find that this is not necessarily the case.
They do pull some big names from across
the world to jockey the disks - Kendrik Lemar
and Dr. Dre were two that appeared in town
while I was there - and Bar Rouge exists in
an incredible rooftop location on the Bund
overlooking Pudong but there isn't anything
remarkably flamboyant about the clubs as
you might expect.
The contrast between those Shanghainese
who sit at the private tables in the nightclubs,
barricaded by mean-faced bouncers and
jeroboams of champagne, and those you
see outside the club doors, who are decrepit
and can only beg to survive, is horrible.
China has the most polarised distribution of
wealth, which even the shiny façades of
Shanghai cannot mask. The middle class is
growing exponentially, however, and the
Chinese are intuitively frugal with money.
Unlike in the UK, where families living in
debt-ridden houses nonchalantly borrow
more to fill them with plasma TVs and
jacuzzis, the Chinese are bankers.
Testament to this is the incredible presence
of retail banks on the high streets; national
state banks and regional banks strew
themselves across cities and, in places,
there are more banks than shops.
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The expats, however, are more interested in
spending money 'out on the razz' than
saving it. Indeed, with Shanghai's living
costs as they are, and mediocre salaries for
graduate trainee positions, there is little
saving that can be done initially. The young
expats certainly work hard but they play
even harder, which is arduous in a city with
serious pollution, tap water that isn't safe to
drink, children that excrete on the pavement
and heinously hot weather that exacerbates
any form of respiratory disorder. Shanghai is
not a healthy place to live and, with no green
space for miles in each direction, you can
feel claustrophobic. A day trip out of the city
demonstrates just how endless the urban
sprawl is. The bullet train to Suzhou, which
lies 60 miles north-west of Shanghai, doesn't
zoom through any form of green belt or
countryside to get there. Instead, all of the
land between the two cities is under
development, which means there are neverending vistas of cranes looming over
factories and half-completed roads. Highrise living accommodation for the labourers
that are at the helm of this new landscape
pop up and spoil the skyline. Nothing
appears planned apart from the desired
speed of development - particularly the
development of real estate and transport
infrastru