The cultural revolution has set the country back, and with it Shanghai, for decades. It was only in the mid-1980s, when Shanghai gained the status of an open city with the proclamation of a new economic policy in China, that it began to grow rapidly.
With phenomenal speed, the old Shanghai is disappearing. Not long ago, this was the location of a neighborhood of inexpensive but cozy restaurants. Now there are only ruins left of it. And on these ruins grows a new Shanghai - the city of skyscrapers. Dozens of kilometers of new highways have been built in a matter of years. Shanghai is perhaps the only city in China where people prefer public transport rather than bicycles: comfortable local buses and trolleybuses.
There is a type of public transport in the city that you won't find anywhere else in China, and there are few such systems in the world. In Shanghai, there is a train on a magnetic pillow. A ticket costs 30 times more than a subway ticket. It is not surprising, because this train on a magnetic pillow is the fastest in the world. It is said that its maximum speed is 431 kilometers per hour. Now let's check whether it is so.
By order of the Chinese government, which has allocated 1 500 000 000 000 dollars for the project, a unique road was created by specialists from Germany. There are two trains on the road, each capable of carrying more than nine hundred passengers at a time. Indeed, 431 kilometers per hour! And the most surprising thing is that this speed is not felt: sitting in this comfortable chair, it seems, you drive at a maximum speed of 120 kilometers per hour.
- A milestone event for Shanghai was the approval in 1990 by the State Council of the People's Republic of China of the project to create a new district - Pudong (from the Chinese "pu" - river and "dun" - "east").
- Pudong is the ultramodern Shanghai, in fact, the business and financial capital of the country. The fantastic buildings built here symbolize the economic power of the city. This is the TV tower - Tunfang Mintszu, that is, the "Pearl of the East". It is the third-highest in the world. By the way, the second building in the list of the highest is located here, nearby.
- Here is the skyscraper of Jean Mao Tower, in it, there is a luxurious hotel. There are no hotels of such height anywhere else in the world. And not long ago there was nothing but rice fields in this very place.
- New residential areas are also being built in Pudong. As on the yeast grow thirty-story skyscrapers. I climbed one of them to see the city from above, and the old neighborhoods still occupy a significant part of it, but in the next five years, they must be completely transformed.
- Today, Shanghai produces one-sixth of the country's gross national product. If the city continues to grow at this rate, its economic potential will soon be equal to that of Hong Kong.
- And here is the model of the future of Shanghai. This city is already half-built. The Pearl of the East TV Tower. The skyscraper of Jean Mao Tower. And the World Financial Center building will soon appear next to it. It promises to be the tallest building in the world. The facility is planned to be completed in 2007.
- The city is booming with tourism. According to statistics, every year the Chinese metropolis receives 3,000,000 foreign tourists and more than 90,000,000 Chinese tourists. The authorities intend to at least double these figures, which is why they hold an annual tourist festival.
- Huai Hai Lu, the most central part of Shanghai, is the street of the most luxurious restaurants and expensive shops. Today, dozens of TV cameras and hundreds of guests of honor - all this is the 15th Shanghai Tourism Festival. The festival aims to show the world that China is not only Beijing, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. China is first and foremost Shanghai.
- The atmosphere of the festival is unique. It combines seemingly incompatible things: the Brazilian carnival, the Milanese fashion show, the Beijing opera and our May Day demonstrations, which I remember from childhood, but have not seen for a long time. Despite the high price, it was almost impossible to get tickets to the opening of the festival.
- Chinese pop and movie stars and local top models participate in the procession. Chinese airline stewardesses are defiling.
The grand opening of the Shanghai tourism festival has come to an end, but I have the impression that it's just beginning, because the crowd, who used to sit on the stands, is now gone and flooded all the streets. The holiday continued until the morning. People were walking around the city, riding on the river on boats, which on the occasion of the festival were running all night.
From the water, despite the abundance of advertising, the city seemed old, colonial. But the shape of the skyscrapers constantly reminded me that I was in a city where modern Chinese history was being made. Maybe the whole world, too.