Gulf between Shanghai, Taipei immense in era of direct links

By 8:45 p.m. we were sitting at Oscar’s, sipping cocktails and listening to bluegrass mandolin and banjo plucked by a couple of young Chinese maestros.

The new era of direct links has dawned.

Yet, the gulfs between the two cities at some levels are immense.

Take, for example, social etiquette. My ex-colleague was stunned by the sullen Shanghainese sales girls, the blatantly rude, smoking taxi drivers, the constant, loud gorge-clearance followed by pudding-thick phlegm-expectoration, the public bladder-emptying and so on. This one may suppose is balanced by the histrionics of Taiwanese politics.

Shanghai by day is one giant construction site readying for World Expo 2010, but by night it is magical.

For the best view of both sides of the Huang-pu go to the 32nd floor rooftop Vue Bar of Hyatt on the Bund. They have a Jacuzzi into which if you strip to swimwear and plunge during these wintry nights, you will be rewarded with a bottle of bubbly. This is not a plug but simply the best place to see Shanghai as magnificent and glittering, not the tawdry, dusty truckstop it can appear by daylight.

Nevertheless, the recently completed World Finance Center in Pudong — the twenty-year-old city on the other side of the river — won Best Skyscraper of the Year 2008 award from the Chicago-based Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

But to the Shanghainese it is known without affection as the “bottle opener,” or “kai ping shi.” The building is Japanese-funded and viewed by some as a bayonet blade rising from the Pudong mud, thus combining traumatic Nanking memories and bad feng shui.

Plans are under consideration to change the laws regarding the use of farmland — a sacred tenet of the communist revolution — that would allow tenants to lease out the land for profit in the future.

You can’t get something like that past the razor-sharp Shanghai boys who are now scurrying to the countryside to find a bride whose father has some farmland. Last thought; Shanghai must be unique in the world to offer hot cans of Red Bull — now you can have sweaty wingflaps.

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