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 You heard that right, ladies and gentlemen... Our city's foresighted urban planners, God bless their hearts, have looked into their glassball and decided that Shanghai needs another Lujiazui ??? and really, soon ??? in three years to be exact. Well if they were able to build Lujiazui I in ten years, we have every confidence they can build Lujiazui II in three. Never ever ever doubt the ambitions of Shanghai city planners. Just build first, and everything will fall into place later.
The management committee of the new zone, however, was quick to assure us that it "will not have Lujiazui's cluster of skyscrapers", but "will feature a combination of modern and historic buildings". Xinhuanet has more: The site, the Sanlin Expo Functional Zone, is to the south of the Lujiazui area and will cover 82 square km, three quarters of the 2010 World Expo Site.
"We hope the World Expo will bring more business opportunities to this new zone," Jiang Ming, head of the managing committee of the Sanlin zone, said Monday at a meeting to invite business interest.
Before the inauguration of the six-month world fair in May 2010, the area will be home to luxury hotels, an Expo village for Expo staff, a huge public activity center and parks along the Huangpu River.
It also expects to attract various fashion and cultural studios, commercial outlets and complexes.
By the way, does anyone here remember how long the Super Brand Mall was left empty before the gods finally smiled on them?
Photo from Montrasio International.
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One of the things that makes being on the tube during rush hour even more miserable than we had previously imagined possible is the "film" made by Starbucks and Pepsi showing on the subway TV. Titled 晴天日记 (Qingtian riji), the film is about a young man and a young woman, blah blah blah. Of course the film takes place in Shanghai but most of the scenes take place in Starbucks. We think the whole rationale behind "soft-advertising" is that it's supposedly better than "hard-advertising" or traditional advertising. Honestly, we prefer the traditional type as a lesser of two evils. Soft advertising is supposedly less in-your-face, but in our media saturated world we all notice it (it would be a failure if we didn't), but we resent all the insinuations and false associations that soft-advertising relies on.
But don't listen to us, here it is from the straight from the horse's mouth: The actors say that to connect with an audience that will be watching on small screens in a swaying subway, they kept dialogue and movement to a minimum. In one shot, Sunny slowly twists a bottle filled with water and guppies - to reveal the Starbucks "Mocha" label.
"It's a new medium," says Director John Xiao Qi. A film with strong elements of a commercial isn't a compromise, he reasons, as "It's easier for the audience to accept the message because of the setting." We've seen this "film" several times, and there's nothing subtle about it—most of the scenes take place in Starbucks, with the logo ever present. Furthermore, where do you get off saying that "the audience can accept it more because of the setting." Statements like this really tick us off because this type of marketing malarkey involves insulting the intelligence of the audience—that is, all of us—while all the chimps at the board meetings congratulate themselves for being so smart for thinking up such a scheme. Sure you've got a captive audience, who are "bored", but at least from our personal experience, watching that small flat-screen TV when the subway is moderately or very crowded is a futile exercise at best. If the subway cars were empty, we'd probably find a seat as soon as we could, which might be far enough from the TV to make viewing impossible. This is perhaps why the product placement is so egregious—they really don't care if you can read the subtitles or follow the plot. Of course, that's the not the bad thing—the bad thing is that everyone knows this.
Starbucks is in the game to win the game, and we respect that. We've noticed recently that Frappucinos are being sold in convenience stores as well as Starbucks itself. What we don't get it is why it's more expensive to buy in Starbucks than it is in All Days, but who really cares, since it was a *** drink to begin with. Whoever designed that drink has evidently never heard of a disease called diabetes.
If you're interested in seeing the series, most of the episodes broadcast can be found on video-sharing sites such as Tudou. It looks like they are up episode eight on the video above. Each episode is about three minutes in length. Here's a link to the various episodes:
In other Starbucks news, you might have heard that Starbucks recently opened its first store in Xi'an. Welcome to civilization, Xi'an! A colleague of ours went there recently, and snapped a picture.
It's easily the most interesting design of all the Starbucks stores we've ever seen.
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 They say bad news travels fast. That Pudong gas blast we told you about on Saturday has made it to international news. The Associated Press, Reuters, the International Herald Tribune, BBC, Times of India, ABC (Australia) all reported on the blast.
The AP reports that four deaths have been confirmed and more than two dozen people were injured from the explosion. Our hearts go out to the family of the 29 year old cyclist from Anhui that was struck dead by the flying debris. He was one kilometre away from the blast.
Xinhua has been quick to report that improper work practices were to blame for the freak accident: Operations at the gas station, an outlet of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) located at No. 909, Third Pudong Road in Pudong New District, had been suspended since Nov. 11 for a safety inspection.
The underground gas tanks needed to be pressurized to carry out the inspection, said an official with the municipal department of publicity. The official, who declined to give his name, said there had been residual gas in the tanks, leading to the explosion at 7:50 a.m. Saturday.
More pictures after the jump...
Photos from QQ.com
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 ...well, that is if that most beloved of governmental catchphrases elicits in your mind the reprehensible world of Disney. That's right, it's full Steamboat Willie ahead for the cloven-hoofed mouse and his sinister denizens and their scheme to move into Chuansha and Nanhui, according to China Daily. Plans for a Disneyland Shanghai were mooted in 2005, but put on hold due to the company's fears that it might detract from their Hong Kong park. Now it looks like they're back on track, and that it could be four times bigger than the one in HK, with metro line 11 to serve the site. Still, it makes a change opening a theme park rather than a sweatshop in a Special Economic Zone.
Image from Pocacola.com
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Shanghaiist has been wanting to tell you about the remaking of Taikang Lu which for a while was in danger of getting a 'lil old and tired, but has changed pretty rapidly over the last few months. And now we even have a video to show you. Many new al-fresco cafes and creative stores have sprung up and the place has expanded. On our last trip there, we found many old residents that have stubbornly chosen to stay on despite all the changes and increasing commercialisation of the area, and as such you will see many old decrepit houses (that look like they're in need of a makeover) sitting side by side with fancy new stores. It is definitely one factor that still makes Taikang Lu our favourite bohemian district in town. Okay, we shouldn't be comparing, we know, but Taikang Lu does appear to have grown a lot more organically than other artist districts like Moganshan Lu which sometimes seems to us as though it had change shoved down its throat. What do you guys think?
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 ... and that is a conservative estimate, writes Bernie Leo of Shanghai Daily.
We have to give it to him in the way that he succeeds to make a science out of the subject:
Population figures for the city vary wildly but the latest I can find say we have 17 million permanent residents and four to five million migrants. Obviously not everyone is a spitter or expectorator. (And there is a difference. To spit is to expel saliva; to expectorate is to eject phlegm). So we cancel out young children, the elderly who are in care facilities and more enlightened citizens.
I reckon that leaves seven million hawkers. Some cough up a teaspoon each time; some a tablespoon. Some hawk 15 times a day; some maybe twice. So if we balance that out and say that the average hawker does the deed four times a day at 60 milliliters a shot, we have the 1.68 million liters. That's 11.76 million liters a week and 613.2 million liters a year.
An Olympic swimming pool is 50 meters long, 25 meters wide, three meters deep at the blocks and two meters deep at the far end. It holds 3,125,001 liters of water when full. Shanghai hawkers could overflow an Olympic pool every two days.
Now that is a whole lot of spit. The writer then goes on to exhort Shanghai burghers to stop the spitting habit -- the ultimate exercise in preaching to the converted considering the paper he's writing for. We suspect he might have better luck if his article were translated for say the Jiefang Daily.
Now if those RMB200 car horn fines worked so wonderfully in keeping the noise level down in Shanghai, why not bring back those RMB200 spitting fines? As far as we remember, they did work five years ago during the SARS crisis, sparking talk that SARS would lead to the end of spitting -- which certainly sounds like a big joke now. The breakout of the epidemic led to campaigns such as these which saw a rash of posters enveloping the city, all seeking to educate citizens on the merits of not spitting and how to do it if they feel they really have to. They were omnipresent, but did that help at all? Not an iota.
The only way to really change Shanghai's spitting image (sorry, couldn't resist that one), we think, is not by education, but by enforcement of those anti-spitting fines they once had and worked so well. Sad, but true -- but to make any noticeable change, one's gotta hit where it really hurts.
In western Europe, frequent spitting was part of everyday life, and at all levels of society (surprise, surprise!), and "it was thought ill-mannered to suck back saliva to avoid spitting. By the early 1700s, spitting had become seen as something which should be concealed, and by 1859 many viewed the spitting on the floor or street as vulgar, especially in mixed company."
How long will it now take for China?
Related link
Shanghai Daily: Holy spit, Shanghai,these routes aren't made for hawking
Shanghai Star: Spitting is here to stay - unless . . .
Photo from Summer Under Heaven. Her caption reads, "In China, even the architecture spits, while the impressionable young girl looks on."
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 Recently while out of town, our landlord called us on our cell phone to inform us that he wanted his apartment back ASAP. Why, we asked? He wanted to renovate it, he said, but we were not convinced. You see, the few of us have been living in this apartment for coming to 3 years now, and there was this implicit agreement that we could stay on for as long as we liked, so some time back we didn't sign any lease with him, but continued to dutifully pay our rent each month (no delays) as we have done for such a long time.
Okay, call us stupid, we know, for not signing a lease with him, but today we came across an article from the Oriental Morning Post (东方早报) that may be the reason behind our landlord's latest move. In the article entitled 上海治理群租再出新招 朋友也不能合租一间房 ("Shanghai begins to control shared renting of apartments, now even friends are not allowed to co-rent"):
上海治理群租再出新招，上海市房地局昨天表示，该局近日下发通知，对2005年版的《业主公约》、《业主临时公约》示范文本进行增补，新增一些制约“群租”的新条款... 根据该规定，民房出租，一间房只能出租给一个家庭或一个自然人居住。
Shanghai has begun to control the shared renting of apartments and recently the Shanghai Municipal Housing, Land and Resource Administration Bureau (SMHLRA) announced that it has made amendments to the 2005 version of the "Landlord Regulations" and the "Provisional Landlord Regulations". New regulations for shared renting of apartments have been added... According to those new regulations, each private apartment can now only be rented out to a single individual or a family.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, this means that from now on, you may not share an apartment with your boy/girlfriend. And no, you may not even share an apartment with someone of the same gender. Our first response to the new ruling was something along the lines of "WTF@#*$&Y@*&*!!!!" but hey, this is not the first time we have heard of such crazy rules eh. Some time ago, we told you about the ban by the Ministry of Education on students renting private accommodation during semesters and the mandate that ALL students have to share four to eight-person dormitories. Just plain wonderful now that the SMHLRA has decided to make its presence felt in the lives of all working adults in Shanghai! Certainly the desire to have the freedom to choose whether or not to live alone or to choose who to live with cuts across nationalities. In an online poll on 163.com, an overwhelming 88.0% of 25,916 respondents (as of press time) said that the co-sharing of apartments should not be restricted.
Now does anyone reading this have a nice, small, clean and affordable apartment to rent out to this poor soul here?
Related links
Oriental Morning Post: 上海治理群租再出新招 朋友也不能合租一间房
Shanghaiist: Education Ministry mandates curfew and bedchecks for university students
Photo from Mr.Tea
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Number 3 Baoqing Rd, at the corner of Huaihai Rd near the Changshu Rd metro station, is an old colonial-style house with almost 4000 square meters of attached private gardens. For 55 years, award-winning and state-honored Shanghai painter Xu Yuanzhang and his family have lived in this house, upkeeping the house and gardens that his grandfather Zhou Zongliang purchased from a German owner seven years after it was built in Shanghai's booming 1930's.
But now, with Shanghai's real estate market being red-hot -- the residence including gardens has been appraised at over 26 million US dollars -- and 13 heirs spread across several countries and generations claiming rights to the property, the situation turned contentious. After a court order to liquidate the property and distribute the gains to the heirs, the two grandchildren entrusted with the sale, Zhou Guangren and Zhou Ping, shadily sold the property to a developer for nearly a third of its appraised market value. Meanwhile, Xu Yuanzhang has been served by the Xuhui District courts with an order to move off of the property he now unlawfully inhabits, a court order which will come due on September 15th and which he promises to fight.
The property development company that acquired 3 Baoqing Rd from the Zhou grandchildren has offered Xu and his relatives a fifty-square meter apartment in Minhang, which if interpreted in the most obvious way is a pretty nasty kick-while-he's-down. It's hard to feel sorry for Xu, though, who for all his sentimental pleas to the public would, according to the article linked above, settle for a 150 m² luxury apartment in the city center, RMB 300k to cover the apartment's renovation and an cozy RMB 4 million in extra cash.
Will the property be bulldozed and turned into an All Days? Will Xu get to stay in his childhood home or move on to enjoy a life of debauchery in a Huaihai Rd penthouse? Or perhaps stew in his own bile in a Minhang stinkhole? Stay tuned.
Photo by ♥luckjiujiuling.
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 Fire broke out today at the US$910 million 101-storey tall Shanghai World Financial Center in an elevator shaft on the 40th floor at about 4pm today. Eight fire trucks were dispatched to douse the fire, and it was eventually extinguished by 5.42 pm. There were no reports of injuries or deaths.
An AP report offers an excellent recap of the numerous travails that have faced the wedge-shaped building in the last few years (some of which we've covered in this blog too):
For six years after ground was broken at the site in the mid-1990s, the project was little more than a hole in the ground: The Asian financial crisis had virtually obliterated demand for new office space in Shanghai.
After the project was revived in 2003, the builders had to alter a key design feature — a circular cutout near the top — after complaints that it resembled the rising sun on Japan's flag, a symbol reviled by many Chinese because of Japan's brutal occupation of the country in World War II.
And earlier this year, the tower's builder, the Mori Building Co. of Tokyo, were criticized by Shanghai authorities for altering the project's name to "Shanghai Hills" to link it to its other marquee projects, the famed Roppongi Hills and Omotesando Hills complexes.
The company said the formal registered name of the project remained the Shanghai World Financial Center and "Shanghai Hills" was merely a branding strategy.
Related links
AP: Fire extinguished at construction site for China's tallest building in Shanghai
Shanghai World Financial Center: Details related to fire breaking at construction site
Previous Shanghaiist stories on the World Financial Center
Skyscraper Envy: Shanghai to whip out another big one
As far as shapes go, the circle is the evilest
Blogging about the World Financial Center
Welcome to Shanghai Hills!
Photo from China News Agency.
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 Call it the unauthorized sequel of Alain Robert's Spidey-themed Jinmao jaunt, from last June. The Shanghai Daily reports:
An unidentified man became the sixth man to climb the 88-floor Jin Mao Tower last night, although he certainly took his time completing the ascent.
The man dressed in a black T-shirt began climbing the building from the top of a dumpster at around 6pm, and didn't finish until around 11pm after taking a short break to catch his breath near the 80th floor.
Police said he may be held in custody for a term ranging from five days to two weeks. After evading a series of climber-deterring metal spikes at the bottom of Jinmao, Shanghai Spidey paused for a breather around floor 80, then resumed his climb to the top of the tower.
Shanghai Daily: Jin Mao conquered by tired climber
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 Just when we thought the heat-related catastrophes couldn't get any more dramatic, the Shanghai Daily rolls this out:
A 20-YEAR-OLD student was electrocuted by his computer this morning in Shanghai's Yangpu District, Eastday.com reported.
The young man, who was identified as Wu, reportedly opened the external casing of the computer's CPU to prevent it from overheating because he didn't want to switch on the air conditioner in his home.
According to the report, his sweaty legs came into contact with the computer's wiring, which might have caused a short circuit. The computer's internal voltage is as high as 380 volts, enough to give a deadly shock. Note to self: Turn up air conditioner during hot 'n' heavy blog sessions with laptop.
Shanghai Daily: Sweaty man electrocuted by computer
Picture via Destructoid
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 They're looking for foreigners, and they want blood. Especially if it's RH-negative.
In an attempt to diversify their blood bank, the Shanghai Blood Center is calling for foreigners to start rolling up their sleeves en masse (you'll want to click the link to SBC's webpage-- it involves anthropomorphized blood drops, dancing). Since blood type correlates with race, many types common in the West are all but nonexistent in China. In addition to collecting and providing blood, the Center organizes blood type "clubs" for the dissemination of medical information and pick-up lines involving the phrase "compatible fluids."
Fully half of Shanghai's annual 80 tons of donated blood goes to people from other provinces and nations. So get over your trypanophobia (fear of needles) and roll up that sleeve.
Related links
Shanghai Daily: Expats Urged to Donate Rare Drop, or Two
Shanghai Blood Center
Shanghai Blood Center, 1191 Hongqiao Lu, 虹桥路1191号, Tel: 62758257
SBC advertisement via Advertolog
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 Have you ever seen Chinese labourers on the streets digging holes, carrying goods, and what not - in their JACKETS? We have, and always wondered:
1. if it was their bosses that enforced some kind of a dress code on them?
2. if they would not be more efficient in whatever they were doing without their jackets on?
3. if they had some kind of superhuman genes that made them able to bear the heat more than the rest of us?
Here at the busy Shanghaiist newsroom (read: our dingy 10 square meter bedroom), your correspondent is dressed in absolutely nothing but a pair of boxers, comfortably insulated from the heat and humidity out there.
And we read from this Reuters report that 31 office buildings in Lujiazui, Pudong have declared that Fridays would be "Cool dress day" and "white-collar office staff should go to work dressing comfortably on July 27th to promote environmental awareness" (blue-collar workers, please continue to come in your jackets!). Also, to save energy and to "promote environmental awareness", offices have been encouraged to turn up the air-conditioner temperatures.
We haven't heard of many companies around here with "Dress Down Fridays" (but what we do we know, we haven't had a "decent job" in a long while). And while we do think this is a good change, the image conjured up in our mind of everyone going to work in Lujiazui in their shorts is somewhat hilarious. Shanghaiists in the Lujiazui district, start snapping away and share with us your pictures at info@shanghaiist.com!
Photo from slworking2.
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 The Xinmin Evening Post announced today the winners of the third annual City of Shanghai Outstanding Website Awards. This year a committee of specialists chose 58 winners in 13 categories to receive awards, categories including Best Portals, E-Commerce Sites, Sites serving Women and Children, Higher Education Websites, and Sites for the "New Countryside".
The website that the Evening Post chose to highlight was the near-to-our-hearts Shanghai Daily, the only English-language site out of nine to win the Awards' top honor, a "Civilized Internet" Forward-Thinking Institution prize. They were cited for their website's innovative and unique features, like 24-hour news updates, the Live in Shanghai lifestyle guide, and the "Insight" financial magazine.
Congrats to the Shanghai Daily for winning this award. It's not hard to run across new features on each visit to their site: our current favorite is the "Elegant Rhythms of the East" mini-site, where you have the chance to win CDs and tickets to recitals by submitting questions about Chinese folk music. We particularly enjoy crossing swords with their editorial opinions (puh-leaze, Peking Opera is a tool of cultural oppression), but wish they would leave their old articles up on the free part of the site for a little longer.
And speaking of newspapers, ABBao is a site that archives the front pages of over 100 national newspapers in image form, browsable on the internet. Sounds like a great site to while away a muggy summer morning without having to walk to the newspaper stand. Hopefully they'll add the Shanghai Daily soon. (Thanks John!)
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 So about a week ago, the news surfaced that German-born Swiss-based couturier Phillipp Plein released a limited edition T-shirt that screamed "F-U-C-K YOU CHINA". OK, it was more like a whisper - the words were only readable up close and as we all know, couturiers are all about subtle elegance.
We didn't think too much about it but boy did it create a massive furore on the Chinese internet (see here and here). Someone else decided to declare their undying love for the brand at ***-You-Philipp-Plein.net, and in three languages no less - English, Chinese and German.
Also check out the wonderfully thought-out letter written by Philipp Plein's PR guys in response to a customer complaint:
The PHILIPP PLEIN Int. AG company would like to explain what lies behind this abbreviation and give the following statement: f.u.c.k.u.china stands for “the fascinating & urban collection: kiss you China”.
We would like to specify that we never intended to hurt or offend the citizens of China .
On the contrary, with this collection we wanted to thank China because it gives us the possibility to produce some articles of our collection on a competitive price basis. In addition, the man craft we found in China is very precise and leads to a good quality of the clothes. This is a great satisfaction for us and for our end customers.
We are a young and dynamic company and this is why we intituled this limited T-shirt edition “fascinating and urban” collection and “kiss” is a way to thank the Chinese savoir-faire.
Ooooh... fascinating & urban collection: kiss you China eh? Chinese savoir-faire eh? Philipp Plein would have to work a lot harder to sound more convincing. We suggest they first fire their public relations guys.
The hullaballoo also inspired eminent Shanghai Daily columnist Wu Jiayin to put pen to paper and to proclaim in his column that the T-shirt was "greatly hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" - yes all 1.4 billion of them. Philipp Plein has since clarified that only 100 items of the offending t-shirt were produced (they were made in China if we understood their letter above correctly!), and that the product has now been withdrawn from the market. Unfortunately though, one of those 100 t-shirts was found on the back of a German student studying in Shanghai. We wonder if they will banish him next.
Image from CSR-Asia.
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