Shanghai is considered the Paris of Asia. There’s a reason for this, and I hope the photos and video in this post will show that.
Notice the Chinese middle-class tourists on the boat (click on the photo to enlarge it). Study how they dress, see the cameras, and ask yourself this—if these people are so brainwashed and downtrodden, why are they out taking a cruise on the Huangpu River taking pictures as if they were visiting the Grand Canyon or New York?
Pudong side of Huangpu River
See the city skyline along the river.
This is only a small portion of Shanghai.
Shanghai side of Huangpu River – the crowded Bund
West of the Huangpu River is Shanghai. On the east bank is Pudong—fifty years ago, the land on this side of the river was farm land.
A close up of the crowded Bund on the Shanghai side of the river
Check out the number of Chinese tourists visiting the Bund in this photograph. I’ve waded through these crowds. These people are laughing, smiling, eating, taking pictures of each other, clowning around. They are having more fun than I see from most American tourists when I travel in the United States.
Look at the signs: Nikon, LG, and Nestle.
China has about five hundred million people living in its cities. Another eight hundred million live in rural areas. There are now more Chinese surfing and Blogging on the Internet (642 million), and that’s more than twice the population of the United States. And there are ways to get around the censors to visit forbidden websites hosted in other countries. The average time spent on the Internet in China is almost three hours a day or more than 19 hours a week.
The population of Shanghai—the undisputed largest and wealthiest city in China—has a population of almost 24 million people compared to the largest city in the United States, New York, with a population of 8.5 million.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the unique love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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[…] have taken this cruise, too, and this link will take you to that post. The Huangpu River is 71 miles long making it shorter than the Li River. The Huangpu flows through […]