Today’s main job was to do the Shanghai South Railway Station walk I didn’t manage to do properly last time. This will be the last of my 4 “walks” in Shanghai.
Met Wu Dan at one of the 2 metro stations for Shanghai South Railway Station, and then went up to ground level to look for somewhere to eat. The whole area around the station is grassed and manicured and without any of the teeming mass of hawkers and carts I normally expect at Chinese railway stations, so Dan and I had to walk a long way until we found a little restaurant for lunch. We started our walk from there. Even though this was a very cheap restaurant, it had an LCD with a Hong Kong movie playing on it, and all the people in the restaurant were happily sitting around watching it. Dan pointed out that even the most ordinary restaurants in China now all have this as a standard feature.
Walking out to the road, we only saw CCTV at the intersection of Liuzhou and Humin Roads. Then, you go down into the subways that lead to the station itself. Once in the station, as we explored we saw 3 types of screen. There were screens that functioned as noticeboards with red and orange characters. Most of these were to direct traffic, i.e. arrival and departure boards or boards saying what train departed from what platform etc. Some were public noticeboards — the last relic of the blackboards Wenhao suggested to me were the genealogy for screens in China. These had various slogans on them (from “form an orderly line” to “sincerity makes you smile”), none of them particularly aggressively revolutionary! I think these first two kinds of screens might be LEDs rather than LCDs. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode) The third type of screens were LCDs that showed what appeared to be TV. In the general waiting areas and the arrival areas, this was clearly the same on every screen, and it seemed to be a special TV feed for the station. We’d need to spend more time looking at this to understand what it’s showing. But it seems to be a mix of advertising, news, and short feature items. The first-class waiting rooms, which are on the inner circle of the station, are very screened up. It was unclear to me if those screens were showing a greater variety of programming.
In addition to these main visible sets of screens, there are the radar screens at the security check-in and screens on tills in shops.
The station itself has a very unusual design. It is circular, with entrances from the SE, SW, NE, and NW. There is an outer circle, then a security check at those 4 entrances, and then you’re on an inner circle. Here is where the shops, restaurants, first-class waiting rooms, and so on are. The open waiting areas for passengers are in the centre. To get to those you need a ticket. So, if we do an audit later, the only way will be to buy a ticket to the nearest and cheapest destination and then not use it! From there, entrances lead down to the individual platforms. Although the whole area seems very open, glass partitions and walls everywhere guide flows and impede access. Dan remembered how the old corrugated iron at stations was much more permeable, although it didn’t look it. When she was a kid, her parents couldn’t afford train tickets for all the family, so the kids would scramble underneath the corrugated iron walls and smuggle themselves into the station. That is clearly impossible with all this glass!
This was Dan’s first visit to the station. We both commented to each other that it was like an airport. The fact that the ticket checking points are called “check-in” in English confirms that. This echoes what we observed at St Pancras at the Eurostar points.
We also noted that the CCTV was discreet and not all over the place. In fact, Dan did not recognize the CCTV for what it was. People are clearly not intended to be conscious of it. This is quite difference from the UK, where you are constantly being told that you are being watched. Clearly, there are different cultures of CCTV.
We also noted that the circular design of the place might be elegant but it is also quite prone to be disorienting, because it looks the same pretty much wherever you stand. The pillars have numbers on them, and this is clearly to help people find things. When we asked the men at security how we could get in to the middle area, one suggested that we talk nicely to the ticket checker. But the young ticket checker would not let us in on any account. He told us to go to station master on duty and see if we could persuade him, saying “the office is at pillar 2.”
Next, we went book shopping. Dan will help to search out literature on the concept of the public and public space in China. But library access is difficult and slow sometimes here, and books are cheap, so we figured we should just grab what we could. Then we went on to meet Yu Wenhao for dinner.
Over dinner, Wenhao told me about his thoughts for a photo essay. He wants to do nighttime time-lapse photography, which I think will indeed be very glamorous! He also says the time-lapse will effectively remove the contents of the screen, and make them pure expanses of light. This also sounds quite interesting to me.
