This was a very challenging but interesting day. Accompanied by Prof. Lü Xinyu’s PhD student Zhao Yeming (the person with the Fudan ID Card) and armed with a letter of introduction from Fudan, Wu Dan and I set off to the Wujiaochang Street Office (五角场街道办事处). This is the lowest rung of government. We were in search of the government vision for Wujiaochang and also some information about the regulation of screens (if there are any). Chinese government officials are often loathe to talk on the record. This is called “passing the ball” in Chinese. They prefer to send you off to see someone else, especially if you are foreigner, which always makes people nervous. After all, you never know when it’s going to turn out that you’ve accidentally given away a state secret. On the other hand, it would be rude to simply turn us away, so the best way is to refer us up the food chain, and that’s pretty much what happened. To cut a long story short, we did not get too far with the government officials, but we did a bit better at the department stores.

The gatekeeper at the street office sent us to the Residents’ Service Centre (居民服务中心). This is where you apply for various minor business licenses etc. The woman running the place by herself told us to go to the Propaganda Section (宣传处), which turned out to be on the 5th floor. The people there sent us off to “Teacher Wang” in an office on the 22nd Floor of the Orient Shopping Plaza, where they took our details and called us back to say they could not be interviewed by us without permission from the Yangpu District level.

However, the woman in the Residents’ Service Centre did immediately confirm that it was impossible to simply hang up a moving image screen in a public place, and that one did have to get permission. But she wasn’t the person to process that application, it was somewhere else. (We’ll try to visit later.)

On our way up to the 22nd Floor of the Orient, we also visited the Marketing Department (市场部) of the department store, on the 17th floor. Wu Dan will give a more detailed account of this discussion, held in the foyer of the office, but what I gleaned was already very useful. She told us that the screen was not there when the store itself was built around 2000, but was added in 2005 and went into operation in 2006. It was now run by a media company, and they leave everything to them. They don’t even bother to check the ads to see if they are appropriate to the store’s image or not. They just take the money from the company. When I asked her, she said she did not know how much they were paid. She indicated as well that the government requires them to put a certain amount of PSAs in with the commercial advertising. She was fully aware that the screen was poor compared to that on the Bailian Youyi, but pointed out that although business was better than it used to be, Wujiaochang is not Xujiahui, and there are few customers except on the weekends and during the holidays. Meanwhile, they are still waiting for the subway, and so there is not much motivation to invest in upgrading the screen right now. She also said their screen was on from 8 in the morning to 11 at night, and turned off to save electricity and money. Besides, there are not many people around during the night, she claimed.

Wu Dan had already had a brief conversation with Bailian Youyi on the phone the day before. Again, she’ll give a more detailed account and we hope to have a chance to talk to them later. But they told her already that although SMG handles it for them, they do work together to make sure the ad images match their store image.

Next, we went over to the Paris Printemps. (I think I need to see if I can just stand in the doorway and photograph what is on the screens I’ve designated as of interest. Hopefully no one will give a damn.) We were directed up to the Marketing Department again, on the 7th floor this time. A man came out and chatted with us. He told us that Pico Media supplied the pairs of large flatscreens that run throughout the store and outside the elevators, as well as the pairs of screens on boxes that had caught my interest. Pico pays the store for this. The only screens that are the store’s own are the ones in the elevators. The content on the screens is a mix of what Pico wants to put on and the store’s ads. The store and Pico collaborate and make sure the content is OK for both. When asked about the position of the boxes in the entryway, where no one pays them any attention, he seemed to think the logic was that there should be something on the way in to represent the store to the customers. Hmmm… not very convincing to me. As for having the same stuff on both screens, I forget what he said, but it seemed quite speculative.

He explained that the charity boxes had been put there by the government. (This was very ironic, since this morning a researcher from Xi’an in the Fudan Centre had been explaining to me that he thought a major reason why comparatively few Chinese give to charity is that they don’t trust the government not to steal it.) The box was put there and other places throughout the mall by the government, although he was not sure what government office put it there.