19 days before the Expo starts (as numerous screens tell me) and I am getting packed up to go home tomorrow. This morning, I went around the neighborhood getting a few more shots of blackboards I had spotted in the entrances to communities. Some of them are highly wrought and very artistic chalk drawings. Still, I guess fewer and fewer communities still have these. I imagine one reason is that the artists themselves are dying off and not being replaced.
Then, at lunchtime, I got a dramatic call from Wu Dan saying that the people at the Jiangwan-Wujiaochang Municipal Sub-Centre Construction and Administration Office (江湾—五角场市级副中心建设和管理委员会办公室) on the 22nd floor of the Orient Shopping Centre had finally relented. After maintaining again and again that they were too busy to see us, they had consented to an interview at 3.30 this afternoon. I rushed over to Wujiaochang to find that the big “Haibao” Expo figurine in the sunken plaza appeared to have given birth to twelve offspring. It was an eerie sight. Maybe I’m just getting out of Shanghai in time before the whole city is taken over by little blue aliens!
In the office, we met not with the promised “Teacher Wang”, but with a Vice-Director called Rong Zhaoda (戎兆达). I’m afraid that another heavy Shanghai accent made it hard for me to follow. But with Dan’s help and a recording we will be able to make sure we have not missed anything out. Sadly, however, the first thing that needs to be acknowledged is that the Yangpu District government folks who sent us to Mr. Rong did not really get what we needed, as he seemed not have the details and the big picture about Wujiaochang that we were hoping for. It turns out this office is below Yangpu District Office, and according to Mr. Rong the main job is mediating between different stakeholders at the Wujiaochang site itself. When we first arrived there a week or so back and said we wanted the big picture and had been told to find Teacher Wang, we were told he was the right person for that. Well, maybe he is. But Mr. Rong did his best in his place.
He gave us quite a lot of basic information that is in all the material we already picked up from the office earlier. When we asked him about the 3rd Northern stage of Wujiaochang, the “Knowledge Business Centre,” it seemed clear from his lack of concrete answers that this is planned for the future if they can get the other bits finished and up and running. I didn’t really get any answers to my questions about what the difference might between this and the central Knowledge and Innovation Community part of the site. They are both supposed to be live-work-play centres. He emphasized greening and low carbon in the 3rd stage, but that’s about as much as we got.
In a comparison with the more developed sub-centre at Xujiahui, he said they had the advantage of having been in operation for a long time, whereas Wujiaochang had only really been up and going in the new century. But Wujiaochang has the advantage of the universities nearby and is a much larger site.
We asked him about what it meant that the promotion materials often proclaim it a “public activity centre” (公共活动中心). The answer was shopping, promenading, and tourism. Yangpu has 1.2 million residents, and in addition the coloured egg and so on attract people from the neighboring areas of Hongkou, Zhabei, and Baoshan.
We tried to engage him about the screens and city beautification. He had plenty to say about the dominant colour scheme designated for Wujiaochang (blue and grey), but not so much about the screens. I got the impression they have not given much thought to how tatty that Orient Shopping Centre screen looks, not least because so many others have direct jurisdiction over it in various aspects.
Overall, I had a sense that this office is too low on the pecking order to set directions or policy. They are simple there to mediate, and screens have not come into that yet.
Today was mostly taken up with meetings to pick up materials, including the excellent set of shots Wenhao has taken of screens in taxis and public transport screens. There are a lot of shots that include people looking at their personal screens at the same time as the public transport screens are above them. We get a strong sense of a multiply screened environment, so to speak.
Today was the day subway line no.10 finally opened, albeit for very limited hours. However, the prospect of not having to do bus plus subway journeys to get to and from Fudan/Wujiaochang is very appealing!
In the afternoon, Dan and I met Mr Zhang Jingyue, of the Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives, which is part of Shanghai Media Group (SMG), the same folks who run the big screen hanging off the New Era Mall at Wujiaochang. We had been put in touch with him as part of our search for photos of early Wujiaochang. The neighborhood has a complex history, having been designated as the site of the Shanghai City Government in the first city plan back in the early 1930s. Various government buildings and the Jiangwan Stadium — now part of KIC — were all built around here. Mr. Zhang showed us a lot of documentary footage he had painstakingly gathered over the years and put together, and it was very interesting. But there were almost no glimpses of the Wujiaochang intersection itself, sadly.
Mr. Zhang was very helpful and full of information. He explained to us that almost all documentary filmmakers and even photographers were focused on famous people and sights, and there was little interest in recording everyday life until the late 1970s. Then a famous Japanese filmmaker came to Shanghai with that sort of project. Local filmmakers and photographers did not follow suit until even later. Furthermore, the five roads intersection was way out in the countryside, even as late as the 1980s, when Mr. Zhang remembers that people living out there got different, lower ration amounts than people living in the middle of the city. That means that photographers of the city would not necessarily have gone out there very much. The first time the neighborhood got much development was when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and built a large building there. That is knocked down now and people don’t discuss it much, he said. Finally, in the early years of the People’s Republic, there were a lot of military bases out there, also making it difficult to photograph.
Afterwards, Mr. Zhang gave us a lot of suggestions of other places to track down images. I guess we have to decide how much energy we really want to put into what is not a top priority for the project. I’m also concerned about how to get permission to use the images even if we do find them. But I’m sure we’ll keep looking, even if slowly. Dan and I had a big summing-up session about all the things we’d still like to try and get. We’ve got a lot of information already, but there’s quite a lot more we need to amass, I feel.
In the morning I met Tong Xin and Ellen Lai of Urban China in their offices near Tongji University. Ellen showed me the galleys of the section on light in the city (including her work with Friends of the Earth on light pollution in Hong Kong) in the upcoming edition. She told me they did an interview with the head of the Shanghai city urban beautification centre, and from that she learnt that they took a strong interest in shaping the look of the city, especially in regard to landmark sites. So, for example, they have worked to ensure that the neon lights along Nanjing Road match the historical look of the long vertical shop signs that used to hang there a long time ago. Interestingly, the residents along Huaihai Road were not so keen on lots of screens and neon on their apartment buildings at first, when the city suggested that was a way of livening the place up and giving it a global city feel. But then when the property values went up in the buildings with screens, everyone wanted them.
Ellen was interested to know that we were going to interview the men in the Yangpu Urban Beautification office in the afternoon. She wanted to know more about regulation of quantities of PSA ads on screens, hours of turning on and off, and so on. I got the impression they are interested in what we’re doing, but that we need to send them stuff (including lots of photos!) to see if we can get them really excited.
In the afternoon, Wu Dan and I got to meet the Head (所长) and Vice-Head (副所长) of the Shanghai Yangpu District Municipal Administration of Urban Beautification (上海市杨浦区绿化和市容管理局景管理所) — Wang Guo-liang (王国梁) and Wang Bao-Hai (王宝海), respectively. Wang Guo-liang was the younger of the two and did almost all the talking. However, he had a heavy Shanghai accent, and I found it a bit difficult to follow him. However, after reading Wu Dan’s notes and discussing it a bit more with her, I think we were able to gather the following rather useful information.
First, the Administration’s work covers three areas: sanitation, developing the look of the city, and dealing with street stalls and other such activities. Outdoor advertising comes under the second category, and so that is how they get involved with regulating screens. As the discussion developed, it became clear that this “outdoor” (户外) stipulation was important, because it means they are not concerned with screens inside the doorways to buildings, windows, the entrances to residential compounds and so on, even though they are visible from the street.
Anyone wanting to put up a screen (or other form of outdoor advertising) needs to apply to three regulatory bodies: 广告内容归市工商管理局 (Industry and Commerce Administration) to get the content approved; 还有土地规划局 (Land Planning Department) to check it fits in with the city plan and isn’t too close to traffic lights etc; and them. They are concerned about the size and shape of the screen (to see that it is suitable for the look of the city), the safety aspects such as making sure it is properly anchored for typhoons and has a lightning conductor, and that it will not have a negative impact on its environment.
There are three kinds of areas: commercial areas, where more or less anything goes; totally residential areas where (in theory) outdoor advertising is forbidden; and areas of controlled usage, such as densely populated areas which are also semi-commercial. In regard to the latter, as an example of something they’d have a problem with he gave an over-sized billboard set at angles completely different to those of the building it was on top of to get maximum exposure to traffic. People have to apply once a year to get their outdoor sign approved (and checked for safety by one of 4 companies in Shanghai who do that work). In theory this also applies to small LEDs hanging over the entrances to shops, although he realizes lots of people have put those up without applying for permission. Application is free. However, for big LEDs, like the ones at Wujiaochang, they might get an approval that is for 3 or 4 years, rather than only 1 year. However, the maximum period without renewing is 6 years.
Residents are increasingly conscious of the idea of light pollution. So, they usually ask people to turn the brightness of the light down by 50% after 9 p.m. They recognize that if you run a 24 hour shop, which is a convenience for people, you also need to have a sign so that they can find it. But if it’s at half-strength during the night, then that’s much the same as street lighting, and it would be unreasonable for people to complain. However, they do get complaints from residents, and a lot of their work is about mediation between residents and commercial interests. When they do this work they are not thinking about enforcing a particular law or regulation, but rather about working according to the principle of “not having a negative effect on the residents’ lives.” In a commercial area (such as Wujiaochang), it’s up to the screen owners when they turn it on and off. Like everyone else we’ve spoken to so far, he suggested that it wouldn’t make sense to have screens on all night, as it would be a waste of expensive electricity at a time when there are few people in the neighbourhood.
So far they have not come across screens with sound. If they did, they’d receive complaints if it was too loud and intervene accordingly. He also said that if they noticed screens were in a state of disrepair, they’d tell the owners to fix them. (However, going by the Orient Shopping Centre, it seems quite an advanced state of disrepair is allowed….)
In Shanghai, regulation requires that at least 10% of screen time/space should be given over to PSAs. However, in an area like Yangpu, they have a different problem, which is not enough commercial interest in the advertising spaces that they already have. So, PSAs fill the gap. If his Administration wants a PSA put up, they will pay for it. Whoever wants it put up pays for it.
We asked about “cultural squares” (wenhua guangchang), but this was clearly a term he was unfamiliar with, indicating it is not part of the regulatory discourse. The terms he produced were “city sub-centre” (chengshi fuzhongxin) and “commercial centre of the northeast city” (dongbei chengshi shangye zhongxin).
On the way out after the taping was finished, he told me that basically the market decides and that their main job is to mediate between commercial interests and the residents.
This was intended to be a break from the screen project, but of course I have screens on the brain at the moment, so it did not work out that way!
First, leaving through Shanghai Railway Station, I couldn’t help but compare it and its screens to those in Shanghai South Railway Station, which we are studying. The station is much more dependent on the sheer concrete architecture for channelling flows, although the same LEDs are found throughout. In the waiting room, I noticed the combination of red, green and yellow (rather than orange) are used here. I wonder if the orange at Shanghai South is deliberate, or is it just a variation on yellow, so to speak. I could see a logic within the context of the waiting room: red LEDs showing through which gate passengers will go to get on the train, turning to green when they are checking tickets and passing people through the gate, and then to yellow when the gate closes just before the train leaves. However, as I looked at other LEDs around the station, colours were being used in less evidently logical ways, again. I’m not at all sure there is a strict colour code logic at work.
Also, in the waiting room, there was a very large LED in one corner playing a TV channel. The producer of the channel (which mixed what seemed to be children’s cartoon programming with ads) was not clearly marked by a logo. The sound was on. This seems to me to be different from what was on all the screens at Shanghai South Railway Station. Once on the train to Suzhou, there was another LCD showing a similar (but different, I think) channel. I wonder if this is specific to the HRC (Highspeed Rail China) company that runs the bullet trains? There was a bar at the bottom of the screen with info about arrival times at stations, etc etc. The same information was also running across a “zouzi” LED above the doorway of the carriage. All this raises the question of how many different channels there are on different trains and in different stations across the Chinese railway system and why.
After arriving in Suzhou, we went to Yuqian’s very upscale apartment block (owned and run by the same developers who ran the Crowne Plaza Hotel next door, where I was lusuriating, I mean staying). I noticed immediately that inside the “xiaoqu” (community), there was an LED. In this case, the red lettering announced in Chinese and in English details of a yoga class, which tells you a lot about who lives here. The Crowne Plaza also had “welcome” LEDs at the door. The blackboard culture really is everywhere! Focus Media also had their screens in front of the elevators in the lobby of Yuqian’s apartment building. The sort of people who live here are exactly the kind of valuable upscale-but-difficult-to-reach demographic they are targeting, I would imagine. Even when we went out sightseeing, we found “welcome” LEDs at the entrance to some of the sights.
In the evening of the 6th, I was treated to a very nice dinner in a very fancy restaurant overlooking the Jinji (Golden Rooster) Lake. In regard to the idea of the lightscape and enchantment, it was interesting to notice that a very elaborate light show lit up an island in the middle of the lake until about 9 p.m., when it was turned off. This seemed divorced from any direct commercial effort. Rather, it is perhaps construed as a contribution from the city government to its citizens, upgrading the quality of their lives. Next door to the restaurant is the Suzhou Science and Cultural Arts Centre. Designed by Herzog and de Meuron, the same people who did the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium in Beijing, it is inevitably known as the Suzhou Bird’s Nest. Its outer skin had a very elaborate light show playing across it. First it changed from one colour to another, going through a rainbow range. Then it sort of went crackers and did multi-coloured patterns. Yuqian said she didn’t mind the single colours but thought the rainbow display was too vulgar. I think I’m getting more vulgar about these things…
Yuqian’s father very kindly drove us around town. This included a new shopping mall (called “Times Square”!), which has what I was told was the longest “tianping” (sky screen, or canopy screen) in the world over it. According to one article I have read online since, there are one 2 others, one in Beijing and the other in Las Vegas. It was only playing ads for itself when we were there, but there weren’t many people around mid-week on a very cold and windy evening, so I guess that is not so surprising. There are at least 2 Youtube clips of this, so if you’re interested, check them out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfbUvAMJwqc, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a-yXUGbNbw&feature=relatedl. Close by there was also what I was told was the largest ferris wheel in China. It used a lot of coloured neon, and, even more spectacularly, had a sort of hub in the middle where ads were being projected/screened. This certainly gives the London Eye a fun for its money. Wikipedia’s entry on Ferris Wheels lists it as the fourth largest in the world, and says that another one in Nanchang is the tallest in China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferris_wheel.
On the 7th, we spent most of the day far from screen territory around Tai Lake. But when we came back to town and walked along Shantang Street, we noticed that as well as being popular with tourists, this “traditional” street along a canal (Suzhou is the “Venice of the East”) has lots of wedding photo shops, including one which advertised its services not only with an LED “zouzi” across the top of the entrance, but also with an LCD flat screen showing a CGI video fantasy of the ideal wedding and wedding photo service.
When we got back to Shanghai on the 8th and went to the ticket office to get Yuqian her ticket back to Suzhou in the evening, we found that human ticket sellers had been replaced by perhaps 30 self-service machines that are touch-screen operated. We both commented that they seemed a lot easier to deal with than the usually surly ticket sellers! We arrived at Wujiaochang in time to catch the morning taiqi class and the dancers inside the Wanda, doing their stuff before the shops opened.
The 8th was given over to my talk to PhD students and another seminar concerning translation. Zhang Shujuan (my former TA from when I was at Fudan a long time ago) was there. We had a discussion in which she raised the idea of screens as concealment in some very interesting ways. She said she’d been thinking about how the egg at Wujiaochang both displays light but also conceals the roadway within it, and also how the big screen on the Bailian Youyicheng also constitute a kind of glittering screen behind which the alleyways and little stalls and restaurants around the Atlantic Department Store are hidden, too. I think this idea of the screen as something that draws the eye away from something else at the same time as it draws the eye to it is very interesting. Thank you, Shujuan!
Today, over lunch, Chris Connery recommended checking out the Yangpu Difang Zhi, or Local Gazette. Good point. Xinyu told me that there was a new LED screen in the yard where she lives. We went over there. I took a photo of a simple blackboard with a simple notice in white chalk, and then the LED. It has an advertising company’s logo on it. Afterwards we asked the guard at the back gate about it. He told us it was the property owners’ association (this is a private development in which most people presumably own their flats, as Xinyu does) that agreed to let the company put the LED in. There is apparently another facing the street near a school. He things the POA probably gets a few thousand a year for that and a thousand a year plus for this one.
Then I went over to Paris Printemps/Bali Chuntian to shoot what’s on the Pico double screen and the charity box screen inside the store’s doorway. The Pico boxes were showing a mix of music videos and commercials, at least two of which were for upcoming movies. However, one of those “upcoming” movies was 2012, which was advertised as due for release in November (i.e. last year), which makes me think this does not get updated as frequently as the one on the front of Bailian Youyicheng/New Era Mall. I noticed that Wenhao’s video was a bit different from the photos I had taken a few days before. The main reason, I guess, is because they’ve substituted the ads for upcoming TV shows with a new product ad, because the end of March launch date of the TV shows has come and gone.
As for the charity box, it very conveniently had a long video on it not only telling all about the charity and its activities, but also about the construction and placement of the boxes like the one we’re interested in. Although I still want to know how that particular one came to be in the entrance to Paris Printemps, it’s useful.
Finally, on over to KIC, which remains half finished and 90% empty, as far as I can tell. Maybe it’s just too early. Or maybe it’s a matter of things getting going more seriously after subway line 10 opens. Or maybe it’s just not going to succeed. Either way, I’m glad that Scott and I did not get very interested in the office we were shown there!
Into town on the subway again, this time to meet Wenhao and pick up the photos he has been taking. On the subway, as well as ads and news, I’ve been noticing quite a few other things, such as responses to hotline SMS questions about the World Expo (“How much will it cost if I want to park my car there for the day?” was one I spotted, and another asked about additional flights and trains in and out of Shanghai while the Expo is on). There seems to be a lot of PSA information about riding on the subway and so on. According to one newspaper article I read, they are expected 70 million visitors to Expo. That’s a lot of people from out of town, so I guess the PSAs are not so surprising.
Wenhao has taken an excellent series of shots in and around the Shanghai South Station without any trouble. I think we just have to take the line that it’s a public space, that no one stopped him, that lots of people take pictures there and put them on their blog and so on, and so we can go ahead, too, without asking for special permission. Fingers crossed… Everyone here seems to think I am crazy to want to get permission, and that it’s not necessary.
Wenhao has also taken very interesting videos of the 2 screens at Wujiaochang, as I requested. What makes them interesting is the way he has chosen to video them. He’s gone in close, so you see almost nothing except the screen, and he’s recorded sound, too. The result is eerily cinematic, as you are staring at the screen much as you would in a cinema, and not seeing any of the other things in the environment. It’s very thought-provoking. He has asked that if we use it in an exhibition (which I think I’d like to, even though my initial motivation for asking him to do this was purely to have a record of the ads for research purposes), we play the sound or make it available to listen to through headsets.
Finally, I’ve asked him to go and take a series of shots inside public transport.
His wife, who is a journalist, came along, too. We talked about the issue of screens in the back of taxis. It turns out she has heard they might be removed, too. But she hadn’t heard anything about a celeb being injured in an accident. What she had heard about was complaints from riders who feel they are being forced to watch ads and pay for it. She said the first thing does if she gets into a cab with one of these is turn it off. Well, I can understand that. I feel pretty much the same way.
Talking about the ads on public transport, she reminded me that MM is a subsidiary of Oriental Pearl Conglomerate (东方明珠集团), but that the lightboxes in the all the stations of the subway are Decaux (or 申通德高 in Chinese). She also said there were blackboards all around the old communities she knows.
I spent most of today trying to find and download relevant articles through the Fudan Library electronic system. Hopefully, I have got my hands on some useful stuff.
In the late afternoon, I went over to the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum to check out how the renovations are going. Dan and her family came across, too. It’s interesting to see how at home her little boy is in this place, and how much he likes it. While his dad took him around, Dan and I went over to where the AV Paradise and the Children’s Science Playground (or whatever it was called) was. It is closed and there is nothing to see, but presumably they are inside there doing the place over. I shall have to come back later in the year to see the outcome of all this.
The item of interest on this trip was seeing that the ticket office had been moved outside, creating an extra area in the lobby. They haven’t figured out what to do with it yet, but… they have a put an LED announcement screen in there, which functions much like the electronic blackboard we saw at the entrance to the community in Songjiang. In this case, they explained that the galleries were closed for renovation in both English and Chinese, and then ran the usual homilies about the Expo and all that. I photographed a cycle.
In the evening, Dan’s husband and I spoke over dinner about the screens. He’s a software engineer, and sees the differences between London, Cairo and Shanghai in a sort of early adopter and developmental logic. In other words, East Asians are early adopters, so you see more of all these electronic technologies in Japan first, then South Korea, and next in China. Europe comes later, and Cairo lags behind as an undeveloped country. But that’s not quite how I see it, even though I get his point. In Cairo, people might not have a lot of money, but every coffee shop and many more shops than in Shanghai have a TV (and often a flat screen one now). What is more striking to me is how the idea of modernity and progress still reigns so emphatically in China, not least now that people here can believe they are overtaking others and so on.
Today we decided to persevere further in our efforts to get some information about government and regulation of screens. As usual, it proved very difficult, with the tendency for everyone to refer us up the food chain again. However, we found some other interesting things out.
First, we sent a fax to the Yangpu District Propaganda Department to try and see if we can get them to tell “Teacher Wang” to give us an interview. The current line on that is we need to go over there and get a piece of paper with a stamp on it, and then take that back to “Teacher Wang”. Dan will do this next week while I’m in Suzhou, and I guess we have to hope that the interview might take place on Friday next week.
Having determined the location of the Yangpu District “Urban Beautification” (市容) department, which we’d been told was where you went to apply to hang a screen, we headed off to 700 Pingliang Road (平凉路), which is in the lower part of the district, close to Hongkou, and at the intersection with Huaide Road (怀德路). We arrived at midday, only to be stopped by the doorman (门卫), who told us they’d all gone to lunch and wouldn’t be back until 1.30 p.m. When we returned at 1.30, he quickly directed us to 3 men rushing out of the building. They were from the right department, but on their way to an appointment, and they directed us up to the Propaganda Department to make an appointment. Up there, we met Wang Jian of the “Shanghai Yangpu District Municipal Administration of Urban Beautification.” He wants us to fax him a list of questions (no email) and then will set up a meeting with the appropriate people. Maybe.
However, we did make some interesting discoveries while we were cooling our heels waiting for the guys to come back from lunch. After eating our own lunch, we walked around the neighbourhood. It’s an increasingly rare example of the “lilong” traditional neighbourhoods that are being labelled as slums and bulldozed all over the central city. First, we noticed there were no screens here, not even tickertape LEDs. Second, we discovered blackboards at the entrances to the lilongs. This is the missing link for me, and having these photos (complete with chalk versions of the Expo emblem!) is perfect to support my argument about the blackboard lineage.
From there, we went up to the Bailian Youyicheng department store at Wujiaochang and had a brief chat with Xu Jin, a designer with the Operations Department of the store. She seemed a bit less well-informed than the woman we spoke to the other day at the Orient. But she told us that the screen had been installed in 2008, and was not part of the original design of the building, which was built in 2006 (I think I heard her say — Dan?). The store retains control over up to 1/6 of the content, which they can use to put their own advertising on. Otherwise, the screen is controlled by SMG. Youyicheng does not vet what SMG puts on the screen, and so far is not concerned about whether it’s appropriate to their image or not. She said the screen operates the same hours as the store is open (10-10), but I know it starts earlier and runs later. She gave the usual reason for not running it 24 hours — lack of people in the neighbourhood. She also told us that sometimes they make their own ads, but for clips like the ones running currently, they get an outside company to do it for them. SMG probably pays them for the use of the screen (she did not know how much and could not confirm for sure), but the store’s own 1/6 use of the screen is probably factored into the payment.
Dan told me that she had been able to find no information about axing the screens in taxis. In the taxi from the district office up to Wujiaochang, we talked to the driver and he said pretty much the same thing. Maybe it’s all an urban legend?
Finally, over dinner this evening, I was told that the price of flat screens and LEDs has dropped a lot recently, helping to make them more affordable.
It has poured with rain all day, and I’ve been catching up on my fieldnotes and visiting local bookstores in search of more materials.
However, on the subway on the way into town in the evening, I noticed a PSA about what not to do on the subway (no smoking, don’t step down onto the tracks even if you’ve dropped your mobile phone down there, etc etc). It began with a woman in a uniform addressing us and saying “The platform is everyone’s public space…” (站台是我们大家的公共空间).
