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.

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