I watched 'Piers Morgan On Shanghai' on ITV the other night. I wanted to see how they handled Shanghai, and I am drawn to anything in which Morgan is involved - a fascination of the abomination. There were all sorts of problems here, many stemming from the fact that Morgan is one of the most irritating people in the world. Skilled in the art of utter boorishness, he is the man I would least like to have representing my country to China. 'When I think of shipping tycoons, they don't normally look like you', he leered at a young businesswoman. He found a self-raising toilet seat very funny. While helping to drill a new subway tunnel (why did they let him?) he quipped 'I'm literally boring Shanghai'. Ha!
The programme was packed with the expected cliches: Shanghai is 'the capitalist playground that the rest of this socialist state aspires to'. It's 'the gateway to the world'. There is 'a tension between ancient East and modern West.' Time lapse photography and taiqi. Shiny skyscrapers and dirty alleys. Cadillacs and condemned homes. Tycoons and the evicted urban poor. Shanghai is where, opined Morgan, 'the super rich and the desperately poor live together in this vast, smouldering cauldron'.
I wonder when the popular image of China in Britain is going to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy of superwealth vs. huddled masses. It's been a staple in images of China for over 20 years now - the peasant cycling past the skyscraper. This is not to dismiss the extremes of wealth that currently exist in China. In fact, the potentially most interesting point of the programme came when Morgan was chillin' with some successful female entrepreneurs and asked one of them which Western brands her company made clothes for. She was embarassed and giggled and said she was contractually obliged not to say. It all got a bit awkward, and behind the awkwardness was the elephant in the room that Morgan refused even to glance at: Why was she a 'successful entrepreneur'? Why can't she reveal which companies she works for? Because she's exploiting the labour of migrant workers from Anhui, one presumes.
There are clearly thousands more important stories to be told about China than the fascinations of the Shanghai rich with Barbie dolls, but having a few token scenes where Morgan stands outside a condemned house and talks about 'capitalist winners and socialist losers' does not qualify as balanced journalism. Nor does briefly mentioning a lack of independent trade unions and then spending five minutes discussing the popularity of foie gras. Perhaps one can't ask much of ITV, but you do see similar stuff in more respectable places.
These hoary old journalistic motifs ignore the majority of urban residents who are neither forelock-tugging migrant workers nor plutocrats mispronouncing luxury car names while smoking cigars in champagne jacuzzis. If ITV really want to show that the Chinese are 'just like us', they would be better off leaving Xintiandi and its fluent English-speaking sophisticates who know who Simon Cowell is.
In fact, ITV would have done much better to subtitle and screen an episode of 蜗居 ('Dwelling Narrowness' as it's horribly translated). There's a Wall Street Journal piece on it from a while back here, and one on China Hush here.
It's a Chinese soap opera about the problems of middle-class residents of a pseudonymous city, clearly Shanghai. These aren't the kind of foreign-educated shipping magnates Morgan banters with in English in the ITV programme, but white-collar workers with degrees from Chinese universities. In the midst of China's housing bubble they find themselves unable to get a foot on a property ladder. House prices feature heavily in the dialogue which often gets a bit wooden. The Daily Mail would like these bits. However it gets much better: there is sex with corrupt officials, marital breakdown and familial estrangement. It's bleak (so far, at least - I'm only half way through). So close to the bone is it, that, reportedly, the government stopped it from being screened on TV before the series had finished.
I can imagine it being screened here late night on Channel 4 (or perhaps the Channel 4 of 15 years ago), but I wish ITV would run it instead of Morgan. It might be quite popular; it certainly touches on an issue close to many middle-class hearts in Britain. (I meant house prices, though after Mrs Robinson-gate, perhaps there are others...). It might also mean we could increase our collective understanding of China a fraction. Surely Morgan and others would approve of this, since they seem so worried about China 'taking over the world'.
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