Yesterday started with a walk to our local expo centre — the one whose white, wave-like roofs catch my eye every time I stare out at the view from our 20th-floor balcony.
Normally, a R10 taxi ride would have sufficed to get us to the expo centre in Shanghai. There is something deeply gratifying about walking to a place when you know other people would have travelled across the world to get to the same spot.
Business people from around the world make the long flights, expensive hotels and jet lag part of the price tag to get into the city now at the centre of the world economy.
After a scenic riverside walk, we arrived at our destination half an hour later, showing our international passports to get in free of charge. The trade fair is one of Shanghai’s largest and one that fills up every inch of space that nine aircraft-hanger-like halls can offer. Last year, the six-day fair brought in US$3,3-billion (about R24-billion) of business, not far off the GDP of many African economies.
Walking through rows and rows of consumer goods, sports equipment, ornaments and clothing, it was easy to start imagining the same products lining the shelves of Clicks, Mr Price and Cardies back at home.
The Chinese mean business and this is a place of one-stop deal-making. Not only can you purchase just about any consumable the Chinese economy can deliver, there are fancy restaurants to charm the buyers, meeting rooms to negotiate the deal, translators to bridge the language divide, legal services to help with contracts, police offices for disputes and freight companies to get the goods safely home.
Later, we found ourselves in a much smaller school hall helping to sort out clothing donations from expats that were being boxed up and sent to far away, poverty-stricken Yunnan Province. These are just some of the contrasts that make up daily life in Shanghai.
It was not that long ago that I had the idea of moving from our Sandton home to live in Dube, Soweto. I wanted to experience a different dimension of our country. My Zulu was conversational at best, but I had spent time working with a number of primary schools in Soweto and felt drawn by the strong sense of community.
But Wayne Gretzky, Canada’s renowned hockey player, once famously said that the trick is not about skating to where the puck is, but rather skating to where the puck is going to be. And, from a South African point of view, China looked like the place to be heading to — not only is the world becoming a smaller place, but China is playing an increasingly bigger role in the global goldfish bowl.
And so, instead of Soweto, my wife and I have now been living in Shanghai for half a year. As opposed to brushing up on my Zulu, I have been studying Mandarin at a top local university for the past semester. It seems like two incompatible decisions — Shanghai or Soweto — but life nowadays is all about dealing with paradoxes. In this case, it was a question of balancing local knowledge and global awareness.
While China is part of the daily business news in South Africa, while companies like Sasol, SABMiller and Naspers have made big strides in China and while Africa is a big part of China’s global picture, the bridges that straddle these divides are not very wide. Take Shanghai as an example. Shanghai is a city of 20-million people and the financial face of China. In the whole city, there are a total of three South Africans studying at local universities and, at a guess, less than 10 young professionals making a career here.
On the governmental side, although South Africa has good relations with its Chinese counterparts, I have been told that there are few if any Mandarin speakers in either the department of trade and industry or the department foreign affairs.
Compare this to Australia, which has a whole team of Mandarin speakers working within their governmental trade negotiation unit. Perhaps we are catching up. In July this year, the first employees of the department of foreign affairs leave Beijing as fluent Mandarin speakers after an intensive language programme.
But the point remains: for all the opportunities that China opens up to South Africa, and for all the challenges it poses, there is much scope for us to learn the language and understand the business and cultural aspects of a society that is rapidly shaping international affairs.