So, Shanghai is sinking. Perhaps it is hubris, with a name that literally means “Above the Sea”, maybe it will have to be renamed soon. They have staved off trouble temporarily by building dykes (isn’t the Bund so picturesque?) and for the long term they are busy making up for the depletion of ground water by pumping in large quantities of effluent chemical sludge water from the Huangpu river.

Shanghai used to be swampland. Noxious gases, a complete lack of civilized life, unfit for human habitation and dangerous wildlife. Then they started reclaiming the land, nothing much changed other than they actually sited people on it.

Of course, it doesn’t take a lot of genius to realise that pumping the water out to make firmer mud, then piling on towering buildings on the top, doesn’t make for a stable long term seaside city. Unfortunately, even that small amount of brainpower is completely absent in any of the municipal authorities.

Enter Haibao – the proposed new name for Shanghai. Designed to represent people, based on the Chinese character ‘ren‘, and his name meaning “Treasure of the Ocean”, Haibao is the mystic embodiment of the people driving Shanghai into the sea.

After the Expo the myriad of Haibao’s will finally be put to use. Those of flimsy construction will be ceremonially burnt, as symbolic human effigies. Hopefully this will counter the curse. Those of more solid construction will be used as underground structural supports, to try and keep the subsidence to a minimum. Yes, hidden in that simplistic design is a nice load-bearing arch.

So, will Shanghai become Haibao in the near future? Only time will tell, but by all means go visit the basements of the skyscrapers, and check the water level for yourself.

– DaBizarre

After my astute boss, Mr MyLaowai himself, alerted me to the presence of our little blue friend, I started to flex my contacts and poked many back doors to find out some more. I was startled to find a huge, well-hidden conspiracy.

I had noticed this little fellow scattered liberally around the country, but had been told by locals he was representative of China’s new water policy to provide larger quantities of drinkable water to the population. Unfortunately, 80% of China has water quality so low I wouldn’t let my dogs drink it, so this seemed like a plausible explanation.

Of course, MyLaowai discovered this blob is actually the mascot for the Expo, so I thought to myself “Damn this KTV Xiao Jie, Miss Erection, is good in bed”, followed by “I wonder how much more Miss Direction has been taking place?”

So, following hot on the heels of the Movement of 100 Flowers, I began to dig behind the scenes to find the real truth.

For those students of ancient history, China has had magic practitioners for many thousands of years, for example, Anqi Sheng. Each dynasty sought to make contact with these magicians, but usually failed. These magicians were famous for many acts, but most especially for the elixir of life, floods, droughts and the raising and lowering of land. Indeed, Hairman Miaow is not dead, just sleeping, after imbibing this fabled elixir.

Unfortunately, in the true spirit of the Cultural Revolution, several of these magicians were ordered to death. Even an elixir of life fails when faced with the high-speed lead poisoning that accompanies the Chinese judicial system.

This led to some fascinating retributions, including the massive droughts, earthquakes, dust storms and so on, but most importantly (and at last, relevantly) – the sinking of Shanghai. More in the next instalment.

– DaBizarre

After being alerted by the MyLaowai management team to the well-hidden presence of a major international event in Shanghai, I dutifully climbed off my KTV girl, kicked aside the empty bottles of baijiu and scattered mah-jongg tiles, crawled into my best tracksuit and hit the road to investigate. Just another of the small sacrifices we here at the MyLaowai investigative team make on a daily basis to help satisfy our readers and local support teams. Sunday it may be, a day off for a small fraction of the workforce, but we can put aside our small vicarious pleasures and martinis at a moment’s notice to document the continuing development and growth of the Harmonica Society.

Once on the site, I immediately discovered something amazing: the first pavilion was open on a trial basis already! Well, that wasn’t the amazing part, it being open already, but rather – which pavilion it was. In complete defiance of their usual nature, the Shandong pavilion was leading the way. Shandong province can best be described as traditional, conservative and replete with historical and natural treasures. At worst, it can be described as an intellectual backwater that is 200 years behind the rest of the country, whose greatest claims to fame are a tall mountain, Mount MaiTai, a small fishing village retrofitted for the Olympic sailing event in order to provide some impetus for cleaning up the algae blooms caused by over-fertilization of the delicious kelp farms to the south, and an ancient philosopher called Kong Fu Zing.

Completely unsurprisingly, these are indeed major features of the pavilion. A larger than life, and completely inaccurate, statue of Kong Fu Zing dominates the display space, looking down on all visitors in the traditional Shandongese manner. Also dominating the area are two large view screens. One is continuously depicting the scene from the top of Mount MaiTai, which stands so high it is actually above most of the pollution in China – excepting the trash left behind by the Chinese tourists – and enables anybody to look down on most of the rest of China, in true Shandongese fashion.

Obviously, these first two displays have nothing to do whatsoever with the theme of the Expo, “Better Cities, Better Life”, but Shandong, as usual, doesn’t have to take any notice of what everybody is doing, or with what they are supposed to be doing. However, with the barest of nods towards this theme, the second display screen shows scenes from city life in Shandong. In typical Shandongese manner, very little, if anything is showing initiatives or developments to improve city life, just documenting how glorious happy the people are living in perfect harmony with the pollution. The final display piece is an abstract work depicting the curling ocean waves that are completely non-existent in Qingdao, but did provide a means of disposing of some of the algae by compressing it into a sculpture.

The next day, Easter Monday, I couldn’t work as it was Tomb Sweeping Day, and verily the Chinese were busy sweeping one of the biggest tombs in China, a coal mine in Shanxi, a riveting event that even I couldn’t take my eyes off.

– DaBizarre