ShanGhai

SHANGHAI
I just arrived to Shanghai! Trying to talk my pretty bad mandarin, but in fact I realized that Chinese language is difficult not about the characters they have, once they are almost the same around this huge country but because of the amount of dialects and accents I find everywhere. In Shanghai they do not speak the same Chinese or Mandarin from Beijing or even from the next door Suzhou. But still, after losing myself in translation I made it, I am around the city in this 1st of October, the National day of China, where 90% of Shanghai is on the street, and celebrating the day that Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China a reality! I just do not know how many scream the name of Mao. Not so many, I hear or feel more the love for Deng Xiaoping, the man that among the regime declared the open doors to the world! So still it is the National day! I am watching a great documentary about Mao and National day, I think it is great because of the old images – I do not understand what they are saying, but one image value is 1000 words, isn’t t it? The govenmernt con troll the TV so I think we can all imagine what they are saying!
The truth is that I found prosperous mainland china, no I left HK for some days, at least in the cities. In 1978 there were 250 millions of people living in the abject of poverty, about 26% of the rural population, in 1994 this has been reduced to 78 million, but the past twenty years were very important the Chinese became very prosperous, the world bank’s estimates that by 2020 the income per-capita will be similar to the one that Portugal had around 1990, but still less than half of the US.