The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

Author:Simon Winchester
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141937908
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2008-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

Today the ferment and the jostle is much the same, though cars crowd among the rickshaws and there are sleek and brilliantined men with shiny suits, cellular phones clamped to their ears. Plenty of foreigners are here: men from Budweiser setting up a brewery, men from AT&T tinkering with the telephones, the big European information firms – Siemens, Philip, Alcatel – doing much the same, plugging Wuhan into digital networks. These men live well-fed but lonely lives in a tiny hotel well away from the Bund, and they loathe the place cordially.

The longer-established business houses of the tri-cities are prospering in a thousand brand-new ways, and they are in most cases jammed into the old structures that the foreigners built in Edwardian times. Wuhan bank clerks, who when awakened will honour letters of credit and perform cable transfers and hand over cash on presentation of a credit card from almost any country on earth, sleep their afternoons away under Victorian iron archways and stained-glass windows and under the light of dull brass library lamps. Trading companies are crammed into dusty art deco palaces and crumbling godowns; there are real estate brokers and paging firms and couriers where once there were more classically Chinese functionaries, likin officials, octroi collectors and compradors.

Hong Kong businessmen have now begun to infiltrate Wuhan with a sudden eagerness not nearly as evident in other cities. It is true that most major centres in China have one or two establishments whose headquarters are in Hong Kong – there are Hong Kong-run hotels in places as remote as Ürümqi, and Hong Kong-owned office blocks in faraway Shenyang and Kashgar. But in Wuhan there is much, much more. The city has been put on a quick and easy non-stop flight route from Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport, and to the southern businessmen who fly in each day, Wuhan is now their most proximate example of the real China, the closest big city of the Chinese heartland. (What they have on their doorstep in cities like Canton and Xiamen are still very obviously southern Chinese cities, with the southern tongue spoken, southern food eaten, southern attitudes struck.) Hong Kong developers are now pouring in, busily putting up scores of hotels and department stores and trade centres, with promises of multiplex cinemas, nightclubs, and hostess palaces. Hong Kong businessmen are rebuilding the Wuhan airport. They have put money into the gleaming and delicate new Yangtze bridge. There is talk of yet another southern-built bridge, this time over the Han Shui. A Hong Kong bank is financing a new six-lane expressway into the city's heart.

It is in part because of this that I find myself unaccountably prejudiced, and have come to like Wuhan a great deal less than I like Shanghai. Cities like Shanghai and Nanjing are growing fast – too fast for comfort, it is true – but they appear, on the surface at least, to be performing their growth by a large measure of their own hard work, with their own villainy, much of their own money.

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