Snow Days, James Fallows and Social Disharmony

It's been snowing in Shanghai for three days now. It's a wet snow that melts as soon as it hits the pavement but on the vegetation it accumulates. The temperatures hover around freezing and the local paper refers to the mild snowfall as "brutal". School has been canceled for tomorrow. Yesterday, the children in the neighborhood gathered up enough snow to build a two-foot tall snowman - no, it was more of a snowgnome.

A snowy Sunday is a great day to stay inside and read James Fallows' blog about his life in China. Yesterday he touched upon a subject that is high on the list of visitors gripes about Shanghai and other cities in China. Here's his observations on how taxi and bus drivers test the patience of visitors: Stupidist things

I admire Fallows' Buddha nature but I would guess that if more drivers that nearly run down pedestrians got their cars slapped and scratched that they'd stop endangering peoples lives. Of course, the best solution would be for the police to actually start enforcing laws to protect pedestrians and for the cities to launch public awareness campaigns to get drivers to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks.

The police have other things to do however - like "maintaining social harmony". Every few months the Communist Party leadership meets in a large hall near where I work. You can always tell when a big meeting is about to take place because the police remove the benches from the sidewalk near the hall and police vans and cars line the street. Last week while the Party cadre met protesters in shabby clothing gathered to vent their grievances about being forcibly evicted from their homes. The police quickly rounded up most of them and put them on public buses that had been parked nearby and driven off. Later that same day, in front of the hall, I witnessed about 10 policemen and women that had surrounded a protester in a wheelchair and were shouting at him and pushing his wheelchair. The poor man tucked his head down and stood his ground as best he could. The police told those of us nearby to get out of the area so I didn't see what ultimately happened to the man.