Chris Arnade: preference

Transcript context

…I think they’re deathly afraid of disorder and civil war, given their history, in a way we are not. To me, what’s interesting about it is how explicit the top-down organization is at the built level as well as at the cultural level. Everything is micromanaged, again, with a loosey-goosey approach to give a little bit of wiggle room. The image I will always have of, at least Shanghai, one of the initial images is how . . . Asia has very rambunctious cities, and what I like about Asian cities is they have an organic street life, a low regulatory, organic street life. That is gone in China. To have gone from Taipei to Shanghai to see that, and that lack of organic street life is intentional. They say, “We don’t like this.” There was this neighborhood I was walking through in Shanghai where they had bought up the entire neighborhood. It had been an old neighborhood, and it was slated for development into a business park–style living. They had replaced where there had been stores with murals of store life. [laughs] It’s just too spot on for what they’re doing, which is, removing actual organic street life and replacing it with cartoon images of it. You should try Kunming, by the way, if you haven’t been there. It still has organic street life, as does much of western China. It’s more fun. It feels less authoritarian.…

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