Hello all – it’s been a long time since my last post. I do have a good reason though; my family and I moved from Shanghai to Singapore in early 2021. I really loved my time in Shanghai and miss the hustle and bustle of the biggest city in the world! I will take this opportunity to reflect on some of the changes witnessed in Shanghai since I first visited in 2015 and moved there permanently in 2016.
Home Comforts in the East
By the time I first visited in 2015, the days of Shanghai being a hardship location were long gone. I don’t know exactly when it happened but from talking to long timers, things changed rapidly from around 2010 onwards. By 2015, there were multitudes of options for shopping, eating, drinking, leisure etc. The bars were excellent. The cinemas showed a lot of western movies, undubbed. There was lots of interesting live music (although nothing like at home). The restaurants were fantastic. The quality and variety of food was really good. The grocery stores offered high quality western and Japanese products, albeit at a big price premium. It was much easier to eat well in Shanghai in 2015 than in 2010! The quality and variety of food on offer only got better in my time in Shanghai. It was especially interesting and exciting to see an explosion in interest in plant-based food offerings. I was honored and exhilarated to be personally involved in an innovative plant-based food start-up that is still going strong!
Technology – Cashless society
When I first arrived, cash was king. The switch to electronic started in around late 2016 for me (later than most!) and was fully complete in 2018 when all services were on board with either WeChat or Alipay. I witnessed a complete switch from 100% cash to 100% cashless within the space of 3 years – an incredible transformation. The numbers are staggering, mobile payments in China went from insignificant in 2015 to 40 trillion USD in 2018. That’s $40,000,000,000,000!
Technology – Dock-less bike sharing rise and fall and now
They came from nowhere in mid-2016. I used them a lot, they were everywhere, literally everywhere for 2 years. But then the city declared war on station-less bike shares, creating huge restrictions, removing street-side parking, rounding up illegally parked bikes by the truck load. Huge bike graveyards were created, with piles of bikes twisted and turned into 30 foot piles of metal and rubber. The situation has stabilized now, there is nothing like the same quantity of bikes as before but they are still plentiful and easy to locate when needed; a great option to get around a city that was already easy to navigate for locals and newcomers alike.
Technology – DiDi
When I first arrived, the taxi of no choice was a horrendous Shanghai-built Volkswagen Santana. Then Didi’s car for hire service arrived in around 2016, with an English version of the app in 2017. They had clean new cars; often electric, and good drivers. The app was really easy to use, providing different options of standard, premium and luxury. It was cheap and safe & it made getting around Shanghai even easier than before.
Air Quality – inside and out
Shanghai introduced a smoking ban for bars and restaurants in 2017. It was immediately effective. It was very noticeable when travelling outside of Shanghai from 2018 onwards how bad the smoke was in cities with no smoking ban. It’s so nice to come home from a meal out and not reek of stale smoke!
I also witnessed noticeable improvements in outdoor air cleanliness year on year. Shanghai’s average PM2.5 dropped from 54 µg/m3 in 2015 to 32 µg/m3 in 2020. The bad news is that Shanghai’s PM2.5 still averages more than 3 times the WHO annual guideline value of 10.
Shanghai: ever-changing
These are only some of the changes that I witnessed in my time in Shanghai, a city that never stops moving and never stops changing. There were so many other developments in my time there – hope to be back again some time soon and maybe see some more!
Until the next time – eat well Shanghai! 🙂 Jessica W
