On weekdays, I usually go to an easy-going, delicious restaurant near my office. I have always liked the owner; a quick-witted and, as far as I can see, quite a shrewd business lady. She may be in her early fifties, still with a youthful flair, often swaying graciously across her restaurant.
When a few days ago, I asked her opinion of the Beijingers, she put her hands on hips, scowled, puffed out her chest and squared her shoulders, doing the best imitation of a pompous bureaucrat.
That's the picture with which I would define the two major cities in Mainland China. Beijing: Man, rhetoric and bureaucrat. Shanghai: Woman, shrewd and charming.
The residents of Beijing are often described as more intellectual, thermoses—cold on the outside and warm on the inside and gregarious. They are also regarded by other Chinese as aloof and having a droll, ironic sense of humor.
They open up with a little encouragement, eager to talk about politics, Chinese culture, and the family as an anchor in their society.
Beijing is a historical city and the former center of a great empire. Today it is the heart of the officially-sanctioned culture of the ruling Communist Party.
Shanghai natives form an urban tribe, set apart from the rest of China by language, customs, architecture, food, and attitudes.
The People of Shanghai are considered blunt, jaunty and worldly. They define themselves more reasonable and efficient than the rest of the Chinese.
Unlike Beijing, Shanghai history is not related with dynasties; strategically located at the Yangtze River Delta emerged as a major commercial center in the seventeenth century by a crucible formed by foreign merchants and Chinese immigrants from other regions. With the rise of the Communism, the metropolis had to pass the role of melting pot center to Hong Kong… A role that Shanghaiese are slowly taking back from the Honkies.
Although the two major Chinese cities have very different personalities, Chinese; regardless of whether they live in China are essentially the same. They are Confucian at the core, strong personal ambition, respect for mathematicians, disdain for humanities, competitive, high saving rates (at the same time voracious consumerisms’)... and on line chat “addicts”.
In fact, the inhabitants of these two cities; Beijing and Shanghai are, mainly, the ones who have begun (however reluctantly), what we could call as the real contemporary dragon: The Internet Republic of China.
