Word: emeralds
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...come here that day to see how construction was progressing. Our house, along with about 140 others, was going up in a development called Emerald Riverside. It sits on the banks of a tributary that dumps into the Huangpu, the river that cuts Shanghai in two about 28 miles (45 km) to the northeast. On that dreary afternoon I gazed out to the other side of the river, looking at the only significant patch of land for miles that was not yet being developed - about five acres (20,000 sq m) of green that local farmers still used to grow...
...comparison is not exact, of course, but it's compelling enough. The effects of China's suburbanization are just beginning to ripple across Chinese society and the global economy. It's easy to understand the persistent strength in commodity prices - steel, copper, lumber, oil - when you realize that in Emerald Riverside construction crews used more than three tons of steel in the houses and nearly a quarter of a ton of copper wiring. There are 35 housing developments either just finished or still under construction in New Songjiang alone, a town in which 500,000 people will eventually live...
...Olympic weight lifter, with thick, powerful legs, and she and other work-gang members would offload the bricks on a wide wooden plank attached to a rope that they would sling across their shoulders. The subcontractor who built our development estimates he used about 70,000 bricks at Emerald Riverside. Qiu and her work gang delivered all of them...
...lugging bricks 12 hours every day, in Shanghai's suffocating summer heat and stinging winter's chill, Qiu earned 1,500 renminbi (about $200) per month before she managed to get a job - and a raise - at a construction site not far from Emerald Riverside. Now she makes about $220 per month and, she says, the work is not as backbreaking. "We work about 12 hours a day," she told me one recent evening, sitting outside a big worker's camp, "and get one day off a week." I asked if she, like so many migrants, has family back home...
...There are 148 houses and townhouses as well as three 11-story apartment buildings in Emerald Riverside, and Fan Wei, the president of Forte and Guo Guangchang's deputy, says they are all sold. Slowly, as the day draws nearer that the town will be linked to Shanghai, people are beginning to move in. Until recently, one of our neighbors was Zhang Shuyi, 35, who owns his own small advertising agency. He lived just behind us with his girlfriend and a big mutt of a dog who occasionally scared the daylights out of our daughter, Abby. (Zhang, in typical Shanghainese...