Word: shanghaied
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...cold, gray afternoon a year ago, I stood on the deck of our newly purchased, half-constructed house about an hour outside Shanghai, wondering what, exactly, I had gotten myself into. My wife, a Shanghai native, and I had moved back to China from New York City in the spring of 2004, and 21⁄2 years later we had decided to take the plunge. We bought a three-story, five-bedroom townhouse way out in the suburbs, in a town called New Songjiang, a place that was then - and remains now - very much a work in progress...
...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...
...This is China's Short March. A wave of those who are newly affluent and firm in the belief that their best days, economically speaking, are ahead of them, is headed for the suburbs. In Shanghai alone, urban planners believe some 5 million people will move to what are called "satellite cities" in the next 10 years. To varying degrees, the same thing is happening all across China. This process - China's own suburban flight - is at the core of the next phase of this country's development, and will be for years to come...
...Companies all over the world, who have fed China's long-running urban economic boom, are already beginning to benefit from its suburban phase. The average size of a house in New Songjiang is more than twice that of the average downtown Shanghai apartment, and now we, and our fellow suburban pioneers, are stocking up with stuff. In our house we have drapes that were made in Tianjin, and tile flooring from Kunming, but also bathroom fixtures made by Kohler (headquarters: Kohler, Wis.) and consumer electronics from Samsung and Panasonic. Our town's central shopping mall - which looks...
...discern. Others - political, social - are like aftershocks of an earthquake: you know they are coming, even if you're not quite sure when, or exactly how powerful, they will be. One, I'm certain, will be environmental. New Songjiang is supposed to be linked, by 2010, to central Shanghai when a spur on the light-rail system is completed...