4 - What Is Wrong with Shanghai?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
Summary
Why can't India plan bullet trains when China can smoothly roll hi-speed trains between Shanghai and Pudong covering a stretch of over 450 km in one hour?
– Jayant Patil, finance minister of the Indian state of MaharashtraWe must acknowledge that relative to the needs of economic growth and social development, Shanghai is not dynamic enough. The praise for Shanghai's dynamism mainly comes from the mouths of international friends based on impressionistic comparisons with metropolises of foreign countries.
– A report by the Shanghai Association of Industry and Commerce (2006, p. 29)Nowhere else in the world has Shanghai inspired more imagination – and despair – than in the Indian city of Mumbai (particularly during its monsoon season). Indian intellectuals and business people ask, often in great exasperation, “Why cannot Mumbai be more like Shanghai?” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an Oxford-trained economist and a man steeped in humanistic values, nevertheless sees the heavy-handed Shanghai as a model. This is an excerpt from a speech he gave in March 2006:
When I spoke of turning Mumbai into a Shanghai, many wondered what I had in mind. It is not my intention to draw a road map for Mumbai's future. But I do believe that Mumbai can learn from Shanghai's experience in reinventing itself; in rebuilding itself; in rediscovering itself.
This chapter begins with a quote by Jayant Patil, the finance minister of the Indian state of Maharashtra. His observation of Shanghai is fascinating.
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- Information
- Capitalism with Chinese CharacteristicsEntrepreneurship and the State, pp. 175 - 232Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008