Piers Morgan heads for Shanghai
In the third episode of his ITV series, Piers visits the gleaming mega-city of Shanghai, the friendly face of capitalism that Communist China shows to the world.
Piers tells the programme that Shanghai is set to become the world’s greatest economic superpower within the next 20 years and he sets off to explore the city to discover what will make it the mightiest, richest, most riotous place on earth.
He takes in the highest hotel in the world and the busiest port in the world and meets some of the people living and working in the city, including a multi-million pound heiress who built her own apartment block.
Piers tell the programme: “It’s hard to give you a sense of Shanghai, but its ambition oozes from every pore. The closest parallel is Victorian London with its super rich and desperate poor; a cauldron of construction and consumption on an immense scale. It’s a fast forward Industrial Revolution.
“And, just like those Victorians, there is a confidence about the future here that is addictive. According to surveys, 83 per cent of Chinese believe that tomorrow will be better than today and Shanghai epitomises that attitude.”
Piers sails down the Huangpu River, taking in the new skyscrapers which are springing up on either side, two of them are the world’s tallest and there are plans for a new one which will be half a kilometer high.
He visits the highest hotel in the world, between the 79th and 93rd floors of one building where it costs £8000 to stay in the Chairman’s Suite and you get your own personal chef, personal kitchen and indoor garden.
Piers discovers that to make way for these new skyscrapers, buildings are taken down without any discussion. He meets the family who are being forced to find somewhere else to live as their home is being taken away from them and demolished.
He discovers the Chinese love for all things Western when he browses around the Barbie store - which has six floors dedicated to the doll – and visits a Rolls Royce garage where the cars sell for twice as much as in England and are bought before they even hit the showroom.
Piers meets one of the 116,000 millionaires living in the city. Pearl Lam is a multi-millionaire heiress who adds to her fortune by selling art. Pearl shows Piers her private art collection which she houses on the 18th floor of the luxury apartment block she built.
The programme follows Piers as he visits Shanghai’s Yangshan deep water port. The ports of the city are the busiest in the world, shipping over 500 million tonnes of cargo a year. Yangshan cost an estimated £7.5 billion to build and has a 32.5km bridge across the sea to service it.
He chats to shipping magnet Sabrina Chao, the vice chair of Wah Kwong Shipping, the company her grandfather started in the thirties.
On his journey around the city, Piers visits the hospital where Chinese people, desperate to conform, are having folds put in their eyelids to make them look more western.
And he learns that a government fear of social networking means they have 30,000 IT experts keeping an eye on anyone who is online in the country to stop them accessing sites like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.
Piers says: “The Chinese are a clever bunch. They’re renowned for taking our expertise, doing it better and making it cheaper. That’s how China has amassed Billions and begs the question - is China taking over the world?
“I’ve glimpsed the future and it’s here in Shanghai. Empires have come and gone. Us Brits conquered the world in the name of God, queen and country, the Americans, democracy, but when the Chinese are masters of our universe there’ll be no such pretence. For them it’ll be about just one thing - the money.”
Piers Morgan On…Shanghai - Tuesday, 19 January 2010, 9:00PM - 10:00PM, ITV1.
