Chapter 24: Never lost
The changing melody seemed to carry the spring of willows; fresh blossoms in the imperial gardens dazzled the eyes.
These lines by the Tang dynasty poet Li Qi vividly captured the gradual succession of things emerging and disappearing in Shanghai Municipality.
Living in Shanghai, China's economic flagship and the center of its coastal economic region, Su Can could feel all the more keenly the approach of a new era.
When he took the day's newspaper from the owner of the little shop on the Nanjing University campus, he saw news that Shanghai Telecom had begun dismantling public telephone message stations across the city. These stations had occupied a place in Shanghai residents' lives for half a century. Now, with household telephones widespread, they had retired after fulfilling their purpose and become history.
The "temporary passage permits" and "temporary parking permits" used in the Shanghai area for nearly twenty years had also begun to reveal their negative effects as Shanghai Municipality's traffic conditions improved and key transport projects opened up one after another. The Shanghai Municipality Public Security Bureau withdrew and abolished both permits, rescinding the special privileges of official vehicles to enthusiastic public approval.
"Public hearing" appeared as a new term at meetings of the Standing Committee of the Shanghai Municipality People's Congress. Ordinary people felt that the country's laws and regulations had indeed come a step closer to them, no longer something remote and intimidating discussed only by lawyers and legal professionals.
For a city with a population of thirteen million at the time, five million mobile phone users already made for a sizable base. Yet the radiation produced by the seventeen hundred mobile base stations standing throughout Shanghai Municipality's urban area frightened residents. Su Can knew this was not merely a present concern, but