Manhattans 2.0 on Foreign and Far Away Shores

The picture that refuses to become forgotten is an aerial shot of a business district jutting into a water expanse that goes around an island that carries, as a giant ship standing still under its crushing weight, a whole landscape of skyscrapers shooting into wuthering heights that only a bird's eye view can measure. Rather than being the southern tip of Manhattan, the small scale vertigo that the magazine illustration captures refers to is Chongqing, a city in the mainland China. Wikipedia article on it does not disappoint in terms of iconic images that this 35-millions plus megapolis routinely churns out in its daily toil of representation. A brief scroll through what amounts to an analytical precis and a newspaper overview of an encyclopedia article that it offers in English depicts soaring construction, demographic, and economic trajectories of urban growth that undeniably catapults the city and the country around it to the position that seemed only recently to be restricted to the countries that had had a place in the story of Western modernity. With the half a trillion yuan budget that the province is going to throw on the aim of moving up the value chain, Chongqing may be in a position to genetically, nanotechnologically and cyber-optically reengineer the value chain itself just as New York, and the country around it, did when it grew at comparable speed. If my impression from a European periodical does not fail me, welcome-mats for modernity 2.0 are being already rolled out around the world.