This has been quite a month, highlighted by a visit to the Shanghai Motor Show which was a real eye-opener in many respects. From the moment you land at the airport, you are agog at what you see around you - for those who know it, it is rather like Dubai on steroids. Everything is ultra-modern, ultra-slick and seemingly ultra-efficient. In fact, it is very difficult to believe that you are in a People's Republic at all. Of course, much of this is on the surface and both the airport and the journey to the city of Shanghai are designed to leave the visitor overawed. What was of great interest, though, was the motor show itself. In some respects, it was like any other one, but in other ways it was totally different. To start with, on Press day, it seemed as if the local university had sent all its students to gatecrash the event. However, I was reliably informed that they were all working journalists, just that they were all so young because "media" is still a young industry in China and the number of motoring journalists as we know them in the West can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
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