Phantom Shanghai

By Greg Girard, The Magenta Foundation, April 1 2007, 224 pages

Photographer Greg Girard captures the degradation of Shanghai's historic landscapes, providing raw and contradicting images as China's economic hotspot ceaselessly undergoes a modern face-lift. His five-year endeavour brought him through the buildings, shops, homes, and neighbourhoods of a place where the politics of historic neglect meet that of eager all-out metropolitan development. Shanghai, he says, is "a city in the process of dismantling its history to accommodate China's new cosmopolitan vision of itself." The Canadian native has lived in Shanghai since 1998, allowing him to frame his images with an anthropological eye - depicting the real people of this changing environment he has come to know. Editorial work of his appears in publications such as Time, Newsweek, Fortune, and The New York Times Magazine, and now his Phantom Shanghai is being represented by the Monte Clark Gallery in Toronto. Sci-fi writer William Gibson provides the book's foreword.

China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power

By Rob Gifford, Random House, May 29 2007,352 pages

Gifford, an acclaimed reporter for National Public Radio in the United States, takes readers along on his journey from east to west on Route 312 - China's equivalent of Route 66, the famous American interstate highway. From Shanghai's thriving economic centre to the desolate boarder of Kazakhstan, Gifford reveals life in China from one end of the socio-economic spectrum to the other. From talk-show hosts to Tibetan monks, peasants to yuppies, Gifford travels one of the major highways that tens of millions now migrate along toward various burgeoning urban areas around the country. "Rob Gifford has found the perfect road trip," says Peter Hessler, author of bestsellers River Town and Oracle Bones. "His years in China have given him a keen eye and a deep understanding of the country's contradictions; he's the perfect guide to this magnificent road from Shanghai to the Kazakhstan border." He rides with a Shanghai jeep club, hitchhikes across the Gobi desert, and sings karaoke with migrant workers at truck stops. But, besides providing colourful accounts, Gifford also wants to leave a more lasting impression: serious problems lurk ahead, and neither China nor the West can ignore that.