Sat June 28, after dinner: to sum up

Drove back to the hotel with Tobi’s mom. Although based in Vancouver, she was born in China and escaped to Hong Kong with her family in 1949. So I was curious to hear her impression of contemporary China. “It’s going too fast here,” she sighed, as our Mini Cooper driver put the pedal to the metal. “China is trying so hard to catch up with the West, while forgetting where we come from. It’s a shame—why not keep and celebrate our culture, instead of letting outsiders interpret it for us?” She inadvertently summed up the goal of 100% Design Shanghai: creating a platform for native talent to analyze their unique, complex, and contradictory culture—and show it off to an international audience hungry for the next new thing.

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