Lansing to Shanghai to Jerusalem

by Dan Redford
August 13, 2010

JERUSALEM — If you’ve been reading my blogs on Shanghai-Exposed.com you may have been confused by the last few days of posts. They have nothing to do with Shanghai or the Expo or even China.

The simple reason for this is that 13 days ago I flew from Beijing to Tel Aviv to take part in a “Once in a Lifetime” experience learning about Israel.

Three other “young, world-renowned” bloggers and I were brought here by a group of 24 students at Hebrew University, who are part of an organization called “StandWithUs,” to describe what life is like here in one of the most conflicted and controversial places in the world.

“What does Israel have to do with China?”

This has been the most popular question among my followers. This entire trip, I’ve been seeking that answer. I’ve been looking for ways in which Shanghai is connected to Jerusalem and, going further, how these places are connected to Lansing — the place I call home.

It hasn’t been an easy search.

On the surface, Jerusalem is entirely different than any place I’ve ever been. Its history goes back thousands of years. It has been built and rebuilt, destroyed and reconstructed seemingly hundreds of times over the course of the last few thousand years. It is a diverse place. Christians, Jews and Muslims live within the city, and though most of them seem to live peacefully in coexistence, “a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch.”

They have to worry about things here that we don’t in America. Our closest neighbors in Michigan are Canada and Ohio. In Jerusalem, the threat is terror organizations like Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, a 10-minute walk from the neighborhood of Gilo in Jerusalem. This used to be a place where bullets would fly into residential homes and apartments from Palestine before the Security Fence was built in 2003.

It is hard to compare Lansing to Shanghai, as well as Shanghai to Jerusalem. With a population of almost 20 million, Shanghai is an enormous place. And it’s growing.

Since 1990, the city has grown at a staggering pace — increasing by almost 3.5 million people, up 25.5 percent in a 20-year period. People are still moving in, the opposite of what is happening in Lansing and Jerusalem. Yet, this is not necessarily the best thing for the city. It is becoming too large. The quality of medical care is not good enough to support the masses and, because a large and increasing part of the population is made up of migrants, the city will inevitably see the returns on innovation dwindle.

Yet through all these differences, I still find that there are many things that we can learn from each other. It starts with what is common between all of us.

I had the opportunity to meet with the mayor of Jerusalem along with a couple of city councilmen and economic developers last week. They were talking to us about their strategies to promote the city and create a better image of the city that doesn’t look like what we read about in the mainstream media. They were talking about their ideas for attracting and retaining young people in the city.

Today we met with a representative from the Jerusalem Development Agency. She went through a presentation in which she showed us plans for expanding Hebrew University to bring in more international students. They want to develop business incubators and are preparing to offer grants to people doing life science projects. They’re trying to be new, hip, and modern. This meeting was, by the way, only minutes before we toured the city on Segways.

Shanghai’s goals, though maybe bigger and grander, are not all that different. The whole purpose of the Expo is to show the world China’s entrance into the modern world. They invested $50 billion into their biggest city in order to present an image of modern China that has a future of sustainable living and technology. They want to attract people to this “new China.”

All of these things make me think about Lansing. I think about the Technology Innovation Center at 325 Grand River Ave. I think about the Greater Lansing Next initiative. I think about the push to bring Zipcars to the city.

This is how success is defined in the modern world, no matter where you are. We are competing with people all over the world who are fighting to make their places the best places to live.

This fight does not have to be malicious. There are so many things that we can learn from our differences. We can learn from best practices in Jerusalem, and Shanghai, and they can learn from us. If we can recognize this, maybe we can begin to understand each other, to be aware of each other’s perspective, and to contribute to peace and development.

It is easy to pigeonhole a place, to ignore something or someone thousands of miles away. But I’ve learned in my travels that it is no longer a luxury — it’s imperative — that we develop a society that has knowledge of places like Jerusalem and Shanghai that seem so far away.

All it takes is recognition of our common struggle, our common goals in this modern, globalized world. We must continue to invest in our young people, to encourage them to experience the world, to make international friends both at home and abroad.

We also must do this in the work place and in the government. The best answers for Lansing, and for Jerusalem, and for Shanghai, don’t exist in any one of those places. They lie in personal exchange, in experience and research that comes from all over the world.

You can follow Dan during the week on his blog, www.shanghai-exposed.com.

Dan Redford is a Michigan State University student working as a U.S. student ambassador at the Shanghai World Expo.

(Editor’s note: Also see Tom Watkins’ “Bridge to China” September 2009 cover story.