It was a spectacular glimpse into the future that was offered to visitors to the world exhibition in the spring of 2010 in the pavilion of car manufacturer SAIC – and one into the past.
Henrik Ankenbrand
Economic correspondent for China based in Shanghai.
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Together with General Motors, the Chinese manufacturer had filmed the twelve-minute vision of a Shanghai with a gigantic budget using computer animations and real actors, in which the daily traffic jams under the smog in the sky of the city of 25 million inhabitants would come to an end.
In the video, the people of Shanghai whizzed through their futuristic metropolis in small, electric-powered carts, which seemed to turn green everywhere after the fine dust had been removed. Because traffic lights were no longer necessary thanks to automated driving, a pregnant woman made it to the hospital in time for the birth. A blind woman arrived home safely in the car with her Golden Retriever. It was a China that a few years later the incoming President Xi Jinping would use as a leitmotif in his speech on the “Chinese dream”: prosperous, clean and beautiful.