Laundry nation

Last year, when Mission Impossible 3 came out, there was some Chinese press uproar about the way Shanghai was shown in the movie. I didn't see this movie, but I read that there wasa scene where Tom Cruise's supposed first view of Shanghai is a run-down apartment complex with laundry hanging out. Laundry hanging out the window is, obviously, a sign of the poverty and backwardness, right?

Nearly everywhere you go in Shenzhen, clean laundry is on display. Everyone hangs their laundry out to dry because very few have driers. Rich, poor, foreign, Chinese......it's all hanging out and on display. All of it. Nothing's a mystery.

So perhaps the MI3 portrayal was unfair, omitting some of the shiny showiness that is Shanghai in favor of t-shirts and underwear drying outside. If they were in Shenzhen, the filmmakers would have been hard pressed not to film laundry.