Changing Chongming - Fantasy Islands - page 50

Contemporary bridge-building in China echoes the age of iconic bridge-
building in the United States, from the mid-nineteenth-century Brooklyn
Bridge in the East westward to the grandeur of the 1937 Golden Gate Bridge
on the Pacifi c Ocean. h e symbolism of bridges was a big factor in Shanghai,
which decided to go with the Nanpu Bridge as the fi rst linkage infrastructure
between the two sides of the river, the Puxi and Pudong, although tunnels
were cheaper to build. Campanella points out that tunnels were “not photo-
genic. h ey strike no heroic silhouette against the sky. A bridge on the other
hand, is a proud and soaring thing that makes for great publicity shots at
tourist brochures.” 47 Calling such bridges “eye candy,” he describes the folio,
titled “Bridge of the Century,” published to celebrate the completion of
Shanghai's epic bridges, as evidence of the city's “infrastructure pride.”
On a practical level, the question then is: what did it mean to make
Chongming Island accessible by bridge and tunnel to Shanghai? Not much
good from an ecological standpoint. In the weekends that followed the 2010
bridge opening, more than one hundred thousand day-trippers from Shang-
hai visited Chongming, including the sensitive wetland areas. Within a
month of the bridge opening, local authorities limited visitors to the wet-
lands amidst concerns about their environmental impact. 48
h e other part of government infrastructure planning is to connect
Chongming to Jiangsu in the north. h e completion of that project makes
Chongming the midway point in a new superregional corridor, raising land
values and housing prices on the island to match Shanghai's phenomenal
real estate prices, and bringing wetlands protection into greater confl ict
with urban and tourism development.
More frequent connections to the mainland also have serious ecological
consequences in terms of invasive species. Chongming Island's two main
invaders, with no natural competitors, are Spartina alternifl ora and Solidago
canadensis, both of which originated in North America (the former was
brought from the U.S. Atlantic Coast to protect the marshes in 1979, while