Letters and Blogs

Pajamas on streets will leave poor impression

Let me express, as an European, why I wholeheartedly support the Shanghai government's endeavor to educate some residents to abandon - even if momentarily - the habit of wearing pajamas outside their homes.

I should stress momentarily, because after the World Expo, there will not be, for a long time, such an extraordinary confluence of foreigners in the metropolis. What the Shanghainese wear afterwards will become insignificant as a means of exercising soft power in the minds of the estimated 70 million outsiders, mostly Westerners, who will visit the country for the first time. There will be no other chance, for many years, to give foreigners a positive, congenial impression of the average Chinese people in a way comparable to the Olympics.