Source ｜ Ningnan Mountain (ID: ningnanshan2017 )
Author ｜ Ningnan Mountain in Shenzhen
Head Map ｜ Visual China
From the Axis Powers VS Allies during World War II, and the Soviet Union VS Western Group during the Cold War, every time the two powers compete in the world, it is a period of great technological development, and in the end, the side with higher technological level wins.
If we believe that the competition between the United States and China is inevitable, then the intensification of competition will surely bring about another major development in science and technology, and as before, the side with higher technological level will win.
I usually look at various materials in my work. There are two places that aroused my interest.
We all know that the Western world is still a place with higher global living standards, but we still lack a concept. Recently I saw a documentary called “Berlin 1936”. Of course, the film’s introduction says that some of the shots were taken in 1939. The film reflects the city’s appearance in 1936 and the lives of Berlin citizens.
The main landmarks of the city of Berlin appear in the film, including the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag, Old National Gallery, Museum, Alexanderplatz, Under the Bodhi Street, Berlin Zoo, Elevated Railway, Wanhu, etc. .
The opening screenIt makes people feel a little shocked, because if you freeze the picture and let you guess what year it is, if you do n’t look at the flags and ignore the slag quality and the style of the car, it is not so easy to guess-flat Cement roads and endless cars. In the screenshot below, you can see that a dozen or two cars are driving, with standard street trees on both sides. Compared with today’s streets, it’s just the shape of the car.
The tram in the picture below, the wires above, and the surrounding European buildings, cyclists, it ’s no surprise that you say this is the streets of Europe in 2020.
You can see in other pictures that the traffic of Berlin in 1936, in addition to the traffic police, has begun to show traffic lights, indicating that its traffic automation has made considerable progress.
In the picture below, I saw urban rail transit vehicles driving on an elevated riverside. After inquiries, Berlin opened the first subway line in 1902.
Further inquired about the opening time of each line of the Berlin subway. In 2020, Berlin has a total of 10 subway lines. The opening times of these 10 lines are:
Two were opened to traffic in 1902;
A total of two were opened to traffic in 1910 and 1913;
Three were opened to traffic in 1923, 1924, and 1927;
One was opened to traffic in 1930.
By the time of this video shooting in 1936, eight of Berlin ’s current ten subway routes were open to traffic.
The picture below is an ordinary street in Berlin at that time. It can be seen that the buildings on both sides are already modern. The street is covered by a large lawn. From the picture below, ordinary people ca n’t tell whether this is 1936 or 2016. .
As you can see from the picture below, the square built in the urban area of Berlin is very wide:
The following picture shows the train entering the station. It can be seen that the railway line is very dense. It can be seen that the Berlin railway has been popularized and is extending in all directions. There are also many cars parked next to the station, which shows that the number of cars is not low.
The following picture is a common open-air bar in Berlin. Drink beer, drink coffee, dance ballroom dances, chat and sunbathe. This is the lifestyle that many Chinese people want to experience when they travel to Europe today, especially in Paris. It is also a kind of petty bourgeois lifestyle in China, but in Berlin in 1936, this kind of lifestyle was already very common.
The picture below is a construction site in Berlin. It is impressive that the number of workers on the construction site is not large. The machine crane in the picture below is dumping stone and soil on a truck. It is used in infrastructure, which is different from the publicity film in our impression that there are always a lot of people working hard on the construction site.
The picture below shows the lawn, flowers, tourists and benches of the Berlin City Zoo. It looks completely different from today.
The picture below shows the citizens of Berlin playing and relaxing on the famous Wanhu Lake at that time. The citizens’ clothes have already had a special swimsuit, and the style of the steps and railings built by the river is no different from today. numerous. Even if you cross from today to the Wanhu Lake at that time to swim, there will not be any sense of crossing.
Note that the woman in the picture below is holding a paper cup. In the video, she squeezed the cup naturally after drinking water. It can be seen that the paper industry was very developed at that time, enough to meet the needs of ordinary citizens drinking paper cups, and the glasses she wore were dark, and she did not know whether they were sunglasses.
The Wanhu Lake is located in the southwestern part of Berlin. As shown in red in the figure below, a leisure and entertainment area is also formed so far from the urban area. It can be seen that the traffic level and various supporting facilities have been relatively perfect.
This already highly developed city will be destroyed by war in a few years, and a large number of people died in the war, not only to sigh. But the level of modernization of Berlin in 1936 reflected in this video still shocked me a bit.
In another 1945 color video of Berlin, at this time the Allies have won the battle. The picture below is a picture of the roads and bridges in the suburbs of Berlin. It can be seen that there is no difference from the roads and bridges now.
After watching Europe, let’s look at the United States of the same period.
The most famous is one of the classic movies in the history of film “City Lights”. This film is indeed very good. It is considered to be one of the pinnacles of Chaplin’s life. Einstein also participated in this movie. Premiere.
In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked “City Lights” as the 11th greatest American film in history on the “AFI Centennial Top 100 Film” list. In 1949, film critic James Aiji called the last scene in the film “the greatest performance ever.” After I watched it, I also felt that the end of the film was the climax of the film.
This film was filmed from December 1928 to September 1930. New York in the film is already highly prosperous. The picture below is the place where Charlotte and the flower girl met for the first time. There are endless vehicles, ground and roadside The steps are neat and clean.
The flower girl in this film is a poor man who lives with her grandmother, but in the movie they also have a phonographI am very interested in the festival.
In fact, the United States in the 1930s has been highly developed. The following picture is the “Change New York” composed of 302 photographs by photographer Berenice Abbott in 1940. The New York in the 1930s was shot in New York, which can be seen in New York. The Manhattan skyline has been completed.
The English picture below shows that this is a greyhound bus terminal, and greyhound is the name of the bus company:
About 90 years ago, in the 1930s of Germany and the United States, the prosperity of the core area, the living standards and methods of the citizens were not much different from today.
If a German or American at that time traversed the world by 2020, the most shocking everyday items he could feel were the Internet and computers, because this was the product of the third industrial revolution. Other modern daily necessities that we now consider existed in the lives of Europeans and Americans in the 1930s before World War II, such as elevators, electric lights, movie theaters, automobiles, roads, railways, trains, sofas, telephones, subways, and plastics. , Beer, coffee, electricity, construction machinery, radiotelegraphy, ships, skyscrapers, pianos, newspapers, swimwear, zoos, parks, lawns, newspapers were all commonplace at the time.
It ’s just that the form has changed. For example, the movie is a moving image. Later, after World War II, there was a transistor TV, then a liquid crystal display, and then an OLED panel display, justThe carrier of the moving image has changed, and it is no longer the previous way of projecting the movie screen.
Another example is that the telephone has changed from the landline of the year to the current mobile phone for wireless communication, but it is not difficult to understand. It is nothing more than a fixed to a mobile.
Only computers and the Internet are a bit difficult for Germans and Americans in the 1930s to understand.
Why is this? This is because the second industrial revolution in Europe and the United States began in the late 1860s, and it was in a leading position. Electricity, steel, automobiles, highways, telephones, subways, construction machinery, radio telegraphs, skyscrapers, newspapers, etc. The product of the second industrial revolution. For example, newspapers began to spread on a large scale, because behind the advancement of printing technology, printers and printing machinery appeared on a large scale, completely rid of the manual writing method.
In the movie “Under the City”, Soviet workers used a printing machine to print a large number of newspapers with photos of the sniper hero Vasily. It can be seen that the emergence and popularization of the machine led to the large-scale distribution of newspapers.
The tremendous development of science and technology quickly reflected the industry, and finally reflected the people ’s living standards, just as the Berliner ’s drinking paper cup in his hand when playing in Wanhu, this is enough to illustrate the great development of the paper industry. , So that the cost is so low that ordinary people can use it on a large scale.
Without the development of technology, there will be no improvement in people ’s living standards and lifestyle changes.
In the previous article, I wrote about the construction of high-speed rail in Vietnam.
The Vietnamese government first proposed the construction of a high-speed rail in 2006. After Vietnam ’s Prime Minister Nguyen Jin-yong visited Japan, the Vietnamese and Japanese governments jointly signed a memorandum of understanding on the Vietnamese high-speed rail and the North-South Expressway Project.
Four years later, the Vietnamese parliament rejected the government ’s high-speed rail plan on June 19, 2010. The reason was that Vietnam did not master high-speed rail technology, and it could only import from abroad. Its estimated north-south high-speed rail investment The cost per kilometer is almost 50% higher than China’s Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail.
In the spring of 2019, the Ministry of Transport of Vietnam again proposed to discuss the 350 km high-speed rail plan. After entering July 2019, the Ministry of Planning and Investment publicly expressed its opposition to the plan, mainly because the investment cost is too high-if the design speed is reduced from 350 kilometers per hour to 200 kilometers, the cost can be reduced by half to about 2.9 trillion yen. Even if the high-speed rail is completed according to the plan envisaged by the Ministry of Transport, it will still be in 2050.
This is a living example in which the life style and living standard of the nationals in the country cannot be improved without their own skills.
Ordinary Chinese people have to live in the above videos and movies in the 1930s in Germany and the United States, basically after the 21st century.
Otherwise, in 2000, most large cities in China did not have a subway. The first subway in Shenzhen opened in 2004. Drinking beer and chatting in open bar is not popular in Shenzhen today. Especially in the factory area outside the customs, ordinary workers will still go to the street stalls to drink beer, the environment is almost worse than in the video.
Taking the car as an example again, China really entered the automobile era after 2010, and the United States produced 5.7 million cars in 1930 in one year, and the number of cars in the country reached 31 million. In terms of population, 25% of Americans own cars, and in terms of households, more than half of American households own cars. This ratio is even higher than that of China in 2020.
Until today, our living standards at the bottom are not high enough for most people to accept.
Shenzhen outside the Guanwai factory, there are a large number of various roadside stalls and snack bars. The food is very cheap and delicious. I have been to Shenzhen for a few years when I first came to Shenzhen, which is much richer than the company cafeteria. However, the entire environment is not complimented. Outside the factory are roads and wasteland. The ground is usually ash. If the water is accumulated, it is the surface sewage flow, especially when the rain is a mud.
Every night, there will be a large number of food stall vendors, from the village in the city about one kilometer away, pushing the food truck to the factory side and then walking, and then occupying the empty space outside the factory. Location, selling all kinds of food.
Because I was tired of the factory’s canteen’s unchanging flavor, I often came out here at night to look for good food. To be honest, the taste is very good, but my colleagues generally reject it.
Later was reminded that these roadside gears were temporarily built on the roadside next to the factory at night, and they were all removed during the day, without toilets or running water. These stores stayed here for one night until one or two in the morning After the night shift finishes eating, how do you wash the dishes, how to use the toilet and wash your hands during these seven or eight hours? Later, I paid special attention in front of the stall. The dishes were all in a basin or a bucket, and the water inside would be washed repeatedly for one night. The stall owner finished the toilet in the wild and started to cook without washing his hands. Rinse twice in this water. Suddenly awakened it was too unhygienic, and later went less, remembering that I suddenly felt young.