Connections
On April 18 of 2000, former president of Poly, David Chang, delivered a speech on World Conference On Business Incubation And Technology Innovation in Shanghai, China
It is my pleasure to be invited to this conference and, even more important, to witness the resurgence of Shanghai as a vibrant global city. As a Chinese-American, I salute you, Vice Mayor Zhou, for what you have accomplished in such a short period(Chang 1).
As we gather here today to celebrate the success of Pudong, I believe it is meaningful for me to share with you a similar success story about downtown Brooklyn, New York, although on a much smaller scale. Like Pudong, Brooklyn is an outer borough. It is located just across the East River from Manhattan, the nerve center of New York City. As you exit the Brooklyn Bridge, you enter the neighborhood of Polytechnic University-which even today is still better known as "Brooklyn Poly."(Chang 1)
But unless you have visited us within the past ten years, you would not know that we are now situated in the middle of one of the largest deliberately designed "urban knowledge parks" in the United States. Interestingly, this happened not because we moved to another location, but because our surroundings have changed dramatically.(Chang 1)
This park is called MetroTech, and it will be the focus of my presentation. What I hope to share with you is our own experience of how a technological university can play a critical role not only in technology innovation but also in the economic development of its region. I hope to demonstrate how Polytechnic helped shape the destiny of a place once characterized as an urban wasteland. And I hope to articulate the symbiotic partnership we are now forging in this era of the New Economy.(Chang 1)
I was impressed by the fact that Shanghai in some ways are really similar to Downtown Brooklyn. Although Shanghai was once the largest city in East Asia, it switched to a communist system so that it was overtaken by Hong Kong and Tokyo. It was until 1990s that Shanghai just started to develop, later than the rise of Downtown Brooklyn. But New York City served as a typical example for Shanghai to learn from. I was delighted to see Pudong transformed from countryside to city.