Overall, one-quarter of journeys in Shanghai are by public transport, and the city would like to increase that to 30% by 2010.
According to Professor Chen, that will mean boosting the numbers who ride the buses as well.
Shanghai has more than 1,000 bus routes, run by a variety of private bus companies, but the system of interchanges between lines is confusing and expensive.
She has convinced the city that it should make all transfers free in order to encourage more people to ride the system.
“Pollution is responsible for serious chronic disease and premature death on a daily basis,” said Anthony Hedley, professor of community health at the University of Hong Kong.
He is less worried about departing expats than the children who grow up here.
Hong Kong’s air quality objectives are 20 years old and less stringent than World Health Organisation guidelines set in 2006.
The government has commissioned its own review of objectives – but it has been accused of procrastination.
“It seems they want to postpone raising the objectives because of fear about Hong Kong’s public image,” said Bill Barron, an environmental economist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Law Yuk Kai of the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor acknowledges that peoples’ rights have largely remained in place, but points to a number of instances when the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress has weighed in and interpreted the Basic Law.
“As soon as Hong Kong was handed over, there was a rolling back of civil liberties legislation,” he said.
Many point out that the change in Hong Kong is less significant than the change in China – a country that only opened up to the world 30 years ago
As with the frog, Hong Kong’s freedoms will evaporate in a cloud of steam, democrats warn.
“I think Hong Kong’s freedoms are under threat all the time,” said Margaret Ng, a pro-democracy legislator who represents Hong Kong’s legal sector
She says constant vigilance is needed in an environment where government control of the media and public life is growing through patronage, financing and the rewarding of pro-Beijing behaviour.
One example she cites is the government’s refusal to prosecute Mrs Grace Mugabe, and her bodyguards, for their reported beating of photographers in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s lack of checks and balances on power produces a sense of a lack of fairness, Ms Ng argues – and of helplessness.
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In January there was a failed suicide attack against AU peacekeeping positions in Mogadishu.
The governor of the Banaadir Region around Mogadishu, Mahamed Osman Ali, told the BBC Somali Section soon after the attack that the assailant was a foreigner, possibly of Arab extraction.
“We found a human hand in the wreckage of the exploded vehicle which belonged to the suicide bomber,” he said. “I think it was an Arab hand.”
In February, two suicide bombers from al-Shabab attacked an African Union military base in Mogadishu, killing at least 11 soldiers and injuring another 15.
It was the fourth suicide attack against African peacekeepers and the deadliest
An al-Shabab spokesman told the BBC one of their bombers, Ahmed Sheikh-Doon Siidow, blew himself up in the compound of Burundian peacekeepers.
Another bomber, Mursal Abdinur Mohamed Ali, drove a car laden with explosives into the same base – a building which was formerly home to the Somali National University.
Mursal Abdinur was a young man in his early twenties raised in one of the oldest districts of Mogadishu, Hamar Jabjabo, and a student at one of the many madrassas in that district.
Saed, who asked the BBC not to reveal his real name for security reasons, knew him.
He said: “Al-Shabab recruited [Mursal Abdinur] in 2006 when they established the Salahu Din training camp in Mogadishu.
“He was a normal young man who lived with his parents. He liked football and was sociable but when he joined al-Shabab, he became very quiet, and completely changed.
“He started dressing like Pakistani or Afghan people. I had never known him dress like that before. He sometimes used to wear military camouflage.”
Saed said he had never thought Mursal Abdinur would kill himself and was shocked when he heard the news.
Sixteen-year-old Ma’ey Kheyrow has been left caring for her baby brother after losing her parents and sister.
“I only remember a week ago we were separated by gunfire as we were running out of our village in Mogadishu,” she says. “We ran in two different directions and since then I haven’t heard of them.”
Civilians end up slaughtered daily in the crossfire.
The gory civilian by-product of the mayhem can be glimpsed in the city’s three hospitals: Medina and Keysaney (run by the International Committee of the Red Cross) and Daynile (run by Medecins Sans Frontieres).
Just 30 days old, the tiny chalky grey body of Sahali Haji Abdi lies trembling on an operating table in Medina Hospital.
His little stomach is slit down the middle.
A nurse tells me a doctor is searching for a bullet in the baby’s abdomen; I can see a large hole in his lower back.
Sahali’s frantic mother awaits the results of the surgery outside the operating theatre.
“Me and my family were about to flee a house in Jungal [north Mogadishu] when the bullet hit my son,” she said.
“I only realised he was hit when I heard him cry out and saw blood streaming out of a cot he was lying on.”
India’s media have congratulated Congress on its sweeping election victory but warned the party that such a large mandate comes with great responsibility.
Congress now holds all the aces, newspaper editorials say, with little room for back-room deals.
The papers said the BJP had needed to expand outside its traditional strongholds to challenge Congress but failed badly, while the Third and Fourth fronts were dismissed as “flotsam”.
With great power comes great responsibility. The people of India have reposed their faith in the Congress, the Gandhis and Manmohan Singh. The party and its leaders can do one of two things: become complacent, even arrogant, and abuse the mandate they have been entrusted with: or they can carry this enormous burden of expectation with humility and honesty and deliver on their promise of a better tomorrow.
The choices provided by the flotsam of the Third and Fourth Fronts have been exposed for what they were; at best, professional nay-sayers; at worst, fly-by-night operators. But with the [ruling] UPA [coalition] now without albatrosses like the Left around its neck, we expect the Congress-led government to press its foot more firmly on the gas of reforms.
Verdict 2009 gives little scope for the smaller parties or groupings to engage in back-room negotiations to decide the shape of the next government. The Congress holds all the aces. The prime ministership will not be up for bargaining, as some of the smaller parties were hoping.
The principal opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, needed to expand beyond its core support base to get ahead of Congress. This it was unable to do.
After more than four decades of white minority rule, most black South Africans naturally sympathise with a victim and they have rallied behind Jacob Zuma in his hard-fought campaign for the presidency.
An opinion poll published earlier this month by Ispos Markinor showed that 77% of likely black voters favour Mr Zuma – the leader of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) – while his support among white voters is negligible – 1%.
What his critics view as his biggest weaknesses – charges of rape and corruption; a lack of education and a peasant background – his supporters regard as his strengths.
Another Ispos Markinor poll revealed that they were “more likely” to vote for the ANC because of the charges.
As the South African author and journalist Fred Khumalo said: “South Africans love a victim – someone who has been vilified, ridiculed, humiliated and pilloried – who has had his dignity trampled upon by fate or real-life enemies.”
