China
Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2015 4:57 pm
Again, blame Moi for this.
The thing everyone hears about China is the pollution. I honestly did not see it that bad. What I saw was the skies were definitely blue with some whitish tones. Like here in AZ before the 2007 bust. I got there thru Beijing. The pollution was not that bad, about like Salt Lake or Denver. I have heard that it does have really, really bad days. But I went to university in central Los Angeles in the late 60s/early 70s when things two blocks away would fade into the smog on a really bad day and there were other days that were not so bad. I dont doubt that they have super smoggy days, about like Los Angeles when I was there or Mexico City, but it was not a pollution wasteland.
The first and obvious problem is the written language. At least in Spanish speaking countries, you can take a shot at how to pronounce it, but you are dead in the water in Russia, Japan, the Middle East and China. I always remember stories like the guys who copied down their hotel sign in Moscow before going out to walk around. When it came time to go back, they realized they were a little lost. They tried to show people the paper and one lady called the cops for harassing her. In jail, they finally got it straightened out. They had written down in Russian, No vacancy. My big test came when I had to go to the airport alone. The driver and hotel people could not or would not speak English with me. I looked at the driver and put my two hands horizontally flat together and then moved one hand forward like a plane taking off from and a runway and showed him two fingers for terminal 2. He took me where I wanted to go. That brought out the story about a business man who made a flapping motion with his arms to go to the airport. He missed his flight. The driver took him to the zoo.
The more I travel, the more I found how ill-informed I am. Like always, what I was expecting and what I found in Beijing were two completely different things. Guess I will have to hang up being an opinionated asshole. I was expecting Beijing be like my idea of Russia (never been there either) with blocks of gray concrete multi-story apartment buildings. That is totally wrong. Beijing does have a number of new buildings with fantastic architecture like buildings shaped like an individual piece from a picture puzzle or inverted letter L or some odd shape like that. We also went to the Great Wall. Coming back, the taxi driver brought us thru an area that is like an urban dream in Berkeley or someplace. It was all two story buildings with each building a small shop, store or restaurant and tree lined streets. I really liked that area. Later when we had a little free time after Tiananmen Square, I asked a policeman the name of that district so I could get a taxi. By keeping my sentences very simple, I got the answer. English has been mandatory for many years in China. They just do not have a chance to practice it. Many of the highway signs are in both Chinese and English.
I did notice some things travelling on the interstate. There were few of those convenience store/gas station complexes like we have. We stopped at one and it really was over the top in terms of a sparking new luxurious setting. I looked at it in awe. The only comparable display of too much money I have seen was in Saudi Arabia where one gas station had marble pavement and gas pumps covered in bling. We also stopped at a rest stop. The mens room had like a 30 foot (fake?) jade urinal. When I asked about that, I was told that you can skim more money off big ticket projects than little ones. When you see the form not matching function, the answer might be corruption. That might help explain those odd shaped futuristic office buildings in Beijing. It was interesting going to some of the older laboratories. They are like Hollywood sets for 19th century laboratory settings. Obviously there is not the money in those that there is in new construction.
We went to Tiananmen Square. It was neatly barricaded off. Police manned the entry points. Chinese were motioned right thru. There was a reporter in front of us. We all had American passports and were pulled aside. It was a simple questioning. Why were we there? How long would we be in China? Etc. Then we were motioned thru. The Square is huge and very neatly kept. The government has co-opted the place by having lots of huge screens with videos of the physical beauty of China. There were lots of cops, both in uniform and plain clothes (everywhere in the world you can tell by plainclothes cops by the shoes), but we were never bothered. We wandered around freely to take pictures. I got a really neat photo of wifey cheek by cheek with an old soldier in his Mao-style uniform with the red star on the cap. It is interesting to me how when politically intense people are NOT involved, you can get a photo with a foreigner you do not share a single word with and nothing but good vibes fill the experience. You can see that in the photo. I got a similar picture of myself with a classically dressed old man up on a mountain. He told me that I was the first American to ever go there. Those are the moments I live for.
Another point about Beijing and China is that they have a modern freeway system. You do not see a lot of junkers on the road. Cars are new and mostly the brands we are used to seeing. The freeway system is at least the quality of ours when new. They obviously can manage big construction projects. The thing is that when you build an interstate, you get an immediate economic bang for the buck from the great improvement in productivity with improved transportation. China has benefited from that great improvement in the last two decades. But all roads need maintenance. Money spent on maintenance does not yield that benefit. It is money spent just maintaining what already is. I only saw one maintenance project. But as the interstate gets older, China is going to face a big bill just keeping what they have instead of spending the money on new and improved transportation with the economic kick. You can see other issues like care for oldsters, the environment, etc. which will be future big ticket items they will have to deal with and which do not gave an economic bang for the buck.
I know they have taken their highway building skills and exported them to build highways in Africa, for example. I have talked with two guys from African countries where the Chinese build highways and their countries are not that happy. When the Chinese build something like that, they build a gated residential compound and fill it with flown-in Chinese workers who do all the work and then fly back to China. The countries are left with a new road and no knowledge of construction and maintenance. Even projects as small the really nice Chinese restaurant in Georgetown, Guyana are built that way. That is one thing I feel good about how the American, Canadian, British and Australian companies I have worked for go about their business. They hire locals and teach them. Guys like me live out with the locals. I have spent several years of my life being 100 kilometers from the nearest white guy. My joke is that we live with them, eat with them, go to the bathroom with them, go to their festivals, graduations and funerals and get drunk with them, get sober with them and go to the VD clinic with them (joke). We experience life with them. The western way of resource exploration in the third world is totally different than the Chinese way. We leave them with training and experience.
In one place I did see big concrete pylons being built for what I was told would be a high speed rail line. China leads the world in that. I read that they had built 7,000 miles of high speed rail while the US has built 0 miles with California way out in the lead of that with 0 miles. They are now taking that technology and proposing high speed rail routes connecting the Chinese network with Europe to the west and other Asian countries to the south. They have taken western technologies to get started in country and now have expanded that to Chinese technologies which they are exporting.
Chinese infrastructure development has driven the price of iron ore for three decades. The new head of the China Iron and Steel Association said that the Chinese iron industry peaked last year. That would be 20% below projections of when the industry would peak. Iron ore prices have fallen 50% in the last year. One source projected Chinese steel demand to fall by about 12% by 2025.
I have seen lots of different graphs and stories about the Chinese economy. Most show an up and down sawblade pattern with a definite and undeniably downward trend for the last decade. Economies reach a place where they never can grow at 15% forever. Japan was there. My guess is China is getting there. If I had to bet, I would bet that in another ten or fifteen years the Chinese economy does not grow much faster if any faster than America.
I was given a very simple explanation of the Chinese economic miracle, so consider that in the following comments. The expansion began about 1980 with four special zones with different rules to draw in foreign investment. Amazingly enough, the first flood of money came from electronic Taiwanese manufacturers. (I remember years ago reading a story when some tourists were in China and one asked the guide where the Chinese nuclear test zone was. Without missing a beat, he answered Taiwan). That was a rousing success and things have snowballed since then. While the people do not earn that much, they are very frugal. The only place they can invest their money is in the bank accounts. The sum of millions of Chinese each saving a little is a huge amount of money. Their system uses that money for local governments to buy peasant land (whether at a fair price is a really good question) which the local government re-sells at profit to developers who have access to the money to build wonderful things. Some of the most popular things in addition to office buildings are apartment towers. I talked with a guy seven years ago who had gone thru China many times to and from Mongolia. He said that the growth in the major cities had been incredible. The big cities had changed skylines from like Salt Lake to New York or San Francisco in a decade. What I saw now is a forest of those spindly construction cranes in the third and fourth tier cities which, incidentally, have incredibly modern and architecturally fantastic airports (more money skimming?). Regular Joes have benefited from that by buying an apartment and then thriftily saving their money and then buying another, etc. I was told there are people who now own one apartment for themselves and four as rental speculations. This has all been fed by migration from the country to cities. To me there are some caveats here. One is you do see articles about how local government debt has skyrocketed. The other is that the Chinese population has peaked and it is mathematically impossible for the rural-city migration to continue for another 30 years. So the system has benefited an awful lot of people. Can it continue and for how long?
I did have two impressions of the people before I went. One was maybe ten years ago I went to a conference. The question that was on my mind was where do people have a twinkle in their eyes? One guy had worked in China and said that while they might not have a pot to piss in, but three generations lived together, the grandparents kept care of the kids while the parents worked in the fields and everyone seemed happy and had a twinkle in their eyes. The other was a local educator who had worked for the Chinese government to help their education move from rote memory to learning how to think. We were talking about how some cultures were difficult for Americans to adjust to and understand. I said that I did not see a big problem in Latin America or western Europe, but that the Arabs exotic to me. He said that Arabs and Japanese were difficult for others to relate to, but that amazingly Americans and Chinese easily got along together. That is what I found. They were thrilled that wife had also come to visit and they took us places and invited us to stay in their homes while there. It was a wonderful experience.
They are like Latinos about taking pictures. Go to Machu Picchu and when the bus stops, everyone offloads. Gringos take pictures of the scenery or buildings and Latinos line up and take pictures of each other. The first thing you do in China when you get somewhere is take pictures of everyone. The last thing you do in the day (sigh) is take pictures of everyone before eating. We stopped in one town for some food at the market (just like Latin America). I went out to walk around a bit and take pictures. I was amused one time to put my camera down and realize that I had taken a picture of a bunch of people taking a picture of me with their smart phones. When our guys got back from the market with food, the translator smiled as he told me that word was already spreading that a foreigner was in town.
Eating is a social event. You always eat in a group. Food is either buffet on a rotating turntable. You end up eating 5 or 15 different things for a meal while lots of talking, gossiping and joking goes on. Drinking is also like Latin America. You cannot lift your glass alone. You have to says the equivalent or Cheers or offer a toast. You have to lift your glass a lot to keep up with the alcoholics, so the key is to take small sips each time so you do not end up a drunken embarrassment.
Like you always hear about dealing with the Chinese, I did get screwed financially on the deal. You hear a lot about their currency replacing the dollar, but there are a lot of issues like transparency, living up to commitments, etc. that have to be dealt with before I personally would even think about using a Chinese currency.
Would I go again and spend more time hundreds of miles from the nearest white guy. In the case of China, in a heartbeat. Aside from the money issue, I do not think I have enjoyed a trip anywhere more than China.
The thing everyone hears about China is the pollution. I honestly did not see it that bad. What I saw was the skies were definitely blue with some whitish tones. Like here in AZ before the 2007 bust. I got there thru Beijing. The pollution was not that bad, about like Salt Lake or Denver. I have heard that it does have really, really bad days. But I went to university in central Los Angeles in the late 60s/early 70s when things two blocks away would fade into the smog on a really bad day and there were other days that were not so bad. I dont doubt that they have super smoggy days, about like Los Angeles when I was there or Mexico City, but it was not a pollution wasteland.
The first and obvious problem is the written language. At least in Spanish speaking countries, you can take a shot at how to pronounce it, but you are dead in the water in Russia, Japan, the Middle East and China. I always remember stories like the guys who copied down their hotel sign in Moscow before going out to walk around. When it came time to go back, they realized they were a little lost. They tried to show people the paper and one lady called the cops for harassing her. In jail, they finally got it straightened out. They had written down in Russian, No vacancy. My big test came when I had to go to the airport alone. The driver and hotel people could not or would not speak English with me. I looked at the driver and put my two hands horizontally flat together and then moved one hand forward like a plane taking off from and a runway and showed him two fingers for terminal 2. He took me where I wanted to go. That brought out the story about a business man who made a flapping motion with his arms to go to the airport. He missed his flight. The driver took him to the zoo.
The more I travel, the more I found how ill-informed I am. Like always, what I was expecting and what I found in Beijing were two completely different things. Guess I will have to hang up being an opinionated asshole. I was expecting Beijing be like my idea of Russia (never been there either) with blocks of gray concrete multi-story apartment buildings. That is totally wrong. Beijing does have a number of new buildings with fantastic architecture like buildings shaped like an individual piece from a picture puzzle or inverted letter L or some odd shape like that. We also went to the Great Wall. Coming back, the taxi driver brought us thru an area that is like an urban dream in Berkeley or someplace. It was all two story buildings with each building a small shop, store or restaurant and tree lined streets. I really liked that area. Later when we had a little free time after Tiananmen Square, I asked a policeman the name of that district so I could get a taxi. By keeping my sentences very simple, I got the answer. English has been mandatory for many years in China. They just do not have a chance to practice it. Many of the highway signs are in both Chinese and English.
I did notice some things travelling on the interstate. There were few of those convenience store/gas station complexes like we have. We stopped at one and it really was over the top in terms of a sparking new luxurious setting. I looked at it in awe. The only comparable display of too much money I have seen was in Saudi Arabia where one gas station had marble pavement and gas pumps covered in bling. We also stopped at a rest stop. The mens room had like a 30 foot (fake?) jade urinal. When I asked about that, I was told that you can skim more money off big ticket projects than little ones. When you see the form not matching function, the answer might be corruption. That might help explain those odd shaped futuristic office buildings in Beijing. It was interesting going to some of the older laboratories. They are like Hollywood sets for 19th century laboratory settings. Obviously there is not the money in those that there is in new construction.
We went to Tiananmen Square. It was neatly barricaded off. Police manned the entry points. Chinese were motioned right thru. There was a reporter in front of us. We all had American passports and were pulled aside. It was a simple questioning. Why were we there? How long would we be in China? Etc. Then we were motioned thru. The Square is huge and very neatly kept. The government has co-opted the place by having lots of huge screens with videos of the physical beauty of China. There were lots of cops, both in uniform and plain clothes (everywhere in the world you can tell by plainclothes cops by the shoes), but we were never bothered. We wandered around freely to take pictures. I got a really neat photo of wifey cheek by cheek with an old soldier in his Mao-style uniform with the red star on the cap. It is interesting to me how when politically intense people are NOT involved, you can get a photo with a foreigner you do not share a single word with and nothing but good vibes fill the experience. You can see that in the photo. I got a similar picture of myself with a classically dressed old man up on a mountain. He told me that I was the first American to ever go there. Those are the moments I live for.
Another point about Beijing and China is that they have a modern freeway system. You do not see a lot of junkers on the road. Cars are new and mostly the brands we are used to seeing. The freeway system is at least the quality of ours when new. They obviously can manage big construction projects. The thing is that when you build an interstate, you get an immediate economic bang for the buck from the great improvement in productivity with improved transportation. China has benefited from that great improvement in the last two decades. But all roads need maintenance. Money spent on maintenance does not yield that benefit. It is money spent just maintaining what already is. I only saw one maintenance project. But as the interstate gets older, China is going to face a big bill just keeping what they have instead of spending the money on new and improved transportation with the economic kick. You can see other issues like care for oldsters, the environment, etc. which will be future big ticket items they will have to deal with and which do not gave an economic bang for the buck.
I know they have taken their highway building skills and exported them to build highways in Africa, for example. I have talked with two guys from African countries where the Chinese build highways and their countries are not that happy. When the Chinese build something like that, they build a gated residential compound and fill it with flown-in Chinese workers who do all the work and then fly back to China. The countries are left with a new road and no knowledge of construction and maintenance. Even projects as small the really nice Chinese restaurant in Georgetown, Guyana are built that way. That is one thing I feel good about how the American, Canadian, British and Australian companies I have worked for go about their business. They hire locals and teach them. Guys like me live out with the locals. I have spent several years of my life being 100 kilometers from the nearest white guy. My joke is that we live with them, eat with them, go to the bathroom with them, go to their festivals, graduations and funerals and get drunk with them, get sober with them and go to the VD clinic with them (joke). We experience life with them. The western way of resource exploration in the third world is totally different than the Chinese way. We leave them with training and experience.
In one place I did see big concrete pylons being built for what I was told would be a high speed rail line. China leads the world in that. I read that they had built 7,000 miles of high speed rail while the US has built 0 miles with California way out in the lead of that with 0 miles. They are now taking that technology and proposing high speed rail routes connecting the Chinese network with Europe to the west and other Asian countries to the south. They have taken western technologies to get started in country and now have expanded that to Chinese technologies which they are exporting.
Chinese infrastructure development has driven the price of iron ore for three decades. The new head of the China Iron and Steel Association said that the Chinese iron industry peaked last year. That would be 20% below projections of when the industry would peak. Iron ore prices have fallen 50% in the last year. One source projected Chinese steel demand to fall by about 12% by 2025.
I have seen lots of different graphs and stories about the Chinese economy. Most show an up and down sawblade pattern with a definite and undeniably downward trend for the last decade. Economies reach a place where they never can grow at 15% forever. Japan was there. My guess is China is getting there. If I had to bet, I would bet that in another ten or fifteen years the Chinese economy does not grow much faster if any faster than America.
I was given a very simple explanation of the Chinese economic miracle, so consider that in the following comments. The expansion began about 1980 with four special zones with different rules to draw in foreign investment. Amazingly enough, the first flood of money came from electronic Taiwanese manufacturers. (I remember years ago reading a story when some tourists were in China and one asked the guide where the Chinese nuclear test zone was. Without missing a beat, he answered Taiwan). That was a rousing success and things have snowballed since then. While the people do not earn that much, they are very frugal. The only place they can invest their money is in the bank accounts. The sum of millions of Chinese each saving a little is a huge amount of money. Their system uses that money for local governments to buy peasant land (whether at a fair price is a really good question) which the local government re-sells at profit to developers who have access to the money to build wonderful things. Some of the most popular things in addition to office buildings are apartment towers. I talked with a guy seven years ago who had gone thru China many times to and from Mongolia. He said that the growth in the major cities had been incredible. The big cities had changed skylines from like Salt Lake to New York or San Francisco in a decade. What I saw now is a forest of those spindly construction cranes in the third and fourth tier cities which, incidentally, have incredibly modern and architecturally fantastic airports (more money skimming?). Regular Joes have benefited from that by buying an apartment and then thriftily saving their money and then buying another, etc. I was told there are people who now own one apartment for themselves and four as rental speculations. This has all been fed by migration from the country to cities. To me there are some caveats here. One is you do see articles about how local government debt has skyrocketed. The other is that the Chinese population has peaked and it is mathematically impossible for the rural-city migration to continue for another 30 years. So the system has benefited an awful lot of people. Can it continue and for how long?
I did have two impressions of the people before I went. One was maybe ten years ago I went to a conference. The question that was on my mind was where do people have a twinkle in their eyes? One guy had worked in China and said that while they might not have a pot to piss in, but three generations lived together, the grandparents kept care of the kids while the parents worked in the fields and everyone seemed happy and had a twinkle in their eyes. The other was a local educator who had worked for the Chinese government to help their education move from rote memory to learning how to think. We were talking about how some cultures were difficult for Americans to adjust to and understand. I said that I did not see a big problem in Latin America or western Europe, but that the Arabs exotic to me. He said that Arabs and Japanese were difficult for others to relate to, but that amazingly Americans and Chinese easily got along together. That is what I found. They were thrilled that wife had also come to visit and they took us places and invited us to stay in their homes while there. It was a wonderful experience.
They are like Latinos about taking pictures. Go to Machu Picchu and when the bus stops, everyone offloads. Gringos take pictures of the scenery or buildings and Latinos line up and take pictures of each other. The first thing you do in China when you get somewhere is take pictures of everyone. The last thing you do in the day (sigh) is take pictures of everyone before eating. We stopped in one town for some food at the market (just like Latin America). I went out to walk around a bit and take pictures. I was amused one time to put my camera down and realize that I had taken a picture of a bunch of people taking a picture of me with their smart phones. When our guys got back from the market with food, the translator smiled as he told me that word was already spreading that a foreigner was in town.
Eating is a social event. You always eat in a group. Food is either buffet on a rotating turntable. You end up eating 5 or 15 different things for a meal while lots of talking, gossiping and joking goes on. Drinking is also like Latin America. You cannot lift your glass alone. You have to says the equivalent or Cheers or offer a toast. You have to lift your glass a lot to keep up with the alcoholics, so the key is to take small sips each time so you do not end up a drunken embarrassment.
Like you always hear about dealing with the Chinese, I did get screwed financially on the deal. You hear a lot about their currency replacing the dollar, but there are a lot of issues like transparency, living up to commitments, etc. that have to be dealt with before I personally would even think about using a Chinese currency.
Would I go again and spend more time hundreds of miles from the nearest white guy. In the case of China, in a heartbeat. Aside from the money issue, I do not think I have enjoyed a trip anywhere more than China.