China

I wish Canada had state-owned banks and construction companies ranking among the world's top 500 largest companies. Our big-little economy might grow at a respectable clip, too, if that was the case.

quote:Originally posted by Fidel:
I wish Canada had state-owned banks and construction companies ranking among the world's top 500 largest companies. Our big-little economy might grow at a respectable clip, too, if that was the case.

If we had state-owned banks with the precarious books some of the Chinese state-owned banks have it would not be a great thing. It's generally believed that the Chinese banking system is as screwed or more than the American banking system is, the bubble just hasn't burst yet.

See here for more

Shanghai, the central city of the central kingdom of the world, is overwhelming in its power and contrasts.

Despite China’s weak central government – almost invisible on the streets of Shanghai – the city has many superb public services.

Pudong is Shanghai’s newest borough. Almost 3 million people, where 16 years ago were only rice fields, Pudong makes Toronto look old and dirty. Shanghai’s 8 metro lines include two brand new ones opened in December. The wide streets are spotless, thanks to the street-sweepers in orange jump suits employed by the local borough, with long brooms worthy of a Moscow babushka. The metro cars are spotless, due to a sweeper moving up and down the train scooping up any stray scrap of paper.

The countless expressways and multi-lane major arteries in all parts of Shanghai are incredibly safe. Despite vast fleets of buses and taxis (which seem to outnumber the private cars) with driving habits that make Montreal drivers look like Sunday school teachers, I saw no hint of any accidents. One collision yesterday between a bus and a truck, in which no one was killed, was page 3 news in the Shanghai Daily.

Bicycle lanes everywhere. Along the major arteries of Pudong, they are condoned off with neat green chains between perfectly placed pilons (why doesn’t Toronto do this?), perhaps to protect the (usually) law-abiding bus drivers from the anarchist cyclists.

Transportation is so cheap. Entering the metro station, you touch your destination station on a touch-screen ticket machine and it sells you a ticket to anywhere downtown or in the inner suburbs for only 4 yuan (60 cents). A taxi from the downtown to our hotel in Pudong costs only 18 yuan (about $2.70).

And this prosperous city somehow makes money. No annual property tax. A small municipal income tax. Do they finance all this by leasing their land (people own their condos, but the city owns the land) to investors building a new building, it seems, every few minutes?

Construction cranes everywhere. Hoardings around demolition sites for the latest sky-scraper, or is it for the latest expressway tunnel or metro line (they are building one new line per year)? The city has about 13 million permanent residents, and perhaps 6 million migrant workers drawn by the boom.

But the future-is-now breakneck gleaming growth of Pudong looks nothing like much of the old city. Alleyways festooned by what our tour guide calls China’s national flag -– laundry –- have a third-world appearance. The Shanghai princesses in the latest fashions, raised in one-child families, jostle on the sidewalks with migrant workers who let their children pee on those sidewalks. Crowds throng entire narrow streets lined with millions of tiny shops, while a tour bus honks in the vain hope of clearing a path. Yes, millions of tiny shops. Even the metro station mezzanines are lined with dozens of tiny shops. How do all these people make a living in such tiny spaces? Oh, and despite its mostly excellent public services, you still can’t drink the tap water.

Pudong and the downtown seem totally bilingual. The metro cars have signs in Chinese and English, and a recorded message in Chinese and English announces the next stop, and re-announces it as you enter. This is for those who are standing where they can’t see the cute little animated map showing the next station by a blinking red light, which a line of dots keep passing as the virtual train zips around the map to show the direction of travel. (A few people even get seats, including the elderly Chinese – but not elderly tourists - to whom everyone yields their seat.) But the bilingual ads along the metro station walls are sometimes in Chinglish.

Yesterday one of our tour group went off on a pilgrimage of his own. His parents were stationed in Shanghai in the 1930s when the Japanese invaded. They let the foreigners stay, even after 1939. But after Pearl Harbour they were all interned as enemy aliens, whole families, including his parents and his two older siblings (he himself was born just after the war.) So he went to see the “concentration camp”— actually a commandeered high school – where they lived for those years. Today it has been converted to condos renting for US$3,000 to $5,000 per month.

Today, on to Hangzhou.

Bicycle lanes.

[ 12 June 2008: Message edited by: Wilf Day ]

First, the earthquake.

Our hotel's TV has BBC World (which calls it the "Chinaquake"), NewsAsia from Singapore (which calls it the Sichuan Quake), CCTV9 (China Central TV's English channel which calls it the Wenchuan earthquake), TV5 Monde Asie (French), DW-TV (Deutsche Welle, German), and CNN. All are covering the quake except CNN which is more interested in counting Hillary Clinton's delegates. CCTV gives very frequent updates and live news conferences with uncensored blunt questions, but has given up on trying to count bodies. The death toll seems likely to reach 100,000. They say the disaster is well beyond the scope of any municipal or provincial construction teams, so the central government is co-ordinating municipal and provincial construction teams from the 6 neighbouring provinces. (Note there are no national construction teams.) The rail link to the area was cut when part of a tunnel collapsed on a freight train that had 12 oil tank cars, which burned, although both crew members escaped. Will that line re-open in a month? They hope so. Roads, much sooner.

No one mentions the fact that the worst-hit area has a large Tibetan minority. Perhaps this was not lost on the Premier, whom we have seen working beside the front-line troops pulling survivors from the rubble.

Back to the China tour.

To grasp China, imagine Europe if the Roman Empire had never fallen. Imagine a Europe where everyone speaks Latin as well as their local language. (There are at least seven Chinese languages in addition to Mandarin.) Imagine a culture stretching unbroken for almost 5,000 years. Imagine Ancient Rome and its Greek accretions being not a different older world, but just part of our own history. Imagine Roman engineers having built a grand canal from Hamburg in Germany past Paris to the west of France back in 500 AD. Imagine the majority of that canal still carrying large freight boats today. Imagine popular movies about Roman heroes from 500 AD, and our Shakespeare being poets and dramatists writing in Latin 500 or 1,000 or 1,500 years ago.

Zhou En-Lai famously said, when asked the Chinese view on the impact of the French Revolution, "We think it's too soon to tell." He was poking fun at the Chinese perspective on history, yes, but not unreasonably.

In 2,500-year-old Suzhou, we are in a very different world than Shanghai. It has 200 gardens, and 8,000 bridges over its various canals. No buildings over 6 stories in the old city. Beside the 2 or 3 lane streets you see a row of manicured shrubs or a bed of red azaleas, then the bicycle lanes, and then sometimes a small canal. Getting off the tour bus, the street vendors ask us if we want to buy "Chapeaux?" Touring a 1180-AD garden (restored in 1958), half the foreign tourists are French, which makes sense. Suzhou has a very French sensibility, from its world-famous gardens to the soft, sweet accent (says our tour guide) spoken by the locals.

It's hard to understand the overtones. For example, our guide explained the symbolism in one garden. The Chinese word for mirror sounds the same as the word for peace, although written with a different character. Same for the words for vase and tranquility. Same for clock and eternity. So a garden with a clock, mirror and vase is a visual metaphor for eternal peace and tranquility.

Yesterday in Hangzhou, we were on a tour boat on West Lake (a Unesco World Heritage site) at 2:30 when the quake hit Wenchuan. No tremors in Hangzhou. We knew nothing of the quake for over 6 hours until we watched the evening news.

West Lake has inspired poets for centuries. Marco Polo saw it, along with Suzhou, and told Europe he had seen paradise on earth. The pavillions, causeways and islands have gardens with every tree shaped as though by an artist. They are surrounded on three sides by ranks of hills, which in turn are covered (on closer inspection) by terraced rows of tea-leaf shrubs. We got a lecture from a charming young woman with a degree, she said, in Tea. Elsewhere are mulberry bushes for the silk worms.

We saw a silk museum which explained the life-cycle of the silk worm (just as shown in every grade 1 class in Canada), but also the history of silk production in China which dates back to their pre-history.

In Suzhou we saw an embroidery workshop where they make what look like paintings, with almost microscopic stitching using 71 different stitches, a craft which they began 2000 years ago.

Meanwhile, in yesterday's Shanghai Daily is a story on China's new "transparency" regulation in force May 1. It requires disclosure of information to the public. A public opinion survey showed 77.5% of people wanted most to see the salaries -- and assets -- of public officials. Going Ontario one better.

[ 26 June 2008: Message edited by: Wilf Day ]

Thanks for the updates!

quote:

Originally posted by Stargazer:
I hope you keep it up.

As requested . . .

Maybe you've already heard of the miracle baby: 100 hours post-quake she was pulled from the rubble, as was her mother, whose dead body had sheltered her infant. The mother had left this text message on her cell phone: "If you survive the earthquake, remember I love you."

Today our riverboat was met by a class of about 8 sweet girls in their school uniforms, aged 9 or 10, standing by a metre-high photo of the earthquake's devastation, collecting money for girls their age in the earthquake zone. They did well.

Last night we went past WanXian, a city of about 200,000 that knows how to party. Nine o'clock on Saturday night there must be special. They were playing loud music on speakers in a downtown plaza echoing across the river, but at nine o'clock a computer imitation of Big Ben sounded the full-hour chimes followed by nine "bongs," followed by a brief announcement by a woman's voice, fireworks, and more dance music.

In fact the most interesting aspect of China, overall, is the friendly people.

On HangZhou's West Lake, where everyone was taking photos, half a dozen different Chinese tourists asked Margaret to pose with a couple of their group in front of some famous scene. (She says she's still wondering whether they were simply acknowledging her beauty, or whether she bears an accidental resemblance to some famous painting of the White Snake Lady or some such figure from Chinese mythology.) 

Everyone takes pictures. When we again see yet another photogenic child and ask mom's permission to snap a picture, not only is it never refused, but they love to help pose the child.

Many people comment on the generation gap. The new generation are ostensibly not interested in politics nor in religion, but very interested in the future of China.

And the definition of the "New China" is shifting. Sometimes it still starts in 1949, "the year China stood up." But increasingly it starts with Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the "Father of the New China." Even the Three Gorges Dam is now attributed to a plan he wrote in 1919, quite a stretch. Some people still refer to Deng Tsiao Ping, the "founder of the open policy." But then they have to refer to Mao who is still then labelled "70% correct and 30% incorrect." One person even commented, while discussing Chinese idioms, on the expression "to have a soft ear" meaning being overly susceptible to persuasion: "For example, during the Cultural Revolution Chairman Mao had a soft ear for his wife."

But on the whole it seems simpler to avoid such topics and simply refer back to the man everyone loves, Dr. Sun Yat Sen whose picture now outshines Mao's. We have seen only one big picture of Deng Tsiao Ping: a riverbank town had a school which had been built about 20 years ago with help from a school in GuangDong (Canton) after GuangDong had been the first of the New Economic Zones. They required a giant portrait of their hero in the school wall as a condition of their aid.

quote:Originally posted by Wilf Day:
ChongQing is unique. One of China's big four cities, over 10,000 people, it's the only one in the interior.

Wilf, is that this Chongqing, population 31,442,300 ? That's approaching the population of Canada in one municipality eh.

I saw a documentary about the first emperor on tele. He was fascinated with the idea of immortality, and his royal physicians prescribed mercury capsules for him. Apparently they knew it was a special substance that lasted a long time. He slowly went mad, and legend says about one of the mounds excavated somewhere there is emperor Qin's grand burial chamber complete with a royal city for Qin to rule in the afterlife, tens of thousands of jewels embedded in the earthen ceiling simulating twilight sky, and a lake of mercury for everlasting life or some such.

Would the gods that Bertolt Brecht sent to scour the countryside of Szechuan, looking for good people, be reaffirmed in their doubt by the quality of school construction? The Globe's account puts 10,000 kids buried in their schools and counting. Right next to buildings housing a more privileged set of humanity still standing strong.

Where would they most likely be able to say, with confidence, that they had found The Good Person (Soul) of Szechuan, outside of the kids?

Or has the obvious new wealth of the country satisfactorily resolved Brecht's central question about the difficulty of remaining a good person amidst impoverishment? Look around, it's been solved? It's only a matter of growing the economy?

And yet,in such a 1984ish setting,how DO you distinguish war from peace without getting to peek behind the state facade, or be confident about the meaning of one single impression? Down a road which is going to require one helluva lot of goodwill.

Thanks for the wonderful account!

Wilf Day wrote: quote: By the way, I think I now understand the excess male births in China. It's not selective abortions. The one-child policy applies strictly in the urban 45% of China, but in the rural 55% a family that has a girl child can have a second child in hopes of a boy. Perhaps they can even have a third child
after two girls. That would skew the stats. (Putting on my Dr. Spock ears) That's illogical, Wilf. The net effect of the factor you mention would be more baby girls, not more baby boys. Selective abortion - and probably infanticide - is indeed the culprit.

I did, and you are right (sorry for the flip-flopping...) I get a ratio of 23 boys to 22 girls for 24 couples trying until they reach a boy, up to 4 children.
However that ratio is much closer to the actual demographics in China, so there has to be another factor. such as femicide, before or after birth.

[ 30 May 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

[ 30 May 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

If you start with 16 couples, a 50-50 chance of boy/girl baby, and stop at the first boy or fourth child, whichever comes first, the sex ratio comes out 50-50 - 15 boys and 15 girls.

2^4 = 16, so redoing the exercise I did with a maximum of 4 is

b
b
b
b
b
b
b
b
gb
gb
gb
gb
ggb
ggb
gggb
gggg

15 boys
15 girls

Just like M. Spector said.

[ 30 May 2008: Message edited by: Stephen Gordon ]

Actually, this sort of thing is pretty important when you're trying to figure out the causes of the sex ratio imbalance in China. Exercises like this suggest that on its own, the one-child policy can't explain the imbalance.

[ 30 May 2008: Message edited by: Stephen Gordon ]

Actually, it was a "Dr. Ma" who brought the problem before the powers that be - probably also using math and statics of food production - back when Trudeau first visited the place. They were buying a lot of Canadian wheat, if I recall rightly????

Anyway, that "Dr. Ma" was quoted by a U. of Beijing engineer/academic who visited us while on a year's sabbatical at U. of W. in the early 80s.

The fellow who informed me about Dr. Ma, was Wang Dajun, associate professor in the department of mechanics at Peking University, Beijing. This was over a quiet dinner at our place in 1982.
He likely did not survive (professionally) the pogrom that shook the universities even before the "slaughter in the square".

Another visitor, in the late 90s, the grandparent of two of my wife's students, asked,through his son-in-law, acting as interpreter, where China had "gone wrong". He was, through his working years, the political officer of an army regiment. In retirement, he depended on help from his Canadian daughter, as Chinese society became more and more stratified.

Such personal accounts can be helpful in understanding the recent history of developments there.

I would not have learned of Dr. Ma without that help. I only wish that I could have met and conversed with a thousand more people.

China highlights, in retrospect:

China's first and best surprise was its friendly people. Margaret had been nervous: how can you relate to a seething giant mass of 1,300,000,000 people? One family at a time, as it turned out. On our second full day in China, our free Sunday in Shanghai, we started our exploring. At the subway station across from our hotel we got on a brand new Metro line. Who knew Chinese celebrate Mother's Day too? Children and adults were carrying elaborate Mother's Day bouquets. Across the aisle in the crowded subway car was a mother serenely holding a bouquet in one hand. She held her son's hand with the other, while her granddaughter leaned her head on her shoulder. Some people in the crowd stared at us a little, but still we felt almost at home, among people just like us.

Everywhere, people wanted to take Margaret's picture (once even mine) along with their group, putting their arms around her as though she were part of their family. Since everything in China has a negotiable price, she wondered if she should start charging. Nevertheless she was, and still is, curious. Why, out of all the westerners in the tour group, did the Chinese tourists pick out her to be photographed with? It was at the serene and magnificent West Lake in the renowned gardens of Hangzhou, where tour guides relate the ancient myth of the white snake lady, that I ventured to suggest this might be a clue.

Chinese say "Travelling 10,000 km is like reading 10,000 books," or perhaps it's "Travelling 1,000 km is better than reading 10,000 books." Either way, it's true.

Chinese people celebrate a lot. Many firecrackers go off on Saturdays (moving day), to celebrate a family having moved into a new apartment -- and to scare away ghosts. Weddings in restaurants feature masses of fresh flowers. (Still, they almost all smoke, even in restaurants.)

Chinese are fearless in traffic, drivers and pedestrians alike. We saw hundreds of fathers and mothers on bikes or scooters with a child on the back or front, driving between buses and taxis and cars with no fear. On an old Shanghai street, cars mounted sidewalks when necessary to pass a delivery truck, but children on the sidewalk stood their ground. Cars dodged them. Even with only 12 in our group, we had both a tour guide and a driver for our little bus: driving in China is a job for professionals.

In China keeping the body supple appears to be a national obsession. Across from our Shanghai hotel, not only did store staff do their famous morning tai chi and calisthenics on the plaza in front, but dance classes kept practising in the plaza all day and late into the night.

The Chinese are world masters of food. We ate many wonderful mystery dishes. If only someone had given us a full description of what we were eating. But they haven't limited themselves to traditional foods. Watch for cans of Lulu Almond Drink to appear on Canadian shelves before long. And then there's Hot Coke with Ginger. Margaret saw it on the menu of a simple restaurant in Beihai Park overlooking the beautiful lake, and took a chance. It was a big mug of hot Coca-Cola with about an inch of finely shredded fresh ginger floating on top: extremely refreshing and delicious. Carp is the favoured, even hallowed fish of China appearing repeatedly through the centuries in Imperial architecture and art treasures. Its appearance however on the lazy susan, anatomically complete, as the gastronomic highlight of the evening meal, was not always greeted with reverence or relish by the western diners.

Chinese are tenacious, especially street vendors. Our Yangtze cruise is the only time our Canadian group is submerged in hundreds of American tourists. On a shore excursion we are led through a row of makeshift stores but have no time to shop, being on our way to a motorized sampan ride through the Lesser Three Gorges. Margaret looks at an item in Store 34, and the owner fixes her gaze on her: "you come into my store later, okay? Store 34, remember me." Several hours later, heading back to the cruise ship, we again run the gauntlet of the row of buzzing, in your face, vendors. (Surely someone is getting a kickback for directing us this way). Margaret is no longer wearing the same jacket, but the woman in store 34 isn't fooled, searches her out, chases her down, and grabs her from the crowd. The social director of the cruise ship -- a handsome blond American refugee from a TV cruise show -- is, for some reason, hovering in the shop too. As the high-pressure sales pitches pile up, Margaret appeals to him for help, but far be it from him to interfere with local "retailers." He just stands there flashing the same Crest white-strip smile he used to varying degrees of effect on the cruise ship. It's an unwritten rule: our own tour guide will tell us what an item is worth, but not within earshot of the local merchant.

Restoration does not mean, in China, what it means to us. In Jinan (pop. 3 million), there's the 60-metre-high Gold Buddha on the dominant hillside overlooking the downtown, set in the Thousand Buddhas Park. Most of the thousand Buddhas had been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. So they restored the Park by building one giant new Buddha, only eight years ago. But why not? Some of their greatest scenes of natural beauty are not natural, but were built (like Hangzhou's West Lake) many centuries if not milennia ago.

Chinese know their history -- of China. Jinan's Baotu Spring is the best of its 72 springs. First written about 3,543 years ago, its clear water is of the highest quality. The large volume feeds a small river leading to yet another beautiful small lake with a pavilioned island in the middle. This one is dedicated to the extraordinary poetess Li QingZhao (1084-1151), and has a statue of her. The most famous lines of China's most famous poetess, which it seems almost every school child knows, include a lament on those who, in the 1127 rush to escape Manchu invaders, thought more of saving their lives than of defending their emperor:

"Alive we need heroes among the living
Who when dead will be heroes among the ghosts.
I cannot tell how much we miss Xiang Yu
Who preferred death to crossing the River"

Xiang Yu had lived more than 1,300 years earlier (232 BC – 202 BC), yet was still the metaphor for honour: he died rather than retreat in disgrace. To this day he is still an early example of a Chinese tragic hero. History is long in China.

So is their history with national minorities, of which the Manchu are the second largest. As everyone repeats: China is 92% Han Chinese, 8% in the 56 national minorities with special privileges. They are exempt from the one-child policy, so that 8% will grow. They have quotas at universities, so they can enter with lower marks than Han Chinese, and get various free services and preferential economic development and aid. Remarkably, we heard no hint of resentment of these special privileges.

Other than these pleasant generalities, we can say little about China as a whole. It is not a whole in the western sense. No country so large can be other than a series of local republics or kingdoms. Each of our seven local guides was impressively proud of their city, even the young woman in little Yichang (barely 500,000 people). Our local guide in Shanghai told us he could tell what neighbourhood of Shanghai a person lived in by his accent. We learned a great deal from our guides. They made the difference between sightseeing and understanding.

Shanghai will stay in my mind forever. I have total recall of it even three weeks distant and thousands of miles away. Hordes of people in the subways, in the parks, riding bicycles, even stylish young women in their stilettos speeding on their motorbikes. Hordes of people in the streets dodging fast traffic while talking on their cell phones, even on traffic islands in the middle of mad intersections where fast vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, and the odd, terror-stricken western tourist somehow avoid getting hit. Street vendors selling everything imaginable, everywhere. The explosion of construction or the demolition of buildings that seemed to have been built just last month, to make way for still newer construction. Margaret's wry comment that there "is nothing in Shanghai older than me except in the museum" had some merit. Even the gymnasts in one of Shanghai's top rated shows are retired in their early twenties because after that their bodies are not supple enough to perform the unimaginable, but still mesmerizingly beautiful, routines on a daily basis.

On our last night in Shanghai we want to the famous downtown shopping street, Nanjing Road. Mostly high-end western brand-name merchandise, but still a huge variety. Then we found a basement food court where we could experiment with the menu: four restaurants, one of which was Kentucky Fried Chicken, which we passed up. There we met our one and only spook: we thought it might be a mall security guard who wandered around but kept coming back with his eye on us, the only westerners in sight. Was he just bored? Did he know he was spooking us? That afternoon we had been further off the western tourist path, in a commercial district around Shanghai's oldest Buddhist Pagoda. Far from the downtown, where the merchants spoke little English, we must have looked like visitors from another planet, but still we had never felt nervous.

We felt nervous for a different reason in the Tai'an Ramada. This very impressive hotel was being made still more impressive by alterations. Our room had been touched up with some work in the bathroom, whose door jam was adorned with a sticker reading "DO NOT USE IT, PLEASE." Use what? The door? The bathroom? We gingerly checked all the fixtures. They all seemed to work. Still, we got a laugh from our group at dinner that evening when we related our dilemma. (It seems every hotel on the tourist circuit has recently been bought up by some western chain. Since westerners are proverbially unable to fathom how low Chinese bottom-line prices really are, one wonders how rich the original Chinese owners of these hotels have become.)

As we arrived at our Beijing Sheraton hotel, I got another laugh from our group as we looked around the modernistic four-story atrium, when I said "Ho, hum, yet another awe-inspiring lobby." In a country where so many things are larger than life, even awe has its limits.

No account of a trip to China can be complete without a note on the hardest thing for westerners to adapt to: Chinese washrooms. We called a washroom "the Happy House" (better to laugh than to weep), and graded them from a zero-star through five-star. One-star had only squat toilets (at ground level), were strictly BYOP (bring your own toilet paper), had no doors on the stalls, and were so smelly it was hard to breathe. Two-star were clean but otherwise the same. Three-star had doors, and one western-style sit toilet in a stall marked for the disabled, which we quickly decided included the culturally disabled. Four-star even had one toilet paper dispenser, in the washbasin area, for those whose supply had run low. Five-star were western-style, found mostly in hotels and other tourist establishments. Zero-star defies description and is what Margaret faced during her climb of Mount Tai (known as China's Holy mountain). When we got off the cable car and looked at the long stairway from the South Gate of Heaven to the North Gate, she decided a pit stop was unavoidable. It was the dreaded zero-star. She said she thought her tombstone would read "died of suffocation in a Happy House halfway to Heaven."

What was most impressive about China? The ancient visual poetry of Mount Tai, with its pervasive sweet smell of the Scholar Trees? The grandeur of Beijing, sprouting more ultra-modern architecture at every corner? But these are worlds as different from each other as both are from Canada. How can you compare?

Egypt has been the Nile, for millennia. Much of China has always been its Long River that we call the Yangtze. People at one end of it speak a different language than at the other, but its vast natural beauty, and its vital commercial role in transporting goods, put it at the centre of China's past and future. Northern China is the part north of the Long River, southern China to the south. In 609 AD they built the Grand Canal, linking the Yangtze at least 1,400 km to China's northern centre of Beijing, then just inside the Great Wall (it became capital of all of China only under Kublai Khan in 1279). Before long China will complete a channel sending water from the Yangzte basin -- perhaps even from the lake above the Three Gorges Dam -- about 1,400 km to thirsty Beijing. And when that Dam's power comes on line, it will provide 5% of China's electricity -- that's power for 70 million people, twice Canada's population. I will never forget the pride of our hard-rock dam guide at having "helped build a miracle with my bare hands."

[ 26 June 2008: Message edited by: Wilf Day ]

quote:Originally posted by George Victor:
The Globe's account puts 10,000 kids buried in their schools and counting. Right next to buildings housing a more privileged set of humanity still standing strong.
Chinese prosecutors have joined an official inquiry into 10 schools that collapsed in last month's devastating earthquake, preparing possible charges.
quote:In Shifang, one of several areas of the southwest province of Sichuan ravaged by the May 12 quake, the procuratorate, or prosecutor, will seek to ensure that probes into the sensitive school issue are done fairly, the Legal Daily reported on Monday.

Authorities in Shifang are seeking to ease parents' doubts that any official inquiries into the collapsed schools will be impartial.

Prosecutors there will "enter early into investigations into project quality at 10 collapsed schools in the city to gain first-hand material of construction quality at the collapsed schools, launching preliminary inquiries and prepare for possible investigations into professional crimes," the newspaper reported.

But the report also said many grieving parents doubt the impartiality of official inquiries into the schools.

The investigators were obtaining geological reports, blueprints and documents on building and inspections and also taking samples of steel, concrete and bricks.

"With the participation of the procuratorate, the unsteady emotions of some parents have been comforted," an anti-corruption investigator, Hu Hong, told the paper.

Grieving parents across Sichuan have complained that a disproportionate number of children died in the quake, due to lax and corrupt building practices. The quake killed nearly 70,000 people, with many thousands more missing and likely dead, and at least 9,000 of them were schoolchildren.
Note that The Legal Daily reported both sides: the complaints of parents, and the anti-corruption inquiry.

The Legal Daily is a state-owned newspaper under the supervision of the Ministry of Justice yet it reports both sides. This is fairly new in China. Western media seem skeptical of the extent to which journalism has flourished since Chinese people found suppressing the Internet was not working.

Hi Wilf, i am working for a guy with a factory in China. He says thermal water heaters are built in in all the new housing there.
did you notice any good environmental stuff there?

quote:Originally posted by Wilf Day:
A footnote on China, to illustrate why they don't much need to bow to the rest of the world [...] Are such people going to trust western promises to cut carbon emissions?

Why do you write China does not require "to bow to the rest of the world?" And who are the "such people"?

quote:Originally posted by Wilf Day:

If I was in China, and people in Canada asked me "why do you not conserve energy more, or use solar power or wind power, and cut back on your use of fossil fuels?" I think I would try to answer politely, but it might be hard.

I would answer that the central government has greatly increased its committment to the environment since the early 1990s by legislating an impressive regulatory framework to protect the environment and that its implementation is mostly dependent on provinical and local governments, that Wen Jiabao recently admitted that what his government, and its predecessors, has legislated is still not enough to protect the environment, and that the central government has initiated projects to rejuvenate grasslands and forests. I would admit that more needs to be done such as clarity and public input in the decision-making process regarding environmental policy at each level of government.

I would speak about the public education campaigns initiated by NGOs and government-regulated environmental groups.

I would finish by saying that it takes time.

I would not answer from within an oppositional frame of mind by summarizing the environmental damage caused by industrialization in Canada. That position is outdated, unproductive and, at this point in the history of China's natural environment, hypocritical.

China has just launched the fastest express train in the world, on the longest track on earth.

Wuhan Railway Station in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, cost more than 14 billion RMB yuan (2.4 billion U.S. dollars), to be put into use Dec. 20. It is the first station built for the Wuhan-GuangZhou high speed railway passenger special line.

The first high-speed railway independently developed by China, with a speed of 350 kilometers per hour, celebrated its first anniversary on August 1. It carries 18.7 million passengers in the past year between Beijing and Tianjin and the number of passengers between the cities rose by 86 percent after it opened for service. The travel time was shortened from 90 minutes to 30 between the cities. Despite the influence of economic crisis, GDP of Beijing and Tianjin still saw a big increase over last year. "I attribute the boom to the operation of the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway. It not only promotes close economic contacts between these two cities, but also boosts consumers' confidence."

One hour from Beijing to ShiJiaZhuang, 4.5 hours from Beijing to Shanghai, about eight hours from Beijing to GuangZhou... in three years, high-speed trains as fast as airplanes, will be popularized all over China. This will allow travel between Beijing and most provincial capitals in one to eight hours, and make travel significantly more convenient.

China's hi-speed network will be nearly as large as that of the rest of the world's put together when the 1,300 km Beijing to Shanghai line is completed. With an investment of 220.9 billion yuan ($31.6 billion), the route, linking China's two most populous regions, is the single most expensive construction project in China since 1949. The 1,318-km-long railway line will cut the journey time between China's capital and its eastern financial hub in half, reducing it to just five hours. It connects two major economic zones - Bohai Bay and the Yangtze River Delta. One fourth of the country's population live in these two economically prosperous regions, with the local GDP accounting for 40 percent of the national total. The overall project is due for completion in 2011, in time to begin operations in 2012.

China's Ministry of Railways (MOR) has begun to raise 30 billion yuan (4.41 billion US dollars) to support railway construction through floating the first batch of bonds this year on the inter-bank bond market. Last year, State planner National Development and Reform Commission gave the green light to the MOR to issue 100 billion yuan of bonds, mainly to facilitate construction of 43 railway construction projects and locomotive purchases.

This new generation of 350km/h-multiple unit trains uses the technology achievement of Jingjin Inter-city railways, planing to produce a high-speed train’s producing system with self-owned intellectual property rights that include researching, developing, designing and producing.

High-speed rail in China.

That is amazing, Wilf. Our kleptocrats have talked a lot about funding a study to look at fast rail between Quebec City and I think Windsor. Our corrupt stooges do a lot of talking though, and spending millions on studies. In China they get it done.

Actually they were a bit incoherent, having been posted late in the evening from various hotel "business centres" as we trekked around China.

So the edited rewrite is on TravelPod.

Do you think the Chinese will be more altruistic and benevolent and more of a "team player" with other nations than America is once China is the world power?  Or, do you think China will largely act according to its own interests, much like America does today?

Even if one-party-rule eventually ends in China, I suspect China will be less susceptible to the "peer pressure" of the "community of nations" than even America is.

I think that America may be slightly less the brutal colonizers that the British were. In Iran, for instance, the British didn't even want to share any of Iran's oil wealth with Iran. US oil companies signed some very crooked oil contracts with Iran, and in 1990's Russia, and tried to in Iraq with similar production sharing agreements. In Iraq, the Chinese seem to be willing to develop the oil(and that's a laff as the oil there is in the ground and not too far down, like Alberta's vast crude oil reserves used to be).

The Chinese will be ruthless when it comes to doing business. They will undercut competitors for development contracts in various thirdworld countries as they have been doing for the last numder of years. Our corporate jackals here in the west aren't motivated to do anything unless profit margins are at least, what, Sven, 7 or 8 percent? I think 12% would be considered a supreme insult to their bloated egos. Japanese companies used to do similar with accepting lower profit margins than Wall St would ever consider. British Leyland and big three car companies are good examples of western arrogance which gained them nothing in the end. I think this is something that western corporations never expected in a million years back in the '30's and 40's when they were trying to hack off pieces of Asia for themselves.

Come on! We basically have one party rule in your country and this one as the end result of an obsolete electoral system. And they are as unaccountable to us as what our own propaganda machinery claims the CPC have been for Chinese. I think it will be a multi-polar world for a number of years to come, and that we well be looking at democratizing our own backyards in leading the way. If that does become true, then democracy could be a game-changer for the Brzezinski view of things. With democracy we could go far right here in this hemisphere. We could be world beaters and without the military might end of things. Big changes and lots of suprises in store over the next ten years or so, imo. Your country needs another Roosevelt and more democracy, and Canada needs more democracy, too. We could transform North America into a true cultural gathering place for the world's poor and oppressed, and democratic social democracies held in high regard by billions of people.

Let's concede, for the sake of discussion, that China will be no worse that America.  I think there is little evidence that China will be a more collaborative member of the world community than America has been.  In other words, the fact that "evil America" will no longer be the leading power in the world will not necessarily mean that we will therefore have a "better" or more collaborative community of nations once America has declined because there is little evidence that China, once it is the main world power, will act more benevolently than America has.

That, in turn, will undercut the leftist mantra that America is evil because it is lead by white male Europeans.

Links?

No, the burden's on you, give chiina a chance.

I suggest you study some basic logic.  If I'm not concluding that China will (or won't) be more (or less) benevolent than America has been, what "burden of proof" could I possily have???  If, on the other hand, someone is making an affirmative statement that China will be more benevolent than America has been, then the burden would be on that person to provide evidence to support that statement.

And that, of course, makes sense: If someone believes that China will be more benevolent than America has been, then that person does, indeed, have the burden of providing evidence to support that claim.

Be specific: What statement of mine are you asking me to support?

Huh?

Again: What conclusion or "statement" are you asking me to support?  Be specific.

What does that even mean?

Obviously, you are unable to point to the specific conclusion or "statement" of mine which you are asking me to support. How can I provide you with support for a statement when you can't even tell me what statement you want me to support?

Obviously, you have blithely (and conveniently) ignored post #54 (and every post after that), haven't you?

You appear incapable of pointing out which statement I made in or after post #54 for which you want me to provide "support".

So, how about this very simple request: You either concede that there is no such statement or you quote the statement of mine for which you want "support".

Is that fair?

You quoted post #50, right?

Did you even read post #54?

Do you know what the word "concede" means?  I retracted my post #50 statement (see post #54).  Yet, you appear to be insisting that I now provide "support" for a point I've already conceded!!

Now, that is "thick".

I "haven't even provided a link" to support what statement???

Just do something very, very simple for me, okay?  Tell me what statement you want me to support (and not a statement that I've conceded on, either).

Are you able to do that?  If not, then quit asking me to support (or provide a link to support) a statement that you won't even tell me you want me to support!!

I must say that I appreciate Wilf's posts about China, a country he's visited recently. I think we should try and reserve a few posts for informative commentary and semi-serious analysis on the socio-economic, or what have you, conditions in modernizing China. It's an amazing country that has the rest of the world mesrmerized still.

Interesting article in New Left Review about how China's ruling elites collude with international capital to ensure the ongoing exploitation of China's working classes:

http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2809

Add on China's tendency toward a new imperialism (needed to feed those "satanic mills") and that's the situatiion I also observe from here, JR. 

That may all be true Fidel, but the growth you talk about is based largely on the gross exploitation of the Chinese workers and peasants and brutal suppression of workers' rights activists, not to mention environmental activists and free speech activists.  The fact that the corrupt thugs who carry out the repression and benefit from the exploitation cynically call themselves the "Communist" Party of China changes nothing in my view.  Not even they pretend any longer that their policies have anything to do with "socialism".

So they've developed a superior way to exploit workers and peasants.  Great.  Can't wait for it to be imposed here.

Is someone in this thread defending Harper or any of his policies Fidel?  I don't understand your detours to flail against straw men.  I'm guessing you've never been to China, right?  The gap between the awful poverty of the masses and incredible wealth of the very rich is something to behold.  And yes I know all kinds of shocking exploitation and inequality exist here as well.  I spend most of my time fighting against those things, but I can still acknowledge the misery endured by the majority of Chinese to obscenely enrich a few.

Well I'm guessing you were never there in China when it was a fourth world ex-imperialist country as recently as 1949. China's social and economic indicators were below those of democratic capitalist India. Economist Amartya Sen says that democratic capitalist India manages to produce as many corpses prematurely every eight years as what China did in all its years of shame, from 1958 to 61. Democratic capitalist India has been the kiss of death for somewhere more than 100 million living in grinding poverty and despair between just the years 1947 and 1979. Life is cheap in democratic capitalist India as it is around the democratic capitalist thirdworld producing somewhere more than 50 million skeletons every year with about one-billion estimated to be chronically hungry today. Real capitalism according to the IMF and WTO, World Bank, BIS etc means the kiss of death for tens of millions of human beings annually. 

We have shocking levels of ginding poverty, chronic-hunger, homelessness, gross human rights violations, and general all around despair right here in the democratic capitalist western hemisphere. We don't even have to go to the opposite side of the world to see real thirdworld Darwinian dog-eat-dog capitalism at work in Uncle Sam's backyard. And most all of their client states practicing democratic thirdworld capitalism aren't worth mentioning. Unlike China and Singapore, these unmentionable thirdworld capitalist countries are still waiting for a neoliberal-capitalist economic long run to kick-in. The capitalist economic long run for people in those special countries requires an almost religious faith to be believed. But unlike Washington consensus capitalism, religion at least has an afterlife as a reward for the faithful.

I'm a socialist and agree very little with capitalism in general. But I am at least aware of the differences between Chinese and Singaporean capitalism and the brand of capitalism exported by neoliberal-capitalist institutions based out of NYC. London, Basel etc. And I have solidarity with workers around the world, too, and especially with billions of them in the democratic capitalist thirdworld and subsisting on anywhere from dimes to two or three dollars a day and by no quirk of economics living very well on those paltry incomes. One just has to look at basic benchmarks of mortality to realize that Washington consensus capitalism is the worst form of capitalism treating billions of human beings like cattle every day around the world. 

I think Chinese and Singaporean capitalism is truly vexing for rightwing ideologues here in the west. We have a repeat situation of the 1030's whereby captains of western industry and finance are investing in and helping build up another economy and this time not one ocean away but several. And as it was in the dirty 30's under a laissez-faire shifting slowly to a more leftwing Keynesian approach at home, the "new" liberal capitalism here is working about the same except propped up by public sector economy and what socialist policies still exist and haven't been gutted completely. China is not a purely capitalist economy, and neither is Singapore's.

As I was saying before, countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Haiti, Russia, and India followed neoliberal prescriptions for Washington consensus capitalism since the 1990's more closely than any other countries in the world. And where neoliberal ideology was adhered to the most over the last 20-25 years is where economic problems and deteriorating conditions in general are most severe.

The parts of Chinas's economy that are capitalist have lots of room for improvement toward expansion of trade unionism and basic worker's rights in general.  Whether we call it mixed market state-capitalism or state-socialism, there definitely needs to be improvements for the sake of China's workers who are injured by dilapidated machinery and unsafe working conditions, introduction of worker's compensation, etc. Give them time, because it looks like Chinese workers aren't behind the door when it comes to protesting openly in the streets. The CPC are afraid of workers there. Here, it's the other way around. Workers in Canada and especially the US have learned to be fearful of government and their private sector pals sticking it to us today.

Put another way, there is far too much state interventionism in the economy to be labelled a neoliberal success story. China is not the free market success story that Chile was supposed to become based on deregulation and privatization. If someone in CPC was found to be responsible for a Walkerton-style incident in China, there would be real consequences. Same in Singapore. Our stooges can kill Canadians with dirty drinking water or tainted blood, rip off the taxpayers with E-health and adscandals - it makes no difference. We still cling to laissez-faire policies in general on this side of the Atlantic, and we're also mired in corruption for a long time. Canada has been dubbed a "corrupt petro-state" recently, and we've known it  to be true for a long time.

China's state-owned central bank, construction and investment banks, steel and oil industries,  offshore investment agencies are basically run by the CPC. That's not capitalism and it's not even state-capitalism as we've known it to be here in the west. I can't imagine the Gov of Canada manipulating our dollar to favour our mostly US and foreign-owned manufacturing industries going down the tubes in Canada and US today. I can't imagine the feds here ever saying, let's compete with private capital with our own construction investment bank. Not in our life times. Our stooges in Ottawa and senate enjoy job security and gold-plated pay and fringe benefits,  but they don't actually want to do any thinking on the job. Canada and the US are much more the experiments in new liberal capitalism than China. The CPC are heavy duty Keynesians and Confucianists,  whereas our duds in Ottawa and Washington are a mixed bag of mixed-up rightwing Vancouver make-believe think tankers and Freddy von Hayekians who are now trying desperately to appear to be Bob Rae Keynesians for the sake of electibility. But they don't fool us eh, George.

Benito Mussolini said that state-capitalism was state-socialism turned on its head. And state-capitalism here in the far west has morphed since then into mixed-up market state whatever, and since the late 70's and 80's they've tried re-creating the laissez-faire glory years with the "new" liberal capitalism and now their economic theorists preferring the label "neo-classico" economists since they began abandoning the other. The main point I am trying to make is that leave it to the market 100% capitalism hasn't worked anywhere in the world where tried since 1929, and even before that and dating back to 14th century Italy.

From the book lounge thread, The Man Who Loved China, July 28, 2008:

"George: My comment of April 28 was aimed at those who believe China is a commercial threat and that the West can do without it. More important, as you pointed out, my comment is based on the assumption that Canadians (and Westerners generally) define affluence as materiel wealth and value it above all else. But some days I believe that countries like Canada can do without China's manufacturing capacity and exchange rate. After all, Canada's material affluence after the Second World War originated from the rise of the manufacturing sector in which many Canadians were factory workers who could afford a house and a car on a single income. Moreover, there was a time when Canadian businesses did not rely on Chinese factories to assemble their products at affordable prices -- that time only ended very recently. The popular definition of affluence among well-to-do Canadians and Chinese must change. The definition must include the quality of the natural environment, literacy and numeracy, spirituality, the dignity of labour, aesthetics...."

Jiajie Liang had the right idea, but neither of us advanced the foggiest notion of how to bring it off. Some means of ending invidious comparison with the lifestyle of the Joneses, perhaps?

And here's George Monbiot with some more recent thoughts on the problem:

Posted: 04 Jan 2010 01:12 PM PST

How do we break a system which now permeates every aspect of our lives?

I quite give up on expecting to see your position on China NOW, Fidel, today, this RELEVANT moment, without endless comparisons and exculpatory explanation. 

Internationally, they are playing the mercantalist game, Fidel, See Krugman.  See our empty bloody factories.

You don't hope to influence the situation regarding the employment of people in Canada, Wilf? Or the situation facing their kids?

Jesus, what is your position on the existence of God?

Last yeat China signed scientific co-operative agreements with 47 countries and agreements on natural resource extraction with 50. It also have tied up natural resource extraction in several Latin American countries.

But I'm forgetting, as Wilf and Jiajie Liang suggest, one must be philosophical,  a "realist" in the face of this exercise in capitalist growth and exploitation.

I still haven't read anything that helps me to understand why we shouldn't acknowledge that Chinese workers, under the present system in China, are grossly exploited by both Chinese and foreign elites, or why we should not unconditionally support Chinese workers when they resist.

US-China Rivalry Intensifies

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j09.shtml

"Last year it was fashionable to talk of an energy 'G2'. The US, the world's largest economy, and China, its rising rival, would come together to resolve global problems - in particular the international crisis wracking capitalism.

These illusions have rapidly evaporated this year, as the Obama administration signals a harder line towards China with a series of provocative moves, including the sale of advanced weapons to Taiwan and a planned meeting with the Dalai Lama.

These significant symbolic steps follow the imposition of hefty US tariffs on a range of Chinese goods from steel pipes and steel grate to tires.

Barely hidden is the growing military rivalry.."