Impressions of China

6/26/2010

I visited China to attend two conferences, in Beijing and Changsha, and offer some reflections on my trip. Subsequent blog entries will cover my tourist experiences and the conferences.

I've just returned from a long week's trip to China, where I spent four full days in Beijing and two in Changsha, an obscure little village of about six million people, which does not even make the top twenty list of Chinese cities. First I will cover the grungy details of travel, and my first impressions of Beijing. Then I present some thoughts about Chinese economics and politics, based on conversations with those who live there.

Impressions

The trip to China is pretty brutal, at least given the connections I made. I had initially booked a flight with only one stop and plane change in Seattle, but Delta changed their Seattle-Beijing schedule, and after I pointed out that this would leave me stranded in Seattle with a nine-hour layover, they put me instead on a Boston-Detroit flight that connected with a Detroit-Seattle flight, which left me only a bit over three hours to kill at SeaTac. Most airports nowadays are very stingy with electrical outlets and movable chairs, so my computing options were only to run down my battery sitting in a comfortable chair in the waiting area or to sit on the floor near the public phones. Of course I did the latter, but this put me in a less than perfect mood approaching the flight, whose length furthered my ennui. I left for the airport in Boston at about 10am on Friday, landed at ten minutes after midnight on Sunday and got to my hotel at about 2am, so technically I spent two nights traveling. In reality, because there is a twelve hour time zone difference (it's that much later in Beijing), door to door travel time was "only" twenty-eight hours. But enough kvetching.

Beijing has been almost completely Haussmann'd, as almost all the old hutong (little narrow streets full of shops, people, bicycles, etc.) have been torn down to make way for a rectangular grid of roads that remind me of the Santa Monica Freeway with traffic lights, both in their width (the biggest have five lanes in each direction, plus bike lanes and pedestrian sidewalks), almost constant bumper to bumper traffic, and drivers who weave in and out of traffic. Unlike Los Angeles, there are also vast fleets of buses running all over, so the right lane is usually impassable. The next lane out is also chancy because private vans stop to pick up or discharge people beyond the buses. And traffic signs and signals are taken as advisory. The airport expressway has lanes marked 60-100, 80-100, and 90-120, from right to left, but my driver would think nothing of swerving into one of the right lanes (or even an exit lane on occasion) to get around "slowpokes" who only slightly exceed the speed limit. In city traffic, the etiquette seems to be to honk at people who you are about to cut off, and to squeeze into slots in traffic so long as the person in that lane is not moving fast enough to wipe you out. My first morning, we were walking with our tour guide to his parked van, and I almost got run down by a city bus that decided to barrel through the intersection even though I had a green walk light and his was red. There is also a graceful dance between pedestrians and many bicyclists to establish priority of place without actually wiping out. In fact, I didn't see a single accident during my time in China, so perhaps the Dutch experiment in eliminating traffic signals will work by making everyone more aware and cautious. For an American, however, this represents a challenge to learn the scheme before dying.

Beijing is laid out (courtesy, I'm sure, of the recent demolitions) as a grid of compass-aligned major roads, with a surprisingly few smaller streets in between. There is also a concentric set of circular (really rectangular) highways centered on Tien An Men Square and the Forbidden City, which are clearly the landmark centers of the city. These roads are like the Ring in Vienna or the sequence of Körúts in Budapest, except that each is a freeway rather than a surface street. I saw circular roads number 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, at progressive distances from the center, and I hear they are building number 6. There are also radial highways going off in different directions (e.g., the Airport, the Great Wall), and these seem to be toll roads. Overall, it's a pretty good design for an LA-like city built on flat ground, but they are constantly complaining about the ever-growing number of people with cars, which puts increasing stress on any road network.

Economics and Politics

A TV report on the evening I left brought the sad news that the expected GDP growth rate for 2010 is only 9.7%, and this is the first time that rate has fallen under 10% in many years. Despite the fact that we think we are the consumers of China's industrial goods, apparently they actually sell more to Europe than to the US, and the trauma of threatened bankruptcies of various EU countries plus the consequent decline of the Euro have hurt Chinese export. Nevertheless, nearly 10% is a growth rate most countries could only wish for, and the skyline of Beijing (and Changsha) bristles with construction cranes. Near the Dongzhimen subway station, where I waited for my shuttle bus back to the airport hotel on my last night in Beijing, there was a huge new complex being built, containing a shopping center, hotel, office building, and residential towers. As the bus wound its way through northeastern Beijing, I must have seen a dozen such huge projects under way. I asked one of my Chinese colleagues why I have not seen the Stalinist era huge ugly apartment buildings that I have seen all over formerly Communist Europe, and he was surprised at my expectation. He said, but those were built in the 1950's—they are old and small! In fact, China seems happy to erase the past continually, and is rich enough to be able to do so frequently. I know that US authorities suggest all the time that China must increase its domestic consumption and stop relying solely on exports to grow its economy. Perhaps this is true at the personal level, but I am certainly seeing a great deal of their steel, concrete and glass going into these new buildings. I do sense that the Yuan (officially called the Renminbi) is undervalued. Everything is quite a bit cheaper here, except for coffee, which even exceeds US Starbuck's prices. A bus ride is 1 yuan, a subway ticket is 2 yuan, a McFlurry is 9 yuan, so at the official exchange rate of about 6.8 yuan to the dollar, these correspond to 15 cents, 29 cents, and $1.32. My first Beijing hotel, a very luxurious place next to Peking University, cost about $125/night, the still lovely (but loud) Sino-Swiss Hotel by the airport was about $77, and my really nice hotel in Changsha was about $40. As in the US, there are various taxes and service charges on top of this, but still the prices are very low by US (or European or Japanese) standards. I suspect that this is critical in order to allow workers to feel content (or at least not to rebel) with their very low wages. China is resisting allowing the Yuan to rise against foreign currencies, but from such data it really should, on the international markets.

In a very interesting discussion with a Chinese man who got his PhD in the US and then spent a decade in US research and development labs before returning to China, I got some interesting insights. The most dramatic is that China is really a two-class society, which is clearly visible in the style of individuals' identity cards. The farmer/peasant class, representing about 5/6 of the enormous population, gets very few privileges from the society, whereas the other 1/6 get good health care, subsidized education, pensions, and permission to live in the cities, enjoy high-paying and high-prestige jobs, and essentially to live in the developed world. The farmers are expected to farm, and continue to lead the traditional Chinese lives of their ancestors, except for those who happened to live in desirable places, where their lands were bought (good) or confiscated (bad) to make room for new industrial areas, luxury housing, etc. The desirable places are near the ever-expanding cities, and on the coastline, which Chinese find attractive just as Americans do. There is a plan to change the status of all the 5/6 who are cut out of societal benefits by 2020, though the government has been relying on spectacular growth of the economy to finance the astronomical cost. Now they are starting to backtrack a bit on the date, but the conversion proceeds. For example, the government has decided that they can solve the Uigur problem by making them all first-class citizens, and thus giving them a stake in the country. It helps that there are relatively very few Uigurs, so this is cheap. It's a bit like the US 1960's idea that we could have avoided fighting the Vietnam war just by buying off the Viet Cong. I wonder whether it will work in China. Although my informant's perception is that the biggest differences among people are these economic ones, China does have many ethnic minorities, constituting about 10% of the population (thus, about 140 million people, or nearly half the US population), and many of these also practice different religions and cultural traditions, so it may be that even tons of money will not solve all problems. Nevertheless, the government is strongly focused on preserving stability at the expense of all other goals. China has a very long tradition of revolutions, usually led by a popular demagogue rousing the peasant masses, often in times of famine and economic hardship. Mao Zedong (whom I'm used to calling Mao Tse Tung) represents only the most recent example. Empires have been overthrown, and new dynasties and rulers established as a result of such events, so the current leaders have no desire to fall victim to such fighting and changes. This is why economic freedom (which is quite substantial) has not been accompanied by political freedom. Nevertheless, at least for the intellectual class, and in private, there is essentially total freedom of speech, no fear of denunciations, freedom of travel, and mostly bitter memories of the repression of intellectuals by Mao and the Red Guards. However, they are not free to make their ideas public, because that could be viewed as an incitement of the farmers, and thus the seed of instability.

I also heard about the events through which the Ming Dynasty came to an end and the Ching (Qing) began. In the 17th century, a great famine led to revolt, by peasants led by a rabble rouser, and they sacked Beijing. One of the leaders of the revolt confiscated the residence (and concubines and possessions) of a general of the old reign, who was commanding the soldiers guarding the Great Wall, and when he discovered this, he had his men open the gates in the Wall and invite the Manchu hordes to invade. Hence the Qing Dynasty, wherein the rulers were Manchurian, who ruled until the early 20th century.

Even the relatively recent history of China offers a reminder of the power of leaders who can rouse large segments of the populace to action. For example, Mao clearly led a farmers’ revolt against the ruling Kuomintang for decades until the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and established the People’s Republic. But what I did not know was that the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s was essentially a second similar struggle led by Mao, with the Red Guards playing the role of the farmers, to re-take control of the government that he had lost in the aftermath of the debacle and famine of the Great Leap Forward of the 1950’s, for which he was largely held responsible.

This history, both ancient and modern, explains the paramount place of stability in the thoughts of the government.

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