| Why China? Well, that's a good question. You know all the gloom and doom stories about how America's shutting down for business and China's opening up. The whole world will be outsourced to China. 9% GDP growth! China's the next world's superpower, and America is the old guy yammering about how great things were in the Good Old Days, right?
Well, yeah, that's kind of what I thought too. But you come here and you realize that China's a long way from that happening, especially once you take a single step outside of the big cities. I mean, this is a country where you still can't drink the tap water! This is a country where most people still bike to work. People who can afford their own car to drive or people who can afford to cab to work everyday are an extremely rare minority, even in the cities. The average Chinese person earns $1,000 a year. The average white collar worker earns about $10,000. Are you quaking in your boots yet?
So, let me go through a few observations:
1. The pictures you see of Shanghai and Beijing are not equal to China. China's still really poor and uneducated. 800 million people are nongmin, as the rather politically incorrect Chinese call them, which means peasant. Outside of the cities, most places are extremely backward and poor. They are a tremendous social burden on China and unfortunately haven't advanced much, or at all. But I don't think you usually see that aspect of China on CNN. Lazy journalists never take a footstep out of the seminars in five star hotels.
2. China is dirty. Really dirty. Piles of garbage everywhere on the street. Sanitation is a nightmare. Why? Well, I'm not sure either. There are a lot of litterers, sure. I think it's because of the Laws of Unintended Consequences. Recycling plastic bottles is great, yes? How to encourage more of that? Pay some unemployed nongmin to pick up some plastic bottles. Great idea, right? WRONG. Congratulations, you just made Beijing look like a garbage dump. Why? The nongmin will go into all the public garbage cans, open them up, and dump the contents onto the ground, and then pick up the one or two plastic bottles inside the garbage can. Why? Because they don't care. They get paid. Multiply by that by a few thousand times and you get a yucky city.
3. Complete lack of compliance with the law. Any short-term tourist who tries to cross the street in Beijing knows this. Green light means red. Red light means green. You go with the crowd and ignore the lights. If you have a good mob going with you, you can just walk through a red light with impunity. Meanwhile, the other guy is just quaking with rage at the fact that he has a green light but a river of people in front of him. Likewise, if you have a green light, but you don't have The Power of the Mob (or a "forced green light conversion" as I like to call it), and you have to cross the street, you better watch it. Run quick. Because that cab driver is really gunning for you as he runs his red light. 
It goes way beyond just traffic laws, but that's a long rant for another day. |
