This is China! blog

Major internationalization trends are developing in China’s wind power industry. This year’s big Wind Power trade show and conference in Beijing a couple weeks ago showed a greater level of integration of the global marketplace than what the mainstream media might let on to. I write in my weekly China alternative energy column in the China Economic Review:

Not only were international players in greater evidence, but Chinese companies have become far more international in their own offerings and outlook. Four years before the Chinese wind power industry had seven turbine manufacturers. Now, it has eighty, a handful of which are amongst the largest in the world. The Beijing show saw nearly two dozen of these with displays of their products. The boulevard of expertise and technology traversing China’s borders and the rapidity with which the two-way traffic has developed indicate China just might reach its ambitious goals to see nearly five percent of its energy in 2020 generated from wind power. Chinese manufacturers like Goldwind and Sinovel may sooner than later realize their global aspirations to become major producers of wind turbines and components that rival those of their European and American idols.

Read more of the column here …

And check out my other China Economic Review alternative energy columns here…

image credit: westcoastweathervanes.com

I recently had lunch with Jonathan Fenby and his charming wife Renee in Shanghai. Jonathan is the author of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850 to the Present and the biography Chiang Kai Shek: China’s's Generlissimo and the Nation He Lost. Jonathan likes to write really big books. Anyway, his wife and I were chatting over espressos about the trains in China, and how long it used to take to get around. I remarked that China had just set a world’s record with the fastest train, the line connecting Shanghai and Hangzhou. “No,” she said in a charming French way, “the French have the fastest trains. One can get from Paris to Marseilles in under two hours.”

“Well, are the pastries as good in Marseilles?” I wanted to ask (but didn’t). If not, why the rush?

The Chinese apparently have indeed set the world record for the fastest train, according to the China Economic Review, even beating out the Japanese – who seem rather nonplussed by it all. (I don’t think the French know yet about their recent demotion – been too busy protesting.) Today I also read in the New York Times that China has unveiled a super-duper computer that operates 1.4 times faster than the previously fastest just-super computer, in America. Apparently, the Chinese government plowed billions of dollars into the project to clinch the pole position.

Now, if only they’d invest as much time and effort making a decent pastry. There, the French definitely have them beat.

A recent taxi ride with friends in through a Suzhou neighborhood led to a revelation for me. At an intersection walled in by apartment high-rises was a brightly colored display of the Suzhou skyline. Suzhou is about 75 km west of Shanghai, one of the richer cities in China. The display sketched in vivid reds and yellows and greens high rises and landscapes in Suzhou, and stood about three meters high. The most striking feature of the stationary parade float was the equally tall model of a wind turbine posted at one of the ends of the float, as though blowing energy over the rest of the cityscape.

It occurred to me then that a society’s adoption of alternative energy processes and structures was as much about government policy, adequate funding and industrial mobilization as it was about inserting the alternatives into the consciousness of the citizens. The wind turbine – and other alternate energy sources – the display seemed to say – is as much about what it is to be a modern society as the high rises, bridges and fast trains.

Wind power is here in China to stay.

During a taxi ride a few mornings ago in Suzhou I listened to the most extraordinary call-in radio show. Disk jockeys were moderating a conversation with call-in listeners on chengshi bing; literally, “city sickness”. City sickness is modern-day stress with Chinese characteristics. Of course, we in the West have had an uneasy relationship with post-modern stress, a result of the pursuit or maintenance of affluence – after all, it’s what being a Yuppie or DINK or whatever is all about. Callers on the Suzhou program discussed work-related stress, marriage-related stress, extended-family related stress. The simple stress of trying to keep it all together.

Western readers really need to realize that despite (or because of) 4,000 years of history, modernity and all the side-effects related to it are NEW to China. They’re just figuring stuff out we started to get a handle on 40 years ago (not that it’s that solid a handle).

Much of the cultural aspects of the stress in China come down to its large population, which compound the levels of stress to which many of us in the West have become accustomed.

Most of the callers seemed to be young women, though that represents nothing statistically; however, the callers were overwhelmingly young people – as well as the moderators themselves.

I write in my upcoming book China Inside Out:

However, the stresses and strains of finding a middle-income job in China and keeping it in China’s metropolises has come to the attention of Chinese researchers. The Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Psychology reported in 2010 that in a sampling of 50,000 urban workers, 60 percent were “sub-healthy.” The report stated, “While one in 10 Americans will encounter situations where they need help from mental health professionals, most Chinese turn to their families and friends when they need help,” according to the China Daily.  Chinese culture believes mental health issues are shameful, a loss of face to the disabled individual and to his family. The isolation that those in need of care suffer magnifies their sense of dissociation from family, friends, and society itself.

Everyone needs a little love.

Related posts:

My Father-in-Law Missed This One

Productivity Key: Sexually Repressed Workers

My Father-In-Law is a Hero

image credit: chinacoolerthanthou.net

Image Credit: Build

I wrote this week in my cleantech column for the China Economic Review the extent to which the United Steel Workers Union is pursuing an internationally counterproductive approach to preserving alternative energy jobs in America. It’s a move that is sure to set the United States job market back further and may result in American industry encountering higher barriers of entry to the Chinese domestic market for cleantech in the near future.

“America’s blind spot, however, is in the adoption of a national policy of any kind – it smacks of the sort of big government Republicans demonize and Democrats are embarrassed about. In reality, national energy policy in the 21st century is about gearing a country and its people toward meeting challenges that include dwindling natural resources and increasing amounts of waste and pollution. The Land of Plenty can no longer remain insulated from problems the entire world shares.”

Read more …

I recently had lunch with an American housewife and a bright, stylish young Chinese professional woman. The American housewife is unusual in that she finds the expat wives scene uninteresting – I don’t think just in Suzhou, either. She’s lived on her own in other countries, as well. The Chinese professional noted that the Western expat wives in the compound in which she lives in the Suzhou Industrial Park seldom say hello to her. She noted, however, that expat wives that had jobs in China seemed to have no problem saying paying her a greeting. The phenomenon genuinely baffled the young lady.

My American friend offered that the trailing spouses had no interest at all in being in China. “They didn’t want to be here; they don’t want to be here; and they’re dying to get out of here,” she added. “They want as little to do with China – or anywhere else, for that matter – as they can get away with.” She believed that the wives who had work here were more engaged – and perhaps more interested – in the local culture. I would add they were also likely to feel less threatened by the unfamiliar environment.

The observation about the insulated housewives puts me in mind of quite a few male expats who have lived for years in China who insist to me they will only eat ABC: Anything But Chinese!

Insularity is gender indifferent.

image credit: precisionnutrion.com

“He’s not feeling comfortable,” my Chinese wife insisted about our infant son. Mucous ballooned out from his nose like a blown wad of bubble gum when he exhaled, then deflated when he inhaled. The poor kid had a head cold. In the States we give them lots of rest, lots liquids, lots of cuddling, a humidifier, maybe even a salt water blow up the nostrils to clear away all that gum. In China, they stick them with long very un-acupunture-like needles.

Chinese parents and grandparents take their children to public hospitals and have nurses shave away patches of hair from the children’s tender pates and stick intravenous needles into their scalps. Most of the time the needles are at the end of a long clear plastic pipe that is the conduit for a saline solution.

Personally, I hate the idea. And I hate the practice. I protested all the way to the hospital. And couldn’t watch while the nurse over a two-day course jabbed my son in the head with a needle. “That’s supposed to make him comfortable?” I quipped at my wife, who duly ignored me.

Public hospitals in China have huge rooms equipped with high-backed chairs studded with hooks from which patients hang their bags of saline solution. More serious cases are given anti-biotics, right away, no questions asked; like buying candy from a vending machine. Parents and grandparents sit in the chairs and hold their children in their laps while the solution drip drip drips into the needle.

The children’s hospital in Suzhou even built a new facility specifically to house the Coma-victims*. They were still installing lights in the ceilings while literally hundreds of families crowded into the drip-lounges (I should copyright that one) to find an available chair. Those who could not find a chair or knew they would not be able to  find accommodation had bought stiff-plastic rods – some blue, some pink; depending on the sex of the victim – at the end of which were hooks from which they could hang the medicine bags. Some of the porta-drip families walked aimlessly around the outer lobby of the hospital, while others sat in waiting rooms, with a parent or grandparent usually holding the porta-pole.

There was one moment of clarity I had during the hours of waiting: an aspect of Western medicine has become a Rite of Autumn for Chinese in Mainland China. Though flu season is upon us, it rather seemed to me there were only a handful of children in the hundreds I saw who were actually hospital-sick. Otherwise, it all rather seemed a social event to show to other parents/grandparents you were taking care of your child; and to have a merit badge (that is, the shaved patch on the child’s head) to show to the neighbors during social time in courtyards. I realized that my wife simply would not have been comfortable taking care of our son at home for a very mild head cold. Like preparing for Spring Festival, there was an act of seeing others and being seen by others in preparing for the season to come.

Thankfully, our little one survived the ordeal. So did I. And my wife feels worlds better than she did before the marathon sessions. She also had something more to talk about with the neighbors.

I hate to see what they’re going to do to him when he gets the measles, though.

*a reference to the movie of the same name from the 1970′s.

image credit: my mobile phone – i didn’t think you would believe such a story otherwise – bd

A British neighbor sent me a text this morning that read: “Suicide at our courtyard .. Girl jumped from the building.”

My wife sketched in some of the details for me when I returned home today from work: a young man and young woman argued ferociously on the patio of an apartment owned by the woman’s parents. They were boyfriend and girlfriend. The woman jumped from the 18th floor to her death. From our building.

The tragedy reminds me of an instance a couple years before when I called the police in Suzhou to adjudicate a dispute I was having with a taxi driver who was supposed to drive me from Shanghai to Suzhou without a one-hour detour into the Kunshan countryside the near-side of midnight. I was refusing to pay the full fare because of the detour. The police officer said, “Is that all this is? I’ve got a girl who’s slit her wrists and is threatening to jump off a high-rise.” He jumped in his car and sped off as another cruiser rolled up.

This happens all too often in China. Young people threatening or following through with suicides. Yes, it’s a difficult, confusing time for Chinese society. But there’s also a sense that many of the young people in the cities have not been equipped to deal with the disappointments and disagreements that are a part of life no matter where in the world one lives.

Unfortunately, the  25-year old woman who jumped to her death from my apartment building will never know more of this world and all it has to offer. And her parents now know only grief.

Related posts:

My Father-In-Law is a Hero

image credit: thechive.com

The Diplomat has posted an exclusive excerpt from my upcoming book China Inside Out: 10 Irreversible Trends Re-shaping China and Its Relationship with the World, in which I discuss my meeting with Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo and the implications of Charter 08 for Chinese access to the internet.

Image credit: Hubpages

by Bill Dodson