This is China! blog

The Financial Times recently printed an insightful op-ed piece entitled, “Why the west should not demonise China”.  Minxin Pei, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and an adjunct senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, makes the point that China is caught in a triple-bind when it comes to world perception: it panders to nationalist sentiments at home while attempting to present itself as thoroughly modern and respectable to the international community; the international community judges its actions by the standards of a superpower, not a banana republic; and the West, in particular, always sides with the underdog when the authoritarian regime that China is engages a counterpart in a dispute.

Well worth the read, the article proffers advice to both China and the West in the ongoing wrestling match to figure out the next world order.

Related posts:

New Prescription Needed: Blurring a Bi-polar World

Ostpolitik, China-style

China should go to its room

When Will China Lead?

image credit: sufiansteve.blogspot.com (Note: China-watching should be so interesting, huh, guys?)

A Danish friend recently told me of the revenue growth targets for 2011 company headquarters has set for his China operations. “They set my goal for 25%!” he said, sounding anxious. His company sells widgets into the China market. The highest quality Danish widgets, of course.

“Twenty-five percent. That’s rather ambitious?.”

“Ambitious? You’re kidding, right?”

“No. I mean, let’s face it,” I leveled with him, “your product is a commodity. Double-digit growth of any kind is amazing for the industry. Especially with the economy overheating, the central government is likely to slow things down a bit over the coming months.

“What’s your growth rate been this year?” I asked.

“Fifty-five percent,” he said soberly. “So the 25% takes into account possible government policies to cool the economy. So why is it so hot now?”

“I figure the US$2.4 trillion dollars in loans the central government let fly out of Chinese banks these past couple years has finally worked its way through the entire system, like a huge shot of adrenaline to the heart that needs time to work its way through the veins.”

“No worries,” I told him.

“Many more worries,” he said.

image credit: labs.chinamobile.com

In this week’s China Economic Review online I write in my column about a revelation that’s come straight from the horse’s mouth about China’s wind power industry.

“It’s going to be a disaster. Everybody knows about it, everybody’s bracing for it,” the Chinese senior manager said. “The offshore wind industry will have terrible accidents because of quality issues and the speed of construction.” It was an unexpected confidence delivered with force and certainty. My colleagues and I sat slack-jawed at the round banquet table, shifting uncomfortably in our seats. We were in North Jiangsu Province, a couple hours’ drive from Shanghai. A Chinese wind power components manufacturer had invited us to his plant to learn more about their work and see their progress in the field. The manager spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re just building the wind turbines too fast; there will be some big accidents,” he concluded. It seemed almost blasphemous for a Chinese manager to express massive failure ahead for an entire industry. Still, he just may have had a point…

Read more of the article here.

image credit: co2realist.com

A couple weeks ago in Shanghai over a lunch of Sichuan spicy chicken and Yangzhou-style fried rice (with obligatory stir-fried spinach with diced garlic) Rob Schmitz and I discussed his trip at the beginning of the month to Inner Mongolia. Rob is China Bureau Chief for the Marketplace Business Report, which airs daily on National Public Radio (NPR), in the U.S.

“Everyone thinks Ordos is empty because of speculation,” Rob told me. Ordos is a prefecture bordering the better-known Hohhot. “Actually, it’s because of all the money that’s suddenly entered the local economy from the huge deposits of coal they recently discovered in the surrounding lands that they had money to build the city. It’s not speculation, like the rest of China – it’s because they actually have the cash.” Rob told me pretty much the only residents of the fully functional city are local administrators.

Knock on effects of the new coal business, Rob told me, have included the forced removal of nomads from their now-valuable land, a fair amount of which had already become unusable because of over-grazing by the sheep that have been providing the cheap merino wool sweaters consumers love.

Rob produced several other radio reports on the boom in the economy of Inner Mongolia, because of coal mining. Just a couple days ago, he offered a report on China’s real estate bubble.

Check out the podcasts here:

Urban Desert: Empty homes in Ordos

Boomtime on China’s grasslands

Is there a housing bubble in China?

Related posts:

Space is Curved in China

Property Value Woes

China Property Woes: An un-American Response

North Korea’s shelling of an island ostensibly off the shore of South Korea (and subsequently killing and wounding residents) has caught China flat-footed. The Chinese leadership is caught in a bind by a dictator who is both “mad” and “bad” – to paraphrase former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when asked her thoughts about Saddam Hussein just before he was toppled (she had said Saddam was “bad but not mad)”. It seems no amount of Chinese banquets, red packets of diplomatic support and abstentions at United Nations Security Council meetings to censure the rogue regime have been able to straight jacket its cantankerous neighbor.

North Korea’s  latest provocation is as unsettling for the Chinese leadership as it is for the South Koreans themselves. (The Chinese I’ve asked about it seem oblivious to the event. )Should the inflated paper tiger that North Korea is suddenly pop – and try to take its southern cousin with it – the implications for China are enormous: the sort of Black Swan that could decelerate its economic development somewhat and limit its sphere of influence in its own neighborhood.

The evaporation of the North Korean regime would imply that the trickle of refugees escaping from North Korea into China would become a flood, weighing down local economies; provincial economies.The quickest way for China to re-inflate North Korea might be to invest in the hollowed out shell of a region, along with South Korea.

In addition, South Korea’s influence in the region would increase with American backing, which would put the United States back at the Yalu River all over again – which is how this whole mess got kicked off nearly sixty years ago when the Chinese entered the civil war.

As a senior Chinese commentator told the New York Times in reference to North Korea’s unbridled aggression, “… strategically, China’s kidnapped by it.”

Let’s hope history comes nowhere near rhyming this time.

image credit: debateitout.com

Few writers/journalists/business analysts based in China can deliver an entertaining and insightful lunch talk on the French intellectual classic about pre-WWII Shanghai, Man’s Fate, by Andre Malraux, and then give an incisive interview on the impact obesity is having on Chinese society and economy. However, the ubiquitous Paul French can.

This past Friday at Shanghai’s M on the Bund, in its Glamour Bar, Paul delivered a humorous literary criticism of Malraux’s novel of Shanghai in 1927, a time of political intrigue, underworld skulduggery, and, well, existentialism. Really, it was funny – you had to be there. He did crack on the French (the country and its people; not his own family) quite a bit, and thankfully left us Americans alone for the hour he talked. Still, I did learn more about Malraux the man (apparently, he was a big fat liar about a lot of things – though with flair, admittedly), and wrote graphically and rather accurately about the Shanghai of the time, though he had never visited the city before writing the novel in 1933. I intend to read the book again with the insights I gained from the luncheon.

Afterward, Paul was good enough to give me a bit of his time so I could record an interview about his new book with Mattew Crabbe – his partner at Access Asia – Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation. In particular, I found what Paul called “the privatization of space” and its relationship to the evolution of an unfit society insightful.

Listen to the podcast here to learn more about what inspired Paul and Matthew to write the book in the first place; what Paul found to be the most interesting and exciting finding in the book; and how fat and China just may look come the year 2025.

image credit: moonbattery.com

Technorati Tags: china, chinese middle class, middle class, social trends

The days have been quite hazy of late in the Yangtze River Delta, even when the sunshine is working overtime to shine brightly. It’s the annual burning off of the fields in China, when farmers set torch to the chaff and detritus left behind after harvest. For the last month an inversion layer has pressed the smoke and ash from the burnings even closer to ground, reducing visibility to just a few meters, especially next to the lakes and rivers. It’s been near impossible to see more than a few yards round the Golden Rooster Lake (Jinji Lake) in Suzhou, across from which I live. One China veteran told me it used to be much worse ten years before, especially along the stretch of roadway joining Nanjing and Shanghai (the Huning). Fires used to burn wildly across the cropland. Now, there is less cropland, and more highway.

Still, a friend told the story of how he’d driven to Shanghai along the very same route just a few days ago. A stretch of road became thick with black, acrid, toxic smoke that poured through the vents in the car. It was impossible to see, he said, and more difficult to breathe. Now, farmers are burning their garbage along with the chaff in the fields. This means plastics and rubbers and all manner of noxious materials are going up in smoke and toxic ash, despite regulations to the contrary.

Modernization with countryside characteristics is not a healthy prospect.

image credit: all-china-agriculture.com

I recently attended the “coming out” party for a baby boy who did not attend the event. Neither did the mother. “The baby is too small,” the father told me, “only twelve days old.” The father is a tall, handsome fellow from a small town in Anhui province. He is still in the People’s Liberation Army, still barracked, separated from his wife and newborn. His wife lives and works in Suzhou.

I pushed my way through the throng of well-wishers, fanning away cigarette smoke and smiling politely at people I didn’t know. I asked my wife about the coming out party. “Why are they having a coming out party for a baby that’s only twelve days old? I thought the party in China happens when the baby is 30-days old – and then again when the baby is 100 days old.”

Coming out parties for babies in China are big deals; second only to wedding banquets. I think because in the past the mortality rate was so high in the countryside the townsfolk developed the tradition of celebrating the minor miracle of child and mother surviving childbirth – and mothers-in-law.

“That’s the custom in our town,” my wife answered matter-of-factly. “But I thought the custom was 60 days for boys in your town; not 30 days.” We celebrated our son’s coming-out on his 60th day, at the urging of my mother-in-law.

“Oh, this is another custom,” she said without irony. “Besides, the baby’s father has to return to the army camp at the end of 30 days.”

“So why not have the 30-day coming out party on the 29th day. Then, the mother and child can attend their own party. And anyway,” I said – ironically – “I thought you Chinese mothers are supposed to languish in bed – unwashed – for 30 days.”

“Well, his parents have come from the countryside to see their baby grandson. They brought chickens.”

“Chicken eggs?”

“No,” she said, her voice picking up in excitement, “chickens to eat.” We only got a lousy box of several hundred chicken eggs when my son was born. No  chickens for us. “They’re fresher in the countryside than in the city.”

“Are the chickens dead?”

“No.”

“They brought live chickens from Anhui to Suzhou? On the train? How many chickens did they bring?”

“Six, or maybe eight.”

“They gave us one,” my wife said brightly. “Tomorrow I’ll make stir fried chicken in soy sauce.” I had visions of a live chicken running round our living room, pecking out my infant son’s eyes.

“Is it still alive?” I asked half-seriously, afraid of the answer.

“No, silly,”it’s already dead and feathered.”

Which was how I felt at the end of the conversation.

—

Related posts:

Maternal Wisdom from the Chinese Countryside

Welcome Home, Son

But I don’t Want a C-section!

The Market Value of a Daughter

Technorati Tags: china, expat life

Yesterday a couple colleagues and I made our way up to Nantong, at the mouth of the Yangtze River. Nantong is about an hour and a half drive from Shanghai. We had gone to visit a ship building company that has moved into the manufacture of cement foundations for offshore wind turbines. The central government is looking at having nearly seventy percent of all China’s offshore wind farms off the coast of Jiangsu Province.

Whether from Suzhou or from Shanghai the road northward to Nantong is wide and well-paved. It’s when one hits the township of Qidong, which is part of the Nantong municipality, that things get interesting. Motorcycles and electric bikes abound in Qidong, the economy of which is overwhelmingly based on agriculture and aquaculture. Either side of the road into and out of the one-horse town is patched with crops of grain or shallow ponds in which any variety manner of fish or crab or shrimp is cultivated.

The tallest building in Qidong seems perhaps eight stories high, a great, pink-stone, Romanesque structure that was quite out of place amidst the garage stall storefronts and five-story residential apartments. Cars congested the narrow downtown road, over the main thoroughfare of which was suspended a series of great blue-frame ribbons studded with lights. I imagined at night the street was quite a spectacle in which the town’s fathers took a great deal of  pride.

The single greatest claim to fame I recognized about Qidong, though – the very thing that puts the small town on my mind-map – is that upwards of one out of every four motorcycle or electric cycle ride wore a proper helmet, many of which were visored. Some were the sort one associates with Hell’s Angels – simple upside down bowls with a thin strap gripping the chin; others encased the entire cranium like a goldfish bowl turned upside down,visors down. One woman wore a designer pink helmet with black stretch-fabric that fit down into her designer brown plaid coat.

I wondered what tipping point had prompted so many local town’s folk to such precaution as wearing safety helmets: a vice mayor crippled on his electric scooter? a super-sale on motorcycle helmets? the coolest guy or the sexiest girl seen wearing one, snug and smug that he or she was safe against the insanities of the local traffic.

Whatever the reason, it was a refreshing sight to behold,since most cyclists in China wear no head protection whatsoever – even the families of four (mother, father and two children) on electric motor bikes.

I wonder if the phenomenon will ever tip into the rest of the country.

image credit: blog.scad.edu

I found disconcerting New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s recent comment in Hong Kong that “We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here – only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.” The  statement disturbed me because of the amount of news and books about China pouring through media channels into American newspapers, magazines, TV sets and web portals. Either nobody’s listening or the wrong message about what’s happening here in Asia is not getting through to Americans – especially their leadership.

A conversation during a dinner party a couple evenings ago with a China veteran with more than 13 years experience managing factories in China seemed to support Bloomberg’s assertion. The manager had finished a management contract in Guangdong province and had returned to the States to pick up another contract for another China-based position. He is in his late fifties. He, too, said Americans have no idea of the level of activity occurring here in China; or in Asia, in general. “They don’t understand what’s happening,” he said thoughtfully. We agreed that, whether we like it or not, the balance of economics – if not power – was shifting to Asia.  “I picked up more job leads in the last two weeks since returning to China than the two months I was in the States.” Actually, he hadn’t picked up any China-related leads back in the States.

There’s so much Americans can be doing to rebuild their economy, develop new industries and technologies, create more jobs, and, in general, just feel better about themselves in a dramatically shifting post-industrial world. None of the rebalancing that’s happening globally is a fait accompli.

Congress, as Bloomberg asserts, is doing Americans a great disservice.

Further reading: New York Daily News

image credit: bookhuntersholiday.wordpress.com