This is China! blog

I recently had a conversation with a young(er) American expat who has been living in China nearly ten years. I had told him about the talk – The Warlord and the Engineer – the Royal Asiatic Society (Suzhou branch) had hosted a few weeks before. The remarkable thing about the talk was how the Danish Engineer Robert Christensen and adviser to the warlord Zhang Zuolin had meticulously recorded his life in journals while he lived in China during the 1920s, had cataloged hundreds of photos and had captured the times on film, as well. The expat and I agreed those of us living in China were experiencing a special period in its history – call it “The Goldilocks Time”, when wealth seemed to flood Chinese streets. One day, the rapid-development period will all be a distant memory. Who amongst us will be the chroniclers of this time?

The expat admitted he had desperately few photos of himself and his time here in China, despite a decade’s worth of experiences. I personally have a bunch of photos, the blog, the books I’ve written. And now that I have a son, recording the ordinariness of our lives here has become more important to me.

I told the expat that for me, while watching the photos and film footage of 1920s Mukden (Manchuria), what interested me most was not the foreigners frolicking in the foreground, but the locals toiling in the background against backdrops that are gone forever.

It’s tough to gauge just how precious one’s everyday existence may be to future generations.

Technorati Tags: china, expat life

The past month here on the ground in the Yangtze River Delta has seen activity that runs counter to macroeconomic measures in the property development sector. By all accounts, construction sites are supposed to be grinding to a halt and new projects deferred indefinitely. Instead, what I and Western friends are seeing is an acceleration of construction activity. Where for the last two years we’ve only had to bear incessant noise, dirt and dust from sunrise to sunset, now we are hearing construction activity 24/7 the past three weeks (whenever I became conscious in the shift of pace of construction). And new development projects are continuing to sprout up around us in a region that theoretically is economically mature. It seems a near-impossibility to escape the din of construction machines punching the ground or stamping steel or crunching concrete.

One building that friends and I were talking about in the Suzhou Industrial Park is still having floors stacked on its skeleton frame of concrete and steel while construction workers fix mirrored-windows to lower levels of the same structure.

We’re not entirely sure of why construction activity has accelerated recently; however, we’re sure it has to do as much with uncertainty about what the government will do next with the property sector as much as uncertainty about the Chinese economy in general. Some of the questions likely at the forefront of the minds of developers include: will the government end bank loans to developers completely at the end of the year? will they end all construction projects for and indefinite period of time? and will they be able to find buyers for their residential projects and renters for their office property?

One thing, however, is certain: the accelerated pace of construction does not fill me with any greater sense of security in the integrity of the finished structures.

Technorati Tags: bill dodson, china, construction, economy, infrastructure

FinanceAsia recently reported that officials in the northern province of Jilin were fired for permitting construction teams to fill bridge with garbage instead of with concrete.

China has fired at least 10 railway officials over a sub-standard Rmb2.3 billion ($360 million) construction project that involved bridges filled with trash instead of concrete, and builders without any relevant experience, including one team led by a cook.

I wrote about this sort of padding two years ago in an article for CHaINA magazine, when there was a rash of bridge collapses. Though officials were censured and construction companies fined, seems old habits die hard. Of course, the last thing the nation’s leaders need is for this to be found on their coveted high-speed railway.

Nevertheless, the company responsible for the garbage bridges, China Railway Material Commercial is pushing ahead with a Rmb14.7 billion ($2.3 billion) IPO in Shanghai.

A migrant worker who helped build the bridges said to Chinese media, “I wouldn’t dare to take the train once it’s finished.”

A wise man indeed.

Technorati Tags: china, infrastructure development

A Canadian acquaintance and I recently had a discussion about the state of China’s animation industry as part of the services outsourcing platform China has been promoting to the world. Mark has been an animator based in China for more than twelve years, mostly for Western productions. This year he took up a long-term project with a Chinese production company, which is creating a 3D animated movie. Mark was seeing that the animation industry in China had almost completely turned to create productions for the domestic market. “Costs are simply no longer competitive,” he said, “The Americans are doing their stuff in-house, now.” Quality and sophistication of the animations, as well, has a long way to go. Don’t expect any animated films or television series on the order of the Japanese “Ghost in the Shell” from Chinese studios perhaps in this lifetime (for reasons that are just political as they are technical).

Now that I have a toddler of my own I find myself flicking through local Chinese TV stations to find children’s programming that’s interesting for ME to watch. It doesn’t exist – at least, the stuff that’s domestically made. It’s all South-Park style animation – flat, basic shapes put together with citrus-sliced smiles. South Park animators, though, draw their characters with affect. Chinese domestic animators, I think, don’t have the budgets or the delivery schedules or the skills or the technology or the patience to produce Japanese-style animations (anime). I think the best Chinese animators are working for the gaming industry, where they can copy World of Warcraft and other popular universes.

Of course, salary inflation in China and salary deflation in the West have rebalanced the flow of animation work, dealing a blow not just to animation as a services outsourcing industry, but also to software application development, back office administration and other long-distance support services.

Seeing Chinese services outsourcing for international customers on the same scale as Indian-style platforms is as likely as seeing a well-drawn children’s animated feature come out of China with international appeal. A very long shot at best.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of introducing Simon Gjeroe to local Suzhou residents interested in hearing dramatic tales from the China’s warlord period. We had gathered for a monthly Royal Asiatic Society (Suzhou branch) talk on Chinese culture and society. Simon is proprietor of Beijing Postcards, which sells reprints and books of photos taken by foreigners visiting China in the 1800s and early 1900s.

The warlord period in China took place during the roaring 1920s, when warlords shifted sides and assassinated each other as often as they changed concubines, and when the majority of expats in Northeast China lived in the lap of luxury. Simon gave us all a unique peek into the life and times Zhang Zuolin, one of the mightiest warlords in China during the chaotic 1920s, as chronicled and photographed by the Danish arms dealer and adviser to Zhang, Robert Christensen. He also showed a 25-minute long documentary about the era, all of which was made up of photos and film footage taken by Christensen himself.

Simon revealed that five years ago Chinese were universally embarrassed by the photos taken of the country in the late 1800s through mid-1900s. “Why,” they would ask him, “do you want to look at old photos of how poor China was?” Now, Simon said, the Chinese make up the majority of his customers in Beijing. I was astonished when Simon pointed out that nearly all the old photographic and film images of China are from foreigners. The Chinese have little idea of what their lives really were like during the end of the Qing and warlord periods.

That is, not beyond the latest rounds of soap operas on Chinese TV.

Listen to my interview with Simon here .

Technorati Tags: beijing postcards, bill dodson, china, history, robert christensen, simon gjeroe, warlords