This is China! blog

This has been an annus horribilis for China infrastructure. This year has seen wind turbines blowing up, bridges falling down, bullet trains crashing into one another and, most recently, a terrible accident on a Shanghai subway line I take several times a week. On hearing the news about the Shanghai accident my (Chinese) wife simply shook her head and said, “Everyone knows they’re building things too fast.” She told me of a program she had seen on Chinese national television in which engineers echoed the same sentiment. “I don’t want you to take the bullet train to Shanghai,” she said quickly, “and I don’t want you riding the subway in Shanghai, either. Ride your bicycle!” Of course, that’s hardly feasible with a 150 km to cover between Suzhou and Shanghai; leave alone the thought of navigating Shanghai traffic on a bicycle.”

Nevertheless, it was wise of the central authority to have slowed down travel on all the high-speed rail lines, and to order an audit. The official investigation of the Hangzhou-Wenzhou bullet train accident of the past summer was due out a couple weeks ago. Perhaps officialdom is hoping its citizens will forget they had announced they would publish the findings mid-September. The story that the signal system on the line had failed still stands. However, with the unexpected death a few weeks after the bullet train accident of the general manager of the design company charged with re-innovating and implementing signal technology on the high-speed railways, few dissenters will provide even a gentle reminder to the powers that be of their promise to disclose findings in a timely fashion.

Still, it is jarring that yet another, more stable showcase infrastructure project as the Shanghai subway system should also go off the rails so soon after the Hangzhou-Wenzhou incident. According to news reports, some time before the Shanghai accident subway staff was manually signalling directions to trains on the line because the system had failed. Seems a sort of retribution from beyond the grave.

Perhaps dead men can tell tales after all.

image credit: echinacities.com

Technorati Tags: bill dodson, bullet train, china, shanghai, shanghai subway, subway, subway accident, Wenzhou

At the end of 2010 Shell Oil produced two future scenarios of how the world might revert wholesale to renewable energy sources – Scramble and Blueprint – both of which take account of China’s new-found role as energy heavyweight. TrendsAsia extended the Scramble scenario into a third, grittier scenario called Skirmish.

The first, called Scramble, sees countries in a grab-fest for energy resources they stake out with gusto, cordoning off supplies for their own society’s consumption and perhaps – if there’s enough to go round – for their allies, as well. A lack of inter-governmental coordination and unfettered use and abuse of fossil fuels leads to a global slowdown around the year 2020, which catalyzes governments to place public and private strictures on the use of energy until, ten years on, the world has become green.

Read more at TrendsAsia.asia …

Technorati Tags: alternative energy, blueprint, china, energy, green energy, oil, scenarios, scramble, shell oil, skirmish

Check out a recent Marketplace radio interview in which the intrepid Rob Schmitz interviews me during a National Public Radio report about how energy trends in China are impacting companies – foreign and domestic – doing business in the country.

Listen to the podcast report and read the transcript of the piece here.

Technorati Tags: bill dodson, business, china, energy, marketplace radio, national public radio

Katherin Hille writes on the FT BeyondBrics blog about the terrible way foreign media and then American diplomatic staff were treated as American Vice President Joe Biden began to speak during a formal gathering that included Vice Premier and heir apparent to the People’s Throne, Xi Jinping. Hille writes that just as Biden started talking about the economy, “Chinese security staff and foreign ministry handlers started pushing media out of the room, drowning Biden’s voice out with calls of ‘it’s over, it’s over, let’s go’.” American White House and diplomatic staff sided with the journalists and were themselves physically shoved out the door, as well. Meanwhile, ole’ Joe soldiered on through the kerfuffle with his speech, which sagely pronounced that the world’s economic stability rested on Sino-American cooperation. Which was sadly missing during the showcase basketball game between Georgetown and the Bayi Military Rockets, a local Beijing club. The basketball game ended with time to go because of an on-court brawl between all the players and some spectators, as well (video).

Vice President Biden missed that shoving match, though, as he had attended the Georgetown game in Beijing the evening before with another local team. Most Chinese in the weibosphere seemed embarrassed by the incident, the video footage of which censors wiped from Chinese cyberspace.

And likely no Chinese outside the impatient ministers in attendance at Biden’s speech knew anything of their leaders’ impoliteness to a foreign dignitary.

Nevertheless, the Georgetown players must accept as part of their introduction to Chinese culture and society that their unfortunate experience is pretty much a way of life for the average Chinese. Typically, though, foreigners have to wait several months before moving from theory to lab in the exhausting course called “The Chinese Way 101″.

I do have a sense, though, that come the hand-over of the keys to the throne next year, relations between the two countries will become increasingly fractious as China continues to signal just how much it has to learn about the world outside its borders, and about the nuances of detente and diplomatic relations.

The tone at the top is dissonant.

Technorati Tags: biden, china, georgetown basketball china, xi jinping

After I had delivered a book talk (about China Inside Out) to about 60 members of the British Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai a young Chinese lady approached me and said, “I’m having a Naked Marriage”. She seemed confessional, as though she was committing some great sin in the eyes of the Almighty. I had been telling the group – which was eighty percent Westerners – about how the inflated values of everything from property through weddings and even wedding rings were blocking young Chinese couples from fulfilling social wishes for a grand send up to matrimony. “Naked weddings” saw couples basically living together, marriage certificate in hand and that’s about it: no property, no dowry, no wedding ring, no wedding banquet (gasp!). Half-naked weddings at least net the girl a wedding ring.

The young lady at the BritCham talk told me that both she and her lad were professionals working in Shanghai and that together they could not afford to buy a flat. She was from Wuhan, where her family still lived. Her parents didn’t like her suitor, who was from Harbin. He didn’t have any money, they said. Apparently, the young fellow’s parents didn’t much like her, either; I supposed they figured their son should be marrying into money there in Shanghai. She told her father she wanted to marry for love.

He told her, “You’re being unrealistic”.

“I told him I didn’t want to be caught up in a bad marriage and work a job I hated just for money,” the young lady explained to me.

“No one likes their job,” she told me her father shot back.

How ever the saga ends – or the next chapter begins – it is refreshing nonetheless that a generation gap in China just may see a revision of social values thirty years of the Cultural Revolution were unable to expunge.

Related posts:

Naked Marriages

“Straying Cows” Still Unable to Meet Bachelor Demands

Divorce, Chinese Style

Bullet in the Head (1990) is one of the best films Hong Kong director John Woo ever made.  It’s about how greed and corruption and more greed warp the relationship  between three buddies from Hong Kong during the early days of the Vietnam War. A must-see film if you’re into the genre, as I am.

A bullet in the back of the head is also often the punishment for those who abuse their power in China so egregiously that their crime may incite a riot of protests by citizens or tear a substantial swatch from the leadership’s fabric of rule. Typically, the form of execution is reserved for national level officials, or high-profile leaders, like the Communist Party boss of Shanghai who skimmed from the city’s social welfare pot to personally invest in property. When the Party was cleaning Shanghai’s house because of the scandal six years ago, I recall local government officials as far out as central Anhui  province unable to make decisions because they did not know how far into China’s interior the tremors would reverberate.

Most recently, Vice Mayors of Hangzhou and Suzhou – rich second-tier cities – had the misfortune of being caught out by authorities for corruption on infrastructure projects for which they were responsible five years ago. They met with the same misfortune as the Shanghai CPC boss. The punishments seemed unusual given how relatively low level the officials were in China’s leadership pecking order.

Paul French and I recorded a podcast a couple weeks ago for Ethical Corporation Magazine about the executions and what signals we thought the central government was sending out through such an irreversible punishment. In addition to being an analyst on China consumer market trends, an author of several books on China (and now, a published novelist), Paul is also China editor for the Magazine.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Technorati Tags: national security, policy trends

AP Photo

A China Realtime Report cited a Weibo text that had sounded off about the recent, fatal accident between two high-speed trains running the Hangzhou-Wenzhou line. The message – from a Chinese national – was so well written, succinct and accurate I had to pass it on:

“When a country is corrupt to the point that a single lightning strike can cause a train crash, the passing of a truck can collapse a bridge, and drinking a few bags of milk powder can cause kidney stones, none of us are exempted,” wrote another Weibo user. “China today is a train traveling through a lightning storm. None of us are spectators; all of us are passengers.”

“Egads!” I thought to myself, “I’m one of those passengers!”

Technorati Tags: middle class, social trends, urbanization

The central government may actually be coming to the realization that infrastructure development efforts of the past couple years at least have simply been unsustainable from a quality and quantity point of view. The bullet train accident on the Hangzhou-Wenzhou line this past weekend  as well as problems on the Beijing-Shanghai line have clearly shown up the faults in such a muscular approach to modernization.

However, the probability of additional incidents occurring has increased as government authorities have sent out a directive to media channels to focus on the rescue efforts; journalists are to avoid reporting on the causes and repercussions of the crash, according to the Wall Street Journal. Of course, all manner of cover-ups will likely ensue, as the problem with the trains is systemic – the train accident was symptomatic of a wider web involving ignorance, arrogance and corruption.

The incident has seen the shares of the listed train companies involved in the accident plummet, and governments once interested in purchasing Chinese “re-innovated” train technology are reconsidering their options. World opinion about Made in China, however, has remained on a par, however.

Little short of a long stretch of miracles as far as the eye can see will convince the world China’s investments overseas are about little more than a resource grab or money-for-crap schemes.

Technorati Tags: china, economic trends, globalization

Fan Bing Bing is a Fan.

My (Chinese) wife recently accompanied her sister to one of the numerous clinics in Suzhou that perform face-lifts (or cosmetic surgery, as the profession enjoys calling itself. My wife told me the line to the check-in counter was nearly out the door with young women, as young as high school age. “Many of their parents accompanied them,” she told me, which surprised me.

“Why were their parents there?” I asked, incredulous. I spend a lot of my time in China incredulous.

“The parents are paying for the surgery,” she said matter-of-factly, as though implying I really needed to get with the program here in China.

“They’re paying for their daughters to have surgery on their faces?”

“And breasts,” she added.

“And breasts.” I could feel a rush of testosterone weaken my knees at the prospect. (Men are such simple animals).

“The parents believe if their daughters are more beautiful they can catch a boyfriend with more money.” Of course, “boyfriend” in China nearly always means “fiancee”. Doesn’t take more than a couple dates to seal the deal. I imagine, as well, a pretty face and shapely figure don’t hurt job prospects, either; especially if one looks at job qualifications for airline attendants, bullet train attendants and secretaries.

The Straits Times reported in January this year about the Chinese cosmetic surgery industry, “About 3 million people had plastic surgery on the mainland in 2010 in an industry worth an annual 15 billion yuan (S$2.9 billion), statistics from the MOH [Ministry of Health] showed. There were also 20,000 lawsuits against clinics in China in 2010 for botched jobs and “lopsided” results.

My wife figures that about 90% of young girls in Suzhou have had plastic surgery of one sort or another. I think her estimate is rather high, though I am amazed at the rapid growth rate in pretty girls with busts locally – where there had been very few of both just a few years ago.

Or maybe, it’s just that Chinese women are drinking more milk and wearing more makeup.

Technorati Tags: middle class, social trends, urbanization

The Financial Times writes in its article “China’s Eye in the Sky Nears Par with U.S.” that, in the words of one American military commander, China is practicing “Access Denial” in the western Pacific. The article discusses how during the 1996 spat China had with the United States that China could not pinpoint the position of the two aircraft carriers the United States had sent into the South China Sea to support Taiwan. Since 2000, China went from being able to keep an eye from the sky on objects in its front yard from practically zero to six hours today, nearly equal that of the capability of American satellites (or so they say).

China’s greater assertiveness in the Western Pacific toward its neighbors and toward the United States is getting some teeth to it, worrying its neighbors. The Wall Street Journal writes of the meeting this week between Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and Gen. Chen Bingde, Chief of the General Staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, in a meeting in Beijing to discuss China’s recent clashes in the South China Sea with the Philippines and Vietnam, and its never-ending bellicose rhetoric about territory in the Sea of Japan. China, the Admiral said, was clearly developing a strategy of “access denial” toward United States penetration of the Western Pacific, cordoning the smaller states in the region from an American security blanket.

Of course, flare ups in the region have an assortment of ramifications for businesses operating in China, sometimes depending on the country of origin of the foreign invested enterprise (FIE). Japanese FIEs are a favorite target of protest when relations get rough between China and Japan, while Western FIEs in China in joint ventures with Philipine or Vietnamese companies may find pressure applied to their joint ventures in China.

I’ve edited an analysis report on the implications for foreign companies operating in China of increased strife between China and bordering countries entitled, “Rough Neighborhood: China’s Increasing Assertiveness in Asia And Implications for International Business at TrendsAsia.asia.

Technorati Tags: national interest