Once upon a time in China

Oct. 12, 2005

“You sure work a lot of hours,” I said, trying to start up a conversation.
Although the maid at our hotel knew some limited English, she gave me a blank stare and took off, not knowing what the strange foreigner was getting at.
But I had noticed that the staff at our hotel in central China all worked 12 hours or more each day. They were on the job when we arrived for breakfast at 7 or 8 a.m. and still there at 8 p.m. that night; or even later if the tourists from Australia, Germany, France and the U.S. needed another Tsing-Tao beer or a bowl of noodles.
It was as if the Chinese had no concept of the 40 hour, five-day work week, or time off in general.
It was one of many curious observations on our 18-day vacation to the People’s Republic of China in early September, in which I learned that the Chinese don’t draw imaginary lines between their workday and their time off as we Westerners do. In the ancient, 2,200-year-old walled city of Pingyao, at least, work is a continuous part of life that happens wherever and whenever it’s required.
That work ethic was also true for our guide, who spends 80 days at a stretch leading foreigners some 3,000 miles around China from Hong Kong to Beijing. In all that time, he’s lucky to see his wife and child on one brief stopover, if at all. His dream is to buy a $30,000 apartment for his family in the city of Xi‘an, and then to lead tours of Chinese citizens to the U.S. On our trip, he was always on the job, 24/7 -- always cheerful and helpful.
In fact, the Chinese people in general were about the most cheerful, friendly bunch you could ever hope to meet, even though they seem to work around the clock for wages of half the U.S. federal poverty standard (or much less). Imagine Americans with that attitude.

SIMILARITIES
Some things never change, however. Our guide told us that he started learning English at the age of 14 as part of a large number of teenagers from the countryside who traveled to the city to learn our language. But uninspired teens and lackluster teachers contributed to a drop-out rate of something like 95%, with most of his fellow students returning to the fields for a lifetime of brute toil not much removed from the farming practices of the Bronze Age.
His story reminded me of our own country, where record numbers of kids are now dropping out of high school, too uninspired to see the big picture, or perhaps too lobotomized by MTV or videogames to get it together. What will happen to them? Wage slaves of the Chinese one day, I imagine.
Speaking of which, you can’t help but get a sick feeling about America’s future on the 50-mile drive between Shanghai and Suzhou.
A forest of new high-rise apartments under construction rises on the outskirts of Shanghai for as far as the eye can see, with something like one-quarter of the giant cranes in the entire world perched atop their towers. Sleek new freeways hum with BMWs, Volkswagens, Audis and a dozen makes of cars you’ve never heard of before (but will, once these super-cheap imports start devouring what’s left of Detroit’s auto industry).
Nearing Suzhou (where silk was invented) with its population of 5.7 million, you see glitttering new factories stretching to the far horizon: Hitachi, Microtek and the big technology companies, all looking like they were built just yesterday. They were.
The cities themselves are filled with miles of neon-lit storefronts and huge shopping malls, piled high with pyramids of stuff for sale at a dirt-cheap fraction of what you’d pay in the U.S. -- it’s a modern take on the fabulous riches that Marco Polo set out to find.
One new outdoor shopping center in Suzhou was at least half a mile long with hundreds of stores on either side of its broad avenue -- something like four times the size of our Grand Traverse Mall. It was one of several such malls in the city -- all brand new.

CONSUMER
CULTURE
People who cherish the myth that the human race will someday want fewer possessions rather than more will get real clued-in on human nature by visiting China.
Considering that the kids hanging around the malls are the sons and daughters of communism and the Cultural Revolution of the ‘60s, where Mao Zedong tried to destroy all class distinctions by shipping the entire middle class out to work on collective farms, you’d think the Chinese would be the ultimate anti-materialists.
But the reverse is true. If you want to see an orgy of American-style hyper-consumerism, take a trip to a Chinese shopping mall packed with a youthful, well-educated yuppie class that has sky-high expectations for its place in the world. It’s no wonder Walmart is planning to build its biggest store on earth in China. You can find KFC, Starbucks and McDonald’s in every large city with the potential for thousands of new franchises coming down the pike (stock investors, take note).
Compare these scenes to those of any major American city, many of which are ringed with slums instead of new high-rises, and riven with decrepit, pot-holed freeways that are forever under repair. You can’t help but feel that China is going to be eating us for lunch in the near future; and that the average American is about as clueless as the shrimp peering out from the restaurant tank where you’re dining tonight.

ON TO BEIJING
It’s only when you leave these supercities behind and travel deeper into the country that you see that China also has tremendous social and environmental problems and a river of poverty as long and wide as the Yangtze -- enough, perhaps, to keep this country of 1.3 billion people busy for the next 100 years.
My wife and I traveled about 1,500 miles through China, leaving from Shanghai in a half-circle that took us to Xi’an in the western center of the country and then north almost to Mongolia before ending up in the capital at Beijing. We got a glimpse of China at its best as well as its worst: farmers hacking a living from the soil with primitive tools and literally living with their pigs and chickens, and city-dwellers jammed into filthy hovels, sharing a water tap and squat toilets with their neighbors.
Everything was spectacular beyond our expectations: bigger, friendlier, cheaper, dirtier, glitzier and more crowded than we could
imagine.
Take dinner, for instance. Each night, our tour group of 12 backpacker-types would gather for a 7-10 course meal. The cost per person would run about $3 each. Our most expensive meal, featuring 10 courses and beer, came to about $4 each in Shanghai. Our best meal, a huge Mongolian hot-pot cooked at our table, ran $2.50.
If you like trudging around to dusty old temples full of gilt carvings of dragons and grotesque gods, then China has plenty to go around. I expected Chinese temples to be about the size of country barns; many were more on a scale with the Palace of Auburn Hills or Munson Medical Center.
Traffic? It’s not just 10,000 bicycles and pedicabs anymore. The auto traffic in Beijing is as bad as you’ll find anywhere on earth in a gridlock that runs for miles at rush hour. But then again, this is a city of nearly 15 million people, 100 miles across and 60 miles deep. Your typical hour-long cab ride from hell has only one consolation: a $2-$3 fare.
Pollution? You drive 50 miles or so through a dense, depressing fog of smoke on the way to Inner Mongolia, the result of dozens of plants burning dirty coal without the scrubbers required in the U.S. Word has it that the underground coal fires here generate more hyrdocarbon particulates each year than all the vehicles in the U.S. combined.

CAPITALIST ROADERS
Communism is still the official form of government here, but it’s given only lip service while the Chinese get back to the money-making ways of “capitalist roaders,“ thanks to the economic reforms of leader Deng Xiao Peng back in the late ‘70s. Everyone in China is apparently guaranteed a job of some sort, but that often means you walk into an empty store and find six shop girls standing at the counter with nothing to do.
In that respect, communism seems an inefficient system of make-work jobs, while other intiatives, such as trying to create universal health care, have been flops. Paying to treat a major health problem can break a family here, just like among the uninsured of the U.S. It makes you realize how big a problem health care costs are all over the world, and how much we have in common.
There’s so much more to tell, but the bottom line is you have to go and see for yourself.
It’s a shame more Americans don’t go to China. You couldn’t ask for a cheaper place and a cheaper time to go. With $40 hotel rooms, $3 meals and clothing under $10 I came home with money in my pocket, rather than breaking the back of my credit card which is the usual case on a vacation (credit cards are mostly useless in China anyway). Our two-week vacation to China, including discount airfare, cost about the same as a typical one-week trip to a Caribbean resort, and then only because you really need a tour to get around.
But more to the point, America’s future is tied to China. We buy the stuff they make and keep their economy moving forward. They, in turn, are lending us back our own money to pay for our war, our tax cut, our hurricane relief, and all the rest of the Bush administration’s spending spree. Our fortunes, as Confucius might say, are interconnected. It would pay Americans to know a great deal more about the Chinese. They sure are trying to know more about us.