Random Thoughts

Sept. 24, 2003

Age, disability & lack of skills make job search even tougher Dangling from a pair of chopsticks

In The Matrix, a guy named Neo opens a door into cyberspace and realizes that he‘s been living in a fool‘s paradise. That‘s sort of what it was like for me, stepping through a door into communist China in late August.
Or more like Dorothy getting her first glimpse inside the Emerald City, or Alice checking out Wonderland.
You get off a train from Hong Kong and walk across a bridge over a sluggish river. Then down a corridor past Immigration and cops with red stars on their caps, through a door to the Other Side (“No U-Turns“ allowed), and suddenly you are there, with an unbelieveable landscape of skyscrapers and shopping centers going on as far as the eye can see.
Walking into the city of Shenzhen in the People‘s Republic of China is like strolling into a science fiction movie where everything is of gargantuan Star Wars scope, including a future you never dreamed of.
Imagine a brand new city of 4.05 million people that looks to be the size of downtown Chicago or Houston, built in just the past 20 years. Pedestrian causeways 200-feet-wide direct your steps into town towards Shopping Heaven. Crowding the skies are the heights of 139 new hotels, many of which are similar to Detroit‘s Renaissance Center in size. Tens of thousands of people -- most of them in their 20s -- rush up and down the boulevards along with a vast fleet of buses and the occasional pedicab.
Shenzhen is a Special Economic Zone set up by the People‘s Republic of China on the border of the so-called “New Territories“ north of Hong Kong. The city has been embracing capitalism over the past 20 years with spectacular results, but here in the West, most people don‘t know zip about the place.
Despite its feverish pace, Shenzhen is no utopia. There are beggers on the streets, and if you‘re a man walking alone, you get swarmed by prostitutes along the main drag. It seems to be a place where people are hard on the hustle, but not everyone‘s living the good life.
Still, every Chinese seems to want to come here. The upwardly-mobile from the People‘s Republic come to Shenzhen because there are huge opportunities in this free enterprise zone. Tourists and Hong Kong residents come here because there are scads of five-star hotels, amusement parks and dirt-cheap shopping bargains. Smack on the border is a five-story shopping mall that rocks until 11 p.m. each night. The endless malls of Hong Kong are open that late as well, but there are even more people crowding the shopping maniac‘s paradise in Shenzhen. An embroidered silk jacket goes for $45. A hand-made tea set, signed by the artist, is $22. You‘d pay five times as much for the same items in the U.S.
As an American, you get a sick, punch-in-the-gut feeling walking through the “Garden City“ of Shenzhen because this is the economic face of China, whose economy is said to be just ripping while ours is sinking fast. Only China‘s fudgey, outdated political and marketing practices keep the country from being the panda bear that ate the world.
And thank God for that, because the streets here are filled with an endless tide of young, enthusiastic, well-educated and motivated citizens. You can well imagine that China is building to an explosion as the world‘s dominant economic power while we‘re pouring billions into the maw of war in the Mideast.
China has no wars to fund. All it has is one billion people pounding out the products we used to make in America before we got so high on our horses that we couldn‘t see the ground for having our heads in the clouds.
If only every American could walk down the streets of Shenzhen, then the Mideast and all our troubles there would become an afterthought. The luxury of war? Gone. The NAFTA-style trade agreements which have gutted American manufacturing? Gone. Our hypnotic focus on celebrities such as “Bennifer,“ Britney and Justin? We‘d have no time for that. Most of all, our belief in America as a “hyperpower“ that will rule the world with a Pax Americana for the next century would be gone, gone gone.
Instead, we‘d be working double-overtime trying to keep a step ahead of the Chinese steamroller that‘s bearing down on a blindside we don‘t have a clue about. Talk about Homeland Security -- we‘d be demanding that Washington get America back in the business of staying afloat instead of antagonizing one billion Muslims while a billion Chinese are preparing to break down the back door.
As it is, we don‘t have a clue. Senator Debbie Stabenow notes that Michigan has lost 162,300 manufacturing jobs since January 2001. Some of those jobs went to China, which, coincidentally, is flooding America with cheap products, with the added incentive of China keeping its currency at bargain basement rates. “China has purposely kept its currency undervalued relative to the dollar to promote exports to the United States and as a way of keeping out goods made in the United States,“ Stabenow notes.
Even Hong Kong is feeling the pinch of mainland China‘s economic power. An article in the South China Press tells the story of a poor tailor who came to Hong Kong in the 1960s at a time when the city was the manufacturing center of the world. Times were great until the factories moved across the border to communist China. But even then, Hong Kong thrived on its financial and insurance-related industries. Even during those years, the tailor did well, hand-making silk suits for wealthy businessmen.
But, gradually, Hong Kong‘s service and financial industries began drying up. Its unemployment has risen to record levels. Businessmen started buying cheap, off-the-rack suits from mainland China instead of tailor-made. Unable to pay his rent of $10,000 HK per month, the tailor committed suicide.
It‘s a story that sounds much like what has happened in America over the past 25 years: “outdated“ manufacturing jobs disappear courtesy of new trade agreements with promises that American workers will be rewarded with a “second tier“ of “information age“ jobs. Then even those jobs disappear, thanks to CEOs such as Bill Gates moving them to his new $400 million software plant in southern India. Like the Hong Kong tailor, we Americans find ourselves with outrageous living expenses dating back to the good old days, but fewer ways of making a living.
And dangling, perhaps, from a pair of chopsticks.