Monday, September 04, 2006
Travel to Haimen and back
Monday, August 28 was a long work day. I left my office and traveled with some colleagues about 2 1/2 hours to a small city called Haimen. A small city by Chinese standards means it's under 1,000,000 but still bigger than Charleston, SC. To get there, we needed to cross the Yangtze River. (Sorry James, the place we crossed is nowhere near the Three Gorges Dam.) I've heard the Yangtze River is the 3rd largest River in the world - smaller than the Amazon and the Nile, but longer than the mighty Mississipp. Crossing the river was actually quite impressive - not because of the size of the bridge (granted it was a cable-suspension bridge larger in size than the new cable-stayed bridge in Charleston, SC but it was less than half the size of the cable suspension Mackinaw Bridge in Michigan) but because of the amount of freighter traffic. Even though the haze and smog limited visibility to less than 1 km (0.6 mile), I could easily count 25 ocean going vessels and an equal number of tug boats. And that was on just one side of the bridge! 100 km (62 miles) upstream from the port! Charleston Harbor is one of the busiest ports on the eastern seaboard of the United States, but I've never seen the kind of traffic in Charleston that I saw when I crossed the Yangtze. You don't need to have a degree in Economics to see why the price of steel and oil keeps going up: it's all supply and demand. Chinese capitalism is putting such a high demand on these commodity resources that supply can't keep up fast enough to keep prices down. I'm sure the Saudi Arabian, Nigerian and Venezuelan oil field owners are grinning ear to ear. And I don't think it is going to let up for a long time to come. Even though the Chinese government is trying to slow down the rate the economy expands (to 8% annually!), they are also targetting a 12% annual increase in the consumption of commercial goods through 2011.
It's amazing what kind of thoughts go through a person's head just by crossing a bridge. What's even more amazing is how quickly those thoughts can change just by getting to the other side. Upon crossing the Yangtze, we have clearly moved from a Chinese middle-class standard of living to a Chinese lower-class standard of living. The road we drove on wasn't bad. In fact it's a relatively new highway with three lanes going in each direction, a median filled with well-manicured bushes, and a wide shoulder next to each outside lane. And smooth...oh, to have such roads in Michigan!The thing that's really strange about the highway after we cross the Yangtze is how quickly the traffic has disappeared. The highway had become eerily devoid of other traffic. Several times we had gone 15-20 minutes at 140 km/hr (87 mph) without seeing another car, truck or bus in either direction. This just does not happen in the States - three lanes in both directions and not another car in sight during the middle of the day! And it's not like we're in the boonies either. In fact it's more like one giant sprawling village, mile after mile. Gone are the high rise offices and apartment buldings. Now I found only 2-story homes and a lot of farming. Not the kind of agri-business farming so typically seen in the States, but the kind of small parcel farming you might see if all the homeowners in a typical residential subdivision in the States converted their entire lawn to a tract of farmland. And it was like this mile after mile - lots of houses, lots of farming and very few cars. With all these houses, I'd normally expect to see some cars, but after I took a closer look, I began to understand why there was so little traffic on the highway. It's because there wasn't any traffic amongts all these homes. At least, there wasn't any car traffic. There was a lot of foot traffic, bicycle traffic and scooter traffic. And that's because these people don't have a car, they don't have a garage, they don't have a driveway and they don't have a street. Most just have a dirt path about the size of a rail trail, but in a lot worse condition. For most people in China (meaning more than 750,000,000 people) owning a car is far from possible because they certainly don't have the money, let alone the infrastructure.
We got to Haimen, spent all day with the supplier, had a large Chinese lunch (8 cold dishes and 12 hot dishes - stangest among those was air bladders from fish cooked with some kind of leafy green vegetable in a creamy Chinese mystery sauce - yum!), spent all afternoon with supplier, then turned around and went back home.
What's really amazing is how one's thoughts can change after 12 hours (I told you it was a long work day). On the return trip back to my office, it was becoming difficult for me to see all these homes we had passed earlier in the day. All of a sudden I realize that almost none of these homes have any type of electric lights on. Since I have nothing else to do this late, I start counting the homes without lights, and three times in a row I count higher than one hundred. Everytime I think this country is becoming an economic juggernaut, I'm reminded of how little inertia there is due to this amazingly large mass at rest.
It's amazing what kind of thoughts go through a person's head just by crossing a bridge. What's even more amazing is how quickly those thoughts can change just by getting to the other side. Upon crossing the Yangtze, we have clearly moved from a Chinese middle-class standard of living to a Chinese lower-class standard of living. The road we drove on wasn't bad. In fact it's a relatively new highway with three lanes going in each direction, a median filled with well-manicured bushes, and a wide shoulder next to each outside lane. And smooth...oh, to have such roads in Michigan!The thing that's really strange about the highway after we cross the Yangtze is how quickly the traffic has disappeared. The highway had become eerily devoid of other traffic. Several times we had gone 15-20 minutes at 140 km/hr (87 mph) without seeing another car, truck or bus in either direction. This just does not happen in the States - three lanes in both directions and not another car in sight during the middle of the day! And it's not like we're in the boonies either. In fact it's more like one giant sprawling village, mile after mile. Gone are the high rise offices and apartment buldings. Now I found only 2-story homes and a lot of farming. Not the kind of agri-business farming so typically seen in the States, but the kind of small parcel farming you might see if all the homeowners in a typical residential subdivision in the States converted their entire lawn to a tract of farmland. And it was like this mile after mile - lots of houses, lots of farming and very few cars. With all these houses, I'd normally expect to see some cars, but after I took a closer look, I began to understand why there was so little traffic on the highway. It's because there wasn't any traffic amongts all these homes. At least, there wasn't any car traffic. There was a lot of foot traffic, bicycle traffic and scooter traffic. And that's because these people don't have a car, they don't have a garage, they don't have a driveway and they don't have a street. Most just have a dirt path about the size of a rail trail, but in a lot worse condition. For most people in China (meaning more than 750,000,000 people) owning a car is far from possible because they certainly don't have the money, let alone the infrastructure.
We got to Haimen, spent all day with the supplier, had a large Chinese lunch (8 cold dishes and 12 hot dishes - stangest among those was air bladders from fish cooked with some kind of leafy green vegetable in a creamy Chinese mystery sauce - yum!), spent all afternoon with supplier, then turned around and went back home.
What's really amazing is how one's thoughts can change after 12 hours (I told you it was a long work day). On the return trip back to my office, it was becoming difficult for me to see all these homes we had passed earlier in the day. All of a sudden I realize that almost none of these homes have any type of electric lights on. Since I have nothing else to do this late, I start counting the homes without lights, and three times in a row I count higher than one hundred. Everytime I think this country is becoming an economic juggernaut, I'm reminded of how little inertia there is due to this amazingly large mass at rest.
