A wonderful guest post from our great Deadpan friend, JustaJoe:
OK, as crazy as this seems to be to type, I’ve just gotten back from China!
We took a two week trip with the kids and their significant other others. Long ass flight aside… It was a really good time. There is so so much I could say about the experience.
Short synopsis of the itinerary – we all met up from our respective homes in Vancouver and from there flew to Beijing for a few days. From there we went Bullet train to Xian (she-Anne) then flew to Guilin (guy-Lynn) then boat down a river to Yang Shu than flew Shanghai.
Short bits:
China is BIG.
-“The Great Wall“ seems misnamed. “ Overly Extensive wall“ or maybe “amazingly ambitious wall“ might be more accurate. Stunning to be sure but “Great“ just seems to denote something else.
- The people were great. Wonderfully gracious and seem to love Americans, go figure. Funny anecdote: More than once, my wife had people wanting to take their picture with her because she’s blonde. As one guy explained a blonde woman in China would be like a panda in the United States.
- We had arranged for guides at each location, which was pretty important for language and cultural reasons. Although surprisingly enough, my kids and their others had learned (before hand) enough Chinese to be able to order food or find bathrooms. My kids are so much smarter than me!
- Beijing and Shanghai are stunningly large. More than 23 million people in each city. Beijing is physically 60 km in size.
- The countryside is phenomenal. Gorgeous and exotic.
- Real Chinese food… OMG! So tasty.
- Getting over there is exorbitantly expensive. Existing there is amazingly cheap for Americans. We could order “family style”, six delicious dishes plus drinks (including beer) and walk away from dinner having spent $45.
- Driving is insane! People pass whenever they want. Scooters zipping in and out cutting across roads and up onto the sidewalks. Cars/trucks will do three point U-turns in the middle of any road, in car choked traffic. They want at any given moment. The “car horn” may be there national anthem. And driving itself is a new experience for them. Most families have only owned cars for about 15 years. And yet… I never saw so much as a single “fender bender”. Easily half of the vehicles are electric. Even in the “country“.
If you get an opportunity to go there, do so. Especially before trump ruins that for Americans as well.
CULTURE
(I want to give a disclaimer on my use of the term “middle class”. When I refer to “middle class“ I am referring to the middle of China’s economic society. My wife keeps comparing their current economic lifestyle to the American “middle class” and I don’t think that’s useful. For an accurate picture, I think you have to compare what they’re experiencing now versus what their own parents lived through.)
I think I would describe China as “a 2 to 3000 year-old culture with a society that is only one generation old.”
China is currently undergoing a boom. They have a thriving and growing middle class. They seem to be filled with an excitement and enthusiasm for the future. The tangible feeling of “everything is possible“ seems to be pervasive. It’s almost like America in the 1950s except with today’s most modern stuff and technology… Right alongside women in the country, still doing laundry in the river. It is currently a status symbol for a family to own an automobile. Apparently this is a new thing maybe only 15 years old or so.
All over China, we witnessed a fun new fad that seems to be sweeping the nation and that is Chinese children, teens, young adults, even older adult adults, going to the shops that specialize in renting period costumes and doing their hair and makeup to appear like figures out of old Chinese paintings. Then they wander around town with what appear to be professional photographers, some even with lighting assistants, taking their pictures at various sites, both historic and modern. We were told that this is only a couple of years old, but at the moment it seems to be a booming business. It was really quite fun to see. Something between cosplay and LARPing I guess.
The old and the new side by side.
Our guide in Xian was highly fashionable, well spoken and could have been from any big city in the US. She pointed out though, that her parents had begged for food on the streets when they were kids often going without anything.
On the other hand, we had a Guide who said his parents bemoaned the fall of the Soviet Union because they had the fortune to have gotten jobs in a plant that made radars to protect them from Soviet attack. In the former communist system, this meant a factory, surrounded by a factory built town, with roads, water, electricity, schools, medical facilities and food security. They even had factory sports teams that would compete with the sports teams from other factories and other towns. If you did a good enough job, you might even get a bonus at the end of the year like a refrigerator. When the Soviet Union fell and China cut back on its defense spending, the factory tried to convert to producing commercial goods but that sort of state run factory just couldn’t figure out how to make commercially viable products and eventually closed down.
That guide made a point of saying that while his parents missed the factory towns, his generation simply did not.
Anytime we had to queue for something, like for an exhibit or to get on a bus or plane, people just pushed and cut in front of you. One of our guides explained that this was mostly older people and it wasn’t that they were rude. It’s just that they had grown up in a world where if you didn’t shove your way to the front of the line you would go home with nothing because there just wasn’t enough to go around. When we went to see the terra-cotta Warriors, the crowd around the exhibit was downright frightening with the pushing and the shoving. Like a “Who concert“ in Ohio. I have literally been in the mosh pit at a Ramone‘s concert and felt safer.
On the street everyone walks around with their head in a phone. Even the “adults”. Tech is very pervasive. Pretty much everything there is paid for using your phone and either Alipay or WeChat. Even souvenir stands out in the country where you’re buying spices from a farmer! People would look at you funny if you tried to use cash. In a sense it makes everyday life easier. Of course it also makes it easier for the government to track exactly where you go, what you’re spending your money on and how much money you have.
Cell coverage is everywhere and Wi-Fi is quite available as well although all of that is through government approved sources. So many apps we use in the US don’t work there. Yahoo products do not work in China. And because I use AOL and it is owned by Yahoo, I could not get email the entire time I was there.
While we had been warned that iMessaging wouldn’t work, for some reason it did for us. Also if you used a VPN on your cell service, you could often get unapproved things like Google Maps to work, but it was always a crapshoot as to what would work and what wouldn’t. For instance, to pay for anything you had to turn your VPN off otherwise Alipay wouldn’t function.
The people themselves seemed to neither fear nor have an animosity towards Americans. We were told the enemy they were always afraid of being attacked by, (and that they had spent a huge amount of military money to defend against) was Russia. Once the Soviet Union fell, China cut back on defense spending and put that money towards their own society. The country they all did truly hate was Japan. Most of us don’t know that for the Chinese, WWII started in the 1930s and they lost perhaps as many as 8 million people. More than just the atrocities that Japan had committed to Chinese during World War II. It was the fact that to this day Japan refuses to apologize for those atrocities.
As for America and global positioning, the analogy seem to be – “everyone is always gunning for the top dog and America likes to be that top dog. However, no one ever goes after the guy one step down the hill from the top dog and the view there is almost as nice”
so they’re more than happy to let America play “big boss” while they just casually go about the business of enjoying life and having an ever increasing GDP.
Oh and tariffs? Well China has over 1.2 billion people with an expanding middle class. It seemed like pretty much they can buy all the product they can make to themselves and really couldn’t care much about whether Americans buy it or not. We’re basically fooling ourselves if we think we’re that important to them.
THAT being said … “wealth“ and the “good life” is relatively new to their society. There’s is a certain naïvety about them. And to be clear their new “middle class“ doesn’t have the same standard of living as our middle class. But they have never lived that lifestyle so to them, these are heady times. This current generation is reveling in it, but I foresee their next generation suffering the disappointment of wanting more than their parents have and not being able to attain it.
Already they are starting to see job shortages, and all our guides mentioned that AI and robots were starting to take over the jobs. I think their next generation is gonna start looking around them and realizing that even though economically, they are also supposed to be equal, there is very clearly a stratification of wealth forming. It will be interesting to see how their society deals with that.
Of course that is all just opinion. I am neither an economist nor sociologist.
So, Chinese are swell people just enjoying life and excited about what might happen next. They don’t hate Americans nor do they want to “conquer” or “defeat us”. They all seem to wanna go to America to visit someday, but only as tourists. They like their home country and, at the moment, it seems to be taking care of them.
EVs
From my trips to Europe, I already knew how far behind the rest of the evolved world America is with EV‘s. China, however, is on a whole different level.
Cars, trucks, buses, motor scooters… I would say easily half the vehicles on their roads are EV’s. There were as many makes and models of EVs there as there are gas powered cars in the US.
There were some really sexy looking ones as well but my kids looked them up and said even those were below $45k US!
As I mentioned in another post, owning a family car has become a status symbol in China, and that in itself has led to problems. I can recall a few years back when Beijing would have pollution so bad the some days the air wasn’t considered breathable. Part of their solution to this was making it incredibly difficult to get a license plate. In Beijing it now can take at least five years after you’ve registered for a car tag, before you get it. Unless you have an EV, in that case, you can get a plate immediately. Just one of the ways they’re combating pollution in the city.
Scooters require no plates at all. Many take mass transit for their commute into the city and then use rental E bikes/scooters to get around during the day.
Did I mention Beijing was huge? You can drive for an hour on the highway and still be inside Beijing. Pretty much the same for Shanghai.
Authoritarianism
So let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Or should I say panda.
As with any country, there’s undoubtedly a disconnect between what the average person feels about the world and what their government’s view on things is. We only encountered the average Joe on the street and politics just didn’t seem to be a topic on their mind.
While there were times when I noticed increased security, generally speaking there was no overarching feeling of “better be careful not to step out of line”.
There was plenty of police presence in the big cities but not really more than I’ve seen in London or New York or other big cities. In Beijing, we had to show our passports to get inside just about any place often having it scanned as well as looked over. This wasn’t limited to just foreigners. The locals all had a national ID card that they also had to present as well. So with the use of AI, I’m sure we were definitely being tracked. Of course Beijing is their nation’s capital. We did not have this level of security in Shanghai or any of the smaller towns we visited.
Before we went, our tour agency told us we shouldn’t mention Tibet or the student uprising in Tiananmen Square as that was very upsetting to them. Other than that though, we wandered around as we wanted outside our hotels on streets and cities and interacted with people without interference.
Here is the thing though… Cameras!
There were cameras absolutely EVERYWHERE, even in the countryside, even inside the vans we rode in. For us as Americans this was very creepy.
For the Chinese we talked with about it, it just made them feel safer. It just sort of underlines the difference in cultures. They are a culture who has never not known government surveillance. To a person though, everyone we ask about it said that crime in their big cities 10 or 15 years ago was bad. Pick pocketing, purse snatching, muggings in Beijing and Singapore were just like they are in any other big city on earth. With the advent of these cameras though, everyone feels completely safe on their city streets. By the end of our trip, I did as well. When our adult children wanted to go out and wander the city, apart from normal parental angst, we felt like they were completely safe.
I did bring up the specter of officials misusing the cameras and they seemed completely baffled by the concept. When I told them about recent incidents here in the United States, where LEO had been fired/arrested for using these cameras to stalk women, the reaction was horror. They just simply couldn’t fathom the idea.
Another story –
While in a small rural town, we encountered an artist from Australia, who had been detained in China for over four months and was just finally being allowed to go back home. Seems he had been there on a visit his third time in China, and was arrested at the airport because he had picked up some small river stones with fossils in them and put them in his pocket to take to his grandkids. This was like three or four stones, the largest perhaps the size of an American quarter they had detained him at the airport, then placed him under arrest, interrogated him for hours, then took him to a hospital where they x-rayed him did sonogram tests took his blood. After sometime in jail, they eventually release him with an ankle monitor, telling him he couldn’t leave the province. After more than four months, they had finally, unceremoniously, dropped all charges. By then though he had spent over $50,000 on lawyers and interpreters. The side story here is though, while in that small town to keep himself busy he began painting again. He would walk down to the bridge over the river and set up his easel and start painting landscapes. This of course attracted the attention of the locals, and he became somewhat of a fixture there. He even began giving lessons to a promising local, 10 year old artist who would come to the bridge and set up beside him (he was gifting her with most of the painting gear he had purchased while he had been there) All this turned him into a bit of a Chinese celebrity, being featured in the news media and prominently and social media. Spending that much time in the local landscape also inspired him and he must’ve produced two or three dozen landscape portraits that had been featured in their own shows and prominent Chinese galleries. So while he was glad to finally be going home, he saw the whole thing as kind of a serendipitous positive.
My take is, while this seems to be a cautionary tale about an authoritarian state – how much different is it from a guy riding his bike in Washington DC and being suddenly and publicly arrested and thrown in jail for putting his hand in a fountain? Perspective.
So this has been a very long ramble, but even then just scratches the surface. I was sharing this with some acquaintances and was asked “so would you move there?”
The answer is no.
It is a fabulous place to visit and seems to take care of its people. On the other hand, it does greatly control its people which is exactly the sort of thing I would be fleeing if I left the United States. Also, it would be quite the cultural adjustments.
If anyone has any questions about what I experienced, please feel free to ask!
