I recorded snippets of thoughts on my first long trip to China. Many of these observations may be obvious, fairly well-known, or plain naive. However, these are all mine. In the true spirit of learning, I wanted to record them here, to look back and see how my thinking has progressed.
Second in the set of essays. See the first one here.
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Hong Kong buzzed with protests, tourists, and businessmen from all over the world. One protestor apologized to us. He then gently thrust into my hands, a map that advised where tourists should go to avoid protests the next day.
Macao was like a David Lynch movie — a disorienting reverie. The Venetian was a more imposing replica than the one in Las Vegas, with gondolas on the water under a perpetual hazy blue twilight of false skies. A number of Asian tourists gawked at the haute couture stores and then hurried to their gambling tables with resolute intent.
We entered Mainland China by a speedboat service from Macao to Shenzhen. The speedboat straightaway immersed me in a strange new world — all new, and yet ancient. The world was awash with life that seemed to have gone on perfectly, without us around.
The air in the Macao-Shenzhen speedboat hung still and heavy as stage curtains, lulling the passengers into a torpor. For about thirty-five minutes, I was mute but an acknowledged witness to two young industrious attendants on either side of the cart — a young woman in her twenties, a thin-lipped smile on her weather-worn face lit by her walnut-brown eyes, and her slack-jawed companion, a rake thin young man who did not look a day above seventeen — pitching non-stop and willing a middle-aged passenger into buying copious quantities of tax-free Chinese grain alcohol named Baijiu. I was half-disappointed that they did not try to sell me anything. With my graying Indian looks, I was clearly a tourist there.
Shenzhen is a strange city. It is a Mandarin-speaking city in a Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province, as almost no one who now lives in Shenzhen was born there.
Shenzhen is possibly the fastest place to grow into a megacity in entire human history. It was a sleepy town of 30,000 people in 1980. In 2019, it is estimated that there are more than 20 million people. With its startup culture and younger crowd, it looks and feels like a newly built Bay Area city, only many times bigger, and with excellent public transport infrastructure.
I am told that Shenzhen gets away with many things in the spirit of entrepreneurial exploration. I met a young Instagramming starlet who told me that the internet at a specific Shenzhen Hotel is faster and less-controlled than everywhere else in Mainland China. Seemed true to me from my recollection.
As noted in Factory Girls by Leslie Chang, it is amazing how many women there are in Shenzhen, many working in its factories. In China, the gender ratio is lopsided 113 boys were born for every 100 girls — but Shenzhen population is almost equally balanced. Many firms were focused on training, and retaining the talent of the young crowd.
Bicycles of old China are long gone. The dock-less share-ride bikes are also on the wane, properly culled to a few companies. However, there were a number of Chinese workers in cities riding in makeshift e-bikes with pendant parasols, sometimes with kids, protecting them from unseasonal rains.
Mind-boggling to see the twin-aisle (widebody) aircraft used for domestic flights in China, a feature that is increasingly rare in the US. It is indicative how many more Chinese now travel by air within China, in addition to the estimated 131 million trips made every year by Chinese who travel abroad.
Chengdu was my favorite city. It is quite laidback compared to other cities in China (apparently a national stereotype), but also a counter-culture capital in China. It was fun to see vendors out with street food — stinky tofu was popular — and people just hanging out late in the streets during a summer weeknight.
Lines for seeing the pandas are LONG. I say this as a person who studies queues for a living and as someone who spent his teen years standing in many queues. I have stood in “free”-ticket queues in Tirupati, Kumbhmela, and a hundred other Indian temples and festivals. Lines for seeing the pandas were much longer, but also way less chaotic. But, soon I found that even these panda lines were shorter than the serpentine lines in Tiananmen Square.
Pandas reminded me of tenured profs: no real predators, pretty solitary lives, abundant food, occasionally considered national treasures (although pandas don’t care), and subject to very little bodily harm (but, perhaps a lot of imagined injuries).
There are 14 CCTV channels and I can’t tell one from another.
Lin Chi-Ling apparently typifies the attributes that mark a beautiful face in Chinese aesthetic sense. I can’t disagree with that assessment.
Facial recognition systems are everywhere. A number of cameras on highways and street intersections kept flashing and taking pictures of faces. I do not know how good the technology is, but it was both disconcerting and impressive to note how pervasive their presence was. Every passenger on a high-speed train entered the station premises after a facial scan. For whatever reasons, foreign travelers were not subject to this process on high-speed trains.
High-speed trains in China are a delight and easily compare to the best in the world in Japan and France. The trains whiz past factories, highways, and towns that seemed to be in planned land allotments.
Almost everyone gets physically frisked at airports. Most guards were polite and went on with their business. Unlike in India, the process is not gender-separated. Unlike in the US, passenger preference is not asked for.
Shanghai is easily the liveliest city in China. Nightlife buzzes. The bund around the bend of the river looks electrifying, like nighttime Tokyo sky. The crowd is more cosmopolitan than any other city in China. I am told that Shanghainese — the language and traits of people — are inscrutable even for other Chinese citizens.
I expected more chaos in Shanghai — but with the metros, taxi, excellent road, and controls on car ownership — the traffic is orderly and the congestion is predictable.
I loved Hangzhou. Monolingual signboards everywhere. The air of antiquity from the Song Dynasty, unlike in modern cities of China. More middle-class people on road, brimming with hopefulness without the hustle of Shanghai or the world-weariness of Beijing.
Smart Cities. Encouraged by competing provinces, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu are engaged in an arms race to bring intelligent traffic control (for e.g. control traffic for ambulance diversion). Given the ongoing efforts in social credit scoring, decentralized local control, a high degree of impetus on education, and regulation of vehicular ownership, China will have better smart cities than most places in the world.
Electric cars have no ownership fees. The auto market in China is huge — GM sells more cars in China than in the US. However, auto sales are slowing down. Still, the competition for electric vehicles in China is intense, with Tesla also now throwing in its hat.
French Concession in Shanghai is a beautiful urban oasis.
Along the Bund, Shanghai has created some spectacular public urban spaces. Given the flatness of the city, these are some inviting urban locations to bike around — a wish I hope to fulfill on the next trip.
Beijing is all things that you expect from a capital city. It is a gigantic capital that has an extraordinary history — but also a modern city with humongous sprawl struggling to create a different identity. This organic sprawl has created suburbs with distinct identities. These suburbs are in fact cities with different characteristics.
798 Art District in Beijing is very cool. While there is an interesting exploration of youth and artistic independence, there is also nothing that SCREAMS kitsch cool more than retro-communist sculptures in a capitalist setting, even though the state control is very much around. Where else can you sip a macchiato, and admire a sculpture from DPR Korea?
Apparently, the Chinese in the north are wheat-eaters and are expected to be taller and sturdier. Such a stereotypical expectation seems to pervade in every country.
Safety. It is unbelievable how safe the cities in China are. Asian cities are known to safe. However, walking in the city, it still sends a frisson down your back to experience the moment, when you as an obviously identifiable outsider can feel entirely safe. Every ex-pat family that I met in China stressed upon this factor as the main attractive feature of bringing up their children in Shanghai or Beijing.
Kids love staring at the strangers, smiling at them, and trying to say hello. I think I don’t look like a friendly waiguoren from any angle, but the number of kids that stopped to say “Ni hao” or “Hello” or to practice their English was amazing. There was a kid who stood next to George (our Chinese student guide) and me and stared at us with (imagined?) wonder for full two minutes.
I did not see many people from India during the trip. I love meeting Indian diaspora and have met shopkeepers and restaurant owners in the Greek Islands to Mexico, but there were just not many in China. I saw exactly one family in Chengdu, met a couple of younger IT professionals in Shenzhen, and passed by a small office group on tour in Forbidden city.
The mathematically precise planning of 9000+ concubines’ schedule for the emperor is a disturbing thought for modern liberal societies. Even for the English crown, marriages were uneasy alliances with enemy territories. Royal dalliances surely happened but were frowned upon. The Chinese emperor with the Mandate of Heaven was provided officially with earthly pleasures, with little overt judgment.
The National Museum of China in Beijing, across Tiananmen is a treasure. By some accounts, only Louvre attracts more visitors in a year. The museum had snaking lines of Chinese citizens, almost all of whom must have come from outside of Beijing. They seemed to comprise more than 95% of the visitors.
I had at least one dinner meeting in China that seemed like an awkward Thanksgiving dinner gathering. Was there a crazy uncle? I couldn’t say.
In 1897, the Qing dynasty conceded the Qingdao area to Germany. Out of German breweries established there, in 1903 Tsingtao beer, the most exported Chinese beer was born.
Food is great everywhere in China, varied in preparation and flavors (Cantonese, Hunanese, Sichuanese, Shanghainese, etc.). I think that Chinese cuisine is more diverse than Indian cuisine. Further, these two cuisines are far more diverse than any other country’s cuisine.