Speech, Freedom of……….

It’s a funny thing about speech.  Some we pay attention to and some we ignore.  Say this speech for example……….this is a blog about experiences in China most of the time meant as a record for me and as an easier way to keep the few people interested posted with posts rather than with having to repeat things for them individually.  Not that there are that many, but it’s still quicker and more efficient this way.

There isn’t much traffic for this blog unless I mention something of broad general interest like the cost of things or of broad prurient interest like sex.  I mentioned “sex” in a post in July — “Sex with Chinese Characteristics” — and activity on this little blog soared…………I mean it just went crazy.  It wasn’t because there were hundreds of people just lurking for a interest-peaking title; it was more because of the automated programs that search blogs for particular key words.   I suppose if I titled one “Nazi Resurgence,” “Gay to Straight Conversions,” or “I saw Jesus on Tuesday and He is Really Fat” or the like, I’d get a lot of action too.

Ok, so here’s the Chinese connection………….

One of my students, a bright young guy with quickly improving English language skills has some issues with some of the administrative and student affairs procedures at the school.  It’s a private prep school preparing Chinese kids for the best of foreign universities.  Among his objections are supervised evening study time, mandatory physical activity — running around a track at 6:40 every morning — and overbearing supervision of free time.

There’s logic to his complaints, particularly since he and his peers will be freshmen at some western school in a year and none of what he complains about will apply there or make any sense.  I agree with his objections and think the sooner we can wean these kids off of archaic practices the better, but these practices are traditional and ingrained in the Chinese education system.  So his classmate advised him to just lay low and accept “the leader’s” decision about how the school is run since that’s the Chinese way — part of the culture — and raising a fuss (or even asking a question) was one of those anomalies of the western culture that foreign teachers were bringing to the school.

Reluctance to challenge rules, regulations, decisions or especially ideas is ingrained in most of the Chinese I know.  No matter the provocation.  I had a student who took an internship at a bank and got paid nothing for three months.  Zero. And this was a kid working twelve hour days, six days a week and getting all the work the regular employees could dump on her, the newbie.  That’s a customary thing too.  No matter the issue, it’s really tough to get these kind folks to raise a hand.  That the practice of deferring to leaders being built into the culture might be a big asset for leaders and therefore an idea current leaders might be reluctant to change hasn’t hit home too much yet.

It’s odd, because in other aspects of life, it’s every man for himself. I tried the western practice of deferring to the fair sex in getting on the subway and discovered I was boxed out of four trains in a row.  I was the only guy who was being deferential and any show of weakness in public relegates one to the back of the queue.

Right-turn-on-red is common all over Shanghai with a vengeance.  There is no stopping, pausing, yielding or the slightest concern for pedestrians from those with motorized or man-powered conveyances.  Hesitate and die.  So these folks can fend for themselves it seems except when a designated leader is in the mix.

I was intrigued by the comparison between China and the West when it came to spoken objections because of a couple of news stories that broke here in early November from the States.  One was the shoot-up at Ft. Hood, Texas where a military psychiatrist of all people went berserk and shot up the post and the people he was supposed to becalm.  It turned out, according to reports, that the shooter’s classmates at an Army medical school thought the guy was nuts, dangerous and ought to be kicked out of the Army. They all  kept mum because the guy was an ardent Muslim and they (the one’s who could have forewarned), were worried they’d get nailed for discrimination or some other such claim.   Political Correctness is getting the best of the once celebrated notion of Freedom of Speech.  It used to be that you’d catch hell for screaming “fire” in a crowded theater, but apart from that you could say whatever you pleased without much fear of retribution.  No more.  No matter the context, righteousness or provocation, uttering any series of words that once parsed can make a questionable soundbite in someone’s view will pretty much fry you these days.  I write for money sometimes and I’ll tell you, there is a lot of self-censorship going on.

An unrelated related story came from a Brookstone store in Boston where an ardent Christian of some persuasion expressed his opinion to an equally ardent lesbian co-worker.  The co-worker was apparently vehement in pressing for solicited approvals of a gay marriage to which the Christian guy finally said he didn’t think was such a good idea.  He was fired on a trumped up charge of harassment or something.  Now from what I’ve read, this was not a shouting match, but a civil exchange prompted by in-your-face promotion of a notion the kid didn’t agree with.  Can’t he say so?

What gives?

In an Economics class over here last week, I pointed out that China was moving toward the free market ideas of the west and the west in some regards was moving toward the planned economic ideas and government controls  of old China.  I suggested that the right answer for sustained economic growth was somewhere in the middle and developed and developing economies were constantly trying to find the right balance.

It didn’t occur to me at the time that the same role reversal might be taken place in other aspects of the differences between west and east, but perhaps it is.

If someone writes that they think Barney Frank is wrong for his support of some crazy ideas for banking, wrong for living with a partner who grows marijuana plants in his Maine hideaway and wrong for maybe doing things not intended by mother nature for human beings for his personal pleasure, he or she may get nailed for insulting a Congressman and attacked by all sorts of people.  I like Barney Frank. I think he’s smart, funny and ought to do whatever he wants to do so long as he doesn’t hurt people (or himself), but on some things we just fundamentally disagree.  That used to be OK in my country.

Freedom of Speech was something we revered, not only when the speech pleased everybody, but in particular when it pissed people off.

Oil Paintings

These are paintings, not photographs.  They are painted in oils, from scratch, copied from photographs.  They are not scanned and mechanically printed, or painted over a scanned and printed image, but are hand painted by a talented individual who can do magic from a photo.

Because they are hand painted from scratch, a photo that needs to be changed a little can be.  So if there is some flaw in the picture, the background isn’t right, a tree branch is in the way — whatever — the artist can change it, including colors of stuff.

The painted is Chinese, one of thousands of Chinese who make their living copying other people’s creative work, whether from a photo, an art book or someone else’s painting.  There is a very wide range of quality, masters and students, craftsmen and scam artists — literally.

I’ve worked with several and narrowed it down to this guy and one other who specializes in landscapes.

These take about three weeks to get from an e-mailed photo to a finished oil on canvas, shipped to you.  The cost is pretty good.   Depending on the subject (and how many subjects — like faces), the cost for a 16 X 20 painting is less than $200 delivered to you.  Landscapes are a little less, believe it or not.   Usually we can get the price a little lower.

The hard part about oil paintings is that the framing is so expensive.  I haven’t figured out how to do custom framing and beat the shipping cost from China.  Frames here are incredibly cheap and the quality is excellent.  Most people want to pick the frame to match the painting and shipping a framed painting kind of takes some of the savings out of the deal.  Sooooooo, for now, at least it’s framing somewhere in the U.S. or wherever you are.

Box framing, where the painting is stretched over a wooden frame and doesn’t show on the painting itself is very economical.

If you’re interested in talking about one or more of these, just let me know.

Energy

I wrote a column for The Conference Board Review last month that ruminated about how weird it is to be teaching Western Classical Economics to the sons and daughters of rich Chinese who are suffering along with everyone else from the excesses of the U.S. market economy going a little nuts.  I tell the kids that economists, for all their scholarship and wisdom, forget, along with the rest of us that people will cheat when it comes to money and need to be watched.

After that, it occurred to me that other things I’m used to from living almost all of my life in the United States might be normal there, but maybe not so good.  Take light-bulbs and motorcycles for example.

Here in Shanghai, it’s almost impossible to find an incandescent light-bulb.  I don’t mean in stores when you need to replace one that burned out; I mean anywhere.  Every light fixture I see, whether in an apartment, a school or in a commercial place like a store, has florescent tube lights, sometimes little tiny ones in small corkscrew shapes and sometimes big tubes like neon advertising lights.  I don’t know when the change happened here, but the Chinese are light-years ahead of the U.S. in converting to energy-saving lighting.  It’s not that the prices are competitive with incandescent lights, it’s that there are no incandescent lights.

China has enormous energy needs to power it’s economy that even in bad times grows at seven or eight percent a year.  I don’t want to think about the demand on electric generating systems if every light fixture in China had power-hungry incandescent bulbs.

Why can’t we do that?

With twenty-something million Chinese in Shanghai, transportation is a challenge.  The city has a modern subway system, buses galore, including some that shopping malls operate to get people from neighborhoods to their businesses and back, fleets of VW Sonata taxis, a growing number of cars adding to already substantial traffic jams and tens of thousands of bicycles, mopeds  and motorbikes.

I’ve seen a Hummer and a couple of stretch caddy limos, but no Harleys.  About half of what passes for bicycles have battery packs a little bigger than  the size of a loaf of bread.  Motorbikes, the muffled variety, come in internal-combustion-engine-powered and electric.  I looked at some of the electric ones just for fun.  The newer ones can get about 120 kilometers on a single charge and cost between 1,800 and 2,500 RMB before negotiation.  At about 6.8 RMB to the U.S. dollar, that’s between $220 and $370 — a hell of a bargain for transportation around a city.

Many of the taxis, buses and some trucks are powered by liquid natural gas.  Sitting in the taxi, you see two gauges on the dash, one for the gas in the tank and the other for LNG. Some bus lines are electric with the overhead lines.  Again, many more than you see in the States and from a world-wide energy consumption standpoint, its a good thing.

Oh, for those of you waiting for an economic recovery in the U.S. brought about by jobs in the green energy field,  I just read that a huge new wind generator farm under development in the U.S. is buying its wind generators — towers, blades — the whole shooting match from here in China.   The first wind generators I saw were in the Hurtgen Forest in Germany sometime in the late 1980s.  I’m not sure when they got to China.

The Flu

This morning, Sunday here in Shanghai, I saw on CNN (via the website), that a National Emergency has been declared in the U.S. about this flu business.

Precautions against that sort of thing have been stringent here for some months.  Between flights on commercial airplanes here, workers fitted out in biohazard suits wipe down plane interiors and for International flights, everyone gets their temperature taken before they’re turned loose in the country.

At my school, co-located with a large Chinese high school, the grounds are enclosed by walls and fences so the only way in is one entrance gate with a sliding polished steel motorized accordion gate.  It’s opened wide for cars, trucks or busses and for people, like when kids and teachers arrive in the morning, it’s open only a little for pedestrians and the occasional motor or electric bike.

At the gate every morning for months now, a phalanx of kids and school guards stand with hand-held thermometers about the size of a garden  hose sprayer nozzle and aim them at the foreheads of arrivals taking an immediate body temperature of everyone.  No one gets in without being checked and if your body temperature is too high (or presumably too low), you’re banned until twenty-four hours after your temperature returns to normal.

So far, there has been no problem with the flu at the school although there have been some people turned away.  Every school in the City does this which is one of the benefits of top-down management and a culture that honors unquestioning obedience of leaders’ pronouncements.

One of my students, a smart young fellow who works hard at improving his English, is struggling with this unquestioning obedience thing.  He’s destined for a good U.S. college and university objects to some of the more traditional measures still employed at his prep school.  He thinks uniforms, bowing to teachers and having supervised evening study are among artifacts that do little to prepare him and his colleagues for a western education.

I agree with him and we’ve talked ab out this, not only the two of us, but also among several of us who know the dramatic difference Chinese kids will face when turned loose on a U.S. college campus.  They’ll adjust, freeze and panic or worse, get a little crazy like girls from Catholic school who have to release all that pent up stuff in a rush once they get out.

Anyway, he was talking about this with a classmate, another smart young fellow who was elected leader of the school student union recently, and was cautioned about differences between the culture of America and the culture of China.  American’s, he was advised questioned and challenged all sorts of things and caused a ruckus.  Chinese culture, he was told, was different and less chaotic; leaders were not challenged in the Chinese culture; they knew best — and my student friend should follow his leaders obediently in all matters including some antique practices that would be ditched as soon as these guys hit the shores of the good old USA.

That got me thinking about culture and whether it could be manipulated by unscrupulous individuals or systems.  A place where it is said that the culture dictates obedience to leaders-in-place and where therefore being a good, upstanding citizen of the mainstream means you don’t challenge rules from above, does kind plan into the hands of the incumbents.

There is no doubt that here leaders, teachers among them, get unusual influence from position more than contribution.  Just within the confines of this school, there have been some dumb things passed off as immutable from above.  Challenged (which foreign teachers sometimes do, my foreign teacher colleagues among them), they have a tendency to get modified or go away.  But the propensity to challenge here, among the locals, is almost nonexistent.

It’s good to be a leader.

Sex with Chinese Characteristics

Elliott Spitzer in China

This posting is PG 13. If you are too young to read stuff like this, don’t and go do something else.

This is about sex in China………but first some perspective……….

When I was delivering mail at IBM in the middle of the 1960’s the Poughkeepsie Laboratory manager, whose name doesn’t matter now, was fired for banging his secretary on his office desk. She hadn’t objected, but the colleague who came upon them and had the unmitigated gall to enter without knocking apparently thought it was bad form. Everybody quickly learned the story, but IBM only said the fellow had left the company for personal reasons. They said nothing about his paramour.

Nelson Rockefeller, former Governor of New York, Vice President at one time and rich guy who loved art and women is reputed to have died while with a twenty something lover not his wife when he was seventy. His wife, whose name happened to be Happy, was not at the time, but never said much about it publically. Rocky’s son later said he didn’t know for sure about the stories but he hoped if they were true, that the girlfriend made his dad happy…………….lovely thought, obviously from another guy.

For generations, “names” in the news, men almost exclusively, have had lapses of libido. Jefferson with Hemings, Roosevelt with Lucy Mercer (and others), Eisenhower with Sommersby, Patton with Dietrich and others, Kennedy with more than a few; Gary Hart, Jimmy Swaggart, Clinton, Spitzer, now Sanford of South Carolina. Jack Welch, who many rank a genius in business with GE suffered from peccadilloes that barely dented his reputation or speaking fees. The entertainment crowd basks in lascivious living that either enhances their box office, regains lost publicity or gets them on talk shows to laugh off what would otherwise be worthy of scarlet letters sewn onto their shirts- at least in America. The sexism with that is ridiculous. Charlie Sheen is a hero and celebrated flamboyant playboy for paying five figures to spend time with working girls and his Madam went to jail. Deborah Jean Palfrey, the so-called Washington Madam, hung herself when facing prison time for providing paid entertainment to the unnamed Washington elite.

For many of even the most powerful among us, the need for unmitigated adoration from a female or the temporary illusion of it as shoring up for the big game is inescapable. Whatever the conventional feedback or payoff received for a job well done, it doesn’t seem to provide enough reassurance for the next one and can rarely match the kick provided by a lover — real or imagined. Everyone denies it, from Newt Gingrich to Barney Frank, but it seems all too true.

America has weird contradictions…………Elliott Spitzer lost his job and credibility doing the same thing that Richard Gere portrayed with a lot more audacity and arguably better taste in “Pretty Woman,” a box office smash that has become part of our lexicon and a renowned “chick flick.” “Lost-in-Translation” and “The Girl in the Cafe” portray May-close-to-December romance the former with two married people; the latter with a guy in his sixties and a young girl. The “Before Sunset” “Before Sunrise” films of Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke celebrate the same thing that South Carolina’s Governor Sanford is getting clubbed for. “You’ll miss your plane.” She says. “I know.” he replies forgetting his wife and child at home in America as he stays in the apartment with his love interest in Paris.

People have gone to jail for the kinds of things alluded to in films like “Lolita” and “Beautiful Girls.” Timothy Hutton had something for “Marty” played by Natalie Portman and she for him – ok in the movies and for introducing notions like “Old Souls,” for children who seem to “get it,” but in real-life America it’s jail time and censure. What’s up with that?

God and nature make young women (girls at puberty actually), attractive because God and nature want them active when they are young, strong and healthy because it increases the odds of keeping the species going. The parts of us that make us more human and less beasts cause a little hesitation until these kids get minds of their own because it seems less unseemly, but the attraction was put their by forces other than morality and brain chemistry always threatens to win out over logic.

This sounds terrible to say, but nature has no use for old people for whom procreation is only a memory or whose production of new people would be inefficient or defective. That’s what makes the struggle between head and heart so confounding and what terrorizes souls trying to do what’s right despite the siren’s songs of youth and beauty. I’m not sure anyone is immune from this; some just get vaccinated somehow.

America has a weird way with sex and morality. In 2005, the Academy Award for the best original song went to “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” sung live on network television with only the only heed paid to morality was swapping out “bitch” for “witch” in the lyrics. The whole theme of the song — profiting from selling women for sex — was untouched.

When I lived in the northwest part of Virginia, where there were more churches than Seven-Eleven’s and Evangelical Christians and Mennonites vied for souls, it was common for kids to have more step relations than blood relations and not unheard of for a woman to have four or five kids by four or five different guys. I knew of one young woman whose first date with her newest husband was in the maternity ward where she was in false labor with the child of some other guy. The self-righteousness and hypocrisy of people in that part of the country is astounding.   It’s the leaders and spokespeople of this crowd who go around preaching how to live to the rest of us.

Now this may come as a surprise, but in some places, unsullied by descendants of Puritans and other religious zealots who fled their native lands because they weren’t tolerated too well, human nature and human frailty are a little better integrated into society. While the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi felt the need to declare he had never paid a hooker, he had no issue admitting to having girlfriends one of whom was an eighteen-year-old girl whose birthday party he felt obliged to attend. At the time he was seventy-three. When French politician Francois Mitterand died, his wife and their children were joined at his funeral by his mistress and their daughter – very civilized. Nobody seemed to care much, except for the American press.

It’s different in China.

China has 5,000 years of civilization and ingrained in the culture is tacit acceptance of sexual diversions and dalliance in the same way that sports betting is ingrained in America – technically illegal, but something everyone does, with barely any concealment: college brackets and results of March Madness are everywhere; even President Obama alluded to his picks.

It’s like that with sex in China.

Craig’s List for cities in China are replete with ads for nubile nymphs delivered to your door, but aimed mostly at the expat crowd and priced accordingly. There are no cops or attorneys general pressing Craig’s List to police its ads.

The locals live differently.

It is almost impossible to wander the streets of cities in China, large or small and not encounter sex for sale in one form or another. Almost every hotel, even western hotels, have saunas (massage operations) in or adjacent to them and the vast majority offer “special massage” which means just what you think it does — the happy endings which were the topic of several episodes of the HBO series “Mind of the Married Man.”

In the distance of a city block on a street not far from my apartment in Shanghai, there are no less than eight store-front shops in which sit women in negligees beckoning to passersby, especially foreigners, but accepting all comers. The shops are cheek-by-jowl to metal shops, small groceries, bike repair shops and all sorts of commercial enterprises, not tucked away in sleazy alleys or “red-light” districts. The women range in age from their early twenties to pretty old and from drop-dead gorgeous to ridiculous.

At the other end of the spectrum are stand-alone saunas — in a few cases four story stand-alone buildings, with lockers, showers, dozens of male shower attendants and masseurs who will scrub you, front and back for an hour or more; rooms filled with lazy-boy lounge chairs including chair-side food and beverage service by comely, uniformed attendants and then, at one’s leisure, a line-up of twelve to twenty identically uniformed beauties from which to pick for ninety minutes of show and tell in a room that can match the best of a five star hotel (as can the entire decor and service of the best of these places).

After one selects his lovely, she takes him by the hand and leads him to a private room, well appointed, usually mirrored, and often with a shower or bath. What happens then is a ritual that defies description, unsuitable for this narrative certainly, but think “cat bath” and you’ll get an idea of part of the preliminaries. The price for the best of these places, including food and beverages and as long as you like in a lazy-boy watching TV or sleeping or whatever, is less than $100, inclusive.

I asked a Chinese friend about all of this and why so many, so obvious and so elegant. He told me that after the Chinese government changed the laws to curtail corruption and sanctioned cash payments as bribes with jail time or other harsh punishment, nights out at the sauna became a popular substitute for smoothing business transactions and the number of places exploded. There are no “skyboxes” in China and golf outings are rare as are convention suites in Vegas or Atlantic City. So the saunas are influence peddling with Chinese characteristics.

At the other end of the spectrum, simple massage and the touch of one human to another is an art in China, highly honored and as common as a burgher in the States. Foot massage, full body massage, oil massage, every conceivable kind of massage employs thousands if not millions of practitioners all over the country. For some, up-selling to “special” massages is offered, but for many it’s legit through and through. Yes, they do walk on your back, holding onto cloth straps hung over ceiling mounted bars that parallel the massage tables/beds. At a good place, like the one I frequented in Xiamen you can get almost two hours of bliss including hot moist towels on your back and those small feet for about US$25 or less.

There is a curious middle-ground I’ve only seen in Shanghai….. a sensual massage with limits that seems to satisfy some human need in a population where men outnumber women by a bunch. In some places…………storefronts open to the street………..men of all ages can get the touch of a woman, being caressed really while fully clothed, including the woman masseuse reaching up under the guys shirt and caressing his crotch to the point of arousal. No touching of the girl’s sensitive parts is permitted or attempted, other than to hold the girl’s waist or leg while she sits on a small stool next to the massage bed (usually a cot with a bamboo mat on it) and massages the guy’s upper body and legs. It costs about 20 RMB for an hour of this pseudo-affection, which is less than three bucks.

Selling sex is technically illegal in China as is profiting from selling the sex services of others. Nobody seems to care much about that unless some official oversteps or publicity from the western media may make China look bad. There was a case here a few weeks back where a massage girl stabbed and killed an official who pressed her for more services than she was comfortable providing. She was acquitted and the focus was on the corrupt official trying to use his official position for favors rather than on any other aspect of their encounter. From time-to-time local law enforcement will shut down places, but that’s usually because they are negotiating a new agreement with the owners of an establishment or reacting to too much notoriety. Remember, many of these places are as prominent in neighborhoods as McDonalds or KFC.

More importantly, China is very protective of its image and to prevent western media exploiting what it would undoubtedly term “Chinese decadence” officials in China will sanitize the streets from time-to-time, particularly in areas subject to high traffic by foreigners and in advance of major international events like the Beijing Olympics for example. The 2010 World Expo in Shanghai is having the same effect reportedly, but only in the areas where foreigners and especially the foreign press and dignitaries are likely to go. For locals and Chinese businessmen, their favorite haunts are likely to remain untouched.

The whole idea of concubines and second or third wives came out of China and you’ve got to wonder if 5,000 years of experience maybe brought accommodation with reality not yet achieved in the west, or at least not yet achieved in Puritan if hypocritical America. It’s as though the Chinese say “Hey, this is how people are (men anyway), so we’ll adapt, be happy and knock off all the fuss.” Of course jilted lovers are still jilted lovers and betrayed women are still as betrayed even if they idolize Richard Gere or Bill Murray or some other actor doing the same things they’d kill their husbands or boyfriends for.

Joseph Needham, a Cambridge researcher who studied the history of science and medicine in China for half a century died at 94 in 1995. When his wife Dorothy died, Needham married his “second wife” who we would call his mistress, a Chinese researcher who was Needham’s girlfriend for decades. She lived just down the street from the Needhams in Cambridge and according to Needham’s biographer, the three of them seemed to have reached an accommodation that permitted them to dine and travel together as old friends. Needham never lost his prominence in Cambridge over his personal dalliances. The Needham Research Institute at Cambridge, dedicated to the study of Chinese Scientific History was opened in 1985 by Britain’s Prince Philip whose son once wrote he wished to be a feminine healthcare product so as to be closer to his lover and now wife. He’s the one that the late Princess Diana, no shrinking violet herself, had all those problems with.

Joseph Needham, a Cambridge scholar with Chinese characteristics.

It’s a strange world.

New stuff……..

Xiamen Airlines planes are Boeing 737s or Airbus 300 series.  You get food for nothing even on short flights.  I can take a  RT flight to places within an hour and a half of Shanghai (say 600 miles) for something like $150.

Most of the planes have overhead TVs and at the early and ending parts of the flight they’ll show a map of where you are and screens with the particulars of your flight: airspeed, altitude, time to destination and outside air temperature for example.  In between times they show clips and cartoons.  The clips are usually from America’s Funniest Home Videos showing people falling off things, running into things or otherwise losing their composure.   I’ll bet the folks who signed the release for those never imagined they’d be seen on a plane tooling around China.  A cartoon of a big white bear and a small creature that looks like the Geico gecko is usually next until near landing time

Despite their popularity on Xiamen Airlines, these cartoons can’t hold a candle to Tom and Jerry (original Tom and Jerry cartoons) who dominate everywhere.

There are all kinds of unusual western touches that suddenly appear in odd places.  I was in Fuzchou, a city to the south of Shanghai along the coast, and suddenly heard “Home on the Range” from public speakers in the square.  I have no idea why.  I think I mentioned in an earlier posting that in Xiamen the street-washing trucks play “Happy Birthday” from a truck mounted loud-speaker for some reason; I’ve only heard that in Xiamen — in Shanghai, the trucks are silent except for the water.

We’ve taken some road trips from Shanghai as part of the recruiting efforts for the school I’m with.  Hangzhou is about two hours by car from Shanghai, Wenzhou is six.  Highway travel is highway travel and the Chinese “interstates” look like Interstates anywhere, usually with tolls.  At rest areas there are cafeteria style eateries, and lots of packaged foods.  Instant noodles are popular where a tub is prepackaged with noodles, packages of vegetables, meat and spices and a fork or chop sticks.  You can find hot water taps almost everywhere and the prepackaged noodles are cheap — half a buck (US) and popular.  Add hot water, wait a couple of minutes and you’ve got your meal.

Some of the surrounding towns are filled with very rich Chinese, Wenzhou in particular.  The number of Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and even Porches is astounding and there are streets full of high-end fashion shops.  Wenzhou and Wenling — about an hour from Wenzhou — have three-wheeled bike taxis that fit two or three people in the back over the two wheels and a guy who pedals in front.  Touring the shopping streets is pleasant and an interesting way to see these towns; half an hour of being hauled around by a guy with big calves costs less than ten bucks US. 

They don’t have these contraptions in Shanghai.

One of the hotels has video screens with advertising in the mens room, placed at every urinal.  I had no idea people shopped at urinals, but all they need to do is add a touchscreen and the line for the men’s room could exceed the lines normally for the girls.  

I’ve decided to stay in China for a while.  The school here (www.cic-ghc.com), has made me the centerpiece of their promotional activities since old white guys seem to lend credibility somehow. It’s a little weird to see yourself on ten foot banners and in newspaper ads — especially in Chinese.  But that’s led to a better deal and a chance to learn first hand about Chinese business practices, to meet more regular people (parents of prospective students and people in the education business), and to participate in the changes that are China.  

Banner Ad for Parents' Meeting

The school has helped locate a new apartment, much nicer and bigger, more than I need, but it turns out that two bedroom places are actually easier to find than one bedroom places so that’s the deal.  Two bedrooms, living room, two balconies, a big kitchen, a study, furnished with airconditioning and all the appliances in a modern building costs 4,000 RMB a month (divide by 6.8).  Utilities will cost maybe 400 RMB per month including Internet and cable TV. 

The school will pay for most if not all of that. 

It’s crazy, but if you need a place to stay when you are in Shanghai, let me know.

I read recently that the Obama administration is setting new energy efficiency standards for light bulbs and household appliances.  It’s almost impossible to find and incandescent light bulb in China – they’re all flourescent; either tubes or the coiled ones that fit in regular sockets.  And people here recycle everything.  This guy’s wife is on the other side of his load of styrofoam and paper, pedalling her own bike while holding onto his, giving him extra power to move his load.  You see these folks everywhere along with the junk dealers who have three wheeled bikes, a bell and a small scale and collect anything imaginable.   Just outside the school the other day, right on the sidewalk, a guy with a hammer and screwdriver was beating the hell out of some home appliance; maybe an airconditioner, getting salvagable parts.  In the markets now, at least in all the bigger ones, if you don’t bring your own bag, you’ve got to pay a few cents to get one to carry your stuff.  It just became a rule and that was that.

The Deal in Shanghai

Last year, through July 2008, I taught at Jimei University as part of a joint degree program with a very small US college that managed to have four times the students in China (with no employees; only contractors through an intermediary company) than it has in the US where it is located.    The workload was ridiculous, with more than 22 contact hours each week and more than seven hundred kids and that with no teaching assistants or other support.

Some of us at an outing from the Guanghua College CIE Centre, Shanghai, China

While the last deal was onerous, it paid better than average for China by a wide margin, albeit well below average for the US, and provided a mechanism for an extended stay that included a long-term residence permit, a foreign expert’s certificate and lodging — all at no expense to me.

Finding this new gig in Shanghai which I learned of through a recruiter, uncovered a whole new aspect of the education industry I’d never heard of before, in China or anywhere else. The workload is substantially less by a long shot.

There are many very wealthy people in China these days – someone told me the other day there were more than 300,000 millionaires — and the rich ones follow the Chinese tradition of sacrificing for their kids just like the poorer parents do.  The difference is that the level of sacrifice is proportionately smaller, but the absolute numbers are quite substantial.  Most rich parents aim to get their kids into the best colleges and universities in the west and have the money to do it.

Tapping into that need is an industry of preparatory schools getting kids ready to pass the SATs if it’s a US school they’re aiming for or for “A-levels” if they are headed for the UK or Europe.  So rather than complete the last year or two of Chinese high school, the kids of rich parents are often sent off to a finishing school that concentrates on preparation for foreign college entrance exams.  They forgo the Chinese National Exam which is the placement mechanism for Chinese colleges and universities and bet big on a foreign education.

The program I’m with now is called a college, but it’s a prep school chartered by Cambridge University (the one in the UK), which has a subsidiary business chartering and providing materials for the British “AS” and “A” level entrance examinations.  I never heard of them before I  started poking around for another gig in China.

Chinese kids looking to go to Cambridge, Oxford or a host of other UK (or European and some others) colleges and universities study what seems like advanced placement level courses in physics, chemistry, economics and math, plus a big dose of English for two or three years to get ready for the entrance exams and English tests (IELTS – International English Language Testing System).  It’s all college level classes and the exams are tough.

Get this:  these preparatory schools, which are all private businesses,  charge tuition in excess of 70,000 RMB a year (more than US$10,000), which is almost what four years of college will cost at a typical Chinese university.   It’s an enormous sum of money in China where a decent wage for most workers is well less than 5,000 RMB a month.  One school here in Shanghai, affiliated with Shanghai Normal University (they all try to affiliate with some regular school), accepted less than three twenty five kids from two thousand applicants.  The demand here is huge.

The school I’m working for now (teaching economics), is new with no track record, but even they will have more than 100 kids in their first year.  Cambridge International Examination Centre (CIE) prep schools are popping up all over.   The better ones also provide SAT preparation and preparation for other new and evolving entrance exams for western colleges and universities.

A complementary industry here that works in concert with the prep schools coaches kids and their parents through the college application and Visa process so the kids actually go someplace after the pass the entrance exams.  Those are private enterprises too, so popular that the Chinese government has suspended licensing any more of them.  They can charge the equivalent of US$5,000 to help some kid apply to Harvard or MIT.  One smart CIE Centre here in Shanghai bought one of these advisory companies and got around the licensing problem that way and integrated the advisory/application support business into their prep school — raising tuition to cover the added value.

Education for the offspring of the very wealthy here is big business and there are plenty of them. 

If you want to come to see China for an extended period, one of the easiest ways is as an English teacher.  China needs thousands of them all over the country.  The pay is lousy by US standards, maybe $800 a month, but still more than a Chinese teacher and more than most workers.  And you get housing and part of your ticket paid.  Dave’s ESL Cafe is a good place to find a gig  (http://www.eslcafe.com/jobs/china/).

Academic subjects pay more, but the one’s that teach the material in English are a little more scarce.  The CIE centers and a joint degree program with a US college or university will pay the best and better yet are the few accelerated graduate degree programs suited for professors from western colleges who fly in for a couple of weeks to do an intensive course or two.  They get western pay scales, but those slots are few and usually taken by people already associated with the foreign college or university.

Seeing China over an extended period is an experience not to be missed.  This is the fastest changing place on the planet — beyond the industrial revolution — and you will never get a real sense of it from National Geographic or CNN.

Getting Around

Pudong Airport is one of two that serve Shanghai.  It’s not close to the city, but east of it, and shares air traffic with Hongqiao Airport which is a little closer and to the southwest of the city center.  Pudong is JFK in New York to Hongqiao’s Laguardia and takes all the International traffic.  Hongqiao is all domestic.

I landed at Pudong when I came to Shanghai in February and flew into Pudong last night from a long weekend in Xiamen to see friends and colleagues I knew when I was at Jimei University last year.  Xiamen is about ninety minutes by air from Shanghai, flights cost between $100 and $170 roundtrip depending on time and day. I took Shanghai’s “Maglev” train from the airport to the nearest subway stop — about a ten minute ride at a top speed on this route of 301 kilimeters per hour.  That’s about 187 miles per hour.  Maglev is short for magnetic levitation.  The airport connection Maglev (about 18 miles) goes as fast as 260 miles per hour, but we took our time.  Maglev means the train moves suspended in nothing by magnetic forces so there’s little or no friction.  The ticket cost 40RMB or about $5.20, expensive for China, but more convenient and faster than bus or taxi to the subway.  About what is costs to get into Manhatten via one of the bridges or tunnels.

The Maglev technology is German.

Bug splatters take on a whole new meaning at high speeds!

New York has no Maglev or even a subway link to Laguardia or Kennedy airports.  Long, expensive taxi rides, weird combinations of bus and subway, or buses are the less-than-convenient modes of travel.   Why is that?   We’re supposed to be good a things.

The long weekend of the  Qing Ming (Ching Ming) Festival, China’s equivalent to Memorial Day, is a big deal here.  Traditionally Chinese families gather to “sweep” the tombs of their ancestors.  They go to the gravesite or a temple and burn ersatz money for their ancestors’ well-being and offer fruit and good thoughts — often “talking” to their departed kin or reading letters or asking for advice.

Veteran's Ceremony at Qingming on Gulangyu, Xiamen

On Gulangyu islet, in Xiamen where I stayed for the weekend, I came upon a memorial ceremony honoring military veterans.  The Japanese first when they occupied Xiamen late in World War II and later civil war diehards in Taiwan caused Xiamen and the surrounding islands some grief.  I watched school kids drape red boyscout scarves around the necks of old Chinese vets and too many people shared a hand in carrying colorful tribute wreaths on tripod stands to the memorial stone much as they do everywhere in the world.

Veteran’s Recognition

Two honored vets

Construction here is quick and very practical.  Everywhere it seems there is construction.  I see people mixing concrete by hand on the street, taking whatever room they need.  Mixing concrete seems to be universal in technique.   Mix sand, stone sometimes and cement in some proportions ( I remember 1, 2 and 3 for shovelsful of cement, sand and stone) and heap it all into a pile; then dig out the center like a volcano and put water in the hole.

These three photos I took over two days on Gulangyu where a small shop was being refurbished.  The plumbing is barely subsurface (pragmatic people), everything is done by hand, and the two or three folks doing the job worked from early in the morning until late at night (after 10).  That’s typical in China from what I’ve seen.

Same day.............same two people

Oddities

Shanghai is the financial capital of China with a wealthy population and very modern features.  The subway and architecture of new buildings rival any other city anywhere.  At the same time, it’s impossible to take China out of Shanghai and the old ways die hard.

Tucked into every street and every nook and cranny are small shops and stores, many only a single garage-door wide if that.  I met a shop owner today who is opening a women’s accessories shop on Monday, just six days from today.  She told me she has had two other shops, all small and all hers.  The rent for the space is 3,000 RMB per month, about $450 or so.

I’m going to ask her if  my Economics class can follow her business a little to see how she does.  It will be good for them to compare theory to reality.   Of course that’s just a dodge to collect information myself.  The entrepreneurial spirit is just ingrained for the Chinese I know and see here; it was the same in Xiamen.  Tons of small businesses popping up everywhere, with no consideration for economy of scale.

New Accessories Shop Under Construction

For some reason, small metal working shops are all over the place, here in Shanghai, in Xiamen and in the other places I’ve visited.   The products are of two types predominantly: window frames and stainless steel grates or doors like prison windows and doors.   The shops all look the same, about the size of a one-car garage, and most of the work, including welding, is done on the sidewalk or curbside in front of the shops.

Metal Shop

And there are other very small shops selling all sorts of new and used stuff.  The Chinese throw nothing away.  So there are used-everything shops all over ranging from air-conditioners to electrical appliances, to mobile phones and cooking equipment.

Used stove parts store.

And little food and vegetable shops are everywhere.  Every afternoon, near my apartment a dozen push cart vendors appear to catch the folks coming home from work.   They sell food, including made-while-you-wait noodle dished, barbequed skewers of marinated pork, vegetables, some fried stuff; DVDs, flowers, an assortment of purses and bags…………..and for some reason, a lot of socks.

Basket of Fresh Choy, A very good veggie, hard to find small, tender ones like this in the US markets.

Speaking of fresh food, It’s springtime here and not unusual to see older women weeding.  I saw two weeding the planters in front of a bank and this one in the photo was weeding in front of a shopping mall.  They’re not really weeding, they’re actually picking various green things that are apparently edible.  They look like weeds to me, but these gals are particular and go only for the good stuff.  I did see people actually weeding, a whole big section of grass bordering a park.  All by hand, with little metal diggers……………about ten guys all working away.  No Scott’s Turfbuilder plus anything used here.

Gatherer.............what's cooking for dinner?

Fixes bikes maybe................or saving the bike fixer's spot.

Common scene in my neighborhood.........generic transport and recycler

Old Shanghai

I went to see Old Shanghai this weekend.  The weather was overcast as it has been, but cleared by later in the day.  It takes about an hour to get to the nearest subway and then ride the eleven stops to People’s Square, the big subway interchange and starting point for the Nanjing Road pedestrian mall which runs from People’s Square for nearly a mile to The Bund, along the river.

There are few if any westerners in the suburbs, but in People’s Square and on the mall there are many more and by the time you get to the river, there are more still, littered with them, from all over the world.

Pedestrian Mall, East Nanjing Road

The old part of Shanghai is along the Huangpu River.  Facing the river is a long curved boulevard lined with European style buildings built at the end of the 19th Century and the early part of the 20th when the west, principally European powers dominated the coastal regions of China winning territorial concessions. Parts of Shanghai are still known as the French Concession area among others.

European architecture along The Bund…………….

From the mid-nineteenth century, Britain ran a drug trade in China making fortunes for it’s merchants who imported opium from other British colonies to Chinese coastal cities where big segments of the Chinese populace became addicted and useless.  When Chinese authorities objected, forcibly, the Opium Wars began and western powers prevailed giving way to enormous concessions on the part of the Chinese.   Think of the upper East Side of Manhatten or Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco as sovereign territory of Columbia because the US objected to Columbian drug cartels selling crack and lost a coastal war Columbia waged to enforce their drug trade and protect their drug merchants.

Hong Kong, under British control until the end of the last Century, was an Opium War concession.

It’s a wonder the Chinese have anything to do with the West.

Now the only remnants of European concessions is the wide boulevard and buildings that line it and some beautiful neighborhoods nearby.  Across the boulevard is a broad walkway along the river, opposite Pudong, the new skyline of modern buildings, sky scrapers and “the needle,” which was about the only significant structure on the Pudong side ten years ago.   The Pudong skyline dwarfs “The Bund,” a German name for the sweeping boulevard area and European architecture on the near side, opposite Pudong.

The river banks are a mecca for tourists on both sides.  And there’s a ferry and lots of river traffic including barges of all types, tour boats and the rest.  I saw one floating billboard, an all electronic video screen on a boat, advertising the latest movies for some cinema complex.

Huge Floating Billboard

Tour groups are easy to spot, grouped together in baseball caps of the same color or snaking around behind a leader holding up a small flag or banner, wearing a small amplifier and headset.  I met a group of Russians, they all looked like they came from somewhere in Kansas.

By the end of the afternoon, the sun was out and it was a beautiful day……easy to forget the tragedy of this city and enjoy the weather.