If the reports are to be believed, there’s nothing quite like a Chinese student.
The attitude that I have towards China and its administration is that it’s better for them to make mistakes that cost them economically, because I would rather have British companies making money from the Chinese than have Chinese companies making money from British people. Thomas Friedman pointed this out in one of his columns for the New York Times, recounting how he addressed a Chinese motor show audience and he told everyone that he wanted everyone in China to continue to use fossil fuels, and ignore renewable energy. The point was that while fossil fuel consumption was going up, there was little in the way of development of renewable energy – and this was important because not only would it do the environment some good, it would also give the fastest developer a greater advantage in what would be the next global market.
The money is better in your pocket than in theirs.
Unfortunately, I haven’t told many Chinese people this, and for some reason, they don’t want to cooperate with my vision of seeing thousands upon thousands of Chinese people buying products that were designed, invented and manufactured in Europe. The scary thing is that, as you might well expect from the fastest growing economy in the world, the people that are going to make the difference in China aren’t even a generation away from us. They’re about 10 years behind us.
As anyone who’s taught English in China will know, Chinese people place a premium on education. The English training sector is booming to the point of saturation, and the rise of China’s middle class means that more people than ever are going to universities across the middle kingdom. It seems that in one respect, like Communism, Confucianism is working. All this from a country whose founding father shut down most of the learning centers in China to fuel his own cultural revolution.
30 years ago, Chinese writer Jung Chang was taken on a tour of her native Sichuan. The idea was that young students would see all how beautiful China was, and would never forget to return once they had completed their studies. 30 years ago, all of the students that had their “backgrounds” approved for overseas study fitted on one bus; last year 57,451 graduate students along with 26,275 undergraduate students were sent to the US alone. The language problems are already showing that there are large rifts between the US students and the Chinese students.
Writing for the Boston Globe, Kara Miller noted that “My “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ students this semester are almost exclusively American, while my students from India, China, and Latin America have - despite language barriers - generally written solid papers, excelled on exams, and become valuable class participants.”. Of her American students, she said “too many 18-year-old Americans, meanwhile, text one another under their desks (certain they are sly enough to go unnoticed), check e-mail, decline to take notes, and appear tired and disengaged.”. It seems that where the Chinese students lack comprehension skills, they make up for with their work ethic, eagerness and contributions to their classes.
Of course, anyone who has had to explain to a Chinese student that British people don’t actually celebrate Thanksgiving, and that “going shopping” is not the proper way to celebrate Christmas would call into question Millers numbers that all is lost for the Americans. She writes that “a National Geographic-Roper survey found that most 18- to 24-year-olds could not find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Japan on a map, ranking them behind counterparts in Sweden, Great Britain, Canada, Italy, Japan, France, and Germany. And in 2007 the American Institutes for Research reported that eighth graders in even our best-performing states - like Massachusetts - scored below peers in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, while students in our worst-performing states - like Mississippi - were on par with eighth graders in Slovakia, Romania, and Russia.”. The reason for all this is, of course, that no one bothered asking the Chinese or the Japanese any of the basic, general knowledge questions that were on this survey. Most pig farmers in Wuhan would have problems pointing out where Australia was on the map, as would too many of the unemployed, fluent English speaking Japanese housewives that keep all the English school owners nests feathered inTokyo. In Japan, a white man who speaks English is obviously an American, and a black man in China is obviously a drug dealer.
My first impressions of Japanese students were not good. For a developed country, and one that had a rising economic behemoth on it’s doorstep, the level of spoken English in Japan was much, much poorer than the level that I had come to expect from my Chinese students. Usually in China, I couldn’t get on the bus without someone coming up to me and practicing their English with me. In Japan, the same thing happened twice in 15 months. The width, and indeed depth of the gulf between the two old rivals was put into perspective when I was engaged in a conversation about British and Chinese history with the guy who was making my coffee in a Dongzhimen coffeeshop. To have this type conversation with a barista in Japan would almost be unthinkable.
So, the Chinese are going to be ruling the world in the future? Not really. What’s interesting is that for every Chinese person who goes to American to study now, there are probably the same number of American students who have arrived in China with the firm intention of learning Chinese. In December 2009, I ran into at least six Americans who were studying up on their HSK exam. Most of them were 22 or 23 years old, and all of them spoke, read and wrote pretty decent Chinese. Education is one of those things that everyone can get involved in. While there are always slackers – and I met more than my fair share of them while I was teaching English in Beijing – the slackers are almost always outnumbered by the nerds and the geeks. And it’ll be the geeks that inherit the earth. Or at least, a decent apartment in Ya Yun Cun.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Keep Repeating to Yourself, It's Only a Movie
The old chestnut of how Chinese people are represented in US blockbusters has once again risen up and the patriotic morons who populate the Chinese web forums (most whom I would warrant could benefit from six months being beaten senseless in an Internet addiction therapy centre). This time, it’s none other than 2012 – a movie that is based on the idea that Mayans knew when the world was going to end (in 2012). Reaction to the movie has been well, stupid, with stupid Chinese people asking “could 2012 be real?” (no, it’s a only movie) and even stupider Chinese people asking “should 2012 be banned in China” (no, it’s a only movie). The truly moronic amongst them have even thought that writing in newspapers about it about the fact that it is too horrific for children – especially Chinese children who live in a socialist utopia, and spend their free time dancing in the sugarpulm rainbow fields skipping through the wheat with gumdrop smiles - with one critic suggesting that even he, a fully grown man (and actor, no less) with a driving license and everything, was too terrified to sleep after watching it. Hong Jiantao wrote:
“…ever since 9:30 last night when I finished watching the film, I haven't been able to get to sleep. I'll nod off for a few moments but then I'm startled awake by my dreams, which consist entirely of horrifying scenes…I could still not help being convinced that disaster was really about to strike. Really, you absolutely cannot take children with you to watch this movie. A teenage girl sitting behind me was so scared she started crying, and my own palms were slick with a cold sweat”
From what Jintao writes, 2012 is nothing more than The Exorcist for our generation. At this point, it’s seems fair that anyone who thinks that the world is really going to end in 2012, and who thinks that Los Angeles sliding off into the ocean (something that, till now, has been nothing but an oft-prayed-for fantasy), despite reams of geological evidence, and common sense that this seems hugely unlikely, should not be let anywhere near a computer, a blog, or a cinema without first being doped up real good. Also, in my experience it’s not that hard to find a film that a Chinese girl will cry at.
Ignoring for one moment that there mustn’t be too much in the way of mass media that Chinese people find offensive, and ignoring for yet another moment that it’s a only movie, and for a further moment still that it’s a Christmas blockbuster and not really meant to be taken seriously. Movies of this ilk are two minute cigarette breaks, a five second orgasm, they’re not supposed to be Zen-like mediations on the existence of God, death, life the universe and everything. The real problem seems to be that Chinese people are mostly represented as pig-farmers with money who made it to the bright lights of the big cities, and are mostly helpless without the aid of big brother America coming to save everyone’s skins. And since when do the Chinese want validation from the Yanks? I didn’t leap on my word processor when all those action movies came out in the 80’s that had the bad guys spouting Shakespeare in bad English accents.
The accusation that the movie is creating a negative social effect is ridiculous because it gives the impression that the world will end in three years echoes the equally ludicrous notion that Kung Fu Panda exploits the memories of the people who died in the Sichuan Earthquake last year. This of course is not true, because it’s a movie. Asking Roland Emmerich to direct a movie about the end of the world is like asking Ted Bundy to do the catering at your wedding - you’ve got a pretty fair idea of what the content is going to be. If the overly patriotic Chinese bloggers (and there are a lot of them) think that they can get a movie withdrawn because a girl cried, (and dear Lord, grown adult men have got to be pretty hard up for publicity if they readily admit that watching this bilge gave them nightmares), then they are demonstrating a naiveté not seen since Mao turned to his troops and said “don’t worry, it won’t take us long to get there.”
I mean, it’s only a movie.
“…ever since 9:30 last night when I finished watching the film, I haven't been able to get to sleep. I'll nod off for a few moments but then I'm startled awake by my dreams, which consist entirely of horrifying scenes…I could still not help being convinced that disaster was really about to strike. Really, you absolutely cannot take children with you to watch this movie. A teenage girl sitting behind me was so scared she started crying, and my own palms were slick with a cold sweat”
From what Jintao writes, 2012 is nothing more than The Exorcist for our generation. At this point, it’s seems fair that anyone who thinks that the world is really going to end in 2012, and who thinks that Los Angeles sliding off into the ocean (something that, till now, has been nothing but an oft-prayed-for fantasy), despite reams of geological evidence, and common sense that this seems hugely unlikely, should not be let anywhere near a computer, a blog, or a cinema without first being doped up real good. Also, in my experience it’s not that hard to find a film that a Chinese girl will cry at.
Ignoring for one moment that there mustn’t be too much in the way of mass media that Chinese people find offensive, and ignoring for yet another moment that it’s a only movie, and for a further moment still that it’s a Christmas blockbuster and not really meant to be taken seriously. Movies of this ilk are two minute cigarette breaks, a five second orgasm, they’re not supposed to be Zen-like mediations on the existence of God, death, life the universe and everything. The real problem seems to be that Chinese people are mostly represented as pig-farmers with money who made it to the bright lights of the big cities, and are mostly helpless without the aid of big brother America coming to save everyone’s skins. And since when do the Chinese want validation from the Yanks? I didn’t leap on my word processor when all those action movies came out in the 80’s that had the bad guys spouting Shakespeare in bad English accents.
The accusation that the movie is creating a negative social effect is ridiculous because it gives the impression that the world will end in three years echoes the equally ludicrous notion that Kung Fu Panda exploits the memories of the people who died in the Sichuan Earthquake last year. This of course is not true, because it’s a movie. Asking Roland Emmerich to direct a movie about the end of the world is like asking Ted Bundy to do the catering at your wedding - you’ve got a pretty fair idea of what the content is going to be. If the overly patriotic Chinese bloggers (and there are a lot of them) think that they can get a movie withdrawn because a girl cried, (and dear Lord, grown adult men have got to be pretty hard up for publicity if they readily admit that watching this bilge gave them nightmares), then they are demonstrating a naiveté not seen since Mao turned to his troops and said “don’t worry, it won’t take us long to get there.”
I mean, it’s only a movie.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The Triumph of the Geeks
Apart from pandas giving birth (or at the very least, two pandas looking at each with a twinkle in their eye), there’s not much else from China that will grab the front pages like a presidential visit. The trouble is that while there are was a lot of style, there wasn’t much in the way of substance. Unless you count 6 hours on The Great Wall and taking photos of the The Forbidden City, that is.
But all that was to be expected. As Gady Epstein pointed out on his Twitter feed, Obama wasn’t about to step on Chinese toes on their home turf. Beyond the “town hall meeting” in Shanghai (essentially a televised English Corner), there was nothing much else for the President to do. A press conference turned into a press meeting, with no questions allowed, and public appearances were kept to an absolute minimum. Previous presidents had pushed for changes in the law with regards to human rights (Clinton) and had even accused the country’s leadership of currency manipulation (guess who). Barack Obama, at least officially, seemed to be in Beijing for what everyone else is officially here to do – enjoy the culture and the history. In fact, given the lack of any decent TV coverage, the cancellation of press conferences, and all the rest of it, you wouldn’t be overly shocked to be told that not many Chinese knew that he was in town at all, let along talked to students in a university somewhere.
What was interesting was that the meeting was broadcast on the Internet by the White House tech staff themselves and – get this – the feed is unblocked on the mainland and it was accompanied by a live word-for-word translation of the whole thing. In Chinese. Anyone with an internet connection (which is a lot of anyones in China) could log onto the White House and see a Chinese students discussing Internet censorship by the Chinese Communist Party, and then see what the world’s most powerful man had to say about it. It’s one way of staying ahead of the game – the blocking of the White House website could be seen as a diplomatic slight, so whatever was on it, within reason, would be pretty much available to all and sundry in China. Whoever thought of the idea of adding a Chinese translation is either a devious prankster, or a certified genius. It’s odd the way that those two often crossover.
It’s about this point in the article that you’ll understand from my gushing that I’m a geek. A nerd. I’ve got a blog and more than one email address, you don’t really need much more than that, do you? While most people were gearing up to make themselves ready for Windows 2000, I was wrestling with my first command line on SuSE Linux 6.2. I worked my way through several Linux distros, including SuSE, Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat and finally Ubuntu – Windows finally matured into something that I could use satisfactorily and I’m currently running Vista Ultimate. I had a website, a couple, in fact, both had a couple of visitors a month if I was lucky, and I was a lurking member of Slashdot long before it was made the owners of that blog into millionaires. It’s not unsurprising to learn that most of my angst was directed at the Great Firewall. Now, it seems, I’m not alone in casting aspersions on this monstrosity, as Barack Obama was quizzed on whether people should be allowed to access social networking sites like Twitter this week in Shanghai – the questions about Internet censorship were asked by handpicked members of the Chinese Communist Youth League.
Censorship and the Great Firewall are my personal bugbears when it comes to talking politics in China. The specific beef that I have with the Internet censorship in China is that it doesn’t work. At least half my friends who live in the Chinese mainland are able to post messages of Facebook, and I’m still able to see Tweets from the various journos and commentators that I follow on Twitter. The Great Firewall of China doesn’t work, and it’s costing the Chinese people around $300 million a year to keep going. That’s $300 million that could be spent on giving people a new hospital or rebuilding a decent school in Sichuan. Another wild idea would be that that money could be used to actually make people happy rather than make them repressed – it would surely cut down on the monthly tally of protests that turn violent in China. The Uyghurs would be a little bit happier if they got a bit extra money here and there, and the Tibetans might even welcome the odd donation to keep a remote temple open. But that kind of thing just doesn’t wash with the Chinese Communists.
The odd thing is that while I’m doing my best to be a do-gooding, interfering busybody who, the Chinese are just getting on with it, and even though they aren’t living in the US, they are finding ways and means of getting the work done. How about we look at education? Surely a communist developing country can’t have a better education system than say, Japan or the UK, or the US?
The fact of the matter is that more Chinese students than ever are enrolling and foreign universities – the pool of intellect in China in the next five years will be astonishing. The old system of having your degree chosen for you is long gone, students are free to choose what they want to study. Because they are interested in the subject, they study harder and get better degrees, and the whole thing sets a virtuous circle into motion. Overseas Chinese students numbered an impressive 98, 510 last year, which is a whopping 21% increase on previous years (India still leads, but not by much, with 103,260 overseas students). 60% of all US universities surveyed in the autumn reported an increase in the number of Chinese students they enrolled.
Essentially what is happening is this: because of the one-child policy, children in China are now taking advantage of the best educations in the world while they’re waiting for their own home-grown institutions to mature. They’re not just saying “we’re going to have great universities”, they’re saying “we’re going to have great universities, and while we’re waiting for them, we are sending our kids to great universities.” The Chinese are essentially outsourcing their students to the US. The fashion for an American education is such that a book has just been published by three Chinese undergrads studying in the US. Called “A True Liberal Arts Education”, it describes life at a small liberal arts college, and the concepts of liberal arts.
People are absolutely right when they say that censored version of Google or Yahoo is better than no Google or Yahoo at all – having the tools that organize and make sense of the Internet are vital. What comes with the ability to sort through information effectively is that ability to compare your circumstances with those others have in other countries. Even if the students were handpicked and even if the whole thing was stage-managed, as one Chinese Twitter user commented, for a brief moment in China, people were able to discuss the problems of censorship and one-party rule, and these are subjects that could only really be discussed with a foreign leader.
When it comes to letting the Chinese in on the secret that if they had a more open Internet, they’d be able to make more money is something that they’re going to have to figure out for themselves. The last time that the Chinese were running full tilt boogie, they came up with the compass, the printing press and gunpowder, who knows what they’ll do when they finally get the genie out of the bottle.
But all that was to be expected. As Gady Epstein pointed out on his Twitter feed, Obama wasn’t about to step on Chinese toes on their home turf. Beyond the “town hall meeting” in Shanghai (essentially a televised English Corner), there was nothing much else for the President to do. A press conference turned into a press meeting, with no questions allowed, and public appearances were kept to an absolute minimum. Previous presidents had pushed for changes in the law with regards to human rights (Clinton) and had even accused the country’s leadership of currency manipulation (guess who). Barack Obama, at least officially, seemed to be in Beijing for what everyone else is officially here to do – enjoy the culture and the history. In fact, given the lack of any decent TV coverage, the cancellation of press conferences, and all the rest of it, you wouldn’t be overly shocked to be told that not many Chinese knew that he was in town at all, let along talked to students in a university somewhere.
What was interesting was that the meeting was broadcast on the Internet by the White House tech staff themselves and – get this – the feed is unblocked on the mainland and it was accompanied by a live word-for-word translation of the whole thing. In Chinese. Anyone with an internet connection (which is a lot of anyones in China) could log onto the White House and see a Chinese students discussing Internet censorship by the Chinese Communist Party, and then see what the world’s most powerful man had to say about it. It’s one way of staying ahead of the game – the blocking of the White House website could be seen as a diplomatic slight, so whatever was on it, within reason, would be pretty much available to all and sundry in China. Whoever thought of the idea of adding a Chinese translation is either a devious prankster, or a certified genius. It’s odd the way that those two often crossover.
It’s about this point in the article that you’ll understand from my gushing that I’m a geek. A nerd. I’ve got a blog and more than one email address, you don’t really need much more than that, do you? While most people were gearing up to make themselves ready for Windows 2000, I was wrestling with my first command line on SuSE Linux 6.2. I worked my way through several Linux distros, including SuSE, Mandrake (now Mandriva), Red Hat and finally Ubuntu – Windows finally matured into something that I could use satisfactorily and I’m currently running Vista Ultimate. I had a website, a couple, in fact, both had a couple of visitors a month if I was lucky, and I was a lurking member of Slashdot long before it was made the owners of that blog into millionaires. It’s not unsurprising to learn that most of my angst was directed at the Great Firewall. Now, it seems, I’m not alone in casting aspersions on this monstrosity, as Barack Obama was quizzed on whether people should be allowed to access social networking sites like Twitter this week in Shanghai – the questions about Internet censorship were asked by handpicked members of the Chinese Communist Youth League.
Censorship and the Great Firewall are my personal bugbears when it comes to talking politics in China. The specific beef that I have with the Internet censorship in China is that it doesn’t work. At least half my friends who live in the Chinese mainland are able to post messages of Facebook, and I’m still able to see Tweets from the various journos and commentators that I follow on Twitter. The Great Firewall of China doesn’t work, and it’s costing the Chinese people around $300 million a year to keep going. That’s $300 million that could be spent on giving people a new hospital or rebuilding a decent school in Sichuan. Another wild idea would be that that money could be used to actually make people happy rather than make them repressed – it would surely cut down on the monthly tally of protests that turn violent in China. The Uyghurs would be a little bit happier if they got a bit extra money here and there, and the Tibetans might even welcome the odd donation to keep a remote temple open. But that kind of thing just doesn’t wash with the Chinese Communists.
The odd thing is that while I’m doing my best to be a do-gooding, interfering busybody who, the Chinese are just getting on with it, and even though they aren’t living in the US, they are finding ways and means of getting the work done. How about we look at education? Surely a communist developing country can’t have a better education system than say, Japan or the UK, or the US?
The fact of the matter is that more Chinese students than ever are enrolling and foreign universities – the pool of intellect in China in the next five years will be astonishing. The old system of having your degree chosen for you is long gone, students are free to choose what they want to study. Because they are interested in the subject, they study harder and get better degrees, and the whole thing sets a virtuous circle into motion. Overseas Chinese students numbered an impressive 98, 510 last year, which is a whopping 21% increase on previous years (India still leads, but not by much, with 103,260 overseas students). 60% of all US universities surveyed in the autumn reported an increase in the number of Chinese students they enrolled.
Essentially what is happening is this: because of the one-child policy, children in China are now taking advantage of the best educations in the world while they’re waiting for their own home-grown institutions to mature. They’re not just saying “we’re going to have great universities”, they’re saying “we’re going to have great universities, and while we’re waiting for them, we are sending our kids to great universities.” The Chinese are essentially outsourcing their students to the US. The fashion for an American education is such that a book has just been published by three Chinese undergrads studying in the US. Called “A True Liberal Arts Education”, it describes life at a small liberal arts college, and the concepts of liberal arts.
People are absolutely right when they say that censored version of Google or Yahoo is better than no Google or Yahoo at all – having the tools that organize and make sense of the Internet are vital. What comes with the ability to sort through information effectively is that ability to compare your circumstances with those others have in other countries. Even if the students were handpicked and even if the whole thing was stage-managed, as one Chinese Twitter user commented, for a brief moment in China, people were able to discuss the problems of censorship and one-party rule, and these are subjects that could only really be discussed with a foreign leader.
When it comes to letting the Chinese in on the secret that if they had a more open Internet, they’d be able to make more money is something that they’re going to have to figure out for themselves. The last time that the Chinese were running full tilt boogie, they came up with the compass, the printing press and gunpowder, who knows what they’ll do when they finally get the genie out of the bottle.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Hot, Flat and Repressed
China, in its present state of government will never be the global power that it wants to be. The reign of the ruling Chinese Communist Party will only last so long as they have the energy for the Chinese people.
The unprecedented growth and industrialization of China is, by any measure, remarkable, and fuelling this growth is, well, fuel. Specifically, oil. China has little in the way of its own oil reserves – optimistic estimates say that there’s about 14 years of oil left given the trend of growth and consumption. The government needs to import oil. A lot of it. The problem was that most developed countries that were willing to sell oil to the Chinese would always add the condition that one of the situations, be they the human rights situation, organ harvesting, censorship or any other of the distasteful activities that the CCP indulges in should stop. The rather inventive solution to the problem was to invest in countries that didn’t have the money or the resources to drill for their own oil, and these are usually the countries that don’t have the best human rights situations themselves, so they’re in no place to pile criticism on the Chinese government. The upshot is that the Chinese are ruffling more feathers in the human rights community, signing million dollar deals with countries that White House hawks would consider rogue states.
The big question that is asked by most young Chinese is: “When America and Europe were industrializing, they didn’t have anyone telling them they should use less coal or burn less oil, or pipe less gas. They polluted with wild abandon and everyone in the west is rich and fat because of it. Why can’t we do the same?” The answer is: China can. Not only “China can”, but “China can and I want it to do so”. Why? Because the interest in renewable energy sources is gathering more and more momentum every day. More tax dollars and more private companies are pouring money into solving the world’s energy crisis. They’re not doing this in order to save the world, they’re spending money because they know that renewable energy will become, in the very near future, the next global market. Holland exports its wind turbine technology, and Holland has 2% unemployment. It’s no coincidence that they were one of the first countries to reduce their dependence on Middle Eastern oil to zero, while also becoming one of the first countries to seriously invest in renewable energy technology. The more time that China wastes arguing with Japan about where it can drill for oil, the more time Europe, America and Japan (Japan, being the most energy efficient developed country, which will be able to exploit a market of 1.6billion people in China) have to be the first to make a product that everyone will be relying on. Of course, I want this product to be designed and patented by a British firm, rather than a Chinese firm.
And if you think that this is all just prevarication, the bad news that this has already happened. Pennsylvania train maker GE Transportation is selling energy efficient, eco-friendly train locomotives to Chinese rail and freight companies. The American trains last longer, don’t use as much fuel (they have 10-cylinder engines instead of the Chinese 12-cylinder) and don’t break down as much as the older, more inefficient engines that China has been using for years. Already an American company has a foothold in the Chinese economy. All of this has been done while the Chinese are partying hard, singing Hu Jintao’s praises and raising a glass to Wen Jiabao. While the officials are taking bribes and looking after their own, the Americans are starting to take over major Chinese industries, thanks to their clear regulation and inventive innovation. Some money is going to the Chinese, it’s true, but the big money is going to the US.
How does innovation follow on from regulation? When the auto industry in American was told that they must install all their cars with catalytic converters, only one company looked at how it could get around these rules that were, on average, adding $1300 to the production cost of every car. The chairman of Honda told its engineers that they must look at how to reduce emissions before they got anywhere near the tailpipe. The result was a new engine with a pre-burn chamber that reduced the toxicity of the gas/air mix before it went into the piston chamber to be ignited. Honda not only created a solution that saved their company millions of dollars and helped to combat climate change, they also started licensing the technology to other automakers.
When the movie Kung-fu Panda was released worldwide, there were two camps in China that were critical. The first crackpot camp claimed that the move exploited the memories of those who had died in the Sichuan earthquake. The second group asked the rather more valid question of why hadn’t the Chinese movie makers themselves been able to produce a smash hit animated comedy set in ancient China? Americans were selling Chinese to the Chinese. With the government still in control of the TV and of movie production, this is the way that it’s always going to be. China will always be the one picking up the crumbs, living off the pale imitations and pirate copies of things that other people produce. Americans make movies that sell, the Chinese have to make movies that conform to a haphazardly enforced political and moral agenda.
There’s regulation in America, but there’s little in the way of censorship. And look what has happened there – there are hundreds of companies now that actually sell people software that will censor the Internet for them. Worried parents don’t want their kids to be able to access redhotanddutch.com, so they pay companies to give them software that will block pornographic websites or websites that can teach teenagers how to make pipebombs. If the Great Firewall was removed, then it would free up a monopoly that Chinese companies would be able to take advantage of. If there was an open list available and updated reguluarly by the government, then companies would be able to take that list and create filtering software around it. Laws could be passed that made sure that whichever institutions the government wanted these filters to be installed at had the software properly set up. It’s still censorship, but it’s honest censorship, the criteria would be in the open, and everyone would know where they stood.
What’s happened is that people are scared to develop and innovate, because there are no clear guidelines telling people what they can and can’t do. Copies of existing works are being made because they’ve been around for a while and haven’t caused trouble in other countries. What the Chinese Internet needs isn’t censorship and prison terms, it’s stable, reliable, open regulation. With the regulation will come innovation, Chinese software engineers will be able to clearly see what they can’t and can do, and soon they’ll start creating rather than copying. Copying is only a short-term stop-gap solution, sooner or later, foreign companies will get tired of having their products pirated, and they’ll start coming down hard on the Chinese manufacturers by imposing hefty taxes on Chinese imports.
So, let’s assume that there’s a rising middle class in China, and that incomes, on average, are going up too. The money that’s generated from taxes collected from the wealthy middle class give the government a huge pool of money with which to effect massive social improvement. There’s more money to get the best doctors in better hospitals which now have the best equipment. The parks are clean, as is the water that’s piped into the apartments. On sunny days, lovers may stroll in the many clean, quiet parks dotted around the city. The public transport system is being overhauled with new subway lines and cleaner buses being introduced. In short, there’s enough money going spare to pour into big, flashy projects that do two important things: they keep people happy, and they keep people from asking questions. If you’re happy and you know it, then you’re less likely to demand accountability and transparency from your government. The CCP is still able to bank on the growing economy to keep people happy because the famines and the hardships that were endured during the Chinese civil war are remembered by people who are still alive, so it’s easy now to sing the praises of the CCP and the apparent economic wonder that they’ve orchestrated. The trick of politics isn’t to make people happy, it’s to keep people happy. In order to keep the Chinese people happy, and to keep the lucrative manufacturing contracts China now finds itself reliant on an unsteady foreign oil supply, and oil is a resource that is definitely close to extinction.
The fact that the CCP can so effectively crush opposition shows that the government has enough money to not only to keep the people happy on a superficial level, but they’re also able to spend large amounts of cash developing sophisticated internal intelligence services, and preventing groups that have an agenda different to that of the ruling political party from forming. The rise of China’s middle class and the migration of ethnically Han Chinese to remote areas of the country has made it easier than ever for people to compare their economic status with that of others. Needless to say, these people at the losing end of the equation are not happy. Thousands found solace in the sword verses of the Koran, not because they found Allah, but because they were sick and tired of being the losers all the time. The Muslim men that were unemployed and destitute in their home countries are the ones that migrated to the terror training camps, and they turned that dissatisfaction into a hatred so directed and so pure that they were willing to commit acts of mass murder. There’s no billionaire oil sheik on the planet who feels he needs to sacrifice his life and kill countless others in order to enter paradise. Wherever there are have and have-nots, there’s always terrorism.
The creation of a Chinese middle class has given the Chinese government access to a money pot deeper than it could possibly fantasize of, and so long as people are getting richer and are paying their bills, the more money the government has to strengthen its grip on dissidents. The problem that comes is when the energy that is needed to finance the business ventures that enables the rich to get richer runs out, there’s going to be a problem. More than likely, the CCP will be forced to do as Bahrain had to do – reform its basic, fundamental ideas of how society is supposed to be run. People are not likely to give it all up and go through another North Korea-style great struggle; they aren’t going to trek for miles on the second Long March and dig for coal with their bare hands. They’re much more likely to riot in the streets, and demand that the government fulfill their half of the bargain.
The balancing act that Beijing is faced with in unenviable. While their yearly 8%/9% growth is spectacular, and the effect that this has on the nation’s millions that live on $1 a day has been a phenomenal achievement for a country that started its days 60 years ago bankrupt with no gold supplies, there is no question that this growth has to be sustained. Or else. What has been created now is a strange economic cycle where the economy grows, and must keep growing to satisfy the general population (and to help secure to continued governance from the CCP), in order to keep the economy growing, the country needs oil. The country doesn’t have oil so it has to import from rogue states and at some point, that’s definitely going to come up at the next WTO meeting. If you think this is a big problem, I haven’t even mentioned that America is going after the same oil supplies in order to sustain its own addiction to the black stuff.
After all the fear-mongering and doomsaying, for the first time in a long time, I have hope for China. To put it more accurately, I have a little more hope than I did. The hope comes in the form of the members of the very same middle class that are, according to one economic theory, helping the CCP stay in power, the ones who own the massive Chinese companies, and the ones who protested so vehemently about the absurd idea to install the Green Dam/Youth Escort software on all the computers that were to be sold in China this year. It’s the biggest victory that the Chinese people have scored over their government in a long time. One thing that is apparent after spending so much time in China is that people are able to tell you how great the country is, but the list of achievements is always in the past tense. China and it’s people must look to the longer term, they’ve got to turn their “did”s into “will”s, and the one thing that they can’t afford to do is to wait till later to clean up the mess, once they’ve become rich; they’ve got to clean up to become rich.
The unprecedented growth and industrialization of China is, by any measure, remarkable, and fuelling this growth is, well, fuel. Specifically, oil. China has little in the way of its own oil reserves – optimistic estimates say that there’s about 14 years of oil left given the trend of growth and consumption. The government needs to import oil. A lot of it. The problem was that most developed countries that were willing to sell oil to the Chinese would always add the condition that one of the situations, be they the human rights situation, organ harvesting, censorship or any other of the distasteful activities that the CCP indulges in should stop. The rather inventive solution to the problem was to invest in countries that didn’t have the money or the resources to drill for their own oil, and these are usually the countries that don’t have the best human rights situations themselves, so they’re in no place to pile criticism on the Chinese government. The upshot is that the Chinese are ruffling more feathers in the human rights community, signing million dollar deals with countries that White House hawks would consider rogue states.
The big question that is asked by most young Chinese is: “When America and Europe were industrializing, they didn’t have anyone telling them they should use less coal or burn less oil, or pipe less gas. They polluted with wild abandon and everyone in the west is rich and fat because of it. Why can’t we do the same?” The answer is: China can. Not only “China can”, but “China can and I want it to do so”. Why? Because the interest in renewable energy sources is gathering more and more momentum every day. More tax dollars and more private companies are pouring money into solving the world’s energy crisis. They’re not doing this in order to save the world, they’re spending money because they know that renewable energy will become, in the very near future, the next global market. Holland exports its wind turbine technology, and Holland has 2% unemployment. It’s no coincidence that they were one of the first countries to reduce their dependence on Middle Eastern oil to zero, while also becoming one of the first countries to seriously invest in renewable energy technology. The more time that China wastes arguing with Japan about where it can drill for oil, the more time Europe, America and Japan (Japan, being the most energy efficient developed country, which will be able to exploit a market of 1.6billion people in China) have to be the first to make a product that everyone will be relying on. Of course, I want this product to be designed and patented by a British firm, rather than a Chinese firm.
And if you think that this is all just prevarication, the bad news that this has already happened. Pennsylvania train maker GE Transportation is selling energy efficient, eco-friendly train locomotives to Chinese rail and freight companies. The American trains last longer, don’t use as much fuel (they have 10-cylinder engines instead of the Chinese 12-cylinder) and don’t break down as much as the older, more inefficient engines that China has been using for years. Already an American company has a foothold in the Chinese economy. All of this has been done while the Chinese are partying hard, singing Hu Jintao’s praises and raising a glass to Wen Jiabao. While the officials are taking bribes and looking after their own, the Americans are starting to take over major Chinese industries, thanks to their clear regulation and inventive innovation. Some money is going to the Chinese, it’s true, but the big money is going to the US.
How does innovation follow on from regulation? When the auto industry in American was told that they must install all their cars with catalytic converters, only one company looked at how it could get around these rules that were, on average, adding $1300 to the production cost of every car. The chairman of Honda told its engineers that they must look at how to reduce emissions before they got anywhere near the tailpipe. The result was a new engine with a pre-burn chamber that reduced the toxicity of the gas/air mix before it went into the piston chamber to be ignited. Honda not only created a solution that saved their company millions of dollars and helped to combat climate change, they also started licensing the technology to other automakers.
When the movie Kung-fu Panda was released worldwide, there were two camps in China that were critical. The first crackpot camp claimed that the move exploited the memories of those who had died in the Sichuan earthquake. The second group asked the rather more valid question of why hadn’t the Chinese movie makers themselves been able to produce a smash hit animated comedy set in ancient China? Americans were selling Chinese to the Chinese. With the government still in control of the TV and of movie production, this is the way that it’s always going to be. China will always be the one picking up the crumbs, living off the pale imitations and pirate copies of things that other people produce. Americans make movies that sell, the Chinese have to make movies that conform to a haphazardly enforced political and moral agenda.
There’s regulation in America, but there’s little in the way of censorship. And look what has happened there – there are hundreds of companies now that actually sell people software that will censor the Internet for them. Worried parents don’t want their kids to be able to access redhotanddutch.com, so they pay companies to give them software that will block pornographic websites or websites that can teach teenagers how to make pipebombs. If the Great Firewall was removed, then it would free up a monopoly that Chinese companies would be able to take advantage of. If there was an open list available and updated reguluarly by the government, then companies would be able to take that list and create filtering software around it. Laws could be passed that made sure that whichever institutions the government wanted these filters to be installed at had the software properly set up. It’s still censorship, but it’s honest censorship, the criteria would be in the open, and everyone would know where they stood.
What’s happened is that people are scared to develop and innovate, because there are no clear guidelines telling people what they can and can’t do. Copies of existing works are being made because they’ve been around for a while and haven’t caused trouble in other countries. What the Chinese Internet needs isn’t censorship and prison terms, it’s stable, reliable, open regulation. With the regulation will come innovation, Chinese software engineers will be able to clearly see what they can’t and can do, and soon they’ll start creating rather than copying. Copying is only a short-term stop-gap solution, sooner or later, foreign companies will get tired of having their products pirated, and they’ll start coming down hard on the Chinese manufacturers by imposing hefty taxes on Chinese imports.
So, let’s assume that there’s a rising middle class in China, and that incomes, on average, are going up too. The money that’s generated from taxes collected from the wealthy middle class give the government a huge pool of money with which to effect massive social improvement. There’s more money to get the best doctors in better hospitals which now have the best equipment. The parks are clean, as is the water that’s piped into the apartments. On sunny days, lovers may stroll in the many clean, quiet parks dotted around the city. The public transport system is being overhauled with new subway lines and cleaner buses being introduced. In short, there’s enough money going spare to pour into big, flashy projects that do two important things: they keep people happy, and they keep people from asking questions. If you’re happy and you know it, then you’re less likely to demand accountability and transparency from your government. The CCP is still able to bank on the growing economy to keep people happy because the famines and the hardships that were endured during the Chinese civil war are remembered by people who are still alive, so it’s easy now to sing the praises of the CCP and the apparent economic wonder that they’ve orchestrated. The trick of politics isn’t to make people happy, it’s to keep people happy. In order to keep the Chinese people happy, and to keep the lucrative manufacturing contracts China now finds itself reliant on an unsteady foreign oil supply, and oil is a resource that is definitely close to extinction.
The fact that the CCP can so effectively crush opposition shows that the government has enough money to not only to keep the people happy on a superficial level, but they’re also able to spend large amounts of cash developing sophisticated internal intelligence services, and preventing groups that have an agenda different to that of the ruling political party from forming. The rise of China’s middle class and the migration of ethnically Han Chinese to remote areas of the country has made it easier than ever for people to compare their economic status with that of others. Needless to say, these people at the losing end of the equation are not happy. Thousands found solace in the sword verses of the Koran, not because they found Allah, but because they were sick and tired of being the losers all the time. The Muslim men that were unemployed and destitute in their home countries are the ones that migrated to the terror training camps, and they turned that dissatisfaction into a hatred so directed and so pure that they were willing to commit acts of mass murder. There’s no billionaire oil sheik on the planet who feels he needs to sacrifice his life and kill countless others in order to enter paradise. Wherever there are have and have-nots, there’s always terrorism.
The creation of a Chinese middle class has given the Chinese government access to a money pot deeper than it could possibly fantasize of, and so long as people are getting richer and are paying their bills, the more money the government has to strengthen its grip on dissidents. The problem that comes is when the energy that is needed to finance the business ventures that enables the rich to get richer runs out, there’s going to be a problem. More than likely, the CCP will be forced to do as Bahrain had to do – reform its basic, fundamental ideas of how society is supposed to be run. People are not likely to give it all up and go through another North Korea-style great struggle; they aren’t going to trek for miles on the second Long March and dig for coal with their bare hands. They’re much more likely to riot in the streets, and demand that the government fulfill their half of the bargain.
The balancing act that Beijing is faced with in unenviable. While their yearly 8%/9% growth is spectacular, and the effect that this has on the nation’s millions that live on $1 a day has been a phenomenal achievement for a country that started its days 60 years ago bankrupt with no gold supplies, there is no question that this growth has to be sustained. Or else. What has been created now is a strange economic cycle where the economy grows, and must keep growing to satisfy the general population (and to help secure to continued governance from the CCP), in order to keep the economy growing, the country needs oil. The country doesn’t have oil so it has to import from rogue states and at some point, that’s definitely going to come up at the next WTO meeting. If you think this is a big problem, I haven’t even mentioned that America is going after the same oil supplies in order to sustain its own addiction to the black stuff.
After all the fear-mongering and doomsaying, for the first time in a long time, I have hope for China. To put it more accurately, I have a little more hope than I did. The hope comes in the form of the members of the very same middle class that are, according to one economic theory, helping the CCP stay in power, the ones who own the massive Chinese companies, and the ones who protested so vehemently about the absurd idea to install the Green Dam/Youth Escort software on all the computers that were to be sold in China this year. It’s the biggest victory that the Chinese people have scored over their government in a long time. One thing that is apparent after spending so much time in China is that people are able to tell you how great the country is, but the list of achievements is always in the past tense. China and it’s people must look to the longer term, they’ve got to turn their “did”s into “will”s, and the one thing that they can’t afford to do is to wait till later to clean up the mess, once they’ve become rich; they’ve got to clean up to become rich.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Staring into the 'Jing
To live in an Asian city is to have your perceptions changed of young people. I know that when I lived in the UK, I didn’t see young people anymore. I saw youths – the same way they're described in police reports. Scrawny, underfed spawn that mill about mindlessly who you’d rather stab in the eye with your housekeys than say hello to. Living in Beijing or Osaka, or taking a trip to Kyoto to see people getting together in a park, dancing, drinking, rollerblading, kung-fuing is a refreshing experience.
For a long time I saw China (especially Beijing, the city where I had illogically chosen to make my home for 2 years) as the cowshit-covered, nose-picking, idiot older brother to the Henry Miller reading, Chablis drinking, smoking jacket clad Japan. I ached to get to Japan where things would be more comfortable, cleaner and a whole lot better. The general fact of the matter is that although it isn’t untrue, it’s a lot less true that you’d imagine. China had been like living in a country that was held together with duct tape, and I fantasized that Japan would be like living inside a Rolex.
The fact of the matter is that Japanese people aren’t crazy. The Japanese themselves have pegged themselves as crazy, and they’re not. It’s true; there are a lot of Japanese problems that have been solved by Japanese people for Japanese people that strike outsiders as odd. They may not be the best solutions in the world, but according to the myriad social rules of public conduct in Japan, they make perfect sense. While Chairman Mao was declaring that “women hold up half the sky”, the Japanese were only just getting to grips with the fact that women could and should go to work – the Japanese women have done their best to paint themselves as weak and feeble in the workplace, but it hasn’t washed well with the Japanese government - and fighting their wars with exactly the same death-to-the-enemies-take-no-prisoners attitude that were taught to the samurai on the streets of Kyoto 200 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, they lost to the Americans. Twice.
To say that China has a better, freer, more open society than Japan is to make a bold statement indeed. But having lived in both countries, it’s obvious that the two have more in common with each other than they dare admit. The moment that I found out that one of Japan’s political party had only been defeated twice in the last 60 years of democracy in the archipelago, I decided that I would be better off in China.
When someone pointed out that there are a lot of pointless rules in Japan that no one follows, I made my mind up to leave the country – if things are going to be like this, then I may as well be somewhere where the beer is cheap. Things are just as “crazy” in Beijing. As you walk on through Bei Hai, you might be lucky enough to see a portly gentleman walking on the wrong side of the lake railings, cheerfully taking his dog for a swim. There's not really any 'normal' in Beijing, and the longer I stay here, the more normal that becomes. Seeing sixty people gathered together in a park with a battered stereo, ballroom dancing the night away is something you would never see my local park. The tourists take photos, I just walk past them, and I secretly wishing that I could dance like that.
The only real thing that I’m rather biased towards is anything medically traditional in China. I think it comes from the time when I was suffering from diarrhea that could only be described as “epic” after eating chuanr of dubious origin and was subsequently given a mysterious bottle of green lozenges that I was told would take three or four days to take effect (deciding that in three or four days I would be lucky to have any bones left, I went to a better pharmacy and bought some better medicine).
In the long, seemingly endless summer of 2008, some enterprising young men got together and started producing pirate copies of official Chinese Olympic memorabilia. Even last Christmas, a visit to the Olympic Stadium would almost always in end with someone trying to sell you something Olympic related. When the government said that they had enough stockpiles of almost everything to ensure a safe and enjoyable Olympics, they were including in the two Eiger-shaped mountains of Fuwa plushies. Chinese people are able to reel off four thousand years of history, but seem utterly bewildered when you ask them what their plans are for next week. When you do ask someone what’s changed in whichever Chinese city you left, the answer will, more often than not be, “nothing special”.
One thing that even the casual China observer will notice is that the Chinese often fire criticism at what seems to be the wrong target. While their own news services are censored and monitored by the propaganda department, people set up anti-CNN websites. While people still protest the Japanese prime minister visiting a WW2 war memorial, they ignore the memories of the millions of people who died during the Cultural Revolution. The (mis)representation of Chinese and Japanese in movies has been another sore point, and one that often degenerates into the most pointless of misguided arguments. The uproar over Chinese stars taking on Japanese roles in Memoirs of a Geisha should give you some idea of the average IQ of these mindless, Internet-addicted morons, many of who I daresay would benefit enormously from a sound beating at an internet addiction rehab clinic in the countryside.
The huge gulf between the invading foreign devils and the Chinese that were already living there when the British decided to get them all addicted to opium hasn’t gone unnoticed by the powers that be. The Chinese are too proud and the foreigners are too set in their troublesome western ways. It’s a state of affairs that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Chinese themselves. Last week, I went to a public toilet in Sanlitun’s new shopping district, “The Village” and saw a sign in both English and Chinese that people should not stand on (and thus squat Chinese style over the bowl) the lavatory to use it. Staff at a local hotel run by a English friend are astonished by the fact that foreigners prefer cold milk on their corn flakes in the morning.
One of the things that you'll find about Beijing is the wealth of things that you can actually do. It's something that you'd miss if you traveled to Xi'an or Chengdu. Take the food, if you don’t like Chinese food, so you can go to an Italian restaurant, if that’s full, then you can get Japanese. Despite the out and out hatred that Chinese people foster for the Japanese, there's a number of sushi restaurants that have sprung up, Yoshinoya is here, and so is Kyo Nichi. Beijing is a place to get fat in, there's an obsession with food – have you eaten? Will you eat? What did you eat? When did you eat? Where did you eat? If you're not full you should eat more...why aren't you eating? Are you full? Is your food ok? Is the food good? .
I'm still not really sure what to make of the city – even nearly three years on. Walking down the street, as summer draws its final breaths, the government is clamping down on Internet porn sites and the girls are digging out their skimpiest, tiniest, tightest and unusually sexiest clothes to strut around in. Long ago, I arrived at the conclusion that Beijing annoys the living hell out of me. It annoys me like no other place on the planet, but there's no other city I'd like to be annoyed by.
For a long time I saw China (especially Beijing, the city where I had illogically chosen to make my home for 2 years) as the cowshit-covered, nose-picking, idiot older brother to the Henry Miller reading, Chablis drinking, smoking jacket clad Japan. I ached to get to Japan where things would be more comfortable, cleaner and a whole lot better. The general fact of the matter is that although it isn’t untrue, it’s a lot less true that you’d imagine. China had been like living in a country that was held together with duct tape, and I fantasized that Japan would be like living inside a Rolex.
The fact of the matter is that Japanese people aren’t crazy. The Japanese themselves have pegged themselves as crazy, and they’re not. It’s true; there are a lot of Japanese problems that have been solved by Japanese people for Japanese people that strike outsiders as odd. They may not be the best solutions in the world, but according to the myriad social rules of public conduct in Japan, they make perfect sense. While Chairman Mao was declaring that “women hold up half the sky”, the Japanese were only just getting to grips with the fact that women could and should go to work – the Japanese women have done their best to paint themselves as weak and feeble in the workplace, but it hasn’t washed well with the Japanese government - and fighting their wars with exactly the same death-to-the-enemies-take-no-prisoners attitude that were taught to the samurai on the streets of Kyoto 200 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, they lost to the Americans. Twice.
To say that China has a better, freer, more open society than Japan is to make a bold statement indeed. But having lived in both countries, it’s obvious that the two have more in common with each other than they dare admit. The moment that I found out that one of Japan’s political party had only been defeated twice in the last 60 years of democracy in the archipelago, I decided that I would be better off in China.
When someone pointed out that there are a lot of pointless rules in Japan that no one follows, I made my mind up to leave the country – if things are going to be like this, then I may as well be somewhere where the beer is cheap. Things are just as “crazy” in Beijing. As you walk on through Bei Hai, you might be lucky enough to see a portly gentleman walking on the wrong side of the lake railings, cheerfully taking his dog for a swim. There's not really any 'normal' in Beijing, and the longer I stay here, the more normal that becomes. Seeing sixty people gathered together in a park with a battered stereo, ballroom dancing the night away is something you would never see my local park. The tourists take photos, I just walk past them, and I secretly wishing that I could dance like that.
The only real thing that I’m rather biased towards is anything medically traditional in China. I think it comes from the time when I was suffering from diarrhea that could only be described as “epic” after eating chuanr of dubious origin and was subsequently given a mysterious bottle of green lozenges that I was told would take three or four days to take effect (deciding that in three or four days I would be lucky to have any bones left, I went to a better pharmacy and bought some better medicine).
In the long, seemingly endless summer of 2008, some enterprising young men got together and started producing pirate copies of official Chinese Olympic memorabilia. Even last Christmas, a visit to the Olympic Stadium would almost always in end with someone trying to sell you something Olympic related. When the government said that they had enough stockpiles of almost everything to ensure a safe and enjoyable Olympics, they were including in the two Eiger-shaped mountains of Fuwa plushies. Chinese people are able to reel off four thousand years of history, but seem utterly bewildered when you ask them what their plans are for next week. When you do ask someone what’s changed in whichever Chinese city you left, the answer will, more often than not be, “nothing special”.
One thing that even the casual China observer will notice is that the Chinese often fire criticism at what seems to be the wrong target. While their own news services are censored and monitored by the propaganda department, people set up anti-CNN websites. While people still protest the Japanese prime minister visiting a WW2 war memorial, they ignore the memories of the millions of people who died during the Cultural Revolution. The (mis)representation of Chinese and Japanese in movies has been another sore point, and one that often degenerates into the most pointless of misguided arguments. The uproar over Chinese stars taking on Japanese roles in Memoirs of a Geisha should give you some idea of the average IQ of these mindless, Internet-addicted morons, many of who I daresay would benefit enormously from a sound beating at an internet addiction rehab clinic in the countryside.
The huge gulf between the invading foreign devils and the Chinese that were already living there when the British decided to get them all addicted to opium hasn’t gone unnoticed by the powers that be. The Chinese are too proud and the foreigners are too set in their troublesome western ways. It’s a state of affairs that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Chinese themselves. Last week, I went to a public toilet in Sanlitun’s new shopping district, “The Village” and saw a sign in both English and Chinese that people should not stand on (and thus squat Chinese style over the bowl) the lavatory to use it. Staff at a local hotel run by a English friend are astonished by the fact that foreigners prefer cold milk on their corn flakes in the morning.
One of the things that you'll find about Beijing is the wealth of things that you can actually do. It's something that you'd miss if you traveled to Xi'an or Chengdu. Take the food, if you don’t like Chinese food, so you can go to an Italian restaurant, if that’s full, then you can get Japanese. Despite the out and out hatred that Chinese people foster for the Japanese, there's a number of sushi restaurants that have sprung up, Yoshinoya is here, and so is Kyo Nichi. Beijing is a place to get fat in, there's an obsession with food – have you eaten? Will you eat? What did you eat? When did you eat? Where did you eat? If you're not full you should eat more...why aren't you eating? Are you full? Is your food ok? Is the food good? .
I'm still not really sure what to make of the city – even nearly three years on. Walking down the street, as summer draws its final breaths, the government is clamping down on Internet porn sites and the girls are digging out their skimpiest, tiniest, tightest and unusually sexiest clothes to strut around in. Long ago, I arrived at the conclusion that Beijing annoys the living hell out of me. It annoys me like no other place on the planet, but there's no other city I'd like to be annoyed by.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Welcome To Take Beijing Taxi
A little knowledge is very dangerous, and that’s true of the person who knows about as much Mandarin as the average Chinese four year old. People talk to you. In Chinese. Even if you only know how to say the address of your hotel or apartment properly, taxi drivers, like taxi drivers the world over, will talk to you. Some of them talk about the building work in Beijing, others practice their English, but mostly they yammer on to me in Chinese about everything and nothing. All I’m able to do is offer an appreciative “yes” or “ahhhh”, and hope that it looks like I understand and sympathize.
Because of my horrendously low level of Chinese, most interactions with taxi drivers are short and to the point. I know how to direct someone to my apartment (go straight ahead a little...you see the little road on the left? Ok straight ahead, left here and stop), and I’m particularly good at the old mobile-phone-with-handy-Chinese-directions-on-it trick, but that’s about it. I know nothing of their lives, they’re probably largely more interested in my life as most Chinese people are, and I’d like to know about them, but we’re separated by the huge, bulletproof, reinforced concrete barrier of my own ineptitude, my ignorance and disrespect of Chinese culture.
Sometimes I have a great taxi driver, like the guy a few weeks ago. He seemed, as they often do, rather happy to have a foreigner in the back. Once we’d established that my Chinese was pretty much worthless, and that my girlfriend could speak both Mandarin and English, we quickly fell into the routine of my girlfriend explaining something in Chinese, and then the taxi driver checking his pronunciation on me.
According to the Beijing Olympic website, nearly 90,000 drivers are learning English, and will be able to “chat with foreigners about the NBA star Yao Ming, or Beijing snack[s]”. If the drivers struggle, then there’s still no need worry, as taxi companies are installing computerized translators in their cars. The website doesn't elaborate what’s going to happen if you know nothing of the NBA (like your average British person, who, is, admittedly, more likely to shout directions twice at the poor man, before smashing the car up). Xinhua news releases me always make me nervous, for some reason - especially the use if the word “chat” in the sentence above.
There are two things that foreigners talk a lot about in Beijing. The first thing is mostly about public toilets, ex-pats and tourists alike swap stories about them like war veterans. The second is usually the smell inside a Beijing taxi, largely the smell of a mouth that has been washed with green tea for most of the day, lightly peppered with the smell of aged garlic. The smell problem has caught the attention of the Olympic mandarins and they assure me that only the most fragrant taxis will be available for sports fans this summer - they will conduct extensive smell tests to make sure quality is maintained.
Getting into a taxi, and, a few hours later, when you’ve had a couple of stiff drinks and have worked up the courage to actually take a ride in one to your destination is a watershed for both the tourist and foreign worker. As mentioned, even though the taxis are the lifeblood of the city, not many of the drivers can speak English. They're being forced to do it for the Olympics, but given their attitude of picking and choosing who to pick up and where to go, I wouldn't be too optimistic about them all getting their heads down to study after a 12 hour shift ferrying drunken foreigners to and from Sanlitun.
Under normal circumstances - that is, if I didn’t live in Beijing - I would say that the taxi driver has to put up with a lot of grief. Having been booted out of innumerable taxes simply because the driver doesn't want to go where I want to go - I assume it’s something along the Chinese version of “I’m not going south of the river this time of time of night, you’ll stink up the cab with your kebabs” - I’m going to say that they don’t have that much of a hard life outside of working on national holidays.
Beijing is a crowd surfing city, built on a shifting sand of people. You meet people in Beijing, and then pretty soon, they leave. The Chinese guys usually go back to their families, taking two day train journeys back home. The foreigners soon ache for something different, somewhere where you can breathe air you can't see, a green field, a flower or two that isn't choking on car fumes. Maybe the attraction of English-speaking Hong Kong draws them south, or cooler climes of the north take them to some one-horse village in Gansu. China owes it’s economic success to the migrant worker, and it’s the migrant workers that make up the bulk of Beijing’s taxi driver community.
Weather they liked it or not (and it's more than likely not), Beijing taxi drivers were the front line of the city's personality drive for the Olympics. The hardened, dour-mouthed resident would argue that trying to give a city like Beijing a personality is akin to bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, failed to run, been shot and turned into the contents of a glue pot, but still, you have to give points for effort. Taxi driver might need lessons in hygiene, customer service and basic Beijing geography; they were the first and last people that Olympic visitors were likely to see.
One such driver, a former pig-dung shoveler, laborer and electrician (the connection between the three isn't very clear) isn't optimistic about his prospects, "My monthly income was about 3,000 yuan (£195) two years ago. Now it is 2,000 yuan (£130).” he told a Guardian reporter, “I expect it will go even lower in the future," he says. "I don't get any days off. I want to cry." So says Xia Shishan, Beijing taxi driver of four and a half years. He has to support a daughter at university, and a sick mother.
Compared to his own youth, when he only had flour, sweet potatoes and tea leaves to eat, things are now undoubtedly much better. Shishan and his family eat meat on a regular basis, compared to the times when meat was confined to special events like Spring Festival, but still there is the worry. His worries are not those politics, or social stability, banned movies or songs, or imprisoned journalists. He is more concerned about supporting his family, while surviving on one of the lowest rungs of Beijing society. Already the Olympics have affected him personally - "Developers are going to knock down my mum's home. It's part of the project for South Beijing railway station. They offered compensation, but it is only enough to buy a bathroom. We can appeal for more, but ordinary citizens don't have much power."
The Olympics fired the imagination of everyone in the capital. Xia Shishan reckons that "China is an ancient nation with 5,000 years of history. Thanks to the Olympics, we can show how great our country is. We will finish top of the medal table. There is no doubt about it. And when we win, I will be so excited my blood will boil."
Of course, not all the taxi drivers are this nice. In 2004, Li Pingping was executed for murdering prostitutes in Beijing, he killed three of them from November 2002 to April 2003 - he also managed to stab his ex-employer, his wife and their 12-year-old daughter to death. He killed the hookers because he believed they made money more easily that he did, and his wife was sent to the slammer for fifteen years for helping him.
When you do a little research on the Beijing cabbie, you tend to see why Pingping blew his stack. As well as having to cope with ever-changing rules and traffic regulations, the ever-increasing price of petrol, and the fact that the drivers have to pay their management companies anything from 2000RMB to 6000RMB while they earn a maximum of about 2000RMB - which doesn't leave a whole lot of cash to live on. Add to that a compulsory English test for the 2008 Olympics, and the fact that there are obligatory price hikes, you get a much clearer picture of what's going on. It becomes more and more unfathomable as to why I routinely get told that a destination is too far, or is in the wrong direction, or perhaps the drivers have accepted the inevitable, and have just given up on trying to offer some kind of recognizable customer service. When you consider that the Beijing taxi will be the front line of the welcoming committee for the Games, then everything becomes even more unfathomable - the city authorities should be doing things to keep them happy, rather than poking them with a pointy stick. Repeatedly. For no good reason.
Everything came to a head two years ago, when the driver arranged a mass “go slow day” in Beijing, throwing the city into mild chaos. While it fell short of an out-and-out strike, the message was pretty clear - the drivers were not happy. Foreigners and Chinese alike were forced to stand...waiting (people do not like to wait for much here in Beijing) for a driver to take them somewhere and they did take them. Very, very slowly they took them.
Ok, so no one forces them at gunpoint to become taxi drivers, but when these people have very little else in the way of employment options for them, you can hardly blame them, and they do get a bum deal. Most of them sign on for four or five year contracts, and get paid less that Ghandi’s personal assistant.
What is lacking is a clear, thought-out strategy. The Olympic Games are a great source of national pride, and if there are few smiling faces to ferry around the fresh-faced tourists, then it will largely be the fault of a government that, while it wants to be accepted, is more preoccupied in taxing heavily, and dreaming up kooky new laws that serve only to confuse and bamboozle the average Beijinger. Instead of reveling in their red tape paradise, perhaps the powers that be should focus on giving the workers reasons to be cheerful beyond the pipe dream of a harmonious society.
Because of my horrendously low level of Chinese, most interactions with taxi drivers are short and to the point. I know how to direct someone to my apartment (go straight ahead a little...you see the little road on the left? Ok straight ahead, left here and stop), and I’m particularly good at the old mobile-phone-with-handy-Chinese-directions-on-it trick, but that’s about it. I know nothing of their lives, they’re probably largely more interested in my life as most Chinese people are, and I’d like to know about them, but we’re separated by the huge, bulletproof, reinforced concrete barrier of my own ineptitude, my ignorance and disrespect of Chinese culture.
Sometimes I have a great taxi driver, like the guy a few weeks ago. He seemed, as they often do, rather happy to have a foreigner in the back. Once we’d established that my Chinese was pretty much worthless, and that my girlfriend could speak both Mandarin and English, we quickly fell into the routine of my girlfriend explaining something in Chinese, and then the taxi driver checking his pronunciation on me.
According to the Beijing Olympic website, nearly 90,000 drivers are learning English, and will be able to “chat with foreigners about the NBA star Yao Ming, or Beijing snack[s]”. If the drivers struggle, then there’s still no need worry, as taxi companies are installing computerized translators in their cars. The website doesn't elaborate what’s going to happen if you know nothing of the NBA (like your average British person, who, is, admittedly, more likely to shout directions twice at the poor man, before smashing the car up). Xinhua news releases me always make me nervous, for some reason - especially the use if the word “chat” in the sentence above.
There are two things that foreigners talk a lot about in Beijing. The first thing is mostly about public toilets, ex-pats and tourists alike swap stories about them like war veterans. The second is usually the smell inside a Beijing taxi, largely the smell of a mouth that has been washed with green tea for most of the day, lightly peppered with the smell of aged garlic. The smell problem has caught the attention of the Olympic mandarins and they assure me that only the most fragrant taxis will be available for sports fans this summer - they will conduct extensive smell tests to make sure quality is maintained.
Getting into a taxi, and, a few hours later, when you’ve had a couple of stiff drinks and have worked up the courage to actually take a ride in one to your destination is a watershed for both the tourist and foreign worker. As mentioned, even though the taxis are the lifeblood of the city, not many of the drivers can speak English. They're being forced to do it for the Olympics, but given their attitude of picking and choosing who to pick up and where to go, I wouldn't be too optimistic about them all getting their heads down to study after a 12 hour shift ferrying drunken foreigners to and from Sanlitun.
Under normal circumstances - that is, if I didn’t live in Beijing - I would say that the taxi driver has to put up with a lot of grief. Having been booted out of innumerable taxes simply because the driver doesn't want to go where I want to go - I assume it’s something along the Chinese version of “I’m not going south of the river this time of time of night, you’ll stink up the cab with your kebabs” - I’m going to say that they don’t have that much of a hard life outside of working on national holidays.
Beijing is a crowd surfing city, built on a shifting sand of people. You meet people in Beijing, and then pretty soon, they leave. The Chinese guys usually go back to their families, taking two day train journeys back home. The foreigners soon ache for something different, somewhere where you can breathe air you can't see, a green field, a flower or two that isn't choking on car fumes. Maybe the attraction of English-speaking Hong Kong draws them south, or cooler climes of the north take them to some one-horse village in Gansu. China owes it’s economic success to the migrant worker, and it’s the migrant workers that make up the bulk of Beijing’s taxi driver community.
Weather they liked it or not (and it's more than likely not), Beijing taxi drivers were the front line of the city's personality drive for the Olympics. The hardened, dour-mouthed resident would argue that trying to give a city like Beijing a personality is akin to bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, failed to run, been shot and turned into the contents of a glue pot, but still, you have to give points for effort. Taxi driver might need lessons in hygiene, customer service and basic Beijing geography; they were the first and last people that Olympic visitors were likely to see.
One such driver, a former pig-dung shoveler, laborer and electrician (the connection between the three isn't very clear) isn't optimistic about his prospects, "My monthly income was about 3,000 yuan (£195) two years ago. Now it is 2,000 yuan (£130).” he told a Guardian reporter, “I expect it will go even lower in the future," he says. "I don't get any days off. I want to cry." So says Xia Shishan, Beijing taxi driver of four and a half years. He has to support a daughter at university, and a sick mother.
Compared to his own youth, when he only had flour, sweet potatoes and tea leaves to eat, things are now undoubtedly much better. Shishan and his family eat meat on a regular basis, compared to the times when meat was confined to special events like Spring Festival, but still there is the worry. His worries are not those politics, or social stability, banned movies or songs, or imprisoned journalists. He is more concerned about supporting his family, while surviving on one of the lowest rungs of Beijing society. Already the Olympics have affected him personally - "Developers are going to knock down my mum's home. It's part of the project for South Beijing railway station. They offered compensation, but it is only enough to buy a bathroom. We can appeal for more, but ordinary citizens don't have much power."
The Olympics fired the imagination of everyone in the capital. Xia Shishan reckons that "China is an ancient nation with 5,000 years of history. Thanks to the Olympics, we can show how great our country is. We will finish top of the medal table. There is no doubt about it. And when we win, I will be so excited my blood will boil."
Of course, not all the taxi drivers are this nice. In 2004, Li Pingping was executed for murdering prostitutes in Beijing, he killed three of them from November 2002 to April 2003 - he also managed to stab his ex-employer, his wife and their 12-year-old daughter to death. He killed the hookers because he believed they made money more easily that he did, and his wife was sent to the slammer for fifteen years for helping him.
When you do a little research on the Beijing cabbie, you tend to see why Pingping blew his stack. As well as having to cope with ever-changing rules and traffic regulations, the ever-increasing price of petrol, and the fact that the drivers have to pay their management companies anything from 2000RMB to 6000RMB while they earn a maximum of about 2000RMB - which doesn't leave a whole lot of cash to live on. Add to that a compulsory English test for the 2008 Olympics, and the fact that there are obligatory price hikes, you get a much clearer picture of what's going on. It becomes more and more unfathomable as to why I routinely get told that a destination is too far, or is in the wrong direction, or perhaps the drivers have accepted the inevitable, and have just given up on trying to offer some kind of recognizable customer service. When you consider that the Beijing taxi will be the front line of the welcoming committee for the Games, then everything becomes even more unfathomable - the city authorities should be doing things to keep them happy, rather than poking them with a pointy stick. Repeatedly. For no good reason.
Everything came to a head two years ago, when the driver arranged a mass “go slow day” in Beijing, throwing the city into mild chaos. While it fell short of an out-and-out strike, the message was pretty clear - the drivers were not happy. Foreigners and Chinese alike were forced to stand...waiting (people do not like to wait for much here in Beijing) for a driver to take them somewhere and they did take them. Very, very slowly they took them.
Ok, so no one forces them at gunpoint to become taxi drivers, but when these people have very little else in the way of employment options for them, you can hardly blame them, and they do get a bum deal. Most of them sign on for four or five year contracts, and get paid less that Ghandi’s personal assistant.
What is lacking is a clear, thought-out strategy. The Olympic Games are a great source of national pride, and if there are few smiling faces to ferry around the fresh-faced tourists, then it will largely be the fault of a government that, while it wants to be accepted, is more preoccupied in taxing heavily, and dreaming up kooky new laws that serve only to confuse and bamboozle the average Beijinger. Instead of reveling in their red tape paradise, perhaps the powers that be should focus on giving the workers reasons to be cheerful beyond the pipe dream of a harmonious society.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Unflat Japan: Living in the Shadow of the Dragon
There are many things that a trip to your old stomping ground can do to you. Some people lose themselves in remiscences, others realize why they left in the first place, and others just give up and acknowledge that nothing is going to change much no matter how much they hope they will. I belong to the latter group, with a little dash of the second. Over the Japanese Obon holiday I got the chance to return to the Beijing after nearly a year hiatus.
With my ex-girlfriend badgering me on MSN to check her university paper, and adverts for the 2008 Olympics playing constantly on the subway lines, I could’ve been forgiven for thinking that the plane had inadvertently shot itself through a worm hole over the South China Sea. Given that the plane appeared to be piloted by a drunken eight-year-old, the worm hole and the ground were probably the only two things that we did manage to avoid on the Air China flight.
Due, in part, to the fact that I’m close to finishing Thomas Freidman’s excellent The World is Flat, and mostly due to the astonishing sense of complacent insulation that a lot of Japanese people seem to be hardwired with, it seems clear that something bad is going to happen to Japan and it’s people sometime soon. The problem is, as Friedman would put it, Japan is not flat.
Flattening of the world, for the uninitiated, comes about when technology enables people to communicate and do business with other people in other countries. When call centre jobs are outsourced to India, there is flatness – cheap fiber optic cabling allows someone to be routed from their home in New York to a call centre halfway across the world in Bangalore. Software engineers in China are writing applications for Dell, IBM and Google – three programmers in China can be paid twice the national average wage and still be three times cheaper than. Flattening, and therefore increased globalization (and thus increased interaction and competition with a global ecosystem) comes about through one thing: cheap tech. In Japan, there’s no such thing as cheap tech.
Yes, Japan has one of the world’s highest penetrations of broadband internet in the world. Yes, Japan’s Internet access is both cheaper and faster than anywhere else in the world, and yes, I know that Japan is one of the first countries to completely move to a 3G mobile phone network. I know these things, but, the problem comes about when you realize that innovation in Japan is not encouraged from the bottom up. In Japan, gadgets, gizmos and toys are doled out by closed companies that only conform to their own, closed, proprietary network or format. A Docomo phone works on the Docomo 3G networks with which you can only access the Docomo website, i-mode. To get onto the Docomo network, you can’t just use your cheap Softbank phone, you have to go out and get a Docomo phone with a new Docomo SIM card. Everything is branded, stamped, sealed and walled up.
You might think that this is all well and good, that this is nothing new, and why should Docomo allow free roaming Internet access on its mobile phones, anyway? No one else does. The problem isn’t the mobile phones or the business model, it’s the Japanese population, which is shrinking, and it’s shrinking fast. The over 65’s now account for nearly 45% of the entire populous, and if there’s one thing that over-65’s do not do, it’s play around on i-mode hoping trying to get a dancing panda dance in time with the music. The people who spend the most money on mobile phones are the teenagers, the ones who desperately need a mobile phone to stay in touch with the people they see every day, and have a large disposable income. This pool of rich kids is rapidly diminishing, and so are the profits of Japanese fun-providers everywhere.
There are two important factors that will contribute to Japan’s economic downfall. The first is that the Confucianist culture that promotes the second: top-down innovation. This essentially means that instead of people going out and grabbing tools – be they lathes, scythes or laptops – the companies and government tell people what they can use and then make available a series of models to choose from. Giving people the widest possible choice of how to do their business – or bottom-up innovation – is what has driven economies since the first industrial revolution. When I went to buy a mobile phone, I was told that there were only 4 models that were available with my pre-pay SIM deal. Two of the models were out of stock and the two remaining choices were a black Samsung and a white Samsung.
Compare this with an American going to Starbucks, where the customer is able to create his or her own coffee, mixing and matching from various items on the menu – regular milk or soy milk, low fat or high fat milk, sugar or sugar free, caffeinated or decaffeinated. You can argue that a mobile phone is not a cup of coffee, but the principle of giving choice to the customers is exactly the same. In China, mobile phones are cups of coffee: you can go to a China Mobile showroom and buy the handset of your choosing, then go to the shop on the corner and buy a SIM card (all Chinese phones are unlocked by default) for the network of your choosing. There’s a wealth of choice and payment plans. In Japan, people tell you “these are what we’ve got” and you have to make do with that.
The best example, however, of a flat world (or an unflat Japan) is the actual booking of the flight (for an expat) in Japan to…well, anywhere else in the world but Japan. A local travel agent, No. 1 Travel, takes out adverts in the local press almost every week (every day in the daily English language newspapers). Obviously, they plaster their lowest theoretical ticket prices all over the adverts, and usually the actual price you pay can be double or triple that. The main problem with this particular travel agent was that they add a 5000 Yen fuel surcharge to all their tickets. Thus, a ticket that costs 74,000 Yen can end up costing nearly 80,000 Yen.
So, over Obon, I wanted to fly out to Beijing on the 9th and return on the 16th of August. I was duly informed that because of the busy holiday period, there were no inbound Japanese flights available on the 16th August, and that a ticket on a two and a half hour flight would cost somewhere in the region of 85,000 Yen. I wasn’t particularly happy with this, and spend about an hour scouring the local expat web forums for any website that might be able to give me a cheaper deal. I came across the ANA website, and found that not only were there flights to and from Beijing on the dates that I wanted; there was also no fuel surcharge. In addition, I was able to pay for the ticket at my local convenience store using the same technology that allows me to top up my pre-pay phone credit.
That’s flatness – someone somewhere was offering a cheaper deal that I had to use my laptop to get. Not only did I give my hard earned to the flatter operating business, I took my hard earned away from another, unflat business. If everyone did what I did, sooner or later, the unflat business will be in trouble. And that’s just what’s happening in Japan everyday – unflat, traditionally run companies are being run out of town by flatter companies that are doing Japanese work, but might not be actually located on Japanese soil. If you don’t believe me, take a trip to Dalian and see how many Japanese businesses are outsourcing to Chinese workers.
All this boils down to one simple point: The Japanese economy is in trouble and is going to continue to be in trouble because the tools that people need to compete in a global economy are held in an iron grip by companies that are failing because they won’t give the people the tools they need to compete in a global economy. There are people hungrier than they are who are studying ten times as hard in an effort to race them to the top. In China, there’s evidence that this is happening already, with Japanese companies outsourcing huge tracts of business to Dalian – so much so that the local universities are offering degree courses in Japanese. Of course, the Chinese people in Dalian are also learning English faster and to a higher degree of competence than their Japanese counterparts, so now there’s a labor pool in Dalian of Chinese skilled workers, who speak Chinese, Japanese and English.
These students came from families who worked on farms 60 years ago, and today, they’re leaving behind their contemporaries in developed countries at light speed.
Like many English teachers who work in Japan, I’ve come to both hate the Japanese school system and pity the student drones that it produces. Typically, the average Japanese child goes through about 10 years of English study. This is half the number of years that I studied Spanish at high school, and I could probably get by in Spain on that, some 15 years later. After ten years of English study, Japanese people still have problems asking the time in English (for the record, I can ask the time in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and English). This lack of decent, effective second langauge education is disempowering every child in every developed country, but not all have a country like China on it's doorstep. The demand for international English speakers wasn't created by native English speakers, it was created by domestic and international economic forces - those who spoke English suddenly found themselves in the international market, able to make pots of money, and others wanted to do the same. For the vast majority of Japanese, they've been tragically let down by the Japanese education system when it comes to learning English. An Asian school and university system that produces adults who have to think about starting to study English when they're 22 years old when their counterparts have been studying since they were 12 years old is a school and university system that is falling way short of what is needed in the 21st century.
As the undisputed leader of the great tigers of the Asian economy, Japan is probably in the most dangerous, not the most comfortable, position because China is starting to catch them up, and they’re three times hungrier and three times more likely to study harder in order to become Japan. Pretty soon, products that have "Made in China" stamped on them will be designed in China too. As Thomas Friedman points out several times in his book, developing countries are not racing developed countries to the bottom, they’re competing on the most level playing field that’s ever been available to race us all to the top. Whether you're untouchable in terms of a skillset when the time comes, is up to you.
With my ex-girlfriend badgering me on MSN to check her university paper, and adverts for the 2008 Olympics playing constantly on the subway lines, I could’ve been forgiven for thinking that the plane had inadvertently shot itself through a worm hole over the South China Sea. Given that the plane appeared to be piloted by a drunken eight-year-old, the worm hole and the ground were probably the only two things that we did manage to avoid on the Air China flight.
Due, in part, to the fact that I’m close to finishing Thomas Freidman’s excellent The World is Flat, and mostly due to the astonishing sense of complacent insulation that a lot of Japanese people seem to be hardwired with, it seems clear that something bad is going to happen to Japan and it’s people sometime soon. The problem is, as Friedman would put it, Japan is not flat.
Flattening of the world, for the uninitiated, comes about when technology enables people to communicate and do business with other people in other countries. When call centre jobs are outsourced to India, there is flatness – cheap fiber optic cabling allows someone to be routed from their home in New York to a call centre halfway across the world in Bangalore. Software engineers in China are writing applications for Dell, IBM and Google – three programmers in China can be paid twice the national average wage and still be three times cheaper than. Flattening, and therefore increased globalization (and thus increased interaction and competition with a global ecosystem) comes about through one thing: cheap tech. In Japan, there’s no such thing as cheap tech.
Yes, Japan has one of the world’s highest penetrations of broadband internet in the world. Yes, Japan’s Internet access is both cheaper and faster than anywhere else in the world, and yes, I know that Japan is one of the first countries to completely move to a 3G mobile phone network. I know these things, but, the problem comes about when you realize that innovation in Japan is not encouraged from the bottom up. In Japan, gadgets, gizmos and toys are doled out by closed companies that only conform to their own, closed, proprietary network or format. A Docomo phone works on the Docomo 3G networks with which you can only access the Docomo website, i-mode. To get onto the Docomo network, you can’t just use your cheap Softbank phone, you have to go out and get a Docomo phone with a new Docomo SIM card. Everything is branded, stamped, sealed and walled up.
You might think that this is all well and good, that this is nothing new, and why should Docomo allow free roaming Internet access on its mobile phones, anyway? No one else does. The problem isn’t the mobile phones or the business model, it’s the Japanese population, which is shrinking, and it’s shrinking fast. The over 65’s now account for nearly 45% of the entire populous, and if there’s one thing that over-65’s do not do, it’s play around on i-mode hoping trying to get a dancing panda dance in time with the music. The people who spend the most money on mobile phones are the teenagers, the ones who desperately need a mobile phone to stay in touch with the people they see every day, and have a large disposable income. This pool of rich kids is rapidly diminishing, and so are the profits of Japanese fun-providers everywhere.
There are two important factors that will contribute to Japan’s economic downfall. The first is that the Confucianist culture that promotes the second: top-down innovation. This essentially means that instead of people going out and grabbing tools – be they lathes, scythes or laptops – the companies and government tell people what they can use and then make available a series of models to choose from. Giving people the widest possible choice of how to do their business – or bottom-up innovation – is what has driven economies since the first industrial revolution. When I went to buy a mobile phone, I was told that there were only 4 models that were available with my pre-pay SIM deal. Two of the models were out of stock and the two remaining choices were a black Samsung and a white Samsung.
Compare this with an American going to Starbucks, where the customer is able to create his or her own coffee, mixing and matching from various items on the menu – regular milk or soy milk, low fat or high fat milk, sugar or sugar free, caffeinated or decaffeinated. You can argue that a mobile phone is not a cup of coffee, but the principle of giving choice to the customers is exactly the same. In China, mobile phones are cups of coffee: you can go to a China Mobile showroom and buy the handset of your choosing, then go to the shop on the corner and buy a SIM card (all Chinese phones are unlocked by default) for the network of your choosing. There’s a wealth of choice and payment plans. In Japan, people tell you “these are what we’ve got” and you have to make do with that.
The best example, however, of a flat world (or an unflat Japan) is the actual booking of the flight (for an expat) in Japan to…well, anywhere else in the world but Japan. A local travel agent, No. 1 Travel, takes out adverts in the local press almost every week (every day in the daily English language newspapers). Obviously, they plaster their lowest theoretical ticket prices all over the adverts, and usually the actual price you pay can be double or triple that. The main problem with this particular travel agent was that they add a 5000 Yen fuel surcharge to all their tickets. Thus, a ticket that costs 74,000 Yen can end up costing nearly 80,000 Yen.
So, over Obon, I wanted to fly out to Beijing on the 9th and return on the 16th of August. I was duly informed that because of the busy holiday period, there were no inbound Japanese flights available on the 16th August, and that a ticket on a two and a half hour flight would cost somewhere in the region of 85,000 Yen. I wasn’t particularly happy with this, and spend about an hour scouring the local expat web forums for any website that might be able to give me a cheaper deal. I came across the ANA website, and found that not only were there flights to and from Beijing on the dates that I wanted; there was also no fuel surcharge. In addition, I was able to pay for the ticket at my local convenience store using the same technology that allows me to top up my pre-pay phone credit.
That’s flatness – someone somewhere was offering a cheaper deal that I had to use my laptop to get. Not only did I give my hard earned to the flatter operating business, I took my hard earned away from another, unflat business. If everyone did what I did, sooner or later, the unflat business will be in trouble. And that’s just what’s happening in Japan everyday – unflat, traditionally run companies are being run out of town by flatter companies that are doing Japanese work, but might not be actually located on Japanese soil. If you don’t believe me, take a trip to Dalian and see how many Japanese businesses are outsourcing to Chinese workers.
All this boils down to one simple point: The Japanese economy is in trouble and is going to continue to be in trouble because the tools that people need to compete in a global economy are held in an iron grip by companies that are failing because they won’t give the people the tools they need to compete in a global economy. There are people hungrier than they are who are studying ten times as hard in an effort to race them to the top. In China, there’s evidence that this is happening already, with Japanese companies outsourcing huge tracts of business to Dalian – so much so that the local universities are offering degree courses in Japanese. Of course, the Chinese people in Dalian are also learning English faster and to a higher degree of competence than their Japanese counterparts, so now there’s a labor pool in Dalian of Chinese skilled workers, who speak Chinese, Japanese and English.
These students came from families who worked on farms 60 years ago, and today, they’re leaving behind their contemporaries in developed countries at light speed.
Like many English teachers who work in Japan, I’ve come to both hate the Japanese school system and pity the student drones that it produces. Typically, the average Japanese child goes through about 10 years of English study. This is half the number of years that I studied Spanish at high school, and I could probably get by in Spain on that, some 15 years later. After ten years of English study, Japanese people still have problems asking the time in English (for the record, I can ask the time in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and English). This lack of decent, effective second langauge education is disempowering every child in every developed country, but not all have a country like China on it's doorstep. The demand for international English speakers wasn't created by native English speakers, it was created by domestic and international economic forces - those who spoke English suddenly found themselves in the international market, able to make pots of money, and others wanted to do the same. For the vast majority of Japanese, they've been tragically let down by the Japanese education system when it comes to learning English. An Asian school and university system that produces adults who have to think about starting to study English when they're 22 years old when their counterparts have been studying since they were 12 years old is a school and university system that is falling way short of what is needed in the 21st century.
As the undisputed leader of the great tigers of the Asian economy, Japan is probably in the most dangerous, not the most comfortable, position because China is starting to catch them up, and they’re three times hungrier and three times more likely to study harder in order to become Japan. Pretty soon, products that have "Made in China" stamped on them will be designed in China too. As Thomas Friedman points out several times in his book, developing countries are not racing developed countries to the bottom, they’re competing on the most level playing field that’s ever been available to race us all to the top. Whether you're untouchable in terms of a skillset when the time comes, is up to you.
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