More Real Than Real

You've probably seen reports in the media lately about fake products in China, and I'm not talking about Gucci. Just in the past few weeks, reports about fake toothpaste, tires, and rotten seafood have surfaced. China accused the international media of hyping minor regulatory slips, while at the same time executing the former head of the Chinese FDA for taking bribes. I can tell you that it's definitely not hype - China is full of fakes.

Fake water. Fake soy sauce. Fake liquor. And it's not just unlucky drunken expats waking up with formaldehyde hangovers. In 2004 hundreds of babies in Anhui and Shandong Provinces died after being fed fake baby formula that did not contain any protein, but that caused a bloating symptom that concealed the infants' malnutrition from doctors. This is what it's like on the cutting edge of capitalism, where there's nothing to stop people from making fake baby formula. Did those producers want to murder babies? No, they just wanted to make money, and without regulation the only way to beat your competitor and get some money to feed your kids is to starve someone else's. Quality control costs money, just like fair labor practices, protecting the environment, and so on. And there are more workers than jobs for every position you can think of in China, so everyone's going entrepreneur. Buyer beware.

There's a Japanese anime movie called "Grave of the Fireflies." One of the main characters is a little girl, three or four years old. She's a cartoon, but she's also the most real child I have ever seen on screen. She is the pure expression of the idea and essence of a little girl, without any of the intermediate mess - a young actress struggling to portray a girl, or having to watch an actual human person experience the story of this little girl, which ends in death. She is still an interpretation of a little girl, rather than an actual one, and this makes her more real than real. The fundamental energy is communicated on the screen, rather than the whole construct, and you see right to the center.

In that case, artistic license is more than acceptable, it's unique, important, and valuable. So why is a fake so wonderful here, and so horrifying in my medicine cabinet? It's not just because one can make me sick, because watching "Grave of the Fireflies" put me in bed with the covers pulled all the way up for a good 24 hours. It's not false advertising, because "Fireflies" was, of all things, screened as a double feature in theaters with the happiness-confection "My Neighbor Totoro." Moviegoers who saw "Totoro" first walked out of the second feature, unprepared and unable to handle the grim "Fireflies."

And that's the key. You walk out of the movie, but you don't ask for your money back because you thought the movie would be more fun. There's an implied guarantee in soy sauce, bottled water, toothpaste, and baby formula that doesn't exist for movies. It's also why no one except movie industry executives cares about bootleg Chinese DVDs, a kind of fake that everyone loves. The very cutting edge of the faking trend is that the myth of China as a bottomless well of cheap goods and dangerous fakes is getting complicated. While once a fake Rolex was valuable just as a substitute for the real thing, China is learning the real meaning of value. You'd still better check the seal on your water bottle, but it's getting so that you can also find the great fakes, amazing stuff that will delight you, shock you, and change you. Walk into a boutique in Beijing, and it might not be all Chloe and Levis knockoffs. You might meet a Chinese entrepreneur who designs and sews her own clothes, and you can buy her originals from her, and for a fraction of the price of such clothes in the US. Walk into an art gallery in Beijing, and it's not all copies of the Mona Lisa or propaganda posters with your face painted in. I saw a copy of the Statue of Liberty, but she was a little girl holding an ice cream cone. It struck me silent, and for two days I couldn't bring myself to say anything to anyone in China because I was too embarrassed.

Eventually, China will find a way to enforce the line between what is false and what is more real than real. When that happens, more Chinese producers than ever will start to climb the value chain towards the place where there are fewer guarantees about content and meaning: design, marketing, and so on. Don't think there's anyone in China who just loves cranking out the rotten shellfish. They are just waiting for the leadership to reform the country enough so that everyone can head in a new direction, and I'm hoping that direction will be the most real - an original new way of governing, urbanizing, entertaining, consuming, and living that will make the rest of this century more fun and more of a struggle for the rest of us.

A Day in the Life of a Chinese Biker

8:55 AM - Walk to the first floor of my building. The first floor consists of a lobby and parking for bicycles, hundreds of them. Though Beijing is rapidly converting from bikes to cars, 30% of trips in this city are still by bike and it is still the most common mode for travel.

8:56 AM - Find my bike and unlock it. The locks people use here are really flimsy. Everyone operates by statistical principle rather than the laws of physics. In other words, someone's bike is going to get stolen, but it probably won't be mine.

8:57 AM - Roll my bike down the ramp to the street and start riding. I am not wearing a helmet. I have yet to see a single person in China wearing a helmet.

9:06 AM - Ride to Starbucks, weaving in and out of pedestrians, fruit carts, other bikers, pedicabs, mopeds, e-bikes, some waiguoren on rollerblades, and a taxi that is in the bike lane. Plenty of room, because the bike lane is wide enough for 2 cars. Some places in downtown Beijing used to have bike lanes that were seven car-lengths wide!

9:08 AM - See a red light ahead. Ride straight through it without pausing, looking left to confirm that all the oncoming traffic is turning. Three other bikers do the same.

9:12 AM - Park my bike at Starbucks. The bike parking facility is fenced in, covered, and guarded at all times. The guard's main job is to keep the bikes tidy and stacked so that there is a lot of room for more bikes. It's like valet parking, for bikes, and it's free.

11:52 AM - Lunchtime! Get bike from guard, and ride down the street on the wrong side, into oncoming traffic. Much swerving required, still easier than trying to cross the huge road full of death-taxis. All bike lanes carry two-way traffic like this, even though there is no agreement about which side each direction should be riding on.

12:03 PM - Lock my bike in front of the canteen in a row with other bikes. Sometimes when someone is getting their bike, they knock over the bike next to them and they start going down like dominoes. I once saw six bikes fall down at once.

12:40 PM - Done eating. It's starting to rain. It's OK, the bike has fenders. I open my umbrella and ride to my lab by steering with one hand and holding the umbrella above me with the other. Everyone else is doing this too, except the people who have special bike-ponchos.

12:52 PM - Park at the lab. One of my lab mates pulls up, carrying another lab mate as a passenger on the back of his bicycle rack. She hops off as he pulls to a halt, effortlessly.

5:55 PM - Want to go home. On the way I pass a woman who is riding a contraption that is half-bike, half kitchen for cooking street food. There is a man sleeping in the back on the 'counter'!

6:15 PM - Lock back up under my building. If by lock up I mean just leave my bike down there. It probably won't get stolen.

798

When China collectivized in the '50's, part of that meant reorganizing society in the most literal way. Production units were established. These might be schools, factories, or government departments. Everyone in the unit lived together in standardized housing, and the housing was located in an enclosed compound with the work spaces. These danweis often also included little stores, medical clinics, canteens, etc, so that people rarely left. Today, the danwei system has been pretty much chucked thanks to an elaborate series of reforms, but the infrastructure lingers.

Factory 798 in Beijing originally made electronics. Some smaller enterprises that work on that kind of stuff are still located in the old danwei, as is a bunch of privatized housing and a few stores. The majority of the factory space is abandoned, however. Artists have colonized the area and set up dozens of studios and galleries, so I went there today to check out the new 798, also called Dashanzi. Supposedly this is the very center of Chinese contemporary art.

The only graffiti you see in China is cell phone numbers sprayed on convenient buildings and walls, sometimes accompanied by a couple of characters. It's people looking for work, apartment for rent, and so on. I'm always hearing about how obsessed Chinese people are with hip hop, so I've been wondering where the hell the actual graf is at. Well, at 798 lots of those old factory walls are now covered in some amazing stuff! Check it out.







Here are some samples of other art that I saw, that I was impressed by. Like a jerk, I forgot to write down the artist's name. Actually, technically that makes me a thief. Argh.

Maybe we need to redefine rational.

In China, one gets the sense that urban planning has arrived home at last, to claim its throne. There are major museums dedicated to urban planning in prestigious locations in Shanghai and Beijing. You go inside and there are huge exhibits dedicated to comprehensive planning, historic preservation, transportation, insane levels of detail about plan implementation, 3-D mini-models and virtual flythroughs. And you see it outside the museums, too. Everywhere you go, the visions of planners are being implemented. Over 30 new subway systems are opening in China in the next five years. New towns cut from whole cloth are popping up on the landscape. With environmental planning now an issue, huge water and air cleanup projects are being accomplished. The Big Dig in Boston took God knows how many years and was billions over budget. China don't play like that.

As the economic, housing, and land reforms barrel forward, though, one gets the sense that more than just per capita GDP is changing. Though we have this image of the state being in total control, there are signs that the newly-rich, family-connected, bribe-dispensing factory owners and developers created by these reforms are running the show now. Or maybe it's that the show has new producers. Where once a blunt Marxist rationality ruled the day, it's no longer clear what the state is thinking. For example, let's look at what's happening in Beijing with all the growth. Lots of in-migration, and with the land reforms a lot of housing being built by private developers. The land is still owned by the state, and leased to the developers, so the government still has control. But now they have a financial incentive to redefine rationality from the socialist definition, serving the people, to the neoclassical economics definition, maximizing utility (and what is more useful than cash?). You can see it happening right before your eyes when you ride the Beijing subway:


Lines 1, 2, and 13 have been built so far. Don't ask where lines 3 - 12 are. And just look at line 13 there (yellow), looping around like some kind of drunken snake. The land use development is so out of control that the transportation planning process, which is controlled by engineers, not politicians or shamans, has gone cuckoo.

All this makes the dire predictions about China taking over the world while the US decays into irrelevance and mediocrity a little less scary, though it's still scary that China is the #1 buyer of US debt (Treasury bills). They aren't perfect robots over here, they have problems just like you and me. Now the response to that might be to think that if China's problems get out of control, it will cause an apocalypse. I want to reassure everyone that I have met many determined, capable people here who are dedicated to sustainability and understand very well that there are both good and bad lessons to be learned from the US. They are taking notes and working hard. Remember at all times that we are talking about the country that can accomplish this:

My Sino-Victorian Day

The peak of the Industrial Revolution in Britain was in the Victorian era. During this time, Britain urbanized, shifted from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy, expanded the middle class, and evolved a very distinct set of attitudes and social behavior. It's this culture that comes to mind when I hear the word 'Victorian,' though I suppose one also thinks of colonialism and furniture. My point is that China is undergoing a very similar transition right now, and the figures about urban migration and the economy are there to prove it. What's really fascinating is that you can also see the new era dawning in the bourgeois materialism and faith in social progress of the new Chinese middle class.

On Sunday I went to the Fragrant Hills, a regional park on the western outskirts of Beijing. The park has historic roots as an imperial playground and temporary HQ for Mao, but today people use the park in very modern ways.

My day hiking and wandering in the park started out very Victorian. Families were on promenade. How do I know that they weren't just enjoying fresh air and exercise? I saw a little girl in a pink lace dress and matching hat go strolling by (not exactly playwear). I saw a woman in an old-fashioned Anglo-style summer frock wearing high-heel wedge shoes and carrying a parasol climbing a 3000 ft. mountain. Picnics abounded. I experienced a mechanical marvel (rode a cable car up the mountain). Walking down, I encountered an older gentleman sketching portraits. The price was right, so I dawdled and hung out with the various children and other onlookers until it was my turn to have my picture drawn. The only way it could have been more Victorian would be if it had been a sillouette.

The artist had finished one of my eyes and my nose when I looked over and saw a man in a grey uniform holding my backpack. I hopped up and grabbed it back from him, and a fast exchange ensued between the uniformed man, his partner, and the artist. I realized that the artist was getting busted for running his little business in the park, and these guys were here to clear him out. They escorted him off, and I followed. We went down the hills a-ways, and they disappeared into an office disguised as a pagoda. I hoped they were just charging him a fine and throwing him out of the park, and that the fine wasn't too bad. I was shocked five minutes later to see a horde of about 30 men and women emerge from the pagoda - bottle collectors, water vendors, and the artist. They were all herded off down the hill and that was the last I saw of them.

So that's China's Victorian era for you. It's just like England, except they already have women's rights and the state is a lot more arbitrary in its policies. While it's OK for the vendor at the terra cotta warriors to literally punch me in the arm with his piece-of-junk mini-warrior, it's not OK for the bohemian-gentleman artist to draw my picture. I guess we were having too much fun and not generating enough activity in the Chinese economy.

On a final note, in my explorations of the park I found a huge carved stone turtle with a big tablet on its back (a common motif in China, something to do with longevity). The tablet had a bunch of ancient Chinese characters written on it, but someone had individually scratched out each one. Many of the features of the park had signs explaining that they had been burned by the Anglo-French forces in the 1860's and by the 8-Joint-Allied forces in 1900. However, there was no explanation here for the thorough defacing. It's not hard to guess who did this, and that's the creepy undertone of China that prevents one from fully enjoying the Victorian enthusiasm of today.

Fuwa

So, the Olympics are coming to Beijing. Those li'l cuties up there are the mascots for the Games. The logic for having five is that there is one for each ring. Also, the mascot is usually a native animal of the country, and since China is so big if you just pick one animal there are regions that will feel left out. And of course, the joke around China is that by having five that means that everyone has to buy five times as much Olympic-themed souvenirs and merchandise. Personally, I am completely infatuated with these guys, and I love the little background stories that the Chinese have whipped up for them.

Chinese culture is so different from the US. Sometimes it's hard to imagine how are two countries can become close and work together, because it seems impossible for us to agree with each other. What I hope is possible is that Americans and Chinese can learn to understand each other well enough to communicate and form working relationships where each side knows what to expect from the other side. We don't have to want to be like each other, if we can comprehend, accept, and respect each other. Maybe the Olympics really can embody the spirit of this kind of cooperation.

Why so good?

I don't want to be all down on China. I love this country, and this trip has been great. My last post was a little negative, in part because I'm ronery now that all the students are gone and I'm in Beijing alone, but at the same time I have no privacy thanks to the curious sleep habits of my Singaporean roommate. It's a tough combo. So let me take a moment to share a couple of the wonderful things about daily life in China.

For breakfast this morning I ate dan bing, my favorite Chinese street food. It's a crepe/pancake. You break an egg up all over one side, and sprinkle with scallions. Then, you flip it over, and paint the other side with tasty bean sauce and hot sauce, sprinkle a little fresh ginger, maybe a crushed peanut or two. Add a weird fried crispy thin dough thing and then fold it all up and feast. I first ate this in Xi'an, and it rocked my world. At left, the woman who changed my life.

For lunch I ate a fresh Asian pear. They cost $2 each in the U.S. Here, I paid the equivalent of about 20 cents. Thus, it's not just that Chinese food is really tasty, really fresh, and skillfully made. You can also taste the affordability! I've been chowing down since I crossed the border into Shenzhen. While we were there, we made friends with a bunch of the university students. Whenever they ate something they liked, they would always exclaim, "Why so good?!?" The Chinese in general eat with a great deal of zest, and it's fun to join in.