Winter in Northern China
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November 25, 2007
It’s All Too Small
It may seem an obvious thing to say that Chinese people are generally shorter and all around smaller than Westerners. According to the 2000 National Census, average height for a Chinese man is 169 centimeters. Average height in Western nations is usually around 8 to 10 centimeters taller. Though Chinese people are gaining in stature as their country gains in prosperity and more people have better access to proper nutrition and healthcare, it’s still the case that Chinese people are generally smaller than Westerners.
But what may not be obvious is that these differences in size can make it rather difficult for Westerners to shop in China. Outside of a few places that cater to Western size – such as the Silk Market in Beijing and similar venues – it’s difficult to find clothes that fit the average Westerner. Those hoping to find unique pieces of Asian style at Chinese malls will find over and over again that a size XL is much too small, and that the largest shoe size available is three sizes too small. Those who are a bit larger than Western average are simply out of luck anywhere and everywhere in China.
Even Chinese people who need large clothes or shoes must simply do without. Current NBA hopeful Sun Ming stands at an impressive 7 feet 9 inches (236 cm), but his size has come at the price of his feet. He was unable to find shoes large enough to accommodate his feet while he was growing up and today his toes are deformed as a result.
Simply put, those of above average height, foot or waist size, whether Chinese or foreign, have few options other than customization in China. Fortunately, finding a good tailor in China is easily done, and buying clothes there is usually not much more expensive than the latest fashions at the mall, though of course exact prices will depend on both fabric quality and your particular bargaining skills.
Record number of Chinese Muslims on Haj
With 20 million Muslims around China, it is only in recent years that they have been able to go on the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam's holiest city, in substantial numbers. Thanks to rising affluence, growing numbers of Chinese Muslims are now able to fulfill their spiritual obligations of performing the Haj at least once in their lifetime, and this year, a record 10,700 of them are expected to do so. Five departure ports for non-stop charter flights to Saudi Arabia have been offered — Yinchuan, Beijing, Urumqi, Lanzhou and Kunming. The first batch of pilgrims have just left on flights operated by China Eastern from Yinchuan to Medina, with more to follow.
November 09, 2007
Electricity, phone and gas
When it is time to pay the electricity, phone and gas most people are used to getting a bill in their mailbox or just having money drawn from their accounts. If you are one of those people and are moving to China you’ve better read this. You will not receive a bill and they will not automatically withdraw money from your account in the end of the month. You will have to go to the bank and charge a special card. There are different cards for electricity and gas so bring the right one. At the bank you can choose which amount you want to charge the card with. Then you go back to your building and have someone call the responsible person for charging your meter. Be sure to charge the right apartment otherwise you will have happy neighbors. After this, the electricity starts ticking down and you’ll have to keep an eye on how much you have left. When the electricity is used up it is simply turned off. The same procedure extends to the gas but there can be a difference in which bank you can charge the different cards. This you’ll have to research depending on where you live.
The phone you can either pay at the bank or at the phone company’s office. If you also wish to have internet this will be extra. Most often you pay a monthly fee which will give you internet for one month and then it will shut down. Do not do the mistake and think this means you won’t have to pay since you don’t have access to the service anymore. As long as you don’t tell the company that you don’t desire their service anymore they will keep on charging your account even though they have turned off your access. Sounds strange? Well you can always try to argue but it will not get you further than to the bank. Whether your landlord gives you a big bill or the phone company come knocking on your door you will have to pay. So be careful with just assuming things when it comes to paying bills in China.
For some it might seem a bit complicated with this system but from an environmental perspective it might be the best solution. Lets assume that there are about 250 000 000 households in China and they receive 3 bills (phone, electricity and gas) every month, that would ad up to 750 000 000 bills per month. Since it goes 14 000 regular writing papers on one tree that would be 53 571 trees per month. On a whole year you would have to chop down 642 852 trees and then we haven’t even thought about the envelops. So in other words, if we want to keep the forests we should gladly go to the bank and pay our bills.
What it takes to whiten your collar in China
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently published a report about how much income you need in order to be classified as white-collar in various Chinese cities. At the top of the list was Hong Kong, where you needed to make at least 18,500 RMB. As for some of the other cities: The benchmarks in some major cities at the upper end are: 8,900 yuan ($1,194) in Macao, 5,350 yuan ($717) in Shanghai, 5,280 yuan ($708) in Shenzhen of Guangdong Province, 4,980 yuan ($668) in Hangzhou of Zhejiang Province and 4,750 yuan ($637) in Guangzhou of Guangdong Province.The Chinese press reports are more detailed: 3780 in Nanjing, 3000 in Dalian, 1900 in Chengdu, 1000 in Xining, and last but not least, 900 in Lhasa. If you like mountains and don't mind political repression, you could be livin' large in Lhasa!
From the blogosphere, we found a report that suggests that for a person without a city hukou, it takes an extra 1800 RMB to achieve the same standard of living. Thus, if 5000 RMB is enough to be white-collar in Beijing for a person with a Beijing residence permit, someone lacking that same permit is going to have to make 6800 to maintain the same standard of living. We don't know about the methodology involved, but it obviously makes sense that you would need more money if you didn't have the resident permit because of the extra costs and lack of benefits that make it easier for those that possess the permits to achieve a certain standard of living. There are unconfirmed reports that Yunnan province will eliminate the hukou system, which we hope will inspire the rest of China to slowly follow suit: because things would just be so much more harmonious that way.
According to one report, a lot of people in the blogosphere have ridiculed the report's figures, saying that even if they make the minimum amount of income the report says you need to be considered white-collar that they certainly don't feel as if they are white-collar, meaning that on this income, they can make ends meet and break even or perhaps save some money—but are hardly living what they considered a proper "white-collar" lifestyle. But we suppose that depends on how you correlate income with standard of living, and then where you decide to define the lower limit of "white-collar".
November 04, 2007
China Gets Beijing and Shanghai Ready for the 2008 Olympics and 2010 Expo
CHINA'S ECONOMY IS booming like never before and its social fabric is being ripped apart and knit together in novel ways. State-of-the-art sports stadiums, a renovated airport terminal, and a new financial district have been built or are under construction in pre-Olympic Beijing, where there's even been talk of seeding rain clouds to limit pollution.
And, not to be outdone by its rival to the north, Shanghai is preparing to host the 2010 World Expo, an event that will have decidedly twenty-first-century elements. Upon arrival, visitors will be rocketed from airport to WiFi-wired exhibition halls via magnetic-levitation trains that run through a city that now has more skyscrapers than Manhattan.
Yet amidst the cacophony of the new the historically minded can often hear curious--and sometimes disturbing--echoes of the past. Even the most seemingly futuristic phenomena turn out to have surprisingly old-fashioned aspects. This is certainly true of both the Beijing Games and the Shanghai Expo. Each will open a new chapter in Chinese history: one will be China's first Olympics, the other its first World's Fair. But some preparations underway for both are throwbacks to patterns dating to the 1900s—or even the 1800s.
And mass campaigns of this sort began well before the Communist Party took power. Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party, an earlier authoritarian regime, also launched them. Injunctions against spitting were part of Chiang's "New Life Movement" of the 1930s. They, like the current etiquette drive, took place at a time when efforts were underway to incorporate Confucian ideals into a drive to modernize the country.
Recent discussions of the Shanghai Expo have been equally retrograde. At least to anyone who has read The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, Erik Larson's recent bestseller about Chicago's 1893 World's Fair. Larson captures beautifully the mood in early 1890s Chicago as local boosters, enthused about the potential to modernize their city, struggled to find a way to outdo the Eiffel Tower. In the end, they chose to build the world's first Ferris wheel.
Shanghai boosters have also been talking about how the Expo can modernize their city. There have been lively discussions—not yet concluded—about how to create a symbol for the Expo as memorable as the Eiffel Tower and though this plan has been eventually abandoned, there was even talk of erecting the world's tallest Ferris wheel in Shanghai.
There's also something reminiscent of an earlier era in how the Beijing games and Shanghai Expo are becoming rolled together to transform the summer-long sprint of the Olympics into a drawn out two-city relay. China's rulers hope that this will keep international attention (though ideally not the sort of highly critical attention as of late) focused on their country for several years. To encourage people to think of the two events as linked, the Shanghai Expo is sometimes referred to as the "Economic Olympics." Joint promotional activities for the two spectacles are also underway on the official Beijing 2008 Web site.
For the historically minded, this pairing of an Olympics and a display of global goods and new technologies brings to mind Paris in 1900 and St. Louis in 1904, when the Olympics (not yet a big deal) were folded into a World's Fair (then still the great genre of international gathering).
What this brief look at the lead-up to Beijing 2008 and Shanghai 2010 suggests is that while China of the 1990s defied categorization because it contained both Communist and capitalist elements, the situation is now different. The aspect of China that points most strongly toward the need to think beyond standard categories is the juxtaposition of elements associated with radically different eras.
This dimension of China's situation confounds outside observers and many Chinese alike. After all, there just isn't any standard reference work about how countries develop to explain a place that is preparing for a moon shot yet is still plagued by forms of labor exploitation—like those detailed in recent reports about kidnapped youths forced to man brick kilns under atrocious conditions—that can seem uncomfortably reminiscent of those described by Industrial Revolution-era critics of nineteenth-century, no-holds-barred British capitalism. Such as William Blake (who gave us the phrase "dark Satanic mills") or Charles Dickens. Or, of course, Karl Marx, whose magnum opus on social inequities and the mistreatment of workers, Das Kapital, briefly but perhaps appropriately rose high up Beijing bestseller lists in 2006.
