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| 伏虎 Fú hǔ “Crouching Tiger”. Jing, Beijing |
A vist to Beijing and Datong, In the midst of winter. By a group of old China hands, and China-born China expatriates.
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| Datong, Shanxi province. Minus 15C... |
Quick takes: China is clean, modern, friendly, efficient, cheap. Really! Oh.. and all the Apps work. We'd thought that a VPN would be needed. No.
Clean: everything was super clean. Not even cigarette buts. Not even spittle -- when I first came to China in the 1970s there were spittoons everywhere. And the spitters always missed. They coughed and hacked on the streets, frozen sputum. No more. The streets, everywhere, in city and village, are clean, spotless.
No rubbish. No graffiti.
Safe: China is super safe. Women can walk the streets any time of the day or night. Where is that possible in the west? It's the same here in Hong Kong. But not in Sydney, let alone in London or LA.
Friendly: amazingly so. Even the cops. When stopped for minor infringements, for riding a bike over the line, the cops saw Hong Kong ID and said "oh.. you ride on the other side of the road. No worries. On your way and be more careful!".
Queueing: Used to be a gaggle of people rush at the bus stop. Now they queue, nicely, like here in Hong Kong.
Cheap: Food a few dollars a dish. Hotel rooms, clean, neat, sharp, at $50 a night.
Quick: I first took the train from Beijing to Datong in 1976. It took six hours. The train today is a bullet train, 325kph. Gets there in 2 hours. It's modern, clean, quick, efficient. Tickets are easy to get and easy to pay for. Not just contactless cards, like our Octopus on Hong Kong. There's that, but you can also use any credit card to swipe the turnstile, ever from overseas. That's in advance of any other train ticketing system I know.
The Datong limo driver, Xiao Bo, didn't finish high school. He worked as a coal miner. Then back to Datong when the mine closed, as China moved to renewables. He managed to get enough money together to buy a car and offer limousine services. To take the visitors around. And to make enough money for that to buy two apartments. And yet to complain, still, about how tough it is in China, how hard one has to work. Which leads to the Tang Ping, and all that. This is tough times, but they're not bad tough times, compared to the tough times of socialist days.
How can China be doing so well, when cities in the US, in the west, are failing?
We know the cities in the US. We've lived in some. In LA, in San Francisco, in Oakland, growing areas of homeless, shooting heroin and shitting on the streets. Rubbish. Empty shopping areas, whole districts ghost towns, because of crime.
So how is it that China can be doing so well? Vs the West doing to badly.
Something that the west doesn't like to talk about.
We discuss it, we old China hands and Chinese. Who all read and speak and eat Chinese.
Why? How?
Is it down to Socialism? No. I was in Socialist China in the 1970s. It was grim. Dirty. Polluted. So is it Authoritarianism? Maybe. But then we're risking mockery. "Oh, yeah, well even Mussolini got the trains on time". Or "Hitler. Bad dude, but he did build the Autobahns". There may be something there, of authorotarianism, but we don't want to over-egg that, or we'll simply refuse to learn. And we don't need to go so far.
More likely, we think, is that it's down to a policy that we tried in New York City, but gave up. The "Broken Windows Policy". Fix things as soon as they go wrong. Windows break, fix them. If you allow the window to remain broken, next there are more broken, then more crime then more ... you get the picture. If people jump the subway turnstiles, stop them, fine them, jail them. Or you get what goes on in NYC today: rampant fare evasion.
This Broken Window Policy was what turned around New York City under the mayorship of Rudy Giuliani, who supported the concept of his then chief of police. But which was abandoned by later Democrat mayors. Result; crime, dirt and disease.
In Singapore, their version of the Broken Window Policy was they banned chewing gum. This was mocked in the west. But the idea was to stop gum being dropped on the streets. Then came stopping littering. Then came being hard on crime. And now we have the Singapore of today. Clean, neat, tidy, safe.
China is the same. We think. Versions of the Broken Windows Principle. Of the Chewing Gum principle.
The lesson is that things can be turned around. It needs some tough love. And it needs decisions. To do so. Not to accept anything goes, because you feel super empathetic, but get to Suicidal Empathy.
There may be more to it. I'd like to hear thoughts.
Photos of modern China below:
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| Bell Tower Beijing |
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| A modern, clean, bright hotel room, in Datong, Shanxi province |
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| Delivery is big business |
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| Apple store in central Beijing |
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| Beijing rooftop beers |
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| Beijing HotPot |
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| Datong rock carvings. Shanxi province |
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| Datong cliff houses |
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| A fun local hobby: dressing up in Tang gear |
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| Village snail restaurant |
