China - All Mouth and No Trousers?

There's nothing like a collective panic to get things rolling. And China is the world's authority on collective thinking. It doesn't matter what you want to do, buy a train ticket, get on a bus or just walk down the street. Before long the panic engulfs everything.

Underground, an emergency bell that sounds like the last train ever is leaving the station (but it's not). The crowd stampedes and begins a fierce round of 'musical chairs' as people fight over the seats. Amid all this, a toddler wearing crotchless trousers (they all do) does a poo on the platform. Nice.

We are told that China has super powers, so we were excited about having a look. Their powers of censorship are very scary - have you read 1984? Well, I tried to publish this 6 times while in China, but each time a mysterious administrator froze or deleted it and it only finally worked once I'd got to Australia. They also have special talents for annoying their neighbours - but I'm too scared to type about that in case the secret police come and get me!

Lots of my clothes have 'made in China' in the label, so I expected an abundance of bargains and I was looking forward to replenishing my faded collection. I desperately needed a good pair of trousers for a smart meeting, but no luck. The brands I searched for might be 'made in China' but after the mug tax and import duties, it ends up much cheaper to buy them elsewhere. Instead, mall after mall peddles 'Dapper', 'Bellifico' and 'Trendy', all suffixed with 'Paris', 'London' or 'Milan'. China's own designs, surely? Either way, they cost a bomb and I wonder where the profits go - they are not passed on to the 'cheap workforce' that China promotes to the global textiles industry, that's for sure.

Great parts of the great wall are totally reconstituted. The government faked a bumper GDP when there was famine. The 'Balenciaga' bag I bought fell apart after a couple of days, and then fell apart again the following week. China is expert at taking money and giving nothing in return. For example, we met a guy who'd invested a million pounds in business only for it to be siphoned away on mysterious taxes and bribes. One hotel we stayed in actually charged us for using a bathroom towel, and in most places loo roll is kept under lock and key for only the best negotiators to use.

It was our good fortune to bump into 'Judy' when our train got delayed and two thousand people started rushing around and shouting in Mandarin. She snatched our tickets, said 'follow me' and ran off across the street. She got us onto a sooner train and sat with us all the way back to Shanghai. For a living, she made wedding gowns and sold them on ebay. She said, "China has the best quality". To prove it, she produced a huge meringue that was stuffed in her backpack. Judy shook it out all over the girl-next-door, and while it was trailing all over the floor (which a man had spat on a few moments earlier) proceeded to show us the workmanship. The label said 'Le Vinchy', it felt like polyester and it was now all covered in dirt. "Why did you call it Le Vinchy?" we asked, and her answer confirmed our suspicion about those brands in the malls... "If you make it sound Italian then people will think it's really good."

Somehow, Judy had got the impression that Scott wanted to be her business partner selling the gowns in Australia and the UK, and she started giving him the big sales pitch. We were grateful for her help with the tickets, and had enjoyed her chaotic company on the train, but we were relieved to pull into the station before she produced a contract. I started wondering how China, one of the world's earliest civilisations with some of earth's most creative innovations to it's name, like printing, porcelain, paper, gunpowder and apparently 'America', turned into a borg of unanimous chaos that prefers copying to creating.

Maybe it started in 1423 when Emperor Zhu Di decided, having explored the globe, that the world was best locked out and junked their Armada. Or perhaps it's more fundamental. Before Christ, Lao Tse wrote the Tao Te Ching which taught laymen to avoid claiming credit for their acheivements while at the same time saying that the sages (the guys in charge) were responsible for everything, even things that appeared to happen of their own accord. Hmm, a dubious way to encourage creativity and initiative. Or maybe it is a more recent phenomenon. Mao was extemely busy forgetting the past in order to take a great leap into the future. But I can't help thinking that if he'd paid attention to some of the excellent advice given by Sun Tzu in the Art of War, like for example don't bother to fight a battle you can't afford, then his state owned enterprises might not have apparently used up everyone's life savings in order to stay afloat.



As Scott says, it's an overpriced, over-rated, over-sized 'Elephant and Castle'. Not much fun for people like us to hang out in, what with bird flu scares and everything being rather expensive for what you get. We did, however, find it educational. All the things that we've learned about in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam seem to have originated from China. According to Haing S. Ngor, one of the rare people to survive the Khmer Rouge regime (see below), they generously provided all the training, funding and weapons.


We tried hard to find things to love about China and we met some kind and helpful people. The food is fantastic (if you avoid the chicken-feet curry and whole pan-fried turtle). The ancient stuff, like the Forbidden City, The Great Wall and antique crafts really rule (see 'Niki's Photo's), but modern China, specifically what's happened in the last 50 years, left a strange aftertaste.