My wife and I have just returned from a tour of Guizhou. As usual, I am eager to share my experiences before memory fades, hence this post written immediately upon our return.
I have long admired Ren
Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, who was born in Guizhou. The province itself
had a reputation as a laggard for centuries; it only gained provincial status
about 600 years ago. With 80 percent of its land covered by mountains, Guizhou
struggled with weak infrastructure and slow development until fairly recently.
Historically, it was even considered a place for emperors to banish disgraced or
out-of-favour officials.
But times are changing. Big data centres are now rising across the province, and I wanted to see things for myself. My wife found a 9D8N Guizhou tour through Kuala Lumpur’s GTT, a company we had used before, and I thought they were pretty good.
The Journey…
The attractions we visited were not unlike many found elsewhere in China. “Ancient” towns are rarely as old as their names suggest, and most shops sell nearly identical wares. Prices are fairly uniform, however, and vendors did not appear intent on overcharging visitors. Unlike other parts of China, we saw few street artists offering paintings, calligraphy, or embroidery. Apart from some tour groups from Malaysia and Singapore, almost all the tourists were domestic. (There are simply too many of such commercial-quality “ancient” towns in China to make the ones in Guizhou stand out!)
Frankly, I was not impressed by many of the man-made attractions. The sculptures in Wu-shan Canyon, for example, struck me as crude.
Fortunately, Guizhou’s mild climate made up for some of these shortcomings, though the province does get a lot of rain.
The hotels
Breakfasts were typically Chinese — rice, porridge, noodles, vegetables, buns, corn, sweet potatoes, boiled eggs, etc. Some hotels offered bread, together with butter and jams, but you had to devise how to spread them. (No knives are available.) Smoking was common in lobbies and corridors.
One gets the impression that the architects and designers of these hotels had little exposure to international standards. That said, the linens were clean, showers worked well, and the staff were generally friendly.
Lingering concerns
First is the frightening overbuilding in real estate. Across Guizhou, we saw vast clusters of residential towers – many seemingly unoccupied since “completion”. The same is true of resort hotels, abandoned for years. The billions spent on such projects – and the scars they leave on rare buildable land in this mountainous province – are staggering. What economic logic justified these developments? (I have just read in SCMP that China's micro-drama craze is turning idle real estate projects into lavish film sets! You cannot beat Chinese in entrepreneurship!)
(However, to those in the West who keep predicting China’s imminent collapse, I would say this: while the business climate may seem soft, you won’t find beggars or hungry faces on the streets. What endures, above all, is the resilience of the Chinese people.)
Second is the persistence of undesirable public behaviour. Smoking in restricted areas remains common, and people still jostle aggressively to board courtesy coaches.
Ironically, before landing at KLIA, China Southern Airlines played a recorded message reminding Chinese visitors to respect the laws of the countries they visit. A noble gesture – but surely the government could also do more to improve civic habits at home.
What I would have wanted to see…
Another site I would have liked to visit is the Deyu Wujiang Bridge (德余高速乌江特大桥), near Wenjiadian-zhen, about 170 km northeast of Guiyang. With a main span of 475 metres, a height of 220 metres, and a total length of 1,834 metres, it is the longest-span arch bridge in Guizhou, linking the G56 and S30 Expressways.
Regrettably, the local tour guide provided by GTT did not even see fit to mention them!
Finally, a word about travel
in Guizhou: it is tunnel after tunnel after tunnel.
End
1/n
ReplyDelete1. Xi In Guizhou, 2021
Xi sends Chinese New Year greetings, wishes for prosperous China
People's Daily; Beijing. 06 Feb 2021.
Xi underlined the special importance of Guizhou in the Long March in the Party's revolutionary history.
Of all the places the Red Army reached, it spent the longest time and had the most extensive presence in Guizhou, leaving later generations an enduring spiritual legacy, Xi said.
On Friday morning, Xi met with the project leaders and core scientists of China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), the world's largest single-dish radio telescope.
Stressing the importance of science and technology in China's pursuit of building a modern socialist country, Xi called on scientists to scale the heights of global science, and make new and greater contributions to the construction of China's scientific and technological strength at a faster pace, and realizing the country's self-reliance and self-improvement in science and technology.
Also on Friday morning, after hearing the provincial Party committee and the provincial government report their work, Xi stressed efforts to further integrate big data with the real economy, foster and strengthen strategic emerging industries, and accelerate the development of a system of modern industries.
More should be done to stimulate consumption demand and develop new consumption models, so as to unleash the consumption potential to the full, Xi said.
He also demanded an effective transition from consolidating poverty alleviation achievements to promoting rural vitalization.
An excellent ecological environment is Guizhou's biggest development strength and competitive edge, Xi said, emphasizing that priority should be given to ecological conservation and green development.
Highlighting common prosperity as an important goal of socialist modernization, Xi urged active efforts to resolve issues including the regional development gap, the urban-rural gap and the income gap to ensure tangible changes and benefits for the people.
2. FAST
https://is.gd/QFDIKe
https://is.gd/eiY0uT
3. “The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world,” said Nixon. “I have not been able to change it,” replied Mao, not without pathos. “I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.”
That was then. Perhaps it is still now - that Deng's release of the animal spirits of Chinese entrepreneurship by 'to be rich is glorious' alloyed to a fastidious chase of GDP growth at provincial level had somehow caused ambitions to overreach and finances to overrun resulting in overbuilding of real estate property independent of economic vicissitudes, the urbanization of the eastern coast and migrant workers migration to same that then led to hollowing out of the rural areas leaving empty apartments and banking system loan stress.
With some bravura i had suggested and it was captured but then silence ensued that the state buys up and gives gratis those empty apartments to the migrant workers, thus instantly creating a second middle-class with growth multiplier effect which in turn will spark a wellspring and positive return of the very consumer sentiment that is now dampening confidence in the face of Trump's tariff march and his state department's insidious sanctions.
One needs to spreadsheet build a model using a specific family of data in order to ascertain the national cost-benefit balance from doing so with corresponding downsides and perhaps social destabilization. AI may help but nothing beats a fast laptop, a hot Tanganyika coffee in a Corelle Provence Garden mug, a lit cigarillo and legs crosslegged.
Yet, if it is achieved, those rural hoi-polloi proletarians will be able to interact with the outside world as tourists once their incomes have increased and shed their less salubrious habits. They may even provide inputs on how to reengineer their outskirt accommodations like how they had done with Hangzhou's Tianducheng and Guangdong's Hallstatt which became wedding photo sites.
2/n
ReplyDelete4.. White House Years - H Kissinger (excerpts)
A number of sinologists urged an improvement of relations as an end in itself, for which Americans should make concessions. A group of distinguished professors from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, sent a memorandum on China policy to Nixon during the transition period. They urged that we move toward China by such initiatives as relinquishing our ties to Taiwan and inviting the People’s Republic into the United Nations. Their memorandum did not mention—nor do I recall any other China experts who did so at the time—the geopolitical opportunities for us with respect to the Soviet Union or the possibility that the Chinese might have an incentive to move toward us without American concessions because of their need for an American counterweight to the Soviet Union.
They had started as a tiny splinter group, with no hope for victory, endured the Long March, fought Japan and a civil war, opposed us in Korea and then took on the Soviets, and imposed the Cultural Revolution on themselves.
When the Nixon-Mao meeting finally took place, the irony was overwhelming. Here was the world’s foremost anti-Communist unashamedly sitting down in the Spartan quarters of the world’s foremost Communist leader.
During their sixty-five minute conversation, Mao was clearly the man in charge. Nixon and Kissinger politely flattered Mao, whereas Mao offered only faint praise to his guests. When Nixon told Mao, “The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world,” Mao gave the president a slight compliment: “Your book, Six Crises, is not a bad book.” And when Nixon raised specific national and regional issues, Mao insisted that he would only discuss “philosophical” questions.
Nixon: “The Chinese are a great and vital people who should not remain isolated from the international community. In the long run, no stable and enduring international order is conceivable without the contribution of this nation of more than 700 million people.”
We stressed that we were concerned not with rhetoric but with practical policy. The key to our relations would be the actions of each toward the other. The report explicitly rejected any desire to take sides in the Sino‐Soviet conflict and hence any idea of condominium.
On the evening of October 22 we were taken to the Great Hall of the People to see a “revolutionary” Peking opera—an art form of truly stupefying boredom in which villains were the incarnation of evil and wore black, good guys wore red, and as far as I could make out the girl fell in love with a tractor.
3/3
ReplyDeleteI have already expressed my appreciation of Zhou’s outstanding qualities. I met no leader—with the exception of de Gaulle—with an equal grasp of world events. His knowledge of detail was astonishing, but where many leaders use detail to avoid complexity, Zhou also had an extraordinary grasp of the relationship of events. He was a dedicated ideologue, but he used the faith that had sustained him through decades of struggle to discipline a passionate nature into one of the most acute and unsentimental assessments of reality that I have encountered.
Zhou did not identify leadership with the proclamation of personal idiosyncrasies. He understood that statesmen cannot invent reality, and was fond of quoting an old Chinese proverb: “The helmsman must guide the boat by using the waves; otherwise it will be submerged by the waves.”
Statesmanship required a knowledge of what could not be changed as well as an understanding of the scope available for creativity. In this extraordinary manner—without ever discussing common actions—did the United States and the People’s Republic continue the process of coordinating their approaches to the issues of global peace and equilibrium.
The Chinese stress, because they believe in it, the uniqueness of Chinese values. Hence they convey an aura of imperviousness to pressure; indeed, they preempt pressure by implying that issues of principle are beyond discussion.
In creating this relationship Chinese diplomats, at least in their encounters with us, proved meticulously reliable. They never stooped to petty maneuvers; they did not haggle; they reached their bottom line quickly, explained it reasonably, and defended it tenaciously. They stuck to the meaning as well as the spirit of their undertakings. As Zhou was fond of saying: “Our word counts.”
Every visit to China was like a carefully rehearsed play in which nothing was accidental and yet everything appeared spontaneous. The Chinese remembered every conversation, from those with the lowliest officials to those with the most senior statesmen. Each remark by a Chinese was part of a jigsaw puzzle, even if at first our more literal intelligence did not pick up the design. It engendered a combination of awe and sense of impotence at so much discipline and dedication—not unusual in the encounter of foreigners with Chinese culture.
Mao just stood there, surrounded by books, tall and powerfully built for a Chinese. He fixed the visitor with a smile both penetrating and slightly mocking, warning by his bearing that there was no point in seeking to deceive this specialist in the foibles and duplicity of man. I have met no one, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, who so distilled raw, concentrated willpower.
In contrast to all other political leaders I have known, he almost never engaged in soliloquies. Not for him were the prepared points most statesman use, either seemingly extemporaneously or learned from notes. His meaning emerged from a Socratic dialogue that he guided effortlessly and with deceptive casualness.
He embedded his main observations in easy banter and seeming jokes, maneuvering his interlocutor for opportunities to inject comments that were sometimes philosophical and sometimes sarcastic.
The cumulative effect was that his key points were enveloped in so many tangential phrases that they communicated a meaning while evading a commitment.
Mao’s elliptical phrases were passing shadows on a wall; they reflected a reality but they did not encompass it. They indicated a direction without defining the route of march. Mao would deliver dicta. They would catch the listener by surprise, creating an atmosphere at once confused and slightly menacing. It was as if one were dealing with a figure from another world who occasionally lifted a corner of the shroud that veils the future, permitting a glimpse but never the entire vision that he alone has seen.
There was an extraordinary indication of Mao’s preference for the greater calculability of conservative leaders over the sentimental oscillations of liberals.