Thoughts about China

On a per capita basis Americans enjoy about 10x as much income as your typical Chinese person. Even if you figure that most of that income is concentrated in the 300 Million or so people in the cities that’s still a pretty huge difference. With that in mind, the place actually doesn't look so bad on average. China is perceptibly much poorer than the US, but it’s not profoundly poor in the way that India or countries in Africa are poor. For another thing the country is light years ahead of where it was 25 years ago. It fits the picture of a middle income country perfectly. For example, there aren’t giant piles of rubbish in the middle of the sidewalk, only moderately sized piles of rubbish on the side of certain sidewalks. Sometimes you’ll see a donkey on the side of a busy highway and so forth.

By and large people seem to do alright with the money they make through a lot of economizing and corner cutting. For example, buildings aren’t built to last, and anything that’s more than 10 years old is usually falling apart. Every toilet I’ve seen has been broken and jury-rigged. A lot of people still don’t own washing machines and nobody owns dryers. The owners of stores and restaurants usually live in cramped rooms in the back. So if you go into the bathroom in a given family owned restaurant you’ll usually see a lot of exposed wiring, dirty laundry hanging everywhere, washing basins lying around everywhere, a sink that actually just goes straight to a bucket on the floor and a toilet with some sort of ad hoc pulley system attached to it. Then you go out front you’ll see the owners cluster around the brand new computer in the front playing a pirated copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 or something. The poverty is concentrated in the bathroom and the wealth is all concentrated in the store front.

And that’s one of the most notable thing about China. There are nice parts and there are crummy parts and they’re all right next to each other. I think there are quite literally no zoning laws. One of the Kindergartens I work at is right next to a scrap metal yard, a church, a factory, a wheat field and a prison among other things. There are supermarkets with street markets just down the street, and there are nice restaurants with migrant workers grilling kebabs out front. It’s kind of a mess but it also kind of works. For example garbage collection seems to be handled primarily by these people who ride around on bicycles banging pots and pans that buy your garbage and resell it to factories as scrap. So in a way everyone recycles.

It’s kind of made me appreciate the difference between “poor” and “blighted”. Here’s an example to illustrate the difference: China is poor, downtown Detroit is blighted. One is what happens when all the middle class people take their money and leave, leaving a withered dysfunctional husk. The other is what happens when everything’s kind of dirty, bare bones, crowded and jury rigged, but at the same time there’s still a neighborhood association that’s practicing synchronized dancing routines in the park.