The Chinese auto industry resembles that of the United States in the early 20th century. There are just over 70 auto manufactures in China, many of which started as parts suppliers and later began to put together their own cars and develop a brand, such as BYD, which was originally a battery producer, and Geely, which started as a refrigerator manufacturer, then moved into motorcycles and cars. Like the American car industry in its early stages, there will be a lot of consolidation and will eventually be just a handful of large companies.
China, which has 17 cars for every 1,000 people (compared to about 600 per thousand people in Germany and 800 per thousand people in the United States), is quickly expanding its private car fleet. Car sales topped one million for the first time in September, and earlier this year more cars were sold in China than in the United States, although that was mostly due to a severe slump in US car sales.
Chinese auto companies are aggressively pushing hybrids and electric cars and several will start selling cars in Europe and the US soon.
So rising pollution and oil imports are two enormous problems, but I always worry about other problems in addition to further oil consumption and CO2 emissions that are seldom raised. There is simply no room for many more cars. Given that traffic and parking is already bad in large Chinese cities, adding tens of millions of more cars, whether hybrid or electric or something else, would be a disaster.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Books in China
China is the guest of honor at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, which was a controversial selection because the country bans about 600 books each year and holds dozens of journalists and authors in prison.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival
During the first week of October there is always a holiday for the October 1st National Day and this year another holiday, Mid-Autumn Festival, which occurs eight months after the Chinese New Year (all according to the Chinese lunar calendar), fell on October 3rd this year, so there was an extended break.
I saw some sites in Nanjing during those days off, including a huge fish market near the Yangtze river, a ferry ride to the other side of the river, Purple Mountain, and a memorial to John Rabe in his former home. Rabe was a German who lived in Nanjing in the 1930s and 40s, when he saved thousands of lives during the Rape of Nanking by offering refuge to locals in and around the Nanjing University campus) I also made the trip to an IKEA store in the southern suburb of Nanjing. It was my first time to an IKEA but from what I saw in the Nanjing store I’m fairly certain that Ikeas everywhere are all the same. Swedish meatballs and other family friendly food are served in the attached cafeteria and I recognized several pieces of furniture, a clock, paintings, and other things that my family has at home. I guess the only difference is that IKEA stores in China are packed, especially over a holiday, and are popular places to take pictures, as in, “so this is what an oven looks like!”
I taught a couple of English classes, went to a party organized by my English school for Mid-Autumn Festival, and was a involved in the opening and ribbon cutting at a new school location.
Pictures here
I saw some sites in Nanjing during those days off, including a huge fish market near the Yangtze river, a ferry ride to the other side of the river, Purple Mountain, and a memorial to John Rabe in his former home. Rabe was a German who lived in Nanjing in the 1930s and 40s, when he saved thousands of lives during the Rape of Nanking by offering refuge to locals in and around the Nanjing University campus) I also made the trip to an IKEA store in the southern suburb of Nanjing. It was my first time to an IKEA but from what I saw in the Nanjing store I’m fairly certain that Ikeas everywhere are all the same. Swedish meatballs and other family friendly food are served in the attached cafeteria and I recognized several pieces of furniture, a clock, paintings, and other things that my family has at home. I guess the only difference is that IKEA stores in China are packed, especially over a holiday, and are popular places to take pictures, as in, “so this is what an oven looks like!”
I taught a couple of English classes, went to a party organized by my English school for Mid-Autumn Festival, and was a involved in the opening and ribbon cutting at a new school location.
Pictures here
Friday, October 09, 2009
Nanjing
I live in a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor just inside one of the western gates of the ancient city wall. My bedroom overlooks a park where speakers play music and a fountain in a man-made lake runs and throughout the day, making it sound as if it were raining nonstop during daylight hours.
Nanjing Normal University is about a 20-minute walk to the north and the center of the downtown where I teach is a 30-minute walk to the east.
I brought two books back here with me focus on different parts of Nanjing's modern history. One is The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, about the Japanese invasion of the city in 1937 and the atrocities committed under their rein through 1945. Nanjing (written as Nanking then) at that time was the capital of the Nationalist governed Republic of China, until the Nationalist officials and military fled and relocated the government to Chongqing (Chungking then). It was a capital for brief periods of time during several dynasties, blessed with fertile farmland in the Yangtze River valley and naturally protected by the winding river on to sides and mountains on the other. As Chang describes it:
"For centuries, water and mountain provided not only beauty for Nanjing but military protection. The Yangtze River to the west and the Purple mountain to the east shielded the city “like a coiling dragon and a crouching tiger,” to borrow an ancient phrase describing Nanjing’s natural strength."
Animals are often used in Chinese idioms, and the phrase “where tigers crouch and dragons coil” can describe a place with forbidden terrain. A similar phrase, “hidden dragon, crouching tiger” describes individuals who conceal their talents; the same phrase was reversed and used for the title of an Oscar-winning Ang Lee movie. My apartment, believe it or not, happens to be on the corner of Crouching Tiger Street （虎踞路）and Coiling Dragon Street (龙蟠路), with the address being 38 Crouching Tiger Street.
The other book that is largely set in Nanjing is Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret, a journalist with the Washington Post who was one of the first American students to study in Nanjing in the early 1980s. Universities fully reopened after the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s and the U.S. and China normalized diplomatic relations in 1979. Pomfret’s summary of Nanjing’s history:
“Nanjing, the name means “southern capital,” is a city where Chinese traditionally went to lick their wounds while barbarians from the north carved up their country. In medieval times, it served as the capital during six short-lived dynasties when northern China was occupied by nomadic tribes from beyond the Great Wall. Nanjing was also the capital at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in the fourteenth century and then again during the two decades preceding the Communist Revolution.”
A crossroads for plunderers and poets, emperors and colonialists, Nanjing was a safe house for Chinese culture, home to great painters and writers and the sing-song girls who worked the flower boats and brothels that lined the Qinhuai River snaking through the city… Throughout the centuries, Nanjing has been pillaged, burned, rebuilt, forgotten, and rebuilt again. In the fourteenth century, the first Ming ruler emptied the city of its citizens, exiling more than three hundred thousand to the far corners of the empire. A hundred years later, a repopulated Nanjing was celebrated as one of the most beautiful cities on earth. In the 1920s, an American architect laid plans to rebuild the city as a modern capital, a melding of Washington, D.C., and Paris, France. First, Japanese aggression in the late 1930s and then the Communist Revolution put an end to that.”
His experiences as a student in Nanjing in the early 1980s are pretty wild. Many of his classmates were either poor peasants or were children of urban middle class families who were forced to spend years in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Some were not able to finish high school because of the social turmoil at the time and one student lost his parents, both professors at Nanjing Normal University, when they were accused of being "rightists" and beaten to death by teenage "Red Guards" in the university's mall. Things improved after the Cultural Revolution ended upon Mao's death, but life as a student was still tough at that time. Many goods like sugar, meat and bicycles were rationed, dancing was banned on campus, and students were assigned jobs from a government planning committee upon graduation. Needless to say, it is fascinating to read about Nanjing 30 years ago and ponder how dramatically it has changed.
Nanjing Normal University is about a 20-minute walk to the north and the center of the downtown where I teach is a 30-minute walk to the east.
I brought two books back here with me focus on different parts of Nanjing's modern history. One is The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, about the Japanese invasion of the city in 1937 and the atrocities committed under their rein through 1945. Nanjing (written as Nanking then) at that time was the capital of the Nationalist governed Republic of China, until the Nationalist officials and military fled and relocated the government to Chongqing (Chungking then). It was a capital for brief periods of time during several dynasties, blessed with fertile farmland in the Yangtze River valley and naturally protected by the winding river on to sides and mountains on the other. As Chang describes it:
"For centuries, water and mountain provided not only beauty for Nanjing but military protection. The Yangtze River to the west and the Purple mountain to the east shielded the city “like a coiling dragon and a crouching tiger,” to borrow an ancient phrase describing Nanjing’s natural strength."
Animals are often used in Chinese idioms, and the phrase “where tigers crouch and dragons coil” can describe a place with forbidden terrain. A similar phrase, “hidden dragon, crouching tiger” describes individuals who conceal their talents; the same phrase was reversed and used for the title of an Oscar-winning Ang Lee movie. My apartment, believe it or not, happens to be on the corner of Crouching Tiger Street （虎踞路）and Coiling Dragon Street (龙蟠路), with the address being 38 Crouching Tiger Street.
The other book that is largely set in Nanjing is Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret, a journalist with the Washington Post who was one of the first American students to study in Nanjing in the early 1980s. Universities fully reopened after the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s and the U.S. and China normalized diplomatic relations in 1979. Pomfret’s summary of Nanjing’s history:
“Nanjing, the name means “southern capital,” is a city where Chinese traditionally went to lick their wounds while barbarians from the north carved up their country. In medieval times, it served as the capital during six short-lived dynasties when northern China was occupied by nomadic tribes from beyond the Great Wall. Nanjing was also the capital at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in the fourteenth century and then again during the two decades preceding the Communist Revolution.”
A crossroads for plunderers and poets, emperors and colonialists, Nanjing was a safe house for Chinese culture, home to great painters and writers and the sing-song girls who worked the flower boats and brothels that lined the Qinhuai River snaking through the city… Throughout the centuries, Nanjing has been pillaged, burned, rebuilt, forgotten, and rebuilt again. In the fourteenth century, the first Ming ruler emptied the city of its citizens, exiling more than three hundred thousand to the far corners of the empire. A hundred years later, a repopulated Nanjing was celebrated as one of the most beautiful cities on earth. In the 1920s, an American architect laid plans to rebuild the city as a modern capital, a melding of Washington, D.C., and Paris, France. First, Japanese aggression in the late 1930s and then the Communist Revolution put an end to that.”
His experiences as a student in Nanjing in the early 1980s are pretty wild. Many of his classmates were either poor peasants or were children of urban middle class families who were forced to spend years in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Some were not able to finish high school because of the social turmoil at the time and one student lost his parents, both professors at Nanjing Normal University, when they were accused of being "rightists" and beaten to death by teenage "Red Guards" in the university's mall. Things improved after the Cultural Revolution ended upon Mao's death, but life as a student was still tough at that time. Many goods like sugar, meat and bicycles were rationed, dancing was banned on campus, and students were assigned jobs from a government planning committee upon graduation. Needless to say, it is fascinating to read about Nanjing 30 years ago and ponder how dramatically it has changed.
Friday, October 02, 2009
National Day
Yesterday was China’s National Day, marking the day when the People’s Republic of China was founded on October 1st, 1949. Every 10 years the celebrations are extended and virtually every military division is marched past Tiananmen.
It provides a time for people to look back at their country’s modern history, although usually back only until 1949, and most often overlooking the bad parts (e.g. the film Founding of a Republic was released to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the PRC’s founding conspicuously leaves out the darker periods). It’s important to look back at the entire past century of history, starting with the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 that brought Emperor Puyi and ended the long cycle of China’s dynasties. China’s modern history is chaotic and complicated – the country endured two revolutions, a prolonged civil war and occupation under imperial Japan that killed millions of people, a war against South Korea and the United States that cost one million Chinese lives, the disastrous Great Leap Forward that contributed to the world’s worst famine and 25 to 30 million dead, followed by the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution. Finally, after decades of regressive and destructive policies, China has reopened to the world and undergone a process of industrialization and urbanization at a scale and pace larger and faster than any country has ever experienced.
I’m also fascinated by stories of older people who have lived through so many periods of China’s recent history. There are some great stories about government officials, political dissidents, and ordinary citizens that the journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn met in Beijing and wrote about in the book China Wakes (and one I finished recently).
Two interesting life stories that were profiled in newspapers recently are those of
Wu Jinglian, who helped formulate China’s policies of “reform and opening” in the 1970s, only to be persecuted for speaking out against corruption and poor governance, and the 103 year-old Zhou Youguang who helped create the pinyin system of writing Chinese characters in the Roman alphabet.
What’s in store for China during this century? The are massive problems to work on, all consequences of a rapid and messy process of industrialization and modernization, such as protecting the environment, improving education, reducing income inequality, and reconciling the gap between a liberalized and free economy liberalization and a nondemocratic, authoritarian government. But like Zhou Yougang, I’m optimistic. I only hope to be as intimately involved in the country as he was and to be able to live through more than a century of its changes.
It provides a time for people to look back at their country’s modern history, although usually back only until 1949, and most often overlooking the bad parts (e.g. the film Founding of a Republic was released to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the PRC’s founding conspicuously leaves out the darker periods). It’s important to look back at the entire past century of history, starting with the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 that brought Emperor Puyi and ended the long cycle of China’s dynasties. China’s modern history is chaotic and complicated – the country endured two revolutions, a prolonged civil war and occupation under imperial Japan that killed millions of people, a war against South Korea and the United States that cost one million Chinese lives, the disastrous Great Leap Forward that contributed to the world’s worst famine and 25 to 30 million dead, followed by the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution. Finally, after decades of regressive and destructive policies, China has reopened to the world and undergone a process of industrialization and urbanization at a scale and pace larger and faster than any country has ever experienced.
I’m also fascinated by stories of older people who have lived through so many periods of China’s recent history. There are some great stories about government officials, political dissidents, and ordinary citizens that the journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn met in Beijing and wrote about in the book China Wakes (and one I finished recently).
Two interesting life stories that were profiled in newspapers recently are those of
Wu Jinglian, who helped formulate China’s policies of “reform and opening” in the 1970s, only to be persecuted for speaking out against corruption and poor governance, and the 103 year-old Zhou Youguang who helped create the pinyin system of writing Chinese characters in the Roman alphabet.
What’s in store for China during this century? The are massive problems to work on, all consequences of a rapid and messy process of industrialization and modernization, such as protecting the environment, improving education, reducing income inequality, and reconciling the gap between a liberalized and free economy liberalization and a nondemocratic, authoritarian government. But like Zhou Yougang, I’m optimistic. I only hope to be as intimately involved in the country as he was and to be able to live through more than a century of its changes.
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