Category: Beijing

This New Year, I made a resolution to buy stuff.
 
One of the great things about being an American living in China is that you get two chances to make and break resolutions — one for the Jan 1st new year, and the other about a month later for the Chinese lunar new year.  For months, I have needed a new cell phone, some new clothes, a sofa that doesn’t resemble a wooden plank, earphones for my iPod to replace the ones that broke, and a bicycle to replace the one that broke my heart.  After a full week of commitment-free vacation days spent in Beijing, I succeeded in none of the above.  I did, however, buy three energy-saving light bulbs.  And some toothpaste.
 
If you know me, you know that I tend to hate stuff.  Or more specifically, I hate shopping.  I used to think this problem was a form of well-rounded cheapskateness: Slavic thriftiness passed down to me from my immigrant grandparents, people who fled a soon-to-be famine-filled Soviet Union to end up in a soon-to-be Depression Era America.  But then one day after college, I realized I was spending a lot of money, despite living rent-free with my parents.  According to Microsoft Money, which tracked every credit card swipe I had made during the year, I was spending almost all my disposable income on traveling and eating/drinking out (and business suits).
 
I am, as a friend once put it, an “experience spender.”  I will never spend $200 on a really nice shirt, but would definitely spend $200 on a really nice meal.  I like to think that I’m not alone, that being an experience spender is a hallmark of the nouveau jetset.  Having stuff makes it hard to move, and the more you move, the more you abhor stuff.  Thank goodness for alumni email address, because most people I know don’t have any other permanent address.  My current mailing address is my work address, as I’m more certain I’ll be a my company in a couple years than in this apartment.  So buying a lot of things that I will have to schlep around the world, sell or throw out is highly unappealing.
 
But what about buying a few really nice things?  I admit, I have a Juicy Couture leather bag given to me when my friend was moving out of Hong Kong (and abhorring having stuff).  While I first fell in love with the bag for how the leather and metal chains swing obnoxiously into passersby, especially if you saunter down the street wearing (knock off) Prada sunglasses, I quickly came to admire it for its utility.  It has toted variously my laptop, two bottles of wine, an entire pomelo, and my bike helmet.  It’s a really sturdy and well-made bag.  So the other night, it wasn’t much of a surprise that I found myself (sarcastically?) extolling the virtues of Gucci:  “A luxury bag is the great equalizer,”   I waxed poetically, straight-faced and perhaps even sincere. “Some people who don’t have much money, but can still muster together enough to buy one really nice bag, can skip over the middle class and enter the magical world of the elite.  A bag lets them enter the fantasy vision they have seen in magazines and billboards and ads.  It lets them live the dream.”
 
Buying stuff has been the American dream for generations now.  And this year, the Fed and the US government have made a new year’s resolution itself: to resolve the coming recession by getting Americans to buy more stuff.  Over here in China, in the manufacturing trenches of the world economy, where people are chocking on the pollution created by factories selling said “stuff” to America, I sort of wonder if America doesn’t need more stuff right now.  America extols itself as being a service economy, in terms of what it produces.  But it seems to me to still be a stuff economy in terms of what it consumes.  I don’t really want to buy the world a Coke.  I’d rather go buy you a drink.
 
China has leapfrogged a lot of development steps, and maybe will leapfrog growth through buying stuff too.  China’s leaders are starting to talk up shifting into services as the next engine of development; maybe they’ll try to encourage consumption of services too.  Tourism’s growth has been explosive in China, and coffee shops are flourishing like blue algae in Lake Tai.  So maybe…
 
As always, it’s a fascinating time to be here.  I’m finally going to go buy a bike now, so I can go out and experience it for myself.
 
Yours as always,
Liz

It’s quiet now. 

Of course, the sound of fireworks is incessant as Beijing-ren celebrate the New Year, tossing fireworks like grenades above the roof of my six story apartment complex.  But between each explosion echoes into hollowness.  As China goes on vacation this week, the silence is overwhelming.

I took a bus on New Year’s Eve day across Chang’An Jie, the main drag in Beijing, and a street usually jammed with traffic.  But this week, when the 15+ million people of Beijing stop building, driving, and working to go home to their families, this “Long Peace Street” finally earns its name.  My empty bus flew past the brand new egg-shaped Opera House and the army of red flags fluttering over Tiananmen Square.  The sky is so blue, with factories closed and cars eerily absent from the street, that from across town you can see clearly the two steel frames of the CCTV towers, slowly winding together like Pyramus and Thisbe into a permanent embrace.

Being here in Beijing, you can’t help but feel that we are on the cusp of history this year.  Someday (more…)

Tonight, my rusted red chain fell off my gears twice as I biked from
the Russian district to Alfa’s 80s night.  I had pedaled through the
starry night with my bike squeaking away, tires deflated and bell
decapitated, over dusty construction sites and behind rickshaws
stacked with four inch four pound plastic bags of paper to be
recycled.  I was taking my bike back from my office, as I had biked to
work yesterday morning, as each pedal a struggle.  Either I was
physically tired, my tires were flat, or my gears were jammed.
Something wasn’t right. (more…)

As soon as I got outside my apartment the other day, I stopped in my tracks.  It was clear I wasn’t going to get milk anymore.  I jumped on my well-loved bike — easy to spot with its very unique I ❤ NY sticker plastered on the frame — and set off.
 
I think I knew that that would be the last pure day of autumn, before the air starts to smell like winter as you try to breathe in through a stuffy nose.  The sky was a brightly back-lit blue, and as I hurled through the archway of generous maples lining the street in front of the Canadian embassy,* I could feel every ridge and bump in the pavement clearly through my handlebars.  It was the kind of day that makes you notice the beauty in ordinary things:  the mini-thrill of a trunk pushing up the pavement into a baby jump; the comfort of the old ladies in well worn clothes sitting with their ankles crossed on a banister in front a sign encouraging studying; the man swept up by the flood of people leaving the subway but so satisfied biting into a steaming soft spring roll; or the women with bamboo poles along the river bank walking between the reeds.  I rubbernecked at the guy looking in incredulous and helpless awe at the invisible dent in the front of his pulled-over car. I slowed down to stay behind and watch a rollerblader listening to his headphones and waving his arms gracefully to the music. And I nearly got hit by a car when I realized the air in the alley ahead of me was full of spinning yellow leaves making their slow and final descent toward the yet untouched black asphalt.
 
People say that China's economy is built on cheap labor, but it's more than that:  this country is built on optimism.  It's not just that people work for little money, it's that they work hard for little money, and in large part because they think that it will lead to something better.  It's one of the reasons I came here, actually, rather than Russia. (more…)

My good friend who was transferred 6 months ago to Beijing, working at Microsoft, wrote a note about China that I thought you would really enjoy reading. So without further ado, here are some excerpts:

“At this very moment, I’m sitting in the Industrial Bank of China, trying to pay my credit card bill.   The venue is like the Chinese version of the DMV, where you take a number and then spend forever waiting for your turn at the teller window.   The bank is packed with people; sophisticated folks with designer clothes, school children in their track suits, and even my favorite ma tuan (sesame ball) vendor with a wad of bills so thick I wonder how really makes his living.  What an inspiring place to write about my new life! (more…)

A good opening sentence should be like a vodka shot:  clear, quick, strong, and with a sharp finish that gets you reved up for what comes next — i.e. it shouldn’t ramble on like this Aabservation does with no intention of stopping, completely unrelated to the main topic:  in this case, the question “bells or brakes?”, a with-us-or-against-us type of question which came up last night, when I was biking to a party and panicked for a moment when I realized my brakes were worn out — but quickly regained confidence (and speed) as I realized that my bicycle bell at least was working, meaning that instead of slowing down, I could just announce my arrival and others would get out of my way, which I did, often, and in so doing realized that I would rather have a fully functional bell than fully functional brakes — perhaps a revelation about a change in my attitude toward risk-taking since moving to China (or perhaps the attitude that brought me here in the first place?) — and beyond just me, I started to wonder whether China itself is a country that values bells or brakes more — a question which, after a considerable period of high-speed contemplation (and pedaling), I came to conclude:  yes, China is indeed a country that would rather be able to slow down safely than charge forward bells a-ringing (think of China’s slow unwind of capital controls, its patient and quiet emergence as an international power, and the truly measured pace of its transition from a centrally planned economy to an open one), while the US is the country with the largest bells in the world, and which loves ringing them (think of the US’s strong attitude to foreign relations and its love of global media attention)… though I’d love to hear back from you whether you agree with this assessment and (perhaps more interestingly) whether you would rather have working bells or working brakes, with only one requirement for your reply:  that you, like me in this Aabservation, try writing using as many punctuation bells & whistles as possible (bonus if you can incorporate Chinese backward commas and <> quotes), but that you strictly forbid yourself from using a period to brake your train of thought (a ridiculous challenge — I know — inspired by a hilarious and geeky late night conversation on punctuation in a rooftop bar with a handful of copy-editors, writers, researchers and blumblum friends):  a gimmick which is (outside of Victorian literature and legal documents) only sustainable for so long, and eventually (as you can see) must at some point come to an end.

Cheers, Liz

After a wonderful year and four months of persuading monks to wear bunny ear muffs while overlooking Mount Everest, blowing on beer bottle tops as part of a music ensemble, teaching 600 students English by singing ‘I will survive!’ on a Saturday afternoon in rural Yunnan, inadvertently biking through military training exercises in a patch of forest behind downtown Beijing, staring at a perfectly flat plain with no trees for two days on the cross Australian railroad, and drinking a lot of green tea, I am now back in a suit and working full time in Beijing. (more…)

So you want to do business in China, but you keep hearing about the fact that there is no “rule of law,” or that it’s “unsafe.” Well, last night I sat down with a lawyer friend of mine, and listened as she told me the biggest potholes in the road of China Opportunity.

At one point, my stomach full of Korean food and my brain stuffed with terms like “judicial review” and “normative law” I asked her to stop. “I don’t get it,” I said. “This doesn’t make any sense. Can you explain it again?”

She smiles and says, “No, if you don’t get it, that actually means you get it.”

So what is fishy about the Chinese legal system? I don’t know law from a chicken leg, but here are three things I’d be careful about: (more…)