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 hings
that are done much better in China (1): Cell phones. Everyone
in China has a cell phone. Even peasants have them: From train windows
you see country folk burnt teak-color by the sun, dressed in nothing
but a pair of shorts, a pair of grass shoes, and a coolie hat, flogging
a donkey and cart along some rutted track between villages, yelling
into a cell phone. Having a cell phone costs next to nothing here.
A relative explained how it works: "You buy a wee chip and
put it in here. That gives you so many calls. After that you have
to buy another chip." He uses his all the time — it certainly
seemed to be ringing more often than not — including for calls to
the next province. Total cost to him? He named a sum of money equivalent
to about U.S. $12 a month. When I told him what our accounts with
AT&T Wireless in New York cost us (frequently over $100 a month
for the two of us, though we hardly use the damn things), he laughed
in frank disbelief. I did not even tell him that the wretched thing
comes with a billing schedule you need a math Ph.D. to understand.
All right, I understand that labor is cheap here: But how labor-intensive
is it, running a cell-phone company? I suspect that the answer to
this puzzle is that entity Fred Reed calls "the gumment"
— i.e. that in this as in many other things, Americans simply have
no idea how wildly over-regulated they are, and how much it costs
them.
Beipei
Town, Southwest China
 The
people we are staying with in Sichuan — an old classmate of Rosie's,
with her husband and daughter — are planning a vacation in Tibet.
Apparently this is now a popular thing to do in western China. So
here's the deal: You invade a country, murder one-fifth of its population
(1.2 million people — this is an estimate by the International Commission
of Jurists), outlaw its religion, destroy its temples and monasteries
by shelling and aerial bombing, melt down its antiquities and ship
them home as bullion, drive its educated class into exile, exterminate
its wildlife, pollute its lakes and rivers, impose a secret-police
terror on its cowed, broken population, initiate a program of frank
colonization, bringing in hundreds of thousands of your own people,
maintain with much bogus indignation in international forums that
this country has "always" been a "part" or your
country ... and then declare what's left of the place open for tourism.
This is the modern world. Personally, I shall go to Tibet when Tibet
is free, with a government her people have chosen themselves from
among their own. I urge everyone else who cares about justice and
liberty to make the same resolution.
I
think I may have discovered the reason for China's water shortage:
The toilets run. Sit-down pedestal-style toilets are now taking
over from the older type — which consisted of a hole you squat over,
then throw a bucket of water down. However, they all seem to run.
At any rate, the two hotel and three residential toilets we have
so far encountered all ran. I fixed one of the residential ones,
and totally broke a hotel one while trying to fix it. Running toilets
are, in fact, a universal minor defect of our present civilization
— one of our toilets at home in New York runs from time to time,
and has to be fiddled with. When you look inside a toilet cistern,
you see a rather crude mechanism which, I venture to speculate,
has not changed much since Thomas Crapper invented it, what? 200
years ago? Hydraulic engineering was the first truly scientific
discipline the human race mastered. Today, 5,000 after the taming
of the Nile, 2,000 years after Archimedes's wonderful Screw, is
this the best we can do? A clunky mechanism that, at the slightest
excuse, goes into chronic malfunction? Where are America's inventors?
Where, for that matter, are China's? Can't this mighty civilization,
which gave us paper, gunpowder, sericulture and noodles, come up
with a non-running toilet?
Things
that are done much better in China (2): Eyeglasses. You can
get a nice set of prescription eyeglasses in an attractive frame
for less than U.S. $20 here. As with cell phones, I don't see how
this can be a direct result of the cost of labor. Lens making is
pretty fully computerized. You take measurements, punch them into
a console, and out pop the lenses. Frames? Four pieces of plastic-coated
wire held together with two screws? Yet I think myself lucky to
get out of my local "vision center" less than a $300 lighter.
The damn things aren't even well made: my wife's $250 "designer"
frames dump a lens on the carpet two or three times a week. What
a racket! The whole "designer" business is of course absurd.
Basically, you pay an extra hundred bucks to have the name of some
French poofter attached to your frame by a tiny piece of colored
string. Why aren't Americans marching in the streets to protest
this nonsense? Better yet, why doesn't some Chinese entrepreneur
start a mail-order spectacle business at Chinese prices? The big
U.S. spectacle cartels would be out of business in a week — a major
advance for economic justice and consumer rights.
Riding
down an escalator in Chongqing's biggest, newest and very comprehensively
stocked department store, I noticed that I was being stared at by
a very pretty Chinese girl on the up escalator. I'm afraid I don't
respond well to being stared at, so I returned my customary ill-natured
scowl. To my amazement, she sent back a broad smile — showing excellent
teeth — and an exaggerated wink. This was extraordinary because
Chinese people hardly ever wink, and do not even have a verb for
this action in their language. It was deliberate and extremely suggestive.
Delighted and surprised, I could not help but laugh out loud. She
laughed back, passing level with me now, and the people behind her
on the up escalator, somehow figuring out what had happened, all
laughed too. We were wafted away to our different floors on waves
of mirth. Nicholson Baker wrote a novel about an escalator ride,
but I must say I have always thought of them as perfectly eventless
— part of what Virginia Woolf called the "cotton wool"
that fills up so much of life. This is the only memorable escalator
ride I have ever taken. Some things you have to come to China for.
You
have heard about how everything in China is done through "connections."
Here is how it goes. After a weekend with Rosie's old classmate
in Beipei, we were booked to go on a tour boat down the Yangtze
River, starting from Chongqing (formerly spelt "Chungking").
The question then arose: How to get from Beipei to the dock at Chongqing,
an hour and a half by road? Nobody we know owns a car. ( Very few
middle-class Chinese people own cars.) Well, I said, we'll just
have to hire a car and driver for the trip. Our friends laughed.
"Don't be silly." Phone calls were made. We sat around.
Phone calls came back. "All fixed." We rode to Chongqing
in a spanking new air-conditioned minibus with the words Fa Yuan
painted on the side. Fa Yuan means "court", as
in "court of law." Someone's third brother's bridge partner
had a classmate whose second outside cousin's friend works for the
court system. He, and his minibus, took the afternoon off to help
out. No trouble at the numerous toll plazas: Court vehicles don't
pay tolls, so we just sped right through. Registered taxis aside,
practically all the vehicles you see on China's now-excellent roads
are the official property of some "work unit" — a factory,
a hospital, a police station, a college. At any given time, I would
estimate that at least three-quarters of them are on some private
business. We have never had any difficulty getting a car or a minibus
commandeered on our behalf, generally with a driver included (practically
no middle-class Chinese have driver licenses, either).
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