China Diary, Part VIII
What you have to go to China for.

Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
August 9, 2001 8:30 a.m.

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).