I travel a lot - maybe not as much as some, but it seems like a lot to me. It causes a lot of difficulty in our lives, but I get to see a lot of the country (China, I mean) in a way that I never would otherwise - in a way that I haven’t even seen the U.S. Friday morning I found myself in a dingy office in a small tourist town in Hubei province, deep in the Chinese heartland. I had arrived at the Xiangfan airport three days previously - itself a city I had never heard of before, but still an hour and a half’s drive from our destination - and immediately had the sensation of being in the “real” China, the romantic China of the foreigner’s imagination which apparently never fully goes away, no matter how long you are immersed in the actual real China. This is the China of crumbling temples, peasants plowing the rice fields with water buffalo, and misty mountaintops capped with daoist shrines - and indeed I saw all of those during my trip, although I feel compelled to note that the peasants all seemed to have satellite dishes and brand new motorbikes. (I wanted very much to see a peasant plowing his field with water buffalo while talking on his cell phone, and if I had had one more day I’m sure I would have, and I am not joking.)

Side note: the Xiangfan airport is probably the smallest I’ve ever been to - after landing, the plane (a 30 seat regional jet) simply rotates in place and taxis to the terminal on the runway, and you step off the plane and stroll the 50 meters to the one story terminal with the smell of spring grass in the air and swallows darting around in front of you. It was a beautiful spring evening, and that is an arrival experience which is tough to match.

In any event, there I was in the dingy office. One overhead fluorescent bulb, white plaster walls with calendars and a map of China as decor, two messy desks and a bench, upon which I and my young colleague were sitting. This was the office of a local travel agency, and we were there to ask the manager (owner?) about tourism trends in the area. As the representative of a comparatively expensive foreign firm that usually works for locally important clients (and as a foreigner myself,) I am used to the honored guest routine - effusive welcomes, banquets, etc. However, it doesn’t really suit my personality, and so in this case I was delighted to find that my lowest-status interviewee was the least impressed by me. If she was surprised to find a foreigner in her office asking her questions about itineraries and source markets, she didn’t show it, and without being rude it was clear that she was doing us a favor by letting us try to pose her questions between phone calls (she had two cell phones and a land line,) text messages, questions from her staff, and furiously typing booking requests on her computer.

This was one of the experiences that gave me the strong impression that, at least in this corner of the country, there is no worldwide recession apparent. There may be big office vacancies in Shanghai, huge factory layoffs in Guangdong, worried policies issued weekly from Beijing, and sliding home prices in all the big cities, but in Hubei over and over we heard about not enough hotel rooms to fill demand, and everyone appeared to be too busy to pay attention to trouble elsewhere. Maybe that’s because the big wave of growth which has been transforming the coast for ten or fifteen years is just now hitting the hinterland - I saw lots of opportunities for infrastructure improvement, unlike in the Yangtze delta - or maybe it’s because it takes a while for this stuff to filter down, or maybe it’s because the stimulus spending is working. In any case, this part of the heartland is still booming.

Look, I am sorry to venture into the political, but I have felt a rant coming on and I can’t hold it back any more.

President Obama (still fun to type) ran on a ticket of being inclusive and bipartisan and all that, and it’s important to keep your campaign promises. Many people (my father included) think the partisan divide is a danger and really value Obama’s conciliatory instincts. I admire the sentiment, and normally I would share it. I don’t consider myself a partisan or even particularly liberal person any more.

But. The current times call for quick decision making and a firm direction. The Republican party had eight years in power, during which time they did everything possible to benefit themselves and their funders, to the express exclusion of the opposition party, and at the expense of the public good, a concept for which they appear to have an active contempt. They have wrecked virtually every major effort of government, foreign and domestic, in so spectacular and urgent a way that to modify policy to any degree simply to appease them (to any extent more than is necessary to pass the Senate) is itself an irresponsible and odious act.

Which is to say: Take the helm and go. You need one Republican vote in the Senate. Get it and don’t look back. Be partisan. Screw them.

So I’m walking down the street on the way to my bus stop a week or two ago, minding my own business and hurrying because I am late, as usual. Suddenly a length of thick rope appears around my ankles - I stop and look around, startled, and realize that the rope has come from above; a window washer has thrown it from the four or five story facade, aiming for his confederate just behind me, but through carelessness has almost hit me instead. At the same time I notice that the rope has a weight or hook at the end of it and that it would have clocked me but good, and this point I’m pretty mad. My rage is further fuelled by the fact that the guy’s partner on the ground, far from being appalled and apologetic, seems pretty nonchalant. “Goddamn!”* I swear in Chinese. “You almost killed me! You should be more careful!” I’m pretty sure I did not get this completely right. The guy laughs “No problem,”** amused at the foreigner sputtering, trying vainly to say something that will hit home and make him mad, too. I’m not the kind of guy who looks for fights, but at this point I take a step towards him: “You think this is funny?” He relents and gives me a completely insincere “sorry.”

At this point I realize I am screwed. There is nothing I can say which will not make me look stupider and further embellish the story he will tell to his mates later about the foreigner who got mad at him. I simply spin on my heel and walk away.

The moral is that you can’t swear in a foreign language, or at least you have to be damn good (so to speak.) I knew this before from having foreign friends who liked to incorporate English swear words into their patois, invariably getting the use, tone and/or spirit wrong and making themselves sound ridiculous. I think particularly of a Chinese friend who likes to say “Jeeeeeeeezus,” much too often. You’re much better off sticking to the facts and making your opinion clear from your tone of voice and body language.

*As near as I can make it.

**Can be one of the most infuriating phrases in Chinese, used as here to indicate that whatever objection you have raised is minor and unimportant. We heard it a lot during the house renovation.

I haven’t posted any staggering statistics recently, but not long ago the WSJ had a brilliant one:

“Much of the $586 billion stimulus package China unveiled this week will go toward building highways, railroads and airports. Already, according to official estimates, infrastructure spending had been increasing by an average of 20% annually for the past 30 years…” (Thanks to the Asia Logistics Wrap.)

It’s embarrassing that I had to ask a colleague who isn’t old enough to remember when Michael Jackson was cool how to calculate that number, but I did: An increase of 237 times since 1978 - incredible even if you assume that the 1978 number was something like the annual roads budget of Lorain, OH. Suffice to say that China has been building a lot of infrastructure in the last 30 years.

The result is that in the richer areas, China has infrastructure like a developed country - better, actually, since it’s all brand new. Roads, bridges, airports, subways, ports, a maglev… And as the WSJ article makes clear, all that stuff (except the maglev) has really helped people and the economy; it’s far easier to get around than it used to be, and producers have far more market opportunities than before.

But the big danger with big infrastructure is that it is subject to abuse for governments with something to prove, which is to say all of them. It’s so much easier to build another bridge than to address, say, a lousy health care system, or a retirement safety net, or anything “soft” or intangible. And then you can point to the bridge as proof that you’re doing something useful, even if you’re not. The danger is compounded when a booming economy has been masking bad decisions for a long time, and both America and China know something about that. And now the government has opened the floodgates of infrastructure spending in an effort to hold off the looming global recession, and I’m starting to get a bad feeling.

Today I was in one of the many small cities (190,00 population) of the Yangtze river delta. Their new city expansion zone, many square kilometers, was anchored by a boulevard that was at least 100 meters wide, with eight traffic lanes, three boulevards, and two bike/moped lanes. As a city-building piece it’s a disaster - what kind of buildings do you put on an urban street that’s wider than Park Avenue or the Champs Elysees, especially when you’re a county-level city in southern Jiangsu? - but it was intensively landscaped and really expensive, and this kind of excess can be found all over the place. The new 32 km Hangzhou Bay bridge, which does make sense to me, has at its center a five star hotel under construction - but who will stay there? Who is going to take the immense bridge/tunnel link across the Yangtze from Shanghai to Chongming island and Qidong, two small farm cities? I know the demographics of China are daunting - 20 million new urban residents every year, an economy that doubles in size every decade - but sometimes you have to wonder, is all this stuff really going to get used?

I buy the argument that the U.S. is in a “liquidity trap” in which people will not lend or spend no matter how low interest rates go (although I think the primary reason is not irrational fear but the fact that we don’t have any money) and I think infrastructure spending in America is a good idea and in many cases desperately needed. Ironically, I think it’s less likely to get wasted in the U.S. - the more “advanced” economy - because we’ve been cheaping out on it for so long. But in China, at least in the coastal regions that have been getting all the attention, I’m afraid the era of billion-yuan gold-plated knickknacks is upon us.

Ed: I am very gratified to see that the always excellent, actually qualified and serendipitally-named David Dollar, China economist for the World Bank, agrees with me. At least that’s how I choose to read it.

I’ve been watching the U.S. (and now the world) economy disintegrate with interest for some time. As I wrote to a friend, it’s like watching the house next door burn down: you feel for the owner, and you know it’s going to affect you personally, but at the time all you can do is watch the spectacle. We seem now to really have gone over the cliff; the housing crisis has become a financial crisis and a general panic, and events that would make the news for a week in ordinary times now come several to a day. Currency crashes, bank nationalizations, double-digit percentage declines, trading halts are normal things to us all now. The Times published a long list of stock market results for October so far, and the cumulative weight of all those numbers made me want to cry - or giggle. The U.S. at -26% was among the best off. There was was some thought that Asia and the developing world would be the beneficiary of America’s and the West’s implosion, but it seems clear now that, as before, they will actually be hit the hardest. (China excepted, for the moment.)

I’ve been trying to keep up with all the developments and feel like far from an expert, but I actually think a lot of the discussion is missing the point. So much effort is being made to restart the credit markets, encourage consumers, and support the housing market, but the reason we are in this mess is that too much credit was extended, consumers bought too much, and the housing market went too high. As we now know, gravity still exists and the only way to sustainably move forward is to bring these factors back into balance. We missed the chance to try to do the balancing in a controlled and humane way, and now we are getting nature’s version.

Of course, people and (especially) businesses who want to and can take on credit need to be able to do so, or we will have a depression, no mistake. Restarting the engine is part of controlling the dive - but let’s not spend any effort trying to maintain an altitude at which the plane will not fly.

Sometimes I like to pretend I live in the future. I’ve ridden the Shanghai maglev many times and always liked it, but lately I’ve been on it mostly at night when it doesn’t go as fast (limited to 300km/hr) and it’s dark out anyway. So yesterday afternoon when I took it on my way to the airport it was like a new experience again. When I got to the station I had just missed it, so I went up to the head of the platform to look for the next one. It appeared right on time, swinging around the big curve sleek and fast. It sure looks like the future. You can see as it gets close that there are no wheels; it appears to just slide over its concrete platform, and it makes a very satisfying metallic growl as it slows.

As a thrill ride the maglev suffers from the same problem as the TGV - the ride is so smooth and the acceleration so gradual that it takes a while for you to feel like you’re moving at all. But while the speeding-up process is deliberate, it just doesn’t stop, and eventually things start to flip by pretty fast. And then you start to realize what air pressure means for something going 300 km/hr on the ground, as the roar from the air rushing past picks up and the cabin starts to vibrate - and it keeps getting faster. Looking to the south the cars on the expressway flash by equally fast whether they come towards you or are moving in the same direction. At 400 km/hr several concrete telephone poles go by each second. It was a beautifully clear sunny autumn day, and I could see the giant container cranes at Wusong port far to the north. After just a few minutes at the top speed of 430 km/hr (there’s a prominent speedometer in the cabin for people to have their picture taken in front of) the deceleration process begins. At some point on the opposite track the train going in the opposite direction passes in one single loud whump. After another big gentle curve that now feels slow, though you’re still at 200 km/hr, you glide into the airport. 31 km in seven minutes on public transportation, and to my boyish mind, that’s the future.

As practical transportation the maglev has several faults. Its 15-20 minute headway introduces an unwelcome squishiness into your airport trip planning. But its primary fault, and the reason why it took big price slashes to get ridership to its current level, is the fact that it goes only from the airport to… nowhere in particular, Longyang Road in Pudong. It’s as if you built a maglev from JFK to Long Island City - worse, actually. So wherever you’re going, there is another lengthy trip ahead of you on subway or taxi, and if you are a group of more than one it won’t be cheaper than just taking a cab the whole way. But for me, travelling alone, it’s a little pleasure in the trip.

For me maglevs have always been part of the ideal future. When I was in fourth grade, our art teacher had us draw pictures of an imaginary city. I thought she wanted construction drawings, and I went way over time with an extremely precise plan showing streets, buildings, and a maglev. She had no idea what I was talking about (I had read about the German development program in Discover magazine) but seemed pleased by the result. So every time I ride the maglev now, there is in the back of my mind some wonder that I am actually living in the future that I imagined back then. It’s just a machine (although a train that floats on air at one third the speed of sound is some machine) but it gives a grown up guy faith that that things do change, there are some new things under the sun.

In this post I went on about how fabulous grapes are in China compared to America. But there are all kinds of produce, and China does not win every time. Grapes are far better here, and so are most tropical fruit, particularly mangos. I don’t think I ever had a mango until I came to Shanghai, at least not one worth remembering, and now I consider my youth and young adulthood a barren wasteland of mangolessness. A ripe mango is like the physical embodiment of happiness - a beautiful calm yellow-orange, deliciously fragrant, uncontrollably juicy.

Chinese apples, on the other hand, are usually disappointing. There’s essentially only one variety, vaguely Fuji-like (does one capitalize a strain of produce, I wonder,) sweet but with a tragic tendency towards mealiness. There is nothing like the bounty of Jonagolds, Galas, Granny Smiths, Macintoshes (my personal favorite,) Haralsons and Cortlands that we get in America - often orchard-fresh, at least where I lived in the north. Melons are a hard-fought draw, and I’ve had religious-ectasy-inducing peaches in both countries - perhaps a little more reliably here. China is innocent of the marvelous Florida grapefruit, but it does have the equally good youzi, a clearly related yet totally different fruit. (HIHO Shanghai and I used to get these in Chinese markets in New York. We had no idea what they were - she is a northerner too, and they didn’t get up to Manchuria during her childhood - so we called them “refreshing fruit.”)

But since it’s August I’m here to talk about corn. As a midwesterner, corn is central not only to my idea of a good diet but my idea of a good life. Unfortunately, Chinese corn is (sorry, love) not worth feeding to pigs. I usually avoid it because it looks like corn and smells like (overcooked) corn, but tastes like the gunk scraped off the bottom of a corn pot that has been used to cook ten batches in a row. It’s dark, very mealy and sort of bitter, so unlike the crisp sweet kernels of sugar corn that we coat with butter and suck up like there aren’t fields and fields of the stuff. I used to think that American corn was actually too sweet and not corny enough, but I’d give a lot to have some now.

One of the great things about New York - or any city where you are actually out on the street with other citizens/gangstas - are the random things you see and hear. Occasionally these are hilarious. I have many examples myself, but because I never had a place to record them, I have sadly forgotten them all. But Overheard in New York offers many examples which are just like the ones I have forgotten, except even better. Here are a few of my favorites:

Atlantic Ave Station
(random guy trips over three-year-old girl’s stroller)
Guy: Oops, I’m sorry, honey.
Three-year-old girl in stroller: Don’t call me honey!

Banana Republic, 86th & 3rd 
Upper-East-Side lady on cell: I know, but I was at a funeral all day…Yeah, it was sad, but I really didn’t know him at all…This saddest thing was seeing his daughters upset. They’re the same ages as–Wow! This shirt is only $19!! You can’t even buy a freaking Frappuccino for $19! I’m getting it in blue.

Crema Restaurante, 17th & 6th
Mother with little girl: Excuse me. My daughter wants to know if you’re a pirate.
Woman wearing bandana: No. I’m just a lesbian.

Brooklyn bound Q train
Small child in stroller: Mommy, why did you wake me up? Don’t wake me up when I’m sleeping!
Mom: Fine. I’ll leave you on the train and you can miss your stop and then the rats will get you.

B45 Bus
Bus driver: Everyone get on the bus, I got a schedule. For those of you sneaking on in the back, can you at least do it fast? I’ve got places to be.

N train, Astoria
Conductor: Never give up on life. Keep hope alive. This is 30th Avenue.

There it is, the whole city laid out in front of you. What a treasure.

One weird thing about being an armchair economist is that everything happens so slowly. I’m professionally kind of used to it, but it’s especially apparent these days as the U.S. economy rolls off a cliff in slow mo like a bad 70s car crash movie. Every time you check in it’s a little worse - oh look, there a door came off. And there goes a wheel.

This article from the Times puts it all very clearly: Real estate? Still falling. Jobs? Evaporating. Credit? Still getting tighter. Prices? Going up! But the scary thing is that everyone agrees that things have to get worse, maybe much worse, before housing prices and household credit are at something like normal levels and we can turn around and start building again. My favorite scare line was the estimate that we have enough new houses for the next two and a half years, without building a single new one. (I suspect that this is a deceptive average, and that there is still some demand in New York and Minnesota, to take two places at random, but enough housing stock in Florida and Las Vegas to last approximately forever. Just a guess.)

The Times has been pointing out for a while that not only are we likely to be in a recession, but that the preceding period of expansion wasn’t actually that great: most people’s real incomes have actually been declining since 1991. An earlier article that I lost the URL to said: “For a variety of reasons that economists only partly understand — including technological change and global trade — many workers have received only modest raises in recent years, despite healthy economic growth.” I ain’t no E-conomist, but I think this isn’t actually that tricky. The reason why American workers aren’t getting raises is that technological change and global trade have made it a lot easier to use foreign workers, so jobs are going or are threatening to go overseas, and the real wages of workers worldwide is going up while wages here are stagnating. Or so I thought, and lo and behold How the World Works has just brought out a Goldman Sachs report that agrees. Because I live in one of the places where real wages used to be very low but have been going way up, I tend to see this as a good thing, though of course if you’re an American worker who has been enjoying earning a lot more than pretty much everyone else for the last century or so, it sucks.
Classical economists are on my side, because the winners (Chinese and Indian workers, and of course the global capitalists who are getting them work) could compensate the losers (American workers) and still come out ahead, leaving everyone with more, er, utils. In reality of course this never happens, the winners go to the bank and losers get poor. And if you try and make the winners share a little they whine about global competitiveness. In this case there is a little turnabout at work too, because when American labor was on top how hard did it it work to make capitalists and the US government compensate the rest of the world? That record unfortunately is clear.
And I must be getting old and conservative, because I sense a lot of entitlement loss in America from ordinary people. I read this from Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown from an older How the World Works (quoted in turn from the Nation):

“…There’s a company called American Standard, they make toilets, plumbing fixtures, you’ll see them in near any public restroom anywhere. They’re in Tiffin, Ohio, town of 20,000. They’ve just announced back around 3 months ago, the closing of the plant. It was bought by some investors, they’re moving offshore, they’re honoring the union contract as far as they have to, which is those who already have their 30 years. If you have less than 30 you’re pretty screwed — they give you something, but you can’t get to the 30 years because they close the plant.”

This is hard for the workers and for the town, but “screwed” is a pretty powerful word to use when people are honoring the contract and the worst you can say about them is that they won’t guarantee you the chance to work there for 30 years. 30 years! To me this has the same ring to it as clauses stating how many hogsheads of ale the lord will get from the village, it’s just not credible in the world I see around me.

Here’s something new: Since June 1, you no longer get plastic bags when shopping in China. (The complete policy is given here, but the short version is that shops may not give out free bags, and plastic under .025 mm thick is banned altogether.) My personal take on the rule after a week or so: AWESOME! Twice recently I was out shopping, bought a couple of things, and didn’t get a bag. In one case I was with the baby and actually asked for one and was turned down. In both cases adjustment was easy and painless; it turned out I didn’t need a bag after all.

To me, this is one case where government fiat makes a lot of sense. You can take the fate of the world on your shoulders and be the only weirdo in town carrying around a canvas bag (and trying to get every salesperson not to give you three plastic ones.) But it’s a pain and there’s always the nagging suspicion that you’re not affecting a damn thing, and eventually you stop. At least, that was my story. Or, the government says, we use 3 billion plastic bags a day which requires 37 million barrels of oil a year, and that seems excessive, so just stop. And that’s it.
Nobody familiar with the giant accumulation of plastic in the Pacific Ocean can doubt that we have to get rid of disposable plastic as soon as possible. My personal hope is that the plastic bag ban will be like the smoking bans I have seen take effect - it seems like the end of the world and there’s all kinds of histrionics, but when it actually takes effect everyone realizes that things are just like they were before, except much better. And the rest of the world will soon follow.

P.S. It’s nice to see China taking the lead in an environmental matter. Lord knows it needs the press - not that I’ve seen any.