I put off for a long time to write about my trip to China, despite some friends’ request. They don’t know how despaired I am from this trip. I am in total despair, knowing that it is impossible for me to do what I want to do (Open Source Learning) in China. But coming back to the states, I am again faced with another impossibility: to learn English and American culture while having no free control of my time. It is one billion times more difficult to do what I want to do in China than in US. It is also one billion times more difficult for me to learn of American culture and society without free control of my time. I have to choose a place to base my activities. It is a very difficult decision. I am supposed to spend a lot of time to go back and forth between these two countries to figure this out. But I don’t even have the time to do that. This is my dilemma. What I know is that doing this in China will be a lot of struggles and a lot of pains, but it is a life. Doing this in US is totally another kind of pain. It is pain of no life, or painless pain.
Economically speaking, like everyone coming back from China said, it is of great difference from 9 years ago. For manufacturing capacity, now China can produce cars fully domestically (not relying on import of parts). (9 years ago, we couldn’t even build our own cars.) And a new line to make airplanes is about to be built this year. China still lacks in the ability to make sophisticated instruments such as medical instruments.
All these progress is not surprising to me. And I have expected this kind of change 9 years ago according to the progress then. It is a solid progress, but not much to boast of. There are still a lot of things that China cannot build. And the product from China is still mainly of lower skill levels. US is still the dominate manufacturing country of the world. http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2007/05/23/the_us_is_still_the_worlds_big/ People who have more data on this matter can comment on this.
The coastal cities are a lot more developed. All my friends are living a much better life than mine in America (But that might just be because I am burning myself in America). But my feeling is that if you put all the money in the few big cities, you can make these big cities as pretty as you want. I didn’t have time to travel to rural areas of China, so I cannot really comment on this. But I did pick a new expression in the Chinese language. People now like to talk about “the first tier cities” (referring to the four big cities in China), and the second tier cities (a dozen smaller cities in China). It sounds like a new class system. It sounds like that all the cities other than the first tier and the second tier don’t exist.
About the prices of merchandises in China, if it is of really good quality, it is about the same price as US. But people in China are buying them with lower salary. I learned of this when buying clothing and eye glasses in China. For the communication fee, the cost is about the same level as the cost in US. But people in China is paying for that with a lot less salary. There are a lot more variety of products in the store. I guess it might be because of more people there.
People in Beijing are dressed very well and clean. With the clean and bright subway cars, I guess this is what Japan and Korea are like.
E-commerce seems to be starting. Online shopping is made easier. Credit card usage doesn’t seem to be popular, but it is available. Other means of payment for online shopping are available and seem to be more preferred.
My friend in Shanghai was able to quickly find a pharmacy store nearby using his cell phone.
As far as I have gathered, there seems to be more protection of the poor, such as social security welfare. The disabled people are more taken care of. As I witnessed on a subway in Beijing, people’s responses to the disabled people begging for money on the subway are similar to people’s responses in New York. No one stared at their disfigured faces. Quite some people have generosity to give money to the disabled. I felt quite glad to see that.
About going green, I saw solar panels on top of very regular apartment buildings in Beijing. And the street lights are powered by solar panels. The cars have to take breaks during the week to go on the roads (I don’t remember how many days break a week). The plastic bags are almost completely eliminated. I couldn’t see plastic bags in the super market. You have to pay quite some significant amount of money to buy a plastic bag.
What put me into total despair is that the market place of ideas is dormant. The media is dead. The internet is stupid (interrupted services of google.com and wikipedia, no access to all the major blogging sites such as livejournal and wordpress. The largest open source site sourceforge.org used to be baned, but the ban is lifted now. If you want to access internet in the internet cafes, you have to show your id and register.). The challenge and hope of the world is whether the west and the east can truly learn from each other and reinvent itself in the new age. I am seeing this going on in the states. But in China, it is becoming more and more dormant. China was forced to adopt the western system in the past. But now with our humiliated history long past, people don’t have the urgency to learn from the west anymore. People’s energy is only allowed to be expressed in making money. This is not healthy.
9 years of absence from China is a very long time. What I found out during this trip is that as I was trapped in my endless struggle in America, many bad things have happened to my loved ones in China. I feel very bad that I wasn’t there to prevent those things from happening. What I feared the most have already happened. My life is already screwed up. What I have lost is tantamount to killing myself.
You cannot imagine how much I have sacrificed for coming to America. However, I don’t consider it a sacrifice since on a deeper level I know this is what I chose to do for my life. I put myself into a position of slave and a very long extended period of extreme solitude in order to do Open Source Learning and Grassroots Web in America. Many of you are fans of Obama. I wish you can tell me what he has sacrificed for America? There are a lot of people in the grassroots community doing real sacrifices. If you want to give your trust to a politician, you have to ask what he has sacrificed personally. Otherwise you will just have your trust cast in vain since he is not going to make any personal sacrifice to do what need to be done in America. As he is your president, I don’t deserve to live in America as a free person.
