You arrive in Beijing’s expecting hordes of bicyclists passing in front of a giant portrait of Mao.  There are hordes of people, but not many bicycles. Instead, there is a constant stream of new cars including the occasional Ferrari and Lamborghini. Some say that the eyes in Mao’s portrait follow you as you walk into the Forbidden City. I am not sure about that, but there can be no doubt about the security cameras that blanket Tiananmen Square with their ever watchful gaze. Thousands of Chinese tourists, maybe tens of thousands, are lined up to view Mao’s mausoleum, even more are entering the Forbidden City to take a peek at China’s historical center of power while the real center of power, the headquarters of the Party, is just a few blocks away with its gates heavily guarded. Welcome to the New China.

They say you can see the Great Wall from Space, and I don’t know that that’s true either, but it is more likely you can see the new Global Center Mall in Cheng du, supposedly the largest in the world. Inside the mall, in addition to retail space, restaurants, an IMAX movie theatre, and an ice rink, there are also multiple hotels and a super-sized water park. Yes, a water park. Complete with multi-story water slides and a beach with man-made waves. The New China.

What is the New China? The New China is a growing middle class, just learning to travel and spend money. In the New China 100 million Chinese go on vacation for their Golden Week. Over five million go to Shanghai to Nanjing Street and the Bund, millions more to Guilin to see the Li River’s karst mountains. Everywhere there are massive crowds. Cities of 20 million people are commonplace. River tours on the Li River seem like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, with a chain of identical ships carrying passengers through limestone mountains.

There seems to be little no appreciation or actual knowledge of Chinese history and culture. They crowd into ersatz historical streets designed to look like traditional China, but filled with knock-offs and tacky souvenirs. The terracotta warriors are just another opportunity to hop on a tour bus and follow a guide with a flag and microphone. Of course if there are two American girls there, it is a photo opportunity.

The family tree has been inverted. Instead of one ancestor with many decedents, each “only child” now has a pyramid of parents and grandparents. Grandparents are forced to retire in their 50s and sit around in parks playing hacki-sack and mah jong. Often they can be seen with their young grandchildren as the parents need to work to afford outrageously expensive rent or to buy a car (which they aren’t allowed to drive one day a week due to overcrowded streets). In touring China, nothing was a clearer sign of a foreigner than a sibling. The Chinese now recognize that the one child policy is a train wreck waiting to happen – actually it’s already happening. The government has been pushing pension and retirement funding into private sector for the past decade which means that each child will soon need wages (or bribes) sufficient to support six dependents as the parents and grandparents live longer into retirement. On the other hand, with severe over population, the policy still seems a necessity at least for a few more years.

Among all the crowds, the pushing and the tackiness, a few things shine. Impressions of Sanjie Liu, an exquisite performance, shows what you can do with 600 performers (abundant labor supply) and the Li River (incredible natural resources) as a stage. It links the past and present of China together and demonstrates China’s potential. Cheng du, a city of some 20 million people has preserved its culture of tea houses and hot pot, while sporting a super-efficient subway system. Cars, buses, scooters and bicycles move together in harmony in this tech focused city.

More than anything, China is a country on the move. New buildings are going up everywhere. There is an excitement associated with a whole generation leaving the countryside and moving to the cities. Everywhere there is the energy of possibility. As the US struggles with the two-party system deadlocked over paying our bills, China’s one-party system even with its inbred corruption, seems extremely efficient. While the lack of freedom is grating (Facebook and Google were banned) most Chinese seem to accept the limitations as the price for progress. It is hard to say what is next, but it is clear that the New China will be at the center of the next century.

The trip to the testing center was more of an adventure than we had hoped for.

Testing is scheduled for 9am we were targeting to get there by 8:30.
Our plan was to leave at 7:30 and take a taxi. If that didn’t work we would take the subway, which might take about an hour.

We left the apartment at 7:45, running a bit late, but still with plenty of time for an anticipated half hour taxi ride.

After a few minutes we flagged down a taxi, we realized that we needed to look for the red “for hire” sign. We got in the cab and handed him the name of the testing center and the map. In broken English he said he didn’t understand and couldn’t help us.
Panic begins to set in as we realize we don’t have directions in Chinese to give to the driver.

Fortunately a few minutes later a cab stops and an Asian woman gets out. We ask her to give directions to the taxi driver. She does, but he won’t go to Kowloon, because his shift is ending. She does write down the directions for us in Chinese.

As it is now getting close to 8am we are really worried. We start walking toward the train station, but recognize that that would be futile. Happily within a few steps we get a taxi driver who understands the directions and agrees to take us.

Through much traffic, a tunnel and my wifi not working so I can’t track our progress, we get to the testing center at 8:30. We make our way up to the fifth floor and find the testing room, which looks closed. After a more minutes of searching we find the real waiting room. I look on the board and the girls names are listed. What a relief.
It also turns out that the other students at the testing center are taking tests for financial mathematics and actuarial modeling. I feel like posting a job description.

A nice English speaking Asian man comes out from the office and asks if we are there for the ERB. He says we can start early and finish early. The girls go in and get started in a nice testing room. It has video surveillance of every single station.

Someone is probably reading this over my shoulder as I type.

–Andy

It’s Golden Week here in China. Apparently even the WSJ posted a story about the traffic jams that result when a nation of 1.4 billion people are on holiday. Of course, Golden Week doesn’t mean everyone is excused from work. The farmers are busy harvesting rice from the golden fields and anyone in the tourism business, a growing segment of the Chinese economy, is working overtime.

For the past three days we have been in Guilin. An area of southern China known for its karst mountain landscape. Lauren was here in March and liked the area despite being sick so I had a feeling it would be especially nice. It was.

Our first day we drove to the top of a series of rice terraces in Longsheng. The people here have been farming these terraces for more than 1000 years. Next we boarded a boat (along with dozens of other tourists) heading down the Li River. Andy got a kick out of watching the parade of boats and their tourists photographing everything. We met a nice couple from Boston who have traveled extensively so we enjoyed the scene together as we made our way to Fuli. After lunch, we took a bike ride through farming villages and then drove to Yangshou. Yangshou is a resort town and people from all over southern China were coming here to holiday, making West Street a throng of people. The best thing about Yanshou for us was a show staged by Sanjie Lu the Director of the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony called “Impressions”. It was the telling of a love story and featured a stunning set design – its stage set within the Li River and the karst mountains lit behind – and a perfectly choreographed and synchronized cast of 400 actors.

Today marks a break for us. We booked our Beijing to Guilin trip at a tourists’ pace with three days in each place. Moving around this often was fine and we enjoyed what we saw but we are ready to get back to the slower pace and deeper experiences. We land shortly in Shanghai where there is a more open internet policy and for the next seven days I will have access (hopefully) to WordPress to post this and upload photos, perhaps even read the NYT.

Our love from the road…

We were lucky.

We arrived Beijing late on the Friday holiday and traffic into town was mild, our courtyard hotel inside a hutong area was on a street that didn’t smell terrible, the corner Chinese restaurant was quite good, and for the following two days we had partly sunny/cloudy with a chance of meatballs. What pollution? It was like LA in the early 80s; thin layer of gunk but mostly OK. Like I said; we were lucky.

Our first day was a bit rough. All of China is on short holiday. This means that everyone who can is traveling. Those who came to Beijing from the countryside are going home to visit family and those who live in the countryside have come to see Chairman Mao’s mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. The line of people, whose form was loosely managed by ropes and soldiers in a serpentine pattern, must have stretched over one mile. The lucky ones will reach the front of the line before noon when it closes. If they don’t reach the front in time, they will race to enter the Fobidden City and jam into the largest palace in the world.

We made our way through the Forbidden City and its throngs of people with their pushing, elbowing and spitting.  I actually had to push back to keep one woman from knocking me over!  By the end, I understood why Lauren, who had been here in March, advised that we spend no more than three days in Beijing.

The Summer Palace was more pleasant. A large lake area, paddle boats, dragon ferry boats, people holidng hands and ambling along the bridges and trails up to the Palace. People stopping us to take pictures with our two girls (more on that later). There was space to move around and to appreciate the landscape and the history.

We were guided that first day by Jerry. Jerry is smart and very informative about Chinese history and the modern China. It was a very pleasant refresher course from the ancient civilizations course one might have taken in high school with discussions of culture, economics, politics, uprisings, migration and assimilation. We capped off the day with Peking Duck at Dadong, a modern china place with good food and mostly decent wine by the glass. (I am missing my wine collection right about now. There is no sake here and I just don’t like beer.)

Day two in Beijing was spent on our own with a morning walk along Behai lake, haggling in the market (pearl market) and photographing “snack street” and it’s scorpions, starfish, and even seahorses on kebab. (I thought of you Kim P – you would have been so sad to see these seahorses.)

Our third and final day was spent at the Great Wall. The Mutiayu section was visited by “Billy Boy” says our new guide, Tim. Apparently the Chinese liked Bill Clinton very much.Tim is funny and presents us with a slide show of how the westerners and Chinese are different – a tongue in cheek comparison of our ideologies and lifestyles: western old people walk their dogs, Chinese old people walk their grandchild (singular); western people go to a party and talk in small groups all equal, Chinese people stand in a circle with the boss in the middle.

To get to the wall we drive 45 minutes, stopping for lunch along the way, and then take a cable car up from the valley to the wall. We spend the next three or four hours walking the wall, listening to Tim’s comedy routine interlaced with actual history and social commentary. Lauren and Rose scrambled on ahead and went until the wall was more like mud and broken stones – the unrefurbished section.

We stopped at a cloisonné factory to kill time on the way to the airport. It turned out to be a nice little stop. The factory manager showed us the process for making cloisonné (pound and solder pieces together, hand lay the wire, drop paint and glaze into the designs, fire at 1000 degrees, fix any discoloration, fire again and again, polish twice, overlay the gold leafing (top secret so won’t show that step) and voila! your bowl, vase or bracelet is finished.

Another 45 minutes drive with Tim to the airport. On the whole, the Chinese people are happy he said. From what I can see here in Beijing, that seems about right.

Off to Xi’an…