Today I started form the bottom and now I'm here. With a local friend of a friend as my guide I ventured down into the Yellow Dragon Caves (黄龙洞). According to People's Daily, legend has it that a dragon actually lived in the caves at one point. From the size of the caves, I could see how the primitive man could draw this conclusion. Normally the caves are lit up with LED lights of all colors. While this was true for part of our journey, the power in the caves kept failing, forcing us to use our phones as light sources if we wanted to continue on. One old man became our caving buddy after he, somewhat rightly in my opinion, assumed the caves would be lit so didn't bring an extra light. It was interesting to see the caves as ancient humans once did, as in hardly see them at all. After a quick lunch we headed off to the Buzzfeed famous Glass Bottom Bridge that spans the Zhangjaijie Grand Canyon. Before we could enter, we had to fight with the staff to get my student discount. The normal reason for rejecting foreign students for the student discount is they don't have a student ID from a Chinese university. Much to their surprise, I actually have a Chinese student ID so they gave me the discount. While Buzzfeed liked to show images of terrified young Chinese women grasping to the steel for dear life, that wasn't the case. The Israeli engineers and architects who made the Glass Bottom Bridge made it feel super secure. Other than me, the Bridge consisted of entirely happy Chinese people of all ages taking fun photos. The large number of people on the bridge helped add to the sense of security. Finally, there is also less glass on the world's longest glass bottom bridge than you would think. After getting back to Wulingyuan, where my hotel is, and parting ways I had some not bad duck noodles. They only cost 13RMB, or about 2USD, so almost anything would have been not bad. But the noodles I got were actually pretty good.
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Last night I went to see a Water Puppet show at the Lotus Water Puppet Theater in Hanoi. While the show was clearly meant for foreigners, they had English language narration explaining the Vietnamese songs, it was still fun and an interesting way to spend the night. It should be noted though that the narrator had a bad case of Engrish and was actually kind of hard to understand. The puppets, with the music, had a surprisingly large emotional range. While some puppets did the usual slap-stick puppet comedy thing, the phoenixes were able to tell a simple love story, the turtle was able to tell the sword story from day one, and the unicorns were able to be playful all while actually beaning painted hunks of wood in a shallow pool. The pool itself was used for simple special effects. If I was a young Vietnamese kid 100 years ago I would have been very impressed by the show. The whole show felt somewhat out of time, like little Vietnamese kids at some point in a history use to watch the same show and experience the same feelings. Overall I enjoyed the water puppet show.
Even though I was trying to get away from the communism I couldn’t help thinking of Milan Kundera’s The Joke (a book about the problems of communism) when Jaroslav talks about reviving traditional Moravian folk music. In the beginning of the novel he talks about righting new folk music about the joys and greatness of communism. By the end of the book, Jaroslav realizes how much of an oxymoron “new folk music” actually is. The book concludes that folk culture is folk culture because it is made over generations organically so is always old; any attempts to make new folk culture will fall flat because it can’t be created organically, some entity, in The Joke’s case the party, created it. While the theater is preserving water puppetry, water puppetry is not an evolving art form so no new water puppet shows will be created. It is time for Jared In China to go on a vacation I think I deserve. Thanks to my massive winter break and Asian budget airlines Jared in China will now become Jared in China in Other Places... I did not think that name through when I started this blog... The first leg of my extra adventure is Hanoi, Vietnam. I am now sitting in a coffee bar in Shanghai's Pudong Airport (PVG) waiting for Vietnam Airlines to let me check my bag, so it goes. Vietnam should be cool, I have heard good things about the food (a theme that is very common with my blog).
I started my study abroad study abroad from The Shanghai Maglev train. If you need to go to PVG this is an experance I might skip. It is not that maglev trains aren't rad, because they are, but because it is way to hard to get to the Shanghai Maglev to be a useful method of transportation for most. I spend about an hour trying to get my luggage through the subway system, and experance I also can't recommend, for about 7 minutes on the maglev train itself. I can confirm though, the train goes 301km/h and the ride is smooth. I don't believe there is too much of a cost or time savings between the subway to maglev and the taxis. If the Municipality built a longer line to connect the airports and some of the big hotel areas, I could recommend it, but until then it is a skip. Also, if you hear anyone tell you that China will take over the world because maglev, tell them for me that they are dead wrong. Today, I had to go to Shanghai’s outlying industrial districts to put some items in storage. The only eventful thing that happened dealing with the storage was that I could do everything in English, including signing the contract. I did though get some time to walk around the neighborhood before returning to campus. While I am not wholly sure where in the City I was it was very clear that this area was established under Mao. First, many of the shops and homes had the look of buildings built by workgroups under Mao. From everything I have read, architecture under Mao’s China was a dying art and that is plain to see looking at some of the buildings. The other thing Mao tried to do in Shanghai, that I believe wherever I was had a part in, was turn Shanghai from, as the good Marxists say, a city of feudalists, imperialists, and consumption to a city of production. Factories and other large industrial buildings, like storage centers, were all over the place. While Mao would probably be pleased that there is so much production going on and that many of the factories are relatively new, he might not have been too happy about how they were built. Many of the factories were joint-ventures between a Chinese company and a foreign company. My storage center proudly flew the Bundesflagge und Handelsflagge, the German flag, the factory across the street flew the Stars and Stripes, the American flag right alongside the Five-star Red Flag of the Chinese state. The last interesting thing was that right along the factories was small family farms, a rather strange combo.
Today my China's Economic Impact class took a field trip to the Skoda-Volkswagen factory in Shanghai. Unforntually my pictures are really lame since they didn't let us take photos on the factory floor. Anither key thing to note is that China bans car foreign car companies from wholly owning factories in the country, they must have a Chinese partner; Volkswagen chose Chinese car makers Skoda as their 50/50 partner in China. Other than the picture thing it was a cool field trip. We watched what amounted to a five minute Skoda and Volkswagen commercial before bring driven through the plant on these electric tour cards. As someone who grew up watching How It's Made on Discovery Channel was having a great time. We saw the body shop, press shop, and the assembly shop but we weren't aloud into the paint shop for safety reasons. While the plant did have a food number of robots, a large amount of the tasks were still done by people people. Most of the cars produced in this factory seem bound for the Chinese and Asian markets. The ever present eye of the Communist Party was visible in this center of proletarian indudtural production. I wish we got to spend a bit more time in the factory and I wish we could actually talk to the engineers or the workers. I also wish our tour guide was a bit louder, I had a hard time hearing her. I had a great time though, I don't know if anyone else was as happy being there as me but I really didn't care.
Yesterday as part of the Global Business Project at ECNU I got to go to the Shanghai Bank Museum and stop by one of ICBCs management branches. The Museum itself was actually rather well put together. There were a good number of diaramas, electronics, and actual artifacts. The artifacts though might get stale if you arn't really into banknotes, which fortunately I am. The Museum did have a very modern and very Shanghai focus. They briefly mentioned the money shops of Northern China that represented the early Chinese banking system and they had one diorama of a pawn shop, perhaps the oldest and most universial form of lending. The story of the Bank Museum really starts post-Opium War with the, as the Chinese say, Unfair Treaty of Nanjing. A great deal of time was spent talking about HSBC, one of the major British banks founded in Shanghai, and the Imperial Bank of China, the first Chinese owned comerical bank, who were both based on the Bund in Shanghai. Furthermore, the also spent a good deal of time talking about the problems caused by the Nationalist's management of the financial system. I think this is an attempted dig at Taiwan, where the old Nationalist Republic of China still rules. Interesting everything post-Civil War was put into one section, both the Capatlist banking system of Deng Xiaoping and the Marxist banking system of Mao Zedong. The oddnesses of Mao's Marxist banks, or more properly bank since the People's Bank of China served as the one comercial bank, central bank, and Ministry of Finance at the time, was unmentioned even though they had a lot of artifacts form the early days of the People's Bank of China. The Museum also had a tempeory exhibit on triditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, with all the art shown having a running theme of frugality. We then walked to one of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's (ICBC) management branches. Funnly enough for a day about banking, this walk took us past the meeting place of the first Congress of the Communist Party of China. When we arrived I found that the ICBC branch was nice, the employees we talked to were happy, and the frut provided was nice, but I also found that ICBC is obviously a Party controlled institution. When you first walk in the flag you see next to the reception desk is not the flag of the Chinese Nation, it is the Party's good old red hammer and sickle (☭☭☭) flag. There were also posters from the Party bairing the hammer and sickle in plane view of the reception area. Finally, the confrence room we were taken to had a Chinese state and the Party's flag on the podium. The meeting with the ICBC staff went well and they did give me my favorate Chinese fruit to take home who's name I am still not sure of. Overall, it was an interesting day of banking and comradeship.
In their immortal song CREAM, the Wu Tang Clan rapped “cash rules everything around me.” If you have ever attempted to make a large purchase in China you would find that the Chinese are big Wu Tang fans. As I have previously complained about on this blog, China is a cash society. While this is normally not an issue when dealing with small every day transactions, larger transactions, like a semester’s worth of housing fees are an issue. Frontally, my Mom was able to arrange a game of phone tag between her, Paul of American Express, and myself. As I sat under the ever watchful statue of Chairman Mao, Paul was able to get an American Express partner company in Wisconsin to send a money gram to an ICBC branch about a 45 minute walk away from campus. Unlike some American banks, Chinese banks are only open during regular business hours so today was the only day this week my class schedule and the bank’s opening hours lined up. While I would like to say this process was painless, it was not. The address provided was not actually correct, I was taken to the branch’s general area before I had to use my GPS’s search feature to actually find the place. Once there, I bungled my Chinese so bad the staff just spoke to me in English. Actually transferring the money posed its own problems, first Amex could only send a money gram in US dollars so the cash had to be converted to Yuan and ICBC would only let me transfer the money if I had an ICBC account. I spent about an hour in the bank waiting in line, opening an account, accepting the money gram, converting the money to Remminbi, before finally being allowed to clean out my new account so I can get the cash I need to pay for my room. I also feel the need to mention that this process was not digitized at all, I think I murdered at least three tress with all the paper it took to complete my transaction. The walk back to campus was an interesting experience. I was able to hide the 210 grumpy Mao Zaidongs in my jacket to keep them safe until I got back to campus. Even though just carrying around large amounts of cash money to pay bills is a thing in China, it was no less nerve-racking. Now though, I have a place to stay next semester, took a nice if long walk, and got to take some great rapper photos with my stacks of cash. I only wish there was a system in place that does not force people to carry around enough cash money to put Snoop Dogg and T-Pain’s night out to shame.
Note: I am unable to actually post my selfies at this time, no idea why. Today I made another attempt to pay for my room. It is not that I don't have the money, it is just that ECNU doesn't seem to accept any form of payment other than cash. Using a credit card in China is extremely difficult, almost no one takes them. Debit cards aren't much better, only a few places and the ATMs accept visa cards. It is completely normal just to have several thousand US dollars worth of physical Renminbi lying around so you can get to paying for what ever largish purchase you need to make. I heard this steams from the Chinese people's aversion to using credit for anything, as it is seen as spending money you don't have, and the lack of access to credit in China. What is interesting though is that China's mobile banking system is really advanced. The most common convenient payment method are the mobile payment systems like Alipay or WeChat Pay. China's mobile payment systems are actually more advanced the America's and are far more commonly used. Most places, including the ENCU cafeteria and many of the street venders, accept ether Alipay or WeChat Pay. For smaller payments it is actually more common to use a mobile payment system than cash, credit, or debit. Skipping steps on the development ladder is actually very common. The average Chinese had very little capital until Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in the 1980s, so only really needed little bits of cash to get by. By the time many Chinese had enough money do demand a more convenient payment system, mobile payment was already invented so they must embraced that. We see similar patterns in Africa where, once the population started demanding phones, cellphones were already invented so it just made more sense to build an advanced cell system than a old school land line system.
Last week in my Globalization and Urbanization class we took another fieldtrip, this time to the still unfinished West Bund area. The West Bund is kind of like Thames Town in a way, it is built for significantly more people than are actually there. Unlike Thames Town, I believe the West Bund has more of a chance at being a success. The Shanghai municipal government is trying to make the West Bund an art and finance center, frankly it seems like they are defiantly doing that. The only things that are actually really open in the West Bund are a few fancy restaurants and a massive number of privately owned art museums. I previously went to the Yuz Museum to see the OverPop, Andy Warhol Shadows, and the Audemar Piguet shows. I found the Museum a bit too modern for my taste but the Warhol show was interesting just for how much of the same Warhol print they had in one place. The Audemar Piguet show was also kind of fun. The museum we tried to get into on this trip, the Long Art Museum, was actually horrifically expensive and did not offer a student rate so we did not end up actually going in. Walking around along the river was still fun though, just because it is so rare you see barely used infrastructure on the scale that exists in the West Bund. I can recommend actually going to the West Bund, although it may be more fun to go in a few years it is defiantly still interesting now.
With the election results still undecided I was on the look out for potential homes in Shanghai to potentially move to. Luckily for me, my Globalization and Urbanization in China class took a field trip to Thames Town, a relatively new housing development built in Shanghai's Songjang District (松江区)that still has a high vacancy rate. Thames Town was built as part of the former mayor of Shanghai's One City Nine Towns plan; basically the idea was to build nine suburban towns in the outlying districts of Shanghai all themed around a foreign location to feed Shanghai's appetite for real estate. Only four of them were actually built: Italian Town, Dutch Town, German Town, and Thames Town. If you can guess from the name, Thames Town was meant to look British, but even with my basic knowledge of the UK it does not feel very British at all (If you want to see the UK you can check out my friend's study abroad blog here), actually the German students in my class said it felt more like a German town than a British town. While Thames Town has everything you want in little town like a book store, elementary school, restaurants, and even church, it feels largely abandon save for the statues of famous British figures like Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, and someone who is totally not James Bond. Due to the high vacancy rate of the homes, most of the people walking around weren't residents, their was a large number of Chinese tourists and an ever larger number of couples taking Western style wedding photos with the one church. The Thames Town Church is actually one of the more famous sites in the development simply because of how strange it is. Most Chinese aren't very religious, those who are religious are mostly a mix of Eastern religions, the relatively small number of ethnically Chinese Christians (still about 100 million people though) are mostly members of underground churches who can't own large formal buildings, the small number of ethnically Chinese Christians who are members of the three official Christian Churches tend not to live in largely abandon suburban developments. When we went in the Church we got to see the (yes the, as in one) worshipper. The building didn't even seem like it was ever meant to be used for worship, it didn't have a congregation until relatively recently, it still does not seem to have any Bibles, and the 10 year old stained glass is already starting to lose its color. Our last stop was an actually rather lovely book store that seemed to be the only lively part of town. If I lived in Thames Town I could actually see having a coffee in one of their four very nice coffee shops, strangely most of the books were arranged in no particular order so I think it would be difficult to actually buy a book to read. I guess the big question is, if I had to move to Shanghai would I set up shop in Thames Town? No actually, the houses cost the same amount per square foot as down town Shanghai, it has no public transportation hook up, and their is nothing going on. With Shanghai's need for new real estate I guess at some point Thames Town will be filled and then it might actually be a nice place to live and once the real estate bubble bursts in urban China then the houses might actually be affordable, but until that point I would skip moving into Thames Town. I guess at some point with Shanghai's need for new property and the urban Chinese real estate bubble eventually bursting people might move in and Thames Town might be a nice place to live, until then I would not recommend moving in.
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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