The View From Above

I rose early in the morning and went to Lijiang Airport for a flight to Guilin via Chengdu and Xi'an. This seemed somewhat reckless given our previous experiences with air travel in China, but the day was shot anyway, and it did offer the promise of lots and lots of miles for a comparatively low price. I was pretty sure that at the worst I'd only have to reroute a little, so I took the plunge. This was of course ignoring one of Murphy's best known corollaries: "whenever there are different ways things could go wrong, the most inconvenient one will unfailingly occur." The first two planes were both three hours late, but of course the third was perfectly on time and I had to wait for a much later flight, which brought me to Guilin airport after midnight. I could have reached Sydney by then, but, hey, at least it gave me time to work on the blog.

Weirdly, the most memorable moment of my day was the view of soot-covered Chengdu pictured above. Despite all the good times we'd had down there a week before, I was very, very glad for the air scrubbers sitting between my lungs and what thirty million people breathe every day.

It is almost impossible to overstate how in-your-face China's economic growth is. Besides the blazing lights and extreme pollution in all inland cities, the most astonishing thing is the amount of construction work that is constantly going on everywhere. I’ve read once that one fourth of all the world's high construction cranes are in China, a figure I could not confirm but which I have no difficulty believing. This is mostly from private, and often foreign, investment, but the public works are the most staggering. Not only is China huge, but its current combination of sustained economic growth, high savings rate and centralized government allows infrastructure building on a scale never seen before anywhere in the world. As previously mentioned, every city we visited had at least six metro lines under construction, but that's barely scratching the surface. All airports are incredibly modern and undergoing extension and renovation. Railways are even more impressive. China is currently constructing a 13,000 km network of 42 high speed passenger lines. Almost none of it is currently operating, but when completed in 2012 – yes, that is indeed three years from now -  it will be, according to Wikipedia, "larger and technologically more sophisticated than the rest of the world's high speed rail track combined."

Don't think for an instant that China's geography makes building such a network in any way easy. Overcoming just one trifling hurdle required building the Weihe Grand Bridge, world's longest at 80 km, twice as long as any American bridge, four times as long as Portugal's Vasco da Gama bridge in Portugal. If everything goes well, China will additionally build a rail line all across Eurasia, paying for the whole thing in exchange for mineral wealth from the traversed countries and putting Beijing only two days away from London by rail.

China, and Asia in general, are changing the world at a pace that Westerners are not even remotely acclimated to. In 1940, the three longest bridges in the world were all in the United States (California's Golden Gate bridge, New York's George Washington bridge, and the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Wahington state.) Today, fifteen of the top twenty are in Asia. As of 2010, four of the world's ten largest banks are Chinese. In 2004, none were. In 2007, PetroChina, China's largest oil producer, became  the world's first company to reach a trillion dollars in market capitalization. Even after the financial crisis it remains the world's most valuable public corporation, ahead of ExxonMobil and Apple.

Belgium can boast of only a few world records, but middle-aged Belgians can still remember a time when Antwerp was the world's busiest port. I've asked a number of Europeans how high they thought it ranked now, and what harbor held the top spot, and invariably answers come back as "somewhere in the top five" and "Rotterdam," which is indeed the busiest port in Europe. Worldwide though, it is only fourth. Antwerp is seventeenth, the only other European port in the top twenty. You might have guessed by now that the number one is Shanghai, responsible for three times as much freight as Antwerp. Except for Rotterdam, Singapore and Busan, all ten of the world's busiest ports are in China. Of the top twenty, two are in Europe, two in the US, all sixteen others in East Asia.

Many Americans, who grew up in a country accustomed to being number one in almost everything, would be shocked beyond all hope of resuscitation if they only flew once from beaten-up, shaken-down LAX to the Space Odyssey-like sleekness of Shanghai-Pudong. That single plane trip is all it takes to redefine one's understanding of what "developed" and "developing" countries are supposed to look like.

I could go on and on, but the basic idea can be glimpsed at once from the next two pictures (courtesy of Business Insider) showing Shanghai's central business district, twenty years ago:

and today:

I spent most of the second flight reading the China Daily, a government-controlled English newspaper, which devoted many pages to Obama's visit. The overall tone was very positive and overwhelmingly fraternal: relations between members of this soon-to-be "G2" were steadily improving, both recognizing that only united could they tackle the world's problems. The previous day's New York Times had a different angle: "[T]he trip did more to showcase China's ability to push back against outside pressure than it did to advance the main issues on Mr. Obama's agenda."

To me the scariest part of this "push" was a request by the Chinese premier for the US to stop selling arms to Taiwan. The island nation, home to the only Chinese majority population living under a full democracy, is claimed by the PRC. The United States promised fifty-five years ago that it would go to war with China if it ever tried to assert this claim by force. While there can't be much more than a handful of Americans who remember this commitment, it is fair to assume they all work for the white house. Because of the vastly changed balance of power since then and the United States’ current policy of strategic ambiguity, it is hard to predict what would happen if China was ever to seriously test America’s resolve. I, for one, am not eager to find out.