Library Roof

I went to an art auction in the library. I might have bought something if the auction had been in Mandarin, but it was in fact in Cantonese, which I guess is not unduly surprising although does indicate that in the Cantonese art-dealing community they are not that concerned about dealing with the rest of the country. Well, on the other hand, to be reasonably fair about it, you probably only need to know about 12 words - one through 9 and 100, 1000 and 10000. After one auction I know about seven of them, and I'm sure after the next I will know them all.

The art wasn't awe inspiring - it was, almost of course, technically accomplished. Traditional style landscapes & pictures of birds did well. Pictures of naked women did not. Lucky for Rubens he was not born in China.

It's a very nice library and very busy. I haven't seen this many people in a library since ... before. A lot of people like to read; I was in a bookshop in the old part of town last week where you were at risk of tripping over people reading as you tried to navigate around. Bookshop proprietors/staff are extraordinarily tolerant of people plonking themselves down to read the merchandise.
Anyway, apropos of not much I climbed a staircase and found the roof - there aren't enough accessible rooftops in Australia. We need more. It's why we have no film culture worth speaking of, among other things. This roof has a cram school on it for children with dedicated parents. Don't be misled by the air conditioning units - they are for the library patrons. Anyone lucky enough to be studying (or teaching) physics on Sunday afternoon is doing so in 35+ degree heat. The top picture is taken across the light well in the centre of the library towards the decorative roof in the corner. The classrooms are under the green canvas covered roof.

Above is a reasonable close up of the surrounding apartment blocks - these are the oldest remnant housing that you generally see in Guangzhou, three or four stories high. They look a bit grim on the outside but that's largely the result of pollution and a general regional disdain for the idea of cleaning the outsides of things. These apartments are all small - 45 square metres would be considered luxury for 2 people by the generations who grew up with these. Now, 100 square metres is "essential" for the up and coming middle class. Despite the difficulties, gardening is a massively popular activity. Obviously, being gardeners, these must all be very nice people. I like the air conditioning unit propped a little haphazardly on the roof.


Taking a step back, there are definitely 4, and probably 5 generations of buildings visible. I think I can defend pre-war, 50's, 80's, 90's and 00's. Mind you, it would be sensible to ask someone who knows what they are talking about. I'm just guessing. (The pre-war stands confirmed, as does the 00's). I had a builder mate from Sydney planning to drop in this weekend, but he's been delayed. So I was planning a professional opinion - he's originally a local and studied architecture in Sydney.

All in all, a highly worthwhile roof.


Coming home through the sports centre, this is the view north from the north gate. On the left is the CITIC building, the thing that towers over all the other skyline shots I've taken. Next to it (there is actually a 4 lane highway between them, is the Westin Hotel. My local staff spend hours plotting how they can get into the swimming pool there, apparently it's the current luxury touchstone. Reflected in the Westin is the pink apartment building, and sandwiched between them is Concordia Building A, which is where I live. We're not quite as shiny as everyone around us. That's an 8 lane highway between me and the 4 lane highway. On a rainy day, this leaves me with quite a few rivers to cross before I get home.

Peasant Movement Institute

Another week swallowed up by work; the leisurely blog on Monday AM over coffee is looking less like a staple and more like a luxury. Memo to self: must work less.










Actually summer - note blue sky - finally kicked in on Monday & Tuesday, 32 by about 10 am with humidity in the Queensland zone. On Wednesday the humidity got to 100% and it's been raining since. It's not such a bad climate if you can remember your umbrella and live near a subway station.
Although, speaking of climate, I've never seen anything quite this nasty growing on a tree in Australia. It's a very hairy growth (in fact two very hairy growths). I bet it's got something to do with perpetual humidity over 80%. I suppose it could be an orchid.




Still and all, I managed a very pleasant Sunday, kicked off with brunch with Simpson (one of the school managers) & his wife who are off for a 2 week visit to Australia soon. I couldn't persuade them not to see Canberra - they have the typical misconception that the capital of a country should be a place of significance. Then I caught up with the Peasant Movement Institute. Excellent name in my view, but for obscure reasons it causes the locals to snicker. Unfortunately, as I start to think about the possible reasons for its ludicrosity (<== copyright me) , I'm losing my intial warmth. Still, whatever it's called, it's an interesting place. It was Zhou En Lai's anniversary ( I forget which) so admission was free. I'm guessing it was a touch grimmer back in the 1920's than it is now - I doubt there were so many trees in the middle of - effectively a paramilitary - a training centre in its heyday in the 1920's. I am a sucker for revolutionary history; I'm pleased to report that I am not the only one left in the country, although it's fair to say there aren't many of us. Maybe another dozen people passed though the place in the 2 hours that I was there.

Amongst the many things I didn't know were that Mao Ze Dong was the director here at one stage. In fact I jumped about a yard in the air (at moments of stress we revert to the measures of our childhood) when I found he was still here, along with wife #1 and children. It is my firm contention that there should be a warning sign if a museum contains random waxworks.


It is in fact due to Mao that the PMI is so well preserved, rather than vice versa.

Curiously, the PMI was set up by the KMT (actually that would be GMD according to the modern romanisation) for the communists to run - somethiong to keep them out of trouble?. I diimly knew that the KMT were Marxist/Socialist in at least notional origin, but setting up a special institution for the communists to train people to incite peasant/farmer insurrections seems like a pretty desparate throw of the dice for a ruling political party. They (the KMT) must have seriously lacked confidence that they would be able to enact agricultural reform via the rule of law. Bet if they had their time again they would go with plan B, although the KMT turned out to be so rubbish anyway that it was probably not the one fatal tactical error.





It looks to have been a pretty tough place. The beds look pretty good compared to the mess hall & lecture hall. Modelled on a 19th century British boarding school, do you think?






The wall (it's quite long) of photographs of murdered/executed/shot alumni is emotion-provoking. This one is wearing a fox (the unduly artistic photograph rather obscures it) which strikes me as a faintly odd accessory for a nascent revolutionary. Still, dead at 26 is pretty serious punishment for crimes against fashion.

She was not alone, most of the them were dead before they were 27, typically within 2 or 3 years of graduating. Like Martyr's Park, it's hard to avoid wondering how I would have responded to those times in this place. Indeed, how would the university left of the 70's have responded? Would the overt reality and urgency of the possibility of revolution have attracted more or repelled? I have no idea. There doesn't seem much point speculating, the case can be made either way. Certainly China was able to produce an extraordinary number of people committed to political action - I don't think the subsequent fate of the ideology is particularly germane - and people able to sustain that commitment over a lengthy period of time. Mao, and Zhou, and many others were in Guangzhou in 1926. It wasn't until 1949 that they were proved right. I think I managed to remain pretty passionate about bridge for 15 years, but no-one was firing bullets at me to encourage me to stop.

Another episode in my continuing struggle to take a decent photograph of myself. Note improvements, not appearing strangled by camera case this time. Still coming to grips with how to wear a T-shirt. May one day remember to straighten my head

The Line to Shenzhen

Another frantic week, indicated by the absence of a leisurely Sunday or Monday AM post. In fact I caught the express to Shenzhen at lunchtime on Sunday instead of breakfast time on Monday, which left me running around trying to pack on Sunday morning instead of drinking coffee in the usual ruminative way.


But I did take a few more pictures of the trip down, although I missed the one I really want to get. Having said that, it's definitely a morning shot for the right lighting, so in the absence of Photoshop I guess I am constrained to fit myself in around reality. If I get it I'll add it, anyway.

I really like this train trip. The more often I take it the more I like it. Plonked down in the dining carriage, largely undisturbed with a whole table to work on, it's the best commute. It takes less time than flying - in fact it takes less time than the combined trips to and from the respective cities' (Guangzhou & Shenzhen) airports, each of which is roughly an hour out of town. I don't know what the flying time would be, not much obviously, it's only about 130 km. But still, I can get from my apartment to my "office" in two hours (in peak hour, longer at weekends), made up of 30 minutes on subways (one at each end), 1 hour of express train and 30 minutes of pfaffing - the "p" is silent - about buying tickets & waiting for things to happen. And unlike the plane trip, I can get a solid and comfortable 60 minutes work in - try using your laptop in the back of a taxi. If I ever have to go to Shanghai for work I will have to see if I can catch the night train - my boss always looks extremely stressed by the airport commute.


Also the train attendants are far far far more courteous than flight attendants have ever been, even thinking back to the days when budget plane travel didn't really exist. One of them chased me down the platform with my forgotten umbrella on Sunday. Now that is service.


The train travels fast - the camera blur is NOT my hand shaking, it's art. There's a video too, but my computer won't show it to me so I don't think I 'll publish it yet. If ever, I can't imagine how the video function in a still camera/mobile phone works at 200 kph, which is the top speed. It's actually quite hard to believe that you are travelling anything like that fast, until you try and take pictures and realise.


I may have mentioned something about the trip before in an earlier entry, but I probably didn't do it justice. It is a factory run, there isn't much doubt about that. But it seems to be a lot more besides.


There is certainly much more farming than I initially realised, and it is much more systematic than I first thought. They will be a bit worried about the rain in the north of the province, because the water levels look a lot higher last week than they had 2 weeks previously, and I doubt the main runoff is even halfway here yet. So there may be a few submerged farms, although there looks to be a fair bit of engineering (run off channels & empty sloughs) to deal with some of it. They are farming a river delta so I guess they have a pretty fair idea of how to organise it.


I can't decide if the farmers are living on their farms or not. These buildings certainly wouldn't make comfortable dwelling places, their defects are obscured by the circumstances of the photograph. And these are not the least solid structures on the trip, although somewhat paradoxically, it's the more flimsy ones which have caused me to think again. My original thought was no, but I'm weakening. There are lean-to's that are too far away from farms, with washing hanging on sticks nearby. I think here are some, a minority probably, of subsistence workers living in the shanties along the railway and trying to make a living with a bit of farming, a bit of labouring, a bit of recycling and a bit of whatever else goes.


When I first came to Guangzhou in 1990 it was an obvious border town, the areas around the railway station full of people who wanted to be somewhere else. It seemed much obviously poorer and nastier than Shanghai or Beijing. None of that is so clear now. Shenzhen has taken over as the real border town, although it doesn't have the despairing edge that GZ had in 1990 - well, I haven't seen it, more to the point. There's a lot more gloss around to distract you, even though the heavy rain makes Shenzhen into a disaster area. It's so bad that Guangzhou & Sydney start to look well engineered by comparison.


But there are borders and borders and the one between Guangzhou and Hong Kong is just one of them. It's pretty porous for me, although I haven't crossed it yet, and for the staff we have in Shenzhen weekends in Hong Kong are pretty much the norm. Bigger borders look to be the border between farmer and middle class, and maybe the border between those who have and those who don't have English. Although, to be fair, there are plenty of people making a good living out of trading with the West who don't have a word of English. But having English gives you access to a much better paid layer of clerical job - the English speaking wage slaves are definitely better off than their Chinese speaking counterparts. Some people are crossing the border from farmer to middle class via the role of guest labourer - but I'm betting that it's pretty few compared to all of those who are trying it out. There's an education border too, because there is no guarantee of getting an education after Year 9, and no advantages in not getting one.


Just outside Guangzhou, before the train really picks up speed, is this bridge which carries 8 lanes of highway over the railway line. On the other side of the bridge is pretty much a meadow - grass, not crops, a solitary palm tree in the middle. And behind it something a bit forest-like; I suppose it might be a plantation. I like this picture because it reminds me how much a frame can do for a picture - never mind all that black concrete because it makes the landscape inside it glow gently. It's a curious effect.

Dragon Boat Festival

As well as making babies cry I apparently make the elderly laugh. It's a new social rule I have discovered, that if you are over 70 you can laugh out loud at stupid foreigners. Others can only smile, but you can laugh. Given that I was extremely wet at the time, having been caught yet again by an afternoon tropical storm without an umbrella, and failing to gain any benefit from sheltering under a young fig tree, I quite possibly looked a tad woebegone. I must say that I was in fact feeling philosophical - it was warm rain, after all - a feeling that was reinforced by the passers-by. They had umbrellas. I didn't. It was raining. Who needs the Olympics to build a global community?

It was really a very satisfactory day. Armed with a map, improved knowledge of the geography and landmarks, a compass and a 20 minute planning meeting with myself I decided to walk to the river to see if there were dragon boats. People who know how excellent my sense of direction is will be wondering now how I got to write this, as opposed to vanishing off the planet - after all a 5 kilometer walk in a strange city by a man who once got lost 200 meters from home could possibly be described as foolhardy.

To be honest, I don't think I spent more than about 10% of the journey on the allotted route. Either that or the local government has ripped out a major major park (not impossible, the local government is quite keen on development). But truth be told, the river does cut across the middle of the entire city so so long as the compass kept pointing South (which Chinese compasses traditionally do) it would be impossible not to find it. And I did.

On the way I also discovered an Indian restaurant and a mobile phone technician. And a place where people sell boxed food from wheelbarrows to half-asleep taxi drivers. It sounds faintly picturesque, except it was a road running between the middle of two massive building sites. And the boxes were polystyrene - has anything picturesque ever involved polystyrene?

The river was very cheerful. I don't know how much of it was occupied by drgaon boating, because I hung around the one bit of it (two small bridges crossing to an island (sort of) east of Er Sha Island where there was definitely something going on. But in a city of 10+ million on a festival day there weren't so many people around - a lot, but but not relative to 10 million - and so my guess is there was more going on elsewhere. Either that or shopping is taking a bigger toll of traditional Chinese culture than I imagined.

The noticeably big difference between dragon boats in Australia and Guangzhou was a distinct absence of seriousness. And the boats here are enormous, 50 people long, with drums in the middle. And a man with a whistle, presumably so the drummer has someone to follow. And they are made of timber, not fibreglass, so they must weigh tonnes.

No one was racing. This was party central, lots of lolling around on boats, flags, streamers, fireworks, umbrellas and fireworks. It's unlikely any fish were hanging around to eat the poets body. I imagine most of the fish had moved to Hong Kong for the afternoon.

Since the boats were so big and heavy, some people had hired a boat with an engine to pull them along. Not such a bad plan. The basic drill seemed to be to get into a boat, inch yoour way down the bank until you got a turn in the middle. And then again. Did I mention the fireworks?

Not even the rain was stopping this parade, although it did remove a significant bunch of spectators. Not this one though. Not until I'd finished entertaining the troops.

Modernity

I took these photos on the Saturday of the weekend of the dragon boat festival, alas the last national holiday for quite a while. Hunker down for the endless 5-day weeks.


Just a normal summer morning in Guangzhou - these were taken around midday with the afternoon storm just starting to announce its presence.

Being a national holiday, once again everybody and their grandmother is engaged in the national pastime, to wit, shopping. Or at least, walking around shopping centres. Me too, the A/C is fantastic.

A lot of people here aren't comfortable with escalators; I've noticed it before but today the problem seemed particularly noticeable, perhaps because it causes a break in the holiday-relentless flow of people. Perhaps because a lot on Sunday escalator-users (would that be escalateurs?) are out today. People hesitate at the top waving one foot in the air trying to time their first step. Does that happen in Australia? My feeling is that it doesn't, but then, I have another feeling that one is much more observant when not at home. It's at least plausible though, that in Oz everybody has grown up with escalators and the first step problem has been relegated to a reflex by about the age of five. Perhaps there is another generation or two to go in China before escalators are not a significant obstacle. (But, really, is it so difficult? Maybe I just notice it more here because there are more people and more escalators)

Coming to the mall, I crossed the road behind a couple who had just got off their bikes, chained them to a railing, and set off across the road towards the TEEMALL emanating all the excitement and anticipation of a big day out. (Is it really possible to notice that kind of thing?) Judging from the bikes, gearless, heavy and without any sign of the original paint, which were the kind that everybody rode even five years ago – bikes have almost vanished from the roads by comparison with 2002 – and their clothes, they were not going to buy anything in the mall, except possibly lunch.

That's a little bit unfair, although it sounds more harshly than it should. Look at it this way. I would say they were roughly my age, which would put them into a generation who were and generally still are extremely frugal (they were born in the middle of a massive drought, which has left people in their parents' generation in North China still picking edible weeds out of the lawns in public parks, and while it may have been fun being a pre-teeen in the Cultural Revolution, life wasn't providing anyone with much more then the bare minimum) . They could, in fact, easily have had the money to be buying things, despite the fact that they appeared not to have spent anything on their bikes or clothes for twenty years, because their generation wouldn't bother replacing a bike that worked or could be repaired; likewise clothes. But even if their churchmouse appearance was the result of frugality rather than poor-ness – I'm deliberately avoiding the word poverty, which more properly belongs to the countryside than the cities – that same frugality would militate against their buying much in the mall, because everything in the mall can be purchased elsewhere for much less. Not, perhaps, the Mont Blanc pens, but apart from that.

They might have been meeting their children there to pay for a wedding, too, because their generation spends an extraordinary amount of money on financing their children's entry to modernity, and because the big malls will generally have four or five big wedding planner roadshows on the holiday weekends. Weddings are big business. And a western style wedding is the must have accessory for the modern couple. And that is absolutely not to mock - it's the must have accessory for the average Western couple too, if you judge by the number of wedding-related businesses in the yellow pages in Oz.

But I reckon they were having an excursion to the capitalist 21^st century from the socialist 20^th. And they were planning to enjoy it.

This is one of the things that I find repetitively seductive about China; its zest for its new world. My own life has been – I would say it was typical of a pretty solid subset of the population – imbued with a solid distrust of the mechanisms of the modern capitalist state. But I've never tried to live without the benefits of said state either, so it would be foolish to deny that my distrust doesn't have a hypocritical side; or if that is too strong, a complacent side.

I imagine that the mood here is not wholly dissimilar to the mood in the West in the 1890's, the 1920's, the 1950's, the great booms that pushed modernity into existence, baptized it and consolidated it. (Historians who actually know what they are talking about are welcome to dispute that potted summary of the last 120 years) I missed out on the optimism; but here in China it is on display everywhere. It's not an unmixed blessing, it's optimism tinged with a great awareness of the weight of the future, but it is rather infectious.

Outside the sports centre, which is the geographical focus of Tian He, there were a couple of guys with Chinese chess endgame problems, collecting 100 RMB per sucker in the crowd who thought they knew the answer. They were coining money hand over fist, at least 2000 RMB visible in one guy's hand. What makes people think they can win this kind of bet? Not one of the punters even asked how they could be certain there was a winning sequence – I didn't see any sign that there was a choice of colours involved in the bet. From what I saw, I would have had a better chance of analyzing the position than anyone actually handing over their money, and I couldn't see the remotest possibility. That doesn't mean it wasn't honest, good chess puzzles are like that, but honestly, do people think the guy with 2000 RMB in his hand is there to give money away?

Sanya

I was going to call this "Rain", but I noticed I had used it twice before already. It was/is the title of one of my favourite Maugham stories (and a play too, in fact) too, so I guess that makes me a careless plagiarist. Anyway, not three times. From this you may deduce that it is raining again. Correct. I'm sheltering in the coffee shop that is exactly halfway between the subway exit and my front door.

It has been a wet week, except Tuesday. We had the annual management conference, this year at the resort "town" Sanya on Hainan. Notionally pretty similar to Guadaloupe - a small island in the tropics with tourism as the sole industry - but no French. Hence much more pleasant. In fact, while it's possible the locals were all rubbing their hands with glee at the amount they could charge tourists for ludicrous things like bathing suits, they (the bathing suits) were in the main on a par with Guangzhou department store prices. Even the hotel prices were not ridiculously ridiculous - although not entirely cheap either.


Actually, it was probably a bit more like Fiji in the early 1970's than Guadaloupe.

And while no doubt it will end up like Surfer's Paradise, it has got a few years to go to achieve that degree of awfulness.

I arrived on Monday, when the hotel was crammed full of Russians continuing a Communist holiday tradition dating back to the 1950's that appears to have survived the 21st century. They seemed to have all vanished by the end of the week - perhaps they have mysterious powers of predicting the weather. (I don't want to make unjustified generalisations, but if the American public health industry is worried about obesity they could try a quick trip to Russia to help them understand that the problem is not their's alone.)

Tuesday the weather was sufficiently pleasant to compel me to test out the swimming pool. On Wednesday it started to rain and didn't stop until 3:27 am on Saturday. I know that because at 3:27 somebody woke me up from my snooze on the airport floor to tell me that my flight was finally boarding. All over the airport people were similarly waking up with a degree of renewed optimism.

I got to the airport at about 6 the previous evening, just after the roof in the check in area had proved inadequate to the task of keeping rain out. People in gumboots were trying to sweep the water out of the terminal, but since the road was also full of water there wasn't really anywhere for it to go. Would-be passengers removed their shoes and rolled up their trousers to queue in giant puddles and check in their luggage. Then it was just a question of staking out a spot on the floor and waiting. Curiously the floor in the gate area was completely dry; particularly so as the gate area is downstairs from the check in area.

Two examples of how bad the storm was:

• The Beijing-New York flight made an emergency landing at Sanya,


• The thunder made the glass in the windows shake.

Somewhat extraordinarily, in the8 hours waiting I saw no instances of airport rage. Really a very calm place, Sanya, even in the middle of an emergency.

Rain

And that was a quiet week, due mainly to the fact that I was preparing a paper to give at a conference next week and that my computer broke down, rendering preparation a slow & painful process. It did in fact rain all week, every day and multiple times on most, but that actually doesn't really stop anyone doing much. It's not cold rain, it's just wet and when you get out of it you gently steam dry in short order. Strange to look out the window at what could easily be an English winter mizzle (half mist, half drizzle) and then walk out into an indisputable summer.



The rain is very unseasonal, so everybody is talking about global warming.



I did get out during the week to have a look at Jinan University, which is Guangzhou's major international university (meaning it can accept international undergraduates on the basis of their domestic university entrance exams - wonder if my life would have been different if it had been open in 1976?). It has teaching space for 50,000 students, but current enrolment is somewhat less. On-campus dormitory space is the big problem. It's a very big campus, the dormitory "suburbs" are intertwined with some of the academic buildings and there is plenty of open space as well. It looks like a good place to spend 4 years or so.



Sunday I finally managed to get to the "copy markets"; these are a group of wholesale and retail markets and sweatshops where you can pretty much buy any brand of clothing, or get it made for you at what can only be described as ridiculous prices. If you paid $10 you would probably have paid too much. I bought 6 items of clothing for the same price as the first 2 items I bought in this city at what I was then told was the cheap place to buy things. A vote of thanks to David, an expat Adelaidean I met in Starbucks over a technical discussion about whther Starbucks IT, WIndows, or a malicious universe was to blame for our inability to connect to the internet. (The answer turned out to be... Windows!) He told me the upmarket locals usually avoid the copy markets becasue they (the locals) are obsessed by brands, but that in his view (and he is an importer) there is absolutely no difference in manufacturing quality, and even if there were, paying 1/6 the price makes up for the occasional failure. Since I know someone in Melbourne who used to sew Adidas, Nike, Puma and Kmart labels on exactly the same tracksuit pants and resell them accordingly, I have no trouble in believing this.



The copy markets are down near the main railway station, which is where I first stepped on mainland soil in 1990. They have a built a mid-level and a high-level expresssway through the middle of the district since then, and I can only say it has still improved it dramatically over 1990. The greening of Guangzhou that is the major difference between then and now has also taken hold there as well. I'm guessing that it's still a pretty rough and tough area though; railway station terminus + wholesale markets is not a formula for upmarket tourist destinations. The hotels here are catering for the budget business traveller - flying in to set up the next season's orders. And there were lots of them, from Europe and Africa. I heard Czech, Serb, German, Italian, French (Mozambique), at least one African language, English and none of them were tourists. I know the stuff here is cheap, but how much of it do you have to resell in Africa to make a business? Surely it can't be that expensive there? And if I understood that mystery, then I'd be in the business.



I didn't take a lot of photos this week, but take a look at this one:

It's a job advertisement for one of the restaurants in my building. Waiters, kitchen hands and dishwashers start at 900 RMB per month, roughly $150. Free board and lodging is thrown in, which makes it a substantially better deal, becasue rent in this part of town is from the stratosphere. But the free food is somewhat undercut by the "Only people with a good attitude who are prepared to work hard" section of the advertisement. The Chinese idiom for "work hard" is "eat bitterness". Free bitterness, eh? Doesn't sound quite so compelling.

Most of the quality restaurants have a permanent ad outside looking for staff. This one doesn't have height restrictions (well, shortness restrictions, really), but is otherwise typical.

The bitterness diet is obviously is not one that people acquire a taste for.