Eric's Beijing Diary

Went to dinner this evening with one of my homeboys from the old country, and a guy from the Caribbean country (actually a British dependency) of Anguilla. The guy from Japan is a student in my Japanese class. He did not go to University, and he is in China trying to learn enough Chinese to be able to do business here. He has a small "arubaito" business selling jewelry, but he told me that he is hoping to get into the auto business. Japan's economy is getting better now, but it is sad to see how Japanese young people struggle so much to try to establish themselves in a profession. Many years ago, Japan was in very much the same position as China. The currency exchange rate when I was a child was 360 yen / 1 dollar. The United States put pressure on Japan to revalue their currency, and the result was disastrous. Japan's economy has been flat for ten years. Now the United States is trying to do the same thing to China. Fortunately, China is a little more independent.

I remember, when I was in college, watching some US Congressmen getting together with sledge hammers and pounding the daylights out of a Toshiba boom box, as a demonstration against the persistence of Japanese exports. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. Since that time I have spent seven years as a truck driver. Trying to load steel out of a union steel mill gave me a very real picture of how the labor unions destroyed productivity in the American labor force. It wasn't Japan's fault then, and it isn't China's fault now.

The guy from Anguilla works in a gym and he is here in China visiting his Indonesian girlfriend. He told me something that took me by surprise. He has an EU passport, since he lives in a British colony. Somehow, in the development of the European Union, it had escaped me that the individual countries no longer issue their own passports. Interesting.