Eric's Beijing Diary

Got off the canal boat this morning about 6am. I was immediately swarmed by rickshaw drivers who wanted to charge me exorbitant prices. I finally met a guy with a van who offered a price close to par with a taxi price. When he dropped me off at the youth hostel, he asked me for two American dollars. Interesting...he would rather have American money. Not sure what good a couple US bucks would do, but perhaps he is establishing a collection.

As soon as I checked in at the youth hostel, I told them I needed a ticket to Beijing. This place is very clean, but they don't seem to have the travel services I have come to expect from Youth Hostels. I don't think it is because they are lazy. I think it is because, for some reason, they have not been able to establish the back channel connections needed to negotiate travel arrangements for travelers. The guy at the youth hostel told me how to get to the train station. At the bus stop, I met a lady who was on her way to Shanghai. She said she was leaving on the 9am train. I thought perhaps this might be an option. Sure enough, when I got to the ticket window, the lady told me there were no sleeper tickets. I decided on the spot to go to Shanghai. Shanghai is only an hour from Suzhou, so it is easy to get a ticket from here to there, since trains run throughout the day. There are five trains a day from Shanghai to Beijing, so with luck, I should be able to get a sleeper ticket to Beijing as soon as I get to the Shanghai station. I used this method once before, in the summer of 2004 when I was out in Yunnan Province. Couldn't manage to get a ticket from Kunming to Beijing, so I bought a ticket to Shanghai, and had no trouble buying a ticket to Beijing once I got to Shanghai.

This evening, I was walking back toward the Youth Hostel, when I passed a bunch of expats standing and sitting by tables on the sidewalk outside an expat bar. I got into a conversation with a German engineer who is working for his company at an industrial park constructed by a company from Singapore. Both in his industry (automotive), in the IT industry (such as IC design) and other areas, Suzhou is becoming an extension of Shanghai. It is just a little bit too far to be a bedroom community for Shanghai, but close enough to be an extension of the massive commercial activity surrounding that city. The German told me that his company has contracts for manufacturing that allow it to operate at a much lower cost than if everything were done in Germany, but the tradeoff is that they are not allowed to do anything unless they train local people. China does not allow these companies to just come in and use workers. They must not only pay them, they must give them technology. In this manner, China is inheriting the technology of the industrialized nations.

In one sense, this seems fair to me. Before the Communist revolution, Western commercial involvement in China was entirely exploitive. Western companies came to China, took the money, and left. China is now cashing in on the desire of Western based companies to lower costs by moving manufacturing operations to China. But I do see problems with this. So far, China has made most of its money as a "factory for the world." But they are not satisfied with that, nor should they be. After all, Japan did not become an economic powerhouse merely by manufacturing other countries' designs. Japan made megabucks by coping foreign designs and reengineering them. Improving them. This requires significant innovation. This level of innovation was possible, in large part, because of the great measure of freedom brought in by the post-World War II reforms of General Macarthur. China is trying to become an innovative, creative society, while still maintaining the right to control the way people think. Will she be able to pull it off? I am skeptical. There must be much greater freedom of thought and expression if there is going to be greater creativity. I understand that China must be careful about this change. And I certainly don't advocate American style freedom. But if you want people to be able to think for themselves and innovate, you must begin to develop a society and culture where that kind of thing is encouraged.