#lobbing posts over the Great Firewall

[the-firebrand]

If you ever wonder if bans on smoking indoors are maybe too nanny-statish, just visit any enclosed space in China to quickly disabuse yourself of the notion.

[the-firebrand]

The CCP got exactly one thing right; they spent like $1 billion USD painstakingly restoring an idyllic Ming dynasty village in my wife's hometown and it's honestly pretty great.

[the-firebrand]

While Beijing is undeniably a megacity, and admittedly the infrastructure that supports it is really nothing short of incredible, the weird thing is that the architecture (barring of course things like the Forbidden City and 1000 year old temples) is so boring.

While there are plenty of large towers and skyscrapers, especially in the wealthier parts of town, they're almost all uniformly bland. They might be impressive from an engineering standpoint, I wouldn't know, but they're just rectangles. In New York or Chicago there's also a glut of tall rectangular buildings but there's usually some kind of design flair to give each a bit of individuality.

And that's not even touching on the kinds of buildings most people live in, which are either concrete 5-1s or towering and identical commieblocks.

[the-firebrand]

有人的地方就有江湖

[the-firebrand]

Day & Night

[the-firebrand]

Mrs Firebrand and I were driving around Xian (where the traffic may be used to punish sinners in hell) with an old college friend of hers and her husband, who spent a couple years in America doing post-doc work.

He said that when he was in America he noticed that when American drivers merge lanes, they look ahead, to the sides, and behind them, whereas Chinese drivers only look to the front and sides, and suddenly so much made sense.

[the-firebrand]

Once the bullet train leaves the immediate environs of Beijing, it passes through basically farm country until you get to Tianjin a little ways south. There are a lot of fields, farming villages, and a few factories here and there, but what's really striking about the space between Beijing and Tianjin is that because the land is pretty flat (and the train tracks slightly elevated) it's easy to see for miles.

And what's most striking as you travel through these rolling fields is that in every direction you look you can see these gigantic residential towers looming up in the distance, 50+ stories high and copy-pasted all across the landscape. And then your train gets a little closer and you realize that these are hardly luxury towers; they're the same commieblocks that are ubiquitous in Beijing, and Jinan, and Qingdao, and Xian, and Shanghai, that continue to sprout like weeds all over the country but in many cases are vacant for years or, at best, are just stores of value for a middle class desperately trying to build a portfolio.

It's probably not that deep, but even so all I could think about was being someone who lived in one of those farming villages in a concrete house with a dirt floor, climbing up onto my leaking red tile roof and in every direction I turn seeing these gigantic monoliths sprouting up all across the sky in a world that's just a few kilometers distant on the horizon but where I would could never afford to live.

[the-firebrand]

The most quintessential Chinese image is not an ancient temple or clouds drifting through limestone peaks, it's a guy sitting under a no smoking sign with a lit cigarette.

If you ever wonder if bans on smoking indoors are maybe too nanny-statish, just visit any enclosed space in China to quickly disabuse yourself of the notion.

[the-firebrand]

Also to follow up on the last point that I barely glossed over in this earlier post, one of the first things that becomes immediately apparent when you actually are in China is that the standard of living is across the board much lower.

My in-laws are all what would be considered in the west to be the professional class (i.e., accountant, surgeon, bank manager, university lecturer, finance bro, etc.) and yet they definitely live at a much lower standard than someone with that career would in the west.

Even my Mrs. Firebrand's cousins who live in newer build apartments and the rare instances of a single family home are like... nice, but even they have exposed pvc piping in the bathroom for their showers, or air conditioning that's prone to shorting out, or hardwood floors that are obviously fake, etc. It's definitely not the conditions a bank manager or stock trader would put up with in the west (except maybe the last one I guess?). Even appliances here are smaller; fridges hold less, washing machines are tiny, dryers are non-existent, showers are generally just a nozzle in people's bathrooms where the floor slopes to a drain, but this is normal for people.

And this is just the people near the top; it bears remembering that over 400 million people, something like half again as much as the US's total population, live in poverty. For anyone not living as migratory workers in the big cities, this basically means they live in a village with dirt floors and maybe a tile roof on their house. Buildings even in the cities are generally dilapidated unless it's a brand new build within the last 5-10 years.Things here just aren't built to last, but people are generally thrifty and stubborn, so places and things that were probably only meant to last a certain years before being replaced are still in use well after their projected lifespan.

It's easy to look at the west and America specifically as an empire in decay, but it's a really stark contrast to China as the latter bills itself as a wealthy rising power even the reality on the ground belies that it's begun to crumble even as it rises.

While Beijing is undeniably a megacity, and admittedly the infrastructure that supports it is really nothing short of incredible, the weird thing is that the architecture (barring of course things like the Forbidden City and 1000 year old temples) is so boring.

While there are plenty of large towers and skyscrapers, especially in the wealthier parts of town, they're almost all uniformly bland. They might be impressive from an engineering standpoint, I wouldn't know, but they're just rectangles. In New York or Chicago there's also a glut of tall rectangular buildings but there's usually some kind of design flair to give each a bit of individuality.

And that's not even touching on the kinds of buildings most people live in, which are either concrete 5-1s or towering and identical commieblocks.