On Guangdong

We did not stay in Shanghai very long. It was cold, horribly cold. A Siberian airmass blew south and with it temperatures that made Toronto in late January look positively tropical. As I have already noted the Chinese set a standard for energy efficiency that sadly extends as far as not heating buildings through the winter cold.

We went to to Lesley's father's primary place of business, a town in Guangdong called Humen. Students of Chinese history will know of Humen as the place where Qing officials burned the Opium during the First Opium War.

Guangdong to most westerners is usually known as Canton. It is a tropical province of about one hundred million and many of China's emigrants started the journey in Guangdong. When North Americans eat "Chinese Food" typically they are in fact eating a bastardization of Guangdongese (Cantonese) food. The most significant town in Guangdong was built on the "fragrant harbour" of Shang Guang or Hong Kong at the delta of the Perl River, the major river in Guangdong.

Guangdong is also home of a vast amount of China's industrial capacity, Lenovo (and before that IBM) makes the Thinkpad here, today we drove past the Liteon factory, skinheads take note, your Dr. Martens were made here too!

Anyway so much for the geography lesson, sort of. Obviously in Canton the locals speak Cantonese, but many have become fantastically rich, I feel sorry in a way for anyone in Humen who is only middle class, all their neighbours drive around in BMWs, Audis, Lexis (Lexii?) and they are still on mopeds!

Actually I rather doubt any of the locals did not make it HUGE. In the 80s and 90s Deng Xiaoping and later Jiang Zemin went to some length to promote private business here and the result was a capitalists wet dream as a vast labour force went to work with ludicrously lame labour and environmental laws coupled with one of the great shipping ports, Hong Kong right across the delta made financial success a certainty. Well the locals got money, so much that they had to outsource all the manual labour jobs, restaurant server, nurses, doctors, teachers, you name it - if getting rich was not a certainty with a particular job, it was outsourced to someone else from China's teaming masses. The result, everyone has to speak Putonghua (Mandarin) as almost no one in town is actually Cantonese.

Tonight we had dinner with Lesley's father's extended family, everyone was using Cantonese and everyone was yelling, a pretty typical method of communicating, when the language is Cantonese. One of Lesley's uncles lives, and works, in Shang Guang (Hong Kong), the rest work in Guangdong proper. There was a noticeable difference between the Cantonese spoken by Hong Kongers and the Cantonese of mainlanders. Cantonese is a language where the last syllable of a sentence is drawn out and when spoken by someone from Hong Kong that last syllable becomes vaguely lyrical.

For myself I speak about three words of Cantonese, it is a difficult language and probably has a greater proportion of native Cantonese speakers in Toronto than Humen.

One way I can always tell I am in China though, the forgeries. We went to a supermarket in Shenzhen (a city across the river from Hong Kong). While in Shenzhen we went to a supermarket that sold wines from around the World. For context a bottle of Masi went for about 500 RMB (about $100 cdn). We found some horribly over priced sparkling wines and champagnes, Moet et Chandon was over 700RMB. But the thing that got me, a bottle of Maple Fly ice wine from Canada, 1794, between the Jackson-Triggs and Inniskillin. Now last I consulted my grade 8 history text there was no such thing as Canada in 1794, and last time I drove on the QEW through wine country there was no Maple Fly. (The Jackson-Triggs and Innskilin both had Chinese labels over the English labels, but the Maple Fly only had the Chinese labels. The lack of labels is the only evidence someone who does not drive the QEW often would have to warn them off the Maple Fly... That and the fact that no self respecting Ontario Vinter would ever call his, or her, grapes something that conjures up images of insects.)

In other news I have had the chance to reflect more on economics. Late in 2008 the government of China announced it would spend something in the neighbourhood of $500 billion (US) on economic recovery, money that would take the form of tax cuts and export subsidies. Now to my way of thinking the last thing the World needs right now is even more cheap Chinese exports, the completely skewed imbalance in trade between the United States and China plays no small part in the financial crisis the World is in.

The fact is Chinese people don't spend money, they cannot afford to, in the West we have Social Security or Social Insurance, all nations in the G7 have some form of health care for the elderly, (if not everybody in the whole country). In "Communist" China, if you are sick and have no money, you are up a creak without a paddle. Well anyway the reason for the trade imbalance is in no small part because while we in the west are not afraid of consumer debt and having our last cheque bounce, the Chinese are, understandably petrified of not having enough to make it through retirement. The result, we rack up the credit card debts buying the cheap Chinese made goods, while the Chinese people take our money and sock it away, unwilling to spend it.

Well I had an idea of shocking simplicity. Beijing should spend that $500 billion or about 4 trillion RMB on something that would make Hu Jintao as popular in China as Tommy Douglas is in Canada - well alright, nobody besides me has heard of Douglas, but that does not mean this is not a good idea. Beijing should take that $500 billion and establish universal old age health care. By my rough estimates, based on the stupid low price of hospital visits currently (all unsubsidized by the government) that $500 billion should be enough to pay for old age health care for the next ten years.

How would government pay for health care thereafter? Well there are a few options, enforce tax laws uniformly, reduce defence spending, join international space flight efforts instead of going it alone, allow freedom of the press to shine a light in the entirely corrupt regional levels of government. It would probably help if it were obvious to the lower classes that the law and law-makers were not totally at the beck and call of the rich and well connected. Such changes, in attitude mostly, would make the necessary tax hikes far more palatable while having a a very strong stabilizing influence in society.

Sadly it seems to me Beijing would rather whip up nationalist fervor than make the social improvements that would actually improve the quality of life for so many people. That is a real shame.