We piled into two buses and set off to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City in the center of Beijing. Tiananmen Square is the World’s largest Public square and has been a public space since 1406. Needless to say, it is absolutely Huge and on a summer Saturday morning totally swarming with people. One of the pictures shows the iconic image of Mao’s portrait above the entrance to the Forbidden City where the Emperors used to live before the revolution in 1949.
The “Forbidden City” is another huge complex of palaces and buildings that were occupied by the various Emperors of China from the 1400s to the revolution. There are around 10,000 separate rooms/buildings – many ornate and many utilitarian. We walked thru from the front o the back and saw only a small fraction of what was there. Since the day was hot and humid, and the whole place was mobbed with tourists the experience was rather hard work and falls into one of those best described by “amazing place, glad to have seen it but not very pleasant at the time”. Rachel did very well with the crowded walking and the heat/humidity. It helped that another family have their 4.5 y/o adopted Chinese daughter along to get a 2nd child and Sophia and Rachel had a good time together with Rachel “playing” the big sister to Sophia who is the same age that Sarah will be!
Visiting tourist sites in Beijing, along with most anything else in China does drive home the point that China is a very crowded place and space (personal and other) is short supply. Not good if you are agoraphobic.
After lunch it was time to shop for pearls (not my thing at all but the kids liked seeing how the pearls came out of the oysters and many of the women on the trip were really into the beautiful jewelry ). One interesting note is that this shop, along with similar shops selling Silk and Jade are run by the Government to maintain quality (and, although this was not stated, prices). What was even more interesting was how our guides uniformly described and framed this control as a very good thing. Very different from the US/UK model where quality and price are set by demanding consumers in a competitive marketplace. FWIW, my impression of Beijing is that while there are examples of free-market principles being applied, there are still plenty of counter-examples which illustrate very clearly the degree of government control over what may seem relatively unimportant businesses. However, when considered in the aggregate, all of these examples serve to show how central control and decision-making is still very much enmeshed into the everyday life of business. In this regard, it will be interesting to see how Shanghai and Guangzhou compare since both of these cities are far away from Beijing, the central set of power and control.
Anyway, enough of this amateur economic analysis…..our next stop on the whirlwind tour was to the “Summer Palace”. This was built for a Ming Emperor’s mother but then used by successive emperors during the summer to escape the heat of the city. The place was built over many years and much of the work consisted of enlarging a lake and using the materials removed to make a local hill larger until the palace could be built with a good view. In order to get the labor, sentencing policies were changed such that criminals would spend a short time in jail and the rest of their sentence doing forced-labor at the palace. It was definitely cooler, and a gorgeous spot with great views across what’s now a very big lake. Around the lake’s edges were some beautiful arrays of lotus flowers, however these must be causing a problem because there were multiple crews out in rowboats clearing roots by hand. This is another example of how China works very differently. There are so many people that wages for labor stay very so, so it is more cost effective to use a lot of laborers to clear a lake or dig holes or patch the road that it is to find the capital to buy some equipment to do the same work with fewer people. David Xu, a former aerospace engineer in China who worked for me as a production technician explained it thus: “n China, you look for ways to do a job using as many people as possible, in the US it is the opposite.”
After the Summer Palace it was another shopping stop. This time at a Gov’t run Silk factory where we did get an interesting talk about how the worms make the cocoon which is then harvested, the worm killed by dunking the cocoon in boiling water and then the individual threads pulled off the cocoon and spun into thread. Quite a process. The fabrics were certainly beautiful but Debbie didn’t find anything that really fit with what she wanted so we didn’t buy anything.
The last thing for the day was a performance by a troupe of acrobats from Szechuan province. Per one of our guides, the acrobats from Szechuan come from either multi-generational acrobat families or are very poor and looking for a way out of their mostly poor province. Once again, the theater is a Gov’t run operation. The show itself was amazing. I’ve seen the two-pole act in a Cirque du Soleil show but this one and the others are phenomenal examples of grace, balance and years of training!
No comments:
Post a Comment