China is huge and it has an ubiquitous density to it.\u00a0 You rarely find the end of a road or a point where the imprint of man ends and nature takes over.\u00a0 You almost never see an untended patch of ground that is not orderly planted and carefully tended.\u00a0 For example in Shanghai, the largest city in the world, the freeways have a flower box lining on both sides of each direction of the many elevated sections.\u00a0 These are small planter boxes mounted to the concrete sidewalls.\u00a0 They must be watered and pruned.\u00a0 Mile after mile, they all show blooms, no weeds, no dead plants, no brown patches, each one full of colorful blooms.\u00a0 There is no automatic watering system to maintain the miles of flower boxes on the elevated roadways.\u00a0 Alongside the street-level freeways are elaborate ornamental gardens in a buffer zone either side of the road, all maintained by hand labor to a standard you might see in a city park in America.\u00a0 These strips of gardens can be twenty miles long and are maintained because they look good, not because they are used for recreation.<\/p>\n
While easy enough to describe, that doesn\u2019t really capture the impression that so much order, so much attempted perfection, makes on you when you see miles of it.\u00a0 Radiating out from Shanghai on the trains, you see many more miles of small farm plots and clusters of homes.\u00a0 The homes are generally drab, the color of concrete or tile.\u00a0 They don\u2019t appear to use much paint on the exteriors of homes, preferring instead to use non-wooden materials that don\u2019t require painting.\u00a0 The surrounding rice fields in various stages of their planting, flooding, growing, harvesting, and burning cycles are meticulous.\u00a0 Shaped and tiered to fit the contours of the land, no square foot is ignored.\u00a0 You see a lot of the work done by hand, some of it done with older farm machinery, and an occasional ox.<\/p>\n
Small to medium sized factories are everywhere and they usually have a dual track expansive chrome accordion gate that slowly rolls open and closed with a motorized module at the head, looking like one of those little square service robots in Star Wars, and mounted with a revolving yellow warning light.\u00a0 Crossing through the gate you\u2019ll come to an administration building and then one or more factory buildings.\u00a0 These multi-story buildings usually have wide concrete stairways at one end of the building.\u00a0 You rarely find an elevator.\u00a0 People climb the stairs at work.<\/p>\n
Many factories have dormitories, especially if their production involves hand labor.\u00a0 Chinese labor will often contract for a year or two and live on the premises where they work.\u00a0 Contracts usually expire at the Chinese new years and workers take that time to travel across the country to their various homes to reconnect with family.\u00a0 Jobs are competitive in China.\u00a0 Everyone wants one, and everyone wants a better one.\u00a0 The competition is fierce and people work hard.<\/p>\n
A home in a city for a young working couple who are moving up from a rental usually begins with the purchase of a concrete space in a residential building.\u00a0 The couple must then finish the space with everything else.\u00a0 That means doors, even front doors, windows, railings, plumbing fixtures, cabinets, wiring, lighting, and of course furnishings and personal effects.\u00a0 Main entry doors are a major investment because most Chinese don\u2019t believe in banks.\u00a0 As a result their front doors are often impenetrable ornate steel vaults.<\/p>\n
Title for ownership of these home spaces is for a definite period, usually 50, 65 or 75 years.\u00a0 At the end of the title period, ownership reverts to the state.\u00a0 Homes in these residential buildings can be sold and bought on the market, but the duration of the total title period doesn\u2019t change.\u00a0 So, for example, you could buy a place that might have 35 years remaining on it before it reverts to the state.\u00a0 Notwithstanding this diminishing time limitation, home prices continue to escalate because the force of demand is the stronger price influence.\u00a0 At some point, even demand will not overcome the price effects of imminent reversion and prices should begin to come down to reflect the shorter available terms.\u00a0 When that begins to occur on a large scale, I would expect these property owners in China to revolt in some way.\u00a0\u00a0 Where property is owned, you see great care taken to maximize the utility of every available square foot, be it living space, garden, or some productive activity.\u00a0 Over 75 years and several generations, people will get attached to their places.<\/p>\n
The newer streets outside of the old cities in China are all very wide and straight.\u00a0\u00a0 Out in the countryside it\u2019s usually a two lane road but in the newer sections of the cities they\u2019re routinely 6 or 8 eight lanes across, often with merging frontage roads.\u00a0 These thoroughfares go for straight lines for untold miles.\u00a0 Think of Colfax eight lanes wide and saturated with human conveyances of all sorts \u2013 cars, large trucks, taxis, vans, bicycles, scooters, 3-wheeled construction carts (some pedaled, some motorized), tractors, two wheeled hand carts, wheelbarrows and lastly, walkers.\u00a0\u00a0 You see all of it on virtually any Chinese street, whether in the city or the countryside.\u00a0 And quite often you\u2019ll see loadings on these various conveyances that can only be described as preposterous.\u00a0 Things stacked and strapped high and wide, balanced on a comparatively tiny conveyance, moving collections of goods from one place to the next.<\/p>\n
Public buildings in China, like most things, are massive.\u00a0 Airports, train stations, convention centers, administrative complexes for the communist governments, these are always huge affairs.\u00a0 Even, for example, the train stations in the small towns, places that might not see more than a handful of passengers in a day, are built to huge government standards.\u00a0 We stood on one train platform that could have held 5000 people, with perhaps 10 other travelers.\u00a0 And judging by the surroundings at this particular town, 10 was probably the norm.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s an observation worth expanding upon.\u00a0 The communist government’s layout of cities, streets, transportation infrastructure, and public buildings reflect a one-massive-size-fits-all philosophy that perhaps doesn’t really fit anyone.\u00a0 The Chinese people soldier on through this massive spatial consumption knowing no other way.\u00a0 They traverse vast distances to do the simplest of things because that\u2019s the grid they\u2019ve given themselves to live on.\u00a0 They all built it, much of it with hand methods, and they\u2019re very proud of it.\u00a0 It is well maintained, if not well conceived, but they make it work, one way or another.<\/p>\n
Economists talk about opportunity cost \u2013 what could have been realized had not something intervened to forestall a more economic outcome.\u00a0 In this case, for that image, Taiwan holds the key.<\/p>\n
B_Imperial<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China is huge and it has an ubiquitous density to it.\u00a0 You rarely find the end of a road or a point where the imprint of man ends and nature takes over.\u00a0 You almost never see an untended patch of ground that is not orderly planted and carefully tended.\u00a0 For example in Shanghai, the largest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19,94,20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2971","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-asia","7":"category-communism","8":"category-travel","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}