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Chinese Insurance Drill

2011-10-27T10:03:51Z

Since I came to China, I have gotten into discussions about insurance on a number of occasions. Insurance is just beginning, in China, but it's not trusted by the people. Indeed, most people who are rich enough to afford a car don't even have car insurance: they just negotiate, sometime for hundreds of thousand of Yuan, in case of an accident, injury or death.

At the university where I teach finance and econ they offer to get us health/accident insurance or we can get our own. Several people have gone for the Chinese insurance [suckers], but have reported bad experiences. One kept going to a clinic, handing in the bills, which the insurance company, each time, told her that the bills were improper bills, and they wouldn't pay them.

More recently, an instructor did have an accident for which his out of pocket costs were around Y50,000, and handed the bills into the company. The insurance company asked him how much he paid for his premium, to which he replied, Y1,300. Insurance company said: here's your Y1,300; we're canceling your policy.

We have a friend who works for a foreign insurance company and whose spouse is in the government. Even the friend said we should never buy Chinese insurance, advising us to buy Hong Kong insurance because it is reliable but much less expansive than the foreign brands.

Chinese really have to learn to play fair, not cheat, not make or offer fakes, not try to overcharge, be honest, and many other things. Without trust and fairness, China will never become any kind of financial or economic power.

Chinese Napkins and Napkin Holders

2011-10-01T12:08:36Z

When I first came to China, I was surprised by the situation in napkins [and toilet paper]. I might go to a cafe and order a coffee, which was priced at, say, Y18, but when the bill would come, it would be Y22.

As it is, paper must be scarce, in China, I guess, when you measure it against the people. Thus, at many restaurants, you have to pay for napkins. Moreover, you don't really get napkins for that Y4 charge...you get a small packet of facial tissues [Kleenex, in the vernacular]. In fact, even to buy napkins for home use, it took me a while to find a source, which turned out to be the German equivalent of Walmart: Metro.

At many other places, napkins are actually toilet paper, which is put onto the table in a dispenser, the center roller having been taken out of the roll. A typical "Chinese napkin holder" is shown in the picture, below, taken at an outdoor restaurant on Shangchuan Island, off the coast of Guangdong Province (Canton).

There are certainly strange things, in China, even in what we might consider the simplest circumstances, in the West.

The China Moon Cake Arbitrage

2011-09-17T09:29:00Z

Each year, China celebrates one of its most important holidays: Mid-Autumn Day. It occurs in September, on the night of the full moon, and represents the beginning of the Fall. Celebration includes, family gatherings, walks to look at the moon, and moon cake, a cake created just for that day, like fruit cake during the Western Christmas-Chanukah-New Year season.

Moon cake is a big part of the celebration, and stands at department stores begin to pop up several weeks before the day. Another more subtle activity is moon cake arbitrage, It begins with moon cake makers selling gift certificates to Chinese companies, many of which are government agencies or companies, who give them to employees. Just about everyone in the country gets a moon cake from their work, it seems.

The moon cake manufacturer sells the gift certificates, en masse, to a company for, say a 30% discount, on Y200 cakes. Then, moon cake arbitrageurs stand around the vicinity of the ,moon cake stands and offer to buy the certificates for Y80. And they sell them back to the company for Y120.

Thus, the arbitrageur makes a 50% return on his capital, and the moon cake company, who is effectively short moon cake certificates, covers its short at a return of about 20%. Almost all of the parties, the original short seller, the moon cake maker, the receiver of the free gift certificate, and the moon cake arbitrageur, make money. All funded by the companies who buy moon cake gift certificates for their employees.

Slap: Stick

2011-06-21T13:46:00Z

This post addresses to observations that I have made about culture, customs, in China, which have suddenly come together in one package for me. The last time I hit a girl (female) was in 2nd grade. She was a Tomboy, and, so, I came to think of her more as a boy than a girl, and, for a reason I cannot remember, all these years later, I retaliated by slapping her. Of course, my mother, upon hearing about that, told me that boys don't hit girls, no matter what.

Sure, I remember seeing movies from the first half of the twentieth century, in which one or another tough guy s;lapped a girl, and even in more modern film, in the U.S., that might be about crime or spies, there might be a little slap of a woman, here and there. Thus, it was quite surprising to me when I began to watch TV, in China, almost seven years ago, now, that there was a lot of slapping and beating of women on TV shows. As I commented to girl friends about this, they told me that it was still common, in China, for men to hit women, in real life. Indeed, I have seen its result, quite a number of times since then. Of course, if I had actually witnessed it, I would not have been able to stop myself from intervening, as I would when any bully takes physical advantage of another person.

The second observation that I am reminded of, daily, is that Westerners will always be outsiders, in china, and will not be accepted for some thing, the one of which I have in mind, now, is as an acceptable mate for someone of the opposite sex. China is so prejudiced to begin with that they speak of the 56 minority Chinese people versus the prime indigenous "majority", the Han. As a foreigner, people always try to cheat me, in my daily shopping or touring, so, there is that. However, just as my friends and I, even one who spoke perfect Chinese, could not attract a woman, in Montreal's Chinatwon, at the beginning of the century, I have seen many relationships between a Chinese and a foreigner eventually fall apart. Some of it has been because of one cultural difference or another, but as someone who has dated a number of Chinese woman since I arrived, in China, often, it is because the family of the Chinese component objects to a relationship with a foreigner.

Another ingredient to this Chinese culture is that, just like many Chinese stick together and live in Chinatowns, throughout the world, the Chinese seem very dependent. When I would want to venture into a new area of China for a get away, and I would ask a student who knew the area about it, they would offer "to go there with me because no one travels alone." Of course, I would gently tell them that i have been on my own since I went to college, and even language barriers cannot stop me. But, in their minds, and as I have observed, often enough, it is not possible to do things alone. They were always asking me if I missed my family, and I would tell them that even when we lived within 100 miles of each other, we didn't see that much of one another. Here, one sees women walking around holding hands, much after their school years; I see men walking around with their arms around each other. I see two people working on a small motor, while only one person is required.

And when it comes to the apron strings, they are very long and very thick. Even artist, Ma Yixing, has told us that the horses in many of his works represent man, by which he means that man is controlled by the family, in China, much like a horse by its master. In my own experiences with male-female relationships, i have had to put up with the family comes first, more times than I care to think about. However, recently, with a woman that I really thought I could go further with, was told by her parents, this year, first, that i would break up with her, this year, because two fortune tellers told that to her mother. When that didn't work, they began making threats of all kinds, including threats, even, on my business. The final event happened, recently. When she went home to visit her parents for the weekend, her father slapped her for not listening to them about me. Now, she too is towing the line. We have to break up, and she is going back to live with her parents after almost 3 years of living with me.

Her older sister had a similar, yet different, experience. She was dating a lowly Shenzhen local, whose family was living there before China turned a small fishing village into a large Metropolis. She got her slaps, too, but, in the end, she went against the parents and married him. Fear not:: in the intervening years, the Shenzhen government has given a lot of money and benefits to those original local families, and her nouveau riche father, who moved to Shenzhen to start his multi-million dollar business back when Shenzhen was targeted by Deng Xiao Ping to revamp, is happy with his son-in-law, now. Her older brother is still living at home with mom, dad, the girl they chose for him, and their little boy. Of course, there has been much recent fighting among them, recently, but all the parents gathered together and made them make up and keep their unhappy family. Now, mom and dad are looking for the perfect mate for the next younger brother; so far, he has dodged the bullet.

As a final note, I will pint out that when I was 16, my father called my girlfriend a slut. I told him fuck you, and my mother had to get between us to stop us from having a physical fight. I went to my room; crawled out the window; and drove off in my car, not to return for 3 days.

Year of the Rabbit, in Guangdong, China

2011-02-06T06:24:00Z

We have just entered the Chinese year of the rabbit, and anythime I think of any animal, I think about how it is usually food, in Guangdong. Locals, in the countryside, still eat dog. At the fresh seafood restaurant, they have waterbugs and silkworm cocoons. At the local market, at the end of our street, you can see scorpions, snakes, frogs, turtles, alligators, and, of course, bunnies...

I used to make it every year for Thanksgiving, in the U.S., but I've only seen it one time on a menu of snacks at a cafe, in Qingdao. Now, it's nice to see it in the local market. Of course, the other problem is that Chinese apartments usually do not come equipped with an oven, so, I still have to wait for the day that I finally get a portable oven...it is fast approaching [too much else on my plate, so to speak].

Happy Lunar New Year from Guangdong.

Happy New Year: 新年快乐 from Red Hill and Leona Craig

2011-01-01T09:39:00Z

A happy life is different things to different people. Ma Yi Xing says that a happy life, to him, is having a beautiful woman and a loyal dog. Wishing you all a happy, healthy and prosperous life in the New Year from all of us at Leona Craig Art. Hope the new year brings you your personal dream of a happy life.

Craig, Ayu, Fanny, Carrie, Yiling, and Longlong,
LC Gallery, Dong Shan Kou, Guangzhou, China

China tech

2010-11-27T08:22:00Z

Living in China for 6 years, now, I expect to be disappointed by the simplest request. When I first got here, I needed a power strip to plug in my computer equipment. Before I even talk about that, a preliminary observation is that most apartment, classrooms, etc. have a dearth of power outlets in the wall. Anyway, I bought a power strip with four slots for Y5 (less than US$1), and I thought that I was in heaven. In reality, it lasted one week before it burned out. Quickly calculating in my mind, that would be Y260 per year to buy one per week, so, it would cost more like $US35, which is more than a decent power strip would cost in the US, and they last a long time.

When I wanted to buy a CD player for my apartment, I could not find any that played more than one CD. I told my assistant that it is common in the US to get a rudimentary combination 5-CD-player, dual-tape deck and radio with two speakers, in a box you can easily carry home, he was in disbelief. Even six years later when we bought one for our new Art Gallery, L. C. Yilang, in Guangzhou, we could only get a 1-CD player, and when we wanted to connect four speaker to it instead of only two we had to buy an amplifier to plug the player into to have output to four speakers. I should mention that the 1-CD player I bought six years ago for Y400 ($60), it lasted for only one year [the 5-CD combination player I left back in the US is still in use by my nephew).

I bought a pasta machine, like my mom bought on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, in the 1960's and is still in use by my sister, it lasted 1 year. The next one we bought lasted one month. We took it back to the store. They sent it in for repair. I lasted another month...too much time and taxi fares wasted to get the motivation to take it back again.

I could go on and on and on and on. Every time I want something, and I think that my request is simple, coming from the U.S., even if from a small town in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania, it becomes impossible. Other times I settle on a substitute, which has such inferior quality that i should not have wasted my time, in the first place.

Thus, the other day when I heard that China was launching a new communications satellite, the image that immediately came into my head was this:

Saving Face: It’s What’s Outside that Counts

2010-01-03T10:22:00Z

I have lived in China for five years, now. Back when I began my decade of wandering, at the beginning of the millennium, I had just had sold my eighteenth century estate, which I owned, restored and turned into an art inn, before that concept had even been coined. Since I moved to China, I have seen countless old buildings that could be really cool, if they were restored and made into nice contemporary living spaces. However, the vast majority of Chinese people and, apparently, the state, topped off by a new rich class, prefer a flashy new apartment with a high price tag to restoration of something old. We say vast majority because, finally, after living here for five years, I have discovered an old section of the city where people are taking old several story houses and redoing them: some tastefully and to original character; others bastardized . All the same, we are actually going to set up our gallery, there.

More generally, however, much of the old city of Guangzhou, which is mostly old, is getting a facelift, especially, in areas that will be seen by many visitors when driving or walking around the city during the upcoming Asian Games, next November. Indeed, I believe that the stimulus package, much of which was directed to infrastructure, and the extremely loose credit stance of Chinese banks, this past year, combined with the desire to put up a good front for the coming games.

Mind you, it is not a real restoration of the town but, merely, a face list, and extremely facial, at that. Old buildings, including the old up to ten story boxy cement and tile apartment blocks, as well as the early 20^th century buildings with sloped tiled roofs, are getting face lifts on the faces facing major streets, avenues, and raised highways; if you go around to the rear of the building or go inside, you will find that nothing has changed. In addition, just about every major street has been dug up and put back together more nicely, over the past year, and is continuing. Subway lines that were supposed to have been done several years ago have finally bee completed, and bus islands are being built on an avenue near one of the stadium complexes, downtown, which, itself is dotted with cranes busily rebuilding the athletic event complex. In other areas, ground that had been broken but was long awaiting construction to start has suddenly spring tall buildings that are already nearing completion within the several months sine I had been to those parts of town [Guangzhou is a town of 10 million people and covers at least 10 square miles or more, in my rough estimate]. Other areas that used to have cute but dilapidated older structures have been completely razed and new buildings are already going up.

Westerners see pictures of China, they usually are shown the tall buildings that have sprung up in major cities, mostly over the past two decades or less. However, most of China, even most of the interiors of those picture postcard skyscraper cities, are old smaller buildings, mostly in great need of repair. It is a shame, to someone, like me, who appreciates the art of older buildings and who has restored a two hundred year old country estate to its original glory, to see such great old structures go to waste or become lost forever. It is shameful, in my opinion, to see the kind of face lift that is now on-going: saving face for those places likely to be seen by visitors, leaving the rest to continue to rot. Looking at what has been done, on its face, it will probably last no longer than a few years, at most.

The China Telecom Follies

2010-01-02T08:25:00Z

We have China telecom service for our land-line phone and DSL. I also have a mobile internet card for my computer for a PC card modem. The mobile internet was transferred from China Unicom, a mobile phone provider, to China Telecom about a year or so ago, in a government reshuffling of the telephone business, in China.

When we added ADSL, about two years ago, we were required to pay a year’s service, upfront. Six months or so into that contract, Ayu noticed that China Telecom had also been charging one of my bank accounts for the ADSL. She called and went visiting China Telecom for several weeks before they refunded the money, which took several more weeks. Over the ensuing year plus, Ayu has discovered repeated events of overcharging my account for services, and it always takes repeated visits and phone calls, in order to get it straightened out.

Indeed, part of the overcharging and other problems has been problems with charging, not charging, or overcharging my bank account for my mobile internet service. Then, about two months ago, I reprogrammed my computer, and I lost the software for the PC card. After repeated misleads by China Telecom, we were not able to get new software. Part of the problem has been that they have moved on to 3G, and the card did not support that. So, we asked, what can we do to get 3G card, and more quickly and efficiently solve the problem. After several misleads by China Telecom, on that, we just went to the computer center and bought a new 3G card.

While that should have solved the problem, it turned out that there was an ongoing problem with charging the SIM card from my bank account. Remember, now, that China Telecom has been deducting charges for telephone service, internet service and mobile internet service for over a year. For several weeks, Ayu has been spending several phone calls a day trying to get the SIM card charged, but the telephone company keeps telling her that they cannot charge my bank account for the SIM charges because the name in the account differs from the name on my bank account. This is not even a new problem. Even though China Telecom had been deducting money from that bank account, they said they could not refund money to that account because of the name difference, never mind that they also have my passport number on the accounts. The problem in name is simply that the Bank stamp on my account puts my middle name last. All tolled, it has been about a month and a half of this nonsense. The problem is still not resolved, including two phone calls from different people at China Telecom, today. And the easiest thing to do, in my mind, is just to go back to the computer center, tomorrow, and buy a new SIM card, not registered to anyone, with one year’s service built in.

Anyone who thinks that China will rule the business and financial world has, obviously, never been to China.

Chinese Weddings: More Important than the Ceremony are the Pictures

2009-10-26T13:11:00Z

When I first moved to China, I would go to Shamian Island, which is the island that foreign traders were confined to, in the 1800's, in Guangzhou. The architecture is very Western; it has cafés and restaurants; and it is very peaceful and pretty. It has a nice feeling, and, although it is small and separated by small bridges from the rest of the city, it feels like you are in a different world.

I noticed, even on my first outing, that there were photographers taking photos of girls or couples, dressed in wedding attire. Moreover, since there were many such girls dotted around the island being photographed, I naturally assumed that it was just a good place to do catalog photo shoots for wedding attire. The first time that I saw it, I even got a phone number from one of the girls. However, I couldn't have been more wrong about what it actually was all about.

As it turns out, wedding photographs are much more important than the wedding, itself. In the West, we, too, like to take photos at our weddings, but that is not the case, in China. The photos are actually staged and taken many months, or even years, in advance of the actual wedding event. As I have witnessed this phenomenon repeatedly and in more than just Shamian, I have come to also realize that even the wedding attire are just props. The wedding photo studios actually provide the dresses and tuxedos as part of the photo album package. In fact, sometimes I have noticed that the bride is wearing jeans under her dress. Often, in certain locations, you can see many brides and grooms around, just waiting until it is their turn for their "wedding photo" shots. To me, as a Westerner, it is a very peculiar phenomenon.

I have been told, in addition, by friends that, at the wedding, some photos might also be taken, but it is these staged photos that are the ones that end up on walls, tables or desks, in the end.

We have included some photos from both Shamian Island, in Guangzhou, and outside a castle near jetty, in Qingdao, where it is also popular to have wedding photos taken.

Chinese Teapot Art & Other Art on Leona Craig Blog

2009-10-04T16:39:00Z

We have done a recent comment on Chinese art, mostly the teapot art market on our Leona Craig Blog. We believe that art is the best investment, in China.
You can read the article at:
http://blog.leonacraig.com/ ...

Platforms are for sissies

2009-10-01T17:22:00Z

In the U.S., I would see windows of tall buildings being washed, many time in my life. There, a catwalk-like platform is lowered along the face of the building: it has railings to give safety and security, and the window washers can even clip belts to the rails.

In China, even today, many things that we would expect to see done by machinery, in the U.S., are done, manually, in China. Event though China markets itself to the world asd a modern country, that is simply marketing and PR. Others might have you believe that China has underpaid workers in poor conditions. That is too far to the other side. Although there are many cases of poor work conditions, that would not be true of many people in many different types of jobs.

The simple truth is that: (1) China does not, yet, have a lot of capital assets, especially, if you look at things on a per capita basis; (3) China does not have access to all of the latest technology, especially given its record od turning a blind eye and hands in pockets. China does, on the other hand, have a huge pool of labor, most of whom are trying, still, to move beyond the agrarian society that China had been, in still is, overall. In that regard, they try to make up for the lack of worker productivity, i.e., output per person, by having an abundance of worker capital.

That said, with window washing for even tall buildings, in China, window washers rappel down the side of the buildings, mountaineering style, buckets and brushes, hanging from their rope belts. Someone on the top of the building passes down a hose for rinsing. You can see a group of them cleaning the windows of a building that we can see from our office.

I have also seen crude block and tackle, using 3 tall stout logs lashed together at the top to make a tripod to lift incredibly heavy things into place. I've seen hoards of men using jackhammers where we would use heavy machinery, and I have seen hundreds of men using shovels, not even good snow shovels, to clear major highways of snow because there are not enough snowplows around.

© 2009 Red Hill Capital Corporation, Delaware, USA; all worldwide rights reserved!

The Wire Transfer

2009-09-21T14:20:00Z

Banking is always a major affair, in China. It can take between 1 and 3 hours to wait for your number to come up and get your transaction done, even if it is something as simple making a deposit. Like all money transactions, in China, a transaction at a bank involves much hand-stamped paperwork.

Today, after spending twenty minutes waiting (I have begun to take VIP numbers, lately, to shorten my wait...no one questions it because they think that the foreigner just did not know what he was doing), it took over an hour to complete my wire transfer transaction from China to the US from my Chinese bank to my US one. Moreover, it takes at least that long, every time. What is worse, they usually also make me fill out the forms more than once because they only understand English letters written a very specific way, or the writing is not acceptable.

The first time that I did a wire transfer from China to the US, it took a month for the money to get there. Just more examples of China inefficiency.

China Hotels: Forced Energy Conservation

2009-09-05T05:05:00Z

One interesting thing that is part of every hotel that I have stayed in, in China, is that you can't leave the lights on when you go out. In every place that I have stayed, there is a key card for the door, and once you are inside the room, there is a box with a small slot to put the key card, just inside the door. The purpose is that the room's electricity will not come on until you put the card into the slot. Then, when you leave the room and take your key card out of the slot, the electricity turns off, and there is no way that you can leave the room and leave the TV blaring, the air conditioner running, or lights burning. In that way, you cannot waste electricity, at least, not at a hotel, in China.

Spit It Out: Table Manners in China

2009-08-21T10:48:00Z

I come from a relatively humble background, and our table manners may not have been the best when I was growing up. People talked with food in their mouths at the table. They may have been guilty of smacking their lips, while eating. That was one extreme. Since then, I have also rubbed elbows with high society, and I ran an internationally-recognized country inn and cooking school with alumni of the famed Four Seasons Hotel's kitchens. In those latter situations, it was required that I not deviate, even a little, from very proper formal decorum.

Although my experiences and friends come from both low and high, on the social scale, and I am surprised at few things, I was a bit shocked by what are considered acceptable table manners, in China, either, in private or in public. Beyond the lack of proper food safety measures, as in the U.S., which include washing dishes with cold water and, sometimes, not even using dish detergent, even in restaurants, there were many other surprises. Many people use the first pot of tea to rinse chopsticks, bowls, cups and glasses in a resaurant tablesetting, before commensing drink or dinner: that dates back to imperial days. Standard, in Chinese restaurants for use as napkins are small packets of tissue paper, usually for a fee, at better restaurants, and toilet paper, in a dispenser from which you can pull it out from the center, in the more common restaurants. Sure, most everyone talks with food in their mouths and smacks their lips, while eating, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Although most people will not shake your hand, for fear of germs, everybody uses their chopsticks to dig into shared dishes at the table. As we have said in other blog entries, Chinese love to eat food with the bones left in. They also serve shellfish, like crabs, with the shells still intact. Then, while eating such things, there are invariably bones in their mouthes. In the U.S., in such situations, we would use a napkin to discretely remove the bones from our mouthes and keep them under wraps. In China, people do not even, normally, use their fingers to remove bones or pieces of shell, they just spit them out on the table, not even on their own dishes. Then, at the end of such a meal, the table is full of spit-out waste beside each person's place setting. It is acceptable table manners, in China, although I refuse to conform (Yes...my table manners have declined...when in Rome...; when in China ...), and it is one of the most culture-shocking things that a visitor may experience when eating, in or out, with friends, in China.

Chicken

2009-08-07T00:22:00Z

In the U.S., if we want to challenge someone or say that they are afraid, we call them chicken. However, you do not want to make the mistake of calling someone, especially a female, chicken, in China. While some people will not understand why you would call them chicken to imply that they are fearful, if they are a female, they could become really offended because the common Chinese slang expression for hooker is "ji nui", which, literally, means, chicken girl.

Bamboozled

2009-08-01T01:30:00Z

In China, the major material used to build scaffolding for buildings is, believe it or not, bamboo. I have seen it used on buildings over twenty stories high, and making bamboo scaffolding is an art. However, recently, I saw scaffolding that had ripped away from a building of about 10 stories and had, not only fallen on the buildings, in front of it, but also created havoc on the street, which was blocked off by police for half a block, and about ten police cars had shown up.

Talking from Both Sides of the Mouth

2009-07-30T04:04:00Z

We have known, for years, that often, even in menus, in the Chinatowns of New York and Montreal, where I have lived, there is a difference in what is written, in English and in Chinese. Here, in China, we see it even more, and we also hear it when, for example, a store owner tells me one thing and, then, believes that he is secretly talking, in Chinese, to my protégé or to my girlfriend who he has mistakenly taken as my translator and with whom he believes he has a complicity to screw me. I also see it on websites that have English and Chinese versions: often, the English version has nothing to do with what is said, in Chinese.

I remember getting excited about seeing shark fin soup on a menu, recently, and the price was extremely reasonable. Then, my girlfriend pointed out that, in Chinese, it was not shark fin soup, at all. We have downloaded a number of Chinese business laws to make available through our website, and my protégé has ended up having to re-translate part of the English translations. We went on to the website for Shamian Island, in Guangzhou, yesterday to do some research about the many bronze sculptures that are displayed outside around the island. Shamian was the place that foreign traders were restricted to, around 100 years ago, when they can to this capital of Guangdong, in their trading ships. Most of the island is Western architecture, and there are many foreign embassies, there, even today. What was surprising was that in the Chinese version of the website, the history of the island was explained as foreigners forced the Chinese to give them the island as a base for trading, while on the English version, it says that the Chinese forced the foreign traders to be restricted to the island.

The lesson that you should take away from these few examples of a bigger phenomenon is that, if you read something in Chinese, which also has an English translation, be sure to find a friend who understands Chinese to check if both versions are the same.

Something is Missing

2009-07-28T17:31:00Z

The cheap Yuan, while acting as the engine that has driven the Chinese economy by making exports attractive to overseas buyers, is a double-edged sword. As I have mentioned, elsewhere, in blogs, articles, and reports, it costs me less than US$1 for lunch, but a small bottle of Listerine costs me a week's worth of lunches. In addition, minerals, like oil, steel, and copper are priced in the world market, although petroleum products are subsidized by the government. That, on the other hand, makes those minerals valuable, and it is not uncommon to find that, overnight, someone has stolen a manhole cover or the lights out of a tunnel. The melted down steel of the manhole cover or the copper or tungsten wiring from lighting are very valuable, in terms of the buying power of the Yuan.

The Bicycle Kingdom

2009-07-26T03:22:00Z

As we mentioned in previous blog entries, here, and in our other blogs, most people don't have cars. Some have bikes, some of which are electric, and small motor scooters and motor cycles are also popular, although the latter have been banned in Gunagzhou, for example, in the recent past.

There are an estimated 430 million bikes, in China, or about one for every three people, and sometimes we even see more than three people riding on bikes and on motor scooters, too. In contrast, there are only about 24 million cars owned by the civilian population, or about one for every 120 people (imagine that many stuffed in one car) because, as we explained in other blog entries, most Chinese cannot affor a car, which is more expensive than a house, due to the undervaluation of the Yuan and the fact that most cars are imports.

A recently reported phenomenon is the electric bike, which we have seen around, especially for use by delivery people, and it is estimated that about 65 million are now in use in China.