I’ve been back in Guangzhou for the past four days. I hadn’t been back in three years. China just dropped their quarantine requirements sometime in the past year making it a reasonable prospect to actually go. Since I had left money in a bank account there, I had some incentive.
#COVID19 made it impossible to get the money out when we left in July of 2020. The banks were all closed. The school wouldn’t deposit our pay to a foreign bank account if it wasn’t in your name, so they wouldn’t send it Ma Belle Femme’s account. I didn’t have an account, you see? No need.
In short, it was a mess.
I went to China during the Khmer New Years break — still one of the best new years of the year — because it differs from the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration and everything there would be open. Just as an aside, it took a solid eight hours of effort and numerous documents to get my money out of the bank and then out of China.
In China, they track every yuan anyone makes and spends. Literally. They know it down to the cent. Few people use cash anymore. It is all done through electronic transfer of funds either using a credit-debit card or through a third-party payment app. Either way, it is all traceable.
The government knows everything about you. Where you are and what you are doing. All they need to do is to check their vast database of information that they collect on their billion plus population.
I had to prove that I had legally earned the money remaining in my account, even though I had supposedly already done so when it was deposited by my employer. I had to prove that the taxes on the money had been paid, even though at the point of deposit that had already been done. The bank has my contract, payment information, and tax documents on file. But, we had to resubmit it all again. They had to suck their teeth and hem and haw over it all trying to verify that it wasn’t a forgery or I wasn’t trying to pull a fast one.
As it turned out, I could prove that all but a thousand dollars had been earned by me. I would’ve needed another month’s pay and tax receipt to lay claim to it. Here’s the weird thing, they transferred all of the money out my account to Ma Belle Femme’s Canadian bank account, except for that thousand. But, they would gave me the thousand in cash as long as it was in RMB, not dollars.
They wouldn’t even tell me how much money I had in dollars. I had to convert it myself, which is never the same as to what the actual exchange rate is.
I promise this is getting back to US stupidity. Honest. Just stay with me.
Then, they wouldn’t transfer the money to my account in Cambodia because there is too much Chinese mob activity there. They are literally recalling every Chinese citizen back from Cambodia and requiring them to prove the legality of their earnings and existence in Cambodia. I guess that’s a good thing, but my Chinese co-workers have been massively inconvenienced and scared to death of it. It is a frightening process. They treat you like a criminal. One of my friends was detained at the police station for THREE DAYS, as in locked up in jail, while she contacted every employer and bank and produced records for the last ten years. Anecdotally, the process can take anywhere from days to a year in at least one case I know of.
I couldn’t even get a SIM card to use while I was there. I couldn’t link my Chinese apps (WeChat and DiDi, if you know them, to my Cambodian bank account). China hates Google. I had to use Apple Maps, which really sucks instead of Google Maps. I couldn’t access my gmail or use Chrome. The whole thing just sucked.
I only left three years ago in 2020 but a lot has changed since then. These are the changes that I observed:
First, they have really closed off the country. Using the Internet is nearly impossible as we know it. The Great Fire Wall of China has only gotten longer, taller, and thicker. No major news or social media websites are accessible without a VPN, which is illegal, but still widely used.
They are restricting everyone’s freedom of movement and behavior by using social points. Any rules infraction results in a deduction of points. Any. Rule. Infraction. Any.
When I landed, they went through the plane and pulled about a dozen people off for some kind of special treatment, and not in a good way. They looked like normal everyday folks. They had just screwed up somewhere somehow or had to prove they weren’t mobbed up or something. My Chinese friends in GZ weren’t surprised that it had happened, though. They had seen it many times at airports and train stations.
Second, delivery drivers rule the streets. Everybody and their uncle is a delivery driver in China. They ride everywhere and ignore all traffic laws. They clog the sidewalks, they ride against the flow of street traffic, they weave in and out of cars. Everything is delivered.
It’s dangerous. They drive like mad people. Paid by the delivery, I guess.
And third, and this is the real point, the air in Guangzhou was A LOT cleaner than it was three years ago. It is still bad, don’t get me wrong, but in the four days I was there, I could see buildings from many city blocks away instead of having trouble seeing the buildings across the street — literally.
The air is so much cleaner because over half the vehicles (cars, motor scooters, trucks, vans, and buses) are either electric or using LPG. Everywhere you looked electric scooters were zipping around the town. Electric cards were gliding through the streets. It made a big difference in the air quality of Guangzhou.
China is investing heavily in renewables. They are still building coal-burning power plants, albeit at a slower rate than before, but those plants are seen as transitioning them to renewable energy sources.
They have cheap reliable electric cars, trucks, vans, and scooters. They are mass producing them for their billion plus population and for export to other countries. They already have the recharging station infrastructure built.
Why the fuck are we so stupid? The fossil fuel and transportation industries have known this day was coming for sixty years. The only intelligent thing to have done was plan your transition from a fossil fuel energy producer to a renewable energy producer, from a gas-guzzling car and truck producer to an electric car producer. Instead, we get Elon Musk’s manic ridiculous electric cars and trucks and Ford’s unaffordable F150.
What the actual fuck?
Seriously, if profit is your motive, then planning should be your game. You should be able to forecast sixty years into the future and come up with several game plans to cope with changes to the market place. The state of our energy production and vehicle design makes no sense. None.
The only way it does make sense is if we were being deliberately sabotaged by corporations that actually don’t care about liberal democracy.
Comment on that, why don’tcha? What future do we have if we can’t produce cheap affordable electric vehicles that will complete with China’s? What future do we have, if we can’t transition to renewable energy sources? Why the fuck are we so fucking stupid?
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The Psy of Life 
Because our automobile industry is largely controlled by a legal cartel called ‘Car Dealerships’, which are almost uniformly owned by the worst reactionary types imaginable. In most states it is illegal for manufacturers to sell new cars directly to consumers, so car dealers have a great deal of power over what gets sold, and EV’s are not nearly as profitable for dealers, they are largely maintenance-free, so none of that lucrative annual service cash flow.
Plus, being reactionary, they’re deeply suspicious of EV’s, and go out of their way to stoke all the fears the dumb-as-a-rock (and is an insult to rocks) average American consumer.
You know, the types that buy $80,000 gargantuan pickup trucks with 10,000 HP motors, front ends that tower over adults and 4WD that they literally need a ladder to get in….so they can drive to Costco once a week.
Something like 85% of all automobile travel in the US is < 80 miles a day, but the media (and notice just how many nightly news shows, especially local ones, are stuffed with automobile dealer ads) constantly bring up how American Consumers are askeered out of their wits by EV’s not having the range of an IC car, as though every day they get up two hours before they went to bed, kiss their family goodbye, and embark on their 1200 mile daily commute…
I saw a segment on the national nightly news (ISTR it was CBS) about the horrible, horrible state of the used EV market, and how the average price of a used EV has plummeted 31%.
Why?
NEW EV’s have gotten cheaper. They interviewed one person who was bemoaning about how his “investment” has lost so much value.
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Howdy Bruce!
Thanks for writing in. I only knew some of that about car dealerships because when Telas were first being sold, he wanted to go dealershipless, and the car dealerships lost their minds.
I guess it just goes to show that you can’t base an economic system entirely on greed and a democracy on a poorly educated electorate.
I guess with working from home being so popular, the daily commute has gotten a lot shorter. With self-driving cars quickly becoming a reality, the days of individual car ownership are numbered. The car dealerships, like car companies, and everyone else that relies on fossil fuels would do well to prepare for the transition. But, you know, short-term profit trumps all.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Hi Jack- Thanks for he travel warnings abut China. One country that I would be reluctant to travel independently without a tour would be this one. Glad to read the air’s getting cleaner because of electric energy move now. What’s your take on the N.Y Trump trial going on now? Have you written a blog about this already?
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Howdy Usfman!
As a tourist, China has many many interesting places to visit and things to see. The Great Wall of China, the Terracotta Warriors, the ruins of the Silk Road come to mind. Living there was difficult. The government makes daily life hard and it’s only gotten harder. They definitely are making it hard to visit the country. I think #COVID19 broke them in ways that are far worse than it did to the West.
I can’t countenance the idea of spending money in China that helps its economy. They definitely have a surveillance state system that they can scale from one billion people to the seven billion or so of us living in the world today. And that is their goal.
Huzzah!
Jack
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America is stupid because they cater to the lowest common denominator.
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It is the cynical exploitation of fundamental human cognitive tendencies that gets me and the overwhelming greed of it all.
Jack
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I appreciate your descriptions of your first hand experiences in China. I’m a fan of Chinese television/video and I’ve noticed or heard about a lot of the stuff going on over there in the last few years from other fans and it’s scary. What I know about video production over there agrees completely with what you described, a complete clamp down by the government on everything, even silly romantic comedies. The latest is that fantasies/science fiction stories that bring up time travel are forbidden. No one really seems to be sure why, exactly. And they’ve put strict limits on the number of episodes of continuing video series. Apparently it was felt long video series were causing people to waste too much time or something? Who knows.
As for EVs, yeah, the handwriting is on the wall and has been for some time when it comes to ICE powered vehicles, and we’ve failed badly in planning for this and are now struggling hard to try to keep up. EVs in the US are insanely expensive when compared to the rest of the world. Not just in Asia, either. In the EU an the UK you can get a pretty nice little EV from Dacia or other manufacturers for about $20,000 or less. Granted something like the Dacia only has a range of about 150 miles, but the vast majority of trips in the US are 30 miles or less. I could get along quite nicely with an EV with a 100 mile range. We’ve more or less been brainwashed into believing we need these massive SUVs and trucks because they generate more profit for the car makers.
Interestingly enough, I already do have a Chinese car. A Buick. My Envision was almost entirely made in China. Very nice car, too. Supposedly a “luxury” vehicle according to Buick and, frankly, they’re right. The build quality is right up there with BMW and Mercedes for the most part. I’ve owned BMWs before and this Buick was not only about $30,000 less than a comparable BMW I’d say the build quality is just as good.
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Howdy Grouch!
That was one of the more interesting topics of conversation that I had while there. Government control and surveillance certainly reduces crime. They solve just about everything since (a) they can locate any face in the country in eight minutes flat and (b) facial recognition is very difficult to fool. However, the databases that they’re using to track movement and funds can and are hacked. Many of the people I know there like the reduction in crime. They can’t understand why we tolerate crime in the US when it is so easy to just use surveillance to eliminate it.
In the US, I realized, we use guns to help reduce crime or help us feel safe, which is nuts. The feeling there is that the government has swung a little too far into the authoritarian controlling direction, but that we’ve swung to far into the Wild Wild West.
Manufacturing is not as easy as joining two pieces of a thing together. The more complex the device, and more high tech it is, the higher the skills that the assembly team needs to have. It’s why Mexico can’t assemble or manufacture cars, just car parts. China has been working hard on upgrading their work force so that they can create compete in vehicles, electronics, and aerospace industries. Since they’ve seen fit to go it alone to build a space station and reach the moon, they are planning on using whatever advantages they gain for hegemony over the rest of the world.
We are nuts to think that American exceptionalism is going to be all that is needed to keep us on top of the heap, but that seems to be all MAGA thinks is necessary.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I have a lot of friends outside of the US in the UK, Canada and elsewhere and when they see the news coming out of the US, especially the level of gun violence here, they think that the entire country must be insane to permit this to go on.
As for manufacturing, I know a lot of people in the US are fond of calling Chinese manufactured products “junk” but they tend to forget that pretty much everything we use in the US is either made in China, or is made with parts made in China, or by Chinese owned companies in SE Asia, and that a lot of those products are of very high quality. I think that where Chinese products are concerned we’re in a situation similar to what it was like between the US and Japan in the early 1960s. Japanese products were considered to be cheap knock offs of US made goods, but the Japanese invested heavily in quality control, robotics and other techniques to improve their manufacturing processes, while here in the US we didn’t. So Japan’s products turned from cheap junk into extremely high quality while the US concentrated on making profits instead of investing in the future, and we lost out. It wasn’t long before Japanese products began to become known for high quality. Same thing is happening with China right now. They’ve invested billions in improving their manufacturing processes, employee training, etc, while here? Here we concentrate on squeezing every penny of profit we can out of things until things get so bad it can’t go on.
One of my sons used to work for Alcoa Aluminum long ago. This was a classic case of how corporate management’s emphasis on profits above all else wrecks a company. The facility he worked at was using 30, 40 year old manufacturing technology. They had a product rejection rate of something like 30%, insanely high, and as a result they were losing huge amounts of money. Their idea of “modernizing” the facility was to buy out a bankrupt facility in Canada with “new” 20 year old equipment and move that in. Meanwhile their Chinese competition was putting in state of the art robotics, new energy efficient smelters and retraining their whole workforce. You can guess how that worked out.
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Howdy Grouchy!
I had an uncle who worked for Alcoa in Eastern Tennessee. I was too young at the time to talk with him much about his job. I believe it was long enough of ago that he was able to retire from that job.
There is a manufacturing curve that models manufacturing ability. It is the labor force that governs it. As the labor force becomes better educated and trained, which is a product of the wealth resulting from manufacturing, the ability to produce higher quality and more sophisticated products increases. We’re seeing this in the garment industries in SE and South Asia. The people working twelve hour shifts making our $5.00 t-shirts are able to send their children to universities where they’ll learn how to improve their manufacturing capabilities.
Mexico is another example along the same lines as Japan.
Unfortunately, we quit electing people who would be able to govern for anyone but the 1%. It isn’t democracy that is failing us, it is us failing us. It is our two-party system that doesn’t allow for enough competition across issues to allow us to put together a robust enough coalition to govern effectively.
Biden has the right idea. Give money to the middle class and we will spend our way to a good economy. Invest in our infrastructure and we’ll be able to manufacture goods and provide services that will be competitive. Now, just convince a large enough majority to give him a Congress that will help him do that.
Huzzah!
Jack
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“The only way it does make sense is if we were being deliberately sabotaged by corporations that actually don’t care about liberal democracy.”
Corporations, and/or their cronies in the US legislature. I’ve read what you wrote about Chinese air improvement, maybe here, and also elsewhere, and knew then what I’d suspected in earlier years; KS’s US Senators (when they were Brownback and Roberts, on this issue) were lying through their keyboards when they kept telling me that they weren’t going to vote for anything that would put the US economy in danger of falling behind, when China was busy billowing megatons of carbon and smog into their air, and no one was asking them to stop. (That’s paraphrased, though very close to one former Sen. Roberts wrote to me once when he seemed to have lost patience with my nagging about US responsibility for the environment, especially for pregnant women.)
So there’s that. grr.
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Howdy Ali!
Good on you for getting after you senators even if you knew it was going to screaming into the abyss.
The thing is, those senators knew that the Chinese were making the shift. We’ve watched them do it. It isn’t like over night they suddenly had a billion electric vehicles hit the road. They’ve been making the shift.
Anyone with half a lick of sense knew that fossil fuels were a losing bet for the past half century and the only smart thing to do was to begin moving away from them.
It’s like in a capitalist system the only thing that really matters is that the rich keep getting richer any old way they can.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Hey, I just met two Chinese men staying in a hostel in San Francisco that are applying for asylum here in the US. When I described a news program that showed Chinese crossing the border, following Central and South Americans and others as far as South Sudan, one of the men told the me reason is that the government has gotten extreme and there is no freedom of speech and thoughts should be kept to oneself. The governments rules have become so limiting that folks are leaving in droves, he said.
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Howdy Lisa!
How the heck are you? It’s good to hear from you.
That was my observation and word from Chinese friends both in and out of China. We discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the extreme surveillance state and how much knowledge the government has of everyone’s movements and behaviors. On the one hand, it means crime is low — pickpocketing and crimes against women are the most prevalent — it also means that there is an utter lack of privacy.
In the three years since we had left, the differences were palpable.
Huzzah!
Jack
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One of the features (from a systems point of view, a bug) of the pursuit of profit above all, if a single vendor can’t achieve an actual monopoly, is to eliminate effective competition through other means. Once that is achieved, the resistance to any significant change in the business model is maximized and becomes dominant in the motivated reasoning of the owners and managers.
Carbon Dioxide was discovered as a chemical compound in 1754
The greenhouse effect of CO2 was discovered in 1859
The first clear study of the global warming effect of an increase in atmospheric CO2 came in 1896
Warnings of the effect continued in every decade of the 20th Century.
So, when did the dominance of the internal combustion engine get locked in? I trace it to World War I and the development of mechanized warfare, and the industrial systems to support the competition in that. Civilian applications followed.
The other way to understand the stupidity relies on the dynamics of addiction. This says it most simply:
“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
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Howdy Bob!
That about nails it. To add a few more cents:
“Who Stole Roger Rabbit” chronicles the obscene marriage of cars, fossil fuels, tires, and roads to create an unstoppable behemoth.
Henry Ford created his assembly line of cars in 1910’s to make them cheap enough that his employees could buy them, which allowed him to squeeze the electric car out of the market. All of that happened right around the time of WWI.
Vonnegut got it about right. We passed out, woke up still drunk, and are now going for the hair-of-the-dog.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Yep. It might have helped a bit if Edison and Westinghouse had not been fighting it out in the rollout of electric service between AC and DC.
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