Man Made Marvels - Xi'an

Hopfrog, a frequent commenter on here, posted a link to a very worthwhile video in the comments of my last post.

The video is a program that on the Discovery Channel about ancient Chang'an and Xi'an. Chang'an is what Xi'an was known as for much of its history. For anyone who's every been to Xi'an or has any interest in the place, it is a must see.

I'm not sure the next time the program is going to air on TV. The schedule doesn't show when it'll run again (a program on the Leshan Buddha will run on Monday though). Below my summary, I've embedded the program from YouTube.

The show begins with the construction of ancient Chang'an during the Han Dynasty. This part particularly was enlightening to me. I'll admit that my Han era history is not good and learned a lot during this section.

The rebuilding of Chang'an during the Tang Dynasty is featured next. The Tang time period was the cultural apex of ancient China. The arts flourished and commerce boomed with the Silk Road during this era. Chang'an was indeed the biggest and most cosmopolitan city in the world then.

The Tang era is still celebrated a lot in Xi'an. I lived within walking distance of "Tang Paradise," a Tang-themed park with cultural shows and such. I actually taught some English classes to the tour guides at Tang Paradise when I lived in Xi'an. That was pretty cool.

My favorite part of the program was the section of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, also in the Tang Dynasty section of the show. I lived within a five minute walk from the pagoda for over three years. I either walked or rode my bike past it every day on my way to work. It has a very special place in my heart. Learning more about it just now was awesome.

And last was the section on the reconstruction of the city (again) during the Ming Dynasty. The Ming reconstruction is still the foundation for present-day Xi'an. The city walls are featured prominently during this section. As the program says, Xi'an's city walls are the largest and best preserved city walls in the world. They are a very unique aspect of life in Xi'an.

This program makes me very proud of my Chinese 故乡 (hometown) - Xi'an. It also makes me want to go back. I can't wait to go visit again.

Hopfrog, thank you so much for pointing this show out to me.

Below are the embeds of the video, split into five sections:











Edit - I just found this show on Youku for anyone reading this living in China:

Qinghai Quake

I was sad to hear yesterday that China has endured another earthquake in its mountainous west. Thankfully, this quake appears to be nowhere near as devastating as the Sichuan quake in '08. Saying that, this is still a huge tragedy and a major disaster.

Over the past day or so, several people have asked me about the area that was hit. They asked if it was close to Xi'an and if Qian's family is OK. Qinghai is not at all close to Xi'an and Qian's family is fine.

I just did a quick search for some information about Yushu and Xining and found this video. It is pretty well done. (The embed doesn't seem to be working. You can view it here.)

Another topic we discussed at work was the amount of large-scale earthquakes that we've seen already in 2010. Is this all bad luck? What's going on with all of these quakes?

MSNBC addressed this in an article today:

As the numbers of buried or dead continue to climb from today's 6.9-magnitude earthquake in China, an event so close on the heels of the devastating Chile and Haiti earthquakes, you might wonder if Earth is shaking more lately. Perhaps, scientists say, but not unusually so.

Seismic activity may be higher in recent years than the long-term average, but it's still not out of the normal range, the experts contend.

"Relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970's to the mid 1990's, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years," said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science & Technology. "We still do not know the reason for this yet. Could simply be the natural temporal variation of the stress field in the Earth's lithosphere." (The lithosphere is the outer solid part of the Earth.)

...

"What happens is when a lot of people get killed there's a lot of reporting of it, and if an equally big event occurs somewhere out in the middle of nowhere it doesn’t attract the attention," said G. Randy Keller, professor of geophysics at the University of Oklahoma.

...

If you look at it globally the occurrence of earthquakes is confined to zones we already know have earthquakes but it's a largely random process and so sometimes it's a little quieter than normal and sometimes it's a little more active than normal. But it doesn't mean anything, because on a global basis these things aren't connected," Keller said.

Read the Whole Article

Much of China is vulnerable to active fault lines and these kinds of quakes, as the article says, aren't surprising. In fact, the deadliest earthquake in the history of man took place in 1556AD near Xi'an in Shaanxi Province. The quake killed more than 800,000 people.

Chinese people certainly aren't "used to" earthquakes though. I remember the weeks and months after the Sichuan earthquake being a very tense time. People slept outside in tents, there were constant rumors of bigger quakes "working their way up from Sichuan Province towards Xi'an," and a general level of irrationality that I felt rivaled the weeks that followed 9/11/01 in the United States.

Let's hope that China as a whole handles this tragedy well and, more importantly, those who need help right now can get it.

Old School China Photos

I just stumbled across some seriously cool photos a traveler took in China in 1983 (h/t to Josh at farwestchina.com's Twitter account for the link). There are great photos from across the country in this album. It almost goes without saying in China where things change so fast, but these thirty year-old photos look like they were taken eons ago.

Here are some of the best ones from the Xi'an section:











I strongly suggest going over to Mr. Demery's entire collection of China photos. Really neat stuff.

Better Off?

I haven't had a whole lot of time for blogging recently. I have had time to read plenty though.

I'm reading for about an hour every day on my lunch break and it is great. I'm really happy to be getting into books as opposed to focusing on news features on the web, what I've been more into the past couple years. I do have internet access at my work and could theoretically surf the web and/or blog during my free time, but I would prefer to get away from the desk where I spend my days. Going outside everyday with a book (no, I don't use an iPad or Kindle to read books) is something I'm really enjoying this spring.

The last book I finished was James Fallows' Postcards From Tomorrow Square that I referenced in my last blog post.

Fallows is a very humble yet keen observer. His perspective, as someone who came to China with a fairly blank slate (ie. not a "China hand"), has been refreshing. One passage in the book was particularly striking to me. It is a notion that I've thought about before that Fallows lays out very well.

From pages 92 - 93 from Fallows' book:

Has the factory boom been good for China? Of course it has. Yes, it creates environmental pressures that, if not controlled, could pollute China and the world out of existence. The national government's current Five-Year Plan - the 11th, running through 2010 - has as its central theme China's development as a "harmonious society," of hexie shehui, a phrase heard about as often from China's leadership as "global war on terror" has been heard from America's. In China, the phrase is code for attempting to deal with income inequalities, especially, the hardships of farmers and millions of migrant laborers. But it is also code for at least talking about protecting the environment.

And, yes, throughout China's boom many people have been mistreated, oppressed, sometimes worked to death in factories. Even those not abused may be lonely and lost, with damaging effects on the country's social fabric. But this was also the story of Britain and America when they built their great industries, their grand turbulent industrial cities, and ultimately their great industrial middle classes. For China, it is far from the worst social disruption the country has endured in the last 50 years. At least this upheaval, unlike the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s, has some benefits for individuals and the nation.

Some Westerners feel that even today's "normal" Chinese working conditions amount to slave labor - perhaps $225 a month, no life outside the factory, work shifts so long there's barely time to do more than try to sleep in a jam-packed dormitory. Here is an uncomfortable truth I'm waiting for some Chinese official to point out: The woman from the hinterland working in Shenzhen is arguably better off economically than an American in Chicago living on minimum wage. She can save most of what she makes and feel she is on the way up; the American can't and doesn't. Over the next two years, the minimum wage in the United States is expected to rise to $7.25 an hour. Assuming a 40-hour work week, that's just under $1,200 per month, or about 5 times the Chinese factory wage. But that's before payroll deductions and the cost of food and housing, which are free or subsidized in China's factory towns.

This is a very slippery slope. In no way do I romanticize what migrant workers in China go through on a daily basis. While I never saw factory life too much while in China, I was exposed to the lives of plenty of construction workers, restaurant workers, and day laborers while living in Xi'an. Their lives are utterly grueling.

Saying that, a person making minimum-wage in the US also has it rough. Fallows wrote this piece a few years ago and you can tell it's dated by a couple of the expressions he used. Although it is not totally up-to-date to 2010, what he wrote still applies. In fact, I think it's probably even more accurate now.

China has a plethora of domestic issues. It doesn't do me any good to try to list them out. Everyone reading this has seen them all before. But what is going on in China, and what has gone on for the past couple decades, has undeniably brought up millions of people.

And given the state of the US economy and how difficult it is to find work, standards between the two countries' citizens is at least worth discussing. The unemployment rate of young black men in the US is 34.5%. Generation Y's unemployment rate as a whole is 18.5%. Retirement isn't a reality for the millions upon millions of baby boomers entering their 60s. The American Dream® for many is fading or has been completely lost.

Qian and I are lucky. We have enough work to live a comfortable life. But there are scores of very qualified people right now who can't make ends meet. People who are less qualified? Well, they simply have no options.

Although this post is something of a screed against the US, I know that there are things that still make the US great (which I still think it is). One of the most important things that America still has on China is a society that is governed by rule of law. The book I'm currently reading, Wild Grass by Ian Johnson, focuses on the darker aspects of China's rise, particularly its lawlessness. There are significant drawbacks to China's method of development. I'll surely quote a passage from that book sometime here in the coming days.

Currency Affairs

I was delighted to hear a discussion on the radio today of an issue I tried explaining to a colleague recently: why China, a developing country, has so much money and currency reserves. I got pretty fumbled up trying to explain it. Such monetary and economic concepts can be difficult for me to thoroughly understand.

Here's the "Planet Money" report from NPR's Morning Edition that touched on the basics of US/China monetary policy this morning:

The United States government is also thinking about its financial relationship with China. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are calling for Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner to declare that China is manipulating its currency. Geithner will deliver a report to Congress about two weeks from now.

In the meantime, lawmakers like Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan are saying things like Chinese currency distortion is putting a lot of Americans out of work. And if you're wondering what a decision by the Central Bank of China has to do with workers in Ohio, we have an explanation from Alex Blumberg of our Planet Money team.

ALEX BLUMBERG: To understand why American lawmakers are so upset about Chinese currency policy, it helps to follow the money. So let's start with someone pretty typical - an American businessman who gets stuff made in Chinese factories.

Listen to the Report or Read the Rest of the Report

The rest of this story is a discussion of how and why Chinese factory owners turn the US dollars they earn into Chinese RMB. This part of China's "high savings rate" isn't discussed too often.

I read a very thorough overview of this same process a couple days ago in James Fallows' book - Postcards From Tomorrow Square: Reports From China. The chapter - The $1.4 Trillion Question - has a very detailed explanation of how dollars wired to factory owners in China end up being converted to dollars and, often, treasury bills. Very well-presented information. The book is a collection of Fallows' Atlantic Monthly China articles over the past few years. I'm enjoying it a lot.

Another one of the chapters in the book also dealing with economics and finance - China Makes, the World Takes - has an insightful take on the US' view towards China and the "currency manipulation" that was discussed in the NPR article above.

From pages 104 and 105 of the book:

American complaints about the RMB, about subsidies, and about other Chinese practices have this in common: They assume that the solution to long-term tensions in the trading relationship lies in changes on China's side. I think that assumption is naive. If the United States is unhappy with the effects of its interaction with China, that's America's problem, not China's. To imagine that the United States can stop China from pursuing its own economic ambitions through nagging, threats, or enticement is to fool ourselves. If a country does not like the terms of its business dealings with the world, it needs to change its own policies, not expect the world to change. China has done just that, to its own benefit - and, up until now, to America's.

Fallows is right on in this passage.

China is a sovereign nation. I don't understand why US politicians feel as though their opinion has any sway on Chinese currency policy. It shouldn't and, it appears, doesn't matter what the US says. Even if the rest of the world and China would benefit from a shift in policy, it's only the Chinese government's decision to revalue its currency. It's not as if the US thinks about other countries before it acts.

I understand that US politicians huffing and puffing about China are may very well just be politicking. But even if they know that their words aren't going to affect China and are simply dissing China's "manipulation" for votes, I still don't like it. Such China-bashing is allowing Americans to feel as though we don't have to change and that our problems are being caused by others. That is just not true.

Whether I approve of what US politicians are or aren't saying, there's no doubt that the US/China political rhetoric on this topic is important. And speaking of the US/China relationship, just preceding this discussion on NPR this morning was an interview with Zachary Karabell, the author of Superfusion who I interviewed this past fall. I felt pretty cool having interviewed the same guy who was being interviewed on Morning Edition! (I am still grateful that Karabell gave me the time to have such an in depth interview with him a few months ago).